Blurred Keys

What do Gmail, Google Mail, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Economist, Reuters, Fox News, Sky News, TypePad, Wordpress, Al Jazeera, the BBC, RTE, the Irish Times, the Washington Post, the Irish Independent, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, and the South China Morning Post have in common?

With a quick look, they all use the standard text size – the correct size – for web pages with news, other articles, blog posts, and other text heavy pages.

Examples sites which use smaller text includes the Sunday Business Post, ENN.ie, and siliconrepublic.com –  the Sunday Tribune goes one further and uses a hardly readable size. (EDIT: To add to the list Village.ie wound be another site)

Some web designers may say smaller text looks good, you may even agree with them. So, you’re right and the listed names in the above first paragraph are wrong? Indeed.

Paul Drury, currently executive editor at Associated Newspapers’ Irish titles, is to become managing editor of the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Mail on Sunday.

Pressgazette.co.uk says the new post will include liaising with the soon to be opened Irish Press Council, hiring staff, leader writing
and overseeing weekend features.

MORE: Irish Mail’s Paul Drury appointed managing editor

The following is a round-up of Irish media news for December 2007…

Read the rest of this entry »

Senator and Sunday Independent columnist Eoghan Harris appeared visual upset after a recent TV interview was not going his way (clip above).

The senator looked upset on TV3’s ‘the Political Party’ when the interview was not going his way. "We got bogged down in small tribunal stuff," he said on the show in reference to questions about Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who he regularly defends.

He asked "Are we going to re-recorded this?", to which the presenter, Ursula Halligan, told him the programme was "recoded as live, this is pre-recoded as live".

The event follows him storming out of the Today FM studios in May after he was not allowed to control a debate with the Irish Times‘ Fintan O’Toole. At the time he said: "I tell you what, I have enough of  Fintan O’Toole and the Irish Times", and left the studio.

Irishelection.com’s
has publiched research on the Dublin rental market that questions a report by property website Daft.ie which said rents are rising. The research data was from the property website.

The politics site used a sample of 200 properties from Daft.ie, they say that between November 29 and December 22 a total of 22 listing have dropped their price and 68% remain un-rented.

However, it can not be said that the new research debunks the Daft.ie report. To do so it wound have had to being over the same time scale, not after the report’s publication.

Irishelection.com also say that "the Irish Times and Irish Independent announced
Dublin rental demand at an all-time high". But newspapers report the news, they do not announce it. While newspaper now depend too much on reports by non-independent bodies, the report should be attacked at least as much as the newspaper articles.

Bloggers at the site are also proving that bloggers are just like journalists - they’re pointing out that they broke a story three months before the Sunday Independent.
Something the media loves to do. In fact, the story - that a ton of houses are been left unsold - is an
far older one. From our own on-the-ground experience, it dates to a
year or more back. Points about the cosy relationship between the property sector
and the media might be a little more valid.