Regional newspapers & Digital Britain

Digital Britain (5)

If the competition laws are relaxed, it could lead to an asset swapping session among the big [newspaper] players, who would concentrate their efforts on specific regions and target television and the internet as competition rather than each other.

However, it is also speculated that such a change could lead to a mega-merger. One newspaper expert told PrintWeek that he believed Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror could be merged to form a newspaper behemoth.

Several of the big players, including Johnston Press chief executive John Fry, head of Guardian Media Group, Carolyn McCall, and Trinity Mirror's Sly Bailey will appear before the culture, media and sport select committee today to put forward their case.

From Print Week.
And here's a Daily Mail blogger with a 'monopoly' thought:

There's plenty of comment about Lord Carter's Digital Britain White Paper today. But no one seems to be mentioning the one big change that could really radically transform "digital britain" - dumping the BBC News website.

Hmm.

Real World Suffers Population Losses as Privileged Elite Evolve in Subsidised Environment

Obama was an Elitist too, right?

Today, I worry that too many journalists write only for other journalists. Columnists who have never really lived in the real world let alone knocked on hundreds of doors, write columns only for their friends. Large parts of the media are increasingly populated by a privileged elite of top university graduates who, too often, have only ever operated in subsidised environments, and are impervious to what the great majority of people are thinking, removed as they are from the commercial imperative of actually connecting with enough readers to make their papers financially viable.

Some of you here tonight, I suspect, may sneer at the kind of family-values paper I’ve just described – that almost comic obsession with the letters page. Those values, you’ll argue, belong to another era. Well, maybe. My own view is that some values are timeless.

Those "elites" again.


And for the BBC-bashing bit.


Wikipedia (via Roy Greenslade) reveals that the author of the quote was:

... educated at University College School, a private fee-paying school in Hampstead, on a state scholarship... In his school holidays, [he] worked as a messenger at the Sunday Express [his father, Peter... was a prominent journalist on the Sunday Express] and during his pre-university gap year as a trainee in the Daily Express. From 1967 he read English at Leeds University...

So no privilege there, then? Just real world.

Modish and Insincere™ : 1960 - 2008

The Mail doesn't care. It reliably sets its face against what it sees as modish and insincere. It offers a view of the world - that everything has gone downhill since the 1950s, when women stayed in the kitchen, sex was saved for marriage and homosexuality was shameful - that is now rarely found elsewhere, not even in the Telegraph as that paper strives for a younger, trendier audience. It understands that one of a newspaper's functions is to give its readers a sense of security, belonging and simple values in an increasingly complex and unsettling world. The Mail is a supremely confident paper. Where others, trimming to focus groups, muffle their message, the Mail projects it relentlessly, and with great technical skill, from almost every page.

Peter Wilby.