Media
ASDA wants to edit your magazines
Asda has come under fire from independent magazine publishers for proposed alterations to distribution arrangements that include the supermarket being given editorial space in the publications it stocks…
Asda’s demands include a request for two pages of editorial or advertising space each month in titles of the company’s choosing.
And there’s an increase in the bribes - I can’t think of a better way of describing it - it demands to put magazines onto the shelves.
shop space given over to a distributor’s titles will be subject to a “space contribution” of £10,000 paid to the supermarket.
Asda is asking for a space contribution for each new Asda store opened of £2,500 per magazine title to be paid to the supermarket.
The supermarket company is also demanding that any new title distributed in its stores will be subject to an “item set up” charge of £2,464.
I know I keep saying this, but seriously: if you value a particular magazine, take out a subscription. It’ll save you money too.
AOL to AOL bloggers: stop blogging (or at least, don’t expect to be paid)
It seems that AOL’s intrepid army of bloggers has been told to stop posting in order to save money - so some of them are continuing to blog unpaid.
Let’s just nuke the planet from orbit
OK, I know I’m talking about the Daily Mail here, but the comments on this story make me want to kill people. Story first:
When Suzanne Richards and Sarah Dobinson decided to sell their £650,000 home, they expected professional service from their estate agents.
Instead, they were left feeling ‘insulted and violated’ after a staff member outed them as a same-sex couple in a website advertisement.
Logging on to check how their period home was being marketed, they were horrified to find the word ‘lesbians’ in the space where prospective buyers would expect to see a reference number.
It’s a clear-cut case of an estate agent employee being an arsehole, and the firm has settled out of court for £5,000. Bring on the Mail readers!
But they don’t seem to be worried having their names and photographs in a national newspaper along with the “lesbian” comment.
Stating the truth is now is an offence in England.
Hypocrites .. they should be made to repay the money.
Anyone would think they were ashamed to be gay.
Oh, please, do me a favour. Are they lesbians or not? Are they afraid of what they are and therefore unwilling to admit it to others?
Is lesbians a derogatory term now? In this day and age they shouldn’t shy away from what they are.
Well at least they got a bit of money out of it. Can I claim money if someone calls me hetrosexual?
If the women are ashamed of their life style, why live it?
Am I missing something here - They Are lesbians - what’s the problem?
Five grand for stating the obvious.
“Shaking with disbelief” when they read the advert, but more than happy to give a statement and provide a nice piccy.
Absolutely ridiculous! If the advert had said the house was being sold by an architect and his wife, would this be discrimination against architects and heterosexual couples?
It’s not all bad, though. Beeper is clearly being forced to read the Mail against his or her will.
I can’t believe all the commenters who actually think that it wasn’t a big deal. This world is full of bigotry and hatred and these estate agents were intentionally adding to that. This was not done lightheartedly, but with malice. Maybe the commenters would like to have their addresses printed along with choice one word descriptors of them? The first one that springs to mind is “bigot”.
And Beeper isn’t alone. Hats off to Lucy:
We have no idea how this came to be in the paper - it is entirely possible that the press picked the story up from the courts or from the estate agents rather than that the women went to them. It may not be ‘discrimination’ as such but it was certainly no accident - you can’t accidentally insert the word ‘lesbian’ where a reference number should be. So clearly someone at the estate agents thought it would be funny to invade the privacy of two people who had hired them to provide a professional service, and found their sexuality to be a huge joke. The women made a private complaint first which was dismissed out of hand - as with so many situations, had the firm had the decency to offer a sincere apology that would probably have been an end to it. Good for the women for demanding to be treated with courtesy and respect.
Why I’d buy a dedicated e-book reader if somebody invented a good one
I’ve just received my monthly threat from the newsagent, and it seems that my newspaper habit - that is, my one daily newspaper and two sunday newspapers - is costing £12.55 per week. Given that nine times out of ten the paper doesn’t turn up until I’ve been up and about for an hour or two, I’m spending £652.60 per year to read things I could get for free via RSS. And that doesn’t include the extra newspapers I tend to buy at lunchtimes, or my seriously scary magazine habit. Eek!
Think first, publish later
Ian Betteridge argues that blogs aren’t as self-correcting as yer Scobles like to claim:
Watching the development and correction of stories, there’s something interesting that I’ve always observed. When someone posts something controversial (and wrong) few of the sites which post about that original post also post a correction.
And thus begins a classic network effect. Suppose Robert writes something erroneous, which 1,000 blogs pick up on and post about without correcting. If each of those has 100 readers, that’s 100,000 people who believe the original story - and unless Scoble’s readership is so huge that it encompasses all that 100,000 AND they correct their own posts, that’s a lot of misinformation out there on the web.
I’ve got a column about this very same thing in issue 181 of .net (which isn’t out for a while yet). It’s the old problem of truth versus Internet Facts.
Tangent: Ian’s blog fell out of my subscriptions list for no good reason a while back. I’d forgotten what a great blog he has.
Giles Coren gets angry about sub-editing
Some writers get rather upset if sub-editors change their copy, as this sweary rant from Giles Coren demonstrates:
When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion.
Then again, Roland White has a different view:
Subeditors are the people who correct our mistakes. All journalism is done in a hurry, so it’s inevitable that mistakes are mad. Subeditors are our safety net. They make sure that copy fits, see that our words make some vague sort of sense and finally they write the headlice.
They are hot stuff on split infinitives, can advise on the correct way to spell Gadaffi and are virtually the only people outside Burkina Faso who care that it used to be known as Upper Volta. Imagine an English teacher with a flick knife and you’ve got the general idea.
I’ve had the odd thing butchered in editing (not by anyone I currently work with, I hasten to add). The worst was a piece for the Sunday Mail where the only original word that survived the sub-editing process was “the”; I’ve had subtle gags ruined by unnecessary exclamation marks; and I’ve been the recipient of sub-editing that takes the same approach to fixing copy as Father Ted did to fixing a little dent in a car.
Generally, though, I’m with A.A. Gill:
The joy of being a hack is that there is a back room of people far cleverer, more experienced and adept than I working to make me look clever, experienced and adept. If on occasion I fail to do so, naturally it’s their fault.
Despicable rags
Obsolete has written a fantastic post about Robert Murat’s successful libel action against 11 - 11! - newspapers.
the truly unprecedented payout to Robert Murat by not just the Express papers but every single one of the daily tabloids with the exception of the Daily Sport, three of the Sunday tabloids and also the Scotsman is an indictment of a journalistic culture that regards the lives of those who are being written about as being of no concern whatsoever…
Murat may receive £550,000 damages; split that 11 ways and it adds up to just £50,000 a newspaper, which to the Daily Mail and Sun especially is absolute peanuts. They’ve had a year of fun, boosted their circulations, brought in far more than that through their race to the bottom, competing with each other as to who could print the more lurid stories, and at the end of it they have to cough up a whole £50,000? To spout a cliche, they literally must be laughing all the way to the bank.
Perfect parenting: Brad, Angelina and the N-word
In much the same way I love trashy pop music, Mrs Bigmouth loves trashy magazines - particularly the ones with soft-focus shots of impossibly good-looking celebrities and their impossibly perfect offspring. She particularly enjoys looking for the N-word, which occasionally sneaks into the article and depth-charges the portrayal of perfect parenting.
The N-word is “nanny”.
There was a good one last week (sorry, I forget the magazine) where it talked - after a few pages going on and on about what great parents Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were - about how the couple were having to manage with “just one nanny”.
Just one!
At least the article actually mentioned the nanny (or nannies, in the case of Hollywood royalty. Apparently three nannies per child is normal - one for daytime, one for nighttime and one for the weekends). Most don’t, so you’re left with a few thousand words about how brilliant parenthood is. It’s not tiring, you always look perfect, you can resume your career in a matter of days, and the whole thing is a big happy adventure.
It’d be funny if it weren’t such a fuck-you to real parents who can’t just do a baby dump and bugger off to the gym whenever the little ‘un gets annoying, and who can’t just leave the baby in a separate wing of the mansion when they fancy a nap.
I know that actors are in the business of acting and that magazines - particularly ones aimed at women - are in the business of distorting reality, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a bit of truth for once? “God, early parenthood sucks,” said Famous Lady. “Even with a nanny to help out, I felt like punching Chrysanthemum Space Cakes through a hedge loads of times. But you know what? That stage doesn’t last long, and when it’s over it’s a hoot”.
“I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours / but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour…”
Remember the attempts by Christian Voice to prosecute various people over Jerry Springer: The Opera? And the £90,000 costs awarded against CV’s Stephen Green? It seems Green is asking for some good old-fashioned Christian charity from the very people he tried to prosecute.
The money is due to be paid today, but Stephen Green doesn’t have it.
He has written to both Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday inviting them to waive their costs in the interests of goodwill and justice.
Apparently chasing him for legal costs would be “vindictive”. Media Watch Watch says:
Vindictive? Like Green’s relentless self-interested pursuit of the BBC and John Thoday, and his gloating over the dearth of royalties accruing to Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas as a result of his censorship campaign wasn’t vindictive?
While we hesitate to celebrate anyone’s financial ruin, it is hard to feel sympathy for the whingeing hypocrite as he begs Thompson and Thoday to waive their charges. And we seriously doubt it will shut him up.
Chicken Yoghurt is amused, while Richard Bartholomew points out that Green was solely responsible for the “adverse, grotesque costs” and that he targeted two individuals rather than a public body.
Green says:
It is outrageous that a public-spirited individual should be dissuaded from upholding standards of public decency in a public body because of the fear of adverse, grotesque costs orders.
Which is an interesting way of looking at it. As Bartholomew notes, there’s a reason why Green should pay up or face bankruptcy.
without the risk of losing money there would be many more enemies of free speech using the courts – and the very same threat of high costs – to silence ideas they didn’t like.
Is this the future of magazine publishing? Probably not, but it’s still interesting
The Magazineer has put up an interesting post about MagCloud, a print-on-demand service designed specifically for magazines. The content available so far isn’t particularly inspiring, but the idea itself is quite interesting.
But there’s still something about paper. It’s not just because screens suck to read on (they do, but that hasn’t kept us from doing it all day). There is an intimacy about a good book, a pleasure to the glossy pages of magazines, and, ironically, a permanence to paper. (How many times has a website you really loved simply disappeared?)
So what if we could combine the best parts of the web (no waste, personalized content, open to all) with the best parts of print (sexy print quality, permanence, no batteries required)?
For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with HP Labs called MagCloud. The idea is simple, really. MagCloud enables anyone to start a magazine - real, live printed magazine - with no giant pile.