The Times They are a Chargin' - The Musical

When my Uncle first found out I was learning guitar my Christmas present that year was a Bob Dylan songbook. It didn't get much use from me before, I think, I swapped it while at University for a couple of tickets for a new up-coming band called Seymour, you may know them better as Blur. However, one of those songs, indeed it is probably the only one I actually learnt how to play, does seem rather appropriate for a little Stephen Glenn alteration today.

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
A click on a Times link
Will soon make you groan
And accept it that soon
You'll be charged to the bone
If your Times to you
Is worth skimmin'
Then you better start spendin'
Online your news fix to own
For the Times they are a-chargin'.

Come writers and critics
Who spread the news with your pen
>Keep keyboards active
And news free from the pain
And don't link from blogs
For the readers won't win
And there's no tellin' who
That it's readin'
The Times loser now
All the others will win
If the Times they go a-chargin'.

Come Guardian, Telegraph
Please heed the call
Don't charge for your content
Don't put up paywalls
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who installed
A charge to look inside
And it is ragin'
And we'll not open windows
For others we'll fall
When the Times they start a-chargin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the world
And don't charge what's free
That's so very absurd
Your sons and your daughters
Are being charged for words
Your old way is
Rapidly agin'
Please get the new way
Where you widen web's world
But the Times they are a-chargin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
Backward step now
Will later be blast
As the present row
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
The Times of London
Is stuck in the past
So the Times they are a-chargin'.

Music of Bob Dylan, words rearranged by Stephen Glenn (with no assistance from William de Worde*)

* A little mention to the editor of the Anhk-Morpork Times for all my Discworld fan readers. Actually I'd like to see Terry Pratchett's take on this whole situation of the online media overtaking the as yet young and fledgling newspaper industry. A sort of Web 2.0 version of Moving Pictures.

The Times They are a Chargin'

Or why the Times Online business model is turning me off

Or after 22 years readership the grand divorce

Younger readers may not realise this but when I first attended an institute of Higher Education my day started in the University Library in the newspaper and periodical sectio scanning the newspapers. Back then they were all broadsheets none of this Berliner or Tabloid format. The reason being that 22 years ago the papers were not online. Their archives where available on microfilm or microfiche after a few months, or in a filing cabinet in the Library until they were available.

I was studying Economics and in our first week we were told, no instructed, no make that ordered to read the Financial Times plus at least two other papers from different parts of the political spectrum. I chose all three of the The Times, The Guardian and The Independent but for the one I used my student discount to buy and have as my own I chose The Times. One of my shelves in my bedroom became my own catalogue of the back issues for that year and I had a card index or relevant stories. Oh how Google would have made my student days easier.

The reason I'd chosen the Times was not because of its 'balanced' reporting, nor was its political view closest to my own, but because it had the fullest sports section. I even got to see the Northern Irish football results on a Monday morning, almost collapsing one morning in my first year when Bangor where third in the league. I called home to clarify this wasn't an early April Fool joke.

Therefore as Caron has pointed out the news that News International are going to charge for their online edition is making me rethink. I still buy a morning paper every morning and skim the others online. My morning blog post in usually inspired from what I have read or seen on the early BBC breakfast news.It normally gets written up on the bus, it usually includes some quote or other. Obviously I'm cutting and pasting those and linking to the source material

Now if I'm already paying a pound a day for a paper copy of the Time I'm loathe to pay an additional pound a day or £2 a week for an occasional (actually frequent) quote. I only visit the pages online I generally have read in the paper copy for the reason of capturing a quote. I'm also not going to direct my readers to a subscription only service.Therefore now that the Time is not cheaper than the Guardian, and is actually more expensive than the Scotsman now in paper form I'm likely from June to switch my reading habits.

You will have already seen a shift in my linking habits as New International have flagged this potential online charging service. I suspect many other bloggers will follow suit and you wonder just what sort of impact that will have on the Times' online footfall. Knowing the number of out clicks that I get that go to the news sources quoted multiplied by the number of blogs out there it would be quite high I imagine, plus the casual reader will not be willing to chip a pound for browsing.

It is a pity that the Times don't seem to get the media in the 21st Century. The Scotsman only have some articles that premium subscribers have to pay for. Thinks like editorials and comments and certain columnists for example, the bulk of 'the news'is freely available online.

Maybe the Times are wanting us all to go back to that image of huddling in the library to read our newspapers in the online sections. Instead of wrestling with broadsheets and newsprint struggling with the indexing system.

Blogging Bias of the Times - Or Ignorance of @JoanMcAlpine?

I see that Joan McAlpine has done a write up of the Scottish Blogosphere in light of recent events that have seen a bit of a decimation of the politic blogs here in recent weeks. Understandably Jeff is quite pleased about it:

Who can blame Jeff from her comment:

"Scotland is different in that our bloggers are highly individualised. They often link to each other’s sites, even when they are on opposite sides of the political fence.So you can access Scottish Tory Boy and Soapbox, by Labour’s Kezia Dugdale, from Jeff Breslin's SNP Tactical Voting, the most widely read political blog in Scotland."

Which may well be true but only in last month's Wikio rankings he was only one place ahead of me, although with technical difficulties mid month I floundered slightly. So by one measure we are pretty close as is Caron and was Subrosa. But it is far to say that there is an interconectiveness between all the blogs. I remember on my return from hiatus at the end of 2007 gently getting relinked to back on opposition blogrolls and pulling a few others along with me.

Joan went on the say comment about the colour that makes up the 'tartan blogosphere' but in all the various examples of blogs that she mentions fails to mention any of the Lib Dems who make up three of the top ten Scots in this month's Wikio rankings as I blogged yesterday.

Following the recent dropping of Jo Swinson from Question Time with just over 24 hours to broadcast. Caron set up a group on Lib Dem Act*which looks at media underepresentation of the Lib Dems. This is just another case and indeed one which cannot be justified, even the other bloggers from other parties emphasis the input that myself, Caron and Andrew in particular bring to the MacBlogsphere, not bad for a Englishman, a Scotswoman and an Irishman.

This is not a rant brought on by sour grapes, but is one that looks at the wider issue of media representation. It is also one of the reasons that Lib Dems blog in the way they do. We have to get our party message across in an accessible way and for us the controlled media that is blogging is one gateway to do so. Maybe Joan, who blogs at Go Lassie Go, merely made an omission in error, maybe it was just ignorance.

Some will say I'm getting pent up about an opinion piece. But we are within six months of a General Election and the only main Tory blogger and the two main Labour Bloggers as well as several Nats all get mentioned in a piece with deals with politics. Ignoring the not insignificant presence of Lib Dem Blogs in Scotland.

All in all she gave a balanced piece as far as the woes facing blogs has been in recent times as indeed I myself did pointing out not all anonymous bloggers or commenters are nasty following the sad demise of Subrosa. Indeed seeing as that was a major conduit of news to a large number of people it may well have been one other example of the Blogosphere looking out for and policing their own. The sad fact is that in this piece which is in a national paper seems to demise the influence of all but three parties, and a couple of non-aligned commentators.

* You don't need to be a party member to join act.

It's Friday, It's Doughnut Day

Every Friday at work is Doughnut day (fruit alternatives were campaigned for and are available) so therefore this cartoon from Peter Brookes in today's Times, brought a timely smile to my face.

Although just when will the UK be last to pull ourselves out of the economic hole?

Rachel Sylvester: Fail

Rachel Sylvester's column in today's Times really wound me up as I walked from the bus stop to work. First her headline drew me in then wound me up as she quoted Oliver James, but more on that later.



What really got me exacerbated was her daring to comment on politics when she clearly has no idea of opposition "parties" (yes plural) or at least of the English language. She says:

"At the very moment when leadership is required to deal with the economic downturn, politicians of all parties are frozen in the headlights of the recession. The Government is now the majority shareholder of several banks but seems to have no control over the bankers.The opposition parties are quick to criticise Labour's decisions but find it hard to say what they would do instead.

"The political elite has been neutered by the collective failure to predict and prevent the credit crunch and their apparent powerlessness to reverse it now."

Scathing comments if they were 100% true. She mentions parties, Rachel that is the plural of party yet you only mention the Tories as an opposition party. The reason that this really grates is that one party did predict what might happen, did call for measures to be tightened to prevent the banks having carte blanche and are now suggesting what to do different to get out of it. Yes, folks surprise, surprise the MSM, or at least Ms Sylvester, have overlooked the Liberal Democrats.



Strange then that she should have used Oliver James's quote about Tweeters:

"Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It's a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity."

Strange that as Ms Sylvester calls for a party to have a sense of a identity, by her own definition it would seem, had over 1000 uses of the #ldconf hashtag over their conference weekend. Top trended during the leaders speech as well as souring when Howard Dean was speaking. I think that overturns both what Ms Sylvester tried to propagate and disproves what Oliver James has said.



We're Liberal Democrats, we have an identity, and we're going to speak, Tweet, blog and make a fuss about it because it will make a difference.

Lynne Featherstone MP agrees.
Footnote: Proof positive that she doesn't get Twitter she says Nick Clegg Tweets but has fallen for the unofficial Nick as it even says in the profile.