I was asked today if I’d consider subscribing to The Times (of London) now that they’ve moved behind a paywall. My answer was no. In a similar vein, I completed The Guardian‘s iPhone app customer survey, in which many of the questions probed the app user’s willingness to pay for a subscription model. I gave them an ample response (which they probably didn’t want) explaining why I felt they needed an international approach to their strategy.

In short, these news organisation produce some brilliant content for international customers, but all too often it’s buried underneath masses of content that interest only an audience in the UK . Unlike many of my Trinity College classmates, I don’t particularly care about the minutiae of number 10, but rather want my British politics painted in the same broad strokes with which I observe other global powers. Equally (and The Times is particularly bad at this) I don’t want my otherwise enjoyable features reading to be peppered with allusions to “the great British insert-topic-here.” It’s almost as if a sub-editor comes along and looks at each piece, and saying “ah, we’ve missed an opportunity to insert a reference about fish and chips at Cornwall”, inserts some edits.

Online media represents an opportunity for the very best media companies to offer their non-local content to a global audience. I’d pay for the Guardian’s columnists or The Times’ internationally-relevant investigative work. But I won’t pay for the privilege of hunting through localised content to do so. These companies need to provide alternate international sites and applications that prioritise content in different ways. Then, maybe I’ll feel that as an Irish man, I can justify the expense.

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The BBC, that bastion of Britishness, has launched two new iPhone apps for both news and football. Sadly for our UK cousins, they’re not actually available in Britain at all.

The BBC apps were originally due out in April, but were delayed following the Newspaper Publishers Association’s complaint, lodged with the BBC trust, that such a strategy would damage the “nascent market”. At the time, if you remember, there were a lot of questions being asked about how the BBC was spending its licence fee, and so the apps were put on ice.

Now, however, they’re being offered as an ad-supported service outside the UK, where complaints about the licence fee and the UK market don’t apply. And how lucky we fans of the BBC news service are- these applications are absolutely excellent.

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While I’m relatively sure that the only people who still read my blog are those who signed up to the RSS feed a long time ago, I’ve gone ahead and redesigned the site today.

Well, that’s not quite true. I designed and coded this from scratch, so I had to learn most of the skills first- it’s more a a multi-week project. As a result, I’m rather worn out now, and will save the blog post on my learning curve for another day. For the moment, let me just say I’m sure I’ve managed to break some things (categories, obviously) and I only have placeholders for the About, Portfolio, and Contact sections at the moment. And I’m aware that Cufon font replacement is quite slow, though I’ve no idea why.

Well, all for another day. If anyone spots some errors that need fixing, let me know. Even better, let me know how to fix them!

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There’s an excellent piece in the Sunday Times today on Japan bribing voters of the International Whaling Commission to lift the moratorium on whaling.

I recommend reading the extended piece, linked to above, and not just the summary report on the paper’s front page. It’s a wonderful piece of proper investigative journalism, and the care the team took is apparent. For example:

On Friday the Guinea fisheries ministry denied Japan had paid any money to its delegates and claimed Sylla was not involved in IWC matters. Sylla was briefly put on the phone to say he had made everything up.

However, a reporter who telephoned the ministry earlier to check Sylla’s credentials was told he attended IWC meetings and had recently been at preparatory talks for Morocco as a stand-in IWC commissioner.

Wonderful. It’s been a long time since I thought that being a journalist was about shady parking lots and informants, but hot damn, every time I read a piece like this I can’t help but get excited like a kid. Hidden cameras, government bribery, and even a mention of prostitution. Cracking stuff!

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