The Starrenburg’s Website

There are times when you read about, or see, disparate (different) pieces of information, which then connect in your mind and lead to a new idea or conclusion.

This, for me, was an example of one of those times.

Firstly - we see reported on the web (on the website of a mainstream media (or “MSM”) organisation) an article about American media vs the blogs. I am more interested in the mechanism and dynamics of what happened rather than the content, sad as it was. The article on the BBC website basically was looking at the differences in ‘reporting’ between mainstream media and bloggers, using the discussion on comments made by Eason Jordan about American military “targetting” (killing) journalists in Iraq as the basis for the article. A blogsite Eastongate.com was quickly put up by one group to air the view of the persons who objected to Mr Jordan’s alleged comments at Davos. Note that I said “the view of the persons” not ‘the views of the bloggers’. The blog was essentially a (very effective one it seems) tool for people, not ‘bloggers’, to express their strong disagreement of Mr Jordan’s comments. They could have picketed the CNN offices, and a few by passers may have noticed; they could have got on American national television, and be quickly forgotten because of television viewer’s typically short attention span; or they could have setup a weblog, they made the weblog. Mr Jordan resigned. Whether as a result of the blog swarm which drove the MSM media crazy or not we don’t know - but resigned he has.

Secondly - if you have been reading through some of my earlier posts you will have read that I have been getting into weblogs and looking at RSS news aggregator software. I believe that weblogs and RSS have some commonality. I have been investigating RSS news feeds because I am interested in/need to be able to keep up-to-date with information. As part of looking at RSS (which I think is a great concept) I have also been looking at software products like Onfolio which allow effective management of RSS feeds. As part of this analysis I have been looking at, and fine tuning, my sources of information via RSS feeds. So naturally when I am looking for valuable and informative sources I look to see if they have an RSS feed.

This brings me to the screen shot above, and the reason for this posting.

Being interested in adding ‘The Times’ online newspaper to my RSS feeds for news I went to The Times website looking for an RSS feed. No luck browsing for one or via a search. Then I saw a link to The Times epaper - that must be it I thought. No… what I found on their demonstration site was exactly what you see above - yes, it looks that bad. As you mouse over the illegible text you get a popup window telling you to click to read the article, when you click it you go to another illegible page where you have to click again then finally get something you can read.

Amazing - they just don’t ‘get it’, and for this they want to charge £ 90/€ 130/US$ 170 per year!?

Putting these two articles together it can be seen that the traditional MSM’s are under siege - both the reaction to the blog storm about the Eason Jordon incident, and this clumsy attempt at technology show fear. A fear of becoming irrelevant. For me The Times is already irrelevant, they have lost the opportunity of having any input into my thinking. If they don’t have an RSS feed then they’re out.

There is a historical event from the twentieth century to which parallels can be drawn - the Maginot Line. The Maginot Line was a heavily fortified, defensive siege line built by the French between the two world wars to protect France from German invasion, it was considered impregnable. It was - so the German army simply went around it, the whole Marginot Line became irrelevant, and France fell in a matter of a few weeks. How long would it take for a traditional print newspaper to fall if they lost significant revenue from reduced sales of paper newsprint?

With the advent of global personal publishing delivered through the infrastructure of the Internet, and the medium of weblogs, one person has the potential to reach, and influence on a specific issue, more people then any multi-million dollar traditional news organisation. The MSM’s risk becoming an irrelevancy - especially if they attempt to do it the same way as The Times.