The Guardian's pretty well positioned for this kind of thing. We're owned by the Scott Trust which keeps us free from undue influence by shareholders and actively encourages long-term thinking about the future of journalism. We also have a very strong technology department - the site runs on an in-house custom CMS (Spring/Hibernate/Velocity) and we have plenty of flexibility to try out new things.
We're owned by the Scott Trust which keeps us free from undue influence by shareholders and actively encourages long-term thinking about the future of journalism.
In the interest of full disclosure, you should also point out that the Graun has a near monopoly on public sector job ads, so is effectively State-subsidized.
(Back in the late 90s I worked on your old StoryServer implementation... What a bunch of arse that was).
"the Graun has a near monopoly on public sector job ads, so is effectively State-subsidized."
Cobblers. (And a lazy Conservative Party talking point to boot.)
The TES and Times Higher have more education jobs, and local papers get a far higher local government spend in aggregate. And in the Guardian that's only Tuesdays and Wednesdays (having bought them before I can tell you that the Saturday job supplement is merely a repeat and I never paid more for it).
In fact the vast majority of advertised public sector jobs are not advertised in the Guardian. Under what bizarre definition of 'monopoly' would this fall?
I don't know anything about the specifics of public advertising in the British newspaper market, but I will say that a substantial ad buy two days a week could be a significant subsidy to the paper as a whole. And how much you paid for the Saturday supplement is irrelevant: what matters is what the advertisers paid for that reprint.
It's the same Guardian Media Group, ultimately owned by the Scott Trust, that's currently slashing and burning its regional media properties in print, TV and radio to keep the heavily loss-making Guardian afloat.
I hear their Manchester regional arm MEN Media, not content with closing all its small weekly newspaper offices, turning its local TV station Channel M into an infomercial, repeat and music video channel and cutting half its staff, is now up for sale. [1]
The MEN Media weeklies, which this time last year had busy newsrooms in each town, are now literally reduced to having a journo sitting in a public library waiting for people to go to them with stories for one afternoon a week. It's a shame for a newspaper that started out as the Manchester Guardian.
It's all very well pumping money into this kind of thing, but how will it pay for itself when the more popular and profitable MEN is gone?
While I'm mostly far right of center by US or U.K. standards, I find a whole bunch of U.K. papers interesting.
While I obviously prefer the Torygraph, which first broke this story (and what can you say about the paper that employs Matt http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/?cartoon=6798426&cc...), many others like The Guardian frequently deliver very interesting stuff such as this.
Heather Brooke fought long and hard to break the story, but in the end the Telegraph obviously had deeper pockets. But you have to give the Telegraph credit for the way they reported it - Labour one week, Tories the next - with both parties receiving an individual public shaming, hence not being able to simply point fingers at each other like they usually do.
I got the impression it was even better than that, e.g. didn't David Cameron say some things that he quickly had to walk back when the 2nd shoe dropped?
A bit like how the ACORN videos over here were carefully released so that generally at least one statement made after each quickly became "non-operative" as it's said over here.
Not following the ACORN example: The district court tossed out their funding cut due to Bill of Attainder and the MA-AG cleared them, complaining that the unedited videos didn't support the claims illustrated in the edited videos.
If the shoes dropped they found their way quickly back on ACORN's feet.
I'm referring entirely to the sequencing of revelations in these respective scandals.
Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com first released one taken at the Baltimore office, followed by Washington, D.C. After the first or second, the head of ACORN said "Well, yes, but we threw them out of the office at A, B, New York City, etc."
Then Breitbart released the one in NYC. Lather, rinse, repeat.
(It's a bit misleading to say "the MA-AG cleared them", seeing as how that was the execrable (Amiraults) former MA-AG Scott Harshbarger, who was hired by ACORN for an "independent" inquiry.)
