Comments on: The future of newspapers – the Herald hasn’t found it yet

By: phauna

phauna — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:21:01 +0000

Just get firefox and adblock, and you won’t see any ads again. It never even occurred to me that the smh website had ads. They fight dirty, you fight dirty.

By: Stig

Stig — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:17:42 +0000

And an extension of the issue of ads running WITH SOUND is that media companies start to favour sites where their clients can run ads that annoy people. Regardless of whether the placement is best media planning.

Crap, intrusive, annoying, interuptive advertising once again becomes the norm.

Stig

By: Aela

Aela — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:08:01 +0000

Couldn’t agree more, Tim. The crud becomes more obvious when you get overseas. It seems that the Herald online, and also the Age online are suffering a severe lack of direction and sadly, it comes down to money. One of my talented friends who worked there was exasperated after 12 months, so she left. She told of funding problems, bad treatment of staff and managers failing to grasp key concepts of the new media they were trying to create (for example, trying to make a 3 minute news bulletin with few or no moving pictures)
It’s a sad story when this is the best online news site that Australia has to offer. Have you checked out news.com lately? Or for that matter, any of the television stations who are meant to be masters of communication? In an age where more people are going online for their news, never before has the demand for high quality content and analysis been greater. Yet few seem to be able to deliver.

By: Fleta

Fleta — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:03:27 +0000

you fixed your typo faster than smh.com.au – well done.

And I forgot to mention Crikey as the online news service of choice.

By: Fleta

Fleta — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:00:03 +0000

In term of the subediting – I’m sure you just threw in that typo for effect

I think you raise an interesting point in regards to Column 8. It’s been a good 19 years since I started reading this column, following a rather embarrassing at the time appearance in it. I used to enjoy (and find comfort in) reading about other people saying odd/funny things, people with apt names for their profession and little sydney-centric coincidences. It would be 5 years since I’ve read this column with any regularity however, firstly because it receives no promotion on smh.com.au beyond a little link above the Opinion section, and secondly because all it ever seems to have is record first sightings of flowers, people whinging about the downfall of grammar, and funny references to last Thursday’s column, which of course I didn’t read. Is that really my loss?

I remember reading something a year or so ago about why fairfax stopped collecting info on their readers – I think the fact they made you sign up and then sign in to read more than 2 articles was sending people to other news sites. You’d think they could at least come up with ads which match the content of the article you’re reading, although Paris Hilton probably isn’t one of their clients.