Blathnaid Healy » future of newspapers

Greenslade on future of Irish media

Blathnaid Healy — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:40:45 +0000

Roy Greenslade writes in The Irish Times today about the future of newspapers and journalism in general and includes a few sprinklings about Ireland specifically.

Read the full article here

New mobile site for The Irish Times

Blathnaid Healy — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:20:28 +0000

For people who like news on the go, The Irish Times has launched a new mobile site m.irishtimes.com*

The IT’s Hugh Linehan has the details over a Mechanical Turk:

We’ve decided to launch a device-neutral site which will render well on iPhones, BlackBerries, Nokias and everything else. It has breaking news, business and sport stories, and selected content from the newspaper. Some other popular functions, such as Most Read stories and Weather, are also included.

Full post from him here.

*Of course you can always use RTE’s mobile news and sports site: m.rte.ie

(DOI: RTE is my employer)

Sholin on the term newspaper

Blathnaid Healy — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:09:52 +0000

Industry thinker Ryan Sholin has an interesting post where he argues that the term newspaper is an inaccurate way of describing a large and diverse range of publications that produce news.

I’ve been saying those words in person to people a lot lately:

“There is no newspapers.”

What’s it mean?

It means that if you’re in the business of publishing pronouncements, predictions, prayers, analysis, criticism, or full on takedowns related to the current state of the newspaper industry, please understand that despite the convenience it would provide for said ruminations, there is no such thing as a monolithic, uniform entity called “newspapers.”

You can read it in full here.

I don’t think I agree with him on this one. If the newspaper still has a physical form and if it prints news whether it’s a small-town weekly, an evening paper, or a national broadsheet – it is a newspaper.

Of course there are differences between publications (size, ownership, language, audience, aim etc). But like any large classification there will always be a sub-classifications. I don’t think we need to lose the large ‘monolithic’ classification to better understand the common and individual issues that face these different types of publications, or do I dare say newspapers, as a whole.

Being more mindful of sub-classifications,

Blathnaid