The Place Of The Internet
(The Future of Newspapers)
A mid-November
editorial column now – yes, they do tend to pop up at odd
times – sparked off by a feature in the UK newspaper The
Independent.
The Ed. doesn’t
get time to read a newspaper every day, but I like to keep up with
otherthansportscar news whenever possible. I used to be a Daily
Telegraph reader, but that paper’s politics and just
plain stodginess finally led to the change, and I must admit to
being very keen on The Independent.
Monday’s
issue, November 13, included an eight page feature on the future
of newspapers, and opinions were sought from a wide range of influential
media types. Two opinions stood out – for very different reasons.
Andrew
Marr is the BBC’s Political Editor, and a very astute
observer of goings on in Westminster. This is some of what he had
to say:
“Are
newspapers doomed? Absolutely not. Although there’s an enormous
amount of on-line news-related material, if you analyse it, very,
very little is actually new fact, new information – it’s
almost all parasitic journalism carried out either by broadcasters
or newspapers.
“So
you have an enormous, gabbling, opinionated commentariat which has
sort of bubbled up over the last ten years, but what you have not
got, obviously, is a new source of original, proper journalism,
because that costs money and someone has to pay for it.
“Those
newspapers that focus particularly on hard reporting will be the
ones that survive because that’s the thing the internet cannot
do. That’s the USP of newspapers.”
Parasitic journalism?
To be perfectly honest, we at dsc do some of that – some of
this Editorial for example. We ‘borrow’ items from other
sources when necessary (with due credit of course), but then unlike
a newspaper, we’re obliged to try and bring all the
(sportscar) news to your screen.
Are we part
of “an enormous, gabbling, opinionated commentariat which
has sort of bubbled up over the last ten years”? Yes,
we are – can’t argue with that. But I can argue with
the point, in our little sportscar field, that “what you
have not got, obviously, is a new source of original, proper journalism”.
The majority
of the material you read on dailysportscar is original
material – whether that’s race reports, interviews or
whatever. All right, a good part of the news items are sourced from
press releases – but others are entirely original, from our
own sources, thanks to hours on the telephone. What we don’t
do, as you know, is simply copy and paste: we leave that up to others.
And so we come
to the views of the pointless Piers Morgan, former editor
of the Daily Mirror.
“Every
newspaper has a great future online. End of story. Within five years
every newspaper will be free and they’ll all be online. And
if they’re not, they should be. There will still be a presence
in print but that will be for older readers and you will find that
anybody under the age of 35 will only read newspapers online.”
Yes, thank you
for those ridiculous thoughts, Piers Morgan. Sadly, he was named
after a Piers of another type altogether: Piers Courage.
Piers Morgan
was sacked from the Daily Mirror after it was revealed
that the photographs the paper carried showing abuse of Iraqi prisoners
were fakes.
Perhaps Morgan
was right in one respect though: his former paper has seen sales
slump by 5% in the past 12 months, while The SUN has slipped
by 3.6% and The STAR by 6% - which is all good news really,
isn’t it?
We’ll
carry on into 2007 much as before, but with a new look – and
we’ll be trying as hard as ever to bring you the news as quickly
as possible, in-depth race reports as quickly as possible, plus
more of the original material that you can find here (thanks to
our wide range of correspondents).
First job in
that vein is a day with James Weaver and Andy Wallace – tomorrow,
November 16 - so it will be a quiet day at dailysportscar
during regular, UK working hours on Thursday. But the original material
coming out of that day should be the highlight of 2006 here.
Malcolm Cracknell
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