Point made, but ouch.

Now the gutless cowards who work there are getting a taste of competition. Lo and behold, nobody actually cares about their bloated self important ‘opinions’.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. Soon they’ll be deader than Frank Devine.

It’s true, he lives in his car (with a goat), wears a Ned Kelly helmet, and ran for council on the promise of ‘throwing his hat in the ring and rolling up his sleeves to get the ball rolling’ (lifted straight from his candidates’ statement).

And … he came within 3 votes of getting elected. I was honoured to receive his 7th preference:

http://alpineopinion.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/dyer1a.jpg

Seems to me THE big problem, and it affects not only publications like newspapers (and blogs) is the monetary system’s inability to process micro-payments.

I reckon there’s a huge chunk of trade and business which could be transacted over the web, which is being held up and/or possibly wrecked, by the bank’s inability to deal with this.

They don’t seem to be able to deal with a payment smaller than $10. So for example, if you buy, say a lotto ticket for $5.50 on your online Lotto account, when you put in your credit card number, the system whirrs away, then it pays $5.50 for your ticket, but also adds $4.50 to the credit in your account, making a transaction of $10.

Now, when you add in all the sneaky little charges and fees that the credit card company subsequently adds on, you find that you have been charged in effect, something like $12 for a $5.50 purchase.

This affects on-line publishing. Stephen King (and others) have tried publishing books in the old-fashioned instalment format, but online. But they ran into this problem, that each instalment cost $10 (or actually $12) so that people were being asked to pay $40 ($48) for a book they could buy in the store for $20. PLUS, they didn’t even get the actual book! If they wanted the book, they would have to print off all that paper and then bind it themselves. To make such online publishing viable, it needs to be cheaper, not more expensive, than the printed version.

I only buy the Thursday and Saturday Age these days, respectively for the TV Guide and the classifieds. I do this not because I’m a scunge, but because that way I have less paper lying around. Recycling becomes a REAL effort if you live in a flat upstairs, with no elevator!

I would be perfectly happy to pay for the online Age (or for Crikey) but I’m reluctant to subscribe ( I never used to buy the Age every day before the internet came along) and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $12 to read the paper!

There’s a fortune here for some compooter/finance geek who can solve the problem of online micro-payments I reckon.

… tumbleweeds blow through……

I just want to say that I think he writes well, and the sub-story about his son is fascinating, insightful and sad.

Secondly, until someone can prove the existence of a Raymond Bull, I’m gonna remain convinced he is a parody, and his spelling is intentional.

Yeah? And just where can I find these ‘empowered’ revolutionaries? URLs please.

Seems all that ‘Assesses Henry IV, Part 1 from a femmo-marxist perspective’ gunk the lefties have taught them have provided them critical skills.

Therefore that laugh mightily at the transparent and overt editorial slant media companies infect their content with and are less likely to read it – or it they do will mock its overt sping.

The biggest abusers of overt spin in Oz being of course News Ltd papers.

2) Crikey gets paid for its content with subscriptions. Something like 7k subscribers paying $100 a year.

3) Crikey has a staff of around 10-12?

4) Crikey doesn’t pay printing costs and doesn’t have its commentary influenced by the needs of their demographic in terms of advertisting – unlike news.

In short the Crikey business model is designed for the e-news era. News Ltd is not.

Great piece, Scott. Nothing comparable has been published about Hartigan’s speech in any newspaper. Of course you had to go to a blog to read this.

I’m surprised, but not really, that none of the Old Media talked to any bloggers to get their reaction to Hartigan’s amusing Mr Burns-ish rant.

You nailed the shocking new reality they’re desperately trying to comprehend with these two sentences :

“You grew up in a social and business environment where money meant power, where media barons were the only people who could afford to communicate directly with large numbers of people; it has been this way for as long as you can remember, and as long as your father’s generation can remember for that matter.”

“…how dare you people who haven’t suffered through a newspaper cadetship and operating outside the employ of a large newspaper organisation communicate with a wider audience?”

The rules of the game have changed, and dramatically so.

Front pages don’t destroy or make political careers anymore. Hartigan and his Old Media pals don’t wield the power or influence they once did, and it kills them to admit it.

Next newspaper please.

That isn’t true. The newspapers were actually the first to use electronic means. The problem is that they are giving it away on the web for free and they are experiencing a large number of their readers going there. That will of course have to stop. Either they go broke of have to start charging people on the web.