Posts by giovanni tiso
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(Unless I'm missing something, the daily highlights are only available to RWC pass holders, ie, they're not free. Pleeeeese correct me someone!)
Sorry, my bad, indeed they are. I looked into it a while ago and had understood that on the day of the match they would be free.
Locking up the highlights seems indeed excessive (unless perhaps it's the sumptious extended highlights of the UEFA champions league). Besides the NFL (and NHL), the soccer world cup last year is another tournament that gave away for free, in spite of the fact they had negotiated the most expensive national rights packages ever.
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So who owns the digital rights to TRWC?
The somewhat ghastly rugby world cup website has free daily highlights of each game and a subscription service where you can watch every game and all the highlights. Besides that there ought to be regional right holders too, but I'm not sure who it would be for our neck of the woods.
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The jersey thing is a bit classless, really. Unless they are laced with performance enhancing drugs or something.
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Dexter is starting on Sky One tonight. It's about some sort of CSI type person who is also a serial killer - which might just be the worst premise in the history of premises - but it has Michael C Hall (David in Six Feet Under) and it did get good reviews. Can't personally vouch for it, but I have friends with brains who liked it.
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I only block ads from sites that use unsolicited video and other obtrusive crap, and it's only a handful really... do AdBlock and FlashBlock allow you to manage exclusions?
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So long as you're in a consumer activist mood, you could tweak your hosts file to block the ads from the Herald website.
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But the advertisers who end up adjacent to such articles aren't necessarily being associated with the content - they will be keen on associating themselves with the type of reader who reads the hard news
Presumably you want the reader when s/he's in an appropriately idle/playful mood. Unlikely thought process: "Now that I'm finished reading this article about AIDS ravaged Etiopia, I think I'll check out this all new Nissan here." I also strongly suspect they'd try to avoid appearing next to the thing, but I could be wrong. Unless they're Oxfam or something of course.
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Will it mean that they don't place ads in irrelevant content?
Will it mean, therefore, that "irrelevant" content don't generate revenue?
In a previous discussion we touched upon the increase amount of gossip (er, celebrity news) on our beloved online dailies, and regardless of the merits I think we all agreed that that fluff of course is a readership enhancer - the readers' picks are almost always topped by such things. But could it be that way back, in the "before" snapshot of Stuff, newspapers in the main were still busy positioning themselves on the Internet, and that now they are working on how to turn a buck?
Given that fencing content with various kinds of subscription models hasn't worked (does anybody remember when the Onion used to come out one day for subscribers, and a couple of days later for everybody else - what was up with *that*?), they've got to push the ads, and for that they need a certain kind of content - what company wants to associate its name to child abuse, of nuclear disarmament talks, or AIDS epidemics? It doesn't mean they're going to stop talking about those things, to the limited extent that they do already, because they need their cred as sources of hard news in order to push the fluff. You can make the point that at this rate in another seven years it might all be fluff, but I rather see it as a balancing act, as in to what extent we can increase the fluff without damaging our reputation and/or turning people away. It goes to Russell's point as well: you'll still want to cultivate the kind of readership that is worth peddling stuff to, and that will protect the hard news (and other unsexy stuff) to some extent. I don't know that even from the point of view of an advertiser you could then call that "irrelevant" content, simply because you don't place ads on it.
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I just read the news article on stuff relating to this. I couldn't have been less surprised by the news that Bush got Libby off. The odds on that happening were pretty short.
As Jon Stewart said in his commentary to the Libby sentence a few weeks ago, "some people think that Bush will pardon him and spare him prison. Everybody else *knows* he will."
I guess it's easier to designate a fall guy when the fall is only about 30 centimetres, though, ay?
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Or are you saying it does not need to be in the public interest to qualify as news?
We come to this site for points of view and information, and Russell was making the point that we came in greater numbers when a celebrity drug scandal happened to be the topic of discussion. So "we" as in the readers of Public Address collectively cannot throw too many stones at that particular glass house. "We" lap it up. I'm saying "we" in spite of the fact that "I" personally coulndn't give a rat's arse, and neither can you I assume.
But public interest and news clealry don't overlap when you throw in the word "commercial". You would have noticed that entertainment/celebrity news have burrowed their way into the homepages of both Stuff and the Herald, and the articles are consistently topping the readers' picks.
Having said all this, I'm with you, the fact that a lot of people flock to it doesn't impress me as the foundation of a journalistic standard. I would very much like to be able to read my paper without the gossip mag thrown in for free. Free stuff is what kills us. And I find it supremely ironic that The Daily Show is not talking about Paris Hilton (other than suggesting a good title for the saga - The Show Skank Redemption) when every else is; this in spite of the fact that the media circus surrounding the episode is in fact the only interesting thing about it, and would ordinarily be exactly the kind of thing that the Daily Show would go for. But they've chosen instead to become a Hilton-free zone, since nobody else seems keen to fulfil that role. Call it the public's right not to know.