After that short and unblogworthy rant last Tuesday I have thought further about what in particular annoys me about The London Paper. I think first it's the patronising colour coding of different sections, which I notice its older sister the Evening Standard has also adopted. Pink for the fashion sections, blue for business, red for sport and a violent puce (the vomit inducing effect I mentioned earlier) for the letters and comments page.
Then the layout reminds me of many websites circa 2002: image and text heavy, wholly unfriendly on the eye in that the eye cannot rest on anything for long but flicks about from piece to piece. It resembles a scrapbook or a kids webpage - in fact it reminds me very much of Neopets. Every review is a 'blog', supposedly submitted to the website and they have a guest column where readers are invited to text in their votes as to whether this particular author should be able to write again for the paper - aka 'more or bore'. Everywhere you find '@' signs and web speak. Why?
An informal chat with David D-G and his chums during lunch on Thursday brought to my attention the front page of the FT. One of the headlines was that Google stand to make more advertising revenue this year than ITV. When I looked at TLP again it started to make sense. The paper is all about the web, or rather it's all about money. It comes from the (largely incorrect, though not always) premise that a website is a way of making money out of nothing. People read it because it's free - advertisers make money because people read it. I looked at TLP again - just like Google there were advertisements tailored for the paper - one for the Borat movie said 'you get paper for free so you have money to see my movie-film'. Everywhere there is user generated content because a) it's free and b) it lends 'credibility' to the writing along the lines that 'real people' are writing it. I have been looking forward to a web 2.0 paper ever since the technology was released for a downloadable, reuseable paper, but I sure as hell hope it doesn't look like this.
Editing Mama Shamone's trip up to Manchester for In The City all weekend but there's nothing to show yet as I'm still getting to grips with editing to music but I should have a promo to show by the end of the week. I really believe that the music industry is one of the last bastions of casual and unintentional racism/sexism. My band is quite blatently a punk rock band but when we arrived we found we were playing the urban stage with a bunch of RnB, electro and soul funk acts. We're about as urban as a haystack.
Meanwhile here is an interview I did off the cuff for a radio lesson, which made me laugh. Charged with getting an interview with background noise, I had failed until late Sunday night on the 149 bus I spotted a group of Horay Henrys completely out of their usual paradigm in Hackney. Tipsy but not loutish, they noticeably didn't touch in to the oyster reader. Armed with a microphone and a classist confidence they wouldn't attack me with such R.P tones I accosted one for an interview (click the yahoo button below):
2 comments:
Ooh Podcast well done Ruth, first in there for the broadcast course.
As for the London paper I'm glad you have clarified your views on it. But I did like your response to the speculative "London paper?" you had when we were in town last week. There is a certain brevity and clarity to the phrase "no thank you, it's a rag".
Yes I agree with both of you, these free London newspapers are rags and I am a vehement critic of them both. They are trying to be websites in print form but lack the multimedia dynamism of the web, rendering them vacuous entities. As we know already, the Evening Standard vendors have been up in arms about the launch of these freesheets and are clearly being treated like vermin by their own employers. Yesterday I saw Standard vendors being forced to hand out free copies of the London Lite whilst they waited for their copies of the ES to arrive. Can Associated Newspapers stoop any lower?
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