If you have a sub you'll have noticed that Ireland.com and The Irish Times got a face lift a couple of months ago. The site looks better and is a little easier to navigate but little else has changed. At the very least they might have allowed some scope for readers' comments in the op-ed pieces. Instead we can find an email link for their regular columnists. And that's about it. The Unison site for the Independent newspapers is as chaotic as ever. You never know where you'll find particular articles and often the journalist's by-line is missing. The fact that you can't do a proper archive search across dates is infuriating. The Examiner is adequate enough for news but its comment columns are quite thin. As for the Sundays, the Business Post is about the best and at least the links are all gathered together in the Sunday Times. The Sunday Tribune is quite unfathomable. Village has recently relaunched its website but most of that is behind a subscription firewall. There is a blog but there's very little on it so far.
Most of the sites are merely uploaded versions of what has been printed - sometimes, as in the case of the Independent, significantly topped and tailed. So it's the old thing in a now no longer new format. The Irish Times, as we all know, charges for most of its content. I signed up shortly after I started blogging because there's more direct sources of news and commentary to blog about and I'm the sort of blogger that's unashamedly parasitical in that regard. Also it has the only decent set of archives to trawl through.
I presume that because the Irish Times charges for its content indicates that it has given some thought to its online operations, at least as far as making or losing money is concerned. I have no idea whether they generate significant revenue. The fact that they charge for everything makes them a bit unusual. There are two basic models: the Wall Street Journal charges for its news but makes its op-ed pieces freely available, if you can stomach them; the New York Times on the other hand charges for its major columnists. You'd think that the Irish Times would at least give us their opinion free so as the chatterboxes in the blogosphere might link to them. But the tight gits have other ideas.
Irish online journalism is in a very rudimentary state and is essentially passive and non-interactive. It's not even that there are no blogs or video or podcasts. There doesn't seem to be any recognition of the potential of a web-based universe that many would wish to contribute to. The outlets for citizen-journalism are quite undeveloped. John Lloyd recently drew attention to an idea that has come from the New York journalism academic and activist Jay Rosen (whose web magazine-cum-blog, PressThink, is always interesting). Rosen calls this approach "pro-am" and his specific project is NewAssignment.net. This would marry the skills and disciplines of old media reporting with the push for participation inherent in the new. Maybe RTE or Ireland.com will roll out some innovative ways of covering the next election by actually involving that part of the electorate who would like to do more than passively consume their coverage? Probably not. We amateurs will have to try and lead the way.
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