Hong Kong is not viable to remain in under the changes instigated by the Lesser Mao.
Is a newspaper a newspaper when it’s strictly digital? Or is it just another web site? Saying newspapers will “survive” depends on how you define it.
There are literally hundreds of web sites that provide news in one way or another. Being one of hundreds is a long way from being one of two or three (as was the case for most local newspapers). In a sea that vast, you become a very small fish.
This is not all that different from online radio. It’s very difficult for any one online station to stand out in a universe of thousands of stations all of which are relatively equal. In the old era of restricted frequency and coverage spectrum, a listener had only a few stations to choose from. Now we have thousands. While you can argue “let the best man win”, the fact is most sound generally the same. The result is that no one station can build a big enough audience to be attractive to any significant level of advertising.
The bottom line to all this? You can’t just transplant the analogue world to the digital world and expect everything else to stay the same. This isn’t just a new way to deliver old media.
About Time will be freely available online, and available in print to people outside prison through a subscription.
About Time will also be distributed monthly to all incarcerated people across Australia free of charge.
UPDATE 12/7: The Guardian Australia’s Tory Shepherd wrote in the Weekly Beast column today
According to the first editorial, at least 67 prison newsletters and magazines have begun previously, but none were distributed regularly nationally.
The letters from prison include an anonymous detainee writing about how hard it is to eat healthy food, with inmates fed a diet of bread, bread and more bread. Lunch is bread “with two thin slices of meat, either chicken loaf, beef or salami – which actually isn’t salami but apparently called Devon”, the person writes. Cheese is “extremely rare” and vegetables hard to get.
Selina Cheng, the new chairperson for Hong Kong’s Journalists’ Association, was fired by WSJ allegedly due to her new position in the union.
“Around three weeks ago, after senior editors at the newspaper found out I was running to be HKJA’s chairperson, my supervisor in the UK directed me to withdraw from the election,” Cheng said. “She also asked me to quit the board, which I have served on since 2021, even though The Wall Street Journal approved this when I was hired.”
Cheng said she “declined” the request, after which she was told that her role with the HKJA would be “incompatible” with her job as a reporter covering China’s automobile and energy sectors for the newspaper.
She said the company had told her that employees of The Wall Street Journal should not be seen as advocating for press freedom “in a place like Hong Kong,” even though they “can in Western countries where it is already established.”
Oops.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich requested an interview with Russian President Vladimir in one last show of bravery and defiance against the Kremlin before he was finally freed as part of a hectic, top-secret deal to release three Americans imprisoned in Russia.
Gershkovich, 32 – who was released on Thursday after he was arrested and accused of being an American spy last year – had received a form to request presidential clemency from Putin in the days leading up to his release, the WSJ reported.
As he filled out the form, the journalist used the final line to cheekily ask the Moscow leader, who typically shies away from Western media, if he would be willing to sit down for an interview with the reporter.
Gershkovich flew home to the US as part of the largest multi-country prisoner swap since the Cold War, which saw 24 prisoners freed, including former US Marine Paul Whelan and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.
The paper is now called The London Standard and published on Thursdays.
Daily Mail Australia to introduce paywall
Daily Mail Australia has this week announced it is launching a “partial” paywall which it says will “deliver premium content”.
Starting from the end of October, the new Mail+ partial paywall will roll out to all Australia users of the website who will be able to access “daily premium stories and a ‘Best of the Mail’ weekly newsletter” for $1.99 a month.
And you can bet there’ll still be the same amount of ads on each page lol
Nothing is valued if it’s free elsewhere.
The former Crikey columnist Guy Rundle may have apologised in a statement on Arena this week for saying “every grope is now a sexual assault” but another comment on the matter has popped up elsewhere.
In October, Rundle posted a comment on the subject of the “new legal definition of assault” on an article by another writer on Crikey.
He said “intimate relationship violence is defined as both physical and non physical, which then racks up huge numbers.
“That presumably includes shouting, throwing stuff at the wall etc. The ‘every two minutes’ police call out stats are useless; police are called out to loud arguments now, and attend.”