Today, I ploughed through a piece of text which the Sunday Independent was good enough to publish yesterday, written by someone else – as in, not me – which gave me cause to pause. Well that was after the tide of red rage had dissipated, that is. The thought that went through my head is that on and off for the last I don’t know how long, I’ve been writing. Bits and pieces, journals, blogs, reviews here, commentary pieces on various websites. And people get paid to write this.
A couple of things have been going through my mind. On one front, I think the traditional newspaper is dead meat. I don’t think any Irish newspaper has a sufficiently coherent product to make it in the online world; so most of my Irish news now comes from the RTE website. It’s largely devoid of comment, although I have no doubt that the editing has some bias through in if only because people are human.
I have a lot of responses to this. On the one front, I suspect that some judicious organising of google news and my feedreader (which is currently feedly) would serve me a customised news/opinion experience that would blow every newspaper out of the water. I do know that I’ll have to do a certain amount of messing to set it up but I am tempted to do so.
I’m also tempted to start writing myself again. I know that this site is very different to the old windsandbreezes site, some of which is on the Wayback machine but the Wayback machine is currently down so I can’t link to it. I may set up a separate site to handle those things although frankly my internet-fu is pretty dreary since wnb died a year ago.
When I say I’m tempted to start writing, I mean to write articles. Part of this is because to be honest, a lot of what I read is – at best – quite average. I know I used to be better. Linked in with that, I did wonder about the possibility of doing a collaborative one off newspaper…but I’m concerned about the checks and balances in terms of legal requirements given that Ireland is what it is with respect to libel legislation so I don’t know what the feasibility of a one off Anti-Sindo might be.
The internet is full of interesting projects. Mark Little is working on one at the moment, Gavin Sheridan and Mark Coughlan have one, and there are other interesting pieces around all the time. I can’t help feeling this could be leveraged in some way to make the old media completely irrelevant except for the death notices and the crossword. There is a market out there for opinion and interactive discussion. I really question whether the Irish media has worked this out at all.
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Libel is a minefield for the unwary publisher. Consider this: many years ago a company, “X Ltd” went into liquidation. The liquidator compiled a list of debtors and creditors. This showed that the company was insolvent. A publication “Y Ltd” then published the list.
Almost immediately “Y Ltd” was contacted by “Z” who was named as a substantial creditor. Z informed “Y Ltd” that he had been paid by “X Ltd” some months earlier and therefore was not a creditor of the company. He went on to claim that “Y Ltd” had defamed him by stating that he was a substantial creditor who was not going to be paid. “Z” claimed that this damaged his credit status because others would think that he was now short of money.
“Y Ltd” paid out a substantial sum in an out of court settlement because it could not risk the costs involved in losing a libel action.
Large publishers pay lawyers to read copy before it is published. Sometimes items get through and then the fun starts! It is possible to insure against libel claims but this is horrendously expensive and many publishers simply cannot afford it.
I appreciate the reply Niall.
In part, there’s probably this wider issue in Irish society of judgmentalism and gossip and so reputation is hugely important.
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