12 May 2010

Digital Politics

This week has been a momentous period in British politics. I'm glad I was on hand to watch it. But in fact I could have been anywhere - because I have followed events via online news services, bloggers, and in particular the live blog at Guardian.co.uk - which has outstripped even the regular political bloggers in gathering up to date information. It's a site that's updated every sixty seconds or so.

This illustrates two points. First, that the mainstream media has been forced to embrace blogging - after its initial sneering contempt for citizen based journalism. Second - that this competence doesn't come cheap. Despite the Guardian's excellent online presence , they make a loss of eight million pounds a MONTH. Kelvin Mackenzie famously called the Graun 'the worst newspaper in the world' (because it sold so few copies) - and there's still an element of truth in that when you consider the newspaper as a business enterprise. But then that seems to be true of all the daily broadsheets - which another blogger (Guido Fawkes) wittily described as 'vanity publishing'.

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