Keeping up with The Times

Posted on July 3, 2008 | Category: Media

As most of you may know by now, The Irish Times has lowered its paywall on its newspaper, though not its archives.

This was something that Damien Mulley predicted in January and announced last week on his blog. His initial reaction is here. I’m quoting him rather than giving an opinion myself as I’m still getting used to the new design, and am still getting lost in places. The Ireland.com url seems to be shaping up as a what’s on, or magazine-type site.

There are some goodies at the bottom of the front page, and I particularly liked the audio slideshow, showing the Chinese demo in favour of the Olympics. However, the videos appear to be browser specific, ie IE only, or at least they don’t like Linux. When I tried them I got three x,

Compatible Internet Browser x
Windows Media Player/Quicktime x
Macromedia Flash 8+ x

I use Firefox 3, use VLC to play Quicktime movies, and have Flash 9, so that’s a bit disappointing.

The actual newspaper is at http://www.irishtimes.com/todayspaper/ and as I have a homemade page of links as my start page, I dropped that into it. I actually like the way links to all stories are given on the front page, making for an easy scan, although the font here is hard on the eyes. However as I intimated earlier, it’s in the subsections that I’m getting a bit lost at the moment. For instance I like the Technology subsection of the Business section, and couldn’t find that for a while. No doubt it will be second nature soon. [update]: yes, it’s easy in fact. Clicking on the Business tab does it].

One other problem concerns the images. They are so small that their subjects can be either distorted or unrecognizable. There doesn’t seem to be any enlargement of photos to compensate for this, either. Also the captions to the side are a bit weird, I find. But such problems are easiliy rectifiable in css and no doubt will be soon.

I hear subscribers are being offered access to the premium archive until their subscription runs out, but from what I’m told you can’t copy anything from it, as in save as or copy and paste. If you actually want a copy of something there is a whopping fee.

I’ll leave it to Mr Mulley and colleagues to comment knowledgeably on media matters, but I can’t see that lasting. How many will pay something in the region of €80 for what looks on screen like a fuzzy reproduction of their good selves in the newspaper from 1980 or whenever? Again I’m not a media expert but it seems to me that free access with ads would be far more lucrative for the paper.

Anyway, I wish it well, and I’m delighted to see the new approach. There’s a lot of really good people in there, and here’s to their success with the brave new direction.