Slimming for the Beach

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.