A great day for news media

Over the last couple of days, Rupert Murdoch's News International / News Corp has started to put its websites behind paywalls: The Times is already locked up, and The Sun and others will gradually follow.

This is magnificent news. These outlets are poisonous, distorted, propagandistic wells of bile. The less access people have to them, the better - and they won't pay because they're now used to reading individual stories on news aggregator sites, rather than devotedly sticking to one outlet. If only he owned the Daily Mail.

Even better - Sky Sports News is leaving Freeview. Thank heavens - it's the epitome of moving wallpaper. Calling it Sports News didn't make it news - endless titbits of inconsequential guff repeated endlessly, with whizzy graphics attempting to disguise the paucity of real news. Ebbsfleet Town's reserve goalkeeper has a sore knee. Sussex have let their assistant groundskeeper go. Some baseball player has played baseball.

The public sphere will benefit hugely from the clear air provided by the disappearance of this guff.

The Daily Fail - again

The Daily Mail (remember, it supported Hitler, Mussolini and the British Union of Fascists) play another blinder: it found an NHS doctor who earned £380,000 in a year, and it's horrified.

One small problem. This doctor didn't earn that much at all. When the NHS was founded in 1948, the doctors hated it, and so deals were struck. Aneurin Bevan said he'd persuaded them to accept the NHS by 'stuffing their mouths with gold'. The General Practitioners, you may be surprised to learn, aren't salaried NHS staff. Instead, they own their businesses, which they don't mention very often.

So - this £380,000 per year doctor doesn't 'earn' it at all. He receives it, and uses some of it to pay secretaries, rent, nurses, bills, etc. etc. I'm sure he isn't living on beans, but equally, he isn't taking home the same as a lawyer, to draw an appropriate parallel.

Now, how much does the editor of the Daily Mail get for pouring out a daily spume of racism, hatred and inaccuracy? Well, last year it was £1.6m: rather more than four of this doctor's sum and twice the BBC Director-General's salary. It's also over ten times the Prime Minister's pay. Has Dacre saved many lives recently?

Meanwhile, speculation is rife that The Observer might be closed, as the Guardian Media Group is losing lots of money. The Guardian bought the Observer a few years ago, and it looked like a decent fit, as the Observer was a decent liberal paper which had been treated appallingly by some very shady owners. It hasn't worked: although it looks very good, the Observer was drifted further and further to the right, while also becoming quite boring, with some exceptions such as Andrew Rawnsley. I hoped it would become a Sunday version of the Guardian under a different name, but that hasn't happened.

Sunday newspapers are difficult, especially now that Saturday ones are so huge. They used to be run completely separately from the weekdays, and had nice long deadlines so that substantial journalism could be conducted (the model was the Sunday Times and its Insight team before Murdoch ruined it) - now they're acres of fashion and navel-gazing. I'll miss the Observer because it's the best of a bad bunch, but not as much as I might.

All readers, please comment

I just helped out with a Digital Media lecture on social networking sites, which was fascinating. We talked about the various ways SNSs can be conceptualised, their relationship to the public sphere, and the notions of SNSs as loci for performativity.

So: please leave a note on this post (anonymously if you wish) saying whether I a) know you in person, b) consider yourselves my friend, acquaintance, colleague, stalker or other and c) whether you think there's any difference between being an online 'friend' and an offline/real-life friend. Just out of interest.

I realised during this lecture too how many SNSs of which I'm a member. While rejecting Facebook, I'm on three fencing forums including the main British Fencing one, Librarything, Flickr, Academia.edu and several others.