Even online journalists have to be paid somehow. From today, the New York Times will follow in the footsteps of The Times and The Sunday Times in the UK, and The Wall Street Journal in the US, and start charging for its online content. In facing the dilemma of whether or not to make consumers pay for something that they are used to getting (and can continue to get from competitors) for free, the NYT has decided on a compromise – as explained here, you get 20 articles a month free, but “links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter” will be excluded from this limit. So, what’s the point of putting up a paywall?

The experience of The Times may prove instructive – they put their content behind a paywall in June 2010. Between that time and last November, online traffic fell from 21m to 2.7m a month. There were 50,000 paying subscribers at that point, but of these an unkown number were users paying £1 for an introductory 30 day offer. News Corp itself was somewhat cagey about this in its 2010 annual report, making only brief mention of the Times paywall and referring to a “more balanced model”. When the strategy was launched, News International CEO Rebekah Brooks said that

“This is just the start. The Times and The Sunday Times are the first of our four titles in the UK to move to this new approach. We will continue to develop our digital products and to invest and innovate for our customers.”

Could News Corp now be regretting this attitude?

On the plus side though, users who pay are more loyal and ‘engaged’ meaning that you can charge advertisers more to reach them. Nonetheless, this tale and presumably others like it must have made NYT executives think twice before emulating their British namesake. The decision to keep the monthly article limit high is perhaps a result of this.

If you put your newspaper behind a paywall, not only do you drive away visitors to the site, you also severely damage your online presence: people won’t bother to link to your site on social media because they don’t want to frustrate their friends, and blocking links from search engines affects your Google ranking. The NYT has neatly sidestepped this by allowing social media and seach engine links (although I belive you will only be allowed to access five articles per day via search engines).

Yet another reason the paper would have had to be wary of implementing a paywall is the failure of their previous paid content venture, TimesSelect, which was closed down in 2007 after two years despite attracting 227,000 online-only paid subs. So, they must think it’ll be worth it this time, right? Well, for one thing, the Times is the most popular American online newspaper website, receiving more than 30 million unique visitors per month. And now that the precedent has been set by other news organisations, not charging for content might seem like an admission that that what you read in the Times isn’t as valuable as the contents of the WSJ, for example. Also, once some news providers go behind a paywall other must surely follow – assuming they can get away with it – meaning that the last to go will be at a disadvantage if readers’ subsccription funds have been allocated elsewhere. So you might as well go ahead and charge, putting in place a flexible regime so that you don’t alienate the social media masses. Seems like a reasonable compromise – you can still get the eggs more or less for free, but a monetary value has at least been attached to the chicken. Let’s hope that other news site that decide to go paid-for will be equally understanding. (Yes, I realise that milk and cows would be the usual metaphor, this seemed somehow more appropriate though.)

Last legs?

Reports of the demise of Rock are exaggerated…slightly. Music Week reports that rock songs accounted for only three of the 100 best selling UK singles of 2010, dropping from 13 in 2009 to reach an all time low. The top rock song of 2010? Why, of course it was Journey, with classic hit ‘Don’t Stop Believin’, in at number 25 (US chart position in 1981: 9. UK chart position in 1981: 62. UK chart position in 2010: 6). Seems like rock might be dead after all.

Surely though, rock is a genre for albums, not singles? Things are looking up here, with 27 of the top 100 UK albums of 2010 classified as rock. These albums tended to feature towards the lower end of the chart though, and the only ‘rock’ album in the top 10 was Mumford & Sons. Lemmy said that if Motorhead moved next door to you, your lawn would die. If Mumford & Sons moved in they would probably come round and water it. Things still not looking good for rock.

OK, well in the land of the Stones, the Who, Zeppelin, the Clash, and Napalm Death, surely we can be proud that British music is still the coolest in the world, with the industry punching well above its weight both commerically and artistically? Indeed, British artists accounted for 9.8% of albums sold in the US in 2010, up from 9.6% in 2009.

But let’s take a closer look at these paragons of British music:

Susan Boyle scored the most successful album overseas by a UK artist for a second year running, with The Gift selling 3.7 million copies abroad to add to the six million shifted by her debut I Dreamed A Dream, making her the first solo artist ever to have two simultaneous UK and US No.1 albums with 12 months. Oh yeah, and all her songs are covers.

So, no-one buys rock any more, and even when they do it’s really not rock at all, and Susan Boyle is now our most successful musical export. Is there no hope for rock music?

Well, firstly, people definitely still like to rock. Muse can repeatedly fill Wembley Stadium, Glasto tickets sell out in minutes, and Iron Maiden can fly round the world in their own plane, playing to capacity crowds on five continents. And rock still seems to be a creative force even in the pop world, albeing sometimes in a horribly mutated form. The Christmas 2010 X Factor number one was a cover of a Biffy Clyro song, and even Susan Boyle does a version of Lou Read’s ‘Perfect Day’.

Rock music also comes into its own in that fast-disappearing musical format, the album (with ‘shuffle’ turned off). Led Zeppelin, the hugely succcessful founding fathers of heavy rock, never released any singles. Rumour has it that the reason the Beatles and Pink Floyd have only just been made available on iTunes is that the bands didn’t want their songs to be offered in isolation. And people do apparently still revere the concept of a compelete album, at least in one pub in north London where ‘classic album Sundays’ offer an interruption-free listening experience to serious classic rock fans. If you’ve ever listened to Dark Side of the Moon all the way through, without doing anything else, preferably in a darkened room, you’ll appreciate their point of view.

Perhaps most importantly, rock is one of the most participatory styles of music. It’s not that hard to play once you’ve mastered a few chords/beats/basslines. You can talk about it for hours. There are plentiful opportunities to go and see it live. It can be moving, cathartic, aggressive, introspective, or just downright pretentious, but it’s also fun. What other genre could inspire a computer game involving grown men subjecting plastic guitars and Fisher Price drum kits to Pete Townshend-style windmills and Moon-esqe drum fills?

Rock may be dead in the singles chart, or surviving only as a reanimated corpse, but as shown by numerous bands, festivals, downloads, and genre revivals (think of the Killers, the Strokes, and Wolfmother), it’s still a force to be reckoned with. And in a world that thinks it’s OK to allow our youth to listed to Justin Bieber (2010 Grammy nominee, but not winner: Best New Act), the old guard can still pull a few surprises – just ask Iron Maiden (2010 Grammy award winners: Best Metal Performance).

Given that Mr Picard has recouped almost half of the $19.6bn lost by participants in the scheme, this is arguably good value for money. In total, the $1.3bn figure is 7% of the totla loss, or 17% of what’s been reclaimed so far. According to the FT these levels compare favourably with other fraud cases.

However, any investor has a fiduciary duty to conduct appropriate due dilligence – something that must have gone seriously wrong for fraud to take place on this scale. Indeed, Madoff himself accuses banks and hedge funds of “willful blindness” toward the scheme. If the losses of the Madoff scandal were limited to high net worth individuals and banks’ balance sheets (which they aren’t), then perhaps a few burnt fingers would be a good thing.

To quote Linus Wilson, a finance professor at the University of Louisiana, “The lawyers on both sides are usually the only winners in a Ponzi scheme.”

VAT in the UK is going up at midnight tonight, from 17.5% to 20% on standard-rated items. This has led, predictably, to the journalisic profession demonstrating its inability to comprehend fractions.

A rise from 17.5% to 20% means that something that used to cost £117.50 will now cost £120. That means that prices are going up by 2.1%. Or, to put it another way, VAT is going up by 14.3%. A jump from 17.5% to 20% is an increase of 2.5 percentage points – VAT is not strictly ‘going up by 2.5%’ as reported by the Guardian.

That distinction is rather pedantic, but we should at least be getting our figures right. “The VAT rise is relatively small, adding £2.50 to the price of goods previously selling for £100,” according to Sky’s Darren Little. No, goods previously costing £100 will now cost £102.13. If something costs £100 then you’re alreay paying £14.89 VAT on goods with a value of £85.11. Under the new scheme the VAT will rise to £17.02 (giving a total of £102.13…)

The Centre for Retail Research reports that the poorest quintile of the population spend 12.5% of their income on VAT, versus 7.4% for the average household. So the Government is going to be nicking money from the poor. Grrr. And even worse, for those on any income level, is of course the inevitable assault of loose change on our pockets as items costing £4.99 go up to £5.09, and so on. At least we benefit from the irony of the Lib Dems backing a policy they campaigned against (see above), while Ed Miliband uses their figures to say how terribly unfair the whole thing is.

The Great British Public has over-reacted somewhat if we are to believe that petrol stations are being swamped by motorists wanting to beat the rise. For a £50 tank of petrol I make that an extra £1.05, or about the price of an extra large Twix. The rise is a little more than that because fuel duty is also going up; accoring to the AA, this will add £1.77 to the average tank of petrol. But then again if you fill your tank up once a week, queueing at the pumps today will reduce your annual fuel bill by about 0.07% by the same logic.

What could be worse than a 14.3% increase in VAT? Allowing shops to mark prices up at the till until 1 Feb of course, which according to the Daily Mail will result in furious shoppers blockading checkouts as they remonstrate with devious retailers. No wonder the Chancellor is away skiing in Switzerland as he tries to leave his woes behind (see pics of Evil George here – or ‘Goerge’ according to the Daily Mail’s website).

“New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.”

Interested parties are invited to contact the World Press Freedom Facebook page. If you don’t believe me check it out here:

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/12/152465.htm

Meanwhile in France, Sarko-Z is getting his culottes in a twist about some more unfortunate remarks. He decided to expel the Roma people from France and send them back to Romania and Bulgaria, for the sake of ‘public order’ (and happily for the good of his hard man image as well). This is arguably not cool, and after some prevarication, the EU Justice Commissioner, Viviane Reding, has said so. This is a sentiment that we agree with. She also said that Sarko’s treatment of the Roma is a bit like the way Vichy France treated the Jews in World War II. This did not go down well with the French. Accrding to one French Senator, M. Sarkozy suggested that Ms Reding might like to take all the Roma back to her own country, Luxembourg. In public he just said that the remarks were “outrageous”. The Pope also jumped on the Nazi bandwagon by seeming to imply that since not a lot of people in the UK believe in God, that is kind of like the Nazis too.

Sure, you don’t really think that the UK really is a Third World country full of Nazis. You didn’t mean to say that the Sarkozy administration is like the Vichy regime. You didn’t expect your comment about taking all the Roma to Luxembourg to get published. YOU STILL SAID IT THOUGH. Which part of ‘the media publish stuff’ don’t you understand? Everyone else in the world has to be careful about what they put in work emails, or say to their friends at the pub, or tell people at family gatherings. Why can’t public figures choose their words carefully when talking to the international media? Because they are dumb.

Today I am announcing the launch of a major new force in the global PR industry. It’s called ‘Like, hello?’ Partners, LLP. Embedded deep within the DNA of this new organisation is the revolutionary, yet disarmingly simple concept of ‘the media publish stuff’. Expressions of interest are invited from clients caught in the glare of the international media. Hopefully we will do a better job of media training that the Vatican’s PR agency.

UPDATE: 29 September 2010

David Miliband is in line to be the first client of ‘Like, hello?’ Partners, LLP, after not realising that all the TV cameras at the Labour Party conference are connected to TVs. After sitting stony-faced while his brother Ed talked about how Iraq was a bad idea during the latter’s leadership acceptance speech, David said something juicy to Hariet Harman, off mic but in full view of the cameras, so obviously everyone knew what he was saying. It now seems likely that Miliband D will quit frontbench politics - the perfect opportunity for some more media training before he makes his big comeback.

Such a televisual proposition does indeed sound excellent. But more realistically, please please can someone make a musical about New Labour? Act I: The Blair Identity. The Islington dinner party. Rise of New Labour. End with “new dawn breaking” at the Festival Hall. Act II: The Blair Conspiracy. The rivalries. The spin. Blair and Brown confide their enmity to the audience. Mandelson casts his dark shadow. Act III: The Blair Ultimatum. War. Coup d’etat. Televised debates. Finale on the steps of No 10.

I’m thinking Ewan McGregor as Blair. Billy Connolly as Brown. Carla Bruni as Cherie. James McEvoy as Cameron and Carey Mulligan as SamCam. Christopher Lee as Mandelson. Peter Capaldi as Campbell, obviously. Alan Carr as Nick Robinson. Orlando Bloom as Nick Clegg.

Dear Andrew, please could you fix this for me.

Bez cannot have been unaware of the parallels of his own situation with that of the protagonist of Albert Camus’ novel The Outsider (also translated as The Stranger), regarded as a key existentialist text (although Camus himself rejected this categorisation). In the novel, Meursault, the story’s narrator, kills as Arab man on a beach in French Algeria, for no apparent reason, but possibly because he doesn’t have a soul or something like that. Assured by his lawyer that he can escape the death penalty by pleading mitigating circumstances, he instead refuses to “play the game” and just tell it like it is, explaining his actions to the court no more than he can to himself, i.e. not at all really. Consequently he is condemned to death. 

Likewise, Bez’s assault on his girlfriend is an inexcusable and violent act, rightly abhorred by society, which its perpetrator can explain neither to himself nor to the competent authorities. And like Meursault, when offered a way out by the system (in this case community service), Bez refuses to act in a way not in keeping with his own, possibly inexistent, moral compass. He does not play the game. Consequently he is going down for four weeks. 

Bez is no hero and domestic violence is a repugnant crime. However in a philosophical sense his actions after he committed the assault cannot be viewed with such moral clarity. He didn’t do what he should have done even though he knew that it would make things worse for him. Indeed, from a philosophical point of view perhaps his worst offence was come crawling back to the judge, via his lawyers, to say that actually he thought community service wouldn’t be so bad after all. Maybe he decided to re-read The Outsider from his cell and suddenly remembered what happened to poor old Meursault. 

In the words of Bez, tout homme qui ne joue pas le jeu risque d’être comdamné à mort.