Wardman Wire Magazine

Campaigns

This is a fairly brusque Britblog Roundup for the 6/10/2008, as I am currently off the Internet at home - so this is being written at home in Blogdesk (highly recommended - at least double your blogging productivity, and you can write in the bath subject to electric shocks where it hurts when you drop your laptop. Mac Users can go looking for “Ecto”) in the bar of a local pub with free Wireless Access. The imagined beady eye of the landlady watching over the time/revenue ratio dictates that the style of the Roundup is “spare”.

This week: lots of Civil Liberties going .. going .. gone missing, lots of feminism, some politics, a bit of analysis to Party Conferences, and the (first?) ex-Minister announcing his new status on a Blog within a few minutes.

United Nations: G-d Bless Censorship
A perennial favorite of the United Nations has come back like a bit of undigested beef. A non-binding resolution* to “Combat the Defamation of Religion” has been passed again. This censorious old chestnut has been passed a number of times previously, according to Fox News (”The Al-Jazeera of the U.S.”). If [...]

“I’ll sell your ass to the cops for a nickel.” - Skypey McManwhore
Reuters reports that Skype has been recording conversations as part of its deal with the Chinese government. (ONI broke the news.)
(T)the eBay-owned firm had to apologize on Thursday after a report revealed that its Chinese service not only monitors text chats with sensitive [...]

The Independent on Sunday has an interview with the Editor of Tribune.

Independent on Sunday, Today, page 87.

In its heyday, after the Labour election landslide of 1945, Tribune boasted a circulation of 40,000. A typical week might have seen Michael Foot denouncing Ernest Bevin’s pro-US foreign policy, or Barbara Castle arguing for decolonisation. Major political decisions within the Labour party would be thrashed out in its pages and the magazine became a training ground for left-leaning politicians and journalists. But since the Sixties the readership has dwindled to a mere 3,000, although the website, relaunched last year, draws a further 2,500 unique users per week.

So what happened? “The Left has always been bad at promoting itself through journalism – they just don’t put the investment in,” says Seddon. “This is a great lost opportunity for the unions. If they really want to get people thinking about the issues they’ve been discussing at conference, they need something like Tribune. What could be better? But it means putting some serious money into it.”

If the unions decide to adopt his strategy, they will have to continue stumping up the cash, although, relative to their revenues, the cost of keeping Tribune going is small. Producing 49 issues per year costs £270,000, or £22,000 per month. Advertising revenue used to account for about £7,500 per month, but that has fallen sharply since May, when Boris Johnson replaced Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London. Under Livingstone, the Greater London Authority and the Mayor’s office ran weekly ads in Tribune, and the loss of these two advertisers has left Tribune extraordinarily thin on ads: an August edition was entirely ad-free.

I have a few comments.

The Wardman Wire has had a number of “Best of the Web” links from the Guardian in the past.

Yesterday we made the Telegraph in the Bishop of Buckingham’s personal picks:

www.mattwardman.com/blog/

In the Wardman Wire, Matt pokes round media and political dustbins with a fresh Libertarian pointed stick.

One other small (and probably meaningless) note. Our technorati score is back up to 325 from 250 a few weeks ago. But they’ve stopped updating the page about the Magazine Version, and I’ve given up trying to work out how and why Technorati does what it does.

The new Conservative website looks quite pretty. It is far prettier than the old version, certainly, and has more and better information on it. However, it is really quite “safe” in the end, and nothing is really very “eye grabbing” in aesthetic terms.
There is a nice number of sections on the site, such as policy, [...]

Over the next few days the independent think tank Reform will be sharing our experiences of this year’s Conservative Party conference - keep your eyes on this blog!
Full details of all the fringe events we are hosting can be found at http://www.reform.co.uk/partyconferences.php