The Daily Telegraph and Paid for Advertising

Peter Oborne has resigned from the Daily Telegraph because he has realised that the paper was under-cooking the HSBC story because of potential sacrificed advertising revenues.  In an interview, he chastises the Barclay brothers (owners of the Telegraph) for sacrificing journalistic integrity in order to preserve advertising revenues from HSBC (one of the UK's biggest marketing spenders).

Coming from a Telegraph journalist, a sudden pre-occupation with journalistic integrity a couple of years prior to retirement does seem a little rich, but you know, we can accept that. Similar to an elderly slave owner suddenly seeing the errors of his ways as time ticks by and his incapacity to sterilise his guilt, right wing hacks will be similarly struck by the poison they've been spreading their entire lives and take some steps to tear down the unholy edifice they've been building all these years.

Anyway, politics and hatred of The Daily Telegraph aside, what struck me was that most people in many countries now get their written news without paying for it at all; either through the internet or free newspapers.  Considering that services require some form of remuneration to support the individuals that provide said services, these 'free' sources of information have to be paid for.  Again, it's fairly common knowledge that the money that succours these generous journos comes from advertising.

The printed traditional press is suffering, people are reading the fucking freesheets (Standard, Metro, etc) more and more and getting their news from the internet from Bloomberg and idiot newspapers who give their content away for free.  The only way these media sources survive is through advertising.  Therefore, the likelihood that they'll do or say anything that upsets the large organisations that purchase much of their life giving advertising space is very slim. 

I would love to see what the Metro wrote about HSBC; perhaps another thrilling front page about Mcdonalds selling coffee for 49p a cup beat the story on to page 19, next to the full page Tesco advert for their new range of unsecured personal loans which replaced the coverage of their dire financial results.

If people dont pay for things, they wont get the quality they need.  If people pay for things without realising how, it has strange outcomes which make people feel uncomfortable but prevents them from understanding why and where that discomfort is coming from.

Maybe, in the same way Edward Snowden made people realise how Google is not actually 'free', this will help people to see where that discomfort is coming from with a little more clarity.