Current Account »

  • Night of the long knives for quangos

    November 17, 2011 @ 10:52 am | by John Collins

    The big story today will be the publication at noon of the Public Service Reform document at an event in Government Buildings with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin and Minister of State with special responsibility for Public Service Reform and the OPW, Brian Hayes.

    Doesn’t sound that exciting when you put it like that, but what in fact you can expect is an end to decentralisation, the merger or closure of several quangos and state agencies, and the loss of several thousand public sector jobs. Ciaran Hancock revealed this morning that the Irish Aviation Authority and the Commission for Aviation Regulation are likely to be merged. Merging the regulator into the body it regulates is an interesting challenge and gives you some sense of the difficult choices on the table. Here’s a full preview of what we expect.

    Elsewhere this morning the European boss of the IMF has quit, citing personal reasons, media group UTV has seen 2 per cent revenue growth in the first 10 months of the year, and make sure your sitting down for this one, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary and BA boss Willie Walsh have come together to ask the British government to axe air passenger duty.

    In the newspaper today Simon Carswell got hold of David Drumm’s defence documents in his US bankruptcy case. Drumm is claiming that the Anglo Irish Bank board and Financial Regulator knew all about Sean Fitzpatrrick’s warehousing of his directors loans as well as the Maple 10 loans to customers to buy shares, both of which are the subject of investigations.

  • We can laugh at this HD howler but it is hollow laughter

    June 13, 2010 @ 2:12 pm | by Laura Slattery

    “ITV1 HD will make watching the World Cup an unforgettable experience,” according to the ITV website. Adding the word “not” before “watching” in this sentence would be more appropriate under the circumstances. Legions of ITV HD viewers missed the sole England goal in last night’s clash against the USA when the channel accidentally cut to a car advert before fading to black. Never mind Robert Green, this was a truly massive blunder (which you can watch unfold here).

    Football fans who didn’t upgrade their sets in order to see England’s underachievement in its full glory and instead watched the match on standard definition ITV can be forgiven for feeling a schmidgeon of Schadenfreude. But it wasn’t just early-adopter HD enthusiasts who were cut off from what could yet turn out to be the only highlight of England’s campaign. Unlike in Ireland, access to HD channels in the UK is widespread. Both the BBC and ITV’s HD channels are available on the digital terrestrial television (DTT) service Freeview, to which more than half of UK households are connected. It’s really best, at this point, not to ask about the current status of DTT in Ireland.

    As of March, it was estimated that some 24 million HD televisions had been sold in the UK. Last week, as armchair fans prepared to settle in for the duration, British department store chain John Lewis declared it was selling a new set every 30 seconds. Every blade of grass, every bead of sweat, etc, etc.

    So much cash, so much confusion. Why is Fabio Capello smiling all of a sudden? Why are people hugging Steven Gerrard?

    Last night’s epic fail is not just catastrophically embarrassing for ITV, but for the UK broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, which has taken two years to find enough bandwidth to accommodate spectrum-hungry HD services on DTT. Its success in doing so meant the World Cup was billed as the first mass market HD event in the UK, with Ofcom’s pre-tournament press releases describing HD as the biggest development in World Cup viewing technology since 1970, when the Mexico World Cup was broadcast in colour for the first time.

    “Back then, England were knocked out by West Germany in the quarter finals. This year, fans will be hoping for a better result from HD,” said Ofcom, tempting fate. Instead, England let in a soft equaliser and the HD howler has been gleefully replayed in full this morning on Sky News. (BSkyB, incidentally, has 2.5 million HD-enabled subscribers, but zero rights to World Cup live matches.) If I worked in Ofcom’s publicity office, I would be furious with the controllers of ITV 1 HD for screwing up so badly and – given a similar incident in an FA Cup match earlier this year – not for the first time either.

    But though I was grimly amused by news of ITV’s transmission error, the joke is really on me and all other Irish television viewers – and not just because the ears of the Irish team have been deprived of the vuvuzela nightmare that is South Africa 2010.

    To experience HD teething problems, you have to have HD content in the first place. Imagine if RTÉ had broadcast the World Cup in HD. Even with Ireland’s non-involvement, what a nice boost to retail sales that could have been. Now imagine a world in which RTÉ HD is part of a fully rolled out free-to-air DTT service. Neither event requires a technological revolution – just cash that neither RTÉ nor the commercial broadcasting sector appears to have anymore. The money, like the England midfield last night, is spent.

    twitter.com/LauraSlattery

  • Not too many winners amongst Super Bowl ads

    February 8, 2010 @ 7:13 pm | by John Collins

    The people’s favourites, the New Orleans Saints, may have won the Super Bowl in Miami last night but for many the real action doesn’t take place on the pitch but during the ad breaks. (more…)

  • A pint of unspecific please, Peggy

    October 21, 2009 @ 12:38 am | by Laura Slattery

    I don’t understand the logic of the current rules on product placement in television programmes, either from the perspective of a viewer (which I am) or a regulator (which I’m not, although I am available Eamon Ryan should you wish to nominate someone who actually watches television). At the moment, the practice is outlawed in Ireland on the basis that it’s surreptitious advertising, which I think must be regulator code for “almost as sneaky as subliminal advertising but not quite as glaringly unsophisticated as straightforward advertorial”.

    How else to explain the latitude granted to TV3’s The Apprentice? Complaints about the first series appear to have gone nowhere. I’m not complaining, as the show wouldn’t exist without its sponsors and we would be sadly deprived of the Schadenfreude that comes from watching Team Megatron and Team Sparta (or whatever) bicker and crumble as they fail to transform themselves into hotshot television ad directors (the synergy!) by lunchtime. Given they’re all very busy participating in hour-long advertisements for whichever sponsor’s products form the basis of the task that particular week, I think we can cut the 110-percenters some slack.

    So why is TV3 being cut a fair whack of slack? Product placement is defined in the old Broadcasting Commission of Ireland’s general advertising code – now inherited by the new Broadcasting Authority of Ireland – as “the inclusion of, or reference to, a product or service within a programme in return for payment or similar consideration to the programme maker or broadcaster for the specific purpose of promoting that product or service”. And it’s banned.

    However… “Incidental references to products or services in a programme are legitimate where their inclusion within the programme is editorially justified.”

    Ah. It could certainly be argued that the references to Meteor et al in The Apprentice are editorially justified in the context of the show’s task-centric format, although how anyone could describe them as “incidental”, I’m not sure. Certainly, it is true that the Irish version of the show, with its umpteen sponsors, tends to have more brand-oriented tasks than the British version, which is broadcast on the BBC and often features small businesses whose names you never quite catch.

    To recap: The Apprentice, with its orgy of brands, is allowed. But payment for “surreptitious”, by which to say, relatively unobtrusive, “wallpaper” product placement – for example, Cadbury bars in the Carrigstown corner shop – is not permitted. You do see brands on Fair City and Hollyoaks and most soaps and dramas, but broadcasters are not allowed to make money out of them. I interviewed a Fair City producer about this subject in 2001 and he told me “it was impossible to do something like a soap opera and keep it credible without having ordinary brands on display”, adding – quite reasonably – “if we didn’t, we would have to make them up ourselves”.

    You could do that, of course: Coronation Street has its Newton and Ridley ale, while residents of Albert Square test the bounds of credibility by simply asking for “a lager” – a quirk satirised yonks ago by impressionist Alistair McGowan as “a pint of unspecific, please Peggy”.

    But “a pint of unspecific” is not the direction in which the industry is moving. With revenues from regular TV ads on the wane, the UK is now considering allowing product placement, a move that would surely signal a change in the rules in Ireland too, as Richard Gillis outlines.

    Under the advertising code, the paid-for inclusion of brands in a programme acquired from outside of Ireland doesn’t count as product placement “provided that no broadcaster regulated in the state… directly benefits from the arrangement”. So if the British government changes its rules, ITV could rake in revenues from stuffing the Rover’s Return with Bacon Fries, but TV3 wouldn’t be allowed to cash in. That doesn’t seem quite fair, really.

    Okay, so product placement has the potential to get out of hand, especially if it was to start infiltrating the script writing process. But advertisers know that too much cheese will make us turn off. And personally I’d rather see my screen dotted with occasional brands if it meant fewer in-your-face “editorially justified” Apprentice-style promotions, more cash for the production coffers and the obliteration of ad breaks proper. Now if only they’d ban annoying split-screen advertising over end credits…

    twitter.com/LauraSlattery

  • Michael O’Leary must be thrilled by Panorama’s paean to Ryanair

    October 14, 2009 @ 1:22 pm | by Laura Slattery

    “Infamy, infamy – Panorama has it infamy!” is the catchline on the eagerly issued rant from the Ryanair press office. Except it isn’t a rant at all, of course, but another work of comic genius. Point number 11 on its counter-claims to Panorama’s Monday night show on BBC1 goes like this: “Panorama claimed that ‘O’Leary is a bully’ – this is clearly false when the whole world knows that O’Leary is a kind and gentle, caring and thoughtful, sensitive and saintly human being widely beloved by all Ryanair’s 6,5000 people and” – you guessed it – “its 66 million passengers.”

    Yesterday, O’Leary went on Newstalk’s breakfast show to, ostensibly, unleash the full flow of his no-frills indignation on the BBC, but like the press releases and the claims that Panorama did a “hatchet job” on the airline, this is nonsense. Anyone who watched the show, titled Why do people hate Ryanair?, will know that it was probably the most favourable bit of coverage the airline has ever had from a broadcaster like the BBC, for whom being seen to be balanced is paramount. At the end, viewers would have been left mystified as to why exactly people do love to hate Ryanair, not convinced that it’s a hateful company.

    Time was when Ryanair passengers who came a cropper showed up on television it was to complain that Ryanair’s complaints policy largely seemed to involve sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming “no refunds” on a loop. But Panorama featured a family who actually managed to get a refund for a Ryanair screw-up at Stansted airport, we were told. Wow – this global recession must have turned O’Leary soft. Even the design of the website has been changed to make it easier to avoid accidentally buying travel insurance, Panorama said, which must surely be disappointing news to knowing flight bookers who take pleasure in outfoxing the website’s quirks.

    The programme also generously featured two young pro-Ryanair travellers, one of whom had a penchant for drop-of-your-hat trips from the UK to Dublin for 2p – and even had his own handling fee-free Visa Electron card – and another who related how he had flown to Stockholm, Brussels and a plethora of other European cities that he never would have been able to afford to see were it not for Ryanair. Even Ryanair’s love of flying to secondary airports was treated with the humour that this old news deserves.

    Panorama’s problem, journalistically, was that ”Ryanair has revolutionised travel for the masses” has been slightly less done to death than “Ryanair sucks”, so their “agenda” clearly leaned towards the former. The real scoop was that O’Leary dropped his deadpan act for a fleeting moment. The show ended with reporter Vivian White and the Ryanair boss both collapsing into laughter during an on-camera standoff: O’Leary was still chuckling as he walked away. It was all excellent free publicity.

  • Lights, camera, tax relief

    September 9, 2009 @ 3:23 pm | by Laura Slattery

    The Irish film industry can exhale. The Commission on Taxation has not shouted cut on film tax relief. Not that it’s given Section 481 of the tax code (the bit that basically keeps the film production coffers from emptying) a five-star endorsement either. But cash-hunting film financiers will probably settle for this latest stay of execution, given that the last Government-commissioned review of how stuff should work, the Bord Snip report, bluntly suggested that the Irish Film Board should be shut down and subsumed within an Enterprise Ireland super-body. How’s that going to look on the opening credits?

    You have to wonder how the arts sector copes sometimes; always dangling at the end of a fraying thread. I’ve lost count of the number of times that the Government has threatened to remove or change the terms of film tax relief, while if the Irish Film Board is axed, it won’t be for the first time.

    For the moment, the Commission’s report has put a big tick next to film relief (it literally put ticks next to tax reliefs that should continue and crosses next to those that should cease). It added that it should be subject to regular review – common sense, of course, but the kind of qualifier that will be keeping the film industry as tense as an actress on Oscar night. Without tax incentives, production simply migrates, so not only would Ireland lose its position as a tax-effective double for other parts of the world, but films purportedly set in Ireland would wind up being shot in the Welsh valleys or greenest Hampshire.

    Who gets the honour of hosting (and staffing) the film crews is an international competition often determined by whichever tax legislators are the most generous. It is telling that one of the recent success stories of Section 481 is not a film at all, but a television series, The Tudors – with Jonathan Rhys Meyers and (until she lost her head) Natalie Dormer, pictured above – which is filmed at Ardmore Studios and on location in Ireland thanks to its eligibility for tax incentives that are not available in the UK.

    This legislative arms race isn’t just done for the cachet of having lots of extras wandering around Wicklow wearing corsets and bejewelled hair. Keeping the film industry here through tax reliefs generates more wealth for the Exchequer than it costs it (the benefits in 2004-2006 were €96.3 million and the costs were €90.9 million, according to the 2007 Indecon review), while Minister for Arts Martin Cullen expects that €150 million worth of film business will be anchored here this year partly as a result of improvements made to Section 481 in the 2008 Finance Act.

    But from the film industry’s perspective, Section 481 is far from the tour de force it wants it to be. In its submission to Indecon, the film board called for the maximum investment that can be made by an individual to be increased to €150,000, in line with that for the Business Expansion Scheme. Instead, it got a much smaller increase from €31,750 to €50,000. This means more individual investors are required for each production, ramping up the admin headaches for smaller budget films - the very ones that are more likely to be indigenous productions deserving of a little State encouragement.

    The most high-profile example of this is Once (2006), John Carney’s story of love, music and migration that, thanks to its surprise international box office success in 2007, showed off nippy, workaday, busking Dublin to the world – the film was charming precisely because its snapshot of Irish culture is one that could never be made through a Hollywood lens. But Once’s producers did not avail of Section 481, as its micro-budget was too low to justify the costs associated with rounding up funds from hundreds of film-loving investors.

    It would be wrong for the film industry to become the latest tax haven for the wealthy. But in practice, Section 481 to date has hardly been a get-rich-quick scheme – it’s more like a risky investment option shrouded in something akin to a philanthropic edge. Without the tax relief, there would be no return. So it would be a shame if fewer small Irish films like Once, which epitomise the kind of productions the State should incentivise, were to get made because of something as prosaic as admin costs. Even if it was a pretty morose flick, and The Tudors is much more fun, now that I think about it.

  • Wrapped up in e-books

    August 10, 2009 @ 10:01 am | by Laura Slattery

    “There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more,” sang The Smiths, but that was before 15kg per checked bag weight restrictions. Now stocking up on “3 for 2s” at Waterstone’s before you embark on a re-humanising holiday risks flirting with excess luggage penalties so large that you could probably pop down to your local Sony store and snap up an e-reader for cheaper.

    If you did, you’d be an early adopter, which is never much fun. Sure, you get the cachet of being able to show off your gadget to the naysayers, the Luddites and the format-fatigued, but you also have to suffer all the stop-start tricksiness that comes with being quicker off the mark than the industry itself.

    It is almost two years since Amazon launched its Kindle e-reader in the US, and it’s still not properly available here. Search for “Kindle” on electronics e-tailer Pixmania and it will offer you a heat gun, a torch, a slow cooker and a Swiss army knife set, which – while it sounds like the makings of a good night out - just isn’t the same as the joy of kindling your way through the Booker longlist on a slow train to Prague.

    Meanwhile, Sony’s non-wireless e-Readers, which are available here (€243 for the current version on Pixmania), have the misfortune to be tied into Waterstone’s e-Book store. Right now, this is a horrible, horrible site: difficult to navigate, slow to search and, thanks to the heel-dragging of fearful publishing houses, missing key titles. There’s no digital discount either: £15.19 stg for Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall? I’m pretty sure I can do better than that in hard copy.

     So it is with interest that I read that Sony is stepping up its battle for Stateside e-book supremacy with Amazon and bidding to bring e-readers into the mainstream. Amazon is also reported to be planning to launch Kindle in the UK (followed, presumably, by Ireland) before Christmas, although they said that last year. But will lower prices for both e-readers and e-books be enough to convince the bookbuying public to ditch their paperbacks for good?

    In the “no” corner, there are the ownership niggles, as Ciara O’Brien discusses on her technology blog. Then there are the practical limits. Holidays are supposed to be for recharging the batteries – your own. No one wants to spend half their break searching for the conversion plug they swore they packed or fretting on the beach about whether their e-reader has enough power to get them to the final chapter. Thirdly, there is the loss of romance and identity that comes with digitally disguising your taste in literature. (Curiously, the Sony E-Reader PRS 505 promises to hold “unabridged” versions of 160 books, as if e-reader buyers are really toy lovers who might be content with abridged versions.)

    In the “yes” corner, there is the obvious joy from merging your library with your daily news feeds in one lightweight tablet. On that note, Rupert Murdoch last week signalled that The Wall Street Journal (his newest baby) had negotiated a higher percentage of the revenues from Kindle subscriptions. The newspaper industry is belatedly getting tough with every other business that profits from their free content, not just Amazon. But you don’t bother making threats against something you believe to be an inconsequential gimmick, and huffing and puffing about withdrawing The Wall Street Journal from Kindle over a row about subscriber names if anything reveals how much a part of the future media landscape Murdoch thinks e-readers will be.

    Ironically, the rise of the e-book could spur a concurrent resurgence in bookshelf-friendly hardbacks, as publishing houses delay the release of low-margin digital versions and lengthen the period in which only earnings-enhancing hardbacks are available. But just as record labels started making more of a design effort with CD packaging after iTunes took off, putting care and attention into hardbacks is also the smart way for publishers to snaffle cash from price-insensitive booklovers who don’t want to sacrifice the look, feel and smell of a finely typeset novel.

    E-books, after all, don’t furnish a room.

  • Friends disconnected

    August 6, 2009 @ 8:46 pm | by Laura Slattery

    After spending half the Noughties wondering what exactly they should do with this website thingy, ITV has managed to offload Friends Reunited on the publisher of the Beano for a not-so-cool £25 million (€29 million). Sounds like a lot for a website, but then Facebook recently sold a mere 2 per cent of itself for the rather more flattering $200 million (€140 million), valuing its mix of chatter feeds, “which superhero are you” quizzes and incessant smugness at $10 billion.

    Strangely, there was a time when Friends Reunited, the social networking site of yesteryear, was an amazing novelty. Fancy being able to get in touch with people you went to school with! Surely, that’s like crossing into some alternative universe where fractures in the space-time continuum are creating all manner of unscripted chaos.

    Horror stories used to surface in the tabloid press of fortysomething wives leaving their stunned husbands for the boy they fancied when they were 17 – a moral outrage blamed entirely on the new technology, of course. These days, there’s no need for furtive subscriptions. Facebookers think nothing of openly flirting with friends on each other’s walls, knowing full well that both their partner and the friend’s partners can monitor every interaction – as can hundreds of other friends-of-friends should they be having a particularly boring day at work.

    Meanwhile, having been hounded down and tracked with military precision by a procession of mostly recognisable faces (albeit swollen with age), no one’s getting too excited by the prospect of “reuniting” with old friends anymore. Instead, the etiquette of “de-friending” is commonly debated in safely non-digital surroundings.

    ITV, unable to shake off its heritage as a lumbering broadcaster with a strictly analogue attitude to innovation, has been accused of dithering with Friends Reunited since it bought it in 2005. But savvier players in the social networking sphere than the company that brings us The Jeremy Kyle Show have been undone by users’ ennui: witness today’s announcement of impairment charges at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive Media, the owner of MySpace.

  • BBC2’s Freefall hits the credit crunch feel-bad factor

    July 15, 2009 @ 9:17 am | by Laura Slattery

    With very strong language and some scenes of a sexual nature, the first “credit crunch drama” hit TV screens last night, almost two years after terms such as Libor rates and Ninja loans became common currency. Freefall, a BBC2 film by Dominic Savage featuring Irish actor Aidan Gillen, is the only TV show I’ve ever seen to feature explanations of collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and such dialogue as “somebody get on to Asia… monolines won’t even look at deals like this anymore”. Cue credit card cocaine chopping in the men’s loo.

    As one-off dramas go, Freefall was a little subprime. The tripartite story structure, which followed a thrill-seeking CDO trader, a pushy mortgage broker and a shopping centre security guard with a bad credit record, didn’t really make any attempt to draw the connection between the mounting misery of all three. But while some scenes stank of unreality, the logic behind the rampant borrowing seemed all too grimly familiar. You speculate to accumulate, and all that.

    “You don’t own anything,” the pushy mortgage broker tells his old schoolmate during an espresso-fuelled sales pitch. “We don’t owe anything,” the security guard counters, but a few minutes later he’s signing for a catch-ridden introductory discount mortgage that will buy him a mock-Tudor suburban palace. His wife is bemused: “I just don’t see how we can have this. We don’t have any more money than we did last week.”

    She had been perfectly happy in their rented council house – the kind of place you would want to escape from, it was implied, but which looked disarmingly like the kind of sought-after place that Dublin house-buyers were faking pay slips in order to afford during the height of the Irish property boom. Back at the subprime lender office, a colleague is aghast: “You just sold a discounted mortgage to an old mate. Have you not got a conscience?”

    It’s safe to say happy endings in Freefall were as about as elusive as a penalty-free fixed mortgage. But in a world where a recession sparked by the excesses of a financial sector can result in 30 million job losses in OECD countries while around 30,000 Goldman Sachs employees remain on course for a six-digit pay increase, it would be hard to find much about the banking bubble and its bursting that would make good source material for a heart-warming tale.

  • Could your job be done by a teenager?

    July 13, 2009 @ 4:01 pm | by Laura Slattery

    If 15-year-old Matthew Robson was anything like me, he’d have spent most of his work placement at Morgan Stanley wondering where the toilets were. Instead, this morning’s Financial Times boasts the front page headline “Media research note by ‘teenage scribbler’ causes City sensation”. This is a very worrying development for all concerned.

    The story goes that Morgan Stanley’s European media analysts asked Robson, an intern from a London school, to describe his friends’ media habits and his report proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. So we published it,” said Edward Hill-Wood, Morgan Stanley’s chief media analyst. That’s Morgan Stanley’s current chief media analyst. For Mr Hill-Wood is right: Robson’s note is a joy to read.

    First of all, there are amusingly pithy dismissals of such old-century concepts as the Yellow / Golden Pages: “Teenagers never use real directories. This is because real directories contain listings for builders and florists, which are services that teenagers do not require.”

    Some of Robson’s sideswipes might be more surprising to anyone over the age of 21. The idea that teenagers can’t exhale without tweeting about it is laid to waste with devastating logic: “Teenagers do not use Twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.”

    This is hardly a ringing front-line endorsement for the future of Twitter, on a day when co-founder / chief executive Evan Williams made it into the top 10 of the annual MediaGuardian 100 most powerful people in the industry.

    In fact, unless they lower their prices, interested parties should pretty much give up marketing mobile web services at people young enough to be pocket money-dependent: “Teenagers do not use the internet features on their mobiles as it costs too much, and generally, if they waited an hour they could use their home internet and they are willing to wait as they don’t usually have anything urgent to do.”

    Apart from taking over the world, that is.

    The note ends with a “what is hot / what is not” list with which it is hard to argue. What is hot? “Anything with a touch screen”, mobile phones with large capacities for music, portable devices that can connect to the internet (iPhones), “really big tellies”. What is not? “Anything with wires”, phones with black and white screens, clunky “brick” phones and devices with less than a ten-hour battery life.

    The only consolation to this rampant display of precocious adolescent competence is that Robson is bound to be teased on his return to school by Morgan Stanley’s decision to declare his age as “15 years and seven months”, as if he was a pedantic toddler. Mr Hill-Wood, meanwhile, has condemned the career of a City analyst to the criticism that “even a child could do it”.

    This is not to throw stones at the analyst community, who have proven success in charging their clients fees for their insight (or lack of). Like it or not, the children are coming. Teenage workplace participation rates may be falling faster than among any other demographic group, according to the CSO’s Quarterly National Household Survey, but no amount of ladder-pulling college fees, employment legislation or economic depressions are going to leave the young to their Wiis forever. The Irish Times frequently plays host to small pockets of bright-eyed students, most of whom look like they’ll be all too capable of running the show – and have great hair while they do so – when the swine flu pandemic wipes out the rest of us.

    The one small comfort is that no self-respecting teenager would want to work for a newspaper anyway. Unfortunately, this is because they don’t read them. In the words of Matthew Robson, the Morgan Stanley wunderkind: “No teenager that I know regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the Internet or on TV.”

    Well, when you put it like that…


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