Ready To Win?

Watching Andy Murray, loose a Grand Slam Final once again without taking a set, was an experience totally at odds with the way he has played in the previous matches, at Melbourne Park. He would have been Scotland’s first singles Grand Slam winner, as would Caroline Wozniaki for Denmark and Na Li for China, so the pressure is of course immense.

However in the UK, which sees itself as the home of many contemporary global sports, arguably the need to win a males singles Grand Slam is greater than elsewhere, Fred Perry was the last well over 70 years ago. Which begs the question is Andy Murray ready to win? At the moment he gets a life outside the Grand Slams for 44 weeks of the year. This would end.

He would become sporting royalty in the UK and be vying with the Royal marriage for story of the year. The UK’s sports Personality of the Year guaranteed, and a, knighthood probably before he is 30. His only chance to lessen the British sporting hysteria would be to win shortly after England have won their other Sporting Holy Grail the soccer world cup. A very slim hope indeed.   

Daily Newspaper

With the imminent launch of News International and Apple’s Ipad only newspaper the Daily, it looks as if the way we read the news is about to take a giant leap.

There are online subscriptions to existing newspapers. Both the Wallstreet Journal and the Times Online (both owned by News International) can be accessed via a subscription. The latter reputedly has lost somewhere between 95-99% of its readership since it began to charge last year. Its no secret that Murdoch is not an enthusiast of the very largely free access online to the news. As John Lanchester points out in the London Review of Books (December 2010) - the fact that you have to login with passwords every time you want to read the TOL, and have to pay a large fee, very much counts against usage.

There are existing newspaper type websites which do not charge, eg Huffington Post, which is largely made up of articles and does not attempt to break up to the minute news.

However the Daily, is the first example of a newspaper, charging a weekly subscription, only available on the ipad (not on pc)  and arriving daily, presumably, as the title suggests. Sneak previews suggest it may be high on pictorial content, and have many social websites access points, as you would expect from an Apple product. However being from a Murdoch stable can we expect excellent standards of journalism and insightful articles and editorial ? Possibly not.  

The advantages of news on the web, is that it rolls over and frequently updates. Is the daily a once per day event, which doesn’t update ? Or linked so that the version you read at 9am is different in effect from the one read at 4pm, the same day ? I suspect it would have to be. One would expect that the 14 million ipad users worldwide are a bunch who are not wanting their newsonline to be a few hours behind the TV news which is playing in the background and can also be viewed simultaneously from the settee. In that respect it would not be a daily at all.

However Murdoch and News International may never the less, be ushering the future of not just how we view news on line, but how we view web pages generally. The Daily may be charged at 99c per week. We may not be that far from paying a subscription, possibly monthly which allows us to view a number of bundled websites. It will remain free at the point of access as it were, however we will have paid in advance for usage. This is where Murdoch’s legacy will be, and hopefully not in the standards of journalism.