Earlier this year, I did a quite successful series of blog posts which pointed to other blog posts for you to read – a kind of roundup. Sadly, I couldn’t keep the posting frequency up; but here’s a look at a few things I’ve read lately.

Muso and media type David Hepworth follows my piece on a possible future for BBC Radio 4, and my spirited claim that the BBC ignores great speech radio elsewhere in the world, by writing an interesting piece asking where’s the 6 music of talk radio? In it, he, too, wonders why British radio doesn’t produce anything like some of the output of NPR. It’s a good read; particularly the comments.

In the world of UK commercial radio, local stations are currently being removed from the marketplace, with new, regional Heart stations taking their place. James Stodd will miss today’s casualty – Crawley’s Mercury FM, which became just another transmitter for Heart Sussex. Particularly enjoyable in James’s post is the fully orchestral theme for Radio Mercury: a splendid craze for commercial radio in the mid-80s (here’s another example from my childhood – the closedown music, evocative of Sailing By, for Signal Radio).

The Times’s paywall has been the subject of some writing recently. Many have quoted some figures from Hitwise which seemed to suggest that the paywall cost The Times 66% of its readership: but in actual fact, the figures don’t say that at all. Hitwise monitors visits to a website, not paying subscribers. In fact, when The Times went behind registration-only (with no fee), the figures went down by 58%: showing for the first time the effects of requiring that your readers register. PaidContent reports the real figures, which apparently are just 15,000 paid-for subscribers. In June 2008, the newspaper itself reported that its site had 16 million visitors: so that’s, in reality, a drop of over 99.906%. That’s the real comparison to make: and it’s a bleak one for The Times. (@brucewebb put my errant maths right here!)

Meanwhile, another newspaper has worked out a potential money-spinner: though it’s got more to do with a real-name policy than anything else. The Sun Chronicle will charge a one-off $0.99 fee to register to post comments, says LostRemote; and it’ll use the name from the credit card as the author byline. A simple and straightforward system which should remove any abusive comments; similar to the rather onerous real-name system I had to install in Media UK a while back.

Owners of Android phones (which are vastly more popular than the iPhone these days) may now rejoice that Palm OS’s Graffiti system is now available, for free – I remembered a surprising amount of this system for handwriting recognition from my original Palm II.

I start my round-the-world presentation (getting another outing in Zurich in a few weeks’ time) by mentioning the bright things NPR does online, including their API. It turns out that WBUR, the NPR station in Boston, has agressively used this to significantly improve their own website. Worthwhile also reading, in this piece by the Nieman Journalism Lab, what else WBUR has changed: it turns out that a new website has meant new best-practice for the journalists at the station.

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