London's Evening Standard axes daily print edition
bbc.com
bbc.com
> The Lebedevs also bought the Independent in 2010, and scrapped that paper's print edition entirely six years later.
A Russian intelligence officer owning two major UK newspapers seems like a seriously undercovered story.
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/15/lebedev-the-kgb-spy-who-h...
> Britain’s spies were not worried too much about the boy, Evgeny, a seemingly self-obsessed featherweight who once, while freelancing for the BBC, asked Alexander Lukashenko, the strongman of Belarus, what he thought about group sex. Their anxiety focussed on the father, a once and maybe current KGB/FSB actor, who helped put Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. All of Evgeny’s money flows from this single fact, that Putin was grateful to his father for his service as a spy and he was rewarded handsomely for it. And Alexander Lebedev still owes fealty to the master of the Kremlin.
> On the face of it, Alexander Lebedev looks like a model anti-Putin oligarch. He’s big mates with Mikhail Gorbachev with whom he part-owned the now closed Novaya Gazeta, the last good newspaper in Russia. He’s a liberal, or poses as such, and, like his son, he’s thick with the luvvies: friends with Kevin Spacey, John Malkovich, Sir Elton John, Ralph Fiennes who plays M in the Bond movies and Hugh Grant.
> No wonder Boris Johnson ignored warnings from MI6 that the Lebedevs were to be avoided. But look into Alexander Lebedev’s past and the story gets dark, very quickly.
It was a big story in the UK for a while, Johnson also attended a party at Lebedev’s villa in Italy after a NATO conference.
Monarchy is ridiculous, lol. Lets keep giving these people validation like this.
Actually handing out power is more questionable, but I'm not sure whether Britain is worse or better than other countries in this regard.
Eg in Germany or the US you can also get some influence for money, you just won't get a fancy noble title with it.
I wanted to disentangle the two aspects.
There’s probably a case to be made for not allowing any Lords or MPs unless they are British by birth rather than naturalisation or descent.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-party-...
It's Alexander who is the main concern really, but it doesn't seem so easy to separate Alexander from Evgeny.
Also someone who just happens to be rich because daddy is perhaps not worth of a peerage, and not entirely how the system is supposed to work. Unless he actually did anything special, which I don't think he did.
Are you sure? I think that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work and is how it’s always worked.
Quite how the House of Lords persists in a ‘democracy’ is troubling enough on its own.
My thoughts on the content are mixed but generally positive, but for the actual delivery of a daily physical newspaper to my mailbox thing, I really enjoy it. There is something much more real about it as compared to scrolling through endless news articles online or going through yet another email newsletter. If I’m in public at a cafe/on the subway etc. I also feel more present and focused vs. using my phone.
I actually think there may be a revival of print media, especially as the Internet gets increasingly crowded and filled with ads. The newspaper has ads of course but they are considerably less distracting. It will likely be more of a niche high quality product, though.
Define "better." Newspapers don't need staples, and (at least historically) they could be very large and thick. The non-bound aspect allowed them to be easily split and shared between multiple people.
I used to enjoy opening a broadsheet newspaper while standing on a crowded tube. Nearly as much fun as stabbing fellow commuters with a brolly.
> Also great for wrapping fish and chips in.
Didn't they regulate-away the heavy metals in printer's ink, at around the same time they regulated-away selling fish 'n chips in newspaper?
If anything, I think it's more likely that people will invest their news via new means especially AI platforms.
I use chatgpt's voice to hear the latest news instead of staring at a screen but it's clunky -
1. Waiting for the new voice so that we can speed up cadence and interrupt 2. I would prefer to talk to a news service directly with voice rather than relying on an ai platform to give me the news as I can't beg due the platform won't give me less trustworthy sources etc news corp
Ideally, I could log into Reuters or whatever site I want and talk with it about the news, and the same for anything (recipe sites, Reddit, whatever)
A newspaper is distinct from the radio / nightly news / 24/7 news network type journalism and that key distinction is that once it's in your hands it's yours until you give it up. It's that piece of the past that you can hold in your hands to let you know that the things that you remember actually happened in the way they happened.
There's something magical about these artifacts, the ones you can hold in your hands, look at with your eyes, smell with your noses, and hear with your ears, it's a physical thing that exists irrespective of the whims of some tin-pot dictator. Possessing this kind of artifact gives the bearer some sort of power -- an ability to resist those tin-pot dictators -- and that's why certain kinds of people want to burn them or trick people into stuffing them into a memory hole.
I wonder what we lose forever if we don't have these sort of physical and immutable mediums for communicating ideas, and I hope we can find a way to maintain them. I acknowledge that it may not be feasible to do so on a large scale, but I hope that we can find a way to keep them alive in some local form.
The FT prototyped a way to make podcast/article reading interactive. The problem was that we didn't have an LLM to answer the question, so they were stuck on hacking alex's awful API.
The problem with wire services is that they tend to only have light detail. You need a different service for analysis/investigation. (this is different to opinion, which is really just cheap news replacement.)
BBC Radio 4 is also sadly now a shadow of what it used to be.
However I'm fairly close to dutch culture, and the explaining of Gert Wilders wasn't that bad. The first hand reporting of "the youth" seemed to be reasonable from my point of view.
But perhaps thats because I don't use the BBC as my only source? I dunno.
I think they are probably a good model for future newspapers, whereas the evening standard seems to be a general newspaper without much to distinguish it from the competition.
Wow, do I enjoy it, for all the reasons you mentioned. Just the act of folding the page means a natural break to look around, contributing to the "more present" feeling.
Plus, if I take a break from coding I get to stop looking at a screen. And it's a lot easier to recover where I was, since the text has a connection to a physical location.
My spouse also reads it, and sometimes writes commentary to share with me when I read it later.
Many commuters picked up a copy to read on their journey home.
I don't think it was ever intended to compete with newspapers you paid to have delivered to your house.
Once Metro went free then it was inevitable the Standard would have to too. It seems even that model is not working for the Oligarch owner.
Metro hastened the demise of the morning papers.