Can You Trust The Media? — post launch

So not every­one gets the book, and I — like an idiot — went in pre­pared to defend the detail without explain­ing the big pic­ture, utterly ignor­ing everything I would ever tell people…

Accused of nihil­ism (by Andrew Gil­ligan) I was slightly embar­rassed. My first great lit­er­ary love was Fath­ers and Sons, Turgenev’s novel which gave nihil­ism to the world.

But no, I’m no Baz­arov

Al Jazeera: more integration between Arabic and English

My track record on industry gos­sip is so lam­ent­able that I try not to pass on what little I hear. But this rumour of a per­son­nel shift ahoy at Al Jaz­eera, has the ring of cred­ib­il­ity — and it sounds like a sens­ible regroup­ing by the Middle East­ern news network.

Word is that the bur­eau chief of Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish in Lon­don, Sue Phil­lips, will be moved up the cor­por­ate ranks.

Her brief will be to bring together Al Jazeera’s sixty or so Arab and Eng­lish offices around the world. So let’s see…

Fun with metrics

Metrics, met­rics, met­rics. Don’t you just love them? E&P quotes the latest Nielsen fig­ures out show­ing how long people spend at news sites.

Brand or Chan­nel — Mar. ’08 Time per Per­son (hh:mm:ss) — Mar. ’07 Time per Per­son March 07 (hh:mm:ss)

NYTimes.com — 0:37:14 — 0:33:48
USATODAY.com — 0:11:26 — 0:17:50
washingtonpost.com — 0:16:15 — 0:18:01
Wall Street Journal Online — 0:14:49 — 0:11:18
LA Times — 0:07:38 — 0:10:35

So there you have it. Com­pel­ling evid­ence that NYTimes.com read­ers leave browser win­dows open for longer than their LA counterparts.