SMH Spiral

I saw on Facebook today (now restored at work, huzzah!) a group that had recently been created named ‘The Sydney Morning Herald is no longer fit to call itself a real newspaper’. I went to have a look at it, and it made some astute observations. Here is a bit taken from the blurb:

It was once an outstanding newspaper to read on a daily basis, with thorough and objective reporting on both current affairs and local news. It used big words that we would have to look up in a dictionary from time to time.This is no longer the case and the point of this group is too encourage people not to read it nor visit its terrible gossip magazine-style website.It largely buys well written "World" articles from newspapers such as The Guardian, New York Times or LA Times and occasionally the Daily Telegraph. Though it chops them down to about 1200-2000 words because thats all an Australian reader can manage, apparently. (At least that's all its sub-editors being dicated to by moronic marketeers can) It now pursues what it perceives to be of interest to its readers, such as the hounding of individuals or the pursuit of petty scandals.
Its final crime is allowing cadet journalists to write lazy pieces such as "Facebook bans the use of the word gay" which are beneath the intelligence of a ten year old. These articles are usually printed during slow news feed days as too "up" the traffic to the website. The articles are usually pulled off the site within 3 hours and rarely, if at all make it to print.

It is hard to disagree with this. I read the SMH daily but its standards are continuing to drop. As mentioned above, the quality of the articles are dropping, and indeed the number of annoying pop ups is growing rapidly! When I had a look just then, the stories cycling through the bar on the top right were mainly linked to blogs, such as ‘Sam in the City’, that seem entirely pointless. The main story on the left was about the delivery of Hummers today and how it ironically coincided with walk to work day. Trash. Perhaps more telling is the links to the most viewed articles down the bottom. ‘Alan Jones knows election date’ is the top rated video; ‘Ask Sam Friday – Intercultural dating, is there any hope?’ is the top rated blog. The most viewed article is in relation to maternity wards, which has merit, yet the fifth most viewed article is about Ricky Ponting’s retaliation to claims from Indian cricket about something or the other.


It is sad, I guess that you just have to read from international news outlets, or perhaps the Australian.