Damien Mulley

IrishTimes.com, the new site for the Irish Times and with another new design is now live. First reaction is I’m not too gone on it, too like the Guardian Berliner design. I liked the old white background. I don’t like the cream coloured background. It also looks like Shane’s fantastic blog, mothballed as it is, is not on the new site. Meaning that our cries and foot-stamping shouts of “You’ll be back, they always come back” were wrong. Jim’s is still there and Conor’s as is Mark Hennessy’s blog. No new blogs yet. Please please bring in new bloggers.

Paywall removed, moving to IrishTimes.com, Ireland.com to become a portal.

Via Eoin and a really shitty press release comes news that the Irish Times are going online and are moving domain for the freeness to IrishTimes.com and keeping Ireland.com for premium stuff. The last bit is a little stupid really. All those links with “Irish Times” are now going to Ireland.com which is going to become a “portal” on all things Ireland. Great…

The Irish Times will publish on the web under its own title online from Monday morning with the launch of a new site, www.irishtimes.com. The site will be free to access by readers.

The move to irishtimes.com is designed to make the newspaper the dominant media website in Ireland in the 21st century. The change from a subscription model to a free newspaper on irishtimes.com is a further instalment in the biggest editorial development programme in the history of the newspaper embarked upon last February with the redesign and modernisation of The Irish Times and the launch of new supplements.

…

The new ireland.com will combine relevant content across a range of channels, local services and search functionality in a manner that has not been seen in Ireland before. The new site is aimed at Irish internet users or people elsewhere with an interest in Ireland and all things Irish.

Here’s what I predicted at the start of the year, so more to do:

The Irish Times will open up
While some won’t want to see the paymodel go away after defending it for years, the paywalls at the Irish Times will fall away and traffic will go up and up, making this quality paper rightly go up in rankings for all things Ireland. The Irish Times will internally consider buying Beaut.ie or asking Kieran Murphy from IceCreamIreland to do a weekly piece for their food and lifestyle blog. Nothing might happen though.

I’m hearing I’m going to be wrong on the blogs. They’re still greatly disliked in there.

Anyway, overall fantastic news, lets see how these stats look in two months.

A kind of followup to this post about what to write and this post about WordPress installs. Even with guides on what to write, some companies still don’t feel able to blog and I’m getting queries more and more from people asking me to supply names of people or companies that work in the copy writing/blog post writing business. However I smack their knuckles with a ruler if they suggest ghost writers. I won’t supply names to them for that. If I hear you ghost write for business blogs, I won’t recommend you either. Blogging is all about real people and real engagement, remember?

Photo owned by janetmck (cc)

The same way I’m getting a public list of WordPress Installers together, I’d like to put a list of people together that are willing to write blog copy (and get attribution) for businesses. The idea would be too you’d work with the company to eventually bring some of their staff into the blogging lark on their blog. If you think you can write non-PR bullshit and engage the public on behalf of a business, stick your name down in the comments and maybe areas you are good at writing about already.