Last year a regional newspaper in the US tried setting up a “pay-wall”, requiring a payment to access stories on their website.
On October 28, 2009 […] Newsday.com would open its front page, classified ads, movie listings, and school closings to all site visitors, but access beyond this content would require a weekly [USD $5] fee. This fee would be waived for subscribers of the print edition of the paper, as well as for subscribers to parent-company Cablevision’s Internet service.
Through its first three months, only 35 non-[Cablevision], non-Newsday subscribers signed up for the paid web site.
The Times of London, which has just set up their own pay-wall, has a daily circulation of about 500,000. Given that they are a noted paper of record (or used to be), I imagine the Times might be ten times as successful with their pay-wall. In which case they’ll sell 500 weekly subscriptions. At GBP £2 a week, that’ll bring in GBP £52,000 every year.
A Great business model, assuming the operating budget of the Times website is significantly less than £1,000 a week.
If you find yourself starved of news in the absence of the Times, you might try looking…oh, I don’t know, ANYWHERE!
Hengrove Park was a 76 acre patch of open ground. Originally Whitchurch Airport, it was given over to public use in the early sixties. Now, it is a mixed-use development. I wrote about it last year, when the budget rose unexpectedly by £5 million:
The Council are the owner of the huge swathe of open land at Hengrove Park, and along with the South West Regional Development Agency, have been putting together a huge plan to monetise that asset. Phase 1 includes a Community Hospital (not quite a proper hospital), the Healthplex (a swimming pool), the South Bristol Skills Academy (not quite a further education college) and a European Headquarters for Australian share-register Computershare. You can see the document from this time last year [2007] proposing the land sale.
The plan is terribly clever. Using a mix of borrowed money, private finance initiative funding and multiple development partners the council propose to “regenerate” an area of South Bristol with the mixed-use Phase 1 described above followed by 1200 new houses. Or possibly 690 houses, or indeed none; Phase 2 requires central government to find a large quantity of cash which they demonstrably do not have.
Unfortunately cleverness is not enough to overcome the poor state of the British Economy. Because the project relies on such a complicated web of partner organisations and financial funding sources, it is extremely important to all concerned that it maintains momentum; were it to be delayed for even a few months the whole deal could unravel, since any money brought to the project from the public sector (i.e. taxpayers’ money) is certainly being borrowed unsustainably, and might disappear like faerie gold.
Bristol City Council is set to pay out £800,000 to settle a dispute with a company that wanted to build the new £21-million leisure centre at Hengrove Park.
Surrey-based D C Leisure Management (DCLM) did not succeed in winning the contract to build the complex.
But the company has threatened to sue the council over the way the tendering process was handled. And rather than face a drawn out and potentially costly legal battle the city council are expected next week to offer the £800,000 settlement.
I have also previously written about the dark art of public procurement, and so it is no surprise that the competing demands of legislatory compliance and funding imperatives have resulted in problems. i.e. “We better build this thing fast before the money gets yanked by Whitehall; oh no, we’ve bolloxed up the procurement.”
It might at first reading appear to be a shake-down of the Council by a sly private operator, but in fact DC Leisure Management might have a basis for a legal challenge. In public procurement, the essence of the compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) philosophy is to ensure that everything is fair and open; particularly because responding to a tender is expensive.
The argument of DCLM (interpreted second hand) appears to be that the works that the winning bidder have carried out for Hengrove Park are substantially different than the the works requested in the tender. Thus, the tender was not carried out according to the rules, and they ought to get some money back to cover their tendering costs (reported as £1.3m).
There is no way to establish who is in the right on this matter, as it has all been solved out of court with a payment equivalent to about £4 from each Bristolian tax payer. So that presumably is the end of that.
But it does stick in one’s craw a bit. In my professional life, if I made an error that cost a client a big wedge of cash I could be sued personally, since I’m a member of a professional society (ish) and I maintain professional liability insurance sufficient to cover multi-million pound losses. (No claims yet!)
Will there be any repercussions for those Council Officers who administered this tender process? Who ran the tender? And if they are not to blame, who is? There are hundreds of £10m+ tenders carried out in the public sector every year in which the failed bidders are not given a refund.
One could argue – as it appears the current administration have – that it is better to pay this money now to prevent project delay, but then again last year the Sports Centre was due to open in April 2010, whereas this year it is due to open in the Autumn of 2011 (I love seasonal dates; very forgiving). The Pool/Sports Centre is already over a year delayed; if the council’s case was that strong, why did they not refer DCLM to the reply given to the plaintiff in the seminal case of Arkell vs Pressdram?
Note – BBC Bristol haven’t objected yet to me posting short segments of their programmes on You Tube as long as they are attributed; hopefully BBC Sheffield have the same view.
This is a segment of The Toby Foster Bigger at Breakfast Show from BBC Sheffield, in which Toby interviews newly elected Mayor of Doncaster, Peter Davies (Eng Dem). Please try not to gnaw through your knuckles when listening to this, as it really is quite painful. A full transcript is available at Luke’s Blog, which was originally published at Andy’s Org.
Doncaster, a city large town in the North of England, is one of relatively few local authorities in the country to have a directly-elected political chief executive – a Mayor. This is a good idea, and I prefer this model of municipal government to Bristol’s “cabinet+chief executive” model where an executive cabinet is formed from elected councillors and express their policy through an appointed Chief Executive.
To avoid further confusion – the concept of an elected Mayor is distinct from (e.g.) the civic office of Lord Mayor of Bristol, which in our city performs the honorary role of “first citizen” and the legislative role of chairing meetings of the full council.
Anyhow, on June 4th, the voters of Doncaster elected Peter Davies of the English Democrats. Interestingly the election used the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, and Mr Davies squeaked through ahead of an independent on the basis of second preference votes. None of the major national parties were even close to being in the running.
Followers of Bristol politics may recall that the English Democrats were the party that hijacked a popular local Facebook group and turned it into a campaigning platform.
The best one can say about this interview – being extremely charitable - is that perhaps Mayor Davies was ill-prepared to discuss detailed policy points. Perhaps he was expecting something a bit more light hearted - "getting fitted for chains of office" and "settling in to the office".
Regardless - the key learning point: there is no such thing as a friendly media interview if you're nominally right of centre. Prepare for the worst.
Some of his points did actually have a reasonable argument behind them. There is a good rationale for getting rid of "diversity" departments, but employment law, contracts of employment and public sector unions all mean that it is not just a case of pointing at people Alan-Sugar-style and yelling "You're fired".
The interviewer also offered a non-sequitur that for a Council to cut in-house translation services "is, under the European Court of Human Rights it’s illegal." But this is simply incorrect. There is no legal obligation from the ECHR or anywhere else to translate routine local authority publications and documents into non-native languages, although there is one relating to criminal charges. Regardless, such a service could be offered more efficiently - on-demand telephone translation or even with Google Translate.
