The Canary, views and discussion...

[LDC]

It's been mentioned in passing on a recent thread ("BBC has moved beyond bias, into pure propaganda") and I'm interested to hear what people know and think about it.

My opinion... I've only come across it very recently, and leaving aside its slightly incoherent politics (mainly enriching democracy from what I can gather in its blurb) it does seem to have a very dubious business model that seems to result in tabloid style headlines that bear little relationship to the actual content of the article.

For those of you that haven't seen it, and to save you wading through pages of news about the weather in The Canary Isles, here you go The Canary

 

[DotCommunist]

what are its views on coalmining?

 

[spanglechick]

Dreadful journalism. Massive hyperbole.

Really undermines the integrity of those sharing its articles on fb.

 

[J Ed]

I don't think that the tabloid headlines are what is wrong with it, there are some good online tabloids like gawker. The problem is that the headlines are often just dishonest spam, it doesn't do any of its own journalism it just links to other websites with dishonest headlines like 'PROOF THAT THE TORY GOV WILL COLLAPSE THIS WEEK' and the proof will be that someone said something rude about IDS on twitter.

 

[teuchter]

Dreadful journalism. Massive hyperbole.

Really undermines the integrity of those sharing its articles on fb.

^ this

 

[Libertad]

what are its views on coalmining?

You wag you

 

[killer b]

I believe the woman who runs the site is an ex management consultant, 'radicalised' by the occupy movement. Although the nature of the funding model for her site - and the shit, stolen and dishonest journalism it results in - suggests her radicalisation was incomplete. Or she saw a way of making money off liberals... perhaps both.

 

[2hats]

what are its views on coalmining?

It's a gas?

 

[NoXion]

I doubt it's a money-making scheme, or if it is it's a very bad one.

 

[nino_savatte]

I find The Canary's sense of what makes a 'story' (important in journalism) is weak, and the much of the prose is leaden and dull. This is especially true of articles written by Kerry-anne (sic) Mendoza.

 

[ViolentPanda]

It's been mentioned in passing on a recent thread ("BBC has moved beyond bias, into pure propaganda") and I'm interested to hear what people know and think about it.

My opinion... I've only come across it very recently, and leaving aside its slightly incoherent politics (mainly enriching democracy from what I can gather in its blurb) it does seem to have a very dubious business model that seems to result in tabloid style headlines that bear little relationship to the actual content of the article.

For those of you that haven't seen it, and to save you wading through pages of news about the weather in The Canary Isles, here you go The Canary

It's a bit amateur. Some of the stories are interesting, but they try too hard to sell the story on the headline, which only works if the story is truly sensational/shocking/stunning.
The politics are very left-liberal, and the writing is worthy, rather than readable. I suspect that there's little or no sub-editing going on either, as some of their stories would benefit from being about 30-50% shorter.

 

[stethoscope]

I like the way it calls itself 'fresh, fearless independent journalism'.

 

[butchersapron]

Amnesty garden-party journalism.

 

[stethoscope]

'Other peoples content, turned into clickbait' doesn't sound quite so good tbf.

 

[smokedout]

I believe the woman who runs the site is an ex management consultant, 'radicalised' by the occupy movement. Although the nature of the funding model for her site - and the shit, stolen and dishonest journalism it results in - suggests her radicalisation was incomplete. Or she saw a way of making money off liberals... perhaps both.

When she was blogging she tried to crowd fund herself a £25k a year salary and when that didn't work set up a couple of similar sites to the canary that didn't take off. She grew traffic for her blog by auto-tweeting every post about hourly from one of the Occupy accounts which she seemed to have control over and also from an anti-olympic campaign's twitter feed. She then had a brief dalliance with David Icke's project which seemed to result in a fall out. She also had a book publised on austerity, I only skimmed the part on welfare reform but it was full of sloppy errors. Politically she was, and possibly still is, committed to the zeigeist crap combined with a sort of vaguely liberal Corbynism.

tl:dr a blogger who got a bit of attention around the time of Occupy and the first wave of austerity and who's been desperately trying to monetise that ever since.

 

[killer b]

Cheers for fleshing that out.

Irritating that this one seems to have worked.

 

[killer b]

They claim to have a fund for long form investigative journalism BTW, has this borne any fruit yet?

 

[smokedout]

Cheers for fleshing that out.

Irritating that this one seems to have worked.

I doubt it has to be honest. For whoever owns the site, and the writers to make any kind of real money (as in wages not getting rich), then it would have to be acheiving astronomical traffic - or pandering to a specific advertising niche - or become part of the political establishment in the way guido fawkes has. Bloggers who write about fashion or video games get rich, not politicos and especially not lefty politicos even if their leftism is pretty weak. She'd have been better off pursuing the commentisfree/guardian/new statesman career path, but then things like fact checking and accuracy would come into play, and that doesn't seem to be her strong suit.

 

[killer b]

they're getting a shitload of traffic from gullible middle class wet left arseholes - that's got to be a valuable market to sell to advertisers surely?

 

[Jon-of-arc]

I doubt it's a money-making scheme, or if it is it's a very bad one.

It sure is. Journalists are paid on a "per click" basis - 50/50 with the website.

How news outlet The Canary aims to 'diversify media'

 

[editor]

The sad fact is that hideous clickbaity titles can really be effective for anyone looking to make money from online traffic. I'd like to tell you more but you'll have to CLICK HERE TO BE SHOCKED BY THE TRUTH ABOUT THEM etc etc.

 

[smokedout]

they're getting a shitload of traffic from gullible middle class wet left arseholes - that's got to be a valuable market to sell to advertisers surely?

They don't seem to have any advertisers at the moment, just lots of calls for donations and links to buy Kerry's books on Amazon. Traffic on most posts doesn't seem especially high going by the number of comments.

Thing is you can artifically generate a lot of traffic, using click bait headlines, regular publishing, social media saturation etc, but even running google or affiliate ads you've got to be getting thousands of hits a day just to make a couple of hundred dollars a month. Or you can have a very targeted brand, like Guido or The Guardian and find advertisers who want to attract a certain sort of people - namely ones with a lot of money to spend. The Canary won't get those people, partly because of the politics, but also because of the poor journalism - what's the point of it, its a shit version of The Guardian.

They seem to be hoping that a sort of political buzzfeed model will bring in money - but people like 14 celebrity's saggy arses type clickbait, there just isn't a market for 11 boring things someone said on twitter about Jeremy Hunt - or at least not a big enough one. Clickbait works to an extent if its backed up with content people actually want to read, if the headline draws them in but they are engaged by what they find. A blog can go from 20,000 hits one day to 100 the next, and even with popular viral posts only a very small number who click on them will become 'readers' and an even smaller number donate or buy anything. You be surprised how many people share things on social media they haven't even read themselves just because of the headline and political tribalism alone. That's what The Canary is feeding off but without any quality analysis or the ability to generate credible stories for themselves they will fail in the long term. And even if they can gain some credibility, then they will need to turn to more lifestyle Guardian type wank to pull in the advertisers and so lose any radical support base they have. There's no money to be made in genuine anti-capitalism, and as frustrating as that might be for some people, that isn't a bad thing.

 

[butchersapron]

On their shit satire section they preface their shit satire with a shit THIS POST IS SATIRICAL warning.

 

[editor]

Thing is you can artifically generate a lot of traffic, using click bait headlines, regular publishing, social media saturation etc, but even running google or affiliate ads you've got to be getting thousands of hits a day just to make a couple of hundred dollars a month.

I see their articles appearing multiple times in my timeline, and if that's any indicator of their traffic levels, they could well be making a half decent amount of cash (as in thousands, but not millions).

 

[smokedout]

I see their articles appearing multiple times in my timeline, and if that's any indicator of their traffic levels, they could well be making a half decent amount of cash (as in thousands, but not millions).

From what? An amazon affiliate link?

 

[killer b]

I presumed they had adverts but my adblock vanished them...

 

[editor]

From what? An amazon affiliate link?

No, from Google Adwords. If they have them (or decide to add them later).

 

[smokedout]

I presumed they had adverts but my adblock vanished them...

oh yeah, forgot about that they do have a couple of ads. this is one of the reasons they wont make much money though.

 

[killer b]

She doesn't pay anyone and the costs are clearly fuck all, so I guess it's something she can keep running until she works out how to make proper money from it / gets bored. Hopefully the second, and soon.

 

[smokedout]

No, from Google Adwords. If they have them (or decide to add them later).

I think they probably are running adwords, but to get up to thousands then theyd have to be looking at huge traffic. The average adwords cpm is $1/2. That means 10,000 hits on a post just to make a tenner. The fact most of their posts get just a handful of comment suggests they are not getting anywhere near that.