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September 14, 2009
Fairfax have introduced their online commentary magazine Natonal Times, which is in competition with News Ltd's The Punch. The latter is more a tabloid style magazine with different voices and style, whilst the former, basically a resurrected masthead from the mid 80s, is more broadsheet commentary. It promises lively, intelligent engaged debate.
Does it deliver?
Firstly, there is nothing new in the voices in the National Times, as they are just the usual Fairfax commentators collected into one online place without a new visual design or style. No new ground is being broken, and there is no indication that The National Times will develop into an Australian version of The Atlantic or Prospect magazine. That online space is occupied by The Monthly and New Matilda. So why bother with the National Times?
Secondly, one question we could ask is: what is the National Times trying to become if it is not just a collection of existing articles from The Age and Sydney Morning Herald? Is there any original material? If there is new content, then it is buried. Surely Fairfax don't expect that putting this behind a pay wall will work.
Thirdly, the National Times appears to be a defensive attempt to block News Ltd. A counter move as it were with little in the way of an online strategy that recognizes how the commentary world has changed with the emergence of the political bloggers. The boundaries have changed. There is no vision of the future in The National times, and no innovation even in terms of dialogue, use of links, use of Flickr or collaborative networked journalism.
The National Times is still bounded by the 20th century know it all mass media in which the journalists acted as the gatekeepers. They are not going to going to where the conversation is taking place. They are waiting for it to come to them, or think that they are the conversation.
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We've been wondering the same thing. There seems to be a small set of new content in the form of their "blogs", but the site's purpose and layout are pretty incoherent.
The Punch launched with a clearly different look, its content was differentiated from other News Ltd sites, and its layout clearly differentiated between aggregated and original content. If Fairfax wanted the NT to become the hub for all of its opinion content then I would have thought their newspapers' sites would need to be changed so that opinion content wasn't hosted there as well.