Irish Times free online from Monday

RayM

A welcome development

THE IRISH TIMES will publish under its own title online from Monday morning with the launch of a new site for the newspaper, www.irishtimes.com . Access to the site will be free.

Those people who have subscribed to The Irish Times on www.ireland.com will be offered a full refund for the remainder of their subscription period.
If they prefer, they can join the new Irish Times Crossword Club - to be introduced on Monday - and access our digital archive dating back to the foundation of the newspaper in 1859, for the same period.
To help them decide, all subscribers will be given one month's free access to both of these services.
Subscribers will receive a personal e-mail outlining these options.

karen3212

Does this include the Sunday Times, and if so how will the other half and I read the paper together when we only have one laptop?

IanCurtis

karen3212 wrote: »

Does this include the Sunday Times, and if so how will the other half and I read the paper together when we only have one laptop?

Oh fcuk off

jaffa20

IanCurtis wrote: »

Oh fcuk off

Be nice!!

mike65

karen3212

The Irish Times and the Sunday Times are two completly different publications! But I bet you knew that.

About time the IT ponces got with the real online world, I take it only a handfull of the deluded (or professionals) were actually paying for ireland.com (there's a presumptive name for you) which was a foolish domain for a newspaper.

Will the trust keep the old name though? It could be worth a few bob.

Mike.

copacetic

they are relaunching ireland.com as ' Ireland's homepage, a seperate and commercial and new free lifestyle portal site'

That's a direct quote even if it doesn't make much sense.

gaf1983

Is this in response to the Irish Independent's darn good independent.ie site?

The move to a free Irish Times on the web follows in the recent footsteps of many leading newspaper titles in the world today, among them the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Not so - perish the thought that The Irish Times would take a leaf out of the Indo's book: copying the NYT and LA Times is one thing, O'Reilly's paper quite another.

Have they been losing subscribers due to the entirely free news service of that paper?

I only hope this development encourages the Examiner to improve their site, making it much more user friendly.

haz

But did Madame Editrix have to indulge in the arslikhan claptrap in the tail of the article - "trust and accuracy are often the casualties of speed... our reputation for accuracy, authority, independent analysis and comment... an independent newspaper primarily concerned with serious issues for the benefit of the community throughout the whole of Ireland, free from any form of personal or party political, commercial, religious or other sectional control... this newspapers distinct ethos, identity and journalism in new media."

She can't just say it was free, it was a mistake to start charging, and a loss-making error, sorry?

Overdraft

gaf1983 wrote: »

perish the thought that The Irish Times would take a leaf out of the Indo's book

The day that happens we can turn out the lights :rolleyes:

Tabnabs

Please, everyone knows at least one free login for the IT. I'd say there are half a dozen people/companies that actually subscribe and everyone else just uses their login info, but of course shh! you promise not to pass this on don't you...

flogen

IanCurtis banned from News/Media.

jmcc

haz wrote: »

She can't just say it was free, it was a mistake to start charging, and a loss-making error, sorry?

It reads very much like an article by someone who really doesn't understand the web or its economics. Going PPV was definitely a mistake as it cut the site off from traffic generated advertising revenue.

It is quite laughable that the Irish Times considers itself in the same league as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times when it is really just a provincial Dublin newspaper.

The split between IrishTimes.com and Ireland.com is quite interesting. Most of the search engine and link references will have been to the Ireland.com site. And from Monday, Ireland.com is going to be a portal site something it already was under the old model. Interestingly, the domain registration details on ireland.com changed in June.

Going to an advertising supported revenue model was long overdue. It should be interesting to see how SiliconRepublic.com and ENN.ie fare with the IT's 'technology' section freely available.

Regards...jmcc

karen3212

mike65 wrote: »

karen3212

The Irish Times and the Sunday Times are two completly different publications!

:oOops, thank you, I've been confused about all the papers with the words Times in them for many a year, prob because I love weeklies, but I might start reading more free online dailies now.

juvenal

New site is now live

http://www.irishtimes.com/

mike65

Not that live in Opera 9.5 anyway. None of the linky worky.

Mike.

haz

jmcc wrote: »

It reads very much like an article by someone who really doesn't understand the web or its economics.

There is a much more literate interview with "the other boss", Maeve Donovan, in the Sunday Business Post at http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=MEDIA+AND+MARKETING-qqqs=mediaandmarketing-qqqid=34034-qqqx=1.asp and it is obvious she has a reasonable handle on web presence, or has at least read their business analyst's report.

It will be interesting to see how the new site ranks against all the thousands, if not millions, of links to the last decade of stories hosted at Ireland.com

Urgh! So frustrating. Letters are more hidden now and I hate how you can't click 'yesterday's paper' or the equivalent to see that section from the previous day now.

I hope it gets sorted.

jmcc

haz wrote: »

There is a much more literate interview with "the other boss", Maeve Donovan, in the Sunday Business Post at http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=MEDIA+AND+MARKETING-qqqs=mediaandmarketing-qqqid=34034-qqqx=1.asp and it is obvious she has a reasonable handle on web presence, or has at least read their business analyst's report.

You can still detect the stink of the IT's ignorance of the real world. Perhaps she doesn't realise that garage operators like Google, Apple etc built the web. The web has changed since the last time that the IT was important. There is more content and better connectivity. And the readers that it lost when it went PPV may never bother coming back.

It will be interesting to see how the new site ranks against all the thousands, if not millions, of links to the last decade of stories hosted at Ireland.com

A clusterfsck of an SEO problem if they don't manage it properly.

Regards...jmcc

copacetic

google and apple built the web? are you ****ting me? fecjkin know nothing mupppet.

Overdraft

jmcc wrote: »

You can still detect the stink of the IT's ignorance of the real world.

Calm down Sir Tony, clam down.

solskjaer20

I take it the archives will remain subscription only? Would love to get them for free.

Overdraft

Myth wrote: »

Urgh! So frustrating. Letters are more hidden now and I hate how you can't click 'yesterday's paper' or the equivalent to see that section from the previous day now.

I hope it gets sorted.

I agree, so far I hate it....but maybe I'm being a little hasty, it's only been a few hours. But it was nice and simple before, now it seems like you have go burrowing in to sub-menus to find what you're looking for. Yuck.

jmcc

copacetic wrote: »

google and apple built the web? are you ****ting me? fecjkin know nothing mupppet.

You obviously missed the etc (et cetera) there, kid. The idea of garge startups is part of the history of computing and the web. Apple was a garage startup. And it basically drove forward the idea of personal computing - something that would later be copied by IBM. Indeed Apple had a lot of the visual desktop ideas before Microsoft. Though Xerox had them before Apple.

Google was also a garage startup. It is now the search engine of choice for the majority of people using the web. The whole idea of being a garage startup is so deeply part of the Silicon Valley technology culture that Google even had to arrange to have a garage.

Many of these companies (that's the et cetera to you) built the software, systems and technology that is so critical to the web. Is that a simple enough explanation for you?

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Overdraft wrote: »

Calm down Sir Tony, clam down.

Ironically it was the Indo and TCM that gained most when the IT screwed up by going PPV. In 2002, the IT was one of the top Irish websites. When it went to the subscription model, it lost its position. Over the years, RTE, Breakingnews.ie, the Examiner, the Independent have all stepped in and taken the traffic that otherwise would have gone to the IT. With web advertising becoming more lucrative, the IT obviously saw that it was missing out on a major revenue stream. However the period that the IT switched to the subscription model was just after the Dot.Bomb and the collapse of a lot of badly run and highly speculative companies.

The state of the web has changed considerably from 2002. More content is available and blogging has also impacted the viability of Op-Ed type columnists. Due to the connectivity improving in Ireland, the web is far more collaborative than it was in 2002. The IT journalists went from being discussed widely on the web to being virtual non-entities. And the IT loves its columnists. But then as blogs have shown, and no doubt upsetting John Waters, anyone can have an opinion and express it.

Regaining market share will be very difficult for the IT because, unlike the newspaper business, the market is not a small set of clearly identifiable targets. The IT will win back some of the lost market share but it will take time.

Regards...jmcc

ronbyrne2005

Just had a quick look. Still trying to charge for a exact digital version of an individual days paper. Looks lot more clunky and complicated than NYtimes website or even Indo. If you want a digital copy of todays paper that you can read on your laptop or print off you have to pay 1.80euro for one paper/file! Madness. They only had something like 8,000 subscribers if i recall so they would'nt have lost much revenue by freeing all content bar maybe old archive stuff(10+years) and crossword sections would be the right way to go. Like their inflated purchase of myhome.ie the IT show they are out of touch with modern realities of media and finance and economics. I use bbc.co.uk for international news,rte.ie for domestic news and dozens of other great sites for news and other content which are all free and easy to use.
There was no need for the option to purchase an entire digital facsimile of the paper everyday. If someone wants the exact paper they would go to shop and get it.

mike65

Having just looked through it, its as dry as dust. I know they want to look all proper and serious but it smacks of being dull for he sake of it (keeps the prolls away)

Mike.

Overdraft

jmcc wrote: »

The IT journalists went from being discussed widely on the web to being virtual non-entities. And the IT loves its columnists.

Myers (when he was still there) and Waters weren't discussed widely on the web? We must be using a different web.

monument

Myth wrote: »

Urgh! So frustrating. .... and I hate how you can't click 'yesterday's paper' or the equivalent to see that section from the previous day now.

Click on the "Today's paper" section - http://www.irishtimes.com/todayspaper/

It now shows headline text links to all articles from all section on that day on the one page. That's an improvement.

Just use the calendar to flick back to the day you want.

lostexpectation

http://www.irishtimes.com/focus/thelisbontreaty/

mike65

Sums it up!

Mike.

faceman

hopefully they will beef it up over the next while. How I loathed having to read the Indo online upto now!

deisebabe

okok i liked it a lot the first day, and still like most of it, but why does most of the pages break in firefox 3? and where do i get the complete pricewatch blog? Just spent ten minutes clicking through to try to find the complete blog but i cant seem to....seriously frustrated. theres probably a link i'm not seeing in FF!

Patrickof

Is anyone else finding the new Irish Times website practically unusable between 12 and 3pm?

copacetic

seems fine for me, maybe a bandwidth problem at your location?

monument

I've also found once or twice that irishtimes.com was not working or working slowly while other sites were working fine.

The times it has happened to me - I think - were around 9am and again sometime in the afternoon.

jdivision

It's annoying me now I have to say. too much text, hard to find anything you're looking for.

monument

The site is a great improvement.

However, I see the following as problems that have not been fixed...

• they seems to be having some kind of server problems

• some pages still have very small text, for example here

• headline link text on the today's paper page is also small

• and there is other use of small text on pages and menus across the site (I've good eye sight, but want to keep it! And what about those who don't???)

• (even the text on article pages are smaller than guardian.co.uk's article pages - the Times' max text is the Guardian's normal text)

• outside the main pages there seems to be a distinct lack of image (there looks to be less images online than in print with leads me to question: are they having tech or fees/legal issues here???)

• even where images are used on article pages they are small (compared to independent.ie and even more so compared to nytimes.com

• the link to the today's paper page should be accessible across the site, not just in the news section

• (as far as I can see) you can only access the last eight 'latest' stories on the site, this is too few for 24 hour news as it only shows about two hours or so of links (you can see more using RSS - but there are some problems with this. For example, for me clicking on an rss link asks me to add it to Google reader or homepage)

• 'Martyn Turner's Cartoon' enlarges when you click on the image, but when you click on the enlarge text the same size image pops up

• the cartoon also (as far as I can see) does not have it's own page so you can't link to it or browse the archived

• same goes for the letters section - you have to do a search to find a linkable page to each letter or batch

• there's a large amount of white space around half way down on the home page and on other section pages

• some pages are half old design half new

RayM

It's pretty much unusably slow at the moment. It's just taken me over five minutes to load the front page, and the digital archive doesn't appear to be working at all (not that it ever actually worked properly since installing Firefox 3 anyway). I also find, when I try to look at older articles, I get stuck in an eternal 'Login' loop. I somehow don't think I'll be renewing the premium content subscription again.

copacetic

RayM wrote: »

It's pretty much unusably slow at the moment. It's just taken me over five minutes to load the front page, and the digital archive doesn't appear to be working at all (not that it ever actually worked properly since installing Firefox 3 anyway). I also find, when I try to look at older articles, I get stuck in an eternal 'Login' loop. I somehow don't think I'll be renewing the premium content subscription again.

just took about 10secs for me, and I'm on a slow connection. Are other sites working ok for you?

T-max

I find the site is randomly offline when I try to access at different times. They cannot be pulling it down to update, so I would definately say they have hosting issues because I am not just accessing at peak periods.

RayM

copacetic wrote: »

just took about 10secs for me, and I'm on a slow connection. Are other sites working ok for you?

Ten minutes later, it was working ok for me too. It just seems to be very 'up & down' lately. Hopefully, they'll sort it out soon.

mike65

I find it creates "load" when using Opera 9.5, can hear a lot of disk writing.

Mike.

Overdraft

jdivision wrote: »

It's annoying me now I have to say. too much text

Um, it's a newspaper....do you prefer pictures?

Vunderground

Overdraft wrote: »

Um, it's a newspaper....do you prefer pictures?

Well, it is an online newspaper so it can even have video!!!
Check the Guardian!
Dullness doesn't equal gravitas much as the Irish Times might like to think it does

Sandwich

Anyone know how their sales of paper copies are going since they 'went electric'.

I havent paid for a copy since they did and used to but it 2-4 times per week up to then.