The Gist: Glossing over speech, Shrinking ad-bags, Terrible things

Glossing over repeal
The Project Arts centre saw their political speech stifled by an instruction by Dublin City Council to paint over Maser’s “Repeal the 8th” mural, on planning permission grounds.

No, I don’t know either. An empty sort of victory for those who would literally want to gloss over this campaign.

Shrinking ad-bags
Yahoo sold itself to some US phone company. The Guardian lost £170million in the last year. RTE dropped a mere €2.8million in comparison. UTVIreland lost itself, being sold to the people who pipe the internet intermittently into your house. The seven radio stations UTV used to own were also sold, to Rupert Murdoch, after the owner said it was suffering “as the recovery in Irish radio fails to take hold”.

The problem, locally and everywhere else, is that ads are moving onto the internet (basically 75% to Google and 25% to Facebook so far) and not coming back. And these are all ad reliant businesses (RTE by govt policy).

It looks like only the sturdy email newsletter can be relied upon to survive the coming ad drought.

Terrible things
Now, here’s the thing- terrible things are happening all over the world, all the time and they always have been. But (see above) media really want your attention. So, if you’re reading about the terrible things now, that does not mean there is more of them. It just means somebody’s gone to the trouble of playing the part of the sucky-faced old church lady and hurried to tell you the bad news they’ve just heard.

If you don’t want to know about something that doesn’t directly effect you, it is OK for you not to seek that info out.

(A Maser mural near the Project that nobody seems in a hurry to paint over on planning grounds)