Lance Wiggs

It appears as though I made it to the front page of the NBR today.

It was in an article written to defend the seemingly arbitrary and certainly poorly implemented decision last week to charge outrageous fees for access to a part of NBR’s online content:

NBR publisher Barry Colman said the service was introduced last week to a barrage of criticism from most of New Zealand’s “amateur hour, self righteous and all knowing bloggers”

Now that phrase could be referring to anybody, and certainly the NBR’s behaviour caused many people to comment. But just to make sure I was including in the amateur self righteous and all knowing group Barry later said:

“The bloggers had a bad week. New subscribers are coming on every day and the gleeful announcement of one of them [that would be me] that our site’s hit rate had slumped was ruined with a quick check of the facts. Our visitor numbers were unaffected.”

It’s easy to argue with such prose – indeed I suggest that the article was written with this very much in mind. Why not wind the bloggers up, provoke a response, generate even more publicity for our expensive products, sell more newspapers and gain online subscribers? <as a commenter points out – we call this trolling>

Well – I have to confess in this instance Barry was right. The tactics worked and sales have risen.

That’s right – after being tipped off about the article I actually went and purchased an NBR this afternoon.

That makes two this year – so keep mentioning me and other online writers in your newspaper Barry and we will keep buying your paper.

You can still forget about the online subscription though.