Total fail once again!
One of my friends and regular contributors to this blog , phoned yesterday inquiring after my well-being. He had noticed a drop-off in energy in recent blogs and thought that I might be getting tired!
I assured him that I was quite alright. Having completed a 12 hour day, I took the train to London to attend the WTW media awards for which henrytapper.com was under consideration. For another year this blog did not win any award but being there might remind a few more people that there is life beyond the trade press and the FT.
I am supposed to congratulate the FT which picked up the two awards I was going for – the ones about independent thinking and innovation and smart use of technology and such-like. Claer Barrett is a worthy winner and the other journo from FT advisor is , I am sure, very good, But it hard to see how an independent blog such as mine or the various podcasts that I champion here, or indeed the work of Steve Webb with Martin Lewis are going to get recognised – when the FT own the room.
This is not me being churlish, but I do think it tiresome that journalism is in such short supply. It has become so process driven that most of the press rooms I go to, are full of people filing stories having watched speeches on TVs in the press rooms and got comment from a vanishingly small group of paid spokespeople.
With the exception of Charlotte Moore, Jo Cumbo and Stephanie, I see virtually no campaigning journalism in the pension space. Padraig Floyd – who was there last night continues to reach out and explore new ideas but for the most part, the pension press is living on a daily diet of press releases and little more. Journalists rightly complain that there is no money in investigative journalism but there is no career progress without it. I wonder why so many young people hang around press rooms talking to each other when the stories that they could create sit with the people the other side of those TV sets.
The job of this blog is to stay advertising free, to continue to tout for best practice in pensions and to call out the rubbish. It is great to be able to feature great voices like Con Keating’s , Iain Clacher’s , Pension Oldies’s , Byron McKeeby’s and Jnamdoc’s. Thanks to everyone who lets me cut and paste their thoughts – to the tolerance of the FT whose work is particularly potent and to the ever-kind Jon Stapleton and Jon Greenwood, the titans of independent publishing whose good nature I constantly stretch.
The AgeWage and Pension PlayPen linked in group, which is the primary publishing platform for this blog goes from strength and is now close to 17,000 members. We regularly record 50,000 article reads a week from this group and the blog is on target for hitting 500,000 reads this year. This is totally unfunded by any advertising and generates no revenue whatsoever- now that’s what I call independence!
This blog is closing in on 8,000 articles, it is part of the furniture and even if its energy levels dip from time to time, it is not going away. It is fighting its own corner for no-one will fight for it but its publisher. Thanks to WTW for inviting me, for tolerating me and for feeding me some nice tapas. I look forward to providing more details on the awards as and when they are published!
Enough energy?
