Tag Archive for 'future of journalism'

The Guardian does its paywall math

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Economics and Media
. 9 Comments

On the recent thread about the ABC’s intention to offer a 24 hour news channel, commenter SCPritch linked, with appropriate approbation, to the text of a lecture by the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger.

Rusbridger’s topic was “Does Journalism Exist?”. It’s a long piece by online standards, but one of the very best I’ve read on all the vexed and often repetitive debates on the future of journalism. Gary Sauer-Thompson summarises the talk’s themes by arguing that it maps out a path towards “a mutualised news organisation”.

Rusbridger is concerned to interlink the debates about media business models with those about the role of journalists and their public responsibilities in a more sophisticated way than most writers on this set of related topics. But he does make it crystal clear that the model he believes is in the process of emerging can only do so on the basis of a business model which incorporates open access. For The Guardian, then, the economics of Rupert Murdoch and the New York Times’s paywalls just doesn’t stack up:

My commercial colleagues at the Guardian – the ones who do think about business models – want to grow a large audience for our content and for advertisers, and can’t presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content. Last year we earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business, but not trivial. My commercial colleagues believe we would earn a fraction of that from any known pay wall model.

They’ve done lots of modelling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded. They’re looked at the argument that free digital content cannibalises print – and they look at the ABC charts showing that our market share of paid-for print sales is growing, not shrinking, despite pushing aggressively ahead on digital. They don’t rule anything out. But they don’t think it’s right for us now.

There’s more on this at the Reuters blog.

ABC News 24/7

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 4 weeks ago
in Media
. 111 Comments

There’s been some discussion on the ABC’s decision to introduce a 24 hour news channel on a related thread, and it deserves consideration in its own right.

Mark Scott’s announcement was accompanied by the now ritualised shots across the bow from News Limited columnists. As Margaret Simons observes:

…it is another example of how one of the chief battles of the media decade will be between public broadcasters and commercial viewer-pays services.

Indeed. But it also raises the question of whether the ABC’s limited resources should be targeted towards jumping into the same space already occupied by Sky News. Mark Scott’s strategy for the ABC, when you substract some of the bells and whistles about ‘user generated content’, is increasingly looking like turning the ABC into a major competitor in a range of news and public affairs spaces.

The temptation in these debates is to default to a simplistic response, something along the lines of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. But profound shifts in the public broadcasting landscape require a more nuanced evaluation. As Simons herself notes, the question of the ABC Charter will be raised, not least by commercial vested interests.

However, as Jason Wilson argues at New Matilda:

…as news consumers and taxpayers, we’re entitled to pause for a moment and wonder whether it actually makes sense for us.

Go read the rest of Wilson’s piece.

His conclusion: Continue reading ‘ABC News 24/7′

The ABC of Drumming up some online opinion analysis

Published
by
Mark
2 months ago
in Media and The Web
. 27 Comments

When the ABC’s Drum was launched, Margaret Simons cited a piece by Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes on internal discussions of ABC journos writing opinion pieces, which I referred to in this post:

Simons then looks at the cult(ure) of personality attached to high profile journos, and questions whether non-witty, non-pretty, non-Tweeting writers are perhaps missing out in a new age of “audience engagement”. She also worries about objectivity, which is another distinction which is hard to maintain.

I was thinking about this again yesterday, prompted partly by the renewed criticism of the right wing balancing act on the ABC, and partly by a snippet from a Crikey reader (more of that later). Annabel Crabb also popped up to discuss her practice as a ‘political sketch writer’ [deconstructed here by Andrew Elder]. Continue reading ‘The ABC of Drumming up some online opinion analysis’

To the beat of a different drum

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 2 weeks ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Media and The Web
. 17 Comments

With a fair bit of ado, the ABC launched its new opinion website, The Drum, on Monday.

It’s edited by Jonathan Green, formerly of Crikey, to whom congratulations are due, as they are to Sophie Black who’s had a very well deserved promotion to the top gig at that thing on the internet.

Margaret Simons, writing at her Content Makers blog, discusses two inter-related aspects of this ABC initiative. She first riffs on a piece by Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes, which questions the distinction between analysis and opinion, which apparently grounds the ABC’s dictates to its own journos (“analysis good, opinion bad”). Simons then looks at the cult(ure) of personality attached to high profile journos, and questions whether non-witty, non-pretty, non-Tweeting writers are perhaps missing out in a new age of “audience engagement”. She also worries about objectivity, which is another distinction which is hard to maintain.

All these are worthy points for discussion, though I’d also be interested in what people think of the quality of the writing and analysis to date. I’ve already noted some Crikey writers, such as Greg Barns, who may have come across with Green, featured (though Barns does have a tendency to pop up in a lot of places). Whether the ABC should cast its remit rather wider is another issue – which, of course, circles back to the glam/Twitter/name issue…

My own view is that it’s harder than some might assume to find good writers with different takes. It might well be that identifying, developing and mentoring such new voices would be a most valuable contribution. But that’s almost a full time publishing/editorial gig in itself, and it may be incompatible with the ABC’s desire to have an immediate impact. We shall see.

It might also be something we could make a small contribution to here…

Simons and Condon on the future of journalism; Brisbane event

Published
by
Mark
5 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Brisbane, Media and Notices
. 3 Comments

We’ve been discussing issues about the future of the media and of journalism here at LP over a sustained period of time, and many will be aware of Margaret Simons’ work and commentary on these issues. She, along with Queensland writer and journalist Matthew Condon, will be speaking in Brisbane on Thursday night. Blurb provided by Kate Eltham from the Queensland Writers’ Centre:

QWC’s final Wordpool for 2009 is The Content Makers: the future of journalism presented by award-winning writer and Crikey blogger Margaret Simons, and moderated by author and journalist Matthew Condon.

This is a FREE event, co-presented with the State Library of Queensland, on Thursday 22 October at 6:30pm.

Continue reading ‘Simons and Condon on the future of journalism; Brisbane event’

Of media empires and public broadcasters

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 1 week ago
in Consumerism, Markets, Media, Politics and The Web
. 31 Comments

ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has created quite the stir with his A. N. Smith Memorial Lecture in Melbourne last night. Scott took a pot shot at Rupert Murdoch, characterising him as a “frantic emperor”. Decline and fall of old media empires, and all that.

As Jason Wilson observed yesterday in New Matilda, Murdoch’s previous business plays were built on positioning himself for oligopolistic market shares in emerging media. This strategy doesn’t work in the world of online content, so Murdoch is trying to reshape that world to suit his modus operandi. Cutting public broadcasters out of the equation would be an essential component of such a strategy, but despite the fact that he’s leveraged political influence in the past for his own private interests, Murdoch finds himself isolated. Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd are hardly likely to do him any favours, and the very fragmentation of audiences and platforms he’s seeking to counter has reduced any potential for his implicit political threats to have teeth.

Public broadcasters, in other words, have a unique role to play in preserving the openess and competitiveness of new media ecologies.

There’s been lots of commentary on Scott’s speech. Margaret Simons writes at Content Makers, Gary Sauer-Thompson chimes in at Public Opinion, while Ethical Martini and Trevor Cook both put somewhat different and interesting perspectives to work in analysing Scott’s lecture.

Update: Guy Rundle.

Update: Sophie Cunningham.

Update: More from Margaret Simons in today’s Crikey.

Update: Ben Eltham in New Matilda:

As I watched Scott’s speech and the ensuing questions, I began to get a sense of how clueless many media executives really are. I’m fairly certain Scott knows more about this stuff than, for example, Roger Corbett does. In fact, Scott pointed this out later in his speech, arguing that old thinking and internal barriers to reform are the biggest problems for media organisations. “We have seen the enemy, and it is us.”

If Scott is among the savviest — and he may well be — then the path ahead for big media organisations in this country will be rocky indeed.

In the land of the blind, the man with a print-out of a Clay Shirky blog is king.

“The Internet has not destroyed journalism”

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Culture, Ethics, International, Media, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 9 Comments

It’s interesting to see some realism emerging in the media about the causes of the woes of newspapers and journalism as a profession. I can well recall speaking at a number of professional fora over a couple of years where suggestions that something other than changes in the mode of publication and technological shifts might be at the root of the crisis of the media and journalism met with quite hostile or dismissive responses.

Via Margaret Simons at Content Makers, a cri de coeur from Le Monde Diplomatique:

The internet has not destroyed journalism. It has been stumbling for some time under the weight of restructurings, marketing-driven content, contempt for working class readership, and under the influence of billionaires and advertisers. It wasn’t the internet that propagated the allies’ untruths during the first Gulf war (1991) or Nato’s during the Kosovo conflict or the Pentagon’s during the Iraq war. Nor can we blame the internet for the media’s inability to publicise the collapse of savings banks in the US in 1989 and the collapse of emerging nations eight years later, or to warn of the housing bubble for which we are all still paying the price. So if the press really needs to be saved, public money would be better spent on those who purvey information reliably and independently rather than those 
who just hawk malicious gossip. Those who want to make money from investments or 
from being pens for hire can find resources elsewhere.

Accusations against the internet often reveal more than legitimate concern about the ways in which knowledge is disseminated: the fear that the reign of a few powerful editorial figures is ending. Dispensing favours in a feudal style, they have created their own domains, arranged sinecures and had the power to make and break ministers and reputations. Unanimous approval greeted their projects and opinion columns. Here and there a few irreverent papers held out. But then one day hordes of the unwashed appeared with their laptops.

If the public remains unmoved, it’s in part because they have realised that the talk of freedom of expression is often just a smokescreen for media owners’ interests.

Continue reading ‘“The Internet has not destroyed journalism”’

Political media FAIL

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Media and Politics
. 23 Comments

Richard Farmer:

No government this morning. For the first time since I have been preparing the breakfast media wrap for Crikey I could not find a story to list this morning that quoted a Federal Government Minister. The whole attention of the news media is now concentrated just where Kevin Rudd and his team want it to be — on the Opposition. The press gallery really does have itself in a feeding frenzy as it stirs the leadership challenge pot. The only observation I can add is that surely Joe Hockey is not so silly as to succumb to entreaties from his colleagues to take over. He has no more chance of unifying what is now a rabble than does Malcolm Turnbull.

… and that’s the same press gallery which will pontificate, at the drop of a hat, about the noble role of the fourth estate in ensuring government accountability.

Let’s combine Farmer’s take with some other recent commentary.

George Megalogenis:

Consider climate change, which Rudd says is the greatest moral challenge of our time. I could count on one hand the number of journalists who are across the detail of the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. (I am not one of them.) This is not for want of trying on the government’s part; it needs the public aroused so it can intimidate the opposition into passing the scheme through the Senate.

But the media can’t hold this policy conversation long enough for the community to have any sense of how their lives would change and how the economy would function. I can’t think of a bigger reform that has generated so little public demand for scrutiny.

With the exception of the claim about “public demand for scrutiny”, which wrongly elides the expression of public opinion with what is refracted or created by the press (and that’s the big problem), Megalogenis is right (and he himself is often a notable and praiseworthy exception to the rule).

Greg Craven, ACU’s Vice-Chancellor, writing in the Fin Review the other day, observed that governments, at some time in the 1980s, decided to use all the resources at their command to destroy oppositions through the media. Whether or not there was some sort of golden age of political journalism in Australia prior to that, I’m too young to say (though I doubt it). But these sorts of diagnoses, while close to the mark, beg the question of the complicity of the media in all this – as do frenzied attacks on Rudd spin.

The foolishness of the federal opposition in destroying itself through the pages of The Australian (and surely Joe Hockey would be just next in line to be torn down by the punditariat, as a moderate) also points to the “inside the beltway” phenomenon – as does some of the weird jargon and the general outlook of Paul Kelly’s The March of Patriots, which entirely identifies his perspective with that of the “political class”. The public are walk on extras, represented only by proxy through that poll News Limited owns. Live by the media, die by the media.

Is it any wonder, as Bernard Keane remarked fairly wryly the other day, that no one much outside the self-same political class listens to this stuff anymore?

The big unanswered question is whether something else will come along to fill the gaping hole in serious discussion of public affairs. For all the best will in the world, various ’spheres’ and ‘verses’ (blogosphere, twitterverse, and so on) just aren’t resourced well enough to do it.

Win a free pass to the Media140 conference

Published
by
Mark
6 months ago
in Blogging, Media, Notices, Sydney and The Web
. 5 Comments

There’s a big confab on in Sydney on the 5th and 6th of November on all things social media and future of journalism – Media140. Rachel Hills is running a competition to win a free pass to the conference. For details, please see her post!

The web, everyday life and the future of media

Published
by
Mark
6 months, 1 week ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Life, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 9 Comments

A lot of the most reliable data on web use and social media comes from the World Internet Project. Most of the findings from the project derive from rigorous quantitative research, and unlike a lot of what purports to be analysis of the web and social media is therefore free of commercial or ideological and boosterish agendas.

WIP’s founder, Professor Jeffrey Cole, is currently in Australia.

Margaret Simons observed in today’s Crikey email that he’d given a briefing to a Fairfax strategy meeting on Monday:

So when Cole speaks, media executives tend to listen, even if they don’t like what they hear. Cole told me yesterday that Fairfax’s Melbourne chief executive, Don Churchill, was “at one with me” on the future of print newspapers, but that some other members of management seemed to think, or at least hope, that the bad times for Fairfax papers would fade with the end of the global financial crisis.

Yesterday afternoon Cole expanded on his views at a public lecture at Swinburne University. He said that print newspapers will cease to exist in the United States within 3-6 years. The rate of decline in Australia is more gradual, but he gives us a maximum of 10 years, with the only possible bright spot being weekend newspapers, because they are more like magazines, some of which will continue to do well.

Simons has posted a longer summary of Cole’s thoughts at her blog, Content Makers. Continue reading ‘The web, everyday life and the future of media’

The National Times

Published
by
Mark
6 months, 1 week ago
in Advertising, Consumerism, Media and The Web
. 13 Comments

Fairfax has revived an old masthead for its new opinion site. In some ways, that’s probably the most interesting aspect of the launch – those who remember the old National Times might well also recall the days when genuinely hard hitting investigative journalism in the public interest was the stock in trade of at least one Australian newspaper.

Commentary and analysis on the new commentary and analysis site has concentrated on the claim made, in this instance by Darrin Goodsir, that this sort of online opinion vehicle somehow represents ‘the best of journalism’. Something similar was said by David Penberthy when News Limited launched The Punch.

Jason Whittaker:

Enough spin, from publications that also boast their commitment to cutting through it. Let’s call these websites what they really are: another cheap web platform for advertising.

Margaret Simons:

Everyone has been asking me what I think of Fairfax’s new National Times website.

The answer is: not much. From Fairfax’s point of view, I can see the sense. Why wouldn’t you slice and dice your content in a different way, given the opportunity and the low costs involved? By doing so you maximise the national audience and create more real estate for advertising. As for the content, so far it is unremarkable – a mixture of stuff aggregated from the Fairfax papers’ staffers, and extremely variable content from other contributors.

Simons also hones in on the practice of not paying contributors who aren’t staffers. I guess that’s the logical extension of hoovering up traffic through encouraging long comments threads by writing provocative content as a ‘blog’, which has been the typical approach of the MSM mastheads to interactivity. Unless this stuff disappears behind a paywall, it looks like it’s the proverbial citizens (and a motley crew of pollies and academics and interest group folks) who are going to be the putative financial saviours of Big Media.

I also wonder if they’ve been skimping on web designers. What is it with these sites and really busy layouts that break most of the rules of design?

Will anyone pay for online news?

Published
by
Mark
6 months, 3 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Consumerism, Media, Politics and The Web
. 46 Comments

There’s an interesting take in Australian Policy Online from my QUT Creative Industries Faculty colleague, Terry Flew, on the whole question of business models for online news, which has had quite the airing of late. My own view is that the reports that competition regulators were concerned about Rupert Murdoch’s attempts to corral a number of American news corporations into an “alliance” might constitute a cartel are telling. It’s redolent of a certain mindset which goes far beyond the nuts and bolts considerations of revenues and costs.

Flew riffs off an argument made by Shaun Carney in The Age:

What Shaun Carney points to – as does Rupert Murdoch – is that the business of getting news is not free. As economist Tyler Cowen puts it, all of the major news providers have found that their revenues are falling below their average costs curves, and they are not prepared to make losses indefinitely. The problems are that no-one knows what the price should be, what is the best approach to charging (subscriptions, pay-per-view, freemiums, or what?), or whether enough consumers will pay to offset the losses arising from those who will inevitably opt out once some form of charging for news is introduced.

At this point, two further complications emerge. One is the possibility that new opportunities may emerge for commercially viable free news services that capture the convenience users who opt out of pay models. This may be a new provider who also captures the imaginations of those who are now vocally critical of what they term the “mainstream media”, and who access sites such as The Huffington Post in the U.S.

The second is that it is unlikely that the public service media providers – ABC, BBC, SBS, NPR etc. – will charge for news, as it is contrary to their Charter obligations of providing universal access. At any rate, I doubt that Shaun Carney is right that consumers will simply accept paying for what they are currently getting for free simply because they recognise the costs that exist for the established news providers.

It’s also worth considering the value readers receive from particular types of news. Rupert Murdoch, according to Wired UK, had his thinking shaped by the propensity of Wall Street Journal subscribers to pay a premium for online news. But there’s a fundamental category error here.

Continue reading ‘Will anyone pay for online news?’

Rudd vs. The Australian

Published
by
Mark
7 months ago
in Media, Politics and Sociology
. 59 Comments

Some time ago, I made some observations on the significance of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s attacks on various News Limited papers, and on The Australian.

The thrust of that commentary was that – the immediate antecedents of the stoush aside – there had been a recognition in Government circles that the damage newspaper campaigns can do is much over-rated, and has significantly diminished with a change in the mediascape. This is often ascribed to the internet, but in fact – as with the misconception of the problems facing print media (which lie more with advertising income than declining sales) – its causes are both more profound and of much longer lineage. It’s more that a tipping point has finally – and belatedly – been reached where perception has caught up with reality.

Over the fold, I’ve excerpted some paragraphs (with permission) from Bernard Keane’s piece on this in today’s Crikey. It’s very much to the point, particularly the comparison with Fox News – rather than the “heart of the nation”, the News Limited flagship actually increasingly operates on a business model where a small minority of hardline partisans get their worldview catered for. Politics – in the sense of the partisan stoushing that dominates political coverage – is the concern of a very small minority of Australian voters. For all the claims about “spin”, Rudd’s message is resonating not because of some particular cleverness in its conceptualisation and execution (though that’s there) but because he’s speaking to a mass electorate using the only mass media available – radio and tv – and speaking to concerns that are real. That needs to be recognised.

Continue reading ‘Rudd vs. The Australian‘

The Author of A Blog v Times Newspapers Limited

Published
by
Mark
9 months ago
in Authoritarianism, Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Crime, Law, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 10 Comments

At Skepticlawyer, Legal Eagle has written a fascinating post on the bizarrely named case cited above, which was heard recently in the British High Court. As she writes:

“The Author of A Blog” cited as the claimant was the pseudonymous author of a blog known as “Night Jack”. He was a police officer whose blog provided an inside view of police procedure, the seamy side of life and the law. In April this year, the Night Jack blog received the Orwell Prize for political blogging. However, after this, Patrick Foster, a journalist from The Times, determined to work out the identity of the blogger using internet research. Foster has justified his actions on the basis that the Night Jack blogger “was…using the blog to disclose detailed information about cases he had investigated, which could be traced back to real-life prosecutions.”

The blogger sought an interim injunction to restrain Times Newspapers Ltd from publishing any information that would identify him. Although an injunction was granted up until the time of judgment, the High Court ultimately refused the claimant’s application. The officer has been revealed to be Richard Horton, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary.

Legal Eagle draws an interesting inference from all this about Foster’s motivations:

I can’t help finding the action of The Times rather petty and malicious. For some reason, some journalists seem to despise blogging and bloggers (eg, an article in The Australian the other day to which I can’t even be bothered linking). There’s a suspicion in my mind that this journalist thought to himself, Let’s bring down a blogger who is writing something that is interesting and exciting.