How the shockwaves spread

The New York Times has a useful graphic that shows how the wave spread across the Indian Ocean.


Computer simulation by the NOAA based on seismic data from the event.

Papers losing the web war

While readers turn to online for breaking news media organisations are struggling to adapt their business models to the new environment:

Newspapers in the San Francisco Bay area have been hammered by Craigslist.org to the tune of $50m to $65m in job ad losses alone, according to a new report.

Consulting firm Classified Intelligence has issued a 57 page report that tracks how the four major Silicon Valley newspapers were caught off guard by Craigslist and have largely lost the classified advertising wars.

"(The Bay area) is the first major metro market where, with great certainty, the newspaper industry no longer controls the classified advertising marketplace," Classified Intelligence said in its report.

Australian newspapers will face their own battle with Craigslist.org which opened for business here in mid-2004.

Susan Sontag, 1933-2004

Susan Sontag, 71, the American intellectual who engaged and enraged equally with her insights into high and low culture, died yesterday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

In their own words

Message boards about the tsunami disaster at theage.com.au and smh.com.au and eyewitness accounts at abc.net.au and bbc.co.uk reflect the grief of many, the relief of some at finding their loved ones, and sheer horror at the magnitude of the destruction.

Covering the destruction

Tim Blair has done a great job of pulling together the latest updates on the killer tsunamis that have devastated the Indian rim. He's been on it since the story broke. IMO, it's an example of blogging at its best.

The nature of this story doesn't lend itself to bloggers as newsbreakers. But alert bloggers, like Blair, can aggregate stories and photos and point readers to more remote web sources.

Wikipedia also has comprehensive coverage.

There's some chilling amateur video here.

Not surprisingly, though, there isn't much in the way of live blog reports from the scene. Blogger Dare Obasanjo criticised Robert Scoble for questioning this lack of live blogging when the disaster was unfolding.

But the New York Times sees it differently:

For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.

The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help.

[...] Howard Rheingold, the author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution," about the use of interactive technologies like text-messaging to build ad hoc coalitions, said that using blogs to muster support for aid was a natural next step. "If you can smartmob a political demonstration, an election or urban performance art, you can smartmob disaster relief," he said.

One veteran of the online medium said he was initially "a little disappointed" in the reports he got from the blogs. Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in California, said that with the widespread use of digital cameras and high-speed digital access, he was expecting to see more raw video and analysis.

He said that upon reflection he realized that it was difficult to get information out of hard-hit areas and that putting digital video online is still the domain of "deep geeks" with significant resources. "This brought home to me just how far we have to go," he said.

For my money the wires and various foreign bureaux led the running. Media organisations have encouraged firsthand reader feedback via email on their websites, but you can expect blogs to kick up a gear when more witnesses get safe and get online access.

The occasional exceptions are photo blogs. The Age used pics from here on the front page today.


Ocean swells along the flooded coast of Kalutara, Sri Lanka in a satellite image taken shortly after the area was hit. Photo: Reuters

The aftermath

Bodies of victims laid out in the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh
Photo: Reuters / smh.com.au

The wave hits


People fleeing the tsunami at Koh Raya, Thailand. Photo: John Russell / theage.com.au

2004 online review

OJR's wrap of online highlights and lowlights by Mark Glaser describes 2004 as the year bloggers made a difference, while hyperlocal citizen journalism made inroads. Includes top 5 lists and predictions for 2005.

Bertrand Pecquerie at editorsweblog.org takes issue with Glaser's "self-congratulatory" tone.

Meanwhile, Steve Outing believes mainstream journalists could learn a few things from bloggers, but bloggers can also learn a few things from journalists.

Paper wars

In The Oz this weekend Robert Gottliebsen gives a tough assesment of the challenges facing Australian metro daily newspapers in the face of new competition from Sensis:

[...] the outcome of the ferocious war over the Sydney residential property market will play a huge role in determining the future of newspapers such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age in Melbourne, the Brisbane Courier Mail, the Adelaide Advertiser, The West Australian and, in time, similar titles in Tasmania.

[...] Is Akhurst right that papers such as The Australian, the SMH and The Age have had their day? In my view there is little doubt that high-margin, large-volume conventional non-display classified advertisements now have a limited lifespan.

The great strength of the traditional newspapers is that they are capturing high-spending consumers better than any other medium, and if they can retain them with attractive editorial they will gain substantial advertising revenue.

At CJR Phillip Meyer offers his own advice on how to weather the storm:

We need to keep genuine journalism alive long enough for the successful media entrepreneurs of the future to find a way to capture and sell the influence that traditional media are abandoning through their cost-cutting strategies. Those who understand the influence model and apply it to the new, more specialized marketplaces could start to look very much like journalism's philosopher-kings of the twentieth century.

Michael Miner at the Chicago Reader has a different approach:

What the newspapers of tomorrow need to tap is the full potential of alternate reality. Facts alone get us nowhere. True insight demands a healthy dose of make-believe.

The single biggest question, though, revolves around the type of journalism that readers are attracted to. How can newspapers be better in all possible ways - producing better reported, better edited and better designed papers?

Gottliebsen hints at the answer:

To continue to prosper, the papers will need to swing hard to other types of classifieds and display advertising, where there is a rapidly growing market, and perhaps rely more on the attraction of their journalism.

Meyer's solution follows a similar, quality-driven path. Is it just wishful thinking?

Ho ho ho ...

So how does the big man do it?

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Free to speak your mind ... or not

The media in poor countries are freer and more influential than ever before, which is why so many journalists are being killed, says The Economist.

That may be so, but old-fashioned despots are still in vogue in North Korea, Turkmenistan and Togo, and still busily repressing the media. The same issue of The Economist investigates these remaining personality cults and asks: Why do they survive, how long will they last, and why do those who build them always have such vile personalities?