Chris Lilley is neither Jesus nor the anti-Christ

Chris Lilley polarizes opinion, but as an artist he has more in common with David Williamson than Austen Tayshus or the team at Working Dog.

In today's Sunday Age Bruce Guthrie is indignant about Chris Lilley's tastelessness and questions whether the the ABC has breached its charter by airing Angry Boys. Although he does still think Mr Lilley is "supremely talented".

If he was a letter writer he'd be "Outraged of Moonee Ponds" and we'd all just roll our eyes. But Mr Guthrie's a paid columnist and you've got to wonder about manufactured froth and bubble such as this.

Still, he knows there's something going on here. He can sense that what Lilley is doing is interesting, but he doesn't quite know what that is. So he has a bet each way, which is hardly guaranteed to get the passions flowing.

There's been a lot written about Lilley's new show, much of it glowing. But a good deal of it perplexed about the nature of his comedy.

One of the most intelligent critiques of Angry Boys comes from Waleed Aly: 

"Typically from Lilley, there's plenty of discomfort here. His bigoted characters are extreme but presented with an unnerving realism and an editorial silence that raises tricky questions."

Waleed hits the nail on the head with the reference to realism. Lilley's social commentary is sharply observed, and  the work is all the more powerful for it.

Lilley addresses this directly in a recent interview with FHM:

FHM: Is Australia becoming more humourless and uptight? 
CL: I don’t know… I’m not sure if I want to make a statement about that. You might be right.
FHM: I’m sure I’m right. It’s why you’re so successful, because your shows remind people of the way we used to be. We used to be unafraid.
CL: I see what you mean. But I also think there’s this really patriotic thing going on in Australia at the moment. That’s what I was trying to tap into with Daniel and his Aussie flag obsession, and the Southern Cross business. Younger people really identify with that now: you’re white, you’re Aussie and you’ve got to have your Southern Cross tattoo. When I was younger that didn’t exist. It was almost embarrassing – you didn’t want to be associated with that old school “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” thing. It was cringeworthy – but for some reason now it’s back.

One of the mistakes reviewers and commentators seem to be making about Lilley's work is that they insist on reading him through the prism of "comedy". As a writer or actor he's regularly described as a comic genius, but he then confounds these assumptions by not being drop dead funny all the time.

And that reaction is not about his comedy being more or less sophisticated, or the audience being more or less receptive.

As a playwright David Williamson has similarly confounded critics throughout his career. His comedies and dramas are always character driven, but the characters are often types or stereotypes. Lilley is dealing in the same kind of material, albeit in a different milieu.

The one thing on which all commentators concur is that Lilley is a big talent. As David Williamson might agree, it's a talent that deserves a better class of criticism from our cultural elites.

The app is not the savior of news

The iPad is now one Christmas old and with the benefit of more devices in more hands publishers are readjusting their projections and re-evaluating the success metrics.

The weight of expectation of a whole industry is a lot for one small device to bear. So how is it holding up?

The iPad is doing just fine, thank you very much. But it doesn't look like it is going to singlehandedly save the media publishing industry any time soon.

To get a feel for how apps are being received by consumers, I did a small, informal survey of recent iPad converts, including a few longer term users. Of the ten people I spoke to, all are high consumers of news in other formats, and range in age from their twenties to seventies.

The verdict, unsurprisingly, is that everyone loves their iPad. Some use it more than others, but each said they were spending more time online as a result of it.

But they remain underwhelmed by the available news apps and the device hasn't made any real difference to their media consumption habits yet, nor has it convinced them to pay for news where they had previously not been doing so.

There appear to be two elements at work here. One is that the iPad provides an adequate web browsing experience. It's not perfect, and there are plenty of sites that, for example use Flash extensively, that don't work properly on the iPad's Safari browser. But by and large it is a satisfactory news browsing experience.

The other element is that news apps just aren't up to scratch. Most of the survey sample had tried one or other of the available paid news apps but had dropped the subscription after an initial period of trialling it, making do with the available free versions.

The complaints were fairly consistent. All felt that while they were willing to pay for news, they resented having to pay for something they felt was sub-standard The complaints ranged from "It doesn't have everything that's in the paper" to "It's too slow, the news is out of date" to "It looks too much like a paper", there was some criticism of the technology as slow or buggy.

Breadth and timeliness of news delivery was the most important element. The web has taught consumers to expect instant breaking news, and the expectation is that the app will deliver the same, as well as being a luxurious reading experience. The app is seen as potentially combining the best attributes of print and online.

Early iPad news app usage data pointed to early morning and late evening activity. I expect we will see that change as the tablet finds its way into the routine of people's lives. The expectation follows that we should see increased audience numbers and more frequent session times.

But that puts a spotlight back on the real motivation of publishers in producing iPad apps. Are publishers still defending print circulations, or are we honestly trying to build new audiences with our iPad apps? My small survey group felt the publishers really want them to go back to buying the newspaper. Why else, they argue, would an app look and feel so much like a print product, or even in one case look exactly like a replica of a newspaper?

And why would it be so slow with the news? Queensland's flood and cyclone disasters were a case in point. Major rolling news stories were not available on some news apps as fast as they were on news web sites. Paying customers were right to feel ripped off.

Much was written in 2010 about publishers' embracing the tablet as a way of reviving the habit of paying for news. At the same time the consensus was that the new offering needed to be compelling enough to encourage the habit. With a little bit of time and plenty of apps in the app store, it is painfully obvious that few, if any of the news apps currently available are compelling enough to attract and keep paying readers.

The message from the market is - Yes, we'll pay for it, but it had better be good.

First published in the PANPA Bulletin February 2011.

Resuming transmission ... and changing direction

I finished up at APN yesterday after three and a half years. It has been a great ride, and very productive. I feel I am leaving a business quite different from the one I joined.

Digitally it is well positioned, with traffic growing and ending the year with the strongest revenue numbers ever. Really terrific YoY growth. The immediate challenge for the business now is meeting client demand and ensuring audience growth continues. But that's not a unique situation. It's an indicator of success.

During the past three and a half years we have established a whole new network of regional news sites that is now a genuine competitor as a network buy to FD and NDM. Obviously, the APN Digital coverage is specific in geography. But it is 10% of the national market that no one else reaches, so it is very valuable.

And this year we did the agency deal with Fairfax to sell classifieds in Qld and Northern NSW, which kicked off in August. I think that is a classic win win.

We also set up some pretty ambitious new products - such as finda - that are set to continue the growth story and extend into new audiences.

So I feel satisfied I am leaving the digital part of the business well positioned and primed for further growth.

And I am pleased to say that we brought some very good digital people into the business. The kind of talent and expertise that will enable APN to build a new business culture, and continue the growth trajectory that digital has been on.

As for me, I'll watch with interest. But right now I'm looking forward to having a break and spending some time with my family.

Happy Christmas, and here's to 2011 ...

Customisation and news sites

In early March Fairfax Media relaunched www.stuff.co.nz incorporating a degree of user enabled customisation previously not seen in New Zealand news sites. Below is a few thoughts about personalised news services from Darren Burden and David Higgins.

Darren is Director of News and Sport at Fairfax Digital in Australia (he was not involved in the Stuff relaunch). David Higgins is editor of News.com.au which was the first major Australian news site to incorporate broad based customisation.

Q: Any general comments about the style of personalisation we've seen on news.com.au and now stuff.co.nz?

DARREN: Personalisation has been the flavour of the month for as long as I can remember. The thing is that people like the idea of personalisation, but very few could be bothered to actually use the features.

DAVID: Technically – I think I have this right – News.com.au and Stuff.co.nz are examples of customisation, where visitors can change a website to fit their own needs, eg. putting sport up top and entertainment down the bottom. Personalisation is where a site watches a visitor’s behaviour and changes itself to fit that individual’s needs. With care, I think both are good ways of building loyalty, but customisation/personalisation is only one element of a digital strategy.

DARREN: For a news site there are other limitations such as balancing the customisation above the fold, or being able to add components of interest such as email or IM clients. This type of functionality also impedes the “serendipity effect” of being spontaneously directed around a website using devices such as the Top 5 stores, or most viewed videos. I do like the idea however of localisation – this makes a lot of sense. For example the work that Stuff.co.nz has done with weather. We need to get cracking on that concept for all Fairfax sites.

DAVID: For me there are five key reasons why digital journalism attracts people over print. Indulge the alliteration, but I’ll call them the 5Cs: cost (it’s free), convenience (it’s on your work computer or phone), currency (it’s up to date), connection (it’s not just a story it’s a discussion), and customisation (I can make the news suit me).

Q: So, David, has your experience shown that users treat News.com.au differently as a result of the format changes?

DAVID: Just over a third of visitors have in some way used our customisation features to change News.com.au to suit their tastes. Of those, about 40 per cent have moved content modules around on the page. The most popular customisation has been to move sport up to the top of the page. The second most popular has been to move the tech section – which appears at the bottom of the page by default – up to the top. We have seen engagement and session times increase at a higher-than-industry-average rates since introducing the technology.

Would we go to the next level and introduce an iGoogle or NetVibes approach allowing the construction of a totally customised experience? I doubt it because – being a big fan of NetVibes – I know Web customisation is more useful when pulling in feeds from all over the Web, not just from a single news site. Darren and I both agree that news sites are more likely to focus on further enabling users to export news content into third party customised environments.

Q: Darren, I know you have some thoughts on the degrees of personalisation that could work in different circumstances, could you give us either some examples or a rundown of what you see as ideal levels of personalisation for news sites?

DARREN: There are some personalisation techniques that could work really well – initiated from a product point of view. As I mentioned before, people don’t necessarily want to do these actions themselves, but if the product automatically does it for them it makes for a much better experience. Take for example Amazon, who combine behavioural knowledge from an individual – that is what they have bought, with intersections of the crowd to produce suggestions and recommendations. There are other things we can do such as not show you the same video/gallery/story on the home page if you have already clicked on it. The research that we do is consistent - people are time poor, they scan stories, they want breaking news. We should be showing you the stories you are interested in based on your past behaviour – a more up to date and personal experience if you like. We’ll need to change some mindsets and work practices to achieve this – for example the editorial team who currently choose the top eight stories may have to pick the top 25 to ensure we have the selection we need. Jonathan Rosenberg, Snr VP of Product Management at Google talks in much more depth about behavioural personalisation on his blog.

The second level of personalization is really more for readers who want to take our brands/content and build their own views in Facebook, NetVibes, blogs etc. This would entail creating better hooks into our content, but there are commercial challenges around this kind of personalisation which we would need to consider carefully. Nic Newman, Future Media Controller at the BBC recently indicated that they are also going to do more of this kind personalisation/syndication - but BBC don't have the same commercial challenges as public companies.

Q:In that context it’s interesting that The Guardian has just launched Open Platform. Given that we're still at the early, or even experimental stage, of this sort of formatting for news, how far do you think it can be pushed?

DARREN: I think a lot of it starts from some of the ideas already discussed. It can be pushed as far as the limitations allow it. Some of the limitations are commercial, budgetary or the capability of your technical teams. We are pretty interested in making sure we build functionality or features that really add value to the product, rather than just being a good idea.

Q: What about the editing process? Do you think we will see news stories being edited differently as a result of user information generated by personalisation?

DAVID: We certainly edit our home pages and features sections based on behaviour. News-editing is a lot more scientific these days and while there is still an element of “gut-feel”, most editors are more conscious of what stories and angles their audience are interested in. Editors now have incredible real-time data about their audiences and would be foolish not to be making the most of this.

DARREN: Creating and subbing the content would not change – the story will still be the story. The changes are more likely to manifest in layout and content management. For example rather than choosing one lead image, we may select up to 10 that could change depending on behaviour as discussed previously. The types of systems that support this type of content need to be smart and robust – they need to learn as they go along, and above all be easy, fast and flexible for the editorial teams.

DAVID: Current content management systems are not smart enough to efficiently edit stories for individuals – and clearly this will never be a manual task -- but I don’t see why this could not be possible in the future with smarter technology. The positive thing about the disappearance of "competitive barriers to entry" in our industry is the increased focus on innovation, which we all recognise as crucial to our prosperity.

Q: From a commercial perspective, what's the immediate upside? Does it increase the value of specific inventory? Do you think we'll see an upswing in targeted advertising?

DARREN: Clearly any product investment should have a commercial impact. In some of the scenarios above we would see an increase in page impressions as people find more content they are interested in. We would also see a corresponding increase in time on site which is a good indication of engagement – one of the key metrics for smart advertisers. After all it makes sense that the longer someone sticks around, the more chances they have of seeing ads. The engagement metric is also an indicator of quality. People don’t tend to stick around when the content is crap.

The other commercial aspect is really in behavioural advertising – one of the fastest growing segments of the online pie. We expect it to be a premium space as you need to have quite good data to provide this kind of service. It could be as simple as showing specific car ads to people who have been to Drive, or it could be show my ad to readers who are between 18-24, who've visited Drive in the last 7 days and who live at home. There will be an upswing, but creating the infrastructure to deal with this will be a challenge for publishers.

DAVID: Most of the current work News Digital Media is doing in this area is on the commercial side. NDM recently introduced an Audience Targeting product that allows clients to target their ads to people based on their browsing behaviour. For example we can now serve car ads to people who are interested in cars -- even when they are not in a motoring section. This not only makes advertising more efficient for clients, it also makes it more useful to visitors. Visitors remain anonymous of course.

Another US newspaper closes

Denver, Colorado: The Rocky Mountain News ceased production Friday February 27.

Online news in 1981

All eight newspaper sites, publishing via dial up, were only weeks old at the time. It took over two hours to receive the full text of the paper over the phone line ... at $5 per hour!

"This is an experiment," says David Cole of the San Francisco Examiner. "We're trying to figure out what it's going to mean to us as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user." (No office users back then.)

"And we're not in it to make money."

*!*

"We're probably not going to lose a lot, but we aren't going to make much either."

An elderly 'home user' (1:35) - who must be 70 if he's a day - really gets it, though.

Says Mr Halloran, "I think it's the future of the type of interrogation the individual will give to the newspaper."

Working the night desk

Margaret Simons has been all over the Michael Backman incident at The Age this week. Her column in Crikey today discussing how the paper could publish a piece like that in error reminded me of the scene in The Thick Of It (Spinners & Losers episode) where the night desk at the Daily Mail is trying to follow Labour hacks' twists and turns in positioning a replacement for the recently departed PM.

Night Editor: You know our coverage tonight has either been wrong or guesswork. Which was wrong. So all we have now is a story shaped hole.
Angela: Seriously, your blood sugar's low and it makes you very irritable.
Night Editor: No. What makes me very irritable, Angela, is having no f*&*ing story and having to fill an entire newspaper with just f*&*ing prepositions.

(Yes, I know the examples are different, and the TV version of the night desk bears no resemblance to a real newsroom ...)

We're hiring

APN Online is looking for:

Two web developers, specifically with Python and Django experience.
An advertising operations manager
A product manager.
A producer.
A web designer.
And a graphic designer.

What's black & white and completely over?

Jon Stewart explains why it's all the internet's fault.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Final Edition Edition

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Reading Fairfax's tea leaves

Reading between the lines of the latest reports, including comments from industry analysts, it seems there may be a fair shake up inside Fairfax Digital once McCarthy gets his feet under the desk. There's no doubt digital is the future of the business, but there's plenty of debate about the right strategic path to success in this format, and the right structure to pursue within the company.

Here are a few choice quotes.

Malcolm Maiden speculating on Brian McCarthy's brief as new CEO:

"[McCarthy's] elevation following Kirk's departure would resolve a talent overlap at the top, and he would have a brief to accelerate the integration of Fairfax and its new businesses, including its online division, Rural Press and the former Southern Cross radio network."

Jane Schultz and Nick Tabakoff quoting Macquarie Equities media analyst Alex Pollak:

"With respect to Fairfax's ongoing migration to digital, McCarthy was not in the forefront of the digital strategy while at Rural Press (possibly correctly) so it will be interesting to see whether and how he manages this critical process at Fairfax."

Andrew Main in the Weekend Australian (not online) quoting Greg Fraser media analyst at Shaw Stockbroking:

"After pointing out that Fairfax's 'undoubted local content goldmine' could in the right hands become a multimedia powerhouse, as long as Brian McCarthy can upskill himself in that area as soon as possible, Fraser's note ends on a school yard analogy. 'If FXJ was in a game of media bullrush, it would be the big fat kid that knocks a few of the skinny kids out of the way but eventually gets bowled over by its more nimble buddies before reaching the safety line. Lose some weight, FXJ.'"

So, will it be integration and cost cutting at Fairfax Digital?