I was on a panel at the MEAA backed Future of Journalism conference in Brisbane on Saturday. Bronwen Clune and Cam Reilly have covered a lot of what was discussed. The Twitter feed from the day fills out some gaps.
As usual at these things, there was a lot of circular discussion, some confusion, and much furious agreement.
It seems to me the future of journalism relies heavily on the future of publishing. And it's in connecting those two things that the debate constantly gets lost.
But here's a practical idea - and a serious challenge to Chris Warren and the MEAA:
The current Fairfax layoffs will probably put more than 100 experienced journos on the market in Sydney and Melbourne. Many, if not most of them are not interested in turning themselves into publishing entrepreneurs. They want to keep doing journalism.
Most of them will be offered company redundancy packages. But rather than simply accepting a redundancy offer and hoping for the best, as some have suggested, why not take the opportunity to organise as a start-up publishing operation on a digital platform with a combination of syndication and display ad revenues? As an employee-owned, equity backed arrangement it could be a unique and imaginative attempt to find an alternative solution to the publishing challenge.
But this would really only work with the MEAA's complete involvement in getting the members to consider a proposal. It would also require the MEAA to broker some sort of equity support - they'd need to find the partner. But the contribution needn't be a prohibitive amount. In fact the best PR Fairfax could get out of this situation is to support exactly this sort of initiative themselves.
But if Fairfax weren't willing, others might be. The creative and journalistic talent is there, it just needs a publisher with reasonable pockets and a willingness to take a risk. There are a few around. Eric Beecher is one who has put his money where his mouth is. In fact Crikey Blogs is not a bad model for exactly what I'm suggesting.
Who else?
At the Brisbane conference, discussing tools and techniques for digital journalism are, l-r: Bronwen Clune from Norgmedia, John O'Brien from the Courier Mail and David Higgins from News.com.au. Moderator is Peter Lewis from ABC's Landline.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
A bad week for Fairfax is a good week for PR
Last week started badly for Australia's oldest newspaper company, and then it got worse. By the end of the week staff at the two metro dailies - The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald - were on strike and management was bunkering down to produce the weekend's papers.All in all, the publicity was as bad as it gets for a major media company. The Australian, in particular, enjoyed the show and took delight in pointing out the shortcomings of their competitor, which of course eventually got right up the nose of Fairfax CEO David Kirk.
But traditional rivalry aside, the changes at Fairfax are really only good news for one group: PR people.
As a senior Communications executive confided last week, the Fairfax news made life for his staff better in two ways. With a flood of unemployed journos becoming available, suddenly the labour market would turn in favour of PR companies who had struggled to recruit quality staff in recent times. At the same time his people would be writing more copy for Fairfax as there would be less people in their newsrooms to knock it back or rewrite it.
It's a syndrome Nick Davies would recognise immediately.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Flat Earth News
In 2005 US comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness to describe the things people claim to know "from the gut".It rapidly became part of the lexicon, achieved Word of The Year status, and culminated with the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association dinner where Colbert gave a bitingly satirical speech in front of an unimpressed President Bush.
As Colbert said later, "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty."
This concept of assertion as fact is at the heart of Davies’ book, Flat Earth News. Facts still matter to the extent that they are necessary to fill pages and airtime, but according to Davies in newsrooms all over the UK the veracity of those facts is hardly ever questioned.
Davies is a long time Guardian journalist who is well placed to spill the beans on the inside workings of Fleet Street. And spill the beans he does with a quarter of the book dedicated to inside stories of UK newspapers’ failings, from management bungling and bullying to newsrooms’ use of dodgy or outright illegal tactics in the chase for stories.
Covered in particular detail are the slow death of The Sunday Times Insight team, the Observer’s support of Tony Blair’s march to war in 2002 and 2003, and the Daily Mail’s aggressive prosecution of everyone from asylum seekers to welfare organisations.
In addition to his insider knowledge Davies has applied the research grunt of a group from Cardiff University. The researchers contributed a study of the ten largest UK newspapers quantifying the volume of stories originating from newswires and PR versus original reporting. This underpins much of the first part of the book covering the current working conditions of British journalists as well as the external influences that come to bear on their professional lives.
In Davies’ hands it’s highly engaging stuff, peppered with anecdotes and written as well as you would expect of a seasoned professional. Nevertheless, it is a depressing read.
The title of the book refers to news created largely as a result of the commercial and political pressures on media organisations.
As Davies sees it news quality is in a death spiral. Most journalists are still struggling to do the best job they can, but against ever increasing odds and the results of their failure are visible every day.
The evidence is visible in reporters paying scant attention to context and subtlety in the stories they are covering because of increased time pressures. In other words producing what Davies calls “churnalism”.
The failure is obvious when newsrooms obsessively recycle the same stories other media are running to avoid being seen as behind the news agenda.
And it’s clear to Davies that self-censorship is rife, with newsrooms choosing to run stories based on “safe facts and safe ideas” for fear of the “electric fence” of government or corporate interests.
Government information management is pervasive and the power of commercial PR extensive.
Added to all this is the ever increasing significance of the single biggest driving force for modern media managers – the EBIT line.
It is very gloomy stuff, indeed.
Davies has no great conspiracy to report. What he has identified is instead a consequence of the drive for profits in publishing running up against the need of governments, NGOs and commercial interests to control the flow of information. Which of course means there are lot of small conspiracies.
Australia is not immune to his forensic gaze. He writes, “A 2001 study of major Australian daily newspapers […] found that 47% of news stories were created by press releases and other PR activity; and that these stories overwhelmingly expressed the angle chosen by the PR firm.”
And Australian journalists feature occasionally too, albeit somewhat out of context.
Davies retells a story about the Murdoch owned National Star which received a tip off about information on the earlier disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. After convincing the Star he had evidence the tipster persuaded the paper he needed $20,000 to hand it over. The Star reporter who flew to Cologne cash in hand to make the exchange was Piers Ackerman.
As it turned out the evidence, inside an airport luggage locker, was a pair of old brown shoes supposedly worn by Hoffa when he was murdered. The shoes had never belonged to Hoffa. The Star ran the story anyway.
Flat Earth News is rich with this sort of detail, and for anyone who cares about journalism it is confronting stuff. Davies is passionate about the cause but admits that in “trying to expose the weakness of the media” he is really only “taking a snapshot of a cancer”.
The strength of the book is its passion for journalism and the depth of detail about the practical working lives of newspaper reporters and editors. Where Davies is a little less clear is on the philosophical underpinnings of journalism.
On one hand he argues that truth is the primary obligation of journalism. But on the other hand he is equally adamant that objectivity in reporting is impossible. This raises an inherent conflict that Flat Earth News never resolves. If all reporting is necessarily and honestly subjective, what happens to truth?
The closest Davies comes to answering this is by suggesting that honesty is the critical element of good reporting.
The real problem, as this book points out, is that there is a conspicuous lack of honesty operating at all levels within the biggest newspapers in the UK. And because the media is still notionally operating within the traditional fourth estate role this lack of honesty is having a devastating effect, not just on the sustainability of newspaper journalism but democracy as a whole.
Whilst Davies’ conclusion is pessimistic nevertheless there are glimmers of hope. Anyone who loves newspapers ought to read Flat Earth News and grasp the truthiness of it.
Flat Earth News
By Nick Davies
408pp Chatto & Windus
This review is published in the current Walkley magazine
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Blogging Future of Media 2008
Ross Dawson has a review of FOM2008 and a roundup of subsequent comment from a variety of sources.
This was the third FOM event Ross has staged and it went off very smoothly. The technology has been improving year by year so the cross-continental panel discussions worked better than ever.
I was on The Future of Journalism panel with Jane Schultz from the Australian, Jonathan Este from the Media Alliance and Stephen Quinn from Deakin University. We only linked across to Silicon Valley as an afterthought at the end of the session, but it was this topic that seemed to spark the most passionate responses of the day ... mostly on Twitter.
The Twitter streams focus some angry microbursts largely against Oz Media editor Jane Schultz whom the twitterers identified as representative of a counter-productive old media attitude.
Jonathan Este wrote a delightful piece a day or so later that encapsulates the problem as it was manifest last Tuesday. The problem of "Old Media", as such, is given full bore treatment by Stilgherrian.
What surprised me on the day was the attitude of the new media evangelists. They latched on to some generalised points Jane made and then made their own generalisations in turn to cover off the whole of the media. It's intellectually lazy, but it does fit some of the more wild-eyed enthusiasts' view that the MSM is broken beyond repair.
Once that line was off and running it didn't matter what the rest of us on the panel said.
I must admit, though, it was interesting to watch. Here was a bunch of passionate and intelligent new media consultants and proselytisers who believe deeply in the inevitability of the digital media future, who appear not to have the first clue about the way MSM actually works, and who cling violently to a set of pre-ordained notions about said MSM. So the minute any capital "J" journalist makes a disparaging remark about bloggers or blogging they leap on it and shout "told you so!"
It's a two-way thing, though. Of course ...
But it's still annoying how long this same debate has been going round in circles. Back in January 2005 Jay Rosen declared Blogging v Journalists is over.
In June that year I was writing the Media Blog on theage.com.au and I asked Tim Dunlop from The Road to Surfdom to guest blog and discuss some of these issues.
To my mind Tim personified the best Australian example of non-MSM blogger-as-journalist. I later hired him to write the Blogocracy blog on News.com.au.
It should be said that Tim resists the description "journalist", and although we discussed it at length from his perspective he is a political writer in the public intellectual mode rather than the journalist mode. He nevertheless mixes solid occasional reporting with high quality analysis and comment written in an engaging style. Does that sound like journalism?
It's fair enough that he should choose not to be described as a journalist, but my response to Tim back then was that the best journalists are also public intellectuals of one sort or another. The two things are in no way mutually exclusive. It may come as a surprise to some of Tuesday's critics that even in Australian journalism there is a strong tradition of public intellectualism.
I think this sort of example really shows how pointless the argument is.
Maybe one day we can all move past the schoolyard syndrome and just get on with the job of making, distributing and selling great material ... in whatever format.
Update:
* Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen have continued the discussion with particular reference to curmudgeons. Jeff's initial example of curmudgeonly attitude happened at a Blogging conference and came from an MSM news editor. By contrast, last Tuesday's panel in question was on the future of journalism, and while there was indeed some provocation most of the curmudgeons were non-MSM types. So, while I agree with Jay that there are entrenched curmudgeonly attitudes within newsrooms all over the country, I would also say that there are equally entrenched attitudes within the digerati that are simply antagonistic to journalism.
* I ruffled a few feathers by saying that the contributions from the floor last Tuesday displayed a negligable understanding of the way the MSM actually works. And I stand by that. Jarvis and Rosen have both spent a lot of time in and around newsrooms. By contrast being a "tertiary trained" journalist or a freelance contributor is a quite different type of experience. Ben Barren, on the other hand, certainly does understand the challenges facing major media organisations and he also knows a lot about some of the initiatives they are developing in the social media space.
This was the third FOM event Ross has staged and it went off very smoothly. The technology has been improving year by year so the cross-continental panel discussions worked better than ever.
I was on The Future of Journalism panel with Jane Schultz from the Australian, Jonathan Este from the Media Alliance and Stephen Quinn from Deakin University. We only linked across to Silicon Valley as an afterthought at the end of the session, but it was this topic that seemed to spark the most passionate responses of the day ... mostly on Twitter.
The Twitter streams focus some angry microbursts largely against Oz Media editor Jane Schultz whom the twitterers identified as representative of a counter-productive old media attitude.
Jonathan Este wrote a delightful piece a day or so later that encapsulates the problem as it was manifest last Tuesday. The problem of "Old Media", as such, is given full bore treatment by Stilgherrian.
What surprised me on the day was the attitude of the new media evangelists. They latched on to some generalised points Jane made and then made their own generalisations in turn to cover off the whole of the media. It's intellectually lazy, but it does fit some of the more wild-eyed enthusiasts' view that the MSM is broken beyond repair.
Once that line was off and running it didn't matter what the rest of us on the panel said.
I must admit, though, it was interesting to watch. Here was a bunch of passionate and intelligent new media consultants and proselytisers who believe deeply in the inevitability of the digital media future, who appear not to have the first clue about the way MSM actually works, and who cling violently to a set of pre-ordained notions about said MSM. So the minute any capital "J" journalist makes a disparaging remark about bloggers or blogging they leap on it and shout "told you so!"
It's a two-way thing, though. Of course ...
But it's still annoying how long this same debate has been going round in circles. Back in January 2005 Jay Rosen declared Blogging v Journalists is over.
In June that year I was writing the Media Blog on theage.com.au and I asked Tim Dunlop from The Road to Surfdom to guest blog and discuss some of these issues.
To my mind Tim personified the best Australian example of non-MSM blogger-as-journalist. I later hired him to write the Blogocracy blog on News.com.au.
It should be said that Tim resists the description "journalist", and although we discussed it at length from his perspective he is a political writer in the public intellectual mode rather than the journalist mode. He nevertheless mixes solid occasional reporting with high quality analysis and comment written in an engaging style. Does that sound like journalism?
It's fair enough that he should choose not to be described as a journalist, but my response to Tim back then was that the best journalists are also public intellectuals of one sort or another. The two things are in no way mutually exclusive. It may come as a surprise to some of Tuesday's critics that even in Australian journalism there is a strong tradition of public intellectualism.
I think this sort of example really shows how pointless the argument is.
Maybe one day we can all move past the schoolyard syndrome and just get on with the job of making, distributing and selling great material ... in whatever format.
Update:
* Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen have continued the discussion with particular reference to curmudgeons. Jeff's initial example of curmudgeonly attitude happened at a Blogging conference and came from an MSM news editor. By contrast, last Tuesday's panel in question was on the future of journalism, and while there was indeed some provocation most of the curmudgeons were non-MSM types. So, while I agree with Jay that there are entrenched curmudgeonly attitudes within newsrooms all over the country, I would also say that there are equally entrenched attitudes within the digerati that are simply antagonistic to journalism.
* I ruffled a few feathers by saying that the contributions from the floor last Tuesday displayed a negligable understanding of the way the MSM actually works. And I stand by that. Jarvis and Rosen have both spent a lot of time in and around newsrooms. By contrast being a "tertiary trained" journalist or a freelance contributor is a quite different type of experience. Ben Barren, on the other hand, certainly does understand the challenges facing major media organisations and he also knows a lot about some of the initiatives they are developing in the social media space.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Future of Media Summit
I'm speaking at the Future of Media Summit in Sydney on Tuesday on a "Future of Journalism" panel so have been contemplating talking points ...
Stewart Kirkpatrick has a strong view on the future of journalism question. I tend to agree with much of what he says, although I'm perhaps not quite as pessimistic being still very attached to and ensconced in the newspaper industry.
In the same context, I just stumbled across this video. It references The Economist from nearly two years ago, but the points are still relevant.
Stewart Kirkpatrick has a strong view on the future of journalism question. I tend to agree with much of what he says, although I'm perhaps not quite as pessimistic being still very attached to and ensconced in the newspaper industry.
In the same context, I just stumbled across this video. It references The Economist from nearly two years ago, but the points are still relevant.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Gawking at Gawker's pay rates
From Radar: "for Gawker writers, a million pageviews a month to an individual writer's blog posts will now net that writer $5000. Just back in January, a million pageviews would have gotten a writer $7,500. The reduced pageview rate means that writers must do more—or, of course, more popular!—work to even receive the same rate of pay."$5 cpm's down from $7.50 at the beginning of the year?
As Jason Calacanis points out, that still ain't bad ... but the pressure is on.
Interesting insight into the way Gawker pays its writers, though.
Masterful PR at Vanity Fair
You've got to hand it to them.
Consistently first class stories, beautifully written and accompanied by the best photography. Vanity Fair is an editorial-led magazine. And it is the complete advertisers' package.
The advertising pages in VF are beautiful to look at - they don't yell at you, they beckon seductively.
It takes nearly a whole month to enjoy this magazine properly. I love it.
I also love the way they use their web site. vanityfair.com is really a PR and marketing tool masquerading as a full service magazine site. The site is free, but the magazine leaks articles, on to it one by one as promotion for the current and upcoming print issue.
There's nothing particularly radical in that. But when your site content is as strong as vanityfair.com you can take a different tactical approach.
Their approach is to use PR to drive print sales, which of course is where they make the real money.
They do this regularly. Sometimes it's an Annie Leibovitz cover like pre-internet the one of a pregnant Demi Moore.
Today it was a Christopher Hitchens piece about letting himself be subjected to water boarding. theage.com.au lapped it up.
The story was a reprint from The Guardian, two days ago. The Guardian writer had taken Vanity Fair's bait ... and their hook and their line and their sinker too. But theage didn't mind.
I can't understand why theage didn't just write its own version. They did do a video piece. But the way video is presented on the Fairfax sites it really just looks like an afterthought to the serious work of putting words together.
By the way, if you're ever looking for Vanity Fair in an Australian newsagent you'll need to look in the "Women's" section.
Funny that ...
Consistently first class stories, beautifully written and accompanied by the best photography. Vanity Fair is an editorial-led magazine. And it is the complete advertisers' package.
The advertising pages in VF are beautiful to look at - they don't yell at you, they beckon seductively.
It takes nearly a whole month to enjoy this magazine properly. I love it.
I also love the way they use their web site. vanityfair.com is really a PR and marketing tool masquerading as a full service magazine site. The site is free, but the magazine leaks articles, on to it one by one as promotion for the current and upcoming print issue.
There's nothing particularly radical in that. But when your site content is as strong as vanityfair.com you can take a different tactical approach.
Their approach is to use PR to drive print sales, which of course is where they make the real money.
They do this regularly. Sometimes it's an Annie Leibovitz cover like pre-internet the one of a pregnant Demi Moore.
Today it was a Christopher Hitchens piece about letting himself be subjected to water boarding. theage.com.au lapped it up.
The story was a reprint from The Guardian, two days ago. The Guardian writer had taken Vanity Fair's bait ... and their hook and their line and their sinker too. But theage didn't mind.
I can't understand why theage didn't just write its own version. They did do a video piece. But the way video is presented on the Fairfax sites it really just looks like an afterthought to the serious work of putting words together.By the way, if you're ever looking for Vanity Fair in an Australian newsagent you'll need to look in the "Women's" section.
Funny that ...
Friday, June 27, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
WAtoday launches in Perth
It was one of the worst kept secrets in Australian online publishing, but after much speculation Fairfax Digital has launched WAtoday.In design terms the site is more or less a direct copy of theage.com.au, minus that site's feature strip below the splash at the top of the front page. At least it looks better than the Brisbane Times.
Most of the copy is currently coming from the smh or theage, but you can't hold that against them at this stage. With eight dedicated reporters I expect they'll start generating local coverage fairly quickly. It remains to be seen how deep that coverage will go, however.
I suspect they'll struggle for local readers. After more than a year the brisbanetimes.com.au's unique Queensland audience is pretty small and if Watoday does better - given the relative size of the market - it will be surprising. But it does allow Fairfax to flog a (notional) national online reach.
What's the bet they'll do Adelaide next?
Murdoch and the future of newspapers
"Newspapers are in a sad way in America. Readership continues to fall. Advertisers are deserting them for newer forms of media. Revenues are plummeting, as the costs of printing and distribution mount catastrophically. ... In the eyes of many media experts, print journalism, that stubborn 15th-century technology, appears at long last to be on its deathbed.Read the Full article in the Atlantic Monthly.
"Except that Murdoch is investing in it."
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