Nocleanfeed

Protest is erupting against the Rudd Government's clumsy attempt to filter the internet.



It's a quixotic scheme - most likely technically unfeasible, and certainly of dubious economic value.

Stevie Wonder's cure for current ailments ...

"Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing" ... we were sitting too far from the stage for the picture to be clear but the screens either side of the stage help. And the sound is cooking. The Master Blaster was in superb form.

Newspaper cartoons online

I love John Spooner's online animations, and there's a slew of other Age cartoonists pieces on youtube. The Oz had Nicholson's equally brilliant animations, but they seem to have been discontinued.

Reading between the lines with David Kirk

The Fairfax CEO gave a speech at the Sydney Institute last night defending his company's recent restructure announcements and outlining his vision for the future of quality journalism at Fairfax.

Here's a copy of the speech.

A lot of what Kirk said was his standard stump speech about the strength of the business and its ability to face the current cyclical and structural challenges, etc etc.

But in amongst his assertions of long term sustainability and general optimism about the future of Fairfax are some interesting conclusions. These are not obviously statements announcing direct action, but they will be the inevitable result of some of the foundations that Kirk's optimism rests on.

Here's a salient quote:

" [...] we are in the process of transforming Fairfax Media into a multi-media news and information company. We have a long way to go, but we have begun the process of converging editorial content development and management, and brand management and sales, across our distribution platforms."

Fairfax execs have been saying this for a while now. It's quite obviously become a central piece of orthodoxy in the Fairfax camp. That's good and well, but the really interesting question is - what exactly does it mean? My feeling is that a couple of years ago it meant one thing, but now it means something quite different. What might that be?

Here's another clue, from Kirk's speech:

"We have some of the most powerful brands in the country. And they carry an emotive wallop.

"Indeed, a lot of the public reaction to our restructure that I mentioned at the outset is because our audience feels very invested in the brands because of what they stand for.

"In that sense, a lot of the debate and discussion has actually been heartening to us because of the relevance of what we do for so many readers and listeners – in print, on air and online.

"And their message is to reinforce exactly what we want: to continue the high quality journalism that is so important to them, and to the strength of our brands.

"Our brands therefore are the glue in the relationship we have with our audiences built as they are on our long history of journalism of the highest quality.

"For over 175 years, our mastheads have been the newspapers that champion the community and dare to make power accountable.

"The challenge for us as a company is to stretch the brands – to modernise them – so that they are as powerful in the 21st century as they were in the 19th and 20th centuries."

Brand has always been critically important to Fairfax, but it could be that there is now a real willingness to align the brands properly across content channels.

There has traditionally been a good deal of tension between print and online representations of the metro mastheads, ie. the web sites lean towards the salacious and the newspapers steer through an AB heartland. Some feel that has been mismanaged. Others that it is the right thing for two different audiences.

The real problem, though, is not that there are two (or even three) different audiences for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, but that decisions about how the brand should be managed via each channel are not centrally controlled. Neither metro masthead editor has overall control of his paper's web site. Consequently that consumer brand attachment, which David Kirk rightly values, is at risk.

I posted on this a while back. At the heart of the problem seems to be an organisational disconnect between Fairfax Digital which owns the masthead web sites, and the editorial culture of the newspapers which maintains the tradition of quality journalism. The ongoing separation of the two businesses - print and digital - means that the newspaper journalists have every reason to stay suspicious about the way their efforts will be treated online. Whilst that continues, the brands will suffer.

But Mr Kirk's speech last night may be indicating a shift in position on the governance of the masthead web sites. Whilst he is very clear about the overall value of the digital business, the specific needs of the metro masthead web sites remain distinct from Trademe or essentialbaby or Stayz or any of the other non-news sites that Fairfax runs. For the news sites to work most productively with their parent masthead it is only logical that each metro newspaper editor be able to direct online operations.

No doubt there will be voices inside Fairfax Digital who will maintain that no Fairfax newspaper editor could possibly run a major news site. That is to be expected, but nevertheless it would be quite mistaken.

Palin v Biden

Today's much anticipated VP debate turned out to be a bit of a fizzer.

Online profits, Oz Twitter useage

Monday Note shines a light on the elephant in the online newsroom: the financial numbers don't add up.

But can they?

Scott Karp points out that Facebook is lagging badly in delivering revenue against its current valuation. It has 100 million users but 2008 revenue was projected at only $300 million. So where's the rest?

According to Karp the problem is with Facebook's value proposition to advertising clients. It ain't as compelling as Google's by a long way.

In other words even the newest players can take a leaf out of Google's book. It's really about delivering customer satisfaction.

On another note it's interesting to see the growth in Twitter useage in Australia.

Future of Journalism BNE conference

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.

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.

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

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.