Category: media

Pulling up the drawbridge

Is the unpaid content model of unpaid journalism not only unsustainable, but hypocritical?

“Online bloggers and tweters are not subject to the financial incentives which affect the print media.”

While there’s much to disagree with in Lord Justice Leveson’s Australian speeches last week, particularly the bizarre suggestion that bloggers and social media are driving the decline in journalistic standards, he is correct about the economics of online publishing. It’s tough to make a buck on the web.

It’s so tough, many of the new media startups are founded on not paying for the articles they publish. This model has become so entrenched, that some venture capital investors will only invest in media start ups if they don’t have any reporters or editors.

Pure platforms

New media startup Buzzfeed‘s founder, Jonah Peretti, mentioned Silicon Valley’s reluctant to pay writers in a staff email republished by Chris Dixon;

Tech investors prefer pure platform companies because you can just focus on the tech, have the users produce the content for free, and scale the business globally without having to hire many people.

This antithesis to paying creatives and content creators is one of the notable aspects of the current Silicon Valley model, who needs editors and writers when a billion people will post to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram?

Arianna Huffington has been the most successful with this model in the media industry, parlaying a largely unpaid for content business into a fat pay-off.  Chris Anderson described this model best in a description of his website Geek Dad’s economics.

Reading the comments

For readers, much of the value in sites like the Huffington Post and Geek Dad lie in the comments stream where readers give their views and experiences and build the communities so many investors and advertisers are looking for.

This is a point made by Rachel Hills when commenting about Australian website Mamamia’s payment policies;

When I visit Mamamia. I don’t go to Mamamia for the articles, which usually don’t tell me anything I haven’t already read somewhere else. I go for the comments.

Rachel concludes with the thought that Mia Freedman’s Mamamia is providing a platform for discussion. This is true, but that’s no different from newspapers, the six o’clock news, current affairs shows or even the weekend’s football match.

Those football players, newsreaders and journalists are all paid for their work, just like Chris Anderson and Mia Freedman were as magazine editors.

The hypocrisy of unpaid content

Which leads us to the core hypocrisy of the unpaid content model; its promoters – people like Mia Freedman, Chris Anderson and Arianna Huffington – have all been well paid in their careers yet now choose to deny the next generation of writers and journalist an income.

A business adviser once remarked to me that the management of a corporation that were locking in their entitlements while cutting middle management were “pulling up the drawbridge”, that line seems apt as older, affluent journalists demand younger ones work as unpaid contributors or interns.

The bleat from online publishers is “we can’t afford to pay contributors”, in most other industries being able to pay your workers is a measure of whether your business is solvent. That many new media outlets can’t may mean that the entire industry is insolvent.

Writers get exposure

Were the local cafe to say it couldn’t afford to pay its waitstaff, but it was giving them valuable work experience they’d be rightly scorned for exploiting workers. There’s little difference with online publishers.

It may well be because there is no shortage of manipulative, attention grabbing garbage designed to provoke reactions and increase pageviews, which is the flaw in the “writers get exposure” excuse used by many of these sites.

As middlemen, publishers have to add value in order to have a role, ‘offering exposure’ to unpaid writers isn’t a reason in itself. This is an industry with shaky foundations and it’s not surprising founders are desperately trying to find greater fools to fund their exits.

Image of Michael Arrington from Kevin Krejci on Flickr.

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Life in the mob

At a time of easily generated moral hysteria, it’s best to keep your head rather than joining the mob.

The reaction to last week’s tragic passing of a nurse over a hoax phone call shows how hysteria and cynicism in new and old media fuel each other.

Having created villains, in this case the two hapless Sydney radio hosts, the mainstream media creates a moral outrage to stir up the mob which in turn generates more headlines.

As with the Hillsborough tragedy, this allows those in positions of responsibility the opportunity to avoid scrutiny and accountability.

In this case we see the hospital management demanding action being taken against the Sydney duo while conveniently ducking questions about why poorly paid nurses are expected to act as switchboard operators on top of their already considerable responsibilities.

Now we’re seeing calls to make practical jokes illegal – no doubt there’ll be a wave of teenage boys being prosecuted for making prank phone calls when panicked politicians pass poorly drafted laws to deal with the ‘problem’.

Our taxes at work.

Your mission in life is to use your brain and not to be one of the torch bearing mob.

If it’s you the mob are looking for, then it’s best to lie low until another headline or something shiny distracts them.

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Are bloggers immune from the law?

Bloggers and social media users don’t have the resources of newspapers and broadcasters. Does this give them a legal advantage?

Last week Lord Justice Leveson of the British inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press gave his first public speech since handing down his report to the UK Parliament.

In this speech, Lord Leveson claimed that bloggers and social media users have an advantage over traditional media channels because they don’t respect the law. This is nonsense and detracts from the importance of the UK inquiry.

Speaking to the Communications Law Centre in Sydney last Friday, Lord Leveson gave his perspectives on how privacy is evolving as the media struggles with a 24 hour news cycle and the rise of the Internet.

One particular point he made was how the differing economics of traditional media and internet channels affected moral judgements.

“online bloggers or tweeters are not subject to the financial incentives which affect the print media, and which would persuade the press not to overstep society’s values and ethical standards.”

This view seems flawed – the reason for the UK inquiry into the ethics of the press was because the reporters at some of the nation’s top selling newspapers were overstepping society’s standards. They were doing this in the pursuit of profit.

At the other end of the scale, Leveson’s implication is that because most bloggers and social media users aren’t making money from their operations this makes them more prone to flaunting the community’s laws and morals.

What that view overlooks is that those bloggers, Facebook posters and Twitterers don’t live in magical castles sipping the fragrant, rainbow coloured milk of bejewelled unicorns – they have day jobs that pay for their online activities which often makes them far more aware of societal norms than those locked in the hyper-competitive and insular world of professional journalism.

Later in his speech Leveson expanded on this theme with a comment about the jurisdiction of bloggers and their servers.

The established media broadly conforms to the law and when they do not they are potentially liable under the law. In so  far as the internet is concerned there has been and, for many, there remains a perception that actions do not have legal consequences. Bloggers rejoice in placing their servers outside the jurisdiction where different laws apply. the writ of the law is said not to run. It is believed therefore that the shadow of the law is unable to play the same role it has played with the established media.

This view is clearly at odds with reality as again it was the widespread failure of the ‘established media’ in conforming to UK law made Leveson’s inquiry necessary.

Bloggers and other internet users being somehow immune to legal consequences is a clearly not the case.

A good example of this are the various British computer hackers and webmasters who’ve found themselves facing extradition to the US for actions which are either not illegal in the UK or would face minor penalties.

Probably the best example of Internet users facing the full force of the law is the persecution of Paul Chambers who was prosecuted and convicted for making threats against an airport in an innocuous tweet that the local police and airport management thought was irrelevant.

The force of the law that was thrown against Mr Chambers was impressive compared to the somewhat reluctant efforts of bringing charges against the dozens of journalists, editors and crooked policemen exposed by the Leveson inquiry.

At the heart of the difference between the traditional media and the online communities is a power and economic imbalance. Despite the declining fortunes of newspapers, they are still politically powerful, influential and well resourced. Which is a good reason why prosecutors, police and politicians are reluctant to hold them account for their excesses.

On the other hand the vast bulk of bloggers are not; they don’t have a masthead to hide behind or a large, well funded legal team to defend them which actually makes them an easier target for litigation and criminal charges.

Some bloggers may believe they are immune from the law, but the reason for that is because they are ignorant of the legal system’s reach. Some of them will pay for that ignorance.

The idea though that bloggers and social media users have some legal advantage over traditional media outlets because of their comparative poverty and location of their servers is simply wrong.

If anything the advantage is firmly in favour of those working for big business. This is the real lesson of the UK media scandals of the past two years.

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Being damned for publishing

What we post online has real world consequences.

The tragic death of one of the nurses who took a hoax call from a pair of Australian radio hosts posing as the queen and Prince Charles should be a reminder of the real consequences of publishing.

Volume Two of the Leveson Report into the ethics and practices of the UK media describes some of the personal consequences of the terrible behaviour of the UK newspaper industry, the effects are devastating and real.

At a time when we are all publishers – from newspapers and radio stations through to Facebook posts and blogs like this – we all have to keep in mind the consequences of what happens when we press “post”.

Hopefully the dills at 2Day-FM are reflecting on the consequences of their actions, the rest of us should learn from them before we like a dumb, racist Facebook update, post an abuse tweet or plaster someone’s personal details across the web.

There’s also a management lesson here – the nursing staff at King Edward VII hospital should never have been put in the position of receiving media calls, particularly ones purporting to come from the royal household. One hopes, but isn’t optimistic, that the hospital’s managers are also reflecting on their role in this tragedy.

Every action we take has real world consequences, it’s something that we forget when we’re sitting comfortably at our desks or typing on our smartphones.

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Feeding the content beast

Can the tech media change its spots

One of the sad truths of the tech media is just how much news is really regurgitated media release, this is part of a bigger problem where online channels demand that sites deliver content and are ‘first’ to get announcements online.

Yesterday’s Google-ICOA scandal where a forged media release was regurgitated world wide across the tech and general media illustrates the weaknesses in the latter imperative when a fake announcement was released through PR Wire, a news release service.

To exacerbate the problem, the forgers used PR Wire’s Premium service which guarantees the release is not only distributed across services like Bloomberg and Reuters but also passed on to Associated Press which in turn distributes the story to hundreds of media outlets world wide.

Which is exactly what happened; here’s the Sydney Morning Herald’s report ripped straight from the wire. A quick Google search on a phrase in the AP report shows 1,259 other outlets also spat out the same Associated Press story.

Nobody at PR Wire, Associated Press or at any of the 1260 outlets chose to call Google or ICOA to confirm the story was true. Neither did anyone at the various tech blogs who chose to rewrite the PR Wire release as ‘news’.

Around the world at mainstream newspapers, tech blogs and online news services writers are under massive pressure to feed the content beast which is why these mistakes are inevitable.

The content beast also means a lot of rubbish gets published, just to keep new material churning across the home page. A good example is in yesterday’s Gizmodo article on how to save money on soda machine gas refills.

While the writer and editors thought this tosh – which was probably inspired from a media release – was worth posting, readers quickly pointed out that using industrial gas for food uses is dangerous and the economics dubious.

A classic example of the audience being smarter than the writer; something becoming increasingly common as poor quality garbage is posted under provocative, attention grabbing headlines.

The question is whether the content beast is worth feeding, readers don’t care and increasingly we’re all struggling to reduce the noise and clutter in our inboxes and social media channels.

Reducing the noise is becoming most internet users priority and this means publications whose value is dubious will end up being winnowed out or, even worse, being ignored.

In the market where users are reducing clutter it’s only the useful, relevant, trusted and genuinely informative sources that will survive.

For Associated Press, this means they are going to have to terminate their relationship with PR Wire if they are going to remain useful and trusted.

AP’s clients are going to have to add more value than just spitting out whatever turns up on the wire as the SMH and 1,200 other sites did with the Google story.

The tech blogs are most challenged of all. Increasingly they have little to offer except a race to the bottom in regurgitating spin and third rate articles.

It’s possible that the Google scandal is good for the tech media, it’s going to force the sites with a future to do smarter, better writing and rely less on PR releases or shouting “first” when they get a story.

The ones who don’t are history and no-one will miss them.

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A weird case of Stockholm syndrome

Some business have been trapped by their own technology. This is one of the problems for many news organisations.

Hacks and Hackers are regular informal meetups where technologists and journalists get together to discuss how news gathering is changing in the digital age. The November Sydney meeting featured a discussion with Aron Pilhofer, founder of the original event and Editor of Interactive News at The New York Times.

Aron had some great views on how journalism is changing and some of what he mentioned about the New York Times’ digital adventures was off the record

Some gems from Aron included just how ‘dirty’ raw data is from government agencies and how journalists can help open data advocates make their stories more accessible. Those topics are for future blog posts.

One of Aron’s comments about the challenges of the media was how many news organisations are trapped in “a weird case of Stockholm syndrome” – where their output is limited by their Content Management Systems.

It’s notable how many businesses, not just in media are constrained by their own systems – what was set up to serve the organisation has instead has become the master.

Of all the take aways from Aron’s talk, the Stockholm Syndrome of poor CMS’ is the most universal across industries – organisations pay a fortune to multinational consultancies for poor software platforms that management then tries to shoehorn their staff and business processes into.

This rarely ends well and usually creates more problems as the business loses flexibility, which is exactly what has happened to new organisations.

Sometimes biting the bullet and writing off a poor investment, particularly in software, makes damn good sense.

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Trapped in a walled garden

Can social media services like facebook stay relevant as they manage content?

Following up on last week’s criticism of Facebook, US entrepreneur Mark Cuban clarified his position about the social network.

Central to Mark’s criticism are three points about Facebook’s business model; that it is a time waster, it takes control away from users and it doesn’t succeed in connecting people to information and friends.

All of this is true, and these features are key to the walled garden model that all of the internet empires want to build.

Central to this strategy is the “time on site” metric and so far Facebook beats all comers, with a huge 400 minutes per month per user.

Users who spend a long time on a website are more valuable than those who don’t hang around and Facebook’s success has been in capturing the attention of their members and locking them into their platform.

The willingness of other websites, particularly media companies, to lock themselves into Facebook’s platform has puzzled many observers as they are giving their customers away to the social media service.

How willing internet users are in hanging around Facebook’s, or Amazon’s, Google’s and Apple’s, walled gardens remains to be seen; it depends upon how compelling the content and value is.

If Mark Cuban’s right, viewers’ eyeballs and advertising dollars may start moving away from Facebook when people realise they are missing out on relevant information.

The real value in media organisations, whether we talk about old media such as newspapers or new media like social platforms, is in presenting relevant information to visitors and readers. As the many news organisations are learning, when you stop being relevant then people stop paying attention.

Being relevant is the great challenge for Facebook, newspapers and all media organisations.

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