Category: media

Who do journalists serve?

Who is the audience that journalists are writing for?

In an excellent video explaining how to pitch the tech media Milo Yiannopoulos, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Kernel and public relations agent Colette Ballou discuss PR and startups at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna.

One thing that jumps out from the presentation is Milo’s confusion about who their market is – at no time in the spiel does he mention readers or advertisers.

At one stage he says “we’re here to serve you,” this is to a room of tech entrepreneurs.

Milo’s focus raises the question about where do journalists add value and who they serve?

Traditionally that focus has been on giving the readers or viewers  useful and valuable information.

In order to do this, the businesses employing journalists have either raised funds through advertising, subscriptions or government subsidies.

That in itself created conflicts and it took strong courageous editors and managers to resist pressures from advertisers and governments.

With the web stealing advertising revenues, journalists and the organisations that employ them have a problem.

The question now for journalists is where can they add value in a form that people will pay.

Maybe it is shouting into social media echo chambers or spruiking the wares of the latest hot tech start up although it appears those channels are no more profitable than the old forms of journalism.

Another point Milo makes in that presentation is pertinent as well;

The arrogance of a journalist is inversely proportionate to their talent. So the tech bloggers are massively arrogant and have huge opinions of themselves.

Ne’er a truer word spoken.

The question remains though, who do those bloggers or journalists serve?

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What business are newspapers in?

To understand the future of news, we need to define the business

The problems of The Guardian and other newspaper groups around the world raises the question of what business they are actually in – news or advertising?

“Going digital only is not an option” was an agenda item for a meeting of Guardian executives claims the Financial Times.

Digital only however is the option most of the readers are taking with the Guardian’s online channels attracting 9.5 million UK readers a month compared to a print circulation of 6.5 million. The Guardian’s total global online audience is 65 million, ten times the size of the print edition.

Making matters worse is the trend, according to the UK Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), newspaper sales are declining at 16% per year while online readership is growing 14%.

As the Guardian readership figures show, the number of readers isn’t the problem and the same is true for the New York Times or the Sydney Morning Herald. More people are reading these publications than ever before, but the advertising has gone elsewhere.

Essentially a newspaper was an advertising platform, the cover price barely covered the costs of printing and distribution while the classified and display advertising provided the “rivers of gold” that made the business so lucrative through most of the Twentieth Century.

Most of those rivers have been diverted as dedicated employment, real estate, travel and motoring websites have stolen much of the advertising revenue that sustained newspapers.

As classified advertising platforms, newspapers have reached their use by date and now they have to build a model that is more focused on online display advertising and getting readers to pay for content.

Getting readers to pay is difficult when the market has been trained to expect news for free or pennies a day, a problem not helped by some newspapers chasing online eyeballs with low quality content.

Equally difficult is training sales teams to sell digital advertising, too many sales teams have grown fat and complacent over decades of flogging lucrative and easy real estate print ads.

The challenge for newspaper managements around the world is figuring out how to get the advertisers onto their online platforms and providing a product which readers value and are prepared to pay for.

It may well be that The Guardian’s management are right, that print does have a role in the newspaper’s future but first they are going to have to define what their company is and what it does.

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702 Sydney mornings – watching TV on the net

How is the Internet changing the way we watch TV?

On 702Sydney Mornings this month with Linda Mottram, we’re looking at at how the Internet is changing the way we watch TV.

How much do you use ABC’s iView? Okay it’s not every program for forever  but it’s a godsend when you’re time poor – and who isn’t these days.  So you can catch up with the programs on ABC TV you’ve missed or you knew you couldn’t watch it live.
We’d love to hear from you if you’re now watching TV programs – ANY TV programs – primarily on the Net, through your internet browser rather than sitting in front of a telly.
Aside from catch-up services like iView, ABC is already providing programs LIVE. If you log on to ABC News 24 website, you’ll be watching a live TV news straight away. And then of course there’re a number of avenues for pay–per-view services.”
Some of the things we’ll be discussing are;
  • Differences between different services and how they work and how much they cost.
  • Free-to-air or Pay-per-view. Just how much is available for free and how much isn’t?
  • Limitations of catch-up services. How long are programs kept, how comprehensive is their collection?
  • Limitations caused by copyright laws. Some overseas programs are either very difficult to view or impossible to view online. Will the technology advance mean these limitations will be irrelevant soon if not already?
  • Nobody wants to squint at smartphones to watch nature documentaries do they? Is the quality really up to scratch? Alternatively, what do YOU as a computer/smartphone/tablet user need to know that your viewing experience is as enjoyable as possible?
  • While catchup services are becoming more popular than ever, take up of internet based TV (IPTV) remains very low. Will this ever change? What will cause the change?
  • If the catchup services’ popularity continues to grow – and there’s nothing to suggest it’ll slow down – wouldn’t commercial television need to re-examine their advertising based business models seriously?
  • Main takeups of TV-watching on the net will be younger audiences, but it is quite often more mature and older audience who complain about the permeating advertising. What will it take older audience to flee further and significantly to Net-TV?

Some of the material we’ll be referring to in the program is the ACMA report on Online Video Content Services in Australia and Screen Australia’s What to Watch in an Online World.

Join us on 702 Sydney from shortly after 9.30am. We’ll probably take some calls on 1300 222 702 and we’d like to hear your views, comments or questions.

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Heroes of Capitalism

When did it become acceptable for airlines to humiliate passengers and customers on national television?

The few times I watch television these days is either when the footy’s on or the rare occasions that I surface from my interweb connected man cave and stumble into a room where someone has a TV running.

And so it was tonight when I happened to wander out to witness a terrible airport “reality” show – this one being an unoriginal, third rate Australian effort where Tiger Airlines shows how it stuffs around and humiliates its passengers. In Australia, Channel Seven considers this to be prime-time TV “entertainment”.

What was striking about the show was how Tiger Airlines’ check in staff humiliated a pensioner and her young son who hadn’t printed out their boarding passes.

The “fee” for not carrying out a basic task which reasonable people would expect would be part of an airline’s service is $25 a head at Tiger Airlines – one could ask what the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s position is on excessive fees being used to pad airlines’, or banks’, profits but that would be asking too much of Canberra’s worlds best practice doughnut munchers.

As result the poor lady was expected to front up with another $50 – money she didn’t have. So Tiger Airlines’ check in staff wouldn’t let her board and Channel Seven’s camera crew gleefully filmed her desperate tears and shocked son.

Eventually a bystander took pity on her and gave her $60. At least someone in the terminal had some decency and compassion, qualities neither the Tiger Airlines staff or Channel Seven camera crew have in the tiniest way.

No doubt somewhere in an anonymous glass tower some arsehole has a job as a manager at Tiger Airlines and has a KPI that includes how many poor mothers they can reduce to tears.

When the arsehole Tiger Airlines manager gets its annual bonus for making the required number of victims passengers weep, it no doubt goes to lunch with the Channel Seven executives – another bunch of arseholes – to slap each others’ backs and tell themselves what great heroes of capitalism they are.

The question that bugs me is when did it become acceptable to humiliate your customers? No doubt Tiger Airlines think it’s good publicity and Channel Seven think it is good entertainment.

We live in interesting times when our business leaders think it isn’t good enough just to take customers’ money but that it’s also necessary to humiliate them as the managements of both Channel Seven and Tiger Airlines seem to be rewarded for doing.

Fortunately in these corporatist days we still can vote with our wallets and turn off the muck we find offensive – that’s why decent people shouldn’t choose to fly Tiger Airlines or watch Channel Seven.

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Digital fish and chip wrappers

The Magazine is a brave experiment to break out of the churn of modern journalism.

Instapaper founder Marco Arment’s latest creation is The Magazine, an attempt to meld ‘medium length’ journalism with tech writing.

Instead of being a technology magazine, it’s about things that interest geeks. As Marco says of his new publication;

Rather than be limited to technology, its topics appeal to people who love technology.

The Magazine is one of the many experiments to figure out how to make journalism pay now the model of reportage pigging backing on the advertising ‘rivers of gold’ is over.

Marco goes through the rationale behind the project in his forward to the first edition, where he lays out what The Magazine offers and what it doesn’t. The basic philosophy is to have a clean interface just like Instapaper, no advertising and no video.

That’s a brave call which makes The Magazine reliant on subscription income, as is tying the project’s revenues to those of Apple’s Newstand distribution channel for e-magazines as it holds the publication hostage to one of the Internet’s empires.

What stands out to a lot of us in the tech media is the ambition to change the medium. Matthew Panzarino writing in The Next Web makes the point;

The focus on the ‘macro’ vs. the ‘micro’, on articles of lasting value and subject matter, rather than the fleeting ephemera of the tech carousel. I write between 5 and 9 articles a day on average, and many of them have a half-life of a few hours unless someone goes searching for a very specific topic at some point in the future. That’s the nature of the beast when it comes to covering the rapidly moving world of tech, but a periodical needs to operate differently, to work outside of that narrow envelope, if it’s going to work.

Nine articles a day is hard work and it’s questionable that anyone reads these pieces closely or really cares about them. It’s all grist to the new media mill which values quantity over quality, preferably with SEO friendly keywords.

This ‘content’ is the modern day digital fish wrapping of the 24 hour Internet cycle. Most of this posts could be easily replaced just by publishing the vendor’s media releases many of the stories are based upon.

While it would be tempting to say this is a problem with online tech journalism, it’s a problem across the media which is made worse by syndicating content or just getting digital sharecroppers to donate their time and work.

Prior to modern food handling rules British fish and chip were wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers, hence the saying “today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish.” It was a saying intended to imbue journalists with a sense of humility about their trade. It didn’t always work.

Today, we’re churning out the modern digital equivalent to a largely disinterested audience. The Magazine is an attempt to do something better.

Regardless of whether Marco is successful or not with his project we can do better than what we’re currently doing.

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Squandering a reprieve

How did media companies miss the opportunities of the tech wreck?

ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing has a terrific story on the struggles of the Fairfax newspaper empire during the early days of the Internet.

One of the major themes that jumps out is how Fairfax, like many media and retail organisations, squandered the opportunity presented by the tech wreck.

The tech wreck was an opportunity for incumbents to claim their spaces in the online world, instead they saw the failure of many of the dot com boom’s over-hyped online businesses as vindication of their view the Internet was all hype.

As former Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Fray said “In florid moments you could even think this internet webby thing would go away”.

For Fairfax the profits from the traditional print based business were compelling. According to Greg Hywood the current CEO, for every dollar earned by the company, 70c were profits – a profit margin of 233%.

The Internet threatened those “rivers of gold” and media companies, understandably, did nothing to jeopardise those returns.

Another problem for Fairfax was the massive investment in digital printing presses in the 1990s. These behemoths revolutionised the way newspapers were printed as pages could be laid out on computer screens and sent directly from the newsroom to the press itself which printed out pages in glorious colour rather than with smudgy black and white images.

Moreover these machines were fantastic for printing glossy coloured supplements and the advertising revenue from those high end inserts kept the dollars rolling in.

When the tech wreck happened, the massive investments in printing presses were vindicated as the rivers of gold continued to flow while the smart Internet kids went broke.

Fairfax’s management weren’t alone in this hubris – most media companies around the world made the same missteps while retail companies continued to build stores catering for the last echos of the 20th Century consumer boom.

In 2008, the hubris caught up with the retailers and newspapers. As the great credit boom came to an end, the wheels fell off the established business models and the cost of not experimenting with online models is costing them dearly.

Value still lies in those mastheads though as more people are reading Fairfax’s publications than ever before.

Readers still want to read these publications, one loyal reader is quoted in the story that Sydney Morning Herald should aspire to “being a serious international paper.”

That isn’t going to happen while management is focused on cutting costs to their core business instead of focusing on new revenue streams.

Somebody will find that model, had the incumbent retail and media organisations explored and invested in online businesses a decade ago they may well have found that secret sauce.

Now many of them won’t survive with their horse and buggy ways of doing business.

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Will write, play and cook your dinner for free

Playing for love is different to working for free.

From the Internets;

Craigslist Ad:
We are a small & casual restaurant in downtown Vancouver and we are looking for solo musicians to play in our restaurant to promote their work and sell their CD. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get positive response. More Jazz, Rock, & smooth type music, around the world and mixed cultural music. Are you interested to promote your work? Please reply back ASAP.

A Musician’s Reply:
Happy new year! I am a musician with a big house looking for a restauranteur to come to my house to promote his/her restaurant by making dinner for me and my friends. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get a positive response. More fine dining & exotic meals and mixed Ethnic Fusion cuisine. Are you interested to promote your restaurant? Please reply back ASAP.

Shamelessly lifted from the Telecaster Guitar Forum via Bob Lefsetz’s blog.

The discussion about Amanda Palmer offering unpaid gigs for local musos on her US tour has been heated and the perspectives are interesting.

What’s missed is the difference between artist and workers – the local violin player or trombonist getting up on stage with Amanda Palmer in Poughkeepsie isn’t going onstage to make a buck, it’s because he or she loves playing and is honoured to get an opportunity to perform with a big act.

On the other hand, one of the sites that’s been critical of Palmer advertised for a “insightful, knowledgeable and talented writers to contribute to the ongoing and ever-intriguing discourse on music and film.”

For submitting three 200 word blog posts a day, the lucky writer will receive a grand payment of six dollars. That’s one cent a word. Plus a cut of advertising revenue.

Should anyone be tempted to think that revenue could amount to much, they should keep in mind the web is awash with crap content that’s worth one cent a word; there’s no reason why any half decent writer couldn’t set up their own blog and stick adwords on it for a better return.

A few decades ago when printing was expensive and distribution networks difficult to set up, indy magazines offering little but an outlet to their writers served a purpose.

Today you can setup an outlet in five minutes on Blogger or WordPress and let the web do the distribution for you.

Any business that relies on free or cheap content is doomed – we’re in a world awash with cheap, crappy content and the public don’t see much reason to pay for it.

That there is no market for crap is something our once esteemed newspapers, magazines and TV stations should keep in mind as they sack subeditors, retrench journalists and increasingly source material that was available on Twitter a day earlier.

There’s a big difference between a musician or blogger creating something for love versus a business ripping contributors off  – one needs a market to succeed, while the other just does it because they want to.

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