Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: media

  • The Lives they Loved – Another future for journalism?

    The Lives they Loved – Another future for journalism?

    The New York Times’ wrap up of the year’s obituaries may give us an idea of one of the many futures for journalism.

    It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that obituaries are just dry recantations of the lives of dead white men and they often are – particularly when about celebrities or undistinguished politicians and businessmen.

    Good obituaries though are masterpieces and those of society’s genuine unsung heroes are moving and educational. A well written obit of an obscure but deserving person is usually a rewarding read.

    As part of the their summation of 2012, The New York Times has taken their obituaries one step further by asking readers to submit photos and stories of their loved ones who’ve passed away during the year.

    The Lives They Loved is the result, a wonderful collection of touching photographs and stories of parents, partners, children and friends who have passed away in the last year.

    User Generated Content – UGC – is one of the foundation stones of new media. The idea is the audience themselves provide the content which frees services like Facebook, YouTube or I Can Haz Cheeseburger from the costs and irritations of actually creating things that people are interested in.

    The New York Times project may well show that traditional news channels with their dedicated audiences and relevance to communities may do UGC as well as any hot new Silicon Valley startup.

    While User Generated Content isn’t the future of journalism, it almost certainly will be one of the them. Whether it turns out that old media use it better than the newer upstarts remains to be seen.

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  • An infinite number of blogging monkeys

    An infinite number of blogging monkeys

    With the recent kerfuffle over writing for free, I thought I’d spend Christmas Day re-reading Chris Anderson’s Free.

    Deep in the book there’s the pertinent quote;

    Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive

    This is key question all writers, and anyone else in the creative industries need to ask, are we just adding to the tsunami of abundant information or are we adding something insightful and unique that has scarcity value?

    On the web there’s a unlimited number of monkeys writing rubbish, even if we’re the one that’s managed to bash out Hamlet nobody is paying much attention.

    We need to be better than the noise, and the sites we give our work to – whether we get paid or not – need to be a step above those churning out rubbish.

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  • Poor journalism and social media

    Poor journalism and social media

    Brother’s plea shows up online failings crows the Sydney Morning Herald over social media’s role in misidentifying the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

    The problem for the SMH is that social media wasn’t responsible for the story. As the Washington Post reported, CNN and various other outlets misidentified the shooter as his brother who had to take to social media to correct the record.

    For the mainstream media, the Sandy Hook shooting was not their finest hour; not only did they misidentify Ryan Lanza as the shooter, but they mistakenly reported his mother had worked at the school. When the Daily Mail does a better analysis of the story than many outlets, you know something is wrong.

    Something is certainly wrong at Fairfax as the cutting of resources results in the Sydney Morning Herald being three days behind the story and factually wrong on key aspects – not to mention adding a smug headline that is embarrassingly incorrect.

    While the writer of the SMH article should be held to account for sloppy work and poor research, the real responsibility for this embarrassment lies with the paper’s editors and management who should be ensuring what appears under the masthead is accurate and reliable.

    Both The Age and Sydney Morning Herald are essential to the fabric of their respective cities, this story is a good example of the important role the SMH has in shining light on the arcane dealings of the city’s business community. Fairfax can, and should, do far better than a poor, badly researched story on social media.

    Ironically, the mis-identification story quotes media academic Julie Posetti as saying “anyone with an internet connection could now contribute to and comment on the breaking news cycle without going through the filters of the traditional media.”

    At Fairfax, those filters are broken with the breathing space from selling its New Zealand digital operation, the company’s management has an opportunity to fix their credibility problem and focus on its core business.

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  • Pulling up the drawbridge

    Pulling up the drawbridge

    “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

    Life in 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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