Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: media

  • Grappling with the online news beast

    Grappling with the online news beast

    The head of Google News, Richard Gingras, last week discussed how the news industry is evolving at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation.

    Much of Richard’s discussion centred around disruption – the newspaper industry was disrupted in the 1950s by television and by the 1980s most print markets had seen several mastheads reduced to one or two.

    The remaining outlets were able to book fat profits from their monopoly or duopoly position in display and classified advertising.

    By 2000, the web had killed that business model and the newspaper industry was in a decline that continues today as aggregator sites like Huffington Post steal page views and Google News further changes the distribution model.

    One of the problems for the news industry is how different the online mediums are from print, radio or television broadcast. The struggles of media startup The Global Mail is a good example of this.

    In the middle of last year news started trickling out that one of the Australian Broadcasting Corporations’s top journalists, Monica Attard, had left the broadcaster to set up The Global Mail, an online news site funded by Wotif founder Graeme Wood.

    The site launched on schedule in February 2012 and underwhelmed readers with pedestrian content and a confusing layout. By May, Monica Attard announced she was leaving the organisation she’d founded.

    Tim Burrowes of the media site Mumbrella examined why the Global Mail is struggling, his Nine problems stopping The Global Mail from getting an audience details how the site doesn’t use online media effectively.

    At heart is a fundamental mismatch between the methods of journalists raised in the “glory days” of print and broadcast journalism against those of the online world, not least the much harsher financial imperatives of those publishing on the web.

    One key problem it the TL;DR factor – Too Long; Didn’t Read. Where online readers tend to leave stories after around four hundred words.

    Richard Gringas is quoted as encountering this problem when he worked at online magazine, Salon.

    At Salon, articles were paginated, but only 27% of readers made it to the end of the four-page articles. Compared to competitors, Richard was told, this was a good benchmark. But with fresh eyes, he was astounded that a product was being produced with the knowledge that the vast majority of the audience would not consume the entire piece. Richard loves the long form, but if the objective is to convey information, we need to think about the right form for the right medium at the right time.

    So “long form” journalism has to be written the right way and it has to be backed up with good visual components and have “short form” versions suited to the more impatient readers who make up the bulk of the web audience.

    The New York Times made a step in this direction with their iEconomy series on how the US middle classes have been displaced with manufacturing’s move to China.

    An even better example of journalists using the web well is The Verge’s Scamworld where an online expose of Internet get rich quick schemes and the conmen behind them.

    Scamworld shows us what skilled journalists can do online. The amazing thing is the site’s new steam is tiny compared to those of established outlets like the New York Times, Guardian, Fairfax or those of News Corporation.

    This failure to execute by incumbent news organisations isn’t because they are lacking talent – every young, and not so young, journalist has been required to have multimedia skills and the ability to file stories in multiple formats for at least a decade.

    Old Media’s problems lies in the mindsets of senior journalists, editors and their managements who are locked into a 1950s way of thinking where fat advertising revenues funded the adventures and expense accounts of roving reporters who tough as nails editors occasionally bullied into filing stories.

    That model started to die in the 1980s and the Internet gave it the last rites.

    Richard Gringas’ discussion at Harvard shows news and journalism isn’t dead, but it is evolving. Just like many other disrupted industries, the news media has to adapt to a changed world.

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  • Consumer surplus?

    Consumer surplus?

    Last week I came across the term “consumer surplus”, the Boston Consulting Group claimed the gap between the cost of producing media content and what customers are prepared to pay creates a “consumer surplus”.

    That consumers of media want it but aren’t prepared to pay for it is a basic truth; the 20th Century media model is based upon advertising subsiding journalism and entertainment.

    For all forms of media this was true; from TV and radio stations being fully funded by advertising to newspapers and magazines’ cover prices barely covering distribution costs.

    Take out advertising and all these models are dead. The only alternative is government funding.

    Losing the advertising rivers of gold to web services is what’s killing the established business model. It appears that TV and radio will hang on, for now, but newspapers and magazines are in serious difficulties.

    Simply put, there has rarely been a market for journalism; readers and viewers aren’t prepared to pay. Journalism’s golden years of the 20th Century were based upon having a relatively captive market for advertisers; now advertisers can go elsewhere, they have.

    Putting a sophisticated  label on a basic concept is something consulting companies are very good at and Boston Consulting Group has done an excellent job with this report.

    The fundamental truth is that it doesn’t matter how good your product is, if you can’t find a way to make someone pay you for it then you don’t have a market or a business.

    Which is what the real challenge is for online content creators, finding the model that pays. The first person to do that becomes the 21st Century’s Randolph Hearst.

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  • So you call that journalism?

    So you call that journalism?

    On  the revelation his expose of Apple’s employment practice contains “significant fabrications”, Mike Daisy reached for the  “I am not a journalist and “my work is entertainment” excuses.

    This gutless and disingenuous defence is a common one used by those caught distorting facts or outright lying to advance their causes and enrich themselves.

    Perhaps the Mike Daisy expose, along with the sad events around the Stop Kony campaign, should make us consider who is a journalist and what journalism is.

    Is journalism reporting the facts as we seem them or describing the world around us? If so, does a “journalist” have to work for an established and recognised media outlet?

    The modern idea of warrior, professional journalism was born in the 1930s with celebrity journalists like Ernest Hemingway or Evelyn Waugh reporting from Spain or Ethiopia.

    In the 1960s we saw this idea become established through the Vietnam war and reached its peak in the early 1970s with the Watergate scandal.

    Today, someone who is an actor by trade can be appointed as the technology correspondent by a newspaper and automatically become a credible journalist in their field.

    At the same time someone with years of experience in their field — it could be food, travel, technology or anything else — is sneeringly derided as a “citizen journalist” by those who draw a cheque from the established, and dying, media should they decide to self publish.

    The sad thing is much of what is published as “journalism” by the established media outlets is entertainment and many of the “facts” reported are self interested propaganda promoting the latest music star or pushing a political agenda.

    All too often, those claiming to be credible journalists are being used to give the illusion of of credibility on things that simply aren’t true at all.

    We need to re-evaluate what journalism is and how misleading and self-interested reporting distorts debate, markets and the democratic process.

    A start would be in ditching the “journalism as entertainment” meme.

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  • Reinventing activism

    Reinventing activism

    In the late 1960’s the Biafran War appeared on the front pages of the world’s media partly due to a well co-ordinated advertising campaign using the relatively new broadcast marketing techniques.

    During the mid 1980s the Ethopian famine was bought to prominence by Live Aid and Bob Geldof using music videos and live television made possible by huge leaps in broadcasting technology.

    Nearly thirty years later we see an African tragedy – this time the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa – again bought to the West’s attention through new media and advances in video technology.

    Each time there’s been an outpouring of outrage and determination by those of us in the West to ‘fix’ Africa’s problems. We demand our leaders do something so we march, we donate and these days we retweet or like an online video.

    In many ways  we’re like Alden Pyle, the idealistic and well meaning anti-hero of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American who believed a ‘third force’ can fix the problems of Vietnam in the 1950s.

    At the time Graham Green wrote The Quiet American in the late 1950s, the Eisenhower Administration had several hundred US military advisers in Vietnam, sent by President Truman at the beginning of the decade.

    Today, at the time of the Stop Kony campaign in 2012, the Obama Administration has ‘about’ a hundred advisors in Central Africa.

    Sometimes we don’t reinvent anything; we just use modern tools to repeat our grandparents’ mistakes.

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  • The death of sport

    The death of sport

    In the 1960s, sports administrators refused TV replays of games because it would affect their revenue.

    Sports broadcasting rights were invented.

    In the 1970s, sports administrators resisted live TV coverage of games because it would affect their revenue.

    Sports broadcasting rights became lucrative.

    In the 1980s, sports administrators claimed TV viewers using video recorders would affect their revenue.

    Sports broadcasting rights became more lucrative.

    In the 1990s, sports administrators worried cable and satellite TV would affect their revenue.

    Sports broadcasting rights soared.

    In the 2000s, sports administrators warned the Internet would affect their revenue.

    Sports broadcasting rights soared further.

    In 2012, sports administrators shout that cloud computing services will affect their revenue…….

    Photo courtesy of mzacha on SXC.hu

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