Category: new media

Big data, mobile apps and smarter logistics – why Avis is buying Zipcar

Smartphone apps are more than just a funky way of getting information. The combination of big data, social media and mobile insights offer businesses deep market intelligence.

With no bad press over New Year’s Eve it looks like hire car service Uber avoided the surge pricing traps of 2011 and the good news continues for the online booking industry with the news that Avis is buying car sharing service Zipcar.

Assuming the acquisition isn’t another example of the greater fool investment model, Avis’ purchase of Zipcar makes good sense in expanding the hire car giant’s footprint into the share car business.

Regrettably Avis use the 1980s term “synergies” four times in their media release but it does seem the businesses are a good fit both in fleet sharing and improving both company’s services.

Zipcar’s technology is another asset which Avis can use,  with the car sharing service’s ability to track vehicle locations meaning better fleet management for the hire car business.

Car sharing logistics

The logistics angle of car share services is something that’s been highlighted by Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick at various times, most recently at the service’s Sydney launch last November.

Another aspect of the car sharing and hire car booking services is their Big Data advantages which the online startups bring.

Historically, car hire companies have been reasonably good at gathering data on their customers with loyalty schemes, direct mailing and plugging into airline frequent flier programs. However they have been left behind by the Big Data boom in recent years.

Companies like Zipcar, Uber and taxi hailing apps like GoCatch have big data in their DNA, having been founded in the era of cloud computing and social media they have access to more information and a better ability to use the knowledge they gather.

Predicting the price surges

At Uber’s Sydney launch Kalanick described how Uber’s traffic volumes increase in San Francisco when the Giants win a game, the interesting thing is that the surge happens three hours before the match starts.

Insights like the traffic patterns around football games and holidays are gold to a high inventory business like hire car services. They are also important to the entire logistics industry.

This latter point is probably the most overlooked part of all with the current rush into social and mobile based apps – the market intelligence that these services gather.

While it’s tempting to dismiss that market intelligence as just monitoring who likes cats or cheeseburgers, the application of that data is transforming supermarkets, airlines and even concert venues.

Avis seem to have understood that it will be fascinating to see how they will use Zipcar’s data and whether their competitors will figure out the importance of what these services offer.

The Lives they Loved – Another future for journalism?

The New York Times asked readers to send in memories of loved ones who had passed away in 2012 – is The Lives They Loved one of the futures of 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.

Yelp’s problem with activists

Yelp and other online review sites have a problem when the Internet mob gets stirred up.

It’s been a bad couple of years for James Knight, a dentist in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

First his wife found some text messages he’d exchanged with Melissa, his attractive assistant who’d been with his practice for ten years.

Then James’ spouse demands Melissa is fired.

James then has what was no doubt a difficult conversation with Melissa’s husband explaining why she’s been sacked.

Then Melissa sues him for discrimination. He wins the case.

Melissa appeals to the state’s Supreme Court and loses there as well however the case now has national attention.

This attracts the ire of the Internet mob, who start posting bad reviews about James on Yelp despite most of them not even living in Fort Dodge, let alone using his service.

For Yelp, the rabble descending on James Knight’s review page is as much their problem as it is his.

Yelp is one of the leading customer review sites which are changing the way small business operates and getting “smashed on Yelp” isn’t good for one’s reputation.

Recently a builder also attracted the ire of the online lynch mob when he threatened to sue a customer over a poor Yelp review.

As consequence, his Yelp page was overwhelmed with negative reviews by people who’d never used his business. The service had to delete 65 of those reviews which clearly had nothing to do with the quality of service the builder provided.

The problem for Yelp, an other online review sites like Tripadvisor, is that for their sites to be trusted the reviews have to be reasonably accurate – self righteous internet mob skewing results is going to damage the service’s credibility as much as the targeted businesses.

What this means for Yelp is that the low cost online business model doesn’t work, for the site to be relevant and credible there has to be administrators checking reviews and dealing with these situations.

There’s also a lesson for all of us using the web – mindlessly joining online lynch mobs creates more damage than it fixes.

Picking on a mid-Western dentist because he appears to be a pussy whipped jerk isn’t really solving humanity’s problems – we can all find causes that are a better use of our time.

Poor journalism and social media

Fairfax gets the Sandy Hook shooter story wrong and blames social media and shows how broken their own journalism is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Facebook starts driving away brands

Could Facebook be more like old media than we thought?

A few days ago we looked at how giving marketing and communications control to Facebook was a mistake for businesses.

It seems US entrepreneur Mark Cuban agrees and he’s moving his basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks, and the 70 businesses he’s invested in away from Facebook onto other social media channels like Tumblr or even MySpace.

The final straw for Cuban was Facebook wanting to charge $3,000 to reach a million of the Maverick’s online fans.

Facebook’s response that the sponsored post program is not just about the service’s revenue, but also to reduce noise and spam has merit

Last week tech uber-blogger Robert Scoble complained about the noise on social media and many users agree as they find their social media services and email inbox clogged with messages.

Reducing irrelevant noise is essential for any online service to succeed. No-one likes to spam or be spammed and many startup social media platforms have failed because they’ve killed their brand by spamming users and their contacts.

In this respect social media is like journalism – it has to be timely, relevant and useful to its users. If it isn’t the readers will leave and the advertisers will soon follow.

The worry for Facebook’s investors is that the service could be caught between making no money from its massive user base and getting a reputation for irrelevant spam.

Could it be that Facebook has more in common with newspapers and other “old media” than we thought?

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.

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.

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.

Hacking the hacks

Do journalists have the skills to ride the Big Data wave?

Hacks and Hackers is an informal global network of meetings discussing the intersection of technology and journalism. The inaugural Sydney Hacks and Hackers meetup recently looked at how journalists use data and showed the challenges the news media face in an age where information isn’t scarce.

The panel in Sydney were Sharona Coutts, Investigative Reporter at Global Mail; Edmund Tadros, Data Journalist at Australian Financial Review; and Courtney Hohne, Director of Communications Google Australia.

Courtney looked at some of the big data opportunities for journalists, a topic covered in the Closed Data Doors post. One of the areas she highlighted was emergency services sending out PDFs of updates during crises like bushfires and floods.

Listening to Sharona and Edmund, it was clear they were two overworked but keen young journalists who had neither the resources or the training to deal with the data flowing into their organisations.

Because journalists in modern media organisations don’t have the skills or the resources to properly understand and use raw data the public ends up with relatively trivial stories like league tables of school exam results or council building approvals – both of which are important, but are misread and used to confect outrage against incompetent public servants and duplicitous politicians.

For the public servant, school teacher or even bus driver it’s understandable they don’t want their performance measured if the measure is going to be misused and possibly jeopardize their jobs.

A deeper problem for journalism is the skills of the trade. Both Edmund and Sharona are smart young journos who will go far; but both admitted they had no training in statistic and mathematics.

Even more worrying are the older journalists, when I mentioned the lack of older and more experienced journalists to the organiser she said none would agree to come on the panel. One suspects this is because forty and fifty year old journalists have even fewer data skills than their young colleagues.

This lack of skills or understanding of data is probably one of the biggest challenges facing the media. In a world awash with data, the role of journalists is to filter the feed, interpret and explain it.

Pure reportage is being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of news and information available; the 1980s model of opinion based journalism is also failing as the audience now realise they have a voice, and better informed opinions, than the experts and columnists.

One of the notable themes that seemed to jump out of the evening was the divide between journalists and the wider community that always seems to appear when the future of journalism is discussed.

Usually this expressed in terms of those employed by major mastheads sneering at “citizen journalists” but at Hacks and Hackers it was about “geeks and journos coming together.”

In reality there is no divide – good analytic and technology skills should be as much a part of journalism as any other field in a modern economy.

The fear from the Sydney Hacks and Hackers night is that the media industry is one of the sectors that’s failing to deal with technological change.

It’s hard not to think that journalists wondering at the power of spreadsheets and pivot tables is like 18th Century blacksmiths trying to figure out how steam engines can make better horseshoes.

For an industry that is so deeply challenged by technological change, it seems the news media is still unprepared for the changes that hit nearly a decade ago.