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.

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Eating the Old Man’s lunch

Optus’ purchase of Eatability is ironic given Fairfax’s and Telstra’s failure with Citysearch.

Optus today announced the purchase of restaurant review site Eatability for $6 million.

Eatability is one of the services that’s destroyed the business models of both the phone directory business and that of newspapers.

Thirty years ago the Sydney Morning Herald launched its Good Living section and it became the way people went found where the good places were to eat.

Diners wanting to make a reservation at the hip eating places being reviewed in Good Living picked up the phone book.

Now they do neither, they go to web sites like Eatabilty or Yelp where they get reviews, contact details and everything else they need about the venue.

Which killed the advertising revenues that newspapers and phone directories depended upon.

The sad thing is both the newspapers and Yellow Pages could have owned this space. Citysearch was setup by Fairfax to address the online market and it was sold to Telstra when the newspaper chain struggled to make it work.

Citysearch today languishes neglected and nearly forgotten under the Sensis umbrella. Optus now owning Citysearch’s biggest local competitor which must bring a hollow laugh to those involved in the early days of Fairfax’s digital experiment.

Whether Eatability thrives under Optus remains to be seen, but it illustrates just how incumbent strengths like telephone directories are being eroded in the online world.

Old men have to start moving quickly if they don’t want upstarts eating their lunch.

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Australia – the Noah’s Ark of business

Cosy duopolies leave the Australian business community exposed to a changing world.

During a week of big business news, the buyout of another boutique brewery by a big corporation was barely noticed, but Lion Nathan’s takeover of the Little Creatures brewery illustrates the duopoly problem that is crippling Australian business.

A few days after that deal was announced, rumours that Business Spectator – which the above link takes you to – would be taken over by News Limited started circulating. These turned out to be true.

In both cases, existing duopoly players bought out small competitors, a process that’s been going on since Australia decided industry duopolies were necessary to protect the nation’s managerial classes, and these takeovers kill genuine innovation and stymie new thinking.

For those duopolies the definition of success is grabbing a few percent of market share off each other while using their market powers to screw down supplier costs.

A good of example of this is the retail duopoly, the farmers and producers get screwed while the supermarket chains engage in price wars driven by truly awful advertising campaigns.

Un-imaginative, un-original and plain un-inspiring. Any smart young kid wanting to get ahead in the retail industries knows they have to look overseas for job opportunities or inspiration.

Therein lies the real problem with Australia’s duopoly business culture – it triggers a brain drain as comfortable managements block any innovative new thinking as being too hard or just unnecessary.

In the media duopoly, telecoms analyst Paul Budde illustrated the problem in his account on trying to convince Fairfax of where the media industry was heading in a connected economy.

Fairfax’s management didn’t get it and didn’t care – today they still don’t get but they care deeply as their business model crumbles.

It’s not just future managers that are looking overseas for opportunity, the customers are well.

The duopoly model that evolved in Australia over the last thirty years depended upon the tyranny of distance to act as an effective trade wall. The Internet has demolished that wall for most industries.

Almost every Australian duopoly is living on borrowed time. If, like the proprietors of Business Spectator or Little Creatures, your business plan relies on selling out to a local duopolist then you’d better move quick.

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Fairfax of the Future

Can an iconic media company be saved?

The embattled board of Fairfax has announced major changes to the way they publish their newspapers. Is it too little, too late for this iconic media organisation?

As the board of Fairfax struggles with poor performance and angry demands from prominent shareholders, the company has announced a change of focus and a reduction in their printing capacity.

In a presentation given by the Chief Executive Greg Hywood, the company’s management goes through the scope and logic of their changes which are mainly around their distribution networks.

Rethinking print

The clearest message from the presentation is that readers have moved online with over three-quarters of readers now accessing the Age and Sydney Morning Herald digitally.

While there are still substantial print revenues in their metro division, around $500 million dollars a year right now, it’s clear Fairfax has to reduce printing and distribution costs.

Cutting the Chullora and Tullamarine printing plants makes sense given Fairfax has regional capacity just outside both Melbourne and Sydney.

Shrinking the SMH and Age to a “compact” size – tabloid being the word that dare not speak its name – will get shrieks of outrage from those wedded to the broadsheet concept, but really doesn’t make much difference to the online readership that represent the future.

Digital first

Fairfax’s “digital first” strategy where online publication take precedence over the print editions will be detailed in a few weeks, this tis a change that should have happened years ago.

Despite the wringing of ink stained hands by journalists who grew up in the era of hot metal printing presses, the news industry has been digital for over a quarter century. In fact the two printing plants now being closed were the digital successors to the old presses on Sydney’s Broadway and Melbourne’s Spencer Street.

That Fairfax’s management is only realising newspapers are just another distribution medium illustrates how late they are to understanding the changes which have happened in the last twenty years.

Using terms like “Digital First” only indicates an obsession with distribution methods rather than the product itself.

Content above all

Fairfax’s product is the news content which is still a valuable commodity – almost everything driving the Australian news cycle comes out of the metropolitan print media.

What appears in the Sydney Morning Herald, Age, Daily Telegraph or Herald Sun drives most of the day’s radio, television and social media coverage in their cities. It shouldn’t be under estimated how powerful both publications are and it is why Gina Rinehart wants a stake in Fairfax.

That value could see paywalls work for Fairfax, but content has to be worth paying for if readers are going to reluctantly open their wallets.

A product worth paying for?

Having a product worth paying for is where the real challenge lies for Fairfax.

Right now much of the content sucks – there’s too much syndication which can be sourced elsewhere, for instance most of the technology section has article that appeared two days earlier on Techmeme or Mashable.

In domestic sections like politics and property the bulk of the “journalism” is repeating other peoples’ agendas rather than reporting facts or driving debate. Much of what Fairfax’s Canberra correspondents report are anonymous briefings from “party figures” while the property section regurgitates the latest spin from real estate agents and property developers.

Over in travel and food, those sections now largely consist of barely rehashed media releases and it’s no accident readers are fleeing those sections to more relevant, and honest, food and travel blogs.

All of these sections have to be revamped if Fairfax is to survive. This will need new editors and probably wholesale staff changes.

A relevant future

The future for Fairfax is being relevant to the communities it serves. Already newspapers are irrelevant and increasingly 1970s style journalism is being ignored.

Late last week the Prime Minister met with a group a bloggers in an attempt to soften her image with key women’s groups.

Despite the sneering of the Fairfax Canberra correspondents, that meeting at Kirribilli House illustrates how media is changing – to politicians, readers and advertisers the old newspapers and their journalists are no longer relevant.

Hopefully Fairfax’s board can ensure the company stays relevant and survives – the Australian media sector is dominated by too few voices as it is and losing one of the biggest players would be a disaster.

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Product Review: Australian Financial Review iPad app

How does the AFR’s latest iPhone application stack up.

I really wanted the Australian Financial Review’s iPad application to be great as the country desperately needs good reporting on the platforms people are using. Unfortunately Fairfax’s misguided commercial judgement gets in the way of delivering a killer app.

Many publishers are putting faith in iPad applications, seeing them as an opportunity to catch a market that is fleeing paper publications for their online equivalents.

To meet this demand, the Australian Financial Review has released their iPad application with a free fourteen day trial and plans starting from $59 per month for the digital editions.

It’s telling the subscription plans favour those buying the paper editions as the feeling from using the iPad app is that Fairfax’s management would rather you bought the paper.

This continued focus on print shows in the news not being updated – a reader of the app in an airport lounge at 6am will find little different logging at lunchtime or in a cab on the way home in the evening.

Clinging to the old news timetable is admirable but it means the AFR isn’t taking advantage of its marketplace strengths or the talents of its staff.

One of the reasons the iPad has become so popular as a reading device is the rich, relevant content publishers can display, for instance The New York Times iPad app, their stories on the Syrian massacre in Al-Houla link directly to Youtube clips from local news sources.

So it is disappointing is that the AFR hasn’t harnessed the multimedia advantages of the iPad. For instance Canberra correspondent Laura Tingle’s political stories don’t even link to Laura’s video page on the service.

Similarly a story on BHP won’t have any links to the AFR’s profile of BHP, its stock price or financial results. These are features that could make the AFR’s a killer application for anyone wanting to understand the Australian business scene.

Compounding the issue is Fairfax’s unfortunate policy of reluctantly linking to outside sources – this short sighted view devalues all Fairfax’s online efforts as it detracts from the authority of their broadsheet and business publications. This again is true in the AFR iPad application.

Overall, the AFR’s iPad app is a missed opportunity which is a shame as the Australian business sector desperately needs good reporting delivered through the tools today’s executives and investors are using. Hopefully the next version will do better.

The Australian Financial Review online subscription was provided by Fairfax and the AFR. I have free subscriptions available for the best two comments on the blog this week so fire away with your views on this post or others.

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