Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: journalism

  • Re-opening the comment section

    Re-opening the comment section

    The New York Times yesterday announced they will be abolishing their Public Editor role while opening up more of their articles to readers’ comments, a big shift in trends over the past decade.

    One of the internet’s broken promises was how allowing the audience to comment would usher in a new era of accountability and democracy.

    Sadly, it became apparent giving readers carte blanche opened a sewer of abuse, misinformation and libel. Faced with a whole range of risks, not to mention the psychological damage faced by staff members trying to engage with the public, most media organisations chose to be selective about the articles they opened comments on.

    Now the New York Times proposes to re-open most of their articles to readers’ comments.

    We are dramatically expanding our commenting platform. Currently, we open only 10 percent of our articles to reader comments. Soon, we will open up most of our articles to reader comments. This expansion, made possible by a collaboration with Google, marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers, to hear from them, and to respond to them.

    That the NYT is teaming with Google to enable readers’ comments is interesting – will the search engine giant be applying AI to the moderation or is this another attempt to pump life into their failed social media and identity service? It remains to be seen.

    Also what remains to be seen is if removing the Public Editor role affects journalism standards at the Times. The position at the newspaper was established in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal to oversee the organisation’s output and hold editors and journalists accountable for oversights.

    In the era of social media and an empowered readership, the New York Times’ publisher Arthur Sulzberger now believes the Public Editor role is redundant.

    The public editor position, created in the aftermath of a grave journalistic scandal, played a crucial part in rebuilding our readers’ trusts by acting as our in-house watchdog. We welcomed that criticism, even when it stung. But today, our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.

    So the comments section now becomes part of the editorial process, it will be an interesting experiment.

    In some respects, the New York Times’ embrace of social media feedback is a reflection of what many other organisations have done in other industries with ‘social listening’.

    The theory is paying attention to what customers say online gives management immediate feedback, however practice has shown most organisations lack the internal communications systems to take advantage of this. It also appears most executives care little about what the public thinks of them which negates the ‘people power’ aspect of social listening.

    If the Times can get this right, it will make the media outlet more responsive and effective. However history isn’t on their side.

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  • Funding journalism’s future

    Funding journalism’s future

    Following this week’s appearance before the Senate Committee into the Future of Public Interest Journalism, details of which are now up on Hansard, it’s worth reflecting on some of the ideas floated during the hearing on funding media organisations.

    As the union reps illustrated, the challenge facing media organisations is acute with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance spokespeople telling the committee how at least 25% of industry jobs have been lost in the last decade as the sector struggles with collapsing advertising revenues.

    Ideas to find new sources of income ranged from crowdfunding, government funding, tax concessions and levies on the internet platforms like Google and Facebook.

    Crowdfunding

    First up for the morning were the team from Crinkling News, a kids newspaper. Saffron Howden, the publication’s co-founder and editor described how the founders had self funded the publication but after a year of operations they were hoping to raise 200,000 dollars through indiegogo to keep the doors open.

    Senator Ludlam, the Committee’s Greens member, observed that running an appeal every year is hardly sustainable, something Howden agreed with saying the funds are to give the newspaper ‘more runway’.

    Crinkling made its $200,000 target this morning, so for now the paper is saved. It will be interesting to see if Howden and her co-founders will find that sustainable revenue model rather than just an accessible form of capital.

    Government subsidies

    One of the obvious models for Crinkling is a government subsidy, Senator Ludlam asked if the paper had received any funds from state education departments to which Howden replied they hadn’t.

    While for a specialist publication like Crinkling government subsidies may be an answer, most of those giving evidence were cautious about suggesting direct payments as an answer for the industry’s woes as it opens scope for interference in editorial policies.

    There is some precedent for this in Australia, with the Victorian government supporting The Conversation but given how arbitrary Australian government programs are – not to mention the priorities of spending taxpayers’ funds – it’s hard to see how politically acceptable that is.

    Tax concessions

    Something more politically acceptable may be tax concessions to investors and founders similar to the R&D grants available to technology companies or the producers’ offset available to film producers.

    I went further during my questioning and suggested something similar to the 10BA concessions that were available to the Australian film industry during the 1980s which unleashed a wave of innovation and new talent but were misused terribly by taxplanners – something that would give the Treasury apoplexy.

    While this is an idea that may well get legs during the political bargaining over the media reforms, it won’t however solve the revenue problem.

    Charitable or not-for-profit status

    A variation on the tax concession idea was to allow media companies to have not-for-profit or charitable tax status. It’s hard not quip that most media ventures are already run on basis where they don’t make any money.

    Under this idea, subscribers to media services would be able to claim their fees as a tax deduction which may encourage more people to sign up.

    This idea also seemed to find a lot of support from the Senators and may well form part of the political horse trading. Like some of the other ideas there may be a potential problem with defining what exactly is a media company or a ‘journalist’.

    One opportunity these last two options opens up is for philanthropic ventures, like the Guardian’s Scott Trust or the short lived Global Mail, to enter the field. Some cynics would say The Australian already operates on that model, but as the Global Mail’s brief life shows, generous benefactors tend to be rare.

    Reforming copyright

    Also attracting a lot of interest was the idea of updating copyright laws to force search engines, social media sites and content aggregators or scrapers to pay fees to creators. This could be done through an organisation like the Copyright Agency with fees passed onto media companies.

    Tightening the copyright laws has some appeal, but this could prove a double edged sword for journalists, writers and artists as fair dealing – or the US equivalent of fair use – becomes restricted and finds media organisation liable for using extracts of others’ works.

    It’s also unlikely to raise much unless there was a co-ordinated global push to make the major online companies pay fees which in turn would increase the costs of running the system.

    A ‘Google tax’

    There was much indignant huffing about services like Google and Facebook using content and the possibility of levying them for the privilege.

    Were this done internationally, this would be a huge pool but a number of speakers including Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood and freelance journalist Michael West pointed out, these services are also critical distribution channels and it is comparatively easy for publishers to block these sites if they chose.

    That they don’t choose to block Google is indicative of how critical the service is to distribution, so while Google takes most of the ad revenue the media companies are still dependent upon it. Taxing these services might be counterproductive.

    Where to for the future?

    Overall the suggestions were all worth considering but the real question of how do you make money from media wasn’t really answered. While tax breaks and levies may help, the fundamental truth is most news outlets are not financially sustainable in their current form.

    That in itself raises a question of whether incumbents like Fairfax and News Limited are really relevant to journalism at all – maybe the large established Twentieth Century companies don’t have a role in this era.

    Should that be true, the question of how journalism is funded still remains open. As mine, Michael West’s and Crinkle News’ tales described, there is little in the way of sustainable business models at the moment.

    Wednesday’s hearing didn’t give us clues to that viable model could be, so we continue the search.

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  • Journalism in the Twenty-First Century

    Journalism in the Twenty-First Century

    Today I’ve been invited to appear before the Australian Senate’s committee on the Future of Public Interest Journalism. Here’s my planned opening remarks looking at the challenges facing media organisations, particularly in an Australian context.

    I’d like to start off by pointing out I’m not a career journalist, I fell into the media industry through a series of happy accidents starting with appearing on ABC Radio to discuss the Y2K bug twenty years ago, this evolved to where I’m now a freelance contributor to all the major Australian media outlets.

    As a longstanding contributor to various ABC stations across Australia ranging from ABC Darwin through South Australia’s Riverland to the national Nightlife program where the hosts pretend to be floating somewhere above Middle Australia rather than admit they are in the Sydney studio, I have seen some profound changes within the organisation.

    Due to cost cutting and political interference, the organisation has steadily seen power and resources concentrated in the Sydney head office to the detriment of local coverage and regional stations.

    To be fair to the ABC, the same process has happened in commercial media – in print, radio and television – as flawed policy decisions over the last forty years have seen market power accumulating in Sydney and Melbourne at the expense of local content, diversity and regional coverage.

    Wasting the digital dividend

    One of the great missed opportunities of our time was the gifting of the digital TV spectrum to the established radio and TV operators.

    The digital broadcasting switch was an opportunity to bring diversity back into Australia’s media landscape and spur both journalism and the creative industries.

    A few minutes watching what the Free To Air networks have done with those new channels shows how that resource has been squandered.

    This concentration of market power has left Australian media organisations saddled with a protected and well paid breed of managers incapable of responding to the threats posed by US and Chinese social media networks – not to mention streaming services like Netflix or the continuing catastrophic declines in advertising revenues.

    Journalism as a team effort

    Producing quality media to compete globally is a team effort. Good journalism isn’t just the result of good reporters, it requires good sub-editors, producers, researchers, photographers and a small army of other skilled workers. Not to mention strong, principled editors and station managers.

    The media industry’s casualisation, something as freelancer I’ve encountered the brutal reality of, makes it difficult to develop those skills. The ABC is a good example of this where, outside of management and administration, there are few salaried staff aged under 40. This has great ramifications for the workforce, industry and the community.

    It’s difficult to see what governments can do in the face of the global industry’s changing economics, particularly in the advertising industry’s shift.

    We should keep in mind however if we were having this discussion a hundred years ago we would have been asking how people can make money from radio. Entrepreneur David Sarnoff who founded Radio Corporation of Australia figured out the commercial broadcasting model in the 1920s and that industry went on to become one of the most profitable of the last century.

    So it may well be that encouraging a new generation of media entrepreneurs and journalists who can figure out 21st Century business models can be the best thing Parliament can do to ensure a diverse media culture that tells modern Australian stories to today’s Australians.

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  • Digital disruption and civil rights

    Digital disruption and civil rights

    Next Saturday, on the 21st of May, I’ll be sitting on a panel for the Talking Justice series on how digital disruption is impacting on journalism, individual rights and social justice. This is an early draft of what I plan to be saying about the topic.

    The series will be held at Bendigo’s Ulumbarra Theatre in regional Victoria, tickets are available from the Loddon Campaspe Community Law Centre website.

    In the middle of last year I stopped writing for The Australian after their budget for freelance tech journalists ran out. Over the previous two years the newspaper had been my main source of income.

    To be fair to The Australian’s management, this was not surprising as at the turn of the century the paper’s IT section was the bible of the nation’s technology industry, often running to 64 pages as standalone liftout. It was a true river of gold for News Limited that employed over a dozen staff and contributors.

    Now, on a good week there’s a couple of adverts in the single page section and it employs two and half full time equivalent staff.

    The decline of The Australian’s IT section is not in itself remarkable – almost every newspaper has the same story as advertisers have moved away. In the case of the Australian IT, the employment adverts that funded the section’s heyday long ago moved to dedicated online sites.

    How a million flowers didn’t bloom

    For the broader media – including most news websites – Google and Facebook’s dominance in online advertising has meant even the digital dimes have become scarcer. Many of the ‘born digital’ or ‘web native’ publications are just as cash starved as their incumbent competitors, albeit with far lower cost bases.

    The drying up of advertisers’ cash has left the media model in tatters and the early promise of the internet allowing millions of new media sites to bloom has long ago proved false leaving the world of journalism a hungry, desperate place.

    For cyber utopians like myself who believed the web would usher in a new era where power  could be held accountable through citizens’ websites, blogs and social social media accounts, that disappointment is even greater as the internet is seeing power further centralised with extensive data dossiers being collected on every individual.

    An example of just how comprehensively data is being collected and used is shown in this clip from the 2008 US Presidential election campaign.


    That description is almost innocent by today’s standards as there are many, many more data points with social media, connected devices and – most of all – our smartphones tracking every moment of our lives and activities.

    Imbalance of Power

    A good example of how data is being used against citizens is the recent Not My Debt debacle where the government and Centrelink misused information to harass social security recipients.

    Stung by the public outrage, the agency saw fit to leak a critic’s confidential personal data to a journalist, an action later justified by a departmental secretary as necessary to protect their organisation,. A view seemingly legitimised by both the Australian Federal Police and the responsible minister who both saw no legal or ethical problem with such behaviour.

    That a experienced and long serving journalist along with a metropolitan newspaper saw fit to publish that lady’s personal circumstances also tells us the mainstream media, struggling as it is with both money and ethics, may not necessarily the protector of our civil liberties.

    Rights and data brokers

    Governments are not the only risk to our civil liberties, our connected lives give businesses huge control over what we say and do as well.

    With the Internet of Things our cars, smoke alarms, electricity meters, even toasters and fridges are gathering information on everything we do and this information can be used in ways we don’t expect, from denying credit to identifying us as employment or credit risks.

    Added to this is the end of ownership, where a purchase is only a license to use a product and that right can be cut off at any time.

    In the US, farmers are downloading pirated Ukrainian firmware for their tractors so they can maintain them. In many countries, including Australia, even that may be illegal.

    Should a consumer find their product is remotely shut down, they may have few legal remedies as many agreement insist on compulsory, and expensive, private arbitration rather than using the courts or tribunals to settle disputes. The terms and conditions underpinning the software licenses are so restrictive that it’s almost impossible to hold any supplier to account.

    Ultimately to protect the general public from these corporate and government excesses, a strong media is required to publicise official malfeasance and equalise the power imbalance with the rich and powerful.

    Where will a strong media come from?

    Right now it’s hard to see where that strong media will come from with today’s broken advertising and revenue models. However it was equally hard a hundred years to see how people would make money from producing radio programs yet the broadcasting industry turned out to be one of the Twentieth Century’s most profitable.

    To the question of ‘is everyone now a journalist?’ the answer has to be ‘no’ – the risks and costs are too high for the ordinary person who has to worry about keeping their job in a world where timid managers, not just at Centrelink, are frightened of even the mildest criticism.

    Coupled with that are the high legal barriers, from defamation to confidentiality clauses the barriers to reporting on matters are steadily being increased and the costs of defending oneself from plaintiffs who’d rather not see stories written are punitive and beyond the means of all but the richest media organisations.

    Rethinking journalism

    It could well be that we’re returning to an earlier period of journalism where the trade was poorly paid and regarded, it was only during the post World War II years that the occupation became something that supported middle lifestyles.

    With the stakes so high in an increasingly data driven world, it’s essential we do define the role of journalists is in today’s world along with give citizens the technological and legal tools so we can hold the powerful to account in the connected and data rich 21st Century.

    Digital disruption has deeply affected the media and it is redefining our rights as corporations and governments use technology to amass more power. We as citizens, voters and consumers have to exercise what influences we can to ensure our rights in a digital word.

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  • Towards the post journalist media world

    Towards the post journalist media world

    For years I resisted attending the Tech Leaders conference, formerly Kickstart, as I felt a bit of an imposter being invited to attend as a journalist.  As a consequence I missed the peak days of the event.

    In the ‘good old days’ dozens of journalists, most in the employ of profitable media companies, would fly to a Queensland resort to wine, dine and debauch themselves as PR agencies who were picking up the tab would try to introduce their clients and pitch to the group of hungover scribes.

    Funding these events was relatively straightforward, public relations agencies and their clients were happy to pay substantial sums for access to journalists. In the golden days of technology journalism, large IT supplements were full of lucrative advertising for jobs and products.

    That river of advertising gold has long dried up and in the technology industry that shift has been exacerbated by the collapse in IT industry margins which has further hurt advertising budgets.

    As the industry has faded so too have the numbers of media professionals, many journalists have either moved into PR roles themselves or are now desperate freelancers.

    The industry shift to freelancers has been problematic for the organisers as the remaining staff journalists are chronically time poor so can’t lightly take a day away from the desk and the independent reporters don’t offer direct access into trade journals and general news outlets.

    Events like Tech Leaders are giving the PR industry a glimpse of the journalist free media landscape of the near future where the traditional pitching to outlets in the hope of being published is effectively obsolete. Looking at the numbers at Tech Leaders, it’s clear that world is not far off.

    The question everyone in the industry has to ask is ‘how do people perceive I add value?’ For many, including myself, the answer is ‘we don’t’.

    In an age where there is an almost unlimited supply of information and commentary, journalists and PR people have to find a new way to convince the market they add value.

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