Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: media

  • 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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  • Clerks, Dying Videos and Culture Clashes: Links of the week

    Clerks, Dying Videos and Culture Clashes: Links of the week

    The race to rescue VHS tapes, how Ford lost Google and the fascinating world of London legal clerks are among last week’s interesting links.

    London clerks

    Inside the antiquated, but very lucrative, world of London barristers’ clerks.  A fascinating a look at one aspect of the English legal profession where old traditions have conveniently merged with modern fees.

    Saving VHS tapes

    One of the banes of modern culture is shifting standards. As VHS tapes decay, researchers are racing to preserve the culture of the 1980s and 90s, reports US National Public Radio.

    Google and Ford clash cultures

    Joint ventures and business partnerships are often problematic, as Ford found in their abortive autonomous vehicle project with Google.

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  • Crunching the middle classes

    Crunching the middle classes

    This piece originally appeared in The Australian in July 2014. I’m republishing it here given the recent future of work related posts.

    For the past four decades it’s been the working class that has suffered the brunt of the effects of globalisation and automation in the workforce. Now machines are taking middle class jobs, with serious implications for societies like Australia that have staked their future on white collar, knowledge-based service industries.

    Yesterday, the Associated Press announced it was replacing business journalists with computer programs, following sports reporting where algorithms have delivering match reports for some years.

    Some cynical media industry commentators would argue rewriting PR releases or other people’s stories — the model of many new media organisations — is something that should be done by machines. Associated Press’ management has come to the same view with business data feeds.

    AP’s managing editor Lou Ferrara explained in a company blog post how the service will pull information out of company announcements and format them into standard news reports.

    Ferrara wrote of the efficiencies this brings for AP: “Instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter.”

    The benefit for readers is that AP can cover more companies with fewer journalists, the question is how many people can afford to read financial journals if they no longer have jobs?

    Making middle managers redundant

    Many of those fields that cheered the loss of manufacturing are themselves affected by the same computer programs taking the jobs of journalists; any job, trade or profession that is based on regurgitating information already stored on a database can be processed the same way.

    For lawyers, accountants, and armies of form processing public servants, computers are already threatening jobs — as with journalism, things are about to get much worse in those fields, as mining workers are finding with automated mine trucks taking high-paid jobs.

    Most vulnerable of all could well be managers; when computers can automate financial reports, monitor the workplace and make many day-to-day decisions then there’s little reason for many middle management positions.

    Removing information gatekeepers

    To make matters worse for white collar middle managers, many of their positions are only needed in organisations built around paper based communication flows; in an age of collaborative tools there’s no need to gatekeepers to control the movement of information to the executive suite.

    Irish economist David McWilliams — his television series on the rise of the Celtic Tiger, The Pope’s Children, and the causes of the Global Financial Crisis, Follow The Money, are highly recommended viewing – last week suggested that the forces that disrupted the working classes in the 1970s and 80s are now coming for middle classes.

    “The industrial class was undermined by both technological change and globalisation, but rather than lament this, many people who were unaffected by this social catastrophe labelled what happened from 1980 to 2010 as the “inevitable consequences” of global competition.” Mc Williams writes.

    Those ‘inevitable consequences’ are now coming for the middle classes, asserts McWilliams.

    On the right side of progress

    While this is sounds frightening it may not be bad for society as whole; the Twentieth Century saw two massive shifts in employment — the shift from manufacturing to services in the later years, and the shift from agriculture to city-based occupations earlier in the century.

    A hundred years ago nearly a third of Australians worked in the agriculture sector; today it’s three per cent. Despite the cost to regional communities, the overall economy prospered from this shift.

    Answers in the makers movement

    The question today though is what jobs are going to replace those white collar jobs that did so well from the 1980s? The Maker Movement may have answers for governments and businesses wondering how to adapt to a new economy.

    Two weeks ago President Barack Obama welcomed several dozen leaders of America’s new manufacturing movement to a Maker Faire at the White House, where he proclaimed “Today’s DIY Is Tomorrow’s ‘Made in America’”.

    In Singapore, the government is putting its hopes on these new technologies boosting the country’s manufacturing industry in one of the world’s highest-cost centres.

    “The future of manufacturing for us is about disruptive technologies, areas like 3D printing, automation and robotics,” Singapore’s Economic Development Board Managing Director Yeoh Keat Chuan told Reuters earlier this year.

    Britain too is experimenting with modern technologies, as the BBC’s World of Business reports about how the country is reinventing its manufacturing industry.

    Tim Chapman of the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre describes how the economics of manufacturing changes in a high-cost economy with a simple advance in machining rotor disks for Rolls-Royce Trent jet engines.

    “These quite complex shaped grooves were taking 54 minutes of machining to make each of these slots. Rolls-Royce came to us and said can ‘can you improve the efficiency of this? Can you cut these slots faster?’”

    “We reduced the cutting time from 54 minutes to 90 seconds.”

    “That’s the kind of process improvement that companies need to achieve to manufacture in the UK.”

    While leaders in the US, UK and Singapore ponder the future of manufacturing, Australian governments continue to have faith in their 1980s models of white collar employment — little illustrates how far out of touch the nation’s political classes are with reality when they proclaim Sydney’s future as an Asian banking centre or Renminbi trading hub.

    Old business ideas

    In the apparatchiks’ fevered imaginations this involves rooms full of sweaty white men in red braces yelling ‘buy’ into telephones as shown in 1980s Wall Street movies. In truth, the computers took most of those jobs two decades ago.

    As McWilliams points out, the dislocations to the manufacturing industries of the 1970s and 80s were welcomed by those in the professions as the inevitable cost of ‘progress’.

    Now progress might be coming for them. Our challenge is to make sure we’re on the right side of that progress.

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