One of the new models for journalism is being sponsored by corporate interests.
This works well until the news turns against the corporate sponsor, as Australia’s ANZ now discovers.
For companies there are many good reasons for to have their own media centres, but to pretend they are twentieth century style Washington Post, Watergate journalism is probably hoping for too much.
The British Broadcasting Corporation could be about to abolish its radio and television divisions reports the London Telegraph. This could be a pointer for how many other businesses will revamp themselves in the face of digital disruption.
As audiences change, the organisation’s Director General is looking at restructuring the 94 year old broadcaster into new divisions based around content rather than platform.
The demarcation between radio and television, let alone the Internet, made sense in the 1950s as the cost of production was high and the specific skill sets to get a radio program to air were very different to those of television.
Now with increased automation many, although not all, of those differences have vanished and with the internet changing distribution methods it’s harder to justify duplicating production.
Another important aspect of the BBC’s mooted restructure is streamlining of management, with the Telegraph noting how this would be an opportunity to cull the executive ranks.
The changes will lead to a new round of senior executive departures, as Lord Hall seeks to flatten the corporation’s labyrinthine management structures, and reinvest more money on-screen.
How the BBC is restructuring itself in the face of technological change is a lesson for many other businesses, not just media companies.
It’s nice and comfortable living in an echo chamber and we’re all guilty of it one way or another. An example of how insular echo chambers can be are two surveys done by UK company Apollo Research on who UK and US tech writers follow on social media.
The answer was each other, with most tech writers following a common core of twenty in the UK and thirty in the US. Basically the groups are talking to each other which explains how technology stories tend to gain momentum as variations on the same stories feed through the network.
While technology journalists are bad for this, it could be argued their political colleagues are far more guilty of this group think as their working in close quarters makes them even more insular and inward looking. That explains much of the political reporting we see today which often seems divorced from the real world concerns of voters or challenges facing governments.
For all of us, not just journalists, it’s easy to become trapped in our own little echo chambers and find it harder to think outside the pack as the web and platforms like Facebook deliver us the information we and our friends find confirms our own biases.
Clearly, thinking with the pack creates a lot of risks and for businesses also raises opportunities. At a time of fast moving technology and falling barriers to entry, thinking outside the prevailing group could even be a good survival strategy.
A good example of industry group think is the US motor industry of the 1970s where they dismissed Japanese competitors as being cheap and substandard – similar to how many think about China today – yet by the end of the decade Japan’s automakers had captured most of the world’s market.
On a national level, Australia is a good example of dangerous groupthink as up until three years ago the consensus among governments, public servants, economists and business leaders was the China resources boom would last indefinitely.
Today that consensus looks foolish, not that those within the echo chamber are admitting they made the wrong call, and now governments are struggling to find new revenue streams as the expected rivers of iron ore and coal royalties fail to arrive.
For Australian businesses, governments looking to raise revenues are another factor to plan for and getting one’s tax return and company paperwork in on time might be a good idea to avoid fines from overzealous public servants.
The bigger lesson for us all however is not to think like the group. While it may feel safe in the herd, we could well be galloping over a cliff.
One simple way to avoid groupthink, and that cliff, is not to copy the tech writers or the Australian economic experts who mis-called the China Boom. With the web and social media we can listen to what other voices are saying, most importantly those of our markets and customers.
A varied information diet is something we all need t0 understand what our markets, economies and communities are doing. It might be comfortable huddling down with the herd, but you’ll never stand out from the pack.
We may have reached Peak Content suggests Kevin Anderson in The Media Briefing as media companies, social media services and sharing platforms flood the world with information, rendering a lot of what’s being produced by media companies effectively worthless.
For publishers trying to make money from advertising this has been the reality for the last decade as the market has been spread thinner as thousands of new channels have developed and the established players have doubled down on their efforts to churn out content.
To illustrate the content explosion Anderson cites Columbia Journalism Review’s 2010 feature The Hamster Wheel where Dean Starkman described the effect of media outlets’ focus on churning out content with a description of the Wall Street Journal’s output.
“According to a CJR tally using the Factiva database owned by the paper’s parent, News Corp., the Journal’s staff a decade or so ago produced stories at a rate of about 22,000 a year, all while doing epic, and shareholder-value-creating, work, like bringing the tobacco industry to heel. This year, theJournal staff produced almost as many stories—21,000—in the first six months.”
While that was bad enough new players were pumping even more content onto the interwebs as Anderson points out, in 2013 the Huffington Post put out 1,600 pieces a day from its 550 staffers and an uncounted army of unpaid bloggers.
The vast bulk of what is being put out is trash, in Huffington Post’s case well web optimised garbage, that adds no value to readers and is only attracting fractions of a penny per article. The model, as both Anderson and Starkman point out, is broken and no-0ne is paying much attention any more.
Fixing the broken attention model is what online travel site Skift are exploring as they rationalise their operations to focus on delivering more relevant content to their audience.
Skift’s co-founder Rafat Ali described how the company refocused on its core purpose of informing travel industry professionals about their sector and stopped regurgitating syndicated stories and those of less value.
We gave up chasing scale. We took out *all* goals on traffic on the site, for everyone. We could do this because we didn’t have tons of outside money pumping through our veins, and this was a useless pressure we created for ourselves in an effort to show the illusion of growth to investors. And since we weren’t chasing investors, we didn’t need to chase what they would consider scale. It was a vanity metric.
We cut back on spending any money on getting users through Outbrain/Facebook/Twitter. We cut back on the number of stories we were doing on a daily basis, on chasing the tail on disposable news stories. We also cut back on syndicating our stories — in which we put in a lot of effort at the start, publishing on NBC News, CNN, Quartz, Fox News, Business Insider, Mashable and many others, to zero effect on our revenues — and also cut back on publishing useless filler syndicated stories we got from a third party syndication service.
Chasing those ‘vanity metrics’ was killing Skift, just as it is for most of the publishing industry in the views of Starkman and Anderson.
While we’re still some way off finding the model that works for online publishing, Skift’s stripping back to the basics seems to be an important step in finding what’s profitable.
The biggest problem though facing the publishing industry is convincing consumers, or advertisers, of the value they are adding in a world of almost unlimited information. This is a challenge that many industries are going to face.
A constant with social media companies is their fascination with celebrities. At the first opportunity they’ll trash their credibility and burn their credibility with users to curry favour with a b-list celebrity.
The most damaging example of this was Google making an exception of its ‘real names’ policy for celebrity Google+ accounts. In making an exception for pop stars, the company destroyed any argument it had for insisting users had to use their birth names in order to use their service.
In their quest to be relevant Twitter’s management has consistently made itself look like a simpering bunch of star struck groupies in pandering to celebrities. Which they’ve done one again with their Moments service as Josh Dickson point out.
Probably one of the worst examples though is the story of Andrés Iniesta and his Instagram account.
One morning last week Iniesta found his Instagram account had been suspended for breaching the ‘terms of use.’
Iniesta was baffled and couldn’t find how he’s breached the terms, three times he tried to reach out to Instagram and was ignored. In the meantime his Instagram account started posting pictures of his namesake, a Spanish soccer star.
Only after posting his story on Medium did Iniesta get a response – and an apology – from Instagram’s PR people.
It turned out the only breach Iniesta had committed was to be born with the same name as a FC Barcelona star.
Despite having not actually breached Instagram’s terms and conditions, Iniesta had his account taken with no notice and certainly no process.
For the thousands of ‘social media influencers’ and the brands trying to use these service as channels to connect to a fragmented audience Instagram’s actions are a reminder that all their efforts are built on sand – years of work can be wiped out at the whim of a faceless and unaccountable bureaucrat.
Ultimately it’s the social media services who lose the most from their high handed treatment of their users, as it becomes apparent to both advertisers and ordinary account holders that everything they post is impermanent then the trust in the service is gone.
The greatest hypocrites in today’s business world are the social media services – Twitter, Facebook and a host of others which want you to share your intimate details with them for their own commercial use.
As Andrés Iniesta found, the social media service’s commitment to openness and transparency vanishes the moment a user has a problem.
For celebrities, or those well-connected, no such problems exist. One instant message or phone call to their contact within Facebook, Twitter or Google and the problem is fixed.
Ultimately though that insider game and obsession with celebrity will undo the social media services. For the moment though, all their pretences of being identity services or journals of records should be taken with a lot of scepticism.