media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Facebook as the family newsletter

The online and traditional media frenzies over the royal baby show how times are changing for the media and families.

This week’s Royal birth was a curious mix of the old and modern – a cringing fawning by the media over the family and baby which wouldn’t have been out of place of place in a black and white 1950s newsreel coupled with a modern frenzy on social media.

In the social media world, the Washington Post reports there were almost one million mentions of the royal birth on Facebook in the hour following the news. It’s an interesting reflection of how communications have evolved.

Where once we shared news of life events by letter, then telegraph and later the phone; we now broadcast our own news over social media services, particularly Facebook.

Increasingly for families, Facebook has been the main way people keep in touch with their more distant friends and relatives. Your cousin in Brazil, aunty in Germany or former workmate in Thailand can all keep up with the news in your life through social networks.

The Royal family itself is an example of this, having set up their own Facebook page for the new arrival and it shows of how ‘weak ties’ are strengthened by the social media connections.

Another aspect of social media is the ability to filter out noise. If you’re like me, the royal baby is about as interesting as origami classes but I was spared most of the hype by not looking at broadcast media and sticking to my online services where it was just another story.

While being able to filter out what you consider ‘noise’ risks creating écho chambers’ it also means the online channels are becoming more useful for both relevant news and family events.

That’s an important change in personal communications we need to consider. We also have to remember those baby photos we post to Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest are now licensed to those services as well.

One of the great challenges for this decade is balancing the privacy and security aspects of these new communications channels with the usefulness of the services.

In the meantime though they are a great substitute for a family newsletter.

Image courtesy of Hortongrou through sxc.hu

The sport of racing dinosaurs

Bud Selig’s refusal to use email tells us how major sport administrators are insulated from the realities of the modern economy.

The admission from Bud Selig, the US Major League Baseball Commissioner, that he has never used email raised lots of eyebrows around the world.

As Business Insider notes, Selig is 79 years old and there are plenty of other sports administrators challenged by technology so it’s understandable that the commissioner might not see the need to use a technology that became common twenty years ago.

Bud Selig’s story illustrates a much more important issue facing the professional sports industry, that it’s run on an aging business model.

The last fifty years has been very good for professional sport as television and Pay-TV networks bid sporting rights higher across the world.

In most nations, the dominant sport did extremely well as broadcasters fought each other; the Olympics, Soccer leagues in most of the world along with baseball, American football and basketball in the US, Cricket in India, Aussie Rules in Australia, Rugby in South Africa and New Zealand all became incredibly rich.

There weren’t many competitive pressures on the managements of those sport as the dominant sports rarely had any competition, it was a matter of just playing the TV executives off each other.

As a consequence, many sports are run by people with a somewhat exaggerated sense of privilege – they believe it’s their talent, not Rupert Murdoch’s or NBC’s money, that is responsible for their game’s riches.

Bud can dismiss the disbelieving gasps of people in the real economy because for most of his career the only competition he’s had to deal with was from his colleagues has he fought his way to the top job which he won in 1998.

In the real economy, there’s no such luxury. In fact, email may be becoming yesterday’s technology as social media and collaborative tools take over. David Thodey at Telstra and Atos’ Thierry Breton are two leaders in this field.

The danger for sporting organisations is that they are ripe for disruption, so far broadcast media rights have stood up well while revenues in other parts of the entertainment and publishing industries has collapsed. There’s no guarantee though that broadcast sports will remain immune from those changes.

Should disruption come along, even just in the form of sporting rights stagnating, many professional codes will suddenly find inefficiencies like Bud Selig are an expensive luxury.

While Bud’s story is amusing, in reality there’s little the rest of us can learn from how Major League Baseball’s senior executives run their offices.

Image of Bud Selig courtesy of bkabak through Flickr.

Are local governments the key to hyperlocal media success?

Does New York City’s partnership with Nextdoor.com create an opportunity for hyperlocal media?

Wired Magazine reports New York City residents are to get their own social network as the local government teams up with Nextdoor.com to provide a neighbourhood information service.

The aim of the partnership between Nextdoor.com and New York City is to improve the delivery of local services to residents.

The partnership means Nextdoor, which connects residents into geographic social networks based on their verified addresses, will be fully integrated with New York government departments, to be used by police, fire, utility, and other agencies. Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia anticipates the city will use the service to post information about power outages, construction notices, traffic accidents, and weather events like tropical storms, among many other potential use cases, bolstering municipal efficiency and citizen engagement.

On the face of it, this seems a great way for local government to communicate with residents, but it may be this arrangement turns out be a way to make hyperlocal media work.

A continued disappointment are the failures of creating local neighbourhood news services — known as hyperlocal media — with NBC recently closing down its Everyblock operation and AOL struggles with its Patch service.

Part of the problem is that hyperlocal news is labour intensive, doesn’t scale very well and without the locals becoming part of the online community, these services struggle to get traction.

Another aspect is the advertising model, local newspapers were insanely profitable when they were the main way for neighbourhood businesses and real estates agencies to advertise.

The web broke that model and Google’s failure to execute with its local business service has meant there isn’t an online replacement for the local advertising model.

So it may be that partnerships between local government and the online platforms are the way to make hyperlocal services work.

It will be interesting to see if the New York City partnership does become a model for hyperlocal news or just becomes a glorified and expensive community noticeboard.

Journalism’s managerial challenge

How will newsgathering evolve as media managers remains in denial?

Yesterday I had lunch with a group of retirees who aren’t particularly connected to technology. It was a contrast to the previous three days spent with startup and media companies talking about social media and the internet.

One thing that really seemed to disturb them was the idea that printed daily newspapers may not be around in a few years time.

Which makes Elizabeth Knight’s Media Rivals Facing a Brave New World this weekend a timely read in the contrasting strategies of News Limited and Fairfax.

From Knight’s report it’s hard not think News Corp CEO Robert Thomson is deluded;

”Print is still a particularly powerful medium … 43 per cent of Wall Street Journal readers are millionaires.”

Old millionaires. Like the people I had lunch with yesterday.

The problem Thomson has if this is indeed the strategy of the New News Corporation then he’s locked into a dying, declining market.

A bright spot for both News and Fairfax are the digital properties that evolved out of their old classified and display newspaper advertising, specifically the real estate sites Domain and realestate.com.au.

These sites don’t involve substantive news reporting or journalism beyond regurgitated realtor media releases, although if you take the attitude that newspapers were really only advertising channels with some news to attract an audience then this is a natural development.

For journalists, and those who want to be informed about the world around them, that view is a problem as it doesn’t answer the question of how do you pay for news.

With earnings expected to be 30% lower this year compared to 2012, this is something concentrating the minds of Fairfax’s management given they don’t have the profitable Pay-TV revenues of News.

The problem for the legacy news operations is that the focus is on cost cutting while denying the reality that expensive printed newspapers are dying in both readership and advertising revenue.

Desperately hanging onto the daily printed newspaper model threatens to consume resources needed make both Fairfax and News successful online.

Which makes the venues of the investor events that Knight describes a interesting counterpoint to the ruthless cost cutting going on at both News and Fairfax.

Sydney’s Mint and the Four Seasons Hotel are lovely venues and no doubt the executives and analysts enjoyed some nice canapes and drinks after their briefings.

But genuinely cost conscious management would have put their status to one side and held the meeting at their own premises and, if the analysts were nice, offered them a cup of tea and a biscuit, just like shareholders get.

At time when fast, responsive and small management is needed to make fast decisions in rapidly changing markets it seems the companies most threatened by change are those with the most inflexible, and entitled, managements.

It may well be that Fairfax or News discover the magic formula that makes digital media profitable, but it’s not going to happen while they deny the realities of today’s market places and a radically changing economy.

Not that this will worry the older executives of over-managed businesses who will spend their sunny days of retirement enjoying nice lunches and wondering what happened to the days of the printed newspaper.

Dicing up the mobile web

A series of reports last week told how we use computers, tablets and smartphones is evolving. There are big consequences for all businesses.

Last week we had a series of reports on the changing web from Cisco, IBM and Ericsson along with Mary Meeker’s annual State Of The Internet presentation.

One thing all the reports agreed on was there is going to be a lot more data pushed around the net and the composition is changing as business and home users adapt to smartphones and tablet computers.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index forecast online traffic would triple by 2017 while Ericsson’s Mobility Report predicts mobile internet traffic will grow twelve times by 2018.

What’s notable in those predictions is the amounts and types of data the different devices use. Cisco breaks down monthly traffic by device;

Smartphones 0.6 GB
Tablet computers 2.7 GB
Laptops and PCs 18.6 GB

In one way this isn’t surprising as the devices have differing uses and their form factors make it harder to consume more data. Cisco also points out that data consumption also varies with processor power. As PCs are the most powerful devices, it makes sense they would chew through more information.

Ericsson breaks down data use by application as well as device and that clearly shows the different ways we’re using these devices.

Notable in the graph is how file sharing is big on PCs but not on tablets or smartphones while email and social networking take up a bigger chunk of cellphone usage.

What’s also interesting in Ericsson’s predictions is how data traffic evolves. It’s notable that video is forecast to be the biggest driver of growth.

Both Ericsson’s and Cisco’s predictions tie into Mary Meeker’s State Of The Internet presentation at the D11 Conference last week.

It’s worth watching Meeker’s presentation just for the way she packs over eighty slides into twenty minutes with a lot of information on how the economy is changing as the internet matures.

What all of these reports are telling us is that our society and economy are changing as these technologies mature. The business opportunities – and risks – are huge and there isn’t any industry that’s immune to these changes.

Who will fill the online advertising opportunity?

The State Of The Internet report reveals the twenty billion dollar advertising opportunity that still hasn’t been taken.

It’s been a big week of reports with three major sets of findings being published; Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, IBM’s Retail Therapy and, the biggest one of all, Mary Meeker’s annual State Of The Internet.

With a PowerPoint overview weighing in a 117 slides, this year’s state of the internet is a meaty tome with some fascinating observations that compliment Cisco and IBM’s findings which hopefully I’ll have time to write about on the weekend.

On slide five of the State Of The Internet is what hasn’t changed Meeker describes the $20 billion internet opportunity being missed.

Basically online advertising is not keeping up with the audience, the time spent on media versus advertising spend is lagging.

What’s notable is that this is the third year that Meeker has flagged this disconnect, yet advertisers still aren’t moving onto the web in the way audiences are.

The print media industry though seems to be dodging a bullet with a disproportionate amount of advertising continuing to spent on traditional advertising – 23% for only a 6% share of consumers’ time which implies there’s still a lot of pain ahead for newspapers and magazines.

For the online media, it shows there’s a great opportunity for those who can get the model right.

What that one graph shows is that the disruption to the mass media publishing model is a long way from being over.

You can’t buy cool

Yahoo!’s purchase of Tumblr in the pursuit of ‘cool’ is the latest example of Silicon Valley’s greater fool business model.

In many ways it was Yahoo! who pioneered Silicon Valley’s Greater Fool Business Model during the dot com boom of the late 1990s.

The Greater Fool model involves hyping a website, online service or new technology in the hope a hapless corporation dazzled by the spin will buy the business for an improbably large amount.

Fifteen years later many of those services are closed down or languishing and the founders who were gifted millions of dollars by gullible boards and shareholders have moved on to other pursuits.

The news that Yahoo! has sealed a deal to buy blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion dollars shows the company’s urge to buy in success remains under new CEO Marissa Mayer.

It’s difficult to see exactly what Tumblr adds to Yahoo!’s wide range of online properties except a young audience – exactly the reasoning that saw News Corporation’s disastrous investment in MySpace.

What’s particularly concerning is a comment made by Yahoo!’s CFO Ken Goldman at JP Morgan’s Global Technology Conference last week.

“So we’re working hard to get some of the younger folks,” Goldman said on a webcast from the J.P. Morgan Global Technology conference in Boston.

It’s all about trying to “make us cool again,” he said, adding that Yahoo will focus on content that’s “more relevant to that age bracket.”

So they are spending a billion dollars to “make us cool again” – it’s disappointing Marissa Mayer has allowed middle aged male executives to run free with the shareholders’ chequebook in a quest to rediscover their youth.

Like most middle aged life crises, it’s unlikely to end well.

For Tumblr’s founders and investors things have ended well. It’s time to buy those yachts and fast cars those middle aged execs covet.

In the meantime the quest for internet ‘cool’ – whatever that is – will move onto whatever online service teenagers and twenty somethings are using.

Protecting the knaves among us

Australia’s legal system makes it hard for journalists to tell the truth about business dealings.

“The biggest risk for Australian business journalists is being sued into oblivion” said Paddy Manning at a Walkley Media Talks Panel in Sydney last Thursday.

Joining Paddy on the panel was The Australian’s Anthony Klan, the ABC’s Tikki Fullerton and moderator Peter Ryan who looked at the challenges facing business journalists seeking to separate truth from business PR spin.

Business superinjunctions

The problem facing Australian business journalists is a legal system that favours those who want to suppress facts – it’s a game only the wealthy can play and rich fraudsters use it well as we’ve seen over the years in corporate Australia.

Manning described one occasion where he obtained information on a prominent businessman’s affairs and, within hours of asking the gentleman for comment, found he and the Fairfax had been hit with a court injunction with such vague wording it may have any of his employer’s outlets from mentioning the man at all.

These injunctions were the rule, not the exception. Manning went on to tell how Sydney Morning Herald business writer Michael West spends one day a week on legal matters while his colleague Adele Ferguson was even preventing from writing about documents that were on the public record.

Klan trumped that with the seventy injunctions he’s received over stories on the mortgage debenture scandals, an ongoing sore on Australia’s investment industry which threatens to steal many retirees’ savings.

The problem of pre-emptive injunctions stemmed from the ethical requirement of giving a ‘fair opportunity for reply.’ In seeking comment from those engaged in shoddy – or downright – illegal practices, it gives those with something to hide the opportunity to run to the courts who are all to willing to issue wide ranging orders.

An advantage for bloggers?

Interestingly, Justice Leveson of the UK inquiry into press conduct made an observation about the disadvantage mainstream media has before the law during his visit to Australia earlier this year.

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.

While Leveson had it wrong about financial incentives, it’s actually the media’s ethical standards which are the restraining influence. Professional journalists quite rightly don’t like breaching their trade’s code of conduct.

As Leveson opined, bloggers don’t necessary hold themselves to the same standards so they are more likely to publish and be damned.

Where Leveson was utterly and totally wrong is bloggers’ immunity to the law.

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.

That’s nonsense and it’s a matter of time before a blogger goes to gaol for disobeying a court. When that does happen it will be interesting to see how the established media reacts to this.

From the panel discussion it was quite clear that professional business journalists have no intention of breaking the law or their code of ethics, although all are united in their determination to protect sources if they were order to divulge by a court.

The cost of suppressing news

What really stood out from the panel was how the law is being used to stifle examination of Australian business behaviour. In the audience Q&A, veteran reporter Colin Chapman pointed out Australia sits at 26th on the World Press Freedom Index.

The lack of a truly free press could just be seen as journalistic hand wringing, but there’s a real world effect of this – those retirees who will be ripped off by crooked financial advisers and mortgage funds would have a better chance of protecting themselves were they able to see Anthony Khan’s articles on the topic.

Just as crooks have been able to prosper in the absence of press scrutiny, so too have supine, incompetent and lazy regulators.

All too often agencies – such as the ACCC, ASIC, ASX or ATO – have only been woken from their slumbers when prodded by a media scandal, lack of scrutiny has allowed government regulators to get away with not doing their jobs.

This poor enforcement is reflected in international comparisons. The World Bank ranked Australia as 70th in the world for protecting investors, way below Colombia, Thailand or Kazakhstan.Australian business reporters find themselves in a difficult position being caught between the tightening economics of the media industry and a legal system that is more focused on protecting knaves rather allowing society to be informed.That problem facing journalists is a problem for every Australian who’s being kept in the dark about their investments.

The Daily Mail and the visibility fallacy

Is just getting internet clicks the path to online media success?

Reuter’s Felix Salmon has an interesting take on the The Daily Mail’s internet success.

The site might be a traffic powerhouse, but the internet is full of high-traffic sites which are worth very little. Traffic, in and of itself, is worth very little, and there’s no indication that readers are willing to pay for Mail Online, or that advertisers are willing to pay much for those readers. (The site’s revenue of $7.2 million is about 0.25% of DMGT’s $2.7 billion total revenue.)

Felix Salmon makes an important point about the web and the fallacy of high traffic – many of the internet’s high traffic sites are of little value.

In falling for this fallacy we’re making the mistake of thinking in old media terms where high newspaper circulation numbers or ratings winning TV programs translated directly into advertising dollars.

That model worked because of restricted inventory. There were a limited number of TV stations or newspapers in our cities and regions which most people relied on for the day’s news and entertainment.

In the internet age, inventory is not a problem. We live in an era awash with information and the old models of restricted supply no longer work.

To make money, we have to add value. We can no longer rely on broadcasting licenses or prominent mastheads supported by classified advertisements and real estate puff pieces.

Rewriting other peoples’ stuff in a way that grabs the attention of search engines is a way of getting fleeting readerships but it isn’t adding any value and, as revenues from online advertising continue to fall, it isn’t the way to make money either.

Whoever figures out how to make money out of online news and journalism will be the Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch of the 21st Century. Right now it doesn’t appear The Daily Mail, or competitors like The Huffington Post, will be those champions.

Moving to a subscription economy

Customer subscription models are changing many industries which opens up opportunities for smart businesses

One of the biggest changes in business is the move to subscription based services rather than selling one-off, lump sum products. This is affecting industries ranging from the motor industry to software.

Business Spectator has a good interview with Tien Zhou of Zuora on the subscription economy and how it’s changing the business world.

We’re pretty passionate in our belief that every company will be a subscription business in the next five, 10, 20 years. That’s certainly what we’re seeing with digital companies, whether they are technology firms (software, hardware), media and publishing firms, or telecom companies. The ideas of content and access are starting to blend together and we are seeing more and more commerce companies dip their feet as well. So we’re really see this as an across the board phenomenon.

Probably the industry most focused on the subscription model right now are newspapers – subscribers have always been an important revenue stream for the print media and the loss of their advertising rivers of gold means they are looking at ways to get more money from readers.

As Tien Zhou points out, businesses moving to subscription services is an across the board phenomenon.

Yesterday I mentioned the Google Maps connected treadmill, that is a subscription model where the treadmill seller gets money from the initial purchase, but also a revenue stream from the services attached to it.

The same business model applies to connected motor cars or the social media enabled jet engine. The aim is to replace lump sum purchases with lifetime subscriptions.

Getting customers onto lifetime subscriptions has been one of Microsoft’s aims for the past decade as the company realised that software users, particularly those using Microsoft Office, hung onto their CDs for years and increasingly decades.

Perversely it took Google and Apple to show Microsoft how to wean customers onto subscription services.

That Microsoft Office is a good example of the evolution of subscription software, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), isn’t an accident. The enterprise computing sector is currently the most profoundly affected as companies like Google and Salesforce threaten high cost incumbents.

A good example of the changing economics of software is the supermarket chain Woolworths moving onto Google Docs.

With 26,000 seats, the reseller can expect to make $260,000 a year in commissions based on Google’s standard terms of $10 per seat per year.

That total sum is less than the commission a salesperson would have earned for a similar sized IBM, Oracle or Microsoft installation.

A whole generation of IT salespeople who’ve grown fat and comfortable on their generous commissions now find their incomes being dramatically reduced.

Similar things are happening in industries like call centres with Zendesk, point of sale systems and event ticketing with Eventbrite – incumbents are finding their incomes steadily being eroded away by online services.

At the same time agricultural and mining equipment suppliers are introducing big data services for their customers where the information gathered by the sensors built into modern tractors and bulldozers are providing valuable intelligence about the crop and ore being gathered.

The subscription business model is nothing new, King Camp Gillette perfected the strategy with the safety razor at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The razors were cheap but the blades were where the money was.

Microsoft and the rest of the software industry tried to introduce subscriptions in the late 1990s with Software as a Service, but failed because the internet wasn’t mature enough to support the model. Today it is.

Like many things in today’s economy, the subscription model is going to change a lot of markets. It’s a great opportunity for disruptive businesses.

Subscription envelope image courtesy of jaylopez through sxc.hu

Sports cars, the cloud and the need for broadband

How the V8 Supercar races use the internet and networks shows why businesses need reliable communications and the way organisations are using cloud computing.

My relationship with sports cars is similar to horses – I have a vague idea of which end water goes in and where not to stand.

So Microsoft’s invite to the Launceston V8 Supercars to showcase their Office 365 cloud service as the race’s official sponsor wasn’t expected but it was a good opportunity to see how a sports organisation uses modern technology.

Riding the cloud

At the opening media conference V8 Supercars CEO David Malone and Finance Director Peter Trimble described the IT problems the organisation had in the early days.

“We were penny wise and pound foolish” said Peter about their small business system that couldn’t grow with the event.

To properly meet their needs V8 Supercars would have needed a bank of servers, cumbersome remote access software and a full time team of several IT staff for their scattered workforce and constantly changing locations.

With cloud services, they eliminated many IT costs while simplifying their systems.

That staff can now access documents regardless of location is a very good case study of where the cloud works well and understandable that Microsoft wanted to show off what their services can do.

Networking the cars

When challenged about the point of car racing, enthusiasts cite how the sport is a test bed for the motor industry.

The motor industry is one sector leading the internet of machines with one car manufacturing executive recently describing the modern motor vehicle as being a “computer platforms” on wheels.

Eventually we’ll see our cars connected to the net and reporting everything from the engine’s servicing needs to the driver’s musical tastes.

That’s reality in today’s high performance racing, both the drivers and the cars are in constant contact with the crews as sensors report everything from engine performance to the foot pressure the driver is putting on the accelerator pedal.

As continuous data feeds from the cars is essential to the teams the event has its own trackside network with receivers located along the course that are used for both vehicle telemetry and the video feeds from both car mounted and fixed cameras.

Owning the rights

In what’s becoming the future of sports broadcasting, the V8 Supercars organisers run their own camera crews and provide the feed to their broadcast partners and media outlets.

This allows them to control all the rights across TV, cable and online channels.

Having full control of the pictures also gives the V8 Supercars more revenue through signage and sponsorship by guaranteeing advertising placements which wouldn’t be available if they didn’t manage the feed.

Connectivity matters

v8-supercars-launceston-communications-cable — Spaghetti Junction as the various feeds come together

Getting the images out to the media and broadcast partners along with delivering the in car data to the racing teams is major challenge for organisers. The communications centres resemble a giant bowl of cable spaghetti as various groups plug into the network.

It’s no coincidence that part of the deals the V8 Supercar management strike with track owners and governments includes providing fiber and microwave links to the venue.

That single factor illustrates how vital communications links are to a modern sporting event.

Another important factor is that everything will be packed up and taken away. Following Launceston, the entire show is packed up and moved onto Auckland, New Zealand. This in itself is a major logistic challenge which would fail without good connectivity and reliable systems.

v8-supercars-launceston-truck-fleet — the fleet of trucks ready to move on

It’s easy to dismiss the V8 Supercars as a bunch of testosterone driven rev-heads, but the challenges in staging these complex events fifteen times a year shouldn’t be underestimated.

We also shouldn’t underestimate how important communication links are to any business. It’s why debates about the need for high speed internet services are last century’s discussion.

A question of relevance – why the PM welcomes bloggers

The Prime Minister’s courting of bloggers in the run up to the Australian Federal election later this year shows how credibility and relevance are most important asset of any media outlet

The Prime Minister’s courting of bloggers in the run up to the Australian Federal election later this year shows how credibility and relevance are most important assets for any media outlet.

Late last year the Prime Minister invited bloggers to Kirribilli House for lunch then to dinner during her Rooty Hill adventure a few weeks ago.

The press gallery grumbled and wrote patronising articles about North Shore mummy bloggers but failed to recognise the real threat to the established media outlets – these writers are more relevant to people’s lives than the machinations of ‘anonymous political sources’, sports stars or Hollywood celebrities.

Now the Prime Minister is giving one on one exclusive interviews to some of those bloggers, something that will irritate the nation’s political journalists even further.

Old media’s loss of relevance

The press galleries’ problem though is relevance, which lies at the heart of any successful media outlet.

In 1831 when The Sydney Herald’s first edition was published, the front page was made up of advertisements and shipping notices as it was with all newspapers of the time.

That was relevant to the readers, they paid 7d – not an insubstantial amount in 1831 – to find out the latest in shipping movements, real estate sales and livestock prices which were essential to life and business in the colony.

It wasn’t until 1944 that the now Sydney Morning Herald moved news to the front page, the London Times held out until 1966. What was now relevant to readers were photos and wire stories from around the world.

Papers continued to do well despite the introduction of radio in the 1930s and TV in the 1950s because they were continued to be relevant to their readers. If you were looking a job, a house or where to take your mum for her 60th birthday then the local newspaper was the place to look.

The shift to sensationalism

In the 1980s all the media – newspapers, TV and radio stations – started a shift to sensationalism and infotainment and steadily all became less relevant to the populations they served.

At the time media outlets got away with it as there was no-where else for people to get news. If you didn’t like stories about Princess Di’s wedding dress then you had to curl up in the corner with a good book.

Then the web came along.

All of a sudden engaged readers could get relevant information from all over the world.

With social media and blogs, reporting Kim Kardishian’s latest wardrobe malfunction raised a ‘so what’ from an audience that learned about it two days ago on TMZ, the Huffington Post or Facebook.

Making matters much, much worse were the advertising rivers of gold moved to specialist websites and Google.

Newspaper executives found their revenues were evaporating and they worked their way deeper into the quicksand by cutting costs in the areas where their editorial strengths lay, making them even less relevant to the readerships they want to serve.

Relevant lifestyles

Today the mummy bloggers – along with the food bloggers, travel bloggers and political bloggers – are attracting audiences with relevant, useful content that the audience can engage with.

Last week’s embarrassing circus in Canberra was an example of how irrelevant the media, and much of politics, has become to the average Australian.

Indeed it’s interesting to contrast the self important Canberra press gallery pushing non-stories while fawning over their discredited ‘anonymous party sources’ with the genuinely questioning tone of the some of the bloggers.

So the mainstream, established media can kiss the mummy bloggers’ backsides; if they can’t find relevance in today’s society then they may as well shut up shop.

For politicians relevance is important too – political parties that pitch themselves to 19th Century class struggles or 1980s corporatist ideologies are as irrelevant to today’s society as the Soviet Communist Party.

It would serve the Prime Minister and her staff well to listen closely to what the mummy bloggers and their readers are saying.