Category: new media

Feeding the content beast

Can the tech media change its spots

One of the sad truths of the tech media is just how much news is really regurgitated media release, this is part of a bigger problem where online channels demand that sites deliver content and are ‘first’ to get announcements online.

Yesterday’s Google-ICOA scandal where a forged media release was regurgitated world wide across the tech and general media illustrates the weaknesses in the latter imperative when a fake announcement was released through PR Wire, a news release service.

To exacerbate the problem, the forgers used PR Wire’s Premium service which guarantees the release is not only distributed across services like Bloomberg and Reuters but also passed on to Associated Press which in turn distributes the story to hundreds of media outlets world wide.

Which is exactly what happened; here’s the Sydney Morning Herald’s report ripped straight from the wire. A quick Google search on a phrase in the AP report shows 1,259 other outlets also spat out the same Associated Press story.

Nobody at PR Wire, Associated Press or at any of the 1260 outlets chose to call Google or ICOA to confirm the story was true. Neither did anyone at the various tech blogs who chose to rewrite the PR Wire release as ‘news’.

Around the world at mainstream newspapers, tech blogs and online news services writers are under massive pressure to feed the content beast which is why these mistakes are inevitable.

The content beast also means a lot of rubbish gets published, just to keep new material churning across the home page. A good example is in yesterday’s Gizmodo article on how to save money on soda machine gas refills.

While the writer and editors thought this tosh – which was probably inspired from a media release – was worth posting, readers quickly pointed out that using industrial gas for food uses is dangerous and the economics dubious.

A classic example of the audience being smarter than the writer; something becoming increasingly common as poor quality garbage is posted under provocative, attention grabbing headlines.

The question is whether the content beast is worth feeding, readers don’t care and increasingly we’re all struggling to reduce the noise and clutter in our inboxes and social media channels.

Reducing the noise is becoming most internet users priority and this means publications whose value is dubious will end up being winnowed out or, even worse, being ignored.

In the market where users are reducing clutter it’s only the useful, relevant, trusted and genuinely informative sources that will survive.

For Associated Press, this means they are going to have to terminate their relationship with PR Wire if they are going to remain useful and trusted.

AP’s clients are going to have to add more value than just spitting out whatever turns up on the wire as the SMH and 1,200 other sites did with the Google story.

The tech blogs are most challenged of all. Increasingly they have little to offer except a race to the bottom in regurgitating spin and third rate articles.

It’s possible that the Google scandal is good for the tech media, it’s going to force the sites with a future to do smarter, better writing and rely less on PR releases or shouting “first” when they get a story.

The ones who don’t are history and no-one will miss them.

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Facebook starts driving away brands

Could Facebook be more like old media than we thought?

A few days ago we looked at how giving marketing and communications control to Facebook was a mistake for businesses.

It seems US entrepreneur Mark Cuban agrees and he’s moving his basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks, and the 70 businesses he’s invested in away from Facebook onto other social media channels like Tumblr or even MySpace.

The final straw for Cuban was Facebook wanting to charge $3,000 to reach a million of the Maverick’s online fans.

Facebook’s response that the sponsored post program is not just about the service’s revenue, but also to reduce noise and spam has merit

Last week tech uber-blogger Robert Scoble complained about the noise on social media and many users agree as they find their social media services and email inbox clogged with messages.

Reducing irrelevant noise is essential for any online service to succeed. No-one likes to spam or be spammed and many startup social media platforms have failed because they’ve killed their brand by spamming users and their contacts.

In this respect social media is like journalism – it has to be timely, relevant and useful to its users. If it isn’t the readers will leave and the advertisers will soon follow.

The worry for Facebook’s investors is that the service could be caught between making no money from its massive user base and getting a reputation for irrelevant spam.

Could it be that Facebook has more in common with newspapers and other “old media” than we thought?

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What business are newspapers in?

To understand the future of news, we need to define the business

The problems of The Guardian and other newspaper groups around the world raises the question of what business they are actually in – news or advertising?

“Going digital only is not an option” was an agenda item for a meeting of Guardian executives claims the Financial Times.

Digital only however is the option most of the readers are taking with the Guardian’s online channels attracting 9.5 million UK readers a month compared to a print circulation of 6.5 million. The Guardian’s total global online audience is 65 million, ten times the size of the print edition.

Making matters worse is the trend, according to the UK Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), newspaper sales are declining at 16% per year while online readership is growing 14%.

As the Guardian readership figures show, the number of readers isn’t the problem and the same is true for the New York Times or the Sydney Morning Herald. More people are reading these publications than ever before, but the advertising has gone elsewhere.

Essentially a newspaper was an advertising platform, the cover price barely covered the costs of printing and distribution while the classified and display advertising provided the “rivers of gold” that made the business so lucrative through most of the Twentieth Century.

Most of those rivers have been diverted as dedicated employment, real estate, travel and motoring websites have stolen much of the advertising revenue that sustained newspapers.

As classified advertising platforms, newspapers have reached their use by date and now they have to build a model that is more focused on online display advertising and getting readers to pay for content.

Getting readers to pay is difficult when the market has been trained to expect news for free or pennies a day, a problem not helped by some newspapers chasing online eyeballs with low quality content.

Equally difficult is training sales teams to sell digital advertising, too many sales teams have grown fat and complacent over decades of flogging lucrative and easy real estate print ads.

The challenge for newspaper managements around the world is figuring out how to get the advertisers onto their online platforms and providing a product which readers value and are prepared to pay for.

It may well be that The Guardian’s management are right, that print does have a role in the newspaper’s future but first they are going to have to define what their company is and what it does.

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Digital fish and chip wrappers

The Magazine is a brave experiment to break out of the churn of modern journalism.

Instapaper founder Marco Arment’s latest creation is The Magazine, an attempt to meld ‘medium length’ journalism with tech writing.

Instead of being a technology magazine, it’s about things that interest geeks. As Marco says of his new publication;

Rather than be limited to technology, its topics appeal to people who love technology.

The Magazine is one of the many experiments to figure out how to make journalism pay now the model of reportage pigging backing on the advertising ‘rivers of gold’ is over.

Marco goes through the rationale behind the project in his forward to the first edition, where he lays out what The Magazine offers and what it doesn’t. The basic philosophy is to have a clean interface just like Instapaper, no advertising and no video.

That’s a brave call which makes The Magazine reliant on subscription income, as is tying the project’s revenues to those of Apple’s Newstand distribution channel for e-magazines as it holds the publication hostage to one of the Internet’s empires.

What stands out to a lot of us in the tech media is the ambition to change the medium. Matthew Panzarino writing in The Next Web makes the point;

The focus on the ‘macro’ vs. the ‘micro’, on articles of lasting value and subject matter, rather than the fleeting ephemera of the tech carousel. I write between 5 and 9 articles a day on average, and many of them have a half-life of a few hours unless someone goes searching for a very specific topic at some point in the future. That’s the nature of the beast when it comes to covering the rapidly moving world of tech, but a periodical needs to operate differently, to work outside of that narrow envelope, if it’s going to work.

Nine articles a day is hard work and it’s questionable that anyone reads these pieces closely or really cares about them. It’s all grist to the new media mill which values quantity over quality, preferably with SEO friendly keywords.

This ‘content’ is the modern day digital fish wrapping of the 24 hour Internet cycle. Most of this posts could be easily replaced just by publishing the vendor’s media releases many of the stories are based upon.

While it would be tempting to say this is a problem with online tech journalism, it’s a problem across the media which is made worse by syndicating content or just getting digital sharecroppers to donate their time and work.

Prior to modern food handling rules British fish and chip were wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers, hence the saying “today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish.” It was a saying intended to imbue journalists with a sense of humility about their trade. It didn’t always work.

Today, we’re churning out the modern digital equivalent to a largely disinterested audience. The Magazine is an attempt to do something better.

Regardless of whether Marco is successful or not with his project we can do better than what we’re currently doing.

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Squandering a reprieve

How did media companies miss the opportunities of the tech wreck?

ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing has a terrific story on the struggles of the Fairfax newspaper empire during the early days of the Internet.

One of the major themes that jumps out is how Fairfax, like many media and retail organisations, squandered the opportunity presented by the tech wreck.

The tech wreck was an opportunity for incumbents to claim their spaces in the online world, instead they saw the failure of many of the dot com boom’s over-hyped online businesses as vindication of their view the Internet was all hype.

As former Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Fray said “In florid moments you could even think this internet webby thing would go away”.

For Fairfax the profits from the traditional print based business were compelling. According to Greg Hywood the current CEO, for every dollar earned by the company, 70c were profits – a profit margin of 233%.

The Internet threatened those “rivers of gold” and media companies, understandably, did nothing to jeopardise those returns.

Another problem for Fairfax was the massive investment in digital printing presses in the 1990s. These behemoths revolutionised the way newspapers were printed as pages could be laid out on computer screens and sent directly from the newsroom to the press itself which printed out pages in glorious colour rather than with smudgy black and white images.

Moreover these machines were fantastic for printing glossy coloured supplements and the advertising revenue from those high end inserts kept the dollars rolling in.

When the tech wreck happened, the massive investments in printing presses were vindicated as the rivers of gold continued to flow while the smart Internet kids went broke.

Fairfax’s management weren’t alone in this hubris – most media companies around the world made the same missteps while retail companies continued to build stores catering for the last echos of the 20th Century consumer boom.

In 2008, the hubris caught up with the retailers and newspapers. As the great credit boom came to an end, the wheels fell off the established business models and the cost of not experimenting with online models is costing them dearly.

Value still lies in those mastheads though as more people are reading Fairfax’s publications than ever before.

Readers still want to read these publications, one loyal reader is quoted in the story that Sydney Morning Herald should aspire to “being a serious international paper.”

That isn’t going to happen while management is focused on cutting costs to their core business instead of focusing on new revenue streams.

Somebody will find that model, had the incumbent retail and media organisations explored and invested in online businesses a decade ago they may well have found that secret sauce.

Now many of them won’t survive with their horse and buggy ways of doing business.

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Hacking the hacks

Do journalists have the skills to ride the Big Data wave?

Hacks and Hackers is an informal global network of meetings discussing the intersection of technology and journalism. The inaugural Sydney Hacks and Hackers meetup recently looked at how journalists use data and showed the challenges the news media face in an age where information isn’t scarce.

The panel in Sydney were Sharona Coutts, Investigative Reporter at Global Mail; Edmund Tadros, Data Journalist at Australian Financial Review; and Courtney Hohne, Director of Communications Google Australia.

Courtney looked at some of the big data opportunities for journalists, a topic covered in the Closed Data Doors post. One of the areas she highlighted was emergency services sending out PDFs of updates during crises like bushfires and floods.

Listening to Sharona and Edmund, it was clear they were two overworked but keen young journalists who had neither the resources or the training to deal with the data flowing into their organisations.

Because journalists in modern media organisations don’t have the skills or the resources to properly understand and use raw data the public ends up with relatively trivial stories like league tables of school exam results or council building approvals – both of which are important, but are misread and used to confect outrage against incompetent public servants and duplicitous politicians.

For the public servant, school teacher or even bus driver it’s understandable they don’t want their performance measured if the measure is going to be misused and possibly jeopardize their jobs.

A deeper problem for journalism is the skills of the trade. Both Edmund and Sharona are smart young journos who will go far; but both admitted they had no training in statistic and mathematics.

Even more worrying are the older journalists, when I mentioned the lack of older and more experienced journalists to the organiser she said none would agree to come on the panel. One suspects this is because forty and fifty year old journalists have even fewer data skills than their young colleagues.

This lack of skills or understanding of data is probably one of the biggest challenges facing the media. In a world awash with data, the role of journalists is to filter the feed, interpret and explain it.

Pure reportage is being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of news and information available; the 1980s model of opinion based journalism is also failing as the audience now realise they have a voice, and better informed opinions, than the experts and columnists.

One of the notable themes that seemed to jump out of the evening was the divide between journalists and the wider community that always seems to appear when the future of journalism is discussed.

Usually this expressed in terms of those employed by major mastheads sneering at “citizen journalists” but at Hacks and Hackers it was about “geeks and journos coming together.”

In reality there is no divide – good analytic and technology skills should be as much a part of journalism as any other field in a modern economy.

The fear from the Sydney Hacks and Hackers night is that the media industry is one of the sectors that’s failing to deal with technological change.

It’s hard not to think that journalists wondering at the power of spreadsheets and pivot tables is like 18th Century blacksmiths trying to figure out how steam engines can make better horseshoes.

For an industry that is so deeply challenged by technological change, it seems the news media is still unprepared for the changes that hit nearly a decade ago.

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Transparent falsehoods

Openness is more than a buzzword and organisations have to do more than shutting down bloggers.

Transparency, openness, innovation and entrepreneurialism are all popular buzzwords, but do organisations really value these attributes?

At a cloud computing conference this week I sat in on an innovation presentation. Almost everyone in the room was wearing a dark suit.

Despite their dress, most of those folk desperately wanted to be ‘innovative’ and almost all of them worked in organisations that would really benefit with a dash of genuine creative thinking.

I thought of that conference when reading of the attempted shutting down of a primary school student’s food blog by her local education authority.

The saga of the Never Seconds food blog illustrated the classic responses of managers when faced with something they can’t control – shut it down on whatever grounds you can find.

In the case of Never Seconds it was because the food service staff feared they would lose their jobs. Bless the council for caring so much about their staff.

As always in these situations, it was an opportunity missed to promote the school district and improve the services they provide.

Never Seconds is also a great place where other school students shared their school lunches. It is a great idea to promote healthy eating for kids.

Thankfully the Argyll and Bute Council relented on their ban and the Never Seconds blog is back for lunch.

Educators around the world talk about promoting children’s curiosity and creativity yet when a child expresses them in a way that threatens staff or bureaucrat power, they are quickly slapped down.

The same happens in the workplace, most organisations will treat truly innovative and original thinkers like the naughty children they probably were.

For too many organisations – businesses, political parties and even schools – words like innovation, creativity, openness and transparency are just empty buzzwords.

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