Facebook | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Journalism in the Twenty-First Century

Where does Australian journalism go in an age where media channels are dominated by Facebook and Google?

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 21^st 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.

Monopolies and innovation

Monopolies are coalescing across the global economy. That isn’t good for consumer or innovation.

An interview with Media scholar Jonathan Taplin, author of the new book Move Fast and Break Things, on the Pro-Market website poses some interesting questions about the direction of the digital economy and innovation as market power coalesces around the big four internet giants.

This power is particularly marked in online media with Facebook and Google pocketing most of the global advertising spend which leaves little for content creators.

I kept coming back to these three—Google, Facebook, and Amazon. All have extraordinary market shares. Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising and an 80-plus percent market share in Android. Amazon has a 74 percent market share in e-books, and Facebook controls 70-plus percent of mobile social media when you add Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. What more empirical evidence does one need to prove concentration?

Over the past decade we’ve seen the power of the big four online gatekeepers growing although ironically Apple’s light seems to be dimming as the company’s innovative vision fades following Steve Jobs’ passing.

The monopoly problem is broader than just the tech industry though, as The Atlantic pointed out last year, market dominating corporations are suppressing innovation throughout the US. The problem is even greater in Australia and some other countries.

The rise of the monopolies shouldn’t be a surprise as the neo-liberal policies of the United States and most of the western world for the last 40 years have been largely focused on increasing the wealth and power of corporations and their managers. It’s fair to say those policies have been successful.

Where we go next is the big question. An economy dominated, and suffocated, by a handful of well connected and powerful corporations is not going to drive wealth creation, particularly in a world where more businesses functions are being automated.

One short term step may be to break up the monopolies, something that Taplin himself suggests.

This just goes to show how quickly the ground is shifting. I now have a piece coming out in the New York Times that explores the idea of breaking them up, but when writing the book, I tried to be reasonable. I thought no one would buy the idea of breaking them up. And now people are raising that idea.

While that’s a start there’s vastly more that needs to be done from bankruptcy reform – the last 40 years have seen governments make it harder for small businesses and households to seek financial protection – through to intellectual property reform.

Generational change may turn out to be the solution though as the lucky generation of business and government leaders – those born between 1935 and 55 – responsible for the ideology and policy that allowed such an accumulation of corporate power move on.

Counting the digital pennies

The hopes of media companies that Facebook and Google could provide new income streams appears to have been stymied.

With media companies around the world struggling to make money, the publishing platforms on Facebook and Google promised to bring in much needed income streams. They appear not to have worked.

Business Insider reports how US based premium publisher trade body Digital Content Next surveyed its members on their online platform income and discovered some disappointing answers.

On average, premium publishing companies generated $773,567 in the first half of 2016 by distributing their content on YouTube. Content published to Facebook earned an average of $560,144 in the period, Twitter generated an average of $482,788, and Snapchat generated $192,819 for each publisher in the sample.

To call these returns derisory is an understatement and it illustrates how the current media model is unsustainable as it’s impossible to sustain a basic newsroom, let alone produce investigative features with those sort of budgets.

It isn’t just the media model that’s unsustainable, Business Insider cites the CEO of Digital Content Next, Jason Klint, who flagged in a blog post last year that all the growth in digital advertising is being accounted for by Facebook and Google – the rest of the industry is shrinking.

Even Facebook and Google aren’t immune from the unsustainable model that’s currently in place, Klint points out that fraud and intermediaries further skew the model which undermines advertisers’ confidence in the platforms and online media in general.

For the moment though, the intermediaries seem to be doing okay. Klint cites IAB research which claims AdTech companies are making 55% of the online advertising industry’s revenues while publishers are only getting half.

That illustrates how the tail is currently wagging the dog with publishers and content creators losing out while middlemen who add little in the way of value get the bulk of the revenue. That too is not sustainable.

We’re still in early days for online media and the models are still being worked out. While we wait for the 21st Century’s David Sarnoff many sectors are threatened including the advertising, marketing and PR industries. At least the publishers aren’t alone.

Goodbye to Yahoo!

The demise of Yahoo! shows eyeballs are not enough for a mature online business.

And so Yahoo!’s journey comes to an end with the company being renamed Altba and most of its operating assets given over to Verizon.

With the changes both CEO Marissa Mayer and original co-founder David Filo will leave Altba’s slimmed down board.

Mayer’s failure is a lesson that being an early employee at a successful, fast growth tech startup isn’t a measure of leadership. It may even be a hindrance given companies like Google were inventing new industries during her tenure there which develops different management skills to what a business like Yahoo! needs.

The biggest lesson of Yahoo!’s demise is how even the most powerful online brands isn’t immune from disruption itself, with what was once the internet’s most popular website being eclipsed by Google and Facebook.

Interestingly, as Quartz reports, Yahoo! is still one of the US’s most popular sites and only slightly behind Google and Facebook in unique monthly views.

Despite this, Yahoo! has struggled to grow for 15 years and has struggle to make money although it remains a four billion dollar a year business.

Which shows eyeballs aren’t enough for a mature web business, at some stage it has to show a return to justify its valuations.

Among Yahoo!’s many properties remain some gems like Flickr and it will be interesting to watch what Verizon does with them. Sadly any successes will be tiny compared to what the company once promised.

Trusting the web

With misinformation rife on the web, services like Google and Facebook will have to do more to make their services more reliable.

Following last week’s US election attention has fallen onto the role of Facebook in influencing public opinion and the role of rumours and fake news.

The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, says claims that his company’s news feed influenced the US election are nonsense but, as Zeynep Tufekci the New York Times writes, the platform has shown in its own experiments that the service does influence voters.

Sadly misinformation is now the norm on the web given anyone can start a blog and post ridiculous and outlandish claims. If that misinformation fits a group’s beliefs, then it may be shared millions of times as people share it across social media services, particularly Facebook.

Facebook’s filter bubbles exacerbates that problem as each person’s news feed is determined by what the company’s algorithm thinks the user will ‘like’ rather than something that will inform or enlighten them.

Those ‘filter bubbles’ tend to reinforce our existing biases or prejudices and when fake news sites are injected into our feeds Facebook becomes a powerful way of confirming our beliefs, something made worse by friends gleefully posting fake quotes or false news that happens to fit their world views. If you click ‘Like’, you’ll then get more of them.

Over time, Facebook risks becoming irrelevant if the news being fed from the site becomes perceived as being unreliable

For Facebook, and for other algorithm driven services like Google, the risks in fake news don’t just lie in a loss of credibility, there’s also the risk of regulatory problems when news manipulation starts affecting markets, commercial interests or threatens established power bases.

The fake news problem is something that affects the entire web and its users, for Facebook and Google it is becoming a serious issue.

Facebook’s challenge in executing for the enterprise

Workplaces by Facebook is the social media giant’s push into the enterprise computing market. Its success isn’t assured.

Workplaces by Facebook was is the social media giant’s enterprise collaboration service it hopes will put the company into the enterprise space.

Like many similar products, the service is aimed at improving collaboration in the workplace. As the media release gushes, “the new global and mobile workplace isn’t about closed-door meetings or keeping people separated by title, department or geography. Organizations are stronger and more productive when everyone comes together.”

On first impressions, Facebook should score some successes with the service however it’s success is far from guaranteed. As we’ve seen with other major company’s attempts to open new products, being the deepest pocketed player doesn’t automatically ensure a successful product.

The Google example

A common assumption when a behemoth enters a martketplace is will simply smother smaller competitors by virtue of its size.

History shows this not always the case, Facebook itself thrived despite the huge threat posed by Google+, indeed Google is probably the best example of a large corporation that struggles outside its core business.

Part of the reason for the idea of big companies easily squashing the little folk being a fallacy is that the smaller companies are more focused on their problem – for a corporation the division is one part of a broader operation run by managers, not owners.

In such a marketplace, execution and management focus matter so Facebook’s success will depend as much on executive buy-in as the resources thrown at the product.

Cost and complexity

A notable thing about Workplaces by Facebook is its partner network, led by Deloitte. This is not a good sign.

The need to have consulting partners – particularly huge and expensive companies like Deloitte – is not an encouraging sign for the nascent service and may be a barrier towards adoption.

A separate issue in Deloitte’s involvement is how cloud services, which we include Workplaces by Facebook, are buddying up with the major consulting firms with everyone from Huawei to Oracle entering arrangements. While this might help partners squeeze a few more pennies out of their hapless clients, it’s doesn’t seem to be in the vendors’ or customers’ interests.

Trust

What happens to users’ data is a perennial problem for Facebook and it’s notable this issue isn’t mentioned in the announcement.

Facebook’s success shows consumers are relaxed about how the company uses data but that attitude may not be shared by managers and business owners.

The proprietor of one reasonable sized startup said, “I have a slight concern about giving Facebook any access to my company information. Whilst it has been fine from a personal perspective I feel the trust level is not strong enough to warrant handing over access to, effectively, everything.”

Overcoming that objection may be one of the biggest challenges for Facebook being accepted as an enterprise tool.

Becoming an enterprise service

Facebook’s push into the enterprise isn’t surprising and indicates that as the company matures, something more than the advertising funded consumer market is needed to drive its growth.

That consumer background is a strength for Facebook as the consumerization of enterprise software is an established trend. Having an interface and tools that are familiar to most staff is very attractive to managers looking at introducing new platforms with the shallowest possible learning curves.

However the ultimate question is what need does Workplaces by Facebook address? There’s no shortage of collaboration platforms that offer most of the futures offered by the platform.

If Workplaces by Facebook does address a genuine need in enterprise workplaces and the company’s management can maintain its focus on the product then the service may be a success. That isn’t a given though.

P&G focusing on Facebook is bad news for media

Proctor and Gamble’s decision to focus on Facebook is bad news for media and smaller websites

Consumer goods giant Proctor and Gamble has announced they will be dialling back their targeted advertising on Facebook, as they discovered being too precise turns out to stifle sales.

It turns out that big companies need scale, not precision, so to grow sales they need to be engaging with more people and not restricting their message to niche groups.

Given the different natures of businesses it’s not surprising to see strategies that work for one group fail dismally for others, but it’s interesting how targeting turns out not to work so well for mass market products.

The losers though in the P&G story are smaller websites as Wall Street Journal quotes the company’s Chief Marketing Officer as saying they will focus more on the big sites and move away from niche players.

Mr. Pritchard said P&G won’t cut back on Facebook spending and will employ targeted ads where it makes sense, such as pitching diapers to expectant mothers. He said P&G has ramped up spending both on digital sites and traditional platforms. One category the company is scaling back: smaller websites that lack the reach of sites such as Facebook, Google and YouTube.

Again we’re seeing the early promise of the web failing as economic power continues to be concentrated with a few major platforms. This is also terrible news for media organisations as big advertisers – P&G are the world’s biggest spender – focus on a few sites and increasingly ignore local or niche news publications.

There’s also the quandary of where the content that Facebook’s users share will come from, with the advertising shifting away from media companies – new players such as Buzzfeed and Huffington Post as well as the old established mastheads – to Google and Facebook, there’s less funds to create interesting and shareable stories.

P&G’s move is very good for Facebook’s and Google’s shareholder but the future media models still seem a long way off.

The revenge of the open web

The UK government saved £4bn by banning smartphone apps. That’s a small win for the open internet.

Ben Terrett, the former head of design at the UK Government’s Digital Service, tells GovInsider why the agency banned mobile phone apps with the British taxpayers saving £4.1bn over the following four years.

Instead the GDS insisted agencies built responsive web sites so pages would adapt to the devices they were being read upon, saving time and money being devoted to developing and maintaining individual apps for different platforms.

Apps are “very expensive to produce, and they’re very very expensive to maintain because you have to keep updating them when there are software changes,” GovInsider quotes Terrett.

For those of us who worry about the increasingly siloed and proprietary nature of the internet, Terret’s story is very good news. Apps are particularly problematic as they stunt innovation, lock users into platforms and give those who control the App stores – mainly Apple and Google – massive market power.

It’s no co-incidence Facebook are currently in the process of restricting web access to their messenger service. Locking users into their app gives them far more power over users and much more control over their data.

On the other hand, the open web means sites are more accessible and not subject to the corporate whims of whoever controls a given silo. It also means that any data collected is far more likely to be commoditised, something Facebook hates.

That government agencies and large corporations are realising the costs, risks and value they are handing over the gatekeepers by developing apps is encouraging. It would be good if they considered the other downsides of giving the web over to a small clique of companies.

Guessing ethnic affinity

Big data can create big risks, particularly when a service like Facebook starts racially profiling

What’s your ethnic affinity? Apparently Facebook thinks its algorithm can guess your race based upon the nature of your posts.

This application is an interesting, and dangerous, development although it shouldn’t be expected that it’s any more accurate than the plethora of ‘guess your age/nationality/star sign’ sites that trawl through Facebook pages.

Guessing your race is something clumsy and obvious but its clear that services like Google, LinkedIn and Facebook have a mass of data on each of their millions of users that enables them to crunch some big numbers and come up with all manner of conclusions.

Some of these will be useful to governments, marketers and businesses and in some cases it may lead to unforeseen consequences.

The truth may lie in the data but if we don’t understand the questions we’re asking, we risk creating a whole new range of problems.