Tag: journalism

Who do journalists serve?

Who is the audience that journalists are writing for?

In an excellent video explaining how to pitch the tech media Milo Yiannopoulos, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Kernel and public relations agent Colette Ballou discuss PR and startups at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna.

One thing that jumps out from the presentation is Milo’s confusion about who their market is – at no time in the spiel does he mention readers or advertisers.

At one stage he says “we’re here to serve you,” this is to a room of tech entrepreneurs.

Milo’s focus raises the question about where do journalists add value and who they serve?

Traditionally that focus has been on giving the readers or viewers  useful and valuable information.

In order to do this, the businesses employing journalists have either raised funds through advertising, subscriptions or government subsidies.

That in itself created conflicts and it took strong courageous editors and managers to resist pressures from advertisers and governments.

With the web stealing advertising revenues, journalists and the organisations that employ them have a problem.

The question now for journalists is where can they add value in a form that people will pay.

Maybe it is shouting into social media echo chambers or spruiking the wares of the latest hot tech start up although it appears those channels are no more profitable than the old forms of journalism.

Another point Milo makes in that presentation is pertinent as well;

The arrogance of a journalist is inversely proportionate to their talent. So the tech bloggers are massively arrogant and have huge opinions of themselves.

Ne’er a truer word spoken.

The question remains though, who do those bloggers or journalists serve?

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Driving agendas

Agenda driven journalism helps no-one in the long term

A feature of the new question and answer service Branch are “featured questions” highlighting popular or interesting conversations on the service.

One of those early featured conversations was a question from investor Michael Arrington, “when is it good for founders to leak stuff to the press?”

Strategic leaks have become the staple of most news services, time poor journalists are desperate for scoops and clicks which gives an opportunity for companies and governments to feed information that suits their agenda of the moment.

As the answers in the thread indicate, this style of reportage is very common in the Silicon Valley tech press. The greater fool business model of many web start ups require they get lots of media coverage in order to attract buyers.

That media coverage includes ‘leaking’ stories that one big company – a Google, Microsoft or Facebook – is interested in the business. This always creates credulous headlines on the tech media sites and one of these leaks prompted Arrington’s question.

Strategic leaking isn’t just a tech media phenomenon. Australian politics was paralysed at the beginning of the year when numerous stories that “un-named Labor Party sources” were plotting against the Prime Minister dominated the headlines for weeks. All of these were pointless leaks from various minor politicians try to push their agendas. Often to their long term detriment.

In the sports world the agendas often revolve around contract negotiations – remember this next time you read that a star player may be going to another team, almost certainly that story has been planted by that player’s agent in an attempt to increase his client’s value.

The same thing happens in the business, property and the vacuous entertainment, travel and dining pages.

Agenda driven journalism fails the reader and the writer, it also damages the publication as once readers start asking what the motivation is for a story, then the credibility of that outlet is failing.

Increasingly this is happening to all the mainstream publications.

Resisting the push to agenda driven journalism is tough as editorial resources are stripped from media organisations and as journalists come under more pressure to write stories that drive traffic.

One of the great assets of big media is trust in the masthead. A hundred years ago people took what was written in their city’s newspapers as truth, a few decades ago it was what was on the evening news. If Walter Cronkite or your city’s news anchor said it was true, then that was good enough for most people.

In the race for clicks, that trust has been abused and lost by all but the most dedicated fans. It’s probably the greatest loss of all for the established media giants.

For readers, the web and social media is their friend. They can check with their peers to see if a story stands up and if it doesn’t they can spread this across their networks.

Agenda driven journalism fuelled by pointless leaks helps no-one in the long term and it will probably kill many established mastheads. It’s another opportunity for smart entrepreneurs to disrupt a market that’s failing.

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Saving Fairfax

First we sack the managers, then we find some decent editors

“The writer and art critic was one of the great ex-patriots of Australia and he put our country on the map.”

One typo illustrates all that is wrong with Australia’s two oldest newspapers, The Age and The Sydney Morning, who are both part of the Fairfax stable.

It’s particularly disappointing that one of the leading newspapers in the city of Hughes’ birth could have such a dumb typo, but adding to the insult is the paper’s underwhelming and disappointing coverage as compared to the New York Times, the paper of his adopted home town.

Hughes was one of many in his generation left Australia because of the lack of opportunity. Fellow expatriate (note the spelling) Clive James said he could have never have developed his writing skills without the sharp editing his copy was subjected to at London’s newspapers. That is as true today as it was in 1960.

Poor editing lies at the core of Fairfax’s problems, not just in silly typos but also with inappropriate stories like leading with a shop assistant’s Facebook profile or the hysterical regurgitation of spin doctor’s talking points.

This isn’t to pick on Roy Masters and Asher Moses, both are capable of great work — Asher’s Digital Dreamers series profiling Australian technology expatriates (that word again) was excellent work and when Roy doesn’t get sucked into the petty ego wars that dominate Sydney’s Rugby League community his sports writing can match the world’s best.

Both Roy and Asher, along with every other journalist at Fairfax, are let down by poor editors who don’t have the balls to tell them when work isn’t up to standard, let alone pick up dumb typos.

If Fairfax is to survive, it requires strong and good editors that are prepared to hold their writers accountable and back them when the going gets tough. Right now Fairfax lacks those leaders.

That lack of leadership extends throughout the organisation’s management and board. Fairfax’s management lacks people committed to delivering a great product or capable of grappling with the challenges of making online journalism pay.

Making online journalism pay is more than just having one-way Twitter accounts, plastering your site with ads or irritating your users with auto playing video clips. Web strategist Jim Stewart dissects how these tactics aren’t working for Fairfax.

Whoever figures out how to make money from online journalism will be the Randolph Hearst of the 21st Century, currently it’s safe to say there are no budding Hearsts or Murdochs among the comfortable ranks of Fairfax’s management.

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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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Successful Sources Will Not Be Paid

The free myth is biting us in many ways

The whole world wants a freebie, and many of us are giving our ideas, intellectual capital and service away to online magazines in the hope of getting a link or a little bit of publicity.

Bringing the idea undone is the unfortunate reality that web is awash with free pointless material that adds little value. Your contribution, however valuable, gets lost in the static of PR driven articles and SEO optimised fluff.

This is why Google are trying to tie social recommendations into their search results, although it’s hard to see how your cousin’s LOLCat posts are going to add any more value than the generic garbage served from services like eHow.

Yet every day there’s more callouts for  free content – desperate journalists and publishers beg for our ideas or labor in return for some ‘exposure’.

And that ‘exposure’ floats away into the ocean of noise and irrelevance filled with the rest of the ‘free’ content.

Giving stuff away for free isn’t working well anymore and for those of us who are trying to build a business around that model, we’re struggling to get found or heard in the morass.

Along with the wasted time, the danger is we start giving away our best, most valuable work in order to get attention and then we have nothing left to sell.

Consumers are waking up to this and beginning to focus about what they read online. We should too.

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Facebook timelines and the long tail

Can the Internet’s long tail work for small business?

The Financial Times’ Tech Hub blog reports how Facebook’s Timeline function is driving views to old newspaper articles to unexpected stories.

On one level, this is a vindication of Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory of the value of older inventory; that older assets and data become more valuable in an age of unlimited choice.

The question remains though just have valuable old news really is, does the digital equivalent of fish and chip wrapping really have any intrinsic value.

It will probably turn out that information consumers will pay for unique, timely content while leaving the lolcats and funny videos to ad supported content farms.

The long tail model is the digital equivalent of the Fast Moving Consumer Goods business model, just as a big supermarket only makes pennies from each can of baked beans or milk they sell, they make big profits due to the volume they move.

As business writer Seth Godin has put it, the long tail is good for organisations that own big warehouses, and newspapers have the news equivalent of that.

For small businesses, the long tail is not where we need to be, our economics mean margin, not volume.

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Magazines 2020

Content Providers, curators or experience makers?

As hundreds queued around the world for the latest Apple iPad an Australian media tycoon told a business breakfast that newspapers were a sunset industry. Where does this leave magazines and other print media?

The last decade for magazines has been tough, as readers drifted to largely free websites with the advertisers following. The challenge for publishers is how do they follow their markets onto the web while still making money.

Magazines aren’t unique in this challenge – the media industries, like many others, have been affected by the rise of the web. Magazines themselves sit somewhere between the recording and newspaper industries with news stand sales and subscriptions being a bigger proportion of incom while not having the same newspaper classified income which has collapsed so dramatically in recent years.

The Shift Online

We’ve seen a massive shift to the web over the last decade and that movement is only accelerating as advertisers start to follow consumers and the public embraces social media and online gaming.

PriceWaterhouseCooper’s Entertainment and Media Outlook forecasts the magazine industry to lose 1% of advertising market share – from 5 to 4% of the overall spend – over the 2010 to 14 period with all the losses going online.

While the magazine industry looks at losing 20% of its advertising revenue to the Internet, figures are similar for newspapers, radio and free to air television with online advertising moving from 18% to 26% of the market. The advertisers are, quite rightly, following the customers.

Following readers online is the great challenge for the magazine industry, the question is how do they do it and continue to be profitable.

The Internet Challenge

The greatest problem on the Internet is making money, businesses have trained web surfers to expect online products – particularly news and entertainment – for free. Even physical goods have become increasingly commoditised as deal of the day and group buying sites have used “cheap” as the main hook for buyers.

Today’s reader and consumer expects goods they find online to be cheap and any content they discover to be free.

That isn’t fatal for a business as the broadcast television industry has shown us you can provide free content paid for by advertisers and make a good living while there’s no shortage of merchants who’ve built empires on the fast moving consumer good model of “stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap”.

Part of the online magazine industry’s response to the challenge of adapting to these models has been to use free labour. The rise of the Digital Sharecroppers, where writers provide content for free, has been the result.

People have been prepared to provide content for free for all manner of reasons. The problem for publishers, and readers, is quality writing is not sustainable under this model and we’re beginning to see the end result where writers are forced to drive buses and the free content is being increasingly sourced from PR agencies, their tame blogger bunny friends or from content farms more concerned about gaming Google through SEO keywords.

Free content also reduces the barriers to entry, which are already extremely low in online given a geek with a WordPress site or YouTube account can have a site up and running in a couple of hours for less than a hundred dollars. If content is low quality, there’s little reason for readers to have any loyalty or to stick to any one site.

There is the other type of free content though, User Generated Content (UCG) consisting of the comments, forum posts and free articles submitted by readers. Many of these followers are fans and this is perhaps where salvation for the magazine industry lies.

What formats can we expect

The old magazine format isn’t going to go away, it’s just going to decline as part of the overall distribution. We’re going to see more short and long format online content complimenting the magazines along with a lot of user content in the comments and forums sections.

We’ll also see more cross platform selling like we currently see with magazines like Better Homes and Gardens though with a much bigger online and interactive component than the present TV-magazine tie ups.

Content though will be more important than format. The SEO driven plays and content farms are a transition effect and as both search engines and readers become more savvy,  the influence of sites like eHow and The Huffington Post drop away.

Probably the biggest sleeper though are the electronic readers such as the iPad and Kindle, it is just possible these devices might resurrect the fortunes of the publishing industry in a similar way to the Compact Disk did for the music industry in the 1990s. Certainly Rupert Murdoch is hoping this.

How will magazines engage with consumers in 2020?

Successful magazines are going to find the niches where readers and advertisers will pay to be engaged and identified with key groups, demographics and markets. Adding value to readers is going to be the key to revenue on an Internet that is full of noise of movement but with increasingly fewer nuggets of wisdom.

It’s those nuggets of wisdom, useful analysis and unique worthy content that will be what time poor and somewhat information addled consumers are going to be looking for.

They are also going to be looking for a platform to get their views heard. So it’s going to be critical that magazines make that platform available through comments, forums, reader blogs and giving loyal and knowledgeable readers the opportunity to write for the publication.

Engagement is going to mean allowing site visitors some ownership of the content. The more you can build conversations and contributions around content, the more likely it is that readers will come back and the more likely they are to pay for add ons and read advertisements.

Where will the revenue come from?

The great challenge in the Internet era is making money online. We’ve trained the market to expect news and information to be free and that genie is now out of the bottle, and despite the paywalls we try to put up, we’re going to struggle to convince readers of our value.

As writers, journalists, editors and publishers, we’re going to have to demonstrate our worth to the people who are prepared to pay for content. Right now there aren’t many of who will pay for relevance and quality, but things may be changing as readers realise much of what they currently find on content farms is unsatisfactory.

Subscriptions and advertising are still going to be critical while events, merchandise and other revenue streams are going to be useful revenue centres but it’s hard to see how they will contribute to the bottom line any more than they currently do. It’s also important to remember that successful staging events is an expensive task involving skills many publishers simply don’t have.

Hyperlocal is a fascinating area for magazines. While much of the focus has been on adopting local search to the newspaper industry it could be that specialist magazines can deliver effective localised products through directories and mobile phone applications.

For instance let’s say we have an offal magazine for those who like to offal. A Brisbane businessman visiting Adelaide feels like a plate devilled kidneys for dinner. It could be that Offal Eaters Monthly magazine has a paid app or a subscriber site that allows him to find what he wants in a strange city.

What is the role of the publisher/editor?

More than ever the publisher and editor are going to have to know their market intimately. At a time when audiences are going to be widely fragmented it’s going to be essential to understand what the readers want.

User generated content provides an opportunity for publishers and their editors to understand the market and monitoring what is being said by the target audience is going to be a key role of the modern editor.

Moderating and controlling what’s being said on the platform will also be a key role for an editor. We all know the Internet is God’s gift to opinionated idiots and the risks of defamation, piracy and other brand damaging activity on websites are very real. The editor’s job will increasingly be to filter out the lunatics while encouraging interesting discussion.

Most people though don’t want to create content, beyond having a quick comment on a post or sometimes joining a discussion. Another important role of the editor is to balance the higher quality, paid content with user generated material to ensure the publication’s site doesn’t dissolve into just another web forum.

Publishers too are going to be challenged by this and their task is to find the deep niches where these models can succeed then convince advertisers and subscribers that their sites are worth signing up to.

Given the ease of launching new sites, the key to success is being the trusted leader in your segment. If your content can be easily replicated or bought from another source then the survival odds are firmly against you.

The next nine years

We should also keep in mind change isn’t new, broadcast television gave a death sentence to news magazines like Life or the Bulletin a generation ago, and these publications only survived because of indulgent owners.  The magazine industry met those challenges, evolved and survived albeit with great change and a few casualties.

The same is happening now, the industry is evolving and adapting to the new mediums and the changed behaviour of advertisers and readers. It’s not pretty or easy but the rewards are going to be there for those who figure it out.

Had we been around when Gutenberg invented the printing press we would have wondered what will happen to all the monks who up until then had spent their lives manually copying religious texts and important documents. Change came to the monks, but not in the ways they expected.

The web only recently turned 20 and in 2020 it will still be less than thirty years since its invention.  All of us will still be learning, making mistakes and discovering where the opportunities are.

It’s a time of challenge and the rewards for those who get it right are great. The key for magazines, like all of us, lies in understanding our markets and audiences.

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