Tag: media

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.

Good critic, bad artist?

Are critics simply failed artists or do they have a more important role?

With the passing of art critic Robert Hughes I’m re-reading a passage of his autobiography, Things I Didn’t Know.

In Hughes’ passage describing his leaving Australia he talks of attempts at painting and makes an observation about art criticism that is true of every field.

“You do not have to be a good painter to be a good art critic,” he said. “But there is, to me, something a little suspect about an art critic who has never painted and who cannot claim to grasp even the rudiments of intelligent drawing.”

The same could be said of any critic – knowing the technicalities, skills, difficulties and effort enables a critic to make informed judgement. That isn’t to say they are superior at their trade than those they criticise.

It’s been said that we are all two bad decisions from ruining our lives or careers. That’s true in the artistic or professional fields – many managers, entrepreneurs, politicians, artists or just men going through middle aged crises have come unstuck from making the wrong choice at the wrong time.

It’s why we always have to view the stories of great success with caution, as the winners’ tales are tinged with survivor bias and for every winner there a field of skilled, hard working people who didn’t succeed.

In some fields, like arts and sport, the winners have to have skills before they will even get a chance of winning. Although there are many who could have be successful but weren’t because they never had an opportunity to pick up a paintbrush, guitar or ball at a key moment in their lives.

That isn’t quite so true in more subjective fields like business, politics or journalism. In those callings it is possible for a suburban apparatchik, dour accountant or talentless hack to rise because of their mentors, rat cunning or just pure dumb luck.

One of a critic’s roles is to call out those talentless but lucky hacks and in doing so they do society a great favour.

In a world where spin and PR often trump good policy or ethical behaviour, we have to pay attention to the informed critics who help us filter out the misinformation and lies that is part of our information diet.

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.

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.

Breaking the media camel’s back

Will News Corporation’s split be the end of print media?

Speculation that News Corporation is going to split into two could be the straw that breaks the back of the media industry.

News gathering has always been subsided by other revenues, mainly advertising in newspapers and commercial broadcasting.

Since the rise of the internet, most of that advertising has followed the audience elsewhere and newspapers have only held on because some advertisers are slow to break the business habits of the last 150 years.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation took that subsidisation to another level, with profitable pay TV and movie divisions also subsidising the print operations that allowed Murdoch to reach his position of power.

Should News now split those profitable operations away from the declining print divisions, those in the news media are going to find themselves in an even bigger world of pain as their revenue declines become even more apparent.

We could be seeing the end game for print in News Corporation’s move. The challenge for all of us now is to figure out the journalism model that works in an era where information is a commodity and there’s no guarantees of easy advertising revenue.

Australia – the Noah’s Ark of business

Cosy duopolies leave the Australian business community exposed to a changing world.

During a week of big business news, the buyout of another boutique brewery by a big corporation was barely noticed, but Lion Nathan’s takeover of the Little Creatures brewery illustrates the duopoly problem that is crippling Australian business.

A few days after that deal was announced, rumours that Business Spectator – which the above link takes you to – would be taken over by News Limited started circulating. These turned out to be true.

In both cases, existing duopoly players bought out small competitors, a process that’s been going on since Australia decided industry duopolies were necessary to protect the nation’s managerial classes, and these takeovers kill genuine innovation and stymie new thinking.

For those duopolies the definition of success is grabbing a few percent of market share off each other while using their market powers to screw down supplier costs.

A good of example of this is the retail duopoly, the farmers and producers get screwed while the supermarket chains engage in price wars driven by truly awful advertising campaigns.

Un-imaginative, un-original and plain un-inspiring. Any smart young kid wanting to get ahead in the retail industries knows they have to look overseas for job opportunities or inspiration.

Therein lies the real problem with Australia’s duopoly business culture – it triggers a brain drain as comfortable managements block any innovative new thinking as being too hard or just unnecessary.

In the media duopoly, telecoms analyst Paul Budde illustrated the problem in his account on trying to convince Fairfax of where the media industry was heading in a connected economy.

Fairfax’s management didn’t get it and didn’t care – today they still don’t get but they care deeply as their business model crumbles.

It’s not just future managers that are looking overseas for opportunity, the customers are well.

The duopoly model that evolved in Australia over the last thirty years depended upon the tyranny of distance to act as an effective trade wall. The Internet has demolished that wall for most industries.

Almost every Australian duopoly is living on borrowed time. If, like the proprietors of Business Spectator or Little Creatures, your business plan relies on selling out to a local duopolist then you’d better move quick.

Delivering products

Focusing on delivery misses why we we are in business.

Once upon a time the local plumber got to work by bicycle, then he got a jalopy and now he shows up in a van or a hotted up ute. The plumber and his customers don’t care about the way his services are delivered.

A hundred years ago the retail industry was dominated by corner stores that customers could walk to, they received their deliveries by horse drawn carts and made deliveries on bicycles.

Then along came the motor car, which changed shopping habits and delivery methods.

Fifty years later the corner stores were a dying breed as they were replaced by supermarkets which customers could drive to and they took their deliveries by truck.

Today the retail industry is changing again, as the Internet changes shopping habits and society in ways similar to the motor car.

A similar pattern of change happened in the media sector; the evening paper died as commuters switched to cars and reading the Tribune on the tram or train home became less relevant.

Morning papers survived as people took deliveries to read over breakfast before driving to work.

At the same time radio and television became the dominant way most people got their news.

Even more the retail, the web has dramatically changed news distribution methods.

As the effects of Fairfax’s restructure sinks in, there are a group of people who don’t seem to want to accept reality – newsagents.

Mark Fletcher’s initial post about Fairfax’s restructure on his Australian Newsagency Blog attracted some harsh comments;

“Whilst the print media is arguably in decline I consider this post to be scare mongering……Fairfax will be here in print for years to come and to say or suggest that some days of the week will be or may be cut is pure conjecture at this point.”

” I am in semirural metropolitan Sydney. We have just added another 100 customers to our delivery run. Majority dont like reading their news online – old habits die hard. I hope that Fairfax dont abandon them. They like getting their newspapers in print.”

“Hi i will not pay to read online why it is all free, but will buy paper”

Focusing on print condemns those newsagents to the fate of the corner shop.

What is missed in the discussions about the future of the media is that medium is not message – people want relevant content delivered in the most convenient way.

This is true in every business. What we do is not really related to how we deliver the product, if we’re tied to one way of getting our services to a customer then we’re in trouble.

Fairfax of the Future

Can an iconic media company be saved?

The embattled board of Fairfax has announced major changes to the way they publish their newspapers. Is it too little, too late for this iconic media organisation?

As the board of Fairfax struggles with poor performance and angry demands from prominent shareholders, the company has announced a change of focus and a reduction in their printing capacity.

In a presentation given by the Chief Executive Greg Hywood, the company’s management goes through the scope and logic of their changes which are mainly around their distribution networks.

Rethinking print

The clearest message from the presentation is that readers have moved online with over three-quarters of readers now accessing the Age and Sydney Morning Herald digitally.

While there are still substantial print revenues in their metro division, around $500 million dollars a year right now, it’s clear Fairfax has to reduce printing and distribution costs.

Cutting the Chullora and Tullamarine printing plants makes sense given Fairfax has regional capacity just outside both Melbourne and Sydney.

Shrinking the SMH and Age to a “compact” size – tabloid being the word that dare not speak its name – will get shrieks of outrage from those wedded to the broadsheet concept, but really doesn’t make much difference to the online readership that represent the future.

Digital first

Fairfax’s “digital first” strategy where online publication take precedence over the print editions will be detailed in a few weeks, this tis a change that should have happened years ago.

Despite the wringing of ink stained hands by journalists who grew up in the era of hot metal printing presses, the news industry has been digital for over a quarter century. In fact the two printing plants now being closed were the digital successors to the old presses on Sydney’s Broadway and Melbourne’s Spencer Street.

That Fairfax’s management is only realising newspapers are just another distribution medium illustrates how late they are to understanding the changes which have happened in the last twenty years.

Using terms like “Digital First” only indicates an obsession with distribution methods rather than the product itself.

Content above all

Fairfax’s product is the news content which is still a valuable commodity – almost everything driving the Australian news cycle comes out of the metropolitan print media.

What appears in the Sydney Morning Herald, Age, Daily Telegraph or Herald Sun drives most of the day’s radio, television and social media coverage in their cities. It shouldn’t be under estimated how powerful both publications are and it is why Gina Rinehart wants a stake in Fairfax.

That value could see paywalls work for Fairfax, but content has to be worth paying for if readers are going to reluctantly open their wallets.

A product worth paying for?

Having a product worth paying for is where the real challenge lies for Fairfax.

Right now much of the content sucks – there’s too much syndication which can be sourced elsewhere, for instance most of the technology section has article that appeared two days earlier on Techmeme or Mashable.

In domestic sections like politics and property the bulk of the “journalism” is repeating other peoples’ agendas rather than reporting facts or driving debate. Much of what Fairfax’s Canberra correspondents report are anonymous briefings from “party figures” while the property section regurgitates the latest spin from real estate agents and property developers.

Over in travel and food, those sections now largely consist of barely rehashed media releases and it’s no accident readers are fleeing those sections to more relevant, and honest, food and travel blogs.

All of these sections have to be revamped if Fairfax is to survive. This will need new editors and probably wholesale staff changes.

A relevant future

The future for Fairfax is being relevant to the communities it serves. Already newspapers are irrelevant and increasingly 1970s style journalism is being ignored.

Late last week the Prime Minister met with a group a bloggers in an attempt to soften her image with key women’s groups.

Despite the sneering of the Fairfax Canberra correspondents, that meeting at Kirribilli House illustrates how media is changing – to politicians, readers and advertisers the old newspapers and their journalists are no longer relevant.

Hopefully Fairfax’s board can ensure the company stays relevant and survives – the Australian media sector is dominated by too few voices as it is and losing one of the biggest players would be a disaster.

Can Warren Buffett save local news?

Maybe an old billionaire could save the local newspaper industry

Warren Buffett’s purchase of local newspaper chain General Media Publications last week raised eyebrows and the question about the future of local newspapers.

Local news has bucked the trend of the big four gatekeepers taking over – most of us expected Google and Facebook with their local business listings, search and community functions to take over the market just as the web has stolen the income streams of the bigger metropolitan mastheads.

What’s more, us digerati believed social media services like Facebook and Twitter would give us most of the information about what is happening in our communities and make the role of the local newspaper redundant.

This hasn’t happened and there’s several reasons for this – a key one is current web services are great at connecting disparate communities but don’t do a good job of connecting local groups.

A bigger failure is both Google and Facebook blew the opportunity to dominate local news.

Basically, local news isn’t sexy, it’s much more of an ego stroke to be treated like a rock star at a conference or to negotiate a billion dollar purchase of a social media application.

Late nights reporting goings on at the local council or chamber of commerce isn’t sexy. So Facebook and Google’s executive focused on the shiny things.

That failure to execute by the big players has largely left the market to the incumbents and their income is largely untouched – Media General’s income is largely static, unlike the declines being seen by big city mastheads.

A similar phenomenon is at work in other markets, in Australia Fairfax’s regional newspaper division is far more profitable than any other sector while competitor APN makes a good return from their publishing activities in smaller communities.

Interestingly almost all of the local news incumbents are saddled with debts or poorly thought out ventures that absorb the profits coming in from their core operations.

Part of the profitability is because local newspapers are established brands. Locals know they will get news about their community that is immediately relevant to them.

For local businesses, they still have to advertise in the local press as that’s where their market is. Local customers might be reading about Federal politics, Kim Kardashian or Occupy Wall Street on the web, but they are still turning to the district news to find out what’s going on in their immediate community.

How this pans out for Warren Buffett is going to be interesting, Berkshire Hathaway tends to run a lean management philosophy in its businesses and this might be one of the saving attributes for their local media investments.

Stripping out the million dollar men who infest the top levels of the newspaper industry and investing in content – both online and in print – may well be the key to success of the local news industry.

Key to the local news success will be energising the advertising sales teams – there’s little point in skilling up journalists in new technologies or getting editors to “think digital” if the salespeople are stuck in the mentality of display print ads being the only thing that matters. This is the same challenge metro newspapers face.

Strong local media matters in both country and suburban communities. It’s essential to the spirit of the local town and a healthy local media is always a feature of a prosperous community.

One of the promises of the Internet is that local groups could seize back the news about their towns and suburbs, this doesn’t appear to be happening. Maybe it’s going to take Warren Buffett to fix it.

Links of the day 14 May 2012

Some great links over the weekend ranging from the future of media and big box stores to a great, quirky clip promoting Scandanavia as a place to do business.

22 Michaels on an amazing presentation on why you should do business in Stockholm. It’s a shame more government agencies can’t do shows like this.

MIT’s Center for Civic Media writes up a discussion by the boss of Google News. I give this more of a write up in Grappling with Online Media.

Scamworld. Not only is The Verge’s expose of the online get rich quick community a great read, it’s also shows one of the future media models.

Business Insider has the real story why the tale of LinkedIn buying employment site Monster was made up. This is great example of how merchant banks try to create a market for flogging client assets. The managers of Football players do exactly the same thing.

Is there money in Big Data? MIT’s Technology Review doesn’t seem to think so.

Ending the era of the megastore. The Fiscal Times on how Wal-Mart is re-inventing itself.

Tomorrow’s blog looks at phishing scams and how social media is helping the more targeted “spear phishing”.

Grappling with the online news beast

Old media organisations are struggling with the web. Is the news industry dead or evolving?

The head of Google News, Richard Gingras, last week discussed how the news industry is evolving at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation.

Much of Richard’s discussion centred around disruption – the newspaper industry was disrupted in the 1950s by television and by the 1980s most print markets had seen several mastheads reduced to one or two.

The remaining outlets were able to book fat profits from their monopoly or duopoly position in display and classified advertising.

By 2000, the web had killed that business model and the newspaper industry was in a decline that continues today as aggregator sites like Huffington Post steal page views and Google News further changes the distribution model.

One of the problems for the news industry is how different the online mediums are from print, radio or television broadcast. The struggles of media startup The Global Mail is a good example of this.

In the middle of last year news started trickling out that one of the Australian Broadcasting Corporations’s top journalists, Monica Attard, had left the broadcaster to set up The Global Mail, an online news site funded by Wotif founder Graeme Wood.

The site launched on schedule in February 2012 and underwhelmed readers with pedestrian content and a confusing layout. By May, Monica Attard announced she was leaving the organisation she’d founded.

Tim Burrowes of the media site Mumbrella examined why the Global Mail is struggling, his Nine problems stopping The Global Mail from getting an audience details how the site doesn’t use online media effectively.

At heart is a fundamental mismatch between the methods of journalists raised in the “glory days” of print and broadcast journalism against those of the online world, not least the much harsher financial imperatives of those publishing on the web.

One key problem it the TL;DR factor – Too Long; Didn’t Read. Where online readers tend to leave stories after around four hundred words.

Richard Gringas is quoted as encountering this problem when he worked at online magazine, Salon.

At Salon, articles were paginated, but only 27% of readers made it to the end of the four-page articles. Compared to competitors, Richard was told, this was a good benchmark. But with fresh eyes, he was astounded that a product was being produced with the knowledge that the vast majority of the audience would not consume the entire piece. Richard loves the long form, but if the objective is to convey information, we need to think about the right form for the right medium at the right time.

So “long form” journalism has to be written the right way and it has to be backed up with good visual components and have “short form” versions suited to the more impatient readers who make up the bulk of the web audience.

The New York Times made a step in this direction with their iEconomy series on how the US middle classes have been displaced with manufacturing’s move to China.

An even better example of journalists using the web well is The Verge’s Scamworld where an online expose of Internet get rich quick schemes and the conmen behind them.

Scamworld shows us what skilled journalists can do online. The amazing thing is the site’s new steam is tiny compared to those of established outlets like the New York Times, Guardian, Fairfax or those of News Corporation.

This failure to execute by incumbent news organisations isn’t because they are lacking talent – every young, and not so young, journalist has been required to have multimedia skills and the ability to file stories in multiple formats for at least a decade.

Old Media’s problems lies in the mindsets of senior journalists, editors and their managements who are locked into a 1950s way of thinking where fat advertising revenues funded the adventures and expense accounts of roving reporters who tough as nails editors occasionally bullied into filing stories.

That model started to die in the 1980s and the Internet gave it the last rites.

Richard Gringas’ discussion at Harvard shows news and journalism isn’t dead, but it is evolving. Just like many other disrupted industries, the news media has to adapt to a changed world.

Consumer surplus?

Inventing euphemisms for your dead business model

Last week I came across the term “consumer surplus”, the Boston Consulting Group claimed the gap between the cost of producing media content and what customers are prepared to pay creates a “consumer surplus”.

That consumers of media want it but aren’t prepared to pay for it is a basic truth; the 20th Century media model is based upon advertising subsiding journalism and entertainment.

For all forms of media this was true; from TV and radio stations being fully funded by advertising to newspapers and magazines’ cover prices barely covering distribution costs.

Take out advertising and all these models are dead. The only alternative is government funding.

Losing the advertising rivers of gold to web services is what’s killing the established business model. It appears that TV and radio will hang on, for now, but newspapers and magazines are in serious difficulties.

Simply put, there has rarely been a market for journalism; readers and viewers aren’t prepared to pay. Journalism’s golden years of the 20th Century were based upon having a relatively captive market for advertisers; now advertisers can go elsewhere, they have.

Putting a sophisticated  label on a basic concept is something consulting companies are very good at and Boston Consulting Group has done an excellent job with this report.

The fundamental truth is that it doesn’t matter how good your product is, if you can’t find a way to make someone pay you for it then you don’t have a market or a business.

Which is what the real challenge is for online content creators, finding the model that pays. The first person to do that becomes the 21st Century’s Randolph Hearst.