The Pew Future of Mobile News report

Here’s a few things of interest I thought worth noting in the Pew MoJo report, otherwise known as (in very important and loud caps): THE EXPLOSION IN MOBILE AUDIENCES AND A CLOSE LOOK AT WHAT IT MEANS FOR NEWS

“… fully a third of all U.S. adults now get news on a mobile device at least once a week [...] And for many people, mobile devices are adding how much news they consume. More than four in ten mobile news consumers say they are getting more news now and nearly a third say they are adding new sources.”

If you can do it without an app, do: “the use of news apps on mobile devices, which many publishers hoped would be a way to charge for content, remains limited. Most people still use a browser for news on their tablet.”

A very interesting finding on new digital customers, and digital customers who remain loyal to the print product. The latter prefer an app-based news experience that’s similar to a traditional reading experience of the physical product. This brings up development resourcing issues in retaining some readers while continuing to attract new readers with innovative designs.

Highlights from the Infographic, which can be found here: http://pewrsr.ch/P5dWGx

In 2011, iPad had 81% of the tablet market and Android just 14%. In 2012? iPad 52% and Android 48%. iPad people use their tablet more regularly and more for news – Android tablet users are more social, and get their news from shared links.

And if you think ‘email is dead’, it’s still the most performed daily activity on tablets, and even moreso on smartphones. By a large margin. News is right up there too. Smart mobile-formatting + daily newsletters and email news alerts = Win for MoJo.

An interesting statistic for long-form journalism and social sharing: 90% of people who read in-depth articles on a tablet do it for personal use, while only 23% read in-depth articles recommended by friends and family.

And while readers are willing to pay for news, only 6% say they’ve paid directly for news on their tablet.

There’s also the Future of Mobile News Infographic Challenge. Play with all the data, submit your infographic, win, get featured by the Economist and Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)!

Digital conversion or death

My tagline on Twitter has for many years now been “One digital convert at a time”. That was more a reflection of my limited ability to change the world – a quip to humour those who saw digital as an oddity – not a desire to continually and repeatedly convince obtuse individuals that there was in fact a future in digital. For years, whether they knew it or not and especially now, nobody has that sort of time to waste ignoring digital, waiting until they’re persuaded to listen.

One digital convert at a time was never enough anyway, all it did was express a sentiment that we who believed were willing to chip away at the obstructionists. After years of inaction I have lost patience. I am no longer content with chipping away.

Convert thee to digital or risk eternal damnation and suffering in the fires of irrelevance.

It’s not a call to scrap everything, just to accept that digital participation is no longer optional, so embrace it. And we don’t need any more blog posts titled: “Web skills journalists need in 2015″. That list has hardly changed since 2007.

Bring on the revolution.

This rant marks the eight year anniversary of the earley edition.

Merry Christmas from the earley edition!

It’s been a long year for me, but an almost non-existent one for the earley edition. Blogging is dead, long live the blog (in 2012)!

For those who didn’t know, I’ve been online editor at Quest Community Newspapers – questnews.com.au – for almost 18 months now! Time flies, and the last six months of the new website has been like a speeding freight train. A few nudges here and there to make sure it stays on track, but expect to be crushed if you get in the way. Sometimes I have to get in the way, so the last six months has been a particularly hard slog (more so for my family, who have seen me briefly and sometimes not at all), but I’m looking forward to a bigger and better 2012. Not just at work, but here too at the earley edition!

In the last few weeks I’ve had Kristofor Lawson on deck full time as my deputy online editor at Quest, so there are exciting times ahead. 2012 is going to be massive, prepare to be blown away ;) It definitely won’t be less work with an extra set of hands!

Anyway, here’s a fun earley edition Christmas message, featuring the indomitable first edition (Miss 2), and introducing the second edition (Mr 0.75). [abridged version]

Storify – Ben Grubb’s arrest at AusCERT, and the Qld Police Twitter timeline at @QPSMedia

With all the social media kudos being given to the Queensland Police Media unit in the last six months, this will be another instructive case study for them.

It may not be self-evident to the casual observer just from looking at the timeline of tweets below, but there’s a PR storm brewing over how Queensland Police handled the matter on Twitter.

Is this an example where a live response wasn’t the best tactic?

Twitter may have worked brilliantly for Queensland Police in the dissemination of emergency information, but they could have better handled the immense pressure they were coming under from Twitter users who demanded a response to Ben Grubb’s initial arrest tweet.

The main points of why this has turned into a very bad PR exercise for Queensland Police Media.

1. Be sure before you tweet; [blackbirdpie url=http://twitter.com/QPSmedia/status/70427773159735296]

2. Don’t snap back, or take the criticism personally, and; [blackbirdpie url=http://twitter.com/QPSmedia/status/70431825901785088]

3. Try not to appear flippant when acknowledging your mistakes [blackbirdpie url=http://twitter.com/QPSmedia/status/70630340032593920]

A good question during Stilgherrian’s live stream of Det Supt Brian Hay’s media conference at AusCERT was, “When was the last time Queensland Police arrested a journalist?” Anyone know the answer to that?

See Det Supt Brian Hay’s media conference on USTREAM here, or embedded in the Storify below.

Knight Ridder’s concept iPad app – bridging the paper-digital divide. In 1994.

Check out this video, showcasing the Knight Ridder Information Design Lab’s concept tablet news device. With personalised news feeds, articles read aloud and even voice command recognition, it sounds like it could be a news application being developed for the iPad right now.

Only this is 1994.

Imagine where digital news distribution could be by now if, in 1994, Knight Ridder had been able to build that “bridge of familiarity to get us from the ink on paper product into the digital world”.

Maybe a media company could have come up with a user experience like Flipboard a decade ago, or been innovative enough to create a new communication platform like Twitter, instead of constantly being left behind or playing catch up. Suffice to say, the industry would pretty well know by now what works and what doesn’t.

Instead, the merits of all manner of form and function in the digital news process are still being discussed, tested, failed miserably and, if we’re lucky, refined until successful.

Roger Fidler, director of the Knight Ridder Information Design Lab, says in the video:

“This is one of the most exciting places to be in the newspaper industry today. This is where I think we’re going to play a role in changing history.”

Maybe an idea before its time, but one that really could have changed the history of digital news if it had succeeded.

I wonder where Roger Fidler ended up. (UPDATE: Roger Fidler is Program Director for Digital Publishing at RJI, the Reynolds Journalism Institute)

and from Wikipedia:
“Knight Ridder had a long history of innovation in technology. It was the first newspaper publisher to experiment with videotex when it launched its Viewtron system in 1982.”

UPDATE: This was on Mashable in August 2009!
Thanks to @garykemble for the heads up.
And in an interview that same year, Roger Fidler said the tablet concept was never built because screens were too heavy and required too much power. See the May 2009 Bloomberg interview with Roger Fidler here: http://bloom.bg/iiMio0

News.me app launched

For all of us tragics who went to the blank news.me website all those months ago and signed up for an email alert, well today’s the day! News.me for iPad has launched. They’re saying all you need is an iPad and a Twitter account, but you don’t even need an iPad…

For those without an iPad, you can get the same stream ‘digest’ via email.

I’m yet to get beyond opening the app and authorising my Twitter account (it’s Good Friday!), but the recommended/featured users for me to follow were very digital news media centric. That’s great if the app has picked up on my area of interest already, based on my bio and who I follow.

I imagine it’s more than a glorified Twitter stream. It should be! You can get that through Flipboard, Zite, and numerous other great apps without paying a $1.19 per week subscription ($0.99 in US).

Read the full email from news.me below:

News.me for iPad launched today! It’s available in the App Store for download: http://on.news.me/app-download.

News.me is a different kind of social news experience that shows you not just
what your friends are sharing on Twitter, but also what they are reading—a great opportunity to read over the proverbial shoulders of close friends and mega-interesting writers and thinkers alike. All you need is an iPad and a Twitter account to get started!

If you don’t have an iPad, you can still use News.me – just sign up to receive a daily email digest of the most interesting news flowing through your Twitter stream: http://www.news.me/email

Want to read more about News.me, how it started and who’s behind it?
http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2011/02/21/news-me/

Thanks and let us know what you think!

Team News.me

twitter.com/newsdotme
feedback@news.me

Australia drops in World Economic Forum Tech Study

In the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011: Transformations 2.0, Australia ranks 17th in the Network Readiness Index, with New Zealand right behind at 18.

That’s a drop of one place for Australia, which was ranked 16th in the 2009-2010 report.

via World Economic Forum Tech Study Shows U.S. Lagging – NYTimes.com.

For the second consecutive year, the United States finished fifth in the study’s comparison of 138 countries that make up 98.8 percent of the world’s total gross domestic product. Sweden was first, followed by Singapore, Finland and Switzerland.

These rankings, for 2010, are based on an index of 71 economic and social indicators, as diverse as new patents, mobile phone subscriptions and availability of venture capital.

So amongst the 71 economic and social indicators that combined rank Australia at 17, what are we best at?

The report lists Australia as number one in the world on just one measure, “Internet and telephony competition”.

And our worst ranking? Of the 138 countries, our worst ranking is 115, for “Business monthly phone subscription (PPP $).

Full report here:
World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011: Transformations 2.0

Half of all tweets generated by just 20K elite users

A new report from Yahoo! Research has used Twitter in an attempt to answer Lasswell’s maxim: “who says what to whom in what channel with what effect”.

The report, Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo! Research, found that 50% of all tweets consumed are generated by just 20,000 elite users.

For the purposes of the study, they classified Twitter users into “elite” or “ordinary”, breaking elite users into the categories media, celebrities, organisations and bloggers.

One of the more interesting things looked at in the report is the lifespan of content, and what they found with media-related tweets.

“We find that different categories of users emphasize different types of content, and that different content types exhibit dramatically different characteric lifespans, ranging from less than a day to months.”

In its conclusion, the report found that “media-originated URLs are disproportiantely represented among short-lived URLs”.

We also find that different types of content exhibit very different lifespans: media-originated URLs are disproportionately represented among short-lived URLs while those originated by bloggers tend to be overrepresented among long-lived URLs. Finally, we find that the longest-lived URLs are dominated by content such as videos and music, which are continually being rediscovered by Twitter users and appear to persist indefinitely.

That can be seen in this figure, generated by unshortening 35,000 URLs that “lived” at least 200 days, and mapping them to 21,034 domains.

Read the abstract and get the PDF of the report here:
Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo! Research

From the birth of a word, to the intersection of media and conversation

This is an absolutely must-see TED talk. Having seen a preview a few weeks ago, I couldn’t wait to see the amazing data visualisations that would come out of five years of video and audio analysis around a baby learning how to talk.

That was cool enough. What I didn’t expect was how Deb Roy has since applied his research in language acquisition to the intersection of public media and online conversations.

Think ABC’s #QandA on steroids, but instead of just monitoring or displaying the hashtag, it’s mapping every public conversation and connection that’s taking place around a program or individual broadcast.

the digital media edition – issue 4

digital media reading list

• 10 Predictions for the News Media in 2011
• The Power of Twitter in Information Discovery | Both Sides of the Table
• 79% of all U.S. Moms with Kids Under 18 are Active on Social Media
• Six Social Media Trends for 2011

• MediaShift . How Storify Helps Integrate Social Streams Into Articles
• 10 Trends That Are Shaping Global Media Consumption
• Five reasons why Facebook Credits will save newspapers
• The 18 Most Innovative Alternative News Stories Of 2010
• Twitter to be allowed in courts
• 1 Billion Peoples’ Interests Now Tracked by AddThis
• Web Ad Spending Overtakes Newspaper Ad Spending
• Age no longer much of a digital dividing line, says Pew study
• A Bivings Study: how are US newspapers doing on Facebook?
• Nieman Reports issue on beats/rounds
• Common Sense Journalism: Networked neighborhoods study
• How Twitter and del.icio.us are alike – Dave Winer

• Saving del.icio.us – Dave Winer
• News is Not a Story
• Are Twitter photos free to use? Not so fast – Lost Remote
• Flipboard’s Mike McCue: Web format has ‘contaminated’ online journalism
• How to do better than Groupon in building local advertising market share
• Journalism.co.uk’s top five journalism bloggers and tweeters in 2010
• Top five news, features and blog posts on Journalism.co.uk in 2010 (by page views)
• Newspaper Launches Hyper-Local Location-Based Service

• How a small Arkansas TV station uses Facebook, Twitter to drive audience to newscasts, website | Poynter.

• 1860s map shows slavery populations in the United States
• Ten newsroom New Year’s resolutions for 2011 – Lost Remote
• Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data – ProPublica
• 65% of internet users have paid for online content | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

• If an App Is Your Content Strategy, You Are Doomed

• Forecasting the Mashup of 2011 — The Media Equation – NYTimes.com
• Why digital newsstands stink – FortuneTech
• Google Digital Newsstand Aims to Muscle In on Apple – WSJ.com
• MediaShift . Your Guide to Hyper-Local News

• Information is Beautiful makes Debtris
• New Daytum iPhone App Makes Beautiful Charts & Graphs About Your Life
• HTML5 and Visualization on the Web
• ‘Converged’ journalism and building online communities

• Disrupting the Traditional News Syndication Model
• Hyperlocal voices: James Hatts, SE1
• Crisis-Mapping Platform Ushahidi Announces Crowdmap:CI, “Check-ins With a Purpose”
• The NJ News Co-op
• Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years? — Scobleizer
• Infographic on the power of WordPress | Reportr.net
• FAQ: Data journalism, laziness, information overload & localism | Online Journalism Blog
• 24 hours in the life of social media

• TED Curator Chris Anderson on Crowd Accelerated Innovation
• Why Google Dropped Groupon and Local Just Doesn’t Scale
• Journalism in the Age of Data
• Social Media Marketing: Facebook + Twitter Aren’t Enough

• Finding the time to keep up with social media
• Life after Delicious
• Quora info articles
• How to Hire Coders
• Blog Design 101
• Everything the Internet Knows About Me (Because I Asked It To) – Digits – WSJ
• What happens to print journalists after they lose their jobs?
• OJR: Journalism’s problem isn’t the internet or advertising, it’s attitude
• Getting Text Out of an Image-Only PDF – ProPublica
• Courtney Love’s Tweets Lead to Unique Defamation Showdown

• The Game Layer on Top of the World

10 Predictions for the News Media in 2011

The Power of Twitter in Information Discovery | Both Sides of the Table

79% of all U.S. Moms with Kids Under 18 are Active on Social Media

Six Social Media Trends for 2011

MediaShift . How Storify Helps Integrate Social Streams Into Articles

10 Trends That Are Shaping Global Media Consumption

Five reasons why Facebook Credits will save newspapers

The 18 Most Innovative Alternative News Stories Of 2010

Twitter to be allowed in courts

1 Billion Peoples’ Interests Now Tracked by AddThis

Web Ad Spending Overtakes Newspaper Ad Spending

Age no longer much of a digital dividing line, says Pew study

A Bivings Study: how are US newspapers doing on Facebook?

Nieman Reports issue on beats/rounds

Common Sense Journalism: Networked neighborhoods study

How Twitter and del.icio.us are alike – Dave Winer

Saving del.icio.us – Dave Winer

News is Not a Story

Are Twitter photos free to use? Not so fast – Lost Remote

Flipboard’s Mike McCue: Web format has ‘contaminated’ online journalism

How to do better than Groupon in building local advertising market share

Journalism.co.uk’s top five journalism bloggers and tweeters in 2010

Top five news, features and blog posts on Journalism.co.uk in 2010 (by page views)

Newspaper Launches Hyper-Local Location-Based Service

How a small Arkansas TV station uses Facebook, Twitter to drive audience to newscasts, website | Poynter.

1860s map shows slavery populations in the United States

Ten newsroom New Year’s resolutions for 2011 – Lost Remote

Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data – ProPublica

65% of internet users have paid for online content | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

If an App Is Your Content Strategy, You Are Doomed

Forecasting the Mashup of 2011 — The Media Equation – NYTimes.com

Why digital newsstands stink – FortuneTech

Google Digital Newsstand Aims to Muscle In on Apple – WSJ.com

MediaShift . Your Guide to Hyper-Local News

Information is Beautiful makes Debtris

New Daytum iPhone App Makes Beautiful Charts & Graphs About Your Life

HTML5 and Visualization on the Web

‘Converged’ journalism and building online communities

Disrupting the Traditional News Syndication Model

Hyperlocal voices: James Hatts, SE1

Crisis-Mapping Platform Ushahidi Announces Crowdmap:CI, “Check-ins With a Purpose”

The NJ News Co-op

Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years? — Scobleizer

Infographic on the power of WordPress | Reportr.net

FAQ: Data journalism, laziness, information overload & localism | Online Journalism Blog

24 hours in the life of social media

TED Curator Chris Anderson on Crowd Accelerated Innovation

Why Google Dropped Groupon and Local Just Doesn’t Scale

Journalism in the Age of Data

Social Media Marketing: Facebook + Twitter Aren’t Enough

Finding the time to keep up with social media

Life after Delicious

Quora info articles

How to Hire Coders

Blog Design 101

Everything the Internet Knows About Me (Because I Asked It To) – Digits – WSJ

What happens to print journalists after they lose their jobs?

OJR: Journalism’s problem isn’t the internet or advertising, it’s attitude

Getting Text Out of an Image-Only PDF – ProPublica

Courtney Love’s Tweets Lead to Unique Defamation Showdown

The Game Layer on Top of the World

Is Twitter planning to discontinue support for RSS?

Is Twitter planning to discontinue support for RSS? Would there be any benefit in doing that?

I'm sharing this question directly from Quora to 'the earley edition' after connecting the blog in Quora settings.

Is Twitter planning to discontinue support for RSS? Would there be any benefit in doing that?

the digital media edition – issue 3

digital
media reading list

contents:

• So You Want to Be a Journalist
• Infographic: How to make money
  on the web
• The Register Citizen Open
  Newsroom Project | Bringing the Outside In
• Walk In, Grab a Muffin and
  Watch a Newspaper Reinvent Itself
• Clark
  launches hyper-local media play
• When All Content Is
  Personalized, Who Needs TV Networks?
• Why Big Brands Are Dominating
  Social Media
• Hands-on: CNN’s Stunning
  New iPad App
• Facebook creator Mark
  Zuckerberg – Person of the Year 2010 – TIME
• Person of the Year 2010 – Why
  TIME chose Mark Zuckerberg
• Look how many newspapers are
  still sold every day in the UK
• We Need New Ways of Judging the
  Success of Websites
• What will 2011 bring for
  journalism? Clay Shirky predicts widespread disruptions for syndication
• Paywalls: looking for a
  suitable model at News International and The New York Times
• Scripting News: The Paywall may
  be journalism’s Maginot Line
• Dave Winer: A Web Trust to
  Publish and Store Our Creative Work
• How Copyright Takes Away Rights
  From Consumers
• Social Media and the End of
  Age, Race, and Gender
• Bloggers and legacy media
  deserve fair credit for stories
• Digital media can herald a new
  golden age for foreign reporting
• Wikileaks – a documentary
  | Online Journalism Blog
• Groupon, Google, and value on
  the Internet : The New Yorker
• The State of the Blogosphere
  2010
• Mobile Reporting Tools pocket
  guide
• RJI iPad research shows tablet
  subscriptions will cannibalize print subscriptions
• iPad news apps may diminish
  newspaper print subscriptions in 2011
• When’s the Best Time to
  Publish Blog Posts? (or any content online)
• Square: the mobile phone gadget
  that could revolutionise payments
• Twitter co-founder, Jack
  Dorsey’s global ambition for Square
• Blockbuster laughed at Netflix
  partnership offer in 2000
• Yahoo! Gets Hyper-Local
  (limited beta)
• 8 Percent of Online Americans
  Use Twitter
• A brief history of how new
  media is transforming old media
• How to be a data journalist | guardian.co.uk
• Like It or Not, WikiLeaks is a
  Media Entity
• DIY Data Tool Needlebase Now
  Available to Everyone
• 10 More Ways to
  Improve Your Multimedia Right Now
• Reflections of a Newsosaur:
  ‘Objective’ journalism is over. Let’s move on.
• The Ultimate Mobile
  Journalism Reporting Tools Gear Guide
• Interviews from #ONA10 with
  Smart People (Online News Association conference 2010)
• Transparency for journalists:
  AllThingsD shows what it can look like
• Figment.com Aims for Young
  Readers and Writers
• Can you defame someone with a
  hyperlink?
• Why Groupon Could Own Your
  Brand’s Future
• Rupert Murdoch’s Tablet
  Tabloid: How He Can Pull It Off
• The Future of Media Gradually
  Coming Into Focus

Media Reading from the earley edition

I don’t have time to write real blog posts, as evidenced by my lack of updates here at the earley edition. Consider this a curated reading list of carefully selected items, which are of great and enduring import to the changing media landscape.

Or it’s just some random links I had time to take note of.

Enjoy.

• Why Twitter matters for media organisations | Alan Rusbridger | Editor of The Guardian newspaper
  

  1. It’s an amazing form of distribution
  2. It’s where things happen first
  3. As a search engine, it rivals Google
  4. It’s a formidable aggregation tool
  5. It’s a great reporting tool
  6. It’s a fantastic form of marketing
  7. It’s a series of common conversations. Or it can be
  8. It’s more diverse
  9. It changes the tone of writing
  10. It’s a level playing field
  11. It has different news values
  12. It has a long attention span
  13. It creates communities
  14. It changes notions of authority
  15. It is an agent of change

  That’s just an excerpt of Alan Rusbridger’s full speech at the 2010 Andrew Olle Media Lecture, and it wasn’t all about Twitter. The full text, and audio, of Rusbridger’s speech, titled The Splintering of the Fourth Estate, is available from 702 ABC Sydney.

• Mobile Journalism Tools blog
  

  Our Mission
  Exploring best practices in mobile journalism
  Hear what The Experts have to say about the mobilejournalismtools blog.

• Blogging and commenting guidelines for journalists at The Guardian
  

  1. Participate in conversations about our content, and take responsibility for the conversations you start.
  2. Focus on the constructive by recognising and rewarding intelligent contributions.
  3. Don’t reward disruptive behaviour with attention, but report it when you find it.
  4. Link to sources for facts or statements you reference, and encourage others to do likewise.
  5. Declare personal interest when applicable. Be transparent about your affiliations, perspectives or previous coverage of a particular topic or individual.
  6. Be careful about blurring fact and opinion and consider carefully how your words could be (mis)interpreted or (mis)represented.
  7. Encourage readers to contribute perspective, additional knowledge and expertise. Acknowledge their additions.
  8. Exemplify our community standards in your contributions above and below the line.

• 10 ways journalists can use Storify | Zombie Journalism
  

  1. Organizing reaction in social media.
  2. Giving back-story using past content.
  3. Curating topical content.
  4. Displaying a non-linear social media discussion or chat.
  5. Creating a multimedia/social media narrative.
  6. Organize your live tweets into a story
  7. Collaborate on a topic with readers.
  8. Create a timeline of events.
  9. Display audience content from across platforms.
  10. Live curate live tweets from the stream.

• When Are Facebook Users Most Active? [STUDY]
  

  as in – when is your online audience most active?
  Here are some of the big takeaways:

  • The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
  • The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
  • Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.
  • Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

• The top 10 key lessons for hyperlocal journalism startups from ONA10
  

  1. Successful doesn’t mean beautiful
  2. Legal stuff isn’t rocket science
  3. There is no such thing as free content
  4. Follow the data
  5. Focus on money from day one
  6. Advertisers are buying your audience, not funding your stories
  7. Grants don’t come for free
  8. Focus on multiple revenue models
  9. Technology should be fast and cheap
  10. Stop whining and just do it

• Poynter Online – Shirky: The Shock of Inclusion and New Roles for News in the Fabric of Society
• Poynter Online – Rusbridger: Openness, Collaboration Key to New Information Ecosystem
• The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics « Clay Shirky
• Virtualeconomics: News Corp’s paywall is about News Corp, not the Times

Decline, yes. Fall? Maybe not.

Given the timing, this post may seem like a response to Round 4 of Public Broadcasters vs Rupert Murdoch, otherwise known as ABC managing director Mark Scott’s speech at the AN Smith Memorial Lecture in Journalism the other night. It’s not. Instead, it’s a response to a journal article that was published three months ago.

Geoffrey Barker wrote a scathing attack on journalism and newspaper managers in July, reminiscent of Jason Whittaker’s appraisal a few months ago on his blog, importanceofideas.com, where he lambasted the entire managerial hierarchy of Australian print media.
In Barker’s essay, The Crumbling Estate, written for the Griffith Review, he presents 10 trends he says are “throttling the life, authority and influence out of newspapers”.
He rightly asks:

“whether the declines in circulation and revenue result partly from decisions by companies’ managers who, desperate to ensure newspapers’ survival, have embraced a range of practices damaging to the craft of journalism”.

Summarised, Barker’s 10 trends killing (newspaper) journalism in Australia are:

1. Managerialism displacing journalism as the dominant newsroom culture
2. Perpetual efforts to cut costs and staff
3. Changing work habits cutting journalists off from outside world
4. Young journalists less likely to see the job as a vocation and more of a stepping stone
5. Journalists out-gunned, out-thought, out-paid by armies of communications advisers
6. Cost-cuts that lead to buying more content from notable international papers
7. Avoiding difficult issues and highlighting sensationalist material, emphasising sex and sport
8. Breakdown in separation between editorial and advertising
9. Little sustained investigative journalism
10. Downplay coverage of foreign and national news in favour of local news

Indicative of the relative lack of technological progress made by Australian newspapers, Barker says:

“the strategic decisions made by newspapers to defend themselves against technological change and economic difficulties have only worsened their situation”.

and:

“despite their vigour, newspapers are increasingly at risk from their misguided attempts to save themselves”.

On having recently left an Australian newspaper, I can say there is clearly truth in the statements about newspapers not embracing technological change. At the same time, however, I am quick to defend those involved in the production of newspaper websites, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Variously, newspapers are increasingly aware and openly acknowledging that they must be news “outlets” or companies, not just news “papers”. In that recognition, they are admirably going about the work of catching up on years of pig-headedness (and I’m being generous there – not all who are trying to catch up are necessarily working hard in the right direction). Years ago people were trying new things – promising things that had the potential to blossom into new media production experiments that, while not necessarily game changing, would have at least been industry leading.

At fault in that lost potential is not online news teams, who I think genuinely want nothing more than to grow and better inform their audience in exciting and innovative ways. Rather, an industry downturn combined with management’s perceived lack of value in pursuing new platforms or distribution ideas and other decisions like those mentioned by Barker – particularly staff cutbacks or hiring freezes – are at fault. With staff cutbacks, online teams are largely limited to moderating comments and producing image galleries of scantily clad women, instead of implementing additional content of constantly refining quality (the only thing that might be worth paying for?).

It’s positive, as it should be, that Barker sees the Australian newspaper industry as redeemable. In what way can it redeem itself? Well, that’s the trick question. And by redeem I mean make money while at the same time doing the work that can again be called that of the “Fourth Estate”.

UPDATE
Related reading and a superfluous explanation (that I’ve had to retype on my iPhone after losing half of it just before publishing the post):

On the way to catch my flight to Sydney early Wednesday morning I was reading John Birmingham’s piece in The Monthly, Mash-up: A short history of the media future.

During the flight I read The Crumbling Estate, mentioned above, and wrote the majority of this blog post as a kind of summary before going off on a tangent that kept a somewhat less than tenuous link to Barker’s essay topic.

It wasn’t until exiting the plane – and after having written this – that I started to read Jason Wilson’s New Matilda piece, News Corpus Christi (which prompted the despondent tweet below) and then Mark Scott’s speech on the Decline and Fall of the Rupertan Empire.

Some may have seen the below tweet, written immediately having read Jason Wilson’s piece. No offence intended towards either Jason or John, who I both admire and respect, but I felt I had just read a nearly carbon copy article by both men. The arguments, the examples, the conclusions – they all read the same and reminded me of all the similar “ponderings” I’d read before. And so I tweeted:

“Talk talk talk.We all keep saying the same things re future of journalism #foj. slightly #jaded :(

Mr Scott’s words were slightly more uplifting in their ushering of fantastical visions of our future utopia. And in reference to the tweet, it is not lost on me that I what I have written proposes nothing new and is far less erudite than what either Jason or John have written. But there you go. I may later talk about how I have never had to consider the business side of our glorious media future, being but a mere minion. It’s a reality I will now likely have to consider.

Value Archived News

With all the talk about whether the content of newspapers is of a quality the public will be willing to pay for online, it took a search of our paper’s archives recently to remind me that … it is. It’s not necessarily the quality of the individual story (although that’s obviously there), but of the narrative – the archive – that presents an ongoing and valuable commodity.

A mistake of mainstream media has been to ignore and devalue that content.

So if there’s going to be a paywall, maybe it should be for archived content. Not just archived material that you can do a text search on, but a powerful database of related, interwoven “smart” content. At the moment that’s largely unavailable. Allow users to follow the background story, or stories, that give context to the current revision, whether that history is contained in text, image, audio or video content.

As such, it equally applies to any media, or content creator, but this particular post approaches it from the mindset of print.

I had reason to search NewsText, a database of newspaper archives, for the entire history of the Queensland Government’s lobbyist issue, where former government ministers were representing lobbying firms on development projects. During the search I saw clearly the linear progression and connectedness of these articles across months, even years, all presented chronologically. It’s there without tags or related story linking, just a regular text search. Where the authors were different, and in some cases even the publication, the full story still unfolded.

But that linear value is completely lost, both in the newspaper because it isn’t possible, and online when it isn’t utilised. In the newspaper it’s only possible to read each article as a standalone piece, without reference or even knowledge of the wealth of background to the story, or the ongoing work a publication or journalist has devoted to covering that story.

There is the capability to do it online but, in most cases, it’s not being done. People can currently pay for this archival content, with access to historical textual news searches through services like NewsText or Lexis Nexis, but the ability to do that should be provided online from the originating news source.

And why not monetise it?

It’s not like it’s a service offered now and, like academic articles, it could provide a story précis or the context in which the search terms are contained. Some kind of context would help the consumer decide if they want to pay for the entire article, or a sequence of related articles and/or other media content.

If it’s done it shouldn’t be prohibitive to pay for articles. Ease of access is the barrier to overcome, and anything over just a few cents per article would quickly become prohibitively expensive.

You only pay $1.69 AU ($0.99 US) for a song on iTunes, and the whole point of that purchase is to have a product you can use (listen to) again and again. Most people who purchase an article don’t intend to use it over and over again. It’s a one time, single use purchase – generally for reference only and a cheap price should reflect that.

It’s wrong that newspapers and other content creators didn’t start doing this much earlier, or adopt the best practices of somebody who has figured it out. It’s not just another “related articles” plugin, although it includes that, but a seriously robust system that makes the archive useful. Content on news media sites is archived online but, if it wasn’t for Google, it would be nigh on impossible to actually find it.

Everyone has failed at converting content to the web and leveraging the value of their archives. Not just mainstream media. Everybody.

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