by cameron | Sep 14, 2008 | Australian media, Brisbane
I was on a panel yesterday at the Future Of Journalism conference in Brisbane. As you can perhaps tell from earleyedition’s tweets, my comments were not well received. As usual, I tried my best to explain that the economics of media have fundamentally changed and that means all bets are off. But, as usual, nobody listened and I was accused of being a “shock jock” espousing “revolutionary rhetoric”. Jean Burgess from QUT used the old line about “we’ve had technological shifts before and it didn’t cause the end of the industry”, completely missing the point that this is NOT about a technology shift – it’s about an economic shift.
To wit:
Fifteen years ago, if I wanted to publish something to a wide audience, the financial barriers were extreme. The cost of owning a newspaper or magazine were (and still are) very high. So very few people were able to own one. It was a limited playing field. Consequently, the people who *did* own a newspaper had the market to themselves. There was limited competition for people’s attention. As a result, they could carve their local market up between themselves and fund their business through advertising.
However, today, anyone can publish something online. The economic barriers have been removed. Consequently, there are 75 million active blogs that I can read, not 4 newspapers. And so audience attention is fragmenting and the traditional news companies can’t control it. As they lose audience, their ability to generate advertising revenue diminishes. As revenue declines, they can’t afford to maintain their old cost structures, so they start downsizing. Sound familiar? It’s a negative spiral. And there is NO. WAY. OUT.
Anyway, I’d like to thank Antony Funnell from ABC radio’s “Media Report” for doing a great job moderating our panel. He did a good job getting everyone’s views, including the ones that were extremely unpopular.
by cameron | Sep 12, 2008 | Australian media, Brisbane, media 2.0
I’m one of the speakers at the “Future Of Journalism” conference here in Brisbane tomorrow, which is kind of amusing as I’m the furthest thing you can get to a journalist. I’m a panelist on a session called “Who is going to pay for journalism?” and my answer is going to be “frakked if I know”.
As I’ve been saying for five years now, this isn’t about blogging versus journalism. This is about the economic model that old media companies prospered under for the last century being defunct. And it doesn’t matter how much bitching or whining journalists do about it, the fact is, the party is OVER.
Now that doesn’t mean we all don’t want great investigative journalism. As a society, we need it. I just don’t know who is going to pay for it. Of course we all know now that privatized investigative journalism is flawed, as is state-controlled journalism, but they are better than nothing.
As I said on Bronwen’s blog the other day, I don’t remember seeing many Australian journalists going out on strike over the last 20 years as the quality of journalism in this country reached ever-deeper lows. I don’t remember reading too many stories in the AGE or SMH about how tabloidy our news was becoming, either. They just shut up, stuck their heads in the sand, and took the money. They fiddled while Rome burned around them. It’s too late to cry foul now kids.
Meanwhile the Newspaper Association of America just reported that total newspaper advertising revenues fell by $3 billion in the first six months of this year to $18.8 billion, the lowest level in a dozen years.
(Thanks Bron for the link).
by cameron | Aug 20, 2008 | Australian media
Yep, gotta love that trustworthy media. I can see this one appearing on Media Watch next week.
News.com.au is running a story today which claims “Bigfoot body ‘found and put in freezer'” written by “staff writers”.
The story links to another site, Searching For Bigfoot, which actually declares the whole thing a hoax. News.com.au’s site doesn’t say that though, it buys the whole deal.
UPDATE 7.29am: NewForestAlex links me to this story explaining how the hoaxers are trying to make money by gaming the media to drive traffic to their site. This is happening more and more these days.
by cameron | Aug 18, 2008 | media 2.0
Remember that New York ad agency that sued a small time blogger when he picked up some mistakes in one of their campaigns for Boston? If you don’t, you can read my post on it at the time (April 06).
What did the blogger, Dutson, do? He criticized Maine’s tourism office, which hired New York agency Warren Kremer Paino, on his blog. What seems to have specifically upset the agency is that he caught them out:
“… he posted a ”rough draft” advertisement pulled from Maine’s Department of Economic and Community Development website showing a collage of iconic images of the Maine seacoast, woodlands, and ski slopes, with a dummy phone number that turned out to connect to a line promoting a phone sex service. The agency had inadvertently placed the phone number on the draft advertisement for a presentation made to state tourism officials.”
I’ve often used this case as an example of “how to fuck things up royally” when it comes to dealing with bloggers. Back in April 06 when it all hit the fan, I wrote an email to WKP’s senior VP Bill Crandall saying:
Bill,
I just read about your legal action against Dutson. Take some free advice – retract the charges, admit your mistakes, and get on with business. This is a no win situation for your agency. He doesn’t have the money and you will forever tarnish your reputation. Every time someone Googles your agency in the future they are are going read about your sex phone incident and how you sued a small-time blogger. This isn’t a winnable situation for you. Bail out now.
Cheers,
Cameron Reilly
Well… a week later WKP surrendered their lawsuit against Dutson but I never heard from Bill Crandall.
Until now.
Today I got an email from Crandall. TWO YEARS LATER.
In his email, Bill says he knew nothing about the case against Dutson until he got my email and was “aghast” to learn of it.
Bill goes on to say claim it was unfair to list his name on the site, “as unfair to me as the very subject you were covering”. But if you read my post, I never blamed it on Bill, I just put him down as a contact person. Hey Bill – if you’re going to put yourself up on the site as the contact person, what were you expecting it to be used for? Just new business inquiries? He says the agency’s owner/partners were the people who made the decision to sue, not him. Bill says he was let go in April 2008 and is now looking for work but my blog post, and others like it, are making it hard for him to find new work as Google searches on his name bring up the Dutson affair. Sorry Bill. Hey, employers – give Bill a chance to redeem himself. He says it wasn’t his fault and I believe him. Although, as I said to Bill in my reply email, if he wanted to set the truth straight, he should have done it TWO YEARS AGO.
I think Bill might want to take a leaf out of WKP’s book and change his name. It seems to have worked for them:
I looked WKP up and it appears they have treated themselves to a little re-branding. Warren Kremer Paino recently changed their name to “WKP-Spier”. Cute, huh?
Google “Warren Kremer Paino” and you find LOTS of references to the Dutson debacle. Google “WKP-Spier” however and you don’t find ANYTHING, at least not in the first five pages.
Now they are all shiny. They even have a blog, a flickr stream, and a youtube page. Huzzah! Hey Rocky, watch me pull this rabbit out of my hat!
But don’t be fooled – WKP-Spier contains two of the partners (Peter Warren and Bob Paino) who sued Dutson for pointing out their mistakes. Tsk tsk tsk.
So what can we learn from all this?
1. Don’t fuck your Googlerank.
2. If you DO fuck your Googlerank, re-brand.
3. If you DO fuck your Googlerank, and you do re-brand, don’t tell anyone. Or they might out you on their blog.
DIGG IT.
by cameron | Aug 8, 2008 | activism, Australian media, Australian politics
I did a show yesterday on China’s censorship and human rights record. A few people have told me that in Australia, we can say what we like and do what we like. Really?
Why is KRUDD spending $60 million on Internet censorship?
Why did a Gold Coast teenager get arrested and charged for wearing a “blasphemous†t-shirt?
Why was Haneef held without charge for 12 days?
Why was Dr Phillip Nitschke’s book on assisted suicide banned?
Why were two Islamic books banned?
China has censorship. Australia has censorship. Ours may be less strict and more sophisticated, but if you want to argue against the principle of censorship, let’s fight it at home first. I’ll be there with you. Let’s just avoid the mass hysteria and hypocrisy of criticizing easy targets when we have similar laws at home. That’s just the way the mass media and governments deflect attention from what is happening in our own backyards.
Australia has laws about what and can’t be said. So does China. And China isn’t going to change until the people of China was it to and do something about it en masse.
If Australia REALLY wants to protest China’s human rights record, let’s boycott the Olympics. We could also stop selling them coal but I suspect economic sanctions hurt innocent civilians more than the people in power. However let’s stop censorship at home first, then perhaps we’ll be in a position to critique other countries.
by cameron | Jun 24, 2008 | Australian media
Tony Harris sent me a link to this story in the New York Times which says that this year is shaping up to be the worst on record for newspaper advertising revenue.
I’ve been predicting a steady decline in advertising revenue for years (The Future Of Newspapers, State of the News Print Media in Australia 2007, Aussie Newspapers in decline and denial ) as people move online to get their news. The newspapers report people are moving online to their sites, but unfortunately they don’t make as much money from online advertising as they do from print, because online they have competition.
So what happens when revenue is in decline? They have to sack people and stop investing. The rot sets in.
A couple of the big metro newspapers in Australia seem to be holding steady but I suspect that’s got more to do with funny statistics more than anything substantial in the trending. They will inevitably fall prey to the same forces bringing down the newspapers in the US.
This is a good example of where shareholder activism (as Stephen Mayne was talking about on the show last week) is needed. Why aren’t the shareholders of Fairfax and News creating more of a shitstorm about what those companies are doing to make sure they don’t go down the tubes over the next decade? All I ever heard from Fairfax’s management is “things are great, we’ll be around forever” which just shows me that they are either in denial or just lying their asses off, hoping they’ll get out before the whole facade crumbles around them.
