Deja vu. A year ago, almost to the day the ANU’s student admin server isis.anu.edu.au collapsed under load and today it’s done it again. When I emailed the anu web contact last time I got some feeble excuse about unexpected load blah blah. What do these people expect on day 1 when results are available? Perhaps they think everyone will just magically take it in turns to ask the server for a page?
This wouldn’t be so funny if it wasn’t for the fact that the ANU is a leading information technology research centre boasting world class super computing facilities. I bet its a budget thing, someone in a comfy ANU office decided that the vice chancellors latest pet publicity stunt was more important than actually providing a reliable service for students.
pfft
Posted 12 hours, 47 minutes ago at 11:00 am. Add a comment
picture from ABC TV
John Hartigan, CEO of News Ltd took the big stick to citizen journalism as the Rupert campaign against the evil alliance of Google and the blogsphere picked up speed. Apparently John’s not too concerned about the fate of his charges, in fact he was doing his best to be positively upbeat about the future for News Ltd, which is understandable given he is the CEO. Citing market figures that suggest a relatively flat business scenario for newspapers in this country he went on to claim that the Australian newspaper industry was naturally better placed to survive and avoid the fate recently bestowed on similar businesses in the US and the UK. The word from John is that there are simply too many newspapers in the UK and the US newspapers have stupidly failed to keep pace with TV for local news. Furthermore newspapers in Oz have an enviable market reach and revenue base so everything’s hunky dory in the land of News.
But John doesn’t merely want to rest on his laurels, he wants to move forward. He made a big deal of the upsurge in sales for News after the recent Victorian bushfires but as Christine Johnson observed over at Crikey, the big iconic image that John cherishes came not from a News Ltd photographer but from a CFA fireman’s phone. He also waxed lyrically about the number of food recipes “printed” from News Ltd sites, perhaps indulging his audience who probably were less than enthusiastic about their Press Club luncheon. Powerful stuff!
I’ve read Andrew Keen’s book, “a thought provoking and sobering book” according to the front cover, and it isn’t hard to see why John would subscribe so enthusiastically to Andrew’s views. Andrew and John both see the amateur as evil incarnate, destroying asset value and cultural institutions left right and centre. John used the expression “all eyeballs and no insight” and at one stage described bloggers as being “of such limited intellectual value as to be indiscernible from massive ignorance”. Ouch.
Now coming from someone who presides over the Daily Telegraph and the Sun Herald, notable journalistic and ethical mastheads that they are are, I have to take such criticism with a small truck load of salt. Of course their history of breaking important news speaks for itself, whereas us lonely little bloggers can only sprout platitudes from our moralising soapbox. Of course the vast sums of money required to pay for the quality journalism exhibited by News Ltd probably explains why they consume forests on a daily basis to bring us newspapers chockers with full page advertising.
Really, John’s rant displayed more nervous bravado than inspiration. He took the opportunity to talk up his darlings especially the Punch and food.com.au but somehow performed the small miracle of divorcing his internet offerings from the wider internet. In short anything from News Ltd was good for the READER because News said so, the rest are a pack thieving clones. Oh John where do you get such gems?
He spoke of Journalism 2.0 and I was just about on the edge of my small seat, watching as I was in the relative comfort of my home study. John’s going to reinvent the Parish Pump and simplify people’s lives by removing the burden of choice. He about alleviating the suffering of the poor and bringing them little rays of escapist sunshine, all the time backed by the proven judgement that News demonstrates day after day. Most people are bored with the politics of politics so John is even thinking of getting rid of the News Ltd press gallery, perhaps redirecting these talented folk into more pressing local concerns like food and humour.
I could go on but frankly I’m bored with it already. John barely mentioned concerns about the so-called 4th estate even when he was handed the subject on a platter by one of his own journalists. He completely dodged the question about protecting unreliable sources and while he attacked the politicians for the “spin game” he seemed to think we are all oblivious to the self serving nature of his own speech. But hey, that’s just this blogger’s opinion, have a look at some of the others.
Posted 2 days, 9 hours ago at 2:00 pm. Add a comment
Some sound advice for creative people…
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Posted 5 days, 14 hours ago at 9:35 am. Add a comment
“They say all good things in life come to an end. Today we announced that Kodak will retire KODACHROME Film, concluding its 74-year run.”
via “…don’t take my Kodachrome away.” « Flickr Blog.
Posted 1 week, 3 days ago at 2:43 pm. Add a comment
Quantative analysis of the content in a newspaper is pretty boring, it’s also a lot of work and the results aren’t spectacular. For the latecomers, this is a series of entries about what’s actually in a newspaper as distinct from what the newspapers try to tell you as a reader. As we will see, it isn’t all “news” and there are some interesting variations.
Just a quick note about definitions. My classification system is as follows -
- Journalism
- Graphics and photos
- Advertising
- Headlines
In turn the journalistic content is broken down into these categories -
- Journalist
- Editor
- Agency
- Photographer
- Cartoon
Naturally this is not an exact science, some newspapers don’t attribute certain content and the contribution of editors is subject to a certain amount of guesswork. As I said before these results are indicative rather than definitive.
The journalistic content results from the Financial Review in broad percentages look like this -
- Journalist - 62%
- Editor - 13%
- Photographer - 11%
- Agency - 11%
- Cartoon - 2%
The breakdown of contributor numbers look like this -
- Journalists - 46
- Photographers - 14
- Agency contributions - 11
- Editors and guest commentators - 9
- Cartoons - 3
Thrilling isn’t it? Wait till we get to the Telegraph!
Posted 1 week, 3 days ago at 2:18 pm. Add a comment
So it occurred to me that with all the rhetoric currently floating around about the merits of newspapers and how vital they are to our western culture, it would be useful to actually do a bit of research. Now the relative merits of print versus online can be debated till the cows come in so instead of launching into another theoretical and philosophical essay I decided to deal with something a bit more concrete.
Perusing the petty cash tin I decided that I could afford to conduct a pretty basic analysis of a small cross section of the daily and weekend editions of Australia’s major newpapers. This isn’t groundbreaking stuff, just laborious measuring and counting of what is actually in the daily newspaper.
For the purpose of this exercise I intend to look at The Financial Review, The Australian, The Age, The Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald. Its not anything like a broad sample but you get that. If someone wants to defray my costs I will happily pull them all apart however this little sample is intended to be indicative rather than definitive so be warned.
The first cab of the rank is The Financial Review, a tabloid format yielding about 185 column centimeters (c.cm) with five columns across each of which is usually about 5cm. Monday’s edition had 56 pages.
For your three dollars this is what you get on the front page -
- Banner 37c.cm (20%)
- Ad 25 c.cm bottom (13%)
- Approximate “News” content 122.5c.cm (66%)
A breakdown of the news content for the front page goes like this -
- Photo 3*10c.cm ( 16%)
- Headlines (incl WSpace) 30c.cm (16%)
- News 5*4 + 2*10 + 5*4= 60 (32%)
The mathematical geniuses will quickly spot that the percentages don’t quite add up to 100% so I should qualify these results and all those that follow with a general rounding error of around 5%. When you look at all the white space in a newspaper that’s not a bad fudge figure.
As for the remaining 55 pages, the total breakdowns are something like -
- Journalism - 40%
- Graphics and photos - 37.5% *
- Advertising - 11%
- Headlines - 9%
Of course one thing that should be noted about the Fin Review is 14 out the 56 pages (25%) are completely dedicated to the absolutely vital business of reporting the latest stock market figures. I have chosen to throw those figures in with the Graphics/Photo category because it makes it easier to compare the Fin to other newspapers. If you treat the financial figures as a separate component the breakdown looks like this -
- Journalism - 40%
- Financial data - 23%
- Graphics and photos - 14%
- Advertising - 11%
- Headlines - 9%
Tomorrow I will have some rough numbers for journalists and other sources that are attributed in the Fin Review.
Posted 1 week, 4 days ago at 12:35 am. Add a comment
“Moreover, the authors’ canvass the literature on the effects of file sharing on music sales, confirming that the “results are decidedly mixed.”"
A topical subject especially as the rhetoric coming from old media barons like Murdoch becomes more dogmatic. Copyright, like most laws, is firstly about protecting the privilege and position of the copyright owner. To make the claim that weak copyright laws reduce creativity or generally make societies less cultural as some would argue, misses the point that weakening copyright is symptomatic of a more diverse and healthy culture.
via Michael Geist - Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society.
Posted 2 weeks, 2 days ago at 10:17 pm. Add a comment
First it was the net, then there were newsgroups. Does anyone remember newsgroups? What about IRC? Newsgroups, well they had …groups and IRC had channels, you could log in and post anonymously to you hearts content, lurking behind your “handle”. The original internet news may be slowly dying but have a look at any newsgroup server you can and it is still churning out millions of new posts every day endlessly storing and forwarding stuff around the internet. IRC once the cool thing has strangely lost its way but there is a big element of IRC in twitter.
The failure of news and IRC to prosper in the web2.0 world is simple, they were not commercially friendly and you needed a specific computer application with various setting to connect. The user difficulties were often resolved by ISP’s offering helpful howto pages but the big failure was commercial. Essentially, like email, these two internet applications put the onus for functionality onto the shoulders of the ISP. Both news and IRC became a service that ISP’s had to offer. Then the big money came and invested in faster networks so the acceptable face of the internet, webpages, could prosper. You can make money out of web pages, just look at Google, but how the hell would you monetise IRC or a plain text news message about someone’s political opinion?
Yet strangely the two pioneers of the web were immensely social places, restricted by narrow bandwidths real people engaged in real time in a variety of creative and amusing ways. Both news and IRC allowed you to link to web pages and a curious multilayered internet evolved where html web content was dissected plainly and without fanfare. Essentially the only tools available to users were words and punctuation. Email played its part and these three internet1.0 tools birthed lol’s and brb’s and of course the very friendly 
However what both of these applications and, to a lesser extent email, did, was steal your time. Hours could be spent chatting online or posting and reposting opinions into a newsgroup of your choice, it all seemed like so much fun. A critical difference with today’s web2.0 tools is that most people who grew up with news and IRC conducted their alter egos in private space, separate from their day to day existence although clearly taking place in the real world.
So I stopped ircing a long time ago and my isp doesn’t even run a news server anymore. Now I have a facebook page and today I got a twitter account but as I sit here enjoying the beautiful winter sun I wonder whether or not I can really be bothered with investing more of my precious time online particularly when online is rapidly becoming just another marketing tool for vested interests. All the more concerning is that the one fundamental privilege web1.0 offered, anonymity, is no longer a given. My privacy on the net is gone and I must now be a good netizen. There’s my photo and my verified email address, oh and a webpage too. Sure I could fabricate it all but the whole point now is that your public net identity is also your private self.
And the time…do they have the afterlife wired as well?
Posted 2 weeks, 3 days ago at 11:12 am. Add a comment