Paying for Crikey

Posted in Comment, Media by david @ Sep 5, 2008

A few days ago I took a small plunge and paid for a subscription to Crikey. That isn’t too remarkable, people subscribe to all sorts of things. In my case it was a considered decision, after all I can get the squatter version of Crikey forever and there are plenty of other news sites around that I can trawl for free. However the recent Fairfax decision to attack its editorial workforce illustrated what is going to be the biggest single problem with mass media in the not too distant future, the question of how to make the business of journalism pay.

Now I decided to have a quick whip around to see what else is on offer as far as paying for content on the web. Lo and behold top of the pops award goes to the AFR who will give you a year’s worth of access to afr.com for only thirteen hundred bucks! Mind you they appear to charge you about half price if you already get the newspaper version so I suppose that’s an incentive.


On the other hand the Australian is available electronically for the same price as the print version which I suppose is an improvement, except who wants a complete replication of a newspaper delivered to your already overloaded in box.

You can get the Age delivered to your doorstep, newspaper style for a $1.00 a day but strangely they don’t appear to have an online version unlike the Oz. They are not alone, if you toddle off to isubscribe you can sign up for all manner of printed magazines but not a single electronic version.

Some of this might be due to concerns about plagarism and unauthorised redistribution once something hits the web, but such concerns have not prevented things like iGoogle popping up.

A few newspapers have adopted electronic versions similar to the Oz, notably the New York Times, Le Monde and the Guardian in the UK just to name a few. They offer you a electronic replica of the paper version for a comparable price plus access to the archives. It seems like a reasonable deal but it also seems to miss the point that newspapers are the product of the print age, people who want their news via the web aren’t really interested in paying for a rehash of what they can get from a newspaper. This point was illustrated by Antony Loewenstein when interviewed recently on Newshour who suggested that younger audiences are looking for a media that reflects the values of their generation. He also made the point that young people view existing media outlets with a degree of mistrust.

Still newspapers and Radio/TV stations command a sizeable amount of advertising revenue, plus they do have substantial existing audience reach. Although the numbers might be slowly declining, they are not in imminent danger of collapse. What is evident is that a cultural shift is unfolding which is bound to bring new players and different approaches that will eventually replace the institutions we currently have. Making the web pay remains problematic and creates uncertainty but hopefully the journalistic skills and traditions will survive. Although individual bloggers are often castigated for unsophisticated and factually questionable work, it may be that as individual web sites develop and gain an audience they too become more conscious of their reputation and adopt practices that reflect the same ideals that are currently the creed of existing journalism.

Mass media preaching the new orthodoxy

Posted in ABC, Comment, Media, Society, Technology by david @ Aug 28, 2008

As the casualty list grows following yesterday’s Fairfax announcement, you get the feeling that the rest of the local media heavy weights are gathering tips for their own “business improvement initiative” . It seems we live in an age of management speak, where cost saving is used to describe sacking people and going forward, a term of evasion that avoids acknowledging what’s happened before. And it also seems that the disease is spreading, so we now have promises of periods of consultation that are both extensive and one on one. The door is always open, unfortunately it is fast becoming the door you show people out.

One of the amazing things you find in media industries is just how many people work in managing the people who make the content that fills whatever media space you happen to choose. That not to say that management is unnecessary, but it is a fact that the lion share of numbers and wage growth in media employment over time is in management, the people who tell other people what to do and sometimes how to do it. Something doesn’t seem right if the CEO of Fairfax can send 500 odd people in search of other jobs and then collect a performance bonus at the end of the day.

At the ABC similar thoughts must be running through the mind of a former Fairfax man, Mark Scott. Mark doesn’t collect a performance bonus, but he is busy driving a reform agenda designed to streamline content production and improve utilisation of resources. It will also mean quite a few people lose their jobs (mostly operational staff), but you don’t hear management use terms like redundancies, it is all about going forward and gearing up for the new age of media. For the record here is Mark Scott in march 2008.

Now although I confess to a certain cynicism with regard to the idea of a 4th estate, there may well be a problem for the notion of democracy if we end up with next to no one actually generating the stories that were previously thought of as journalism. This might be sold as the price of progress, but the cost savings deserve to be challenged. It is most unlikely that media organisations in the throes of retrenching staff will be very interested in commissioning expensive in-depth journalism. Trivial lifestyle features or cooking shows are much easier and cheaper to make. This is a view illustrated in more depth by Nick Davies, a Gaurdian journalist and author of Flat Earth News on the 730 report. As we move to a new world of fractured news distribution via the internet, there are clear signs that those people who once were seen as champions of the press (journalists) are being replaced with content producers who have little time or interest in pursuing the traditions or ethics that guided their predecessors. Which suits who?

Footnote
Orthodoxy - if you think about the implications of this definition from Wikipedia, it seems obvious that we are indeed losing a radical and dissenting voice in this media revolution.
In general intellectual contexts, the terms “orthodox” and “orthodoxy” are commonly used in an unfavorable sense, similar to that associated with “dogma” and “dogmatic”. The implication is that orthodox beliefs are not rationally justified but are imposed by some overseeing body, such as the dominant group in an academic discipline. For example, the term orthodox economics is commonly used by critics to refer to the dominant approach to economics, which its supporters would more commonly call mainstream economics. In this sense, orthodox economics is commonly counterposed to radical or heterodox economics.

Who needs a library?

Posted in Comment, Media, Society by david @ Jul 10, 2008

Seriously. When was the last time anyone went to a library? I heard a conversation recently about some caller to talkback radio who was inquiring about IF there was something like a video store where you could go and like borrow books. The mind boggles! And today I was re-reading my daily Crikey and in was a little news gem relating how parts of the Fairfax media conglomerate (Fin Review and Fairfax Business Media) have decided that they don’t need their own in-house library service, specifically opting out of paying their contribution for a group wide delivered service. Predictably this appears to be a piece of management inspired enlightenment as it is reported that “AFR bosses Michael Gill and Glenn Burge have decided that journalists can be “self-service researchers”" and then it is also noted that “Business Media reporters have accounted for twenty per cent of the work of the library.”

As is noted elsewhere this has interesting implications for material generated by journalists. But it seems to reflect some popular thinking, that the rise and rise of a universal database called Google has claimed yet another scalp. Of course if material isn’t available in on-line form then Google won’t help you and despite the understated charm of interfacing with the very stylish and attractive Google receptionist, I can’t help but think that losing the quaint little human interface to your very own library is something that deserves special consideration.

Yet in that sense the AFR is just jumping on the bandwagon, albeit one that they don’t appear to be actually contributing to. One of the things that makes it possible to use Google as a research tool is the availability of data. Worldwide a number of significant libraries have committed to digitising their assets and making them available to the general community. Despite the concerns of copyright owners, there seems to have been a bit of an avalanche of digitalisation in recent times, at my local university for example, entire collections have disappeared to be reborn as digital assets and of course even borrowing a book if you can find one, has been automated. You still can’t borrow the latest bestseller from Google, or even micro pay for it like iTunes but that would seem to be the next logical step. Why else would you bother trying to create eBook readers unless you could see a market?

So it appears that globally we are heading in the direction of an on-line only repository of information, the world wide electronic library. There are risks of course, in the past libraries although somewhat revered were not an entirely protected species. The odd burning or ransack was out of the question if things got a little out of hand, yet today’s modern electronic library has built into it a rather naive belief that the technology that supports it is immune to any major disruption. This is rather a simple concept but difficult for some to grasp so consider this; you can still see in some places the actual books made by people hundreds of years ago. That’s right, hundreds of years, and there is even remnants of ancient Egyptian papyrus in some museums. As a storage medium for information and ideas, books are hard to beat. The only thing that the modern age has come close to in terms of durability is the vinyl record used by the music industry which fell out of vogue when the digital age arrived.

The strength of the book as a method of information storage is that provided it is reasonably well made, and our modern paper technology is pretty good, then it requires nothing more that to be stored in a dry place. It will work without power, it doesn’t require a login to open up and all that it requires is someone with some basic literary skill to pass on the ideas and information it contains. Pretty simple huh? Of course they take up space once you start to collect the little beasts and getting back to the Fin Review, after a while you ending up employing people to look after your collection of printed material, people called librarians. But by and large, the system has stood the test of time. It is a brave act of faith to dump such a time honored method in favour of something that has only been with mankind for the last couple of decades.

Finally, borrowing from the IT world, you often hear the term redundancy employed by geeks talking about their wonderful systems. They have a spare of something running that is meant to provide you with some sort of guaranteed level of service, be it a storage system or a network connection or the physical processor. I think there is a very strong argument to maintain redundant systems of information storage just in case the world wide online system ever catches a cold.

books

More is less

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Posted in ABC, Comment, Media, Society by david @ May 12, 2008

In a conversation today the subject of the future of journalism came up. A respected journalist with the ABC was speculating about the impact of a continuous news cycle on journalistic standards. It wasn’t particularly positive.

Quality journalism is a labour intensive trade. Even writing a half decent blog is time consuming. The problem is that up to now our western experience with the written word is strongly rooted in a strong literary tradition, albeit one that has moved with the times. As print media was supplemented with radio and then TV, the basic ingredient of news remained the journalist and their abilities to present a view of the world the public could understand. The development of radio and TV news diversified the news environment and naturally enough led to more people working in the field, more news outlets meant more people creating the product.

The online revolution threatens to undermine this process. It seeks to centralise the source of news and then distribute to a variety of automated processes that will deliver the news to the different platforms, in the industry jargon this is summed up by the notion of “make once and play many”. So in this scenario, a radio journalist might write a story using a sub set of the same tools a TV reporter might use and ultimately using the same sources. The content is easily moved across to the online medium and can be fed to a printing press as and when required. One can easily see the attraction for media owners.

The other equally disturbing implication is the pressure to constantly create new news. On the surface this might even appear to be the saving grace for the online revolution, however it is unlikely to happen that way. The need to make more news is in the first instance going to manifest itself as pressure on existing sources to simply create more news. This pressure is the antithesis of the current journalistic process which is driven by fixed deadlines, not those that are totally fluid. Then there is the question of simply recycling and varying the content to give the appearance of change. Finally there is the problem that a much shorter timescale leads to a less well developed story.

These problems can be dealt with. The simplest way is to hire more newsmakers. Even in organisations with constraints on resources this is the obvious trade-off with the new technology. Another cost neutral idea is to develop new standards that  enshrine some of the integrity of the existing system, a protection for story development for example. But the bottom line is that more shouldn’t result in less. Less diversity, less development and less investigation means a news that loses it meaning and would be a significant threat to the public right to know and how that right underpins our western democratic tradition.

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Lying by omission

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Posted in Comment, Media, Society by david @ Apr 29, 2008

Surrounded by a generation who cannot conceive a world without TV or the internet I often wonder what their version of reality is. With book reading continuing to decline, particularly with young readers there seems to be a trend to more easily consumed information which carries the attendant risk of trivialisation. If, as also seems the case, young people are treating TV and internet web sites as substitutes for more traditional media then there are some serious issues of truth, the public record and the role of the mass media that need to be addressed.

One concern that arises from the digital age is whether the competition between media sources will lead to a more inquisitive and diligent “news” environment or will newsmakers simply take the easiest and most sensational option in order to be first to break a story. In other words, will the news become just another consumer item to be packaged in a certain way devoid of anything unpalatable to the tastes of the those footing the bill.

If the TV news experience is anything to go by, the signs are ominous. Television in particular is guilty of “lying by omission”. It isn’t that what you see on TV is a fabrication or not real in the sense of fantasy or fiction, but it is true that it is a medium created to entertain. At its core, TV is an entertainment medium and this simply fact underscores the way TV treats the material it publishes. If it fails to entertain viewers, they will seek alternatives. The threat posed by the internet is not only that it provides a serious alternative media form, but also it can repackage and deliver existing media in different and more entertaining ways, ways which fit the consumer lifestyle better than the time consuming process of reading a book (for example).

So how does TV lie by omission? The answer is, at a variety of levels. In the very first instance is the gathering of information or sources. TV news is usually a highly networked operation which relies on established sources of “news” for a certain amount of so-called “bread and butter” issues. Political reporting is one such example, the formula is reasonably well known and the availability of material is usually tailored to suit on-air requirements. Such arrangements naturally suit established players. In a similar fashion, the recent trend to more business reporting is similarly an easy option for news makers and of course professional sport only exists with the patronage of television.

In contrast, stories about the environment for example are much harder to make. They might require a dedicated journalist, with supporting crews and an ability to travel to the story, something that in this day and age costs a lot of money and returns a limited quantity of finished product. Not only is it expensive to produce nature stories and documentaries, there is the attendant risk that it will fail the test of entertainment, regardless of the informative value of the content. Anyone doubting this possibility need only look at the relative appeals of the various high rating television productions and a recent decision by the ABC to axe its natural history department.

The truth of the TV news machine is that, when reduced to its basic elements, it is very much a manufacturing process which costs money and returns a product, which is in the main, entertainment. As Chomsky observed, with big business now owning most of the media landscape, it stands to reason those footing the bill for making the news people see on TV expect to get a certain product, they are certainly not paying the bills to get investigative and groundbreaking journalism unless it fits their agenda. A case in point, in 2005 a senior producer and others were sacked after breaking a story in the US about president Bush’s military record. As George Monbiot observed in the Guardian, such stories are common and the treatment given to the Bush story is no different to many sensational “investigations” however the reaction certainly has precedent.

The inherit conformity in the TV media landscape is compounded by internalised processes. Production becomes a formula; acquire some half interesting idea that has worked in the past, gather certain acceptable images and sound bites, splice it together in a manner that people have come to expect and present it in a authoritive corporate style. The boundaries of acceptability are known and very few if any will test the limits. This methodology applies throughout the production cycle and it is this filtering that constitutes “lying by omission”.

How can we expect the internet do be anything different and what does this mean for society when our information sources are so easily and obviously manipulated?

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The times they are a changing

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Posted in ABC, Australia, Comment, Media, Technology by david @ Mar 29, 2008

Mark Scott probably gets it, if he doesn’t he isn’t half as smart as he needs to be, and the NY Times certainly writes about it. The import of this development is that the changes in reporting will weaken the role of the journalist in shaping public opinion. This has at least two sides, one is that the standards that journalists have developed will lose meaning and secondly the importance of journalists in the scheme of things will be diminished.

At first blush this development doesn’t imply a diminishing of the role of media conglomerates. It has just created a couple of new players, like Google for instance. The news still has to come from somewhere, a lot is still generated by traditional sources, but as the web becomes more pervasive and news outlets increase their presence online, then naturally their content is getting into the mix. The fear expressed that the web would destroy their businesses seems unfounded to date, it has however bought about some changes in the way news is gathered or manufactured.

So as a source, entities such as the ABC still have a role, but their monopoly on opinion or the opinion of their journalists is no longer sacrosanct. The danger for the trads is that new savvy players who want to carve out an image or bring new ideas onto the world stage can bypass the traditional outlets. The success of Obama with young democrats in the US is just such an example.

Journalists and there standards will be a casualty in the new order. The pressure to get content out as opposed to stories is the tip of the iceberg. The ecosystem that cocooned journalists and elevated their status as speakers for the rich and powerful or indeed as critics is losing oxygen. Their skill and craft is still laudable, unfortunately a high school hack can now orchestrate a youtube event and run a blog with almost the same impact, if the material is worthy.

This is just part of the journey.

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