Late last week, News Limited’s Director of Corporate Affairs responded with a cross email to my Crikey story about ABC journalists writing free of charge for The Punch. I responded to him, and placed the correspondence on this blog here.
Yesterday afternoon, Baxter wrote again. Here is his email, with my response below.
Hi Margaret,
I don’t care if it is on or off the record.
Your email is disingenuous. In your Crikey piece last week you acknowledged our response to Mark Scott by dismissing it. Without evidence to support your position, you said I was wrong to argue that we’d been saying for years what Scott argued in his speech last week. I wasn’t wrong about this, you were. Just go back and look at everything we have said on the future of journalism – in speeches, interviews, even quotes we have given other media over the past 4-5 years. It’s all there.
On Monday, Crikey referred to Richard Freudenstein’s piece as a “predictable” response using our own outlets to serve our agenda. We are the only media outlet ever criticised for this. Crikey does it all the time. And the ABC gave Scott’s speech generous coverage on the 7pm News, the 7.30 Report, Lateline and the next day’s radio. Interesting how no one has challenged what Richard wrote.
Your are right when you say Crikey previously raised concerns about The Punch using ABC contributors. It did, but on no sensible basis? Doesn’t Crikey use ABC journalists itself – or is Alan Kohler only on the ABC of my imagination? In any case, why is this an issue at all; talented journalists from one media outlet appear on all sorts of others – plenty of our our people and many from Fairfax regularly pop up on ABC radio and television and vice versa. News does not stop its journalists providing content on other media as you claim. I’ve lost count of how many of our people appear regularly on TV and radio outlets owned by someone else, how many books they write for publishers other than Harper Collins or how many articles or essays they write for journals we don’t own.
Penberthy didn’t see the same irony you did. He recognised the irony of what Scott said; if we are the empire in decline and Scott’s is the empire in ascendancy why would anyone from the ABC want to be part of something we are doing.
As for your traffic numbers for Crikey and The Punch, they are misleading too.
Page impressions and time on the site are irrelevant given that The Punch publishes 10 items a day and Crikey usually has more than 30. It’s like comparing the readership of the Herald Sun with Knitting Monthly.
On a pro-rated basis though one imagines The Punch has higher pulling power if you just look at the arithmetic. In terms of unique browsers, your argument only refers to October month to date. In the four months since The Punch was launched it has beaten Crikey twice and finished level the other time. October is not over yet but regardless of that Crikey’s numbers were never a benchmark for The Punch. Our expectations in the first few months were to achieve about 60,000 UB’s – instead The Punch got well over 200,000. If I remember, Crikey is now about 10 years old and its numbers aren’t close to that now, if they ever were.
Anyway, apart from you and me, I think there are two comments on this subject on your blog – a total of four people who give a damn about this ludicrous posturing.
Greg Baxter| Director, Corporate Affairs
Dear Greg,
I have no desire to be like some other commentators, endlessly debating things of interest only to us. I will respond briefly to a few of your points.
You are entitled to disagree with my analysis of the debate between Mark Scott and News Limited. Indeed, given our respective jobs it would be surprising if you didn’t.
However, on some matters of fact. In my original piece on Freudenstein’s response, I provided contrasting quotes on attitudes to audience generated content from News Limited CEO John Hartigan on the one hand, and Scott on the other. That was the context in which I said that News Limited had not been saying the same things as Scott, who anticipated and even advocated an embrace of pro-am collaborations with bloggers and non-professionals. Witness the recent ABC self regulation policy. It is true that Hartigan has said a great deal of good things about the future of media. In my opinion he is the only other Australian media executive who can lay claim to being a “thought leader”. But it is not true to claim that he has been saying the same things as Scott.
I said that most media companies, including News Limited, restrict their staff journalists’ right to appear on other mastheads, and that is true. Permission is also often granted for them to do so. A key difference is that they are usually paid for their contributions when the write books etc. The Punch does not pay contributors, and I think that is of concern. Crikey pays many of its contributors. Not enough, in my opinion, and some are not paid at all. I am also concerned about that, and have written about it.
As for Kohler’s position, I agree that at least when he first began to run his own media businesses, there was an issue regarding his work for the ABC. In fact, I wrote about this at the time (before I wrote for Crikey). Crikey also reported on it.
Regarding the audience figures. Your original claim was that The Punch had “killed” Crikey’s numbers. This is not the case, and that is what the figures I provided demonstrated.
There are certainly some difficulties comparing the two publications, although I am not the only industry commentator to have done so.
For one thing, parts of Crikey’s material are available only on subscription, whereas The Punch is entirely free. Crikey’s main presence in the market is a subscription email service. The website is a different business model. There are other differences as well. But your original claim that The Punch had “killed” Crikey is demonstrably incorrect.
As for the remainder of our disagreements, they are largely a matter of opinion. All the material is in the public realm. Those who are interested can make up their own minds about the merits, and who is and is not guilty of “ridiculous posturing”.
Yours, Margaret Simons
3 Comments
So The Punch shouldn’t be compared with Crikey because such comparisons are misleading??
Greg Baxter should tell that to David Penberthy:
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/the-punch-thanks-its-readers-and-extends-an-invitation/
As a bystander, but one with a deep interest in the future of the media and journalism, the exchanges here between Greg Baxter for News Limited and blogger Margaret Simons have been perturbing and, let’s say it, disappointing. It is certainly a case of reading not what someone says but the way in which he says it that is most revealing. For such a high flying corporate affairs operator, Baxter’s overtly rude and disdainful tone and illogic is almost of adolescent tinge. His final patronising throw-away in the latest sally above is plainly wrong. There are of course many who are following this latest chapter in the roiling story of fundamental change inherent in the digital revolution and the role of News Limited in particular. Rupert and James Murdoch’s cranking up the temperature of the debate with talk of “content kleptomaniacs” and the call to rein in public broadcasters such as the BBC and the ABC to allow “independent voices” has been bizarre and even capable of inducing a touch of schadenfreude. I suppose the Viking, King Canute, had advisers who were saying “Yes, Sire, you can order the waters to retreat … the tides are under your control.” And I suppose Murdoch would not hear too many voices in his inner circle that convey what are now fundamental truths about the future and the very nature of what is happening so fast and so deep in media and communications. Canute acknowledged the limits of his powers. So far, Murdoch is defying the waves lapping at his knees. It also illustrates just how wide apart in meaning the uses of a word such as “independent” can be. Of course there is a constant interflow of media professionals between outlets, including online, owned by different entities, especially as commentators and specialist analysts. One assumes that virtually all of these are perceived by the participants and their superiors as “fair bargains”. But what I understood Simons to be pointing to was the irony of Colvin and Sales, whose principal employer is the taxpayer-funded ABC, contributing to a News Limited online start-up blog site, The Punch. Despite the various Baxter sprays, it is hard to argue with the force of her basic point about this case of cross-contribution being ironic. Against a background of the declining fortunes of newspapers (primarily in the UK, USA, Australia and Europe), a stung Murdoch’s bellicose comments and ABC MD Mark Scott’s cocky salvo towards the “emperor’s redoubt, the arrangement smacks of a comradely meeting in no-man’s land by ordinary soldiers while the larger, fiercer battle rumbles on.
I actually don’t understand the comparison between Crikey and The Punch. I read both, but for different reasons and to get different information/POVs. It’s a lack of other sites with quality local content that leads to the bullshit “war” between the two publications.
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