“THE Israeli government escalated its PR war this morning when it held a world first “Citizens’ Press Conference” about the Gaza incursion, inviting the world to ask questions on social networking site Twitter.

Even before its scheduled start time questions were being asked of the New York Consulate General of Israel’s representative on Twitter, within minutes questions began flooding in and, by the end of the two-hour session, Consul of Media and Public Affairs David Saranga had been peppered with at least 400 questions from all over the world, including Australians who were up before 4am (Queensland time) to take part.”

Read more

The study found that 40 percent of people got most of their news from the internet, up from just 24 per cent in September 2007. More people say they rely on the internet than on newspapers.

Television is still the main source for national and international news, but the number is falling and for young people the Internet rivals television as a news source.

Read more here.

How do we know? Not thanks to the mainstream media, but because of Twitter and the blogosphere, including young media workers who are below the radar of most mainstream journalists.

The person who was threatened, new-media-man-about-the-web Nick Holmes a Court, is not the first nor the most vulnerable citizen ever to have alleged police abuse of power.  Yet the way this story broke is not only an interesting example of how new media can work faster than some journalists. More important, it shows that in this new world we are not alone any more, even late at night and on the street. We are not only citizens, we are networked citizens, or can choose to be so, and this is a powerful thing.

So what happened? Holmes a Court was near his Potts Point apartment when he saw police apparently conducting a search. He started to film them on his Blackberry, and they responded by threatening him with arrest, seizing his Blackberry, deleting the video and scanning his emails, text messages and contacts.

Initially shocked, Holmes a Court told his extended online network about this experience almost straight away – by posting a message on Twitter, where he writes as @nickhac. If you are on Twitterh and follow nickhac, you can read that Tweet, lodged at 10.42pm on December 19, here.

From here, his story was picked up by his fellows interested in new media. I first heard about it when Ben Grubb, an eighteen year old who runs a web hosting business on the Sunshine Coast, blogged about it here. He followed up with a podcast interview of Holmes a Court. (Today, Grubb is boasting that his coverage of the issue has led to 10,522 unique visitors to his site.)

I knew Grubb slightly, having met him at a Future of Journalism conference in Melbourne a few weeks ago. While middle aged journos like me were winging about our disappearing jobs, he gave us an example of someone acting as a journalist and with a job in new media without ever having been on the payroll of a mainstream organisation. I am not even sure he has left school yet.

Having been alerted by Grubb, and on the eve of going on holiday, I posted about the story here and here, encouraging journos to follow up.

I am glad to say they did – not thanks to me necessarily, but simply because they were linked and networked with the places where the story was being discussed.  Fellow Twitterer and Courier Mail journalist  David Earley was first and fastest. Despite holidays and the like, he did this story, which got on to news.com.au.

The Sydney Morning Herald then did this follow up a day later, written by another young journo with a presence on Facebook, the blogosphere and elsewhere. (Sadly it managed to get Holmes a Court’s name wrong, calling him Nick Hac, which is a version of his Twitter username.  Strange, given that his family of origin – yes, those Holmes a Courts – is surely one of the potential news angles.)

Holmes a Court has lodged a formal complaint with police, and doubtless we will hear more – if we Twitter and read blogs.

In his latest comment on Grubb’s site Holmes a Court says:

You are right in many regards, my story is representative of only one side of the event. And I’m sure the officer on the other side of the table would say i was being a jerk. Quite frankly i wasn’t respecting their “authoritah” and probably valued my own civil liberties above them getting the job done. A debatable topic.

I wholly admit – was probably being a bit cheeky when i decided to film them. And to be honest I was deliberately making a point about the rights of the citizens to “police the police”. I didn’t expect the reaction I received though.…

All this has caused me to reflect. I have written elsewhere about other people – neighbours of mine -  who allege police abuse of power, and who have been terribly badly treated at the hands of the media.

So much so, in fact, that I have at timeshaad to remind myself of what is good about journalism.

Now I am wondering if my neighbours would have emerged in better shape had they been on Twitter, armed with a mobile phone that also took video, and with a bevy of media-savvy young people among their followers.

In other words, with the ability to get their story out there before the network of professional copy-hungry journos and their too-close-for-comfort police sources get to work.

A few weeks ago I asked the ABC if it would release the figures on Radio National podcasting and broadcast audience numbers.

Sometimes you ask and you get. The ABC has released  these figures.

So far as I know this is the first time that the breakdowns by program have been made public.

The reason I wanted the figures was to inform the debate about Radio National’s specialist offerings, and the impact of podcasting on audience demand and behaviour, and programming decisions.

When specialist programs were cut recently (most notably the Media Report and the Religion Report) we were told they were not among the most popular for podcasting.

Various other statements have been floating around as well (not necessarily from ABC management), including that scheduling in prime time is less important these days for specialist shows because so many people access them in their own time by downloading, rather than by listening to the broadcast.

So what do the figures show? I would welcome some help here with the number crunching, but what follows is my tentative observations and back of the envelope figuring.

The way the figures are presented make comparisons between podcast audiences and broadcast audiences difficult, because the podcast figures are given for the year to 7 December 2008, whereas broadcast audience numbers are in terms of average weekly reach.  Nevertheless the raw figures reveal some interesting things.

First up, Philip Adams is Podcast King, with his Late Night Live program accounting for more than 17 per cent of the total number of downloads. Close on his heels is Life Matters, followed by RN Breakfast. These three “general interest” shows together make up more than 35 per cent of the total number of ABC podcasts.

Following these podcast queens come a raft of specialist shows, with the Science Show, All in the Mind and the Book Show the front-runners. Sure enough, the shows that have been cut – The Religion Report, the Media Report, the Ark, and Street Stories – come well down the list, with the Sports Factor running last.

Compare the broadcast audience figures. Here, news and current events are the most popular, with RN Breakfast the front runner by a substantial margin, followed by AM and PM. Life Matters is next most popular, and Phillip Adams is down the list a bit. This suggests to me that, as you would expect, “real time” listening is skewed towards stuff that doesn’t keep – news and current events.

Yet, and this surprises me, it seems that the podcast audience is not really a significant factor in audience reach for some of the specialist programs.  I would have thought that high quality specialist content not easily accessible elsewhere would or should be much more popular for podcasters – that the podcast audience would be a high proportion of the total audience.

If we take the Religion Report, the broadcast version reaches 93,000 people a week (77,000 on first airing, and another 16,000 for the repeat).

Doing a bit of basic maths with the podcast figures, it would seem that an average of about 4,300 people podcast it each week. In other words,the podcast audience is around only five per cent of the broadcast audience. The pattern is similar for the Media Report and other specialist programs.

Why so low?

It must be acknowledged that this back of the envelope figuring is very limited. There may be cross over between the two audiences, and the podcast figures don’t  reveal whether the podcasting is consistent through the year, or whether one or more particularly popular episodes account for most of it.  As well, I am assuming the podcast figures do not include those who stream the program from the ABC website (I am checking with ABC management on this point).

Nor do we know if podcasting audiences are new consumers of RN’s wares, or merely old broadcast audiences accessing programs in ways more convenient for them.

Of course size of audience is not the whole of the story, nor  necessarily the most important measure of success when it comes to specialist programming. As mass media declines, niche media will be where the most important and intersting things are happening. The measure of success here will be not audience size but intensity of audience engagement. The reaction of RN audiences when programs were cut would suggest that the specialist programs have been doing something right in this department. Yet why, if the audience is so engaged, do they not podcast the content more?

And there are some Radio National specialist programs for which podcasting is a much more significant part of their audience make-up. For example, running the same rough and ready calculator over All in Mind, I estimate that over 40 per cent if its audience are accessing the content by podcast. For Big Ideas, the figure is 23 per cent. In Conversation gets 56 per cent of its audience by podcasting. Are these programs better, more unique in some way? Comments welcome.

Tentatively I conlude that these figures suggest new delivery mechanisms do not in themselves constitute a new media strategy. If RN wants to make the most of new media, it will also have to think through new ways of developing the content, and engaging audiences.

I am sure this is not the final word. I would welcome some crowd sourcing here. ABC watchers, what do the figures tell you? What have I missed? What else should I ask for from the ABC in the way of information?

UPDATE: An ABC Insider in a position to know has provided me with the comment below. He does not wish to be named:

“Read your piece on RN’s audience figures and thought it good to point out several things.

The first is that it is problematic comparing the audience figures for a daily programme like RN Breakfast with a weekly specialist progamme like Religion Report. RN Breakfast airs for 2-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week. It’s audience ratings will always be larger than a 30 minute once a week specialist programme. Similarly, LNL airs for 60 minutes, four days a week.

The second point is that the “8.30″ programmes like Religion Report, Media Report and Law Report are podcast as a whole programme, while RN Breakfast is podcast in sections, so there are more separate podcasts to download which will of course increases podcast figures for that programme.

With regard to ratings overall, some programmes will always rate higher than others, but what is also important aside from sheer audience numbers is audience impact and influence. I would argue that Religion Report had a significant and influential audience despite having fewer listeners and podcasters than say Life Matters. Similarly, Lateline on ABC TV has a small dedicated audience (much smaller than the 7pm news) but it is arguably as influential (or perhaps at times more influential) than the 7pm ABC News.

What would be interesting to see is how the replacement programmes for Religion Report and SportsFactor rate as broadcast programmes and as podcasts.

I disagree with elements of Young’s essentialy pessimistic analysis. She says:”Even though we are spending more time with media today, we’re spending less time on news,” and backs this up with figures on declining newspaper sales and declining and ageing  audiences for television and radio news and current events.

My main point of disagreement is the definition of news. If you define news as that which is put out by big media companies, then the picture is grim. But that definition is circular.

The decline of mass media does not necessarily mean the decline of news. Indeed, it would be strange if this were so. Gathering and passing on news is a basic human activity. It preexisted literacy, printing and broadcasting. It will outlive them, I believe. But what we think of as “news” has changed in the past and will change in the future.

Jan Schaffer, the US Pulitizer Prize winner who now runs J-Lab, talks about “news ecologies” that are developing, using online social networks among other things. News is no longer only that which is put out by journalists. (In fact, it never was, but we were able to kid ourselves…)

The young people I know are very well informed indeed about the things that interest them. On other things, they may not have the kind of broad yet superficial knowledge that comes from reading a daily newspaper or watching a television newscast. Yet they are able to bring themselves up to speed with astonishing rapidity when they want to.

For example, a twenty something friend of mine who has taught me much of what I know about new media might not know why Australia intervened in East Timor, but if he wanted to know, he might do some of the following things: Post a question on the issue in Facebook or some other social networking site, and follow the links provided in the responses. He might perhaps join a group concerned with East Timor on Facebook. he might look on Twitter for members who know about or are interested in East Timor, and “Follow” their posts. These Twitter posts would lead him to other sources of information – blogs, academic articles and the like.

He would Google, and the Google search would send him to many places: some established media sites, but also to lobby groups and special interest groups and East Timor based bloggers. And that’s all without even mentioning Wikipedia.

Meanwhile there are many things that he hears about long before they make it into the newspapers and television news broadcasts. For example, he was telling me about this story to do with Google’s Chrome browser controversy in great depth a clear week before it made page three of the Age. He heard about it from a friend online, and a visit to a few sites gave him an in depth briefing from international expert sources in moments.

He was also able to tell me, earlier this year, that the later episodes of the TV series Underbelly were available online at a time when Channel Nine was protesting to me and other journalists that this could not possibly be so, because the episodes in question were not even out of the production suite. Foolishly, I trusted Channel Nine and not my friend. He turned out to be right – something he has not stopped rubbing in. Thus his online knowledge undermined, or could have undermined, the claims of corporate PR.

Young writes about the internet, but makes the rather dismissive observation that young people use the internet for “email, socialising …doing homework/research”.  Yet all these activities are often ways of accessing  and disseminating news. Young acknowledges this possibility, but then dismisses it by saying that figures suggest that when citizens search for news online, three fifths of their searches are for the names of familiar news outlets, rather than searches by news topic. Once again, the circular definition.

Yet research by Hitwise here in Australia shows that when a topic is in the news, there are clear “spikes” in the number of searches on the topic – and the traffic from these searches goes in all directions. Hitwise figures also show that of the traffic to print news sites 13.34 comes from Google topic searches. Social networking sites are also becoming significant drivers of traffic to both traditional news sites and news-based blogs. I’ve written more on social networking as a driver of news and other media consumption here .

Certainly there is cause for concern about the loss of  broad knowledge of current events. But we do also need to acknowledge that the concept what is news, and what consitutes current events, may need re-examining. After all, before the printing press “news” was what happened locally or could be passed by word of mouth, and “current events” did not really exist in the same way it does now.

We are living through a change at least equivalent to the invention of the printing press. It isn’t sufficient to say “this is what has been news, and this is declining, therefore news is declining”.

If I may (modestly) give an example. Four weeks ago this blog, which is mainly a source of news on media with an emphasis on journalists, did not exist. I gather my information from friends, colleagues, and the usual journalistic trick of wearing out the telephone keypad and some shoe leather. The audience at this stage is only just over a thousand strong – nearly all media workers or those closely interested in media. Before this blog came in to being that audience did not exist as a single, identifiable entity. I am glad to report that it is growing strongly, and there is no doubt that what drives site traffic most is news – about internecine ABC disputes, who is going to be the next editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and so forth. Stuff that would not interest the great majority of the population, but does interest this audience-in-the-making.

Media workers being what they are, they gossip, and the contents of that gossip both finds its way on to this site (if I can verify it) and is also fuelled by this site. Bloggers link to this site. I link to bloggers.  When I have some news here, I Twitter about it, and Twitterers re-tweet my posts. And so it goes on. What I am doing here is news, yet it looks nothing like any traditional news source. The audience is niche, but if I do my job properly it will be intensely engaged. The boundary between “source” and “audience” is more than usually blurred.

This is my own little meta-journalism experiment.

More in the future on questions such as: “can serving an Australian niche audience pay enough to make it worthwhile”.

Sigh.

*Declaration: Inside Story is published at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, where I am employed part time.

“Thought I’d just let you you can actually watch AlJazeera English in good quality here via the web.

They’re on this great new application called Live Station.

You go to their website, click on Watch Now at top left. This will give you a page which offers three ways of watching. Live Station (free) is the third and bottom option. Download takes a couple of minutes. The  its on your desktop.

It also lets you watch a whole slew of other international channels from the Beeb, ITN, France 24 (English) , Russia Today, Eronews in five languages etc – just by clicking round their carousel.

You just click on the icon at the top of screen to fill the smaller screen. Then you right click to go full screen.

Because AJE is fully HD the picture – even on a big wide computer monitor – is as good as TV. Even the other channels are eminently watchable.

That’s the live oputput.

All AJE programmes and news chunks can also be watched on their You Tube channel which you get to via their website.

Not that I’m suggesting you watch AJE all day!

More pointing out the cutting edge technology that has world networks at anyone’s finger tips.

It makes you wonder – again – at the media make-up of the future and the relationship between TV and online if you can get any TV show from anywhere anytime in acceptable to excellent quality.

Right now you can connect your laptops to your plasma if you want to – the pictures get grainier of course. But the technology is already being tested and even used by which will fix all that.

Who knows how it will all end. But certainly everyone has to sytop thinking in yterms of TV, online , radio or proint. It’s all just programming that follows you around.

I know youy write a lot of Fairfax .. I thought they were being very clever buying the broadcast house to get the expertise and wherewithal for TV and TV-like online production. But now they’re selling! Myopic in my view.”

While I know we are going through a period of paradigm shift, with all the distress and chaos that implies, I think the future contains more threat than opportunity.

Which is why today I want to write about a new web based Australian publication that has started quietly in the last few months, built for nothing using open source blogging software, and kicking arse in the content department.

The publication is Inside Story.

Now, before I go on, I should declare that I have a number of conflicts here. The founder and editor of Inside Story is a mate, Peter Browne, who has also in the dim and distant past been my publisher. Browne is well known to journalists, having once edited Australian Society magazine, (that later became Modern Times), worked at the ABC and also presided over the UNSW Press’s short series of Briefings books.

Another conflict: Inside Story comes out of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University, where I am employed part time. Also, I have written for it and expect to do so again.

So, take all that into account when I say that I think this publication is a prime example of what can now be done with very little, how it is possible with almost no publicity to get noticed and read by a small but engaged audience, and, forsooth, that the decline of newspapers is not necessarily the end of intelligent material on issues of current affairs, written in an accessible fashion.

I won’t go on about the content. Have a look for yourself. It is international, thoughtful and falls nicely between journalism and the academy. Writers include David Corlett, Peter Mares and Geoffrey Barker.

Inside Story had a soft launch in October. It wasn’t really meant to attract much attention. Browne was negotiating a regular print outlet as a partner to run the best articles from the site. The Australian National University were talking about coming in with more funds. He was waiting for those moves to come off before making a big noise.

Yet despite getting almost no publicity Inside Story – which is free to read – already has 1837 subscribers, and around five and a half thousand page views a week.

What’s more, a number of its major articles have been picked up by the mainstream media. Three pieces have been reprinted in the Canberra Times, and one in The Age. Two authors have been interviewed about their pieces on Radio National, and another piece, Xan Rice’s “The Mobiliser”, an extraordinary first person account of the end of a Sudanese refugee camp, is shortly to be reprinted in the New Statesman.

Browne built the site himself, for free, using the open source Wordpress blogging software. For copy he draws on Swinburne University’s network of researchers, as well as his own contacts in journalism and publishing.

What is more, Inside Story pays its contributors on a sliding scale. Less for salaried academics, and rates for freelance journalists that are not laughable by industry standards – not that the pot of money is unlimited.

I think this is the real divider between the various online publications. Those that pay have some hope of sustaining high quality copy. Those that don’t become aggregators of stuff produced elsewhere, and forums for the intensely involved and interested, rather than for disinterested journalism.

The fact that Inside Story can pay is, of course, a product of its home inside the university sector – but if the American experiments teach us anything, it is that universities are one of the places where high quality journalism might have to be incubated and reinvented while new business models emerge.

So, amid all the gloom, it pays sometimes to look at the new things that are happening, and could not happen, without the new technology.

More on new and hopeful things in the week ahead, if I have time away from reporting gloom and collapse.

So says a friend of mine, David Wright, with a strong interest in the internet filtering legislation presently being planned by Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy.

David Wright spends a lot of his time on the Internet. To him I owe my own tentative steps into the world of Internet publishing, as well as my use of social media (hello there fellow Twitterers) , and a great deal of my awareness of how future generations will consume and interact with media content, including journalism.

I think his arguments are worth reading in full. Wright has written in similar terms to Stephen Conroy.

I will let you know if he gets a reply.

David says:

“With more news outlets and people taking notice of the plan for Australia wide filtering of the internet I thought it would be helpful to hear from someone who both understands the goals of this plan and the technical and social problems it will face.

It is a very ambitious plan with a lot at stake. As such it is very complicated so I would like to address only the major points.

For a little background on myself I have been working with computers for over 10 years and am now employed as a systems administrator.

The technology behind the filter is actually very simple and straight forward. Everyone’s internet is run through an ISP (Internet Service Provider) that can control what you can and can’t do with your connection. What Senator Conroy is proposing is a massive list of known bad sites (called a Black list).

So if you try to access any web site your ISP will check it against the bad list. If its not on there, no problem. If it is the ISP will log the attempt and not provide the web page for you. That’s it. Very simple. So what are the problems? It turns out there are many.

For starters it slows everything down. It adds an overlay of complexity to the internet that will adversely affect our already pitifully slow internet. In world rankings of internet speed Australia is falling behind, even if listed by continents we fall third (http://www.speedtest.net/global.php). This is a major problem as almost every business needs high speed internet access.

The counter argument for this is the usual “Please think of the children” which leads into my next point.

It won’t work. There, flat out, it won’t work.

All it would have taken was for Senator Conroy to ask anyone who works in networking or systems and he would get the same answer.

Filtering is a difficult and dangerous game to play, I should know as I have been trying to set it up at my work. The system that is being proposed works on a black list. Who controls what’s on the list? How is it updated? There is no way it will catch everything, there is no way it will be updated fast enough.

But that’s not all; this system will only stop people from accessing the illegal content served through web pages.

It does not stop FTP, where one machine holds the files and sends them to individuals on request.

IT does not stop SMTP (good old email).

IT does not stop P2P (Sending directly from one machine to the other).

It does not stop IM (sending over instant messaging like AOL, ICQ, AIM, etc),

IT does not stop IRC (Inter-relay Chat). Think massive chat rooms which can be created for free instantly.

And that list doesn’t include all the options.

I still haven’t got to the worst part. Let’s say that for some reason the content has to be sourced from web pages. No problem. Set yourself up with a proxy. What that does is send your traffic to a legal webpage say, http://americanproxy.org/, and then that page grabs the illegal stuff and sends it to you.

Since it is coming from a legal site, the filtering won’t catch it. Simple. One Google search for “Free Proxy” will get hundreds of hits. All of about 30 seconds work to permanently get around this filter.

I say it again. Conroy’s plan will not work.

My final, most important point.

This is more important than the fact that it won’t work. More important than the fact that it will slow down the Internet, and make it harder for us to compete in a global marketplace.

It is free speech. This filtering comes in two tiers. One tier is compulsory; it will filter Child Pornography and other (undecided) illegal pages.

The second is an optional component for filtering pornography. An opt in, optional component is fine.

It’s the compulsory filter that is dangerous. In 2004 we passed a law saying we cannot discuss Euthanasia online. Will that be put on the compulsory filter?

What about drug information? Where does it stop? Who decides what is filtered out? The problem with me arguing this is that proponents of this will only stand up and shout “So your in favour of Child Pornography then?” or “Won’t someone think of the Children!?”

This an invalid argument. Instead of debating the issues people claim that if you are against this legislation you must want Child Porn.

The “Won’t someone think of the Children!?” argument is flawed. Since when did parents require the government to help them be parents? This is a condescending stance, tantamount to saying “We don’t think you are being good enough parents”. If parents took an active interest in what their child is doing then a lot of this would be unnecessary.

We should have complete and uncensored access to the internet. Anything illegal online is still illegal and should be handled by the law enforcement agencies.

Once censorship begins we have no real control over where it will go. We might start by filtering child pornography, then it will go to other pornography, then to pages the Government deems distasteful.

The freedoms we have in Australia at the moment are amazing and precious. They are worth fighting for.”

And the stats make it ludicrous to suggest that journalists can afford to ignore phenomena like social networking and blogging.

Here are a few facts to mull over:

• Eighty nine per cent of Australians use the internet daily or weekly
• Fifty five per cent of Australians go online more than eight times a week
• Forty per cent of Australians read a blog or used a social networking site in 2007-8
• Thirty nine per cent of Australians between the ages of eight and seventeen have an online profile
• Seventy two per cent of internet users go online to catch up on news, sports and weather – making accessing news number three in popular uses, below email and banking.
• Blogging and social networking are the fastest growing internet applications.
• Two in every ten Australians belong to an online community or social network, with Facebook more popular than Myspace.
• One in every ten Australians has written a blog or uploaded content to the internet