Margaret Simons on Media

Category Archives: media futures

Competition for This Blog Declines…

February 13, 2009 – 9:06 am

News of fresh departures. Matthew Ricketson, media and communications editor at The Age, is leaving to take up a post as Professor of Journalism at the University of Canberra. Before rejoining The Age in 2006 Ricketson ran the journalism program at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for 11 years, where he had an influence [...]

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Social Media and the Bushfires

February 11, 2009 – 9:41 am

I’m a bit late catching up with this one, but there is an interesting article on New Matilda about the way social media, particularly Twitter, has been used to cover the bushfires. The information is still largely coming from official sources and mainstream media, but the immediacy of the social networking platforms seems to be [...]

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How Much Would You Pay For Journalism?

February 11, 2009 – 1:54 am

So how much would you be prepared to pay for the content you receive in your daily newspaper? How much would your friends pay? Something? $2? $5?
Or would you pay for something else – some other kind of news content?
Waddya reckon?
This question is spurred by a so-called “grassroots” attempt to tout for newspapers in the [...]

By Margaret Simons | Also posted in Death of newspapers | Comments (2)

Read the Book, See the…Powerpoint

February 10, 2009 – 10:07 am

Jeff Jarvis’s new book What Would Google Do is out, but Jarvis is taking a novel approach to publicity. He has provided a powerpoint presentation online. Saves all that reading…
I have reviewed WWGD, as Jarvis would like us to call it, for the next issue of the Walkley magazine.
Its certainly worth reading, and contains some [...]

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Why the Web Won’t Save Us

February 9, 2009 – 3:54 pm

Stephen Quinn, Associate Professor of Journalism at Deakin University, has a guest post at Mumbrella on why going to the web won’t save newspapers. One of his points is that newspapers have come to rely too much on advertising.
For more than half a century, newspapers and commercial broadcasters have relied too heavily on advertising for [...]

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A Setback for Cit J

February 4, 2009 – 10:17 am

The citizen journalism photo agency Scoopt has closed. The business, owned by Getty Images, gave Citizen Journalists forty per cent of the proceeds if their photos were sold to the media. Read more.

By Margaret Simons | Also posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Inside Story – New Media and Old Pair Up

February 3, 2009 – 12:58 pm

I’ve written before here about the newish online publication Inside Story, which is produced out of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University. (Declaration: I write for it, and am employed part time at the ISR).
Inside Story is an interesting example of what can be done now the barriers to entry in the media [...]

By Margaret Simons | Also posted in Uncategorized, fairfax | Comments (1)

Sugar Daddies. Are They the Future?

February 3, 2009 – 9:46 am

There’s been a lot of discussion recently here and overseas about the idea that newspapers should become not for profits, or even charities. It isn’t an entirely novel notion. As Roy Greenslade points out in this post The Guardian newspaper in Britain has been run by a not for profit trust for many years.
We have [...]

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Half the World Has a Mobile Phone

February 3, 2009 – 9:37 am

Almost half the world’s population owns a mobile phone, and the growth is fastest in the poorest countries, according to this article from Internews Europe, promoting The Promise of Ubiquity report.
The findings include the fact that mobile phone access is now well ahead of internet access, and in the third world rivals the reach of [...]

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The Return of the Proprietor?

January 29, 2009 – 6:21 pm

Jonathan Este, the man who is running the Future of Journalism project for the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, has an interesting article over at Inside Story. He suggests that we may be about to see a return of the media moghul, and he quotes some more optimistic than usual analyses of [...]

By Margaret Simons | Also posted in Death of newspapers | Comments (0)