The Content Makers » Social networking

New Business Models for Free to Air Television

Margaret Simons — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:02:24 +0000

The problem with writing about the future of television is that most people one approaches for comment have overwhelming vested interests, and this is reflected in the “he says, she says” nature of most mainstream media writing on the topic.

Freeview types want to talk up the future of Free to Air as against Pay. Foxtel types do the reverse. Public broadcasters want to tout their advantages over anyone forced to depend on the advertising dollar. Thus they talk about areas of “market failure” to back their claims on the taxpayer dollar.

All are defending their own particular business/funding models against the competition and the likelihood that technological change, including internet protocol television, will knock the whole current debate into a cocked hat and force everyone to reconsider their raison d’etre.

So it was with joy in my heart (I’m weird that way) that I happened across this piece by Stephen Byrne of Diffusion, a company that advises on the value of brands.

After speaking frankly about the erosion in viewer numbers, Byrne suggests four new business models that might emerge:

Social Networking

Longtail

Contextual Programming, and

Branded Content

Read the piece for expansion on the points.

This fits snugly with some of the things I said about new business models in my 2007 book The Content Makers, although I have often thought since the book was published that I should have said a lot more about Social Networking, which is clearly going to become one of the biggest determinants of what we choose to consume in media.

I have written more, since the book, about this here. And when I wrote that, I didn’t even know about Twitter.

Things move so fast.

UPDATE: Trevor Young has interesting things to say on social networking from a PR point of view.

ABC Opens its Archives – Slowly

Margaret Simons — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:52:48 +0000

The richest repository of cultural material in the country would have to be the ABC – so it is exciting and maybe even alarming to hear that Auntie is experimenting with the idea of opening up its archives so that members of the public can access and even re-use and remix the material.

The experiment is taking place under Pool, the social media project developed within Radio National. Pool is a groundbreaking experiment in User Generated Content. Users can upload text, music, photos, videos, documentaries or whatever and the content is made available for others to view and use. It’s worth taking a look, or you can read more about it here.

Tentatively, the team opening up the archives plans to start in Darwin in the next few weeks with the release under an open licence of a small amount of footage. The plan is to then move into other areas, slowly releasing slices of archive content. Says Social Media Producer Kate Gauld:

Releasing the archives under open licences is the goal. The platform for the release (and inviting back reused/remixed/repurposed material) will be Pool. The theme we choose (Darwin, censorship, oldest archives etc) is just a way to isolate a tiny slice in a very large pie (perhaps we could crowdsource where to look next?!).

The project is part of a wider initiative by Creative Archive Australia – a program of the Queensland University of Technology’s Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation) to investigate the feasibility of opening up material from government institutions. The ABC project will be the first “test case”.

It’s an expansion on the theme of Media as Application – something I blogged on last week.

And for the ABC, it is one part of the ongoing issue of how to preserve the credibility of the brand, and at the same time become a more porous and interactive institution (in fact, less of an institution and more of a space).

The ABC released a Discussion Paper on User Generated Content last year. I gather that we will be seeing some results, in the way of new Editorial Guidelines for UGC, before too long. Should be interesting

Israel Uses Twitter for a Media/Citizens’ Conference

Margaret Simons — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:40:50 +0000

Another interesting new media story from the Courier-Mail’s David Earley, who writes:

“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.”

Mainstream Media Came to the Party – Lateish

Margaret Simons — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 04:45:16 +0000

On December 19 near Kings Cross in Sydney a man was detained and threatened with arrest under the Terrorism Act.

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.

Statistics to mull over on internet use

Margaret Simons — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 10:22:22 +0000

The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s annual communications report is out, and as usual is full of meaty statistics on the uses of communications technology.

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