This ran in the Crikey email last Thursday but may provoke a bit of conversation here at Pure Poison.
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It must be pretty humbling to feel your power slipping away. And not just slipping away to an equally powerful competitor, but slipping away to — gasp! — ordinary people.
Let’s just say you’re the Australian head of a massive, global media company and that you’re accustomed to people doing what you say. You grew up in a social and business environment where money meant power, where media barons were the only people who could afford to communicate directly with large numbers of people; it has been this way for as long as you can remember, and as long as your father’s generation can remember for that matter. But one day along comes this thing called The Internet, promising to democratise the flow of information, and something terrible begins to happen: the plebs grow bold and start to rise up, empowered by having their voice heard, unworried about profit or business models. If you were that media baron what would you do? Would you adapt or would you atrophy?
When this news and journalism environment started to change dramatically about a decade ago, newspaper media companies initially refused to change with it. They whacked their stories online, slapped a couple of ads up with them, and sat back waiting for the rivers of internet gold to flow. But people don’t use the internet like they do traditional media forms, and most attempts by traditional players to adapt to this new form have been contrived and poorly executed. The failure to adapt a product to a market is bad business, but the petulant bitching and moaning from dinosaur media chiefs who want the world to stop moving so they don’t have to get off their arse and move with it is just bad form.
When News Ltd CEO John Hartigan addressed the National Press Club yesterday he angrily took aim at absolutely everyone in a lumbering speech of contradictions and non-sequiturs. Like a cornered soldier in a ferocious firefight, he stood with his back pressed against the wall, haunted eyes open wide, firing his rifle wildly and indiscriminately in erratic arcs at anything that moved. He made many points during his speech, but the main theme seemed to be: how dare you people who haven’t suffered through a newspaper cadetship and operating outside the employ of a large newspaper organisation communicate with a wider audience?
Some of Hartigan’s best venom was reserved for bloggers, who he said produced content of “limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance”. Along with news aggregation services (Google and others) and non-traditional media outlets like Crikey, bloggers are despised by Hartigan for shamelessly reproducing his outlets’ content instead of producing their own. I know this because I read his speech on a webpage at The Australian’s site, at the bottom of which was this giant invitation to share the paper’s content with bloggers, news aggregators and Google.
Leading us to the central paradox: Hartigan says that for every one hardcopy reader his papers lose, ten online readers must be attracted to break even. In an attempt to attract those ten readers, newspaper websites desperately require blogs and other online fora to reference and link to their stories, hoping that the expanded readership will click back to the original story to eyeball the attached advertising. If such a co-dependence (and it is co-dependence because newspaper journalists often refer to blogs’ content in their reporting) is necessary for the financial stability of traditional media outlets then Hartigan getting huffy and bitchy about bloggers re-publishing his content is laughable.
And let’s be totally honest about what Hartigan’s outlets are up against here: there are blogs and then there are blogs. Any bozo or halfwit with a Wordpress or Blogger account can cut-and-paste massive swathes of newspaper copy into a blog post, add a line or two of comment, and wait patiently for six or seven readers to accidentally stumble across the result while Googling “Britney vids”. But how are these pisspoor “citizen journalism” efforts cannibalising Hartigan’s business model? The combined financial effect of these blogs’ thieving of News Ltd content wouldn’t even total the cost of his Cabcharge to the Press Club yesterday.
Hartigan says he could summarise his speech in two dot points: “If you want to attract readers, break stories people want to read,” and “give them something they can’t get anywhere else, make it relevant and useful and let them get involved.” While the vast majority of blogs of the type described above offer nothing new to their reader(s), the larger, more popular blogs are right across Hartigan’s dot points — they’re offering people something they want to read, often by looking at an issue from a new angle; they’re giving readers something they can’t get anywhere else, in the form of the blogger’s unique perspective, personality and writing style; and they’re letting the reader get involved by facilitating a proper conversation, unhindered by clunky moderation policies and properly involving the article’s author. Often these blogs refer to articles published by mainstream media organisations, quoting sections of text under the fair use provisions of the copyright act, but they’re also adding significant content of their own. In effect, bloggers and their readers are merely discussing those news stories in the same way that people discuss the content of a physical newspaper around the water cooler. Ultimately, this quoting and discussion lead to readers’ awareness of Hartigan’s publications and directs their eyeballs towards Hartigan’s ads.
Traditional journalism and blogging do not compete with each other; it’s not an either/or proposition. A modern news consumer does not consume news and comment from a single source, and it is this fact of 21st century life that so upsets Hartigan and his ilk. The modern news consumer looks to a large and dynamic range of sources for reporting, comment, analysis and debate to inform their world view, and increasingly look to sources that let them get involved. There is room in this multidirectional environment for traditional journalism, blogs, news aggregators, independent media and social networking to all play important roles. The days of a newspaper holding exclusive power over their readers’ eyeballs are over, as are the days of unilateral communication from powerful journalist to subservient reader. Hartigan can feel his power slipping away and he’s not humbled, just frightened and pissed off.
In the end, Hartigan seems to have faith in the idea that quality content has the power to attract paying readers. If that’s the case, and if he’s so sure that what he’s got to offer is so much better than bloggers, then he’s got nothing to worry about. Associate editor of Hartigan’s highest circulation newspaper and, um, blogger, Andrew Bolt, says that “relevance and credibility will be the keys to [News Ltd’s] survival.” And if that’s the case, while News Ltd publications are pumping out credible and relevant content such as the fake Pauline Hanson teenage pictures and Piers Akerman, Hartigan’s got lots to worry about.
18 Comments
Some years ago, Private Eye magazine in the UK had ( and, I believe,still has) a column purely about Fleet Street and the antics of its shonkier employees. The column was titled ” Street of Shame” and the cartoon banner featured a drunken journalist lying in the gutter clutching a scotch and a copy of a newspaper, the headline reading “New Technology Baffles Pissed Old Hack”.
Seems apposite still.
related article from todays Australian here.
Scott
Your prejudices are clearly showing in choice of both Leon and myself as examples of “bad” bloggers because it would seem that your only criteria here is that someone has to have a conservative viewpoint and a willingness to show the world what dingbats you and your cronies are.
No, Iain. It’s not because you and Leon are conservative, it’s because you’re bozos and halfwits. It’s because you both perfectly illustrate the example I was making by conforming to the blogging stereotype of copy, past, comment, publish. I mean, Leon’s got more links to The Australian on his site than The Australian itself, and just go take a fresh look at your own frontpage to see how reliant you are upon the content of newspaper websites.
Anyway, I thought you might like the traffic last Thursday. I’m a nice guy like that.
This is Australia. We do not have a Bill of Rights, or Fair Use.
We do, however, have Fair Dealing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing#Fair_dealing_in_Australia
Just on the subject of traditional media revenue, one suggestion from the US to strengthen newspaper financial viability is to ban websites linking to content financed by newspapers. All this would do in my view is just end debate or make it difficult for people to challenge the kind of fatuous content we see regularly in opinion pages.
in related matter Mark Bahnisch notes (as aside in his post) that news ltd already seem to be making it hard for people to access some content online.
Please explain how what you do at Grods is any different Scott? If there is an issue of the day what do you do? You read, paraphrase,link, comment and publish I just think that I will do my readers the service of quoting the relevant parts from the source directly there is no substantial difference at all as far as I can see all bloggers who want to comment on politics and news have to have a starting point and what is the alternative?
Cat blogging?
Get real.
There are 15 posts currently on the front page of Grods. Five of them link to or quote from a mainstream media article.
Of the 10 posts currently on the front page of
Boltwatch-watchHeterodox ManThe BlowtorchIain Hall, nine of them quote significantly from mainstream media articles. The tenth is a YouTube video presented without comment.And do you really want to start with the spelling police game, Iain? It’s really, really sad that a man so utterly bereft of spelling, punctuation and grammar skills, and so utterly reliant on Microsoft Word spellcheck, and who begs people to focus not on his mistakes but his message, gleefully points out others’ typos.
How heartbreaking for the conservative commentariat that the groundrules have changed: suddenly it’s easy for opinions contrary to their own to be sourced and read! Oh for the good old days when the (conservative) government had intimate links with the (conservative) journalists and public comment was easily censored via the letters-page editor.
What’s irking the Right is that they are being challenged on an even playing-field. How facile this argument is can be judged by the insults they ritually hurl at bloggers who have the temerity to criticise them: puerile, abusive, name-calling…..all features far more in keeping with the hitherto-shameful standards of the News Ltd blogs of Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman and Tim Blair.
Boy, they really are stinging on this, aren’t they!
Part of the problem for the msm here is that for years? decades? ever? their pages have been the only source of information and analysis. There was no competition, because there couldn’t be.
I remember once trying to nail a quote I overheard in an interview on ‘Sunday’, about 1996. To get the transcript, I had to wait for the next day, contact Channel 9 by phone, and get it faxed to me – a turn around of more than 36 hours after the original interview, and thus ‘old news’ by the time I received it. Now, I can get the transcript online within hours.
Similarly with other sources of information: we get the polling results when the msm does, we can watch interviews and media conferences online and replay them if we need to, we get the media releases, government reports etc at exactly the same time the msm does.
Of course, much of this information comes to us through msm sources. The difference, however, is that we now have the tools to analyse what they do with it. If they distort an interview, we know by reference to the transcripts; if they don’t report a poll in full, we know this and can ask why.
You can understand why ‘old’ journos find this challenging and disturbing. Once you wrote an article, and it was holy writ. If someone did question you, the criticism took days to arrive, by which time it seemed irrelevant. Now it’s all instant; five seconds after your article has been posted, the criticisms begin.
The ‘good’ users of the new technology embrace this and enter into a dialogue with their readers (thinking young George M here), which encourages criticism and welcomes different points of view.
More on this stuff at Larvatus Prodeo, by the way.
Three cheers for “letting the reader get involved by facilitating a proper conversation, unhindered by clunky moderation policies”,
the real shame here though is that at crikey this doesnt exist.
At crikey, the blog Authors own the readers comments so dissent of the type that could in some way be construed as libelous does not get posted. Still three cheers for those who do “allow a proper conversation, unhindered by clunky moderation policies”.
I think that this mythical beast is a lot like the yeti, the loch-ness monster and clean coal though.
twobob – why is it that you only ever pop in to bag PP? Zoomster (comment 11) was actually trying to put forward an interesting point, and the next thing we’ve got another twobob rant. Contribute something interesting or GO AWAY!
Seems to me THE big problem, and it affects not only publications like newspapers (and blogs) is the monetary system’s inability to process micro-payments.
I reckon there’s a huge chunk of trade and business which could be transacted over the web, which is being held up and/or possibly wrecked, by the bank’s inability to deal with this.
They don’t seem to be able to deal with a payment smaller than $10. So for example, if you buy, say a lotto ticket for $5.50 on your online Lotto account, when you put in your credit card number, the system whirrs away, then it pays $5.50 for your ticket, but also adds $4.50 to the credit in your account, making a transaction of $10.
Now, when you add in all the sneaky little charges and fees that the credit card company subsequently adds on, you find that you have been charged in effect, something like $12 for a $5.50 purchase.
This affects on-line publishing. Stephen King (and others) have tried publishing books in the old-fashioned instalment format, but online. But they ran into this problem, that each instalment cost $10 (or actually $12) so that people were being asked to pay $40 ($48) for a book they could buy in the store for $20. PLUS, they didn’t even get the actual book! If they wanted the book, they would have to print off all that paper and then bind it themselves. To make such online publishing viable, it needs to be cheaper, not more expensive, than the printed version.
I only buy the Thursday and Saturday Age these days, respectively for the TV Guide and the classifieds. I do this not because I’m a scunge, but because that way I have less paper lying around. Recycling becomes a REAL effort if you live in a flat upstairs, with no elevator!
I would be perfectly happy to pay for the online Age (or for Crikey) but I’m reluctant to subscribe ( I never used to buy the Age every day before the internet came along) and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $12 to read the paper!
There’s a fortune here for some compooter/finance geek who can solve the problem of online micro-payments I reckon.
twobob, do you think that the mods here should let through all comments, even those which “could in some way be construed as libelous”? Assume for the purposes of my question that crikey doesn’t want to get sued.
Scott
Your response is rather typical and does not even address the point that I made in my last comment. Because as I suggested we are both addressing issues of the day and sourcing our information from the public news media. That you choose to paraphrase rather than quote as much as I do is a very minor difference.
I write the posts that I do to inspire/ encourage debate in the comment threads and that has been lively enough with some spirited debate and I think that I would be right to suggest that I have had more comments on the last fifteen posts at my blog than you have had at the fifteen that grace your front page.
On the matter of how many referrals I got from your piece I checked my stats and I got precisely seven referrals from the Crikey email piece and only one trolling comment that I rejected so don’t kid yourself that you are in anyway important to my readership.