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Media trends digest
– 2008
Live reporting is fashionable 30 April
The Australian: The omnipresent clacking of heels is being challenged by the tapping of fingertips as online journalists and e-tailers report on and record the shows from their laptops in real time.
More
Is TV going too far?
Herald Sun: On shows like Big Brother, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, Californication and even 60 Minutes, are the barriers on language, sex and taste are being pushed too far?
More
More phones than people 28 April
For the first time, there is now more than one mobile service for every Australian, with 21.26 million mobile phone services in operation at 30 June 2007, a 7.6 per cent increase from 19.76 million the year before, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority Communications Report 2006-07, released today.
More at ACMA
Piracy fight turns on ISPs 27 April
The big players in the international music industry are turning their attention on internet service providers, in an effort to cut online music piracy.
ISPs have been dragged through the courts in an effort to make them police use of their services and prevent access to file-sharing sites.
The Age reports: “With anti-piracy public relations campaigns and overseas attempts to sue individuals for illegal downloading doing little to deter pirates, record labels have shifted their focus to ISPs.”
More at The Age
Will The Bulletin get a second chance?
 The Australian has been speculating that The Bulletin may get a second lease of life as a weekly political commentary magazine, in the hands of fund manager and former journalist Peter Hall.
It reports: The son of a New Zealand-born journalist and the nephew of former veteran News Limited executive Arnold Earnshaw, Mr Hall already has an interest in the upmarket magazine business. He and 51-year-old London-based hedge fund manager George Robinson have a combined 54% stake in 13-year-old British commentary magazine Prospect. He also has a stake in Monocle, another current affairs magazine.
More
Is there no limit to Murdoch’s expansion?
Opinion – The Independent (via Benton): Why do people fear this concentration of power?
One need only look at Mr Murdoch's papers in the
UK to see the influence they have on the
political process, and how the news that readers
are fed can be skewed to his own political and
business desires. Thanks to a freedom of
information request by The Independent, we learnt
last year how Mr Murdoch had a hotline to Tony
Blair at crucial moments during his premiership,
and that the pair spoke three times in nine days
in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. On two
occasions, the day after a call with Blair, The
Sun launched vitriolic attacks on the anti-war
French President, Jacques Chirac. In the US, his
right-wing New York Post called the anti-war
leaders "The Axis of Weasel". In fact, the Post
has been Mr Murdoch's unapologetic bloodhound in
the US for decades, waging feuds with politicians
such as Teddy Kennedy ("Fat Boy", the Post calls
him) who have opposed liberalized media laws, and
with Mr Murdoch's business rivals. New York's
elite fears nothing more than a savaging in the
paper's delightfully vicious gossip column Page
Six, and the Democrats are fearful of what it
would do to Barack Obama if Mr Murdoch decides
the Senator is too inexperienced and too liberal
to be president. Merging Newsday with the Post
immediately turns it profitable, giving it immense new firepower.
More
Electronic text not ‘writing’ -- report
Pew project, USA: The state of writing among teens today is marked
by an interesting paradox: While teens are
heavily embedded in a tech-rich world and craft a
significant amount of electronic text, they see a
fundamental distinction between their electronic
social communications and the more formal writing
they do for school or for personal reasons. 85%
of youth ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally
in some form of electronic personal
communication, which includes text messaging,
sending email or instant messages, or posting
comments on social networking sites. 60% of teens
do not think of these electronic texts as "writing."
Media release; Report
iPhones to be unlocked?
InfoWorld via Benton: Apple's attitude about unlocked iPhones hints
that the company will abandon its business model
of grabbing a piece of mobile carriers' revenues
in order to make its goal of selling 10 million
smart phones this year, an analyst said Thursday.
"They seemed absolutely blithe about making the
10-million number," said Ezra Gottheil, an
analyst with Technology Business Research,
referring to comments by Apple executives during
Wednesday's earnings conference call. "And I get
the funny sense that ultimately the whole idea of
locked iPhones and the revenue almost doesn't
interest them." Several times during the call,
Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's COO, and Tim Cook, the
company's CFO, stood by the 10-million iPhone
goal. "We are confident on hitting the 10 million
for the year," Cook said. According to the sales
figures Apple released yesterday for the first
three months of 2008 -- its second fiscal quarter
-- the company sold 1.7 million iPhones
worldwide, leaving 8.3 million more to go if it's
to reach its iPhone sales goal.
More
Top third of newspaper sites see expansion
Editor & Publisher (US): A little more than one third of the top 30
newspaper web sites reported an increase in the
time spent per person in March, according to new
data from Nielsen Online. The average time spent
per person for Politico soared about 200% in
March, up an average of 15 minutes from 5 minutes
the same month a year ago. Village Voice Media
doubled its average to almost 7 minutes in March
2008 from about 4 minutes in March 2007. The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer jumped more than 80%
to 11 minutes from 6 minutes in March 2007. Web
sites that experienced drops included The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution from 28 minutes in March
2007 to about 11 minutes in March 2008;
Philly.com down from an average of 21 minutes in
March 2007 to about 7 minutes in March 2008. In
the case of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
monthly unique traffic was up 28% in March year-over-year.
More
China now biggest internet population
Reuters via Benton: China has surpassed the United States to become
the world's largest Internet-using population,
reaching 221 million by the end of February,
state media said on Thursday. The number of
Internet users in China was 210 million at the
end of last year, only 5 million fewer than the
U.S. Internet users then, Xinhua news agency
said, quoting the China Internet Network
Information Centre. "Despite a rapidly increasing
Internet population, the proportion of Internet
users among the total population was still lower
than the global average level," Xinhua quoted the
Information Ministry as saying. The proportion
was 16 percent at the end of 2007, compared with
19.1 percent for the world average.
More
Internet key to participatory society
Aftenposten: According to a new report, 99.8 percent of the
Norwegian population will have broadband access
by the end of 2008, which is considered to be "a
condition for a complete electronic service to
all of the citizens of this land... a key to a
society in which everyone can participate," said
Minister of Government Administration and Reform Heidi Grande Røys.
More
Report it as you see it, or as it is?
The Hoot: Newspapers report the truth as they choose to see it. A classic example of this has been the coverage of the Tibetan protests in Lhasa and elsewhere, and the Chinese and international response to them. The Hoot looked at four Indian newspapers over three weeks (from March 15, the day after the Lhasa protests sparked violence to April 7) to see how extensive and multi-dimensional the coverage was. The Times of India and the Hindustan Times offered both extensive and balanced coverage, HT providing a wider gamut of perspectives, and the Times of India more voluminous coverage.
The Hindu and the Indian Express were narrower in their breadth of coverage and less inclined to give all sides of the story.
More
Journal shares revenue with citizen journos
Journalism.co.uk: Digital Journal has relaunched its citizen journalism site, which now includes a revenue sharing initiative for citizen journalists.
Regular contributors to the site can now qualify for a share of the ‘moneypot’ made up from advertising revenue and the site has reportedly already paid out $38,000 to citizen journalists.
More
ABC shares 2020 vision
ABC Managing Director Mark Scott recently released a paper on where the corporation sees itself heading over coming years.
“The ABC, with its 75 year history of providing reliable news and information, and quality Australian programming to Australian audiences, is uniquely placed to deliver more content on more platforms in the digital age,” Mr Scott said.
“As audiences fragment, and choices multiply, Australians will be looking towards the trusted ABC brand to continue to deliver reliable, quality Australian content.”
Part of the vision includes 6 TV stations and at least 15 radio outlets.
Click here to see the full document
Bad web design bad for business
Jakob Nielsen: Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages -- which is
worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for
costing the company the most money.
More
Tailor content to users
Editor & Publisher (US): With classified revenue dwindling, the news industry must get better at tailoring articles and display advertising to online readers, several newspaper executives said.
Papers must more aggressively "slice and dice" content to readers' particular interests, Leon Levitt, vice president of digital media for Cox Newspapers Inc., said during a panel discussion at the annual conference of the Newspaper Association of America.
More
Fairfax chases Gen Y online 14 April
Fairfax Digital in Australia has launched a news site targeting youth, which can be found at TheVine.com.au.
The site, a joint venture with youth marketing company Lifelounge, will target 18 to 29 year-olds and offer news, entertainment and social networking content.
Research by both companies have found that the 18 to 29 demographic prefer the Internet over all media, spending over 14 hours per week online.
Associated reading: Lessons from Gen Y to newspapers – link
Broadband bids called for
The Minister for Communications, Senator Stephen Conroy, has called for bids for the federal plan to install a national high-speed broadband network.
The National Broadband Network will represent the single largest investment in broadband infrastructure in Australia’s history. The Australian Government has committed up to $4.7 billion and to considering any necessary regulatory changes to enable the roll-out,” he said.
The plan hopes to:
deliver minimum download speeds of 12 megabits per second to 98 per cent of Australian homes and businesses;
have the network rolled out and made operational progressively over five years using fibre-to-the-node or fibre-to-the-premises technology;
support high quality voice, data and video services including symmetric applications such as high-definition video-conferencing;
earn the Commonwealth a return on its investment;
facilitate competition in the telecommunications sector through open access arrangements that allow all service providers access to the network on equivalent terms; and
enable uniform and affordable retail prices to consumers, no matter where they live.
More
Have we got this internet & newspaper thing wrong?
Charles Madigan on newspapers and the internet, via Britannica.com: Not a lot of people are making money through journalism on the Internet, although many are trying. And as for content, it remains the creation of big, stumbling news organizations that still feel obliged (for the moment, anyhow) to send reporters into the field to ask the difficult question, “What’s up?” Then they melt it down so it fits the small container of new media, attach a video or two, load up some jpegs and present it to the online audience as though it were something completely different. But it’s not. It’s another version of the same old difficult thing, the answer to the question, “What’s Up?”
More
Newspaper blogs struggle for influence – study
USA: Newspapers will have to change the way they approach blogging if they are going to be a force in increasing public dialogue on political issues, says a joint study from Ball State University and the University of Nevada, Reno.
A study of blogs and audience engagement during the week before the fall 2006 elections found that most newspaper staff-produced blogs contained a small number of postings, failed to create much interaction between the blogger and the audience and attracted few audience comments.
More
Blogs – the digital sweatshop
NY Times: They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
More
Media threatens cricket league blackout
Times of India: With just a week to go before the Indian Premier League kicks off, the event faces the possibility of a media blackout. On Friday, Press Trust of India announced its decision to boycott IPL unless the restrictive clauses on media that form part of the accreditation guidelines were changed. International news agencies too have decided not to cover the tournament under these conditions and with newspaper organizations continuing to oppose several proposals in the guidelines, the possibility of a boycott has become more real.
More
How Google ranks news
A must-read for web editors with an interest in search engine optimisation is this piece from Google, outlining how its web crawler responds to different publishing techniques.
Link
Reinventing the web page?
Online Journalism Blog reckons it has come across a Dutch site which reinvents page design.
Link
Readers and ‘rules’ of journalism
AP: Newspaper readers agree with editors on the basics of what makes good journalism, but they are more apt to want looser rules for online conversations, a new study on news credibility has found.
More
Telstra cable promises better capacity
Telstra has begun laying a new communications to Hawaii in an effort to boost its internet capacity.
According to the blurb: The new cable, which will be landed at Tamarama Beach this week, can be scaled up to 1.28 Terabits* per second capacity between the two countries. At full capacity of 1.28 Terabits per second the cable is capable of carrying 160,000 concurrent high definition television channels.
"The explosion of user-generated online content means we need more capacity than ever before with the United States, which is already the destination for two-thirds of all Australian traffic on the internet," said Ms Kate McKenzie, a company manager.
More
BBC iPlayer a huge success
Brand Republic: The BBC has reported significant growth for its iPlayer service in the first three months since its launch, with more than 42 million programmes accessed.
The total number of requests for downloads and streams of BBC programmes in March was 17.2m, rising from 14m in February and 11.2m in January.
This represents a growth of 25% month on month and contributes to the total of over 42m programmes accessed on demand since the Christmas marketing launch.
More; iPlayer
Amazon in power-struggle with on-demand authors
A power struggle has erupted between several
national writers groups and Amazon.com Inc. over
the company's new publishing policy, which some
charge gives Amazon a monopoly on book printing.
The new policy, announced March 31, says that
"on-demand" publishers who don't use Amazon
subsidiary BookSurge would not be allowed to sell
their books directly on Amazon.com. On-demand
printing allows publishers to print books as they
are ordered, without the risk of having to
predict public interest. "If they succeed in
doing this, they'll have basically seized the
supply chain, and they can pretty much call the
shots and pay less to publishers for the books,
which means less money going to the authors in
many cases," said Paul Aiken, executive director
of The Authors Guild, based in New York. The
authors are fighting back with petitions to
Amazon, the US Justice Department and the
Washington state Attorney General's Office.
More
Web video consumption rising 4 April
World Association of Newspapers, Sweden: Consumption of video media on the web is on the rise. We watch clips, entire TV programs as well as feature-length films. Last year, 2007, web-TV made a dramatic breakthrough in Sweden with 800,000 new users.
More than 1.9 million 15-74-year-olds watched Web-TV at least once during the most recent quarter according to Mediavision's latest analysis. Downloading of TV programs also increased during 2007. Every tenth 15-74-year-old, or just over 700,000 persons, states that he or she has downloaded TV programs during the fourth quarter of 2007. This is roughly twice as many as compared with the same period the year before.
More
The future of magazines
The New York Observer recently interviewed magazine editors and publishers over their views on where the sector will be in a decade. Some believe we’ll be reading them on hand-held electronic devices (such as Amazon’s Kindle), while a dissenter – ironically from Wired magazine – says they will still be paper.
More
Host content on external sites
Regional press should look to third party websites to increase the reach and popularity of multimedia content, the digital editor of a daily newspaper has said.
The Evening Leader's Christian Dunn told Journalism.co.uk that local news providers should not be afraid of hosting content on external sites, but should see them as way to drive traffic to their own websites and to reach new viewers.
Journalism.co.uk
WSJ prints US edition in UK
The Wall Street Journal will begin to print its U.S. edition in London beginning on April 16, which will complement The Wall Street Journal Europe.
Editors Weblog
New social net guidelines launched
ACMA: New international guidelines for safer use of social networking services, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, will be launched today in the UK Parliament’s House of Lords in London. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) says it has been an important contributor to the development of the guidelines to help providers of social networking services everywhere.
More
Stokes to become own competitor?
Media billionaire Kerry Stokes has launched an extraordinary spray at the West Australian newspaper, of which he owns a near-20% share, and its Editor.
He told a business function in Perth recently, "It's pretty simple: write the stories people want to see, have a front page cover that people want to pick up and buy. Instead, the front page of the paper invariably is not a paper which people want to pick up and pay money to read ... it is poorly laid out and I don't think it achieves the objective that consumers want.” He went on to suggest out that Editor Paul Armstrong seemed to be in conflict with everybody.
Proprietors or shareholders deriding their own product to this extent is rare, but not unheard of. Stokes is currently seeking seats on the WA Newspapers board.
Links via The Australian: New paper; Stokes on the West Aus
ABC loses BigPond feed
The ABC is reported by The Australian to have lost the contract to supply Telstra’s BigPond website with its news feed. Instead, Australian News Channel has picked up the contract – a company owned by PBL, Seven and BskyB (News).
OPEL broadband plan dropped
The Federal Government has dropped its oredecessor’s commitment to the OPEL copnsortium plan to instal broadband in rural areas, in favour of its own, wider plan. The contract, based on Wimax technology, was to cost $900 million.
Blog-talk
Have you heard of 'astroturfing'? In blog internet language it means 'creating fake grass roots movements' or what about 'sock puppet'? It's a blog alias.
These are just some of the terms New York Times journalist Sarah Boxer has uncovered in her quest to put together an anthology on the ubiquitous blog.
Her book is called Ultimate Blogs: masterworks from the world wide web
More: ABC book show
Join the email archive
ABC: We use them to arrange meetings, share news, complain and even flirt. Now, in an Australian first, the emails of ordinary people are going to be archived for posterity.
The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is asking people to send in emails they think are significant in their life.
It is hoped that the collection, which is on a range of topics, will reflect a snapshot of Australian life in 2008.
More
Future of Journalism project
Media Alliance: All those of you interested in the future of the media industry (that's all of you then) should attend the two-day Future of Journalism summit being held by the Alliance at the ABC's Eugene Goossens auditorium in Sydney on May 1 and 2. A host of top speakers including The Guardian's Roy Greenslade, Time magazine's Michael Elliott, as well as an impressive array of Australian media experts, old and new, will gather for the summit to discuss the pace and scale of change in our industry and where that will leave quality journalism in Australia. We've set a special low price for Alliance members: $150 for the two days, so there's no excuse for not booking early to secure your spot. For further information go to this link which also features our brand new Wired Scribe blog.
Media Alliance
Neighborhood publishing hits the web
After 574 days of development, Palm Beach Post's Online Innovations Editor William Harnett and his crew released Backyard Post, a website which brings the "Neighbors" section of a newspaper to the Web.
Backyard Post features an interactive map, where users can click on their neighborhood and share news and connect with their neighbors on personal pages. They can also find news on schools, libraries and parks.
Editors Weblog
Tough times for US papers
The US newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.
According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
Editor & Publisher
What’s that, sonny? 1 April
Jakob Nielsen: Between the ages of 25 and 60, people's ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year — mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties.
Based on extensive research, we've developed special web usability guidelines for young children, teenagers, and senior citizens. Each of these age groups have specific characteristics that designers must understand to attract young or old users to their sites.
More
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