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April 14, 2005
I came across a recent speech by Rupert Murdoch over at Margo Kingston's Webdiary, along with comments by some US bloggers.
The speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors makes some good, informed points about the digital changes taking place in the mediascape. This is a world in rapid flux, despite the Howard Government's fetters imposed on digital TV to protect commercial free-to-air TV.
Murdoch's primary concern is with the survival of newspapers in a digital world. He opens by saying:
What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.
Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.
The corporate media have been slow to respond to this critical way of reading the media. Hence their declining circulation, the constant staff downsizing, the dumbing down of reporters into hacks and their decreasing relevance in a digital world. Thus a new publication in Adelaide, The Independent Weekly, which aims to provide a different approach to Murdoch's tabloid Advertiser in South Australia, has no substantive online presence. It's irrelevant to me.
The solution?
As you would expect Murdoch is up to the challenge. He says that today's newspapers (eg., The Australian and The Age are just papers. Tomorrow, they can be a internet destination. By this he means that instead of people traditionally starting their day with coffee and the newspaper, in a digital world they will start their day online with coffee and a newspaper website.
That's me now. I start at 6.30 am. I basically see the journalists and the op.ed commentators as a starting-point for a discussion about on-going topics.
What I find offered by The Australian broadsheet is pretty thin web presence. I scan the site in minutes then move on. Some newspapers (Australian Financial Review) are even locking up their online content behind paid registration walls, instead of freeing up archives for use in the public domain.
Murdoch, to his credit, realizes that a poor web presence is not god for business. He responds in two ways. He says:
"..we have to refashion what our web presence is. It can’t just be what it too often is today: a bland repurposing of our print content. Instead, it will need to offer compelling and relevant content. Deep, deep local news. Relevant national and international news. Commentary and Debate. Gossip and humor."
Well compelling and relevant content is not happening. However, the internet site will have to do still more if it is to be competitive with news aggregators, such as Google:
For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.
I guess that is the democracy bit. That is not happening at the moment. The public conversation is fostered by bloggers and Webdiary. The Australian's reporters and editors are not interested in more extended discussions with bloggers. They continue to pretend that blogging does not exist in Australia; or if it does exist it is of no relevance. Their boss thinks otherwise.
Murdoch makes a suggestion that the Sydney Morning Herald is moving towards and The Guardian is already doing:
"...we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net...[bloggers] may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists."
So The Australian on this has a long to go if it is become internet destination in the digital media world. It is more likely that the newspapers will transform their offline classified businesses into online marketplaces. But the flow of online advertising depends on the newspaper being a successful internet destination. To achieve this requires a complete transformation of the way newspapers think about their product and their readers.
I cannot see much of newspapers reshaping themselves to become part of a digital world in Australia, can you? Me thinks we have to build on the new digital forms to develop the public conversation on issues of concern to us citizens.
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We set up newcopia as an attempt to wrap commenting around a static medium. Newcopia also has the ability to add comments to ABC news stories, but they move to fast out of the panel there and comments get lost quickly.
The RSS aggregators on newcopia and ozpolitics are extremely useful. I use them instead of the blogrolls now. They are news at a glance. No need to go to a website to see what they have when you can click on a link to go directly to a story you want to see.
I am not certain that Murdoch's idea of putting comments underneath their stories will work. People like blogging because they can make a small home for themselves on their part of the balkanized internet. They can comment in their colours and directly to their friends. Larger sites tend to drown out small or minority voices under the communal group-think.
Many sites like news.com have commenting enabled. But few people use them and the only threads that gain large numbers of commentators are usually flames or trolls. So I am not certain that newsites can gain as large a "community", as opposed to readership, around them as sites like slashdot, fark, metafilter etc have.
Blogs have replaced op-eds for quality now. Devine is competing with the likes of yourself, Quiggin, Parish, Barista, Catallaxy etc etc and she is losing bad. Real bad. As Murdoch recognized blogs are commenting systems on the news. If google had threading so the blog commentaries could be linked through a google search, we could have a meta-connection of a conversation on an issue.
Maybe instead of a trackback, the blogger puts an "up-connection" link to the primary source, or one (many) of the sources that inspired their entry. This way a causal connection can be made. Search engines like google will be able to connect the blogs and convert them into a threaded output when searched on.
It would also push the issue of handling spam up to the search engine. Trackbacks put that respsonsibility on the blogger. It is the blog being hit with trackback spam. Yet false uplinks can be searched on by google and discarded if they look like spam.
You could probably even map that style of connectivity. It would quickly show where the primary source is.