Posts by Alastair Thompson
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Hard News: NZME and you, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Why not let the paper debut these then migrate them to the web…
Why the rush?
The parasite isn’t supposed to kill the host…
Yip. The managers of our current media companies are daft.
Which is far from surprising as the media owners are vacuous money managers (Oaktree capital which owns Mediaworks is a so-called Vulture Fund) who think that news is a form of complicated content widget which can be commoditised scaled and exploited for gross profit margin.
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Hard News: NZME and you, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I’d happily subscribe to a genuine NZ news service that used my subscription to pay journalists. But are there enough people like me to make it work? And would I actually get the news I need rather than just the news I want?
That's pretty much what the Scoop Foundation for Public Interest Journalism is intended to do. We hope to be able to source the other costs in the supply chain out of advertising contra and sponsorship. Once it gets to scale our ethical paywall - which is effectively charging the businesses, political and civil society orgs that use us to both send and receive competitive information - will cover basic infrastructural publishing costs, and we will then be able to invest any donations (hopefully tax-deductable) in journalism which we will have no need to be proprietorial about from an advertising perspective because advertising will be a secondary not primary income source.
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There has been a bunch of discussion in this thread about the role of advertising in all of this, as a cause and as a solution to the problem.
The advertising markets are not well understood by the public nor by the media - and this is pretty clear in reading through the discussion.
Truth is its the simple physics of the thing that is killing an advertising funded news industry. Three centuries of marketing funded news are coming to an end.
People spend 14 hours on average online. Mostly watching video. Roughly half of that time is spent on Facebook which is the biggest online video broadcaster by a country mile. Google and Facebook as a result are now earning more than half of all digital marketing revenue. The amount of time in agregate spent looking at "news" online is relatively small and "public interest news" i.e. serious news about serious shit is close to zero.
Which is not to say that all is lost.
I have written about these issues all year and in April at the height of #savecampbelllive proposed a campaign for advertiser responsibility.
If Govt mandated that its agencies spent part of its advertising dollars in NZ News publishing environments that would make a huge difference. If corporates followed suit ditto. And both Government and Business need journalism... to protect themselves from each other.
And there is also Scoop's new approach to news copyright. which is gaining traction fast.
Finally, hating on the news companies is not the solution. Part of the reason that they are making the daft decisions that they are is that they are unable to face the truth and acknowledge that the click-bait - online on air everywhere - a consolidated marketing suite tracking customers through the day - models are not working and that at the moment they are walking towards a fire basically hoping that by the time it gets hot they will magically develop some way to repel the flames.
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Fantastic report Russell - and thankyou for referencing that piece which I agonised a lot about publishing and which caused considerable consternation at both the major newspaper publishers.
The fact is the NZ news industry is facing an existential crisis. Decisions are being made which cannot be undone which are dismantling much of what remains of the "Fourth Estate" that part of the media which holds the powerful to account on behalf of the citizenry.
There is an urgent need for political and institutional consideration to be given to the question:
What effect will the loss of an effective news industry in NZ have on business, democracy, the rule of law and Government accountability. Once gone it will be much harder to bring it back to life.
And that is why at Scoop.co.nz we have launched takebackthenews.nz which Russell has generously agreed to advertise on this site.
Al
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On the local front, eyes have turned to a collaboration between enterprise incubator Enspiral and Scoop – which Scoop founder Alastair Thompson has already written extensively about – as a hope for something that could be truly innovative.
Fascination post Kirk.
Kickstarting a serious debate started about the State of NZ News Media - and the role fo the news media in society was why we did this in January. It seems to be working which is good :)
Meanwhile keep an eye on Scoop for a development in the Scoop Operation Chrysalis story this week.
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Speaker: The problem is Serco, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Yes you did.... it amazed me that SERCO's CEO
was so candid about that. How this government can possibly be thinking of doing more business with these guys completely astounds me. And yet that's what he claims to be here to talk about. Great Scoop on The Nation. -
Hi Kevin,
RB has no shares in Scoop any longer.
He once did have some, but in December the company was taken by its major creditor, my mother. In September she will be settling it in a trust and it will effectively at that point be owned by everybody.
I am stepping away. That is something I have made clear on numerous occasions albeit not in this piece however so no criticism should be taken from this observation.
Scoop has suffered like all media from inadequate resourcing.You are correct that it would be nice if it had greater focus. I am confident an outstanding journalistic team will take over from me and I look forward to what they do with it.
Thankyou for your feedback :)
Alastair
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Hi Izogi,
They are not being asked to buy our analysis so much as pay a licence fee to read us for work purposes. In the case of other news organistations ultimately organisations need to consider whether they want their staff to have access to reading news (and perhaps in time also to watching news video or listening to news podcasts). If not then they would probably need to inform staff that they are not supposed to read news for work purposes or act on information obtained through reading the news media. At which point you can see that refusing to comply sort of results in a form of absurdity which most institutions of any scale couldn't justify.
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To provide quality timely analysis news organisations need to be staffed by experienced knowledgeable journalists who have the background and knowledge to provide context to the latest development.
In journalism - like any profession - it takes time to learn the skills. I think it probably took me four or five years to feel on top of the craft. But deep subject knowledge takes a lot longer than that to acquire.
One of the great tragedies that is occurring in journalism globally at present is that the experienced subject specialists are the ones who are losing their jobs. This is happening partly because the pay and conditions they are on tend to be much better than those of new entrants to the profession, and also because companies want to remove pension and redundancy liabilities from their balance sheets.
This process of sweeping out experience is why we have publications which are full of breaking news coverage and human interest news. Many of these stories are very well executed - however they are no substitute for what we previously had access to. Smart, free, inquisitive minds telling the truth as best they can.
The hollowing out of experience is rationalised by news organisations who claim that a new digital first news world needs multimedia trained digital news ninjas who can produce news which is online, on air, everywhere all the time. And it is true that if news is valued on the basis of its ability to attract eyeballs then cat gifs will always beat a considered sober analytical discussion of the state of the health system and how we got here in a ratings war.
However cat gifs are not the sort of news reporting which society needs to enable us to understand, critique and hold our political leaders and their officials to account.
For me the best feature of the "Ethical Paywall" innovation is that in theory it looks as if it might be able to help reverse the cycle of experience destruction.
If other news organisations follow in Scoop's footsteps with this then they will need to provide the kind of news which businesses and government agencies need to do their work. I.E. the kind of news which we used to have before things started to turn so badly wrong.
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And when you make a submission say that you want to be heard in person. Christchurch needs to come to Wellington.