There have been a couple of interesting reports out the last few days pertaining to the state of the news media that I thought were worth pointing out:

The State of the News Media 2009 by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism delivers a fairly hard hitting view on the future of news, focusing on the US. From the overview:

Some of the numbers are chilling.

Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the last two years. Some papers are in bankruptcy, and others have lost three-quarters of their value. By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.

…

Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating. The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19% in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%. Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue—the model that financed journalism for the last century—will be inadequate to do so in this one. Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining.

The report also had a look into citizen media, which had some insightful findings:

• Citizen news sites remain relatively rare. Among those that do exist, the range of topics is narrower and the sourcing somewhat thinner than on legacy news sites, and the content is generally not updated, even on a daily basis. But they offer richer content than citizen blogs. These are among the key findings of a new multi-university study of new and old media in 46 markets that builds on a pilot study we presented last year.
• Social networking and citizen video sharing broadened in important ways as a means of distributing news, not just for social interaction and entertainment
• Citizens also continued to engage more in aggregating news for themselves and creating sites built around user-generated news agendas, particularly at sites like Reddit, Digg and Topix.
• In legacy media, news organizations continued to experiment in various ways with citizen contributions, but most seemed to be leaning toward citizens as sources rather than as journalists, and some large experiments with citizen reporting failed.
• A growing array of alternative news sites run largely by professional journalists also emerged during the year. That is covered in another special report entitled New Ventures.

The other report is by Australia’s Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, which launched Life in the Clickstream: The Future of Journalism.

While a lot in the report in not particularly new to many working in online media and focuses heavily on the union’s role in the future news industry, it’s good to finally see some analysis of the media scene here in Australia. I still feel like the Alliance needs to learn to move a little faster (remind me, but I’m sure this report was due out earlier this year.) Its hesitation might come from the fact that it’s seen its role for too long as protecting current jobs in the traditional news organisation set-up, which consequently have very little hope of existing in the future. I can empathise with its position, but it’s good to see some wake-up calls for both the MEAA and the Australian media industry in the report:

The key concern for Alliance members is how the worsening global – and sector – forecasts will affect jobs. We are hostage, to an extent, to anecdote. The number of full-time Australian journalists has, by Alliance estimates, fallen 13 per cent since 2001, from just under 8500 across all media to around 7,500. It must be stressed this is an estimate, based on data and estimates reported by Alliance staff and activists. There is little doubt the sector will continue to shrink, at least in the shortterm.

Fairfax Media has held four redundancy rounds at its Sydney and Melbourne mastheads, the most recent in August 2008 when Kirk  announced 120 journalists would be offered redundancies, mostly in production. Various sections would be outsourced to Pagemasters, while “operational efficiencies” would lead to retrenchments in several areas. This was based on the argument that a multitiered production process was outdated and new tools would obviate the need for many sub-editors. Increasing errors in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age print editions indicates that culling dedicated production staff will inevitably erode quality.

There’s not that much in the way of solutions for the industry. There is some hope in it’s conculsions of its own role in the future, but I feel a real failure to look beyond that:

Understanding how to use new opportunities for journalism is central. Employers, The Alliance and individuals have a responsibility to ensure the media community has the training necessary to deal with the changes. As a union, we have to demand employers provide adequate and appropriate training, and include these demands in collective bargaining and other negotiations.

We need to develop and implement the training working journalists need. If we don’t, noone else will. Members must embrace training opportunities and be eager to apply the skills in their daily work. Work intensification: Employers cannot continue to expect working journalists to carry the load of change by working harder and doing more with less. Inevitably, we will end up doing less with less.

The Alliance has the responsibility for campaigning to end this imposition. And members must learn when to say yes or no: yes to embracing the opportunities but no to overwork and the damage it does. Freelancers and contingent work: The Alliance recognises the changes have a major impact on the structure of work and particularly affect people working freelance, casual and on fixed contracts. Many of these changes are positive – they provide openings for more creative use of our craft and ways to communicate directly with our communities.

I don’t want to be too harsh as there are some good intentions and the Alliance has also set up a facebook group The Future of Journalism Project that “aims for the culmination of industry research and regular events involving executives, journalists, academics and commentators, and aims to build an accurate picture of the extent and pace of industry change, to manage that change for the benefit of the whole industry and journalists in particular.”

I just had a play with Tinychat.com and thought it was worth doing a quick write-up on as I know a few people are interested in video-conferencing and it has just recently added that capability. I’ve seen Tokbox used most often these days, Cameron Reilly has been using it for his G’Day World Live editions and it’s worked pretty well, but Tinychat has a couple of key differences that make it rather interesting.

No sign-up
Firstly, you don’t need to sign-up to use it, it’s simply a matter of hitting “create a room” and you have a dedicated URL to send to people to join the chat. Joining a chat is just as easy, you just give yourself a username and you’re in. You can chat as well as join the video conference simply by hitting “broadcast”.

Better controls
If you set up the chat room, you are able to boot people out of a room if needed. But one of the things I liked is you can mute other speakers, which can make it easier for anyone recording a podcast, for example, to have better control quality. As far as I can see, if you are the one to create the chat room you can’t override other people in the conference by muting them, which would be a handy (and powerful ) feature. As the person who sets up a room you can also make a room private by giving it password access, which is handy if privacy is necessary, if you were using it for a business meeting for example.

Auto recording
Tinychat video conferencing has recording built into it. From what I understand it’s up to the person who set up the room as to whether the conference is recorded or not. I’ve not tested the recording quality, but it’s great to see this built in as a feature.

Desktop sharing
Tinychat has done something a bit different here, that I don’t think exists on any other video sites I can think of (correct me if I’m wrong) by allowing people to share what is on their desktop with people on the chat. This will be a handy feature for people using video conferencing for meetings and the demo I saw of it worked pretty well. The image is a good size and pretty easy to use.

100 people
Dan Blake from Tinychat told me you can have about 100 people in a chat room with about 12 on video. I think any more than 12 would get a bit much, but 100 is a good size for chat.

Embed the chat on your own site
One of the stand out features to Tokbox is that you can embed the chat on your own site or a social network. I haven’t tried this yet, but I think it’s a great feature and something that will make it appealing to podcasters and videocasters doing live shows. And we appear to have a stable of those in Australia 

Tinychat video was originally built with a premium model, but I understand at the moment they are letting people access most of the premium features for free while they build up their user-base. It’s definitely worth having a look at as there aren’t many players in this space yet and Tinychat has an interesting take on video-conferencing. Besides Tokbox I don’t know of any other players in video-conferencing space. In fairness, Tokbox also has a myriad of other  “social” features – sending video mail, profiles and friends – which make it a different service in lots of ways.

Overall, I think Tinychat has got a great interface and is very easy to use. When I was in a video chat there were a couple of bugs with the sound, but as it has only launched today, I’m sure they’ll smooth things out. Best of luck to the Tinychat team.

Last week I attended the Future Summit as a member of the Twitter crew, the ‘unofficial’ official back channel of the two-day conference. Our mission was simply to attend the event and twitter about what was said and our thoughts on the summit. It’s something I’ve seen referred to recently as event-casting. As well as ‘pushing’ out what was happening at the event, our goal was to ‘pull’ some of the conversation from outside back into the conference. We had a number of questions come through Twitter that were asked of speakers and panelists. We were given free-reign as to what we said and there was no expectation that we didn’t voice anything negative about the conference. I wouldn’t have attended had there been any direction against what we could tweet, but I think it’s something that’s worth acknowledging as fairly progressive especially given the rigid formal nature of these events. And we certainly did the avant-guard proud, despite our scrubbing up, I can certainly say the Twitter Crew stood out among the sea of grey suits.

Twitter Crew

Quite a bit has been written about the event itself, but I’d like to give a few thoughts on the logistics of event-casting and what I learnt from my Future Summit experience. I always like to think about how we could do things better next time, so these are my thoughts on improving the effectiveness of the conversation with the Twitterverse.

Spamming the Twitter timeline

Admittedly there was some hesitation about flooding my Twitter followers with a whole lot of #futuresummit tweets. There were some public complaints about it from my followers, others just unfollowed me and added me back after the event was over. All of which is fair enough, but it does raise the question about how willing we are to accept these sorts of Twitter interruptions as they become more mainstream. It’s not happening often at the moment and not at saturation levels like it does during #SWSX for example, but I suspect it will become a more common occurrence.

Most of us who were invited have been on Twitter for some time and have a decent following (I hate to focus on follower numbers as I find that unhelpful, but necessary to discuss here) which was part of the reason for our invitation, getting the event out to as wide an audience as possible. My advice to someone who complained to me was to use a filter on a Twitter desktop client to weed out #futuresummit tweets, but I think overall we should be supporting the intentions of conference organisers who try and implement Twitter engagement. As little as three years ago, we couldn’t have done this and I think most of us would agree that we certainly brought ’something’ to the event – dare I say edginess?

The limitations of 140 characters

The challenge of reporting fairly dense (and heavy) topics in 140 characters was made pretty plain to me at the conference. It was quite hard to give some context to what was being said and by whom (we often added speakers names to the tweets, but realistically I doubt many followers knew who any of those people were.) Some sessions were easier to tweet than others, but my overall feeling is that we may have relied on Twitter a bit too much. It occurred to me afterwards that using more video and perhaps taking turns in writing short blog posts (about what was coming up and what was said) could have better created a context around what we were then tweeting. Kate Carruthers did some great vox pops using video and in hindsight I’d like to have experimented using video a bit more. Perhaps a video of few of us giving a brief summation of talks straight after they happened would have been good and kept up with events. Ideally streaming is the way to go, but logistically the mesh network (which was brilliant) would not have coped with it that well (if at all).

In conclusion, it was a great initiative by Steve Hopkins to have organised for us to be there. I think the response and experience was very positive. I write this post as a big supporter of twittering at these sorts of events. I learnt a lot about the logistics and challenges of event-casting and I hope some of my thoughts can improve on future conversations. Long live Twitter and the Twitter Crew!