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.

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!

A few people were beginning to suspect Nassar was the man behind the account and I’m guessing he outed himself before the press did it for him. The tweet in which he made the announcement looks like it has been deleted.

The sequence of events seem to be this: Nassar announced himself as the account creator (he has joked about being other people from time to time), it was reported on a number of blogs and the SMH that he was infact the person behind it, the Conroy Twitter account appeared to be deleted, Telstra announced that they had not asked Nassar to stop tweeting, they then announced they had in fact asked Nassar to do the right thing, Nassar reopened the account and tweeted:

But this is where the story gets interesting. It appears Telstra were in fact the one’s “faking it”. On its “Now We Are Talking blog“  Mike Hickinbotham wrote that he wanted to get the facts straight that:

• Lesile is not going to lose his job as a result of announcing he is the Fake Stephen Conroy
• Telstra did not shut down Leslie’s Twitter account. Fake Stephen Conroy (twitter.com)
• Telstra did not out Leslie as the Fake Stephen Conroy
• Telstra’s policy is that only selected spokepeople deal with the media

He then went on:

Analogies are developed to educate employees that social media ‘is like a conversation within a group of friends on the bus.  The conversation is meant strictly for the group, but it’s not a private conversation’.

The case of Leslie is different, he understands the whimsical nature of social media and in particular Twitter.  This isn’t a case of solving the problem by offering social media training.  Leslie made a conscious decision to engage in social media.

Telstra is learning the best way to engage in social media – notice our response has come in the form of a blog versus a media release.

We believe transparency promotes credibility.  This post is about getting the facts into the open.

I was pretty impressed with what I believed to be an honest response from Telstra and there is no denying social media throws a lot of challenges up for large corporations. I also knew Nassar to have had a few Twitter accounts in the past and I wondered if the fun was taken out for him now that people knew who he was. Had the Telstra blog not been broken, there would be a congratulatory comment from me applauding its openness. In fact, I did congratulate it on Twitter, and I noticed a few others doing the same.

But my alarm bells started ringing though when @M_Hickinbotham started tweeting something that didn’t quite fit with the NWAT post.

Turns out Telstra is not as transparent as it would lead us to believe and had Nassar not had the courage and gumption to speak up and risk losing his job, it would have got away with it. It appears Telstra had in fact asked Nassar to stop tweeting.

If Telstra had any sense they would have seen the opportunity for good publicity that Nassar offered them. The fact that Nassar is a Telstra employee tweeting on an OBVIOUSLY fake account for the Communications Minister only added to the humour.

I can only hope that it exercises “good judgment” here and looks to learn from the situation and redeem itself. I trust they don’t underestimate the backlash against them should Nassar lose his job.

Across the US, the outlook for many newspapers is grim, highlighted by this interactive graph in The New York Times, which itself has borrowed $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building, to ease a potential cash flow squeeze.

Leonard Downie, VP at Large The Washington Post was recently quoted [video] as saying the business models of media “are beyond broken, it’s completely shattered … newspaper companies as we know them are going to disappear.”

Indeed, the business of model of newspapers in a digital age, coupled with the crashing economy do have a lot to do with the current media crisis, but I also think it’s ignoring what has been a growing disillusionment with modern journalism.

The latest Pew Study showed that many people would shrug their shoulders should their local papers die.

As many newspapers struggle to stay economically viable, fewer than half of Americans (43%) say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community “a lot.” Even fewer (33%) say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available.

Can we be so quick to blame the business models of newspapers (selling advertisements) when people won’t miss the service (news) they are providing? For years journalists have been regarded alongside used-car salesmen as the least trustworthy profession and every journalist has certainly experienced the polite disdain from strangers when you tell them what you do.

There is something very wrong with the media and the quality of journalism has a lot to do with it. “News” has become so devalued that people are not willing to pay for it.

So while news corporations run around trying to breath life into the heavy carcass of their dying mediums who is nourishing new opportunities in journalism. It depresses me that the fascination we have with new media lies so heavily in marketing and new ways to advertise. Have we forgotten so quickly that news existed long before newspapers and that the modern industry was only born once we got the content right? It’s easy to blame the forces like the internet and the economy for which the media cannot take responsibility. But it’s time to face the music before all we have left is the Emperor’s New Media.

Who is going to be the first to yell that so many do not have real news and very little journlaism on their websites?

Or are we all going to pretend they are still enriching our lives for fear we might be accused of being the ignorant masses?

We have an opportunity for change, let’s not let it pass.

The internet is the natural environment for news to take place.

Traditional Western news organisations exist as they do because the distribution of news was previously limited by its means of production and the dynamics of capitalism. You needed a printing press, a TV license etc. to produce and distribute news.

To counter those constraints and deal with the enormity of that responsibility, we structured largely false, and “ideal”, notions of what was news and how that was reported. We developed terms such as newsworthiness and imparted notions of objectivity to sort through the practicalities of “telling stories” to the masses.

News became big business and news organisations became big corporations. All of this was not a bad thing in itself, but born out of social constructs and economic necessity.

The internet has changed this. The barrier to broadcast is essentially access to the internet (not discounting some social challenges), but while this remains a problem in some third-world countries, the existence of large mobile infrastructure is quickly overcoming at least the technical problems.

For me, the impact of this change was made evident during the second-Iraqi conflict, when a group of local bloggers set about writing what was happening from cafes and with limited internet access. Traditional journalists were often unable to go out and report on the situation in any meaningful way because they were compromised by having to go out with the US army or simply unable to leave their hotels for fear for their safety. In fact, it was were the term hotel journalism was coined.

What the Iraqi bloggers were able to do was report on what was really going on in a way that traditional media could not. Their opinions were better informed, personal (free from the falsehood of objectivity) and told the news to the world in a way that could not be done through traditional journalism.
Modern news rooms are somewhat remnant of the situation in Iraq – reporters are often tied to their desks and beats with little time to get out and discover what is happening outside of what is fed to them through sources and press releases. While there are exceptions, this is the harsh reality of the costs and time it takes to write for a large news organisation and the internet has only added to these pressures.

Those on the street now have the ability to report directly on what is happening around them. Our own personal experiences of our neighborhood will always be better informed than that of a reporter, surely? (Hence I was inspired to start the norg.)

News is no longer limited to the false dichotomy of “one side versus another” – there are often many views/sides/opinions to a story and as long as all have equal opportunity and access to sharing that information then we can leave the shackles of control media behind. Open comments on news stories is an important step in the right direction (and also Citizen Journalism).

Lastly, “citizen journalism” is not the best term, but possibly the easiest to understand. I think we are all news makers. Journalism has never been an official profession, but a prescribed name for a skill set many people can learn and contribute to outside of mainstream media.

Also the term Citizen Journalism does not account for the fact that many experts now have access to audiences.

Really what we are seeing is an age of hyper-connected news as opposed to that we have only been drip-fed. We are all news-makers engaging in what is only natural to us – telling our stories.

Photo shared under creative commons.

I caught up with Stephen earlier in the week to have a chat about what wisdom he’ll be sharing with the crowds at the conference, so here’s a taste of what he has to say:

1. When talking about Enterprise 2.0 it has to be a team approach.

It’s no good talking just to management or people on a project about collaboration, there has to be an overall desire from within an organisation to work this way. Often this can be a challenge, so Stephen recommends that YOU be enthusiastic, don’t be afraid to challenge the way things are being done and have evidence to back up what you are trying to do. There are a lot of case studies out there that look at different aspects of using enterprise 2.0 in companies. Arm yourself with examples and use them as evidence.

2. Start small and grow from there.

Start in a business unit of 10 people or 50 people – or one that you can manage – is Stephen’s advice on taking initial steps. Co-ordinate on one or two projects initially and see how it works – often this is a great way for convincing others to try in on their own projects. As you do that, you build momentum from the inside and you get internal entrepreneurs who say “I also want to work that way”.

3. When talking to business types about these things – show them the money!

Often when talking to “grey suit wearers” Stephen recommends a different approach. This is where you need to talk in terms of ROI. If you can show them, for example, that you can go from spending six to two hours to find a piece of information (these are real case studies) then that’s a big cost saving. Encourage them to do things like open their product development window to incorporate opinions from their valued clients. Show them how it increases productivity by reducing time it takes to get a job completed – often people are able to do a job that used to take them two or three days, in a day. “There’s obvious bottom-line business benefits in these sorts of things and you know if you are talking to business and you are trying to convince them to work this way – then they need to see ROI on it and fairly quickly so they are able to justify it in budget terms,” he says.

4. Shared knowledge is a long-term investment (and here is some of that evidence!)

There are a lot of really good case studies from big banks or big mining companies that have proved the effectiveness of shared knowledge. There are mining companies up in Queensland for example, using a Wiki so that when guys come out of a mine after a shift and have broken kit, they register that so that they know that it is going to get it fixed. But there are added long-term benefits as well because, you’ve also got guys who have interim fixes for things, guys who have been working in the mine for 20 years, who may know what you can do while that equipment is being fixed. There is knowledge there that people can go back to.

Best thing of all is that Stephen feels your pain, having worked in government for 12 years and having that feeling of “smacking your head against the wall thinking there must be a better way to do this.” It was while he was in a position of an IT manager in a bigger organisation that he started thinking there must be a better way for him to co-ordinate all that was going in a way that people could contribute to. So let his insights from this tortured experience be your gain

Hoping to catch up with Laurel this week sometime – meanwhile, if you have not read her blog I suggest you do. Same for Stephen – always gems to find there.

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