First, the latest news, Australia's federal workplace minister expresses concerns about the strike:
(AAP) Fairfax strike of concern: Gillard
FEDERAL Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard says she is concerned about the industrial dispute affecting Fairfax daily newspapers and wants quality and diversity to be maintained in the media.
Journalists from Fairfax are on strike because of management plans to axe 550 jobs.
Ms Gillard told Network Ten today she was "concerned'' by the developments.
"I am someone who is concerned about the quality and diversity of our media market.''
The deputy prime minister called on both parties to talk.
"There's never been an industrial dispute in this country that wasn't solved by talking.
"I think when we look at the Fairfax dispute we need to remember that rule.''
And more editorial in support of The Sydney Morning Herald, this time from its rival paper The Daily Telegraph.
The Fairfax job cuts and the dragging down of an icon
Silver Surfer
Saturday, August 30, 2008 at 09:13pm
The shenanigans of the past week at Fairfax, publishers of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald where journos, artists and photographers are on strike over plans for mass sackings, are another example of a big company putting its profits before people, but in this case we’re not just talking about its staff. There’s the loyal core of readers to consider in this as well, and it’s a key issue here because media companies really are a different kind of animal. Be that as it may, it’s still a classic case of the old muddle-headed, knee-jerk reverse thinking that too often seems to provide a quick and easy answer to the executives of corporate Australia, who appear to the average punter more interested in saving their own bonuses and delivering dividends to shareholders than doing the right thing in the first place by their customers, staff and clients.
There’s no doubt here they’ve run out of ideas; advertising revenues are down, no one’s buying the product – at least not in the numbers required to make them highly profitable operations, and readership has been on a steady decline – and so the only answer they can come up with is to make the situation worse by giving everyone the flick. Smart move. The so-called rivers of gold once provided by Fairfax’s classified advertising obviously aren’t translating to a challenging, new era in media brought about by the digital explosion, and even before last week’s announcement, staff numbers had been pared back.
One of the worst things about these kinds of disputes (at any company) is that invariably, the axe falls on the people who are working their guts out to put out a decent product, not the people who’ve either run them into the ground in the first place or who are more interested in stripping them down to increase returns. The staff at Fairfax now face a kind of nail-biting reverse lottery with 550 job cuts on the cards and too many will be wondering in the coming weeks whether they can still pay their mortgages. It won’t be an issue for the executives, though - they’ll still be pocketing the big paypackets and carrying on as usual. For now, anyway. MORE
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Quality v quantity
With the impending Fairfax cuts in Australia comes more opinion pieces about the future of journalism. This one from Jack Waterford in The Canberra Times is one of the better ones I have read.
I like what he writes right at the end:
"The real test of it all is not with newspaper bottom lines. It is with circulation and readership, bearing in mind that the core readership is of baby boomer age or of the generation above it. By no means does it follow that younger journalists will have lower standards. Or that the simultaneous renewed focus on ''new media'' means that proprietors have given newspapers away. But if 50-year-olds are not comfortable with being informed, or hectored, by 25-year-olds, it is likely the demise of the newspaper will be quicker."
The real threat to newspapers comes from quality not quantity
BY JACK WATERFORD
30/08/2008 10:14:00 AM
The big challenge for any professional journalist, particularly in a city such as Canberra, is that a good proportion of readers probably more than 30 per cent here know more about your subject than you do.
They know the subject because it is their job to know it. That job, perhaps in the public service, or business, or academia, gives them access to a lot of other information, including most of our sources of raw information. If the subject is within their field of interest, they may well have already skimmed the latest information upon it even before they pick up this newspaper, or another one. MORE
I like what he writes right at the end:
"The real test of it all is not with newspaper bottom lines. It is with circulation and readership, bearing in mind that the core readership is of baby boomer age or of the generation above it. By no means does it follow that younger journalists will have lower standards. Or that the simultaneous renewed focus on ''new media'' means that proprietors have given newspapers away. But if 50-year-olds are not comfortable with being informed, or hectored, by 25-year-olds, it is likely the demise of the newspaper will be quicker."
The real threat to newspapers comes from quality not quantity
BY JACK WATERFORD
30/08/2008 10:14:00 AM
The big challenge for any professional journalist, particularly in a city such as Canberra, is that a good proportion of readers probably more than 30 per cent here know more about your subject than you do.
They know the subject because it is their job to know it. That job, perhaps in the public service, or business, or academia, gives them access to a lot of other information, including most of our sources of raw information. If the subject is within their field of interest, they may well have already skimmed the latest information upon it even before they pick up this newspaper, or another one. MORE
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Cuts in Australian media
It seems, not surprisingly, that the move to pear down newspaper staff is spreading from the US and UK to smaller markets like Australia.
Fairfax media is commencing a major restructuring program of the mastheads in its stable in Australia and New Zealand, including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Is it the management's only option - in a climate of declining profit margins - to cut staff and downsize the editorial process? I would venture to say that yes, a restructuring may be necessary, to prime the company towards new media and importantly, other platforms, but that there should be a move towards specialist journalism, eg. more high-end analysis type articles for a market that is willing to pay, rather than towards more general reporting and lifetyle-type features. I think it's important to note that general news and entertainment/lifestyle stories can be eaily obtained from other sources on the internet, mobile, cable TV etc and people will not buy the paper for such news.
On the other hand, more exclusive stories and analysis pieces geared towards an Australian market could possibly give media companies like Fairfax a future. Examples like the success of The Economist are encouraging.
But this might also be a simple case of the demise of the daily broadsheet as a source of general news, local, state, national and international. Who knows - the market might become much more fractured, and people will choose to get information from a wider variety of sources. eg. their mobile phone for breaking news, their e-paper or iphone/PDA for longer stories, their computer at work for photos, multimedia and other feature stories, and the news in the evening on telly for a round-up of the day's news. Once a week, they'll read The Guardian Weekly, National Geographic Magazine or The Economist for a in-depth feature.
As it is, a majority of my peers (in the 18-30 age category) do not buy newspapers. They do read news websites that have articles/images/multimedia for free. They listen to commercial radio and television news, and sometimes watch documentaries on SBS, ABC and on cable television channels like the Discovery network. And some still read the weekend newspapers that have more analysis and feature articles.
I don't deny that I will miss the daily broadsheet. To me, it's like books, having a physical product has a certain attraction. But I myself am more of a news consumer online, on cable news channels like BBC and CNN, and of radio podcasts and television current affairs programs. And I'm a very heavy consumer - most people out that don't care if a newspaper collapses or a journalist loses their job.
So if a media company like Fairfax, which also owns websites like rsvp.com.au, domain.com.au and trademe.co.nz, evolves to become an information company and not a newspaper or news driven company, don't be surprised.
The journalists' union Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has set up a Fair Go, Fairfax website and a facebook group, which currently has more than 1000 members.
Articles about Fairfax's cuts:
Fairfax Media legal unit also gets chopped in job axings
Citizen McCarthy swings Fairfax axe
Fairfax newspaper production to be outsourced
Strike paper on Friday, August 29:
Video of Fairfax campaign:
Fairfax media is commencing a major restructuring program of the mastheads in its stable in Australia and New Zealand, including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Is it the management's only option - in a climate of declining profit margins - to cut staff and downsize the editorial process? I would venture to say that yes, a restructuring may be necessary, to prime the company towards new media and importantly, other platforms, but that there should be a move towards specialist journalism, eg. more high-end analysis type articles for a market that is willing to pay, rather than towards more general reporting and lifetyle-type features. I think it's important to note that general news and entertainment/lifestyle stories can be eaily obtained from other sources on the internet, mobile, cable TV etc and people will not buy the paper for such news.
On the other hand, more exclusive stories and analysis pieces geared towards an Australian market could possibly give media companies like Fairfax a future. Examples like the success of The Economist are encouraging.
But this might also be a simple case of the demise of the daily broadsheet as a source of general news, local, state, national and international. Who knows - the market might become much more fractured, and people will choose to get information from a wider variety of sources. eg. their mobile phone for breaking news, their e-paper or iphone/PDA for longer stories, their computer at work for photos, multimedia and other feature stories, and the news in the evening on telly for a round-up of the day's news. Once a week, they'll read The Guardian Weekly, National Geographic Magazine or The Economist for a in-depth feature.
As it is, a majority of my peers (in the 18-30 age category) do not buy newspapers. They do read news websites that have articles/images/multimedia for free. They listen to commercial radio and television news, and sometimes watch documentaries on SBS, ABC and on cable television channels like the Discovery network. And some still read the weekend newspapers that have more analysis and feature articles.
I don't deny that I will miss the daily broadsheet. To me, it's like books, having a physical product has a certain attraction. But I myself am more of a news consumer online, on cable news channels like BBC and CNN, and of radio podcasts and television current affairs programs. And I'm a very heavy consumer - most people out that don't care if a newspaper collapses or a journalist loses their job.
So if a media company like Fairfax, which also owns websites like rsvp.com.au, domain.com.au and trademe.co.nz, evolves to become an information company and not a newspaper or news driven company, don't be surprised.
The journalists' union Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has set up a Fair Go, Fairfax website and a facebook group, which currently has more than 1000 members.
Articles about Fairfax's cuts:
Fairfax Media legal unit also gets chopped in job axings
Citizen McCarthy swings Fairfax axe
Fairfax newspaper production to be outsourced
Strike paper on Friday, August 29:
Video of Fairfax campaign:
Friday, August 22, 2008
What's next after your broadsheet's gone?
I like this blog post that looks at what happens after a daily paper shuts down in the US. Basically, no one will miss it, because the rest of the media ecosystem will pick up on what it was doing. What's good are the replies to the blog, some of which I'll quote a little here:
"Your thought experiment assumes that with the Bugle out of the equation, the rest of the media food chain will pick up the slack. That's where I believe you're being optimistic. Because in the real world, none of those models are making enough money to pay for significant content gathering. The absolute pinnacles of the online model are places like TPM -- tiny staff, many unpaid interns, minimal (though often quite good) content creation; and the HuffPost, paid staff one, content creation minimal.
If those entities, which are widely seen as the best the online world has produced as a business model, can't pay for significant -- particularly local -- content creation, why do you assume the Whoville Daily Trumpet will do any better?
Newspapers on average make abut 7 percent of their revenue from their online product; if the Trumpet captured all of that revenue (unlikely), it could pay for 7 percent of the Bugle's staff. Do you think any major city would be well served by 7 percent of its current newspaper?
I'd love it if you were right; I've been dying to see an online news model appear that thrives financially without taking most of its content from a newspaper. But if there's one out there, I haven't seen it."
and another:
"The layoffs and buyouts have hit newsrooms hard, partly because they are being carried out by managers who want to keep their jobs and think they can still put out newspapers with a dwindled staff. That only results in rewritten press releases, space-filling and mindless whos'-in-who's-out features and skimpy stories with a lot of color pictures"
another:
"People now have other sources and venues for their news. They don't have to read the tainted liberal stories and opinions with so many other available options.
Selling newspapers is not like selling toilet paper. Toilet paper is something that people will always need. People might start buying papers if they started reporting the news the way it happened and not the way the editors and reporters wanted it to happen. In other words, people need toilet paper but they don't need the LA Times."
"Your thought experiment assumes that with the Bugle out of the equation, the rest of the media food chain will pick up the slack. That's where I believe you're being optimistic. Because in the real world, none of those models are making enough money to pay for significant content gathering. The absolute pinnacles of the online model are places like TPM -- tiny staff, many unpaid interns, minimal (though often quite good) content creation; and the HuffPost, paid staff one, content creation minimal.
If those entities, which are widely seen as the best the online world has produced as a business model, can't pay for significant -- particularly local -- content creation, why do you assume the Whoville Daily Trumpet will do any better?
Newspapers on average make abut 7 percent of their revenue from their online product; if the Trumpet captured all of that revenue (unlikely), it could pay for 7 percent of the Bugle's staff. Do you think any major city would be well served by 7 percent of its current newspaper?
I'd love it if you were right; I've been dying to see an online news model appear that thrives financially without taking most of its content from a newspaper. But if there's one out there, I haven't seen it."
and another:
"The layoffs and buyouts have hit newsrooms hard, partly because they are being carried out by managers who want to keep their jobs and think they can still put out newspapers with a dwindled staff. That only results in rewritten press releases, space-filling and mindless whos'-in-who's-out features and skimpy stories with a lot of color pictures"
another:
"People now have other sources and venues for their news. They don't have to read the tainted liberal stories and opinions with so many other available options.
Selling newspapers is not like selling toilet paper. Toilet paper is something that people will always need. People might start buying papers if they started reporting the news the way it happened and not the way the editors and reporters wanted it to happen. In other words, people need toilet paper but they don't need the LA Times."
'Everything's on the table'
Catching up on the latest news ...
FEAR
Some good quotes from this article in the Editor and Publisher.
There's one good reason for the industry's new openness to change — fear, says Drew Davis, president and executive director of the American Press Institute (API): "I have never seen so many senior newspaper executives so depressed and frightened for their future."
"They used to say, 'Tell me who's doing this, and if it's working to increase readership.' Now what they say is, 'Tell me who's doing this — and making money at it.' Everyone wants promises that risks they take will bring in dollars — and, of course, nobody can do that."
"He said, 'We are like drowning people, who are treading water as fast as we can. And you people are throwing life preservers' — he meant it in the form of Newspaper Next — 'and we can't even get our hands out of the water to reach them.'
"What we're lacking right now is really philosophical thinking. If this is a seminal crisis, then we have to do some seminal thinking. And it really does have to be radical."
So everything is on the table, anything goes, because everyone's trying to keep afloat, make ends meet (and keep the sceptical shareholders happy).
What's good about this article is that it takes a hard look at the real dire state of the US newspaper industry and how it is struggling to adapt to the cost-cutting and to produce a product with a lot less people.
1. a look at the deep cuts at the Tribune after the change in management
2. suggestions that some days of the week would be dropped (eg. no more Monday papers)
3. getting rid of feature stories on low-circulation days (and maybe even the reporter)
4. there's also cutbacks in marketing, advertising sales and research
5. don't chase non-readers - leave the paper for those who would read it for 25 years or more, and websites for the younger audiences
Another article - this one from Baltimore - looks at how some media companies are turning to niche publications as the way of the future.
FEAR
Some good quotes from this article in the Editor and Publisher.
There's one good reason for the industry's new openness to change — fear, says Drew Davis, president and executive director of the American Press Institute (API): "I have never seen so many senior newspaper executives so depressed and frightened for their future."
"They used to say, 'Tell me who's doing this, and if it's working to increase readership.' Now what they say is, 'Tell me who's doing this — and making money at it.' Everyone wants promises that risks they take will bring in dollars — and, of course, nobody can do that."
"He said, 'We are like drowning people, who are treading water as fast as we can. And you people are throwing life preservers' — he meant it in the form of Newspaper Next — 'and we can't even get our hands out of the water to reach them.'
"What we're lacking right now is really philosophical thinking. If this is a seminal crisis, then we have to do some seminal thinking. And it really does have to be radical."
So everything is on the table, anything goes, because everyone's trying to keep afloat, make ends meet (and keep the sceptical shareholders happy).
What's good about this article is that it takes a hard look at the real dire state of the US newspaper industry and how it is struggling to adapt to the cost-cutting and to produce a product with a lot less people.
1. a look at the deep cuts at the Tribune after the change in management
2. suggestions that some days of the week would be dropped (eg. no more Monday papers)
3. getting rid of feature stories on low-circulation days (and maybe even the reporter)
4. there's also cutbacks in marketing, advertising sales and research
5. don't chase non-readers - leave the paper for those who would read it for 25 years or more, and websites for the younger audiences
Another article - this one from Baltimore - looks at how some media companies are turning to niche publications as the way of the future.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
So, back to the future
Playing a bit of catch up on my RSS feeds. So here's a bunch of stuff I've read that might be interesting:
* The changing newsroom: from the Pew Research Centre. It provides a good statistic look at how much things have changed in the US newspaper industry over the past few years.
--eg. that larger papers are much more greater affected by cutbacks than smaller papers, cuts especially in coverage of international news (no surprise there).
--Something one of the editors said that's quoted in the paper is worth mentioning here:
"I hated to make that cut," the editor said. "I read all these things about how
cutting film critics is a good choice because you can get film criticism from other places, but those are the same arguments you hear about foreign coverage, national coverage or state government coverage. Eventually, you wake up one day and find there is no somewhere else because everyone has done the same thing you’ve done. It’s very troubling."
--Another point that's interesting is that readers don't care too much about the loss of international coverage, or of the science writer, though they are unhappy when their crossword puzzle is cut. Wonder if that will embolden the "toe-cutters".
--I also found this quite interesting: that the cutbacks mean shorter news stories, but that investment continues in investigative journalism. eg. "shorter news stories and richer enterprise".
--And where are the cuts coming from? Here's the bar chart stats:
It seems the cuts are resulting in the loss of the more expensive but also the most experienced and talented journalists. One editor says: "I read the stories (in my own paper) today and I see more holes, questions I want answered that are not," lamented the editor of a large metropolitan newspaper. "I see more stories … that aren’t as well sourced as I’d prefer."
Here's the intro to the research paper:
Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.
It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.
The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.
Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.
This description is a composite. It is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at newspapers across the country and the results of a detailed survey of senior newsroom executives. In total, more than 250 newspapers participated. It is, we believe, the most systematic effort yet to examine the changing nature of the resources in American newspaper newsrooms at a critical time. It is an attempt to document and quantify cutbacks and innovations that have generally been known only anecdotally. MORE
* Comment piece from The Economist on the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Speaking truth to power. Where are today's intellectual dissident writers?
* An e-reader for newspapers like The Guardian by 2015? And rolled-up too ...
* Five steps to fostering innovation in the newsroom. Not sure how new these ideas are, to be honest, but I guess it's important to keep hammering on these points.
* The wire agency the Associated Press's study on consumption behaviours of young adults, across the United States and the world. Some conclusions were that there was
--more reading of news "above the fold"
--email is very closely linked to news
--constant news checking because of ... boredom!
--way in which people consume news, laptop, TV, all at the same time
--readers WANT depth, especially during breaking news
--consuming news while doing something else, eg. driving
--news fatigue, could explain why Daily Show with Jon Stewart-type shows do well
--people love resolutions to stories (that's why they likes sports and ent)
--packaging is one of the solutions
* The changing newsroom: from the Pew Research Centre. It provides a good statistic look at how much things have changed in the US newspaper industry over the past few years.
--eg. that larger papers are much more greater affected by cutbacks than smaller papers, cuts especially in coverage of international news (no surprise there).
--Something one of the editors said that's quoted in the paper is worth mentioning here:
"I hated to make that cut," the editor said. "I read all these things about how
cutting film critics is a good choice because you can get film criticism from other places, but those are the same arguments you hear about foreign coverage, national coverage or state government coverage. Eventually, you wake up one day and find there is no somewhere else because everyone has done the same thing you’ve done. It’s very troubling."
--Another point that's interesting is that readers don't care too much about the loss of international coverage, or of the science writer, though they are unhappy when their crossword puzzle is cut. Wonder if that will embolden the "toe-cutters".
--I also found this quite interesting: that the cutbacks mean shorter news stories, but that investment continues in investigative journalism. eg. "shorter news stories and richer enterprise".
--And where are the cuts coming from? Here's the bar chart stats:
It seems the cuts are resulting in the loss of the more expensive but also the most experienced and talented journalists. One editor says: "I read the stories (in my own paper) today and I see more holes, questions I want answered that are not," lamented the editor of a large metropolitan newspaper. "I see more stories … that aren’t as well sourced as I’d prefer."
Here's the intro to the research paper:
Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.
It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.
The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.
Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.
This description is a composite. It is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at newspapers across the country and the results of a detailed survey of senior newsroom executives. In total, more than 250 newspapers participated. It is, we believe, the most systematic effort yet to examine the changing nature of the resources in American newspaper newsrooms at a critical time. It is an attempt to document and quantify cutbacks and innovations that have generally been known only anecdotally. MORE
* Comment piece from The Economist on the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Speaking truth to power. Where are today's intellectual dissident writers?
* An e-reader for newspapers like The Guardian by 2015? And rolled-up too ...
* Five steps to fostering innovation in the newsroom. Not sure how new these ideas are, to be honest, but I guess it's important to keep hammering on these points.
* The wire agency the Associated Press's study on consumption behaviours of young adults, across the United States and the world. Some conclusions were that there was
--more reading of news "above the fold"
--email is very closely linked to news
--constant news checking because of ... boredom!
--way in which people consume news, laptop, TV, all at the same time
--readers WANT depth, especially during breaking news
--consuming news while doing something else, eg. driving
--news fatigue, could explain why Daily Show with Jon Stewart-type shows do well
--people love resolutions to stories (that's why they likes sports and ent)
--packaging is one of the solutions
Sydney tackles online media
New setup that I stumbled across on Facebook. First meeting of Media in the Pub is at Surry Hills on August 26. Let's hope it's a useful discussion about the future of journalism in Australia.
I find, personally anyway, that often these types of discussions focus on "oh, all you have online is stuff about Kylie etc" and don't focus on what can actually be done to save jobs. And of course how our industry is changing. Also big questions. But we can't ignore the internet, or change what's happening in the industry right? So why not work on the solutions, alternatives instead?
I find, personally anyway, that often these types of discussions focus on "oh, all you have online is stuff about Kylie etc" and don't focus on what can actually be done to save jobs. And of course how our industry is changing. Also big questions. But we can't ignore the internet, or change what's happening in the industry right? So why not work on the solutions, alternatives instead?
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