AFR continues to shoot itself in the foot

If you didn't see the Australian Financial Review yesterday then you missed this piece by Michael Hirschorn about the challenges faced by TV in the digital era.

In the future, TV will mean a cacophony of professional and amateur short- and long-form content shipped via a variety of platforms to a variety of devices, only one of which is the Sony Bravia taking up too much space in your living room. Then, that content will be edited, poked at, commented on, parodied, and rebroadcast by you the former viewer—now “user”—to whomever you choose. Who gets paid by whom to deliver what to whom in this new dispensation is, as in every moment of grand tectonic digital shift, the $60 billion question.

And, of course, when you go online to look for it on the afr.com, you have to subscribe to get to the content. It seems Glenn Burge is still not ready to embrace the world of free. Here's an interesting wrinkle: while the conventional wisdom is that it's all about reach: as Emily Bell of Guardian Unlimited says, "reach equals revenue", some newspaper sites prefer the subscription model - or at least a combination of both. At the Guardian's Changing Media summit last month, Ien Cheng of the FT and Gordon McLeod of the Wall Street Journal said they had no plans to abandon their subscription models. McLeod said that the WSJ's method of ringfencing "premium content" meant they could sell their subscribers to advertisers at a premium rate, which would appear to make sense.  

Novel way of letting someone know their column's horsesh*t

The Indy has this amusing piece about Sebastian Shakespeare, editor of Londoner's Diary on the Evening Standard, who was assaulted by a "well-known" person, thought to be a critic, who tipped a bucket of horse manure on his head, having taken umbrage at something that appeared in the column. Turns out that the pair sat down for a coffee later that day and it was established Shakespeare was out of the country when the offending item appeared in print.  

"Sebastian arrived in the office, looking rather shaken, at about 8am," said a colleague. "He said he had been assaulted, but wouldn't tell anyone who did it. For most of the day, he had a stain on his shirt caused by a large dollop of the manure."

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Online sales buck retail downturn 

A report just in from Forrester Research in the US has online retail sales predicted to grow to US$208 billion. Clothing($26.6 billion), computers ($23.9 billion), and automobiles ($19.3 billion) will be the largest three sales categories.

Scary but not uninteresting: A life in journalism

Here's an interesting piece about Sue Cross, who runs Associated Press Online. Check out her comments about citizen journalism and activist journalism. I particularly like that she has cottoned to the fact that you can't replace professional journalists with enthusiastic amateurs, no matter how good it might look on the bottom line.

"[Citizen journalism is] tremendous. It’s here to stay. It’s important. It engages people. It pulls in information and comments we wouldn’t otherwise have. But it’s too often cast as when you abandon traditional journalism, citizen journalism will be the model of the future. That’s really not what’s happening. It’s not A or B, it’s kind of A plus B, and it’s going to that.

“And now you’re seeing many of these sites come back and seek professional content. YouTube is licensing professional video because it draws an audience and there’s an appetite for it. Google and Yahoo are making great efforts to bring in credible news content along with all the rest of the content they offer. And so you again are seeing people coming back to credible news sources.”

Philip Meyer takes very much the same line in his book The Vanishing Newspaper. 

I'll be talking to Meyer, who has been in the game since 1950, next week. We are hoping to get him to do a satellite cross for The Future of Journalism Summit. Don;t miss it, by the way.

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The Oz goes Google

A rather strange piece by Anthony Klan in today's Australian, which has taken offence at plans for "Google's prying mapping systems" to provide what sounds like an enhanced, street-level version of Google Earth, which we all had so much sun with when it came out a couple of years ago.

THEY spend their days devising technology that eats away at privacy but when it comes to disclosing their own personal information the people behind Google's prying mapping systems are less than co-operative.

Google Australia is expected within months to launch an application that will publish highly detailed, street-level photos of much of Australia, in a move that has drawn strong criticism from privacy advocates.

Google's picture-snapping cars have been cruising Australia's suburbs since late last year, with pictures of thousands of homes expected to be uploaded to the internet with Street View's launch.

While Google has defended the project, the internet company baulked when The Weekend Australian requested the personal details and addresses of the group's key figures to allow the paper's photographers to take pictures of their homes. "Providing those details would be completely inappropriate," said Google spokesman Rob Shilkin.

Klan goes on to describe and list the purchase price of properties owned by Google's general manager Karim Temsamani (a single-storey house in the eastern Sydney suburb of Kensington that he bought for $2.25 million in May 2006) for those of you who really enjoy prying. But revealing someone's private business is hardly the same thing as providing the sort of streetscapes you or I could get by walking around public thoroughfares.  

He's done rather well. Temsamani, that is. Klan has shown he can do a property search.

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New age guy feeling the heat

Still with The Australian, there's a good piece about the discomfiture surrounding Andrew Jaspan who, it seems, is on an absolute collision course with journos at The Age after revelations as to just how far the paper will do to turn a crust by getting into bed with a variety of commercial interests. 

In a blunt letter to the paper's journalist representative Greg Baum yesterday, The Age's chief executive and publisher Don Churchill said he was "completely satisfied" Jaspan and The Age's other editors had not contravened the "fundamental values of independent journalism". And he warned journalists that commercial partnership deals were here to stay. The company has and will continue to enter into sponsorship arrangements with a variety of organisations in the normal course of connecting with the Melbourne community," Mr Churchill wrote. "These agreements explicitly set out that such sponsorships are not to encroach on our journalistic independence, and they do not. The company upholds the fundamental values of independent journalism upon which this newspaper has been built. I am completely satisfied that these have not been contravened by any of our editors."

Having met Jaspan and spoken to a number of journos - from rank and file to senior editorial execs - all of whom thought him an extremely good editor, I'm in two minds. The first point to be made is that these dangerous commercial partnerships are increasingly part of reality for cash-strapped newspapers - of which Farifax runs a number - but there has to be a carefully designed arms-length arrangement, which is often difficult to achieve. I tend to agree with Margaret Simons when she cautions that "out of sight of journalists, Jaspan has been fighting cost-cutting." Anecdotes from within Fairfax both in Sydney and Melbourne have things stretched about as tight as they can get.

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