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fairfax

You are currently browsing articles tagged fairfax.

Live Blog: Media 2010

17 February 2010 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 4 comments

Photo of Simon Gallagher and Moeed Ahmad: click for Media 2010 website

This Friday 19 February I’m liveblogging from Media 2010 in Sydney, billed as “the Annual Forecast for Digital Media Professionals”.

The highlights for me are likely to be Simon Gallagher (pictured, left) from Hulu and Moeed Ahmad (pictured, right), Head of New Media at Al Jazeera, but I suspect there’ll be some surprises.

Later today I’ll review my live blog from Media 09 and post some reflections. [Update 20 February 2010: Nope, I didn't get time for that.]

Given the changes in the media landscape it should be interesting — to say the least. What I can say already, though, is that I’m hoping Media 2010’s afternoon sessions aren’t like Media 09’s, which were mostly agencies pimping their showreels.

For now, though, just bookmark this page and pop back on the day. The event runs 9am to 5pm Sydney time, and I’ll cover as much as I can.

I’ll also issue reminders via my Twitter stream and tag everything #media_2010. Sorry about the irritating underscore. Blame Fairfax Digital.

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Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009

18 November 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | 1 comment

Stilgherrian’s links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009:

See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

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Twitter babble twaddle

18 August 2009 in Human Nature, Internet by Stilgherrian | 12 comments

Crikey logo

Forty percent of the messages on Twitter are “pointless babble”, claims a story doing the rounds at Fairfax and ABC News and elsewhere this morning. It’s rubbish.

In a piece for Crikey today, I dismantle this claim by market intelligence firm Pear Analytics. Their categorisation is vague and arbitrary, and completely misses the point of phatic communication.

Marketer Stephen Dann is even more scathing. In the comments Sarah, who works for Pear Analytics, digs an even deeper hole as she explains her methodology.

If some DJ posted on there they were playing at a club tonight, I counted that as Self Promotion. If some guy tweeted that he was “at the club with his niggaazz and ho’s”, I put it into babble.

So, if they’re a DJ it’s “promotion”, but “some guy” it’s “babble”. How is Sarah judging people’s value here? By whether they’re a DJ or not? By whether they’re communicating business and work needs rather than social? By whether they use “correct grammar” rather than street slang? That’s just snobbery, and possibly even racism.

It’s all just tawdry low-rent pseudo-science at the level of the Ponds Institute. And, as my Crikey piece explains, t’was all just to pimp a product.

The reason the original bullshit story was picked up and spread so fast, though, was that a Twitter backlash has been foretold. More about that tomorrow.

[Hat-tip to @crikey_news for the headline.]

Whaddyareckon of the Ruddblog?

17 July 2009 in Blogging, Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | 29 comments

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's new blog

Kevin Rudd launched his prime ministerial blog yesterday. I’m not sure it’s going to work — as I already told the Fairfax newspapers.

In addition to the common prohibitions on defamatory and abusive content, the rules for Mr Rudd’s blog say that comments will be accepted for only “five business days” from the time the post is published, be moderated by his staff strictly during business hours, cannot include links to other websites, and are limited to 300 words.

“Not allowing links to other websites is just dumb,” one blogger, Stilgherrian, told the Herald. “Links are the currency of the web. They allow you to reference work that’s already out there. If you can’t do that, and you’re limited to 300 words, then the discussion won’t ever get past repeating slogans.”

It was a sentiment shared by “An Onymous Lefty” blogger, Jeremy Sear, who posted a response to the Prime Minister’s blog titled “Kevin Rudd is hip to the kids… of 2004″.

“The strict moderation will remove the livelier aspects of discussion,” Mr Sear said.

I also reckon the first post, about climate change, sounds like a prepared political speech, with a question tacked on the end to make it look bloggy.

How do you think we can make Australians more aware that we need to act on climate change now?

I thought we’d mostly moved well past “creating awareness” and the biggest criticism of the government’s climate change policy was the lack of actual action so far.

But what do you think?

[Note: The original Fairfax piece doesn't have links: I've added them in myself. Fairfax is still too rude or daft or whatever to link out to the things they mention. It's nice that they included my quote, given that.]

Tom Connell: When the last ink’s dried

04 May 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 4 comments

[Recently I was interviewed by Tom Connell, a journalism student at RMIT University, about the future of newspapers. Here's his resulting feature article. I haven't edited it, apart from imposing my own idiosyncratic typographical pedantry and linky goodness. You read it now, and I'll add my own comments tonight. It's long, but I think it outlines the key issues rather well.]

Newspapers are folding in the United States at an astonishing rate. According to Paper Cuts, a website tracking the newspaper industry, more than 120 have folded since January, 2008. While Australian broadsheets have not succumbed just yet, there is a real possibility that they may not survive in the long-term. But is that such a bad thing? Tom Connell reports.

Mark Scott’s recent comments about the Australian newspaper industry would have sent chills through journalists and editors across the country.

“It does strike me that much of the bold and creative thinking about the future of print seems to be happening outside the major publishers — probably because the talented people within are too busy simply attending to the fire in the building,” Scott said, in and article in The Age on 9 April.

This was hardly the first doomsday article on newspapers, but what set this apart is that Scott, current head of the ABC, was until 2006 a newspaper executive at Fairfax Media –- the second largest newspaper owner in Australia.

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New Journalism: those who get it, those who don’t

05 April 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

Photograph of Henry Porter

Increasingly, I’m getting annoyed with otherwise-intelligent people who simply don’t “get” what is happening as our world becomes hyperconnected and rail against it. The man in the photo is Henry Porter. He doesn’t get it. But a pseudonymous commenter at The Poll Bludger this morning does. And he explains it better than I ever have.

Ah, the contrast!

In a piece for The Observer, Porter’s headline warns that Google is just an amoral menace. The ever-growing empire produces nothing but seems determined to control everything, we’re told.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the Internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs — worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past…

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

It’s worth reading the full rant — because it completely misses the point: I only found Porter’s piece because Google had told me about it.

Google didn’t “steal” his content. It produced a new audience member. And that’s what all media outlets produce: an audience for their advertisers — or, in the case of the ABC and SBS, an audience sufficiently large to justify their existence.

Ever though I think this one piece by Porter is full of shit, I clicked through, read about him, and discovered much better pieces about his concerns for our declining civil liberties and how the decline of one-way TV sets the scene for increased public debate. Porter now has a new reader because of Google.

However that commenter over at The Poll Bludger, yes, he got it right…

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just run through my liveblog from Media 09 and fixed the spelling mistakes and added a few links. I still haven’t found the time to write more reflective pieces, but I’ll get there.

22 February 2009 by Stilgherrian | No comments

Live Blog: Media 09

10 February 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 8 comments

This Friday 13 February I’m liveblogging from Media 09, billed as “the Annual Forecast for Digital Media Professionals”.

The event runs all day from 9am to 5pm Sydney time, and I’ll cover as much as I can. Bookmark this page and come back on the day. I’ll also issue reminders via my Twitter stream and tag everything #media09.

I’m rather amused that the event is being staged by Fairfax Digital, since arguably they’re well behind Murdoch’s News Limited. Maybe they wanted expert advice, couldn’t afford it, so decided to invite others and charge admission.

One keynote speaker is Ben Self, Director and Founding Partner of Blue State Digital, the guy who ran Barack Obama’s online campaign.

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“Trouble at t’paper”

14 September 2008 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

[I wrote this essay "on spec" for Crikey a fortnight ago, just when the Fairfax journalists were going on strike. It wasn't published: Crikey had commissioned other yarns about this story, and some bloke called Obama had just given a speech. I'll publish it now because it informs an essay I'm writing today and it needs to be online first.]

Australia’s Fairfax media empire is sacking 550 staff, including 120-odd editorial staff, and the journalists went on strike. Well, off you go, petals. You can stamp your feet and turn blue in the face too, for all I care — because a strike is just plain wrong.

The MEAA’s Chris Warren reckoned the anger behind the strike was driven by not just the jobs cuts, “but the clear view that there’s no strategy behind the job cuts.” Agreed. As Crikey reported, Fairfax’s message to staff didn’t articulate any kind of vision, and didn’t even mention journalism.

But journalists haven’t exactly provided vision either.

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The Digital Economy: just for big business?

12 September 2008 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

Crikey logo

[This article was first published in Crikey on Wednesday, based on Senator Conroy's keynote speech to the Digital Economy Forum. See below for updates.]

“The Rudd Government is focused on creating a platform for economic growth and is committed to leading and growing our digital economy,” generalised Senator Stephen Conroy as he opened the Digital Economy Forum in Melbourne [on Wednesday morning].

His keynote speech regurgitated budget promises, generously sprinkled with doubleplusgood words about “encouraging” figures and “driving innovation”.

Uh oh. A “Digital Economy Forum”? Already I’m seeing blokes in suits jostling for room at the trough of government largesse. So who’s at this all-day talkfest? Aha! The CEO of Fairfax Digital; reps from Cisco, Google and Intel; a past president of the Australian Computer Society, the CEO of the Australian Internet Industry Association (which overwhelmingly represents big players); the Research Director for Ovum (presumably representing their big clients)… all the usual suspects.

But if the government is truly committed to supporting innovation and economic growth, where’s the involvement from small business?

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