I managed to include a mention of the voice biometric work by Australian company Auraya that’s based on technology used by Centrelink, and the concept of two-factor authentication.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but since they don’t usually post it online here it is.

Could it be that Ben Grubb, deputy technology editor at Fairfax news sites smh.com.au, theage.com.au, brisbanetimes.com.au etc, is the secret love child of independent Member for Kennedy, Cloncurry’s own Bob Katter?

If you have a theory about what the connection might be, do tell me in the comments. People do need to know.

And no, I am not going to reveal who sent me the image.

If you find it to be particularly disturbing, do let me know and I’ll suggest some remedies.

Now the AFP was bouncing off a report from McAfee, which from the title I assume is yet another of those “The internet is dangerous, m’kay?” fear pieces. 2012 Threats Predictions. I won’t bother linking, because all these reports from the major infosec vendors are much the same, jumbling together everything from minor vandalism to “cyberterrorism” — whatever the fuck that is — with little critical analysis.

But I suppose it is actually getting this stuff onto the agenda.

Slowly.

For six minutes.

At this point I reckon I should re-link to two of my pieces from the eCrime Symposium held in Canberra in November 2011. eCrime Symposium: Harden up, warns Aussie crime fighter and eCrime Symposium wrap: Satisfaction tinged with frustration.

The presenter was Cathy Bell (who seems to be missing from the station’s page of presenters), the producer Jared Reed.

The audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. While the audio was posted shortly after broadcast at the ABC NewsRadio website, I’m going to post it here anyway. It’s easier for me than trawling their automated daily audio archive.

This is being posted a full day after the actual radio appearance, even though the post was ready within an hour of the broadcast. Why? Because I didn’t want it on the website before I’d posted last week’s Weekly Wrap. Is that good editorial judgement? Or just a little bit too anally-retentive?

Today I returned to the print media with an opinion piece, Trends on Twitter brief but telling, just like in the real world, in the Sydney Morning Herald.

It’s an overview of Twitter’s “Trending Topics”, including the observation that marketers who try to game the trends are probably wasting their time. Research by Hewlett-Packard’s social computing lab [PDF] shows that there’s probably no point in focusing on the “influencers”.

Topics will trend or not based on whether people found it interesting to retweet at that moment. Just like Yahoo! Research’s Duncan Watts said a few years back.

Somehow I managed to refer to the fisting incident without using the word “fisting” itself.

I wouldn’t have thought about writing this piece myself, being too immersed in Twitter to realise that it needed explanations. Blame Joel Gibson, the SMH Opinion Editor. He commissioned it and did a decent job of improving my Sunday-written words.

I think it’s quite sweet that Fairfax decided to explain my name.

For background, here are the related ZDNet Australia stories, and I’ll post further linkage when I have the time. That’ll include a fairly full collection of media stories.

• AusCERT demo piques police interest
• Qld cops denounce ‘ethical hacking’

Note that the Facebook hack was not demonstrated at the AusCERT Conference but the Security BSides Australia conference. There’s a few more misconceptions in some of the media reportage, but I’ll do another post about them I figure.

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth.

Articles

• Fairfax’s hypocritical web ‘spying devices’ beat-up, for Crikey. The “spying devices” in question are tracking cookies. Nothing new there. But the story was on the front page of the dead-tree slices. Why? Apparently politicians’ websites use tracking cookies. Shock! Horror! And Fairfax uses even more of them. Hypocrites.
• Senate to re-open bloggers versus journalists, for Crikey. A lightly-edited version of my blog post on the same topic.
• Indonesian e-commerce held back by uncertain laws, for Crikey. Based on material presented by leading Indonesian legal academic Dr Sinta Dewi.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 64, “The info commissioner’s fight: Govt 2.0″. My interview with the new Australian Information Commissioner, Professor John McMillan. The new Office of the Australian Information Commissioner came into being on 1 November and represents a significant change to the way the Australian Government will be handing its information — especially given the Declaration of Open Government earlier this year.

Media Appearances

• On Monday I spoke with Fiona Wyllie on ABC Radio’s Statewide Afternoons and the Fairfax tracking cookie beat-up and a father who installed a radio jammer to kill the internet so his kids wouldn’t spend so much time online. Alas, there is no recording. That’s a shame. It’s not often you’ll hear me giving parenting advice on the radio.

Geekery

• I learned how to use Google Site Search by plugging it into the Fender Australia website. It’s fairly straightforward, but it quickly shows you the problems with how your site is constructed. As an aside, if you’re a web developer visiting that site for the first time you’ll be horrified to see that in many places it uses tables for layout. That’s because the site was originally built in 2001 and has just been re-skinned a couple of times since. It’s also maintained manually, all 950 pages of it. There’s little business case for a major overhaul — the numbers are not compelling — but we’re planning to build a proper modern database-driven site early in 2011.

Corporate Largesse

None.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Old bar sign at the Town Hall Hotel, Newtown. Gender roles were a little different back then.]

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.

If you can’t see the CoveritLive tool immediately below, then you’re not using a compatible browser.

Note that anything in black text without a name at the front will be from me. I liveblog using the following conventions:

• Text in “double quote marks” is an exact quote from the current speaker.
• Text not in quote marks is my paraphrase or summary of the current speaker.
• Text in [square brackets] is my commentary.

If you’re going to be at Media 2010, please let me know.

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.

• “I have never used Twitter” — Are Politicians ill-advised to let their Advisors do the Tweeting? | media140.org: Paul Farrell looks at politicians and their tweets following Malcolm Turnbull’s revelation at Media Sydney that his staffer Thomas Tudehope sometimes tweeted on his behalf, and Barack Obama’s admission that he’s never used Twitter at all.
• Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs | Boing Boing: If you have working knowledge of English, basic computer skills and an Internet connection, then you can get a job anywhere in the world.
• cufón — fonts for the people: A JavaScript-based tool for using any typeface you like in web pages. I haven’t explored it myself, but I do know Crikey‘s website uses it.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted Because Only 0.027% of Iranians Are on Twitter | Gawker: Some reality-check commentary on the “Twitter revolutionised Iran” meme.
• Sources of subsidy in the production of news: a list | Quote and Comment: How can we pay for journalism? Here’s Jay Rosen’s list of possibilities, assembled for the conference “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?”
• Someday You’ll Remember I Said This | Daily Patricia: Entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel says Twitter isn’t microblogging. She differentiates between “publishing” and “person-to-person communications” and reckons Twitter’s in the second category, not the first. That, she reckons, is leading people to over-value Twitter monetarily.
• How to play piano like Philip Glass | YouTube: Torley explains in just 10 minutes how to compose and play music like Philip Glass.
• The Naked Truth About Social v Broadcast Media | newmatilda.com: Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong, looks at the #PwnedNudieRun interaction between ABC TV’s Media Watch and folks on Twitter. I particularly like his “lesson for the low-rent McLuhans who see social media succeeding broadcast media in some simple transition”. Many insights.
• Declassified Blog | Newsweek.com: A new blog by investigative correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball with contributions from other Newsweek journalists. It will focus on national security, intelligence and law enforcement issues.
• Judge Bans Twitter From Court | CBS News: While in some jurisdictions journalists have been permitted to tweet form courtrooms, US District Judge Clay Land in Georgia has ruled that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibit “broadcasting” and that Twitter is a broadcast medium. This decision will doubtless annoy som of the social media evangelists who see “broadcast” as a swear word.
• Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media | bronwen clune: Bronwen Clune’s presentation from Media140 Sydney.
• The Future Of Journalism Needs Journalists | newmatilda.com: Marni Cordell, editor of newmatilda.com, expresses some concerns about the ABC’s vision of community-based media, as outlined by managing director Mark Scott at Media140 Sydney.
• Media140 Sydney: Future Of Journalism In The Social Media Age | jjprojects: John Johnston’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• Twitter as a Journalistic Tool: Drilling Beneath the Rhetoric | J-scribe: The second half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• It’s a Revolution, Not a War | J-scribe: The first half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository: Al Jazeera has put all their raw camera footage from the War on Gaza online under a Creative Commons license, “Attribution”, which allows for commercial and non-commercial use. “This means that news outlets, filmmakers and bloggers will be able to easily share, remix, subtitle or reuse our footage.” They so get it.
• Sky News – Interview with Rupert Murdoch | YouTube: The full 37-minute interview with Rupert Murdoch, in which he suggests he’ll block Google from indexing News Corporation news sites.
• Media140 Sydney | Public Opinion: Gary Sauer-Thompson’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• No Strings Attached: Public Broadcaster Seeks Relationships for Collaboration, Conversation and New Ideas: The Media140 Sydney keynote speech from ABC managing director Mark Scott. This is the PDF of his slides with his speaking notes. It includes a look at some of the ABC’s plans for pro-am media creation.
• Claiming to be unbiased is a patronising fairytale, so let’s just own up to our agendas | mUmBRELLA: In this guest post about Media140 Sydney, Cathie McGinn argues there’s no such thing as total objectivity, so better to disclose your agenda.
• My Two Francs Worth: Media 140 | LinenSuave: A parable of sorts about Media140 Sydney, and the pointlessness of the whole bloggers versus journalists debate.
• Journalism and blogging at Media140 | Barry Saunders: “Investigative journalism — while a very valuable form of journalism, and one we need more of — is a very minor part of journalism as it exists, and an over-focus on investigative journalism as the dominant form of journalism obscures vast bodies of journalistic output.”
• Media140 handouts | Claire’s posterous: The BBC’s Claire Wardle presents a beginners guide to using Twitter (including links to other good introductions to Twitter sites), and a general basic handout which covers some of the other social media tools she discussed in her Media140 Sydney workshop.
• Media140 | Flickr: Wolf Cocklin’s photos from Media140 Sydney.
• Call Recorder for Skype | Ecamm Network: This is the OS X tool I mentioned at Media140 Sydney for recording your Skype conversations, both audio and video. Cheap and extremely useful.
• Too tired to tweet | ABC News: ABC political correspondent Lyndal Curtis has been following Media140 Sydney but doesn’t know where people get the time to participate. I really should write a response to this, as I reckon there’s a very clear counter-argument.
• Journalists on Twitter need to ‘be human’ | Renai LeMay: The Media140 Sydney presentation from Renai LeMay, News Editor at ZDNet Australia.
• Congratulations to the ABC | Telstra Exchange: A post on Telstra’s new Exchange corporate blog about the ABC’s new social media policy from Telstra’s Group Managing Director, Public Policy & Communications, David Quilty. Includes links to Telstra’s own social media policies.
• The ABC of social media use | ABC News: The ABC News story that includes the announcement of the ABC’s new social media policy for staff, presented at Media140 Sydney by Managing Director Mark Scott.
• Alex Hawke Liberal Party Downfall | YouTube: The video which supposedly caused Thomas Tudehope to resign from Malcolm Turnbull’s staff.
• YouTube video sinks Turnbull minder | ABC News: Malcolm Turnbull’s staffer Thomas Tudehope has been forced to resign after reports of his involvement in the distribution of a satirical video about the Liberal Party’s factional battles.
• “How would history have recorded the holocaust if there had been I-phones in the concentration camps?” | Paul Farrell: SBS’s head of news and current affairs Paul Cutler asked this provocative question at Media140 Sydney, pointing out that despite the supposed breakthroughs of social media, the genocide in Sri Lanka is failing to get much media coverage.
• Riyaad Minty: Sydney’s Speaker Pash (International Social Media Case Studies) | Media140: Paul Farrell’s commentary on the Media140 Sydney presentation by Al Jazeera’s head of social media, Riyaad Minty. Minty was one of the event’s highlights, in my opinion.
• Malcolm Turnbull | Twitter: The tweet when Australia’s opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull announced that he’d start identifying whether it was he tweeting personally, or a staffer. This came less than three hours after he was asked at Media140 whether there wasn’t an ethical issue with lack of disclosure, especially since Prime MInister Kevin Rudd made the distinction clear in his own tweets.
• The Spin Fails Here: Day One At #Media140 Sydney | The Inquisitr: The Inquisitor‘s editor Duncan Riley wasn’t happy with what he heard at Media140 Sydney, especially that Problogger creator Darren Rowse is the only Australian making money online. There is much bitterness here.
• Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging | Woolly Days: Thoughts on Media140 Sydney from Brisbane-based journalist, blogger and QUT researcher Derek Barry.
• Why the future of African journalism lies in mobile social networks | Slideshare: More solid support for the idea that the future of the African internet is mobile. Plenty of stats and some important observations from Jude Mathurine, who heads up the New Media lab at South Africa’s Rhodes University.
• Apparently editors nurture their journalists by telling them it’s okay to get stuff wrong | mUmBRELLA: One section of Laurel Papworth’s presentation at Media140 Sydney didn’t go down so well at mUmBRELLA…
• Media140 today | Visible Procrastinations: A collection of links to commentary about Media140 Sydney’s first day. I have yet to go though them, but when I do I’ll add the relevant ones to my own Delicious feed.
• Media140 Sydney: Social Media Twitter & Journalism | Laurel Papworth: Laurel Papworth’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, in which she positions social media as the people taking back control and ownership of their stories. Word and video available.
• Media140 Sydney 2009 | Flickr: Neerav Bhatt’s photos of Media140 Sydney. He seems to have captured every speaker.
• Malcolm Turnbull on the (social) media. With Fran Kelly | SlowTV: Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull is interviews by the ABC’s Fran Kelly about his use of social media in the political context, including a little bit of point-scoring.
• How social media is changing political reporting | SlowTV: The full Media140 Sydney session “How Social Media is Changing Political Reporting” with Annabel Crabb, Bernard Keane (Crikey), Chris Uhlmann (ABC), John Kerrison (Nine) and Caroline Overington (The Australian).
• Caroline Overington takes on Mark Scott and the free digital news proponents | YouTube: A 4-minute extract from Overington’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, which turned into a massive anti-ABC pro-Murdoch rant.
• Conceptual Confusion and Journalistic Process — My Highlights and Lowlights of Media 140 | The Content Makers: “The low lights came from conceptual confusions, it seemed to me. Namely the several highly respected and competent journalists who, quite apart from being clearly terrified by the arrival of the audience in the news making process, also can’t tell the difference between… a platform, and a process… [and] objectivity and integrity.”
• So what’s the “cool new toy”? | The Content Makers: Speculation about News Corporation’s plans for some digital news device. Is Apple involved? An iRupert? A RuPod? The SunKindle?
• Caroline Overington Gives Some Hints on Rupert’s Plans (and tangles with Annabel Crabb) | The Content Makers: Margaret Simons’ original report on the rather strange Media140 Sydney presentation by News Limited journalist Caroline Overington and her stoush with Annabel Crabb, who’s moving from Fairfax to the ABC.
• The ABC Springs Leaks in the Porous Digital Age. Mark Scott AGAIN. | The Content Makers: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons covers some of the announcements made my Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, at Media140 Sydney.
• Can Social Media Save Iran? | newmatilda.com: A Media140 presentation by Dr Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong. A nice debunking of some of the social media over-hype.
• John Bergin’s Media 140 Speech | The Content Makers: John runs “digital online stuff” for Sky News Australia, on the pay TV networks. This is his presentation from Media140 Sydney. Some good points about listening as well as speaking.
• Off Air: Iran, Twitter and the new media world. | Off Air: The presentation to Media140 Sydney by the highly-respected journalist Mark Colvin, presenter of ABC Radio National’s PM program.
• Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media | Quote and Comment: Jay Rosen’s presentation at Media140 covered 10 key sound-bites and what they mean for the future of journalism. Here are those ten points, with links to further material on each one.
• freesound: “The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs.” I’ve used this to source sound effects myself, and it’s wonderful.
• “I Can’t Believe We Still Have to Protest This Crap.” | Flickr: A photo taken in Washington, DC during the 27 January 2007 anti-war march. This was used by Barry Saunders in his Media140 presentation.
• Journalism — a defence | Corporate Engagement: Trevor Cook took exception to my Media140 presentation and spend a few hundred words saying so. I added a little to the discussion, and will add more later when I get time.
• Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS): This is the software which Al Jazeera and friends developed for that “War on Gaza” experiment in crowdsourced crisis information mapping. Yes, it’s free open-source software.
• War on Gaza – Experimental Beta | Al Jazeera Labs: An intriguing experiment from Al Jazeera. Anyone can post reports such as casualty counts directly to the site. all of them are then mapped categorised.
• Media140: I am the bastard child of old & new media…| The Digital Wing: The Media140 presentation from Valerio Veo, who’s been in charge of SBS News& Current Affairs Online since 2006.
• Bleating innocents or matted satans: the goat in art | guardian.co.uk: “Jonathan Jones shepherds us through goat art,” it says. Maybe that should be “goatherds us”.
• Sunday Thoughts about Journalism | Stilgherrian: Another long essay from me in September 2008 which is perhaps a prelude to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• “Trouble at t’paper” | Stilgherrian: My essay from September 2008 which formed some of the background to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• Changing spaces in media | Aide-Memoire: Kate Carruthers’ observations form Media140 Sydney. “The first thing that struck me was the level of fear and fear-mongering by some of the print journalists on day one… There seemed to be little idea amongst these panellists that changing media platforms might reinvigorate media and create new revenue or career opportunities.”
• Get with the times, Jay Rosen tells journos | ABC News: A report on Jay Rosen’s keynote from Media140 Sydney. “He says journalists should stop expecting ‘open’ platforms like blogging and Twitter to behave like traditional production systems. Instead, he emphasised the value of listening to the public and being transparent about journalistic processes.”
• Sydney Media140 sessions: The program for Media140 Sydney, held 5 to 6 November 2009, with brief speaker bios, photos and links to their Twitter profiles.

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.]

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.]

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.

Scott’s startling admission is a perspective from the inside, and speaks volumes for how dire the predictions have become for the broadsheet –- even more so given such articles are appearing regularly in the very newspapers they are talking about.

The fire Scott was talking about has been raging for some time; faced with the competition of the internet, broadsheet newspapers are struggling to come up with a way to keep making money.

Yet it’s not so long ago that newspapers were making so much money that the names of some of our most successful businessmen are synonymous with them. Titans such as Murdoch, Fairfax and Packer commanded institutions that had been making money for nearly two centuries, with no end in sight.

The origins of this money-making can be traced back to 1825. Until this time the government owned entirely what was known as the convict press. When two British lawyers, William Wentworth and Robert Wardell, began printing an independent newspaper, nobody stopped them, and by default the free printing press in Australia was born. The byproduct, of course, was that papers now had to be run on commercial imperatives.

There has been, in theory at least, a balance between popular entertainment, in order to sell advertising and fulfil the commercial imperative, and exposing the truth, in order to adhere to the notion of “protecting the public sphere”: to defend the defenceless and criticise those in power.

While newspapers were made viable with standard display advertising, they became big business on the back of one major advent: classified advertising.

Deputy editor of The Age, Andrew Rule, started working as a broadsheet journalist at a time when the newspaper was still king — when the classifieds, known colloquially as “rivers of gold”, were of such importance to Melburnians that leaking an ad before publication was a lucrative business, and in turn a sack-able offence.

“I can recall walking out of The Age on a Friday night in the late evening and seeing a queue of cars three deep, spread for four blocks, with police there trying to keep order, because people were so desperate to get Saturday’s copy of the paper, all because of the classifieds,” Rule said.

“Within a decade, that scene was gone. The classifieds lost their superiority and ad revenue started to go to other sources.”

The scene Rule described is so far out of date it’s unimaginable to later generations — the concept of having to physically queue for information because it can’t be accessed online.

The result, Rule explained, is that for the first time The Age, and similar papers, is trying to make a profit without the cushion of the classifieds, which may necessitate radical change for the newspaper industry.

“I suspect, if we have a future, that it is as a smaller circulation paper, with better material in it, at a higher cover price.”

If Rule sounds guarded about the broadsheet’s survival, it’s understandable given the steady decline in circulation in recent years.

According to the Australian Press Council, from December 2007 to December 2008, The Age‘s Monday to Friday circulation was down nearly 8 per cent.

The Sydney Morning Herald (15.1 per cent) and The Australian (10.1 per cent) also decreased in circulation during this time, and these figures only continue a long established trend of negative growth for Australia’s broadsheets.

But there is some hope in the statistics of the weekend editions.

The Age and The Australian recorded small rises in weekend circulation during this time, and the Sydney Morning Herald a much smaller drop than their weekday edition suffered. What, then, is the ongoing appeal of the weekend paper?

The answer could lie in ritual, according to Stilgherrian (a mononym he adopted in his 20s, Stil for short). Stil is a new-media figure whose output includes radio, magazines, blogging and podcasts.

“There is still an aesthetic thing about the big weekend broadsheet in particular — I can see that people will be willing to pay for it, if for no other reason than spreading the news out on the table on a Saturday morning over a cup of coffee,” he said.

Having started out working for ABC and community radio in Adelaide, Stil is now a regular online contributor for Crikey, with several of his articles focusing on the plight of newspapers in Australia.

He thinks that newspapers are “probably doomed”, but said this may not necessarily be a bad thing, depending upon what replaces them.

“It just so happens that the way history unfolded, newspapers filled the role of spreading information, but increasingly there are other ways of reaching people, other ways of distributing journalism. The problem is that newspapers, and experienced journalists are guilty of this, are thinking only within the box of what they’ve got to work with, and I think that’s really holding them back.”

This echoes the words of Rupert Murdoch, who in giving one of the Boyer Lectures in 2008 said “some journalists are misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity of the internet.”

Murdoch, Stilgherrian and Rule seem to be roughly on the same page — the future revolves, somehow, around the internet. Perhaps not astonishing news, but stark revelations by two of the men, considering their vested interest in the printing press.

An online future represents a two-fold problem for the broadsheets.

First, online advertising is not capable of generating the amount of income to which newspapers are accustomed. According to the Newspaper Association of America, since 2005 in the United States the annual print advertising revenue dropped by $A17.65 billion, while over the same time online advertising revenue was up just $A1.53 billion.

Second, newspapers have not utilised the internet as best they could, and have lost ground to a proliferation of news websites both national and international.

According to the latest AC Nielsen figures, NineMSN gets nearly half a million hits per day, well ahead of both the leading sites of Fairfax Media (smh.com.au at 390,456 hits) and News Limited (news.com.au at 264,257 hits).

Sites such as NineMSN, though, could not be said to be in the business of in-depth news; their role is breaking the bare facts of news, with an obvious emphasis on entertainment.

Independent sites such as Crikey are proving popular for users who want more than just news. Crikey‘s motto is “telling you what they won’t”, with their focus on the story behind what they call the so-called facts.

The main criticism of Crikey, and similar sites such as New Matilda, is levelled at the people writing the content.

Freelance journalists contribute to these sites, but their type is nothing new. The new media figure is the blogger, or so-called citizen journalist.

This is, essentially, an individual who reports from the ground up; an ordinary person’s experiences of or opinions on the news. It is a much-derided form of journalism, though some believe it has real merit in today’s world.

One such person is John Pilger, who said that if journalism is the fourth estate, these individuals might just be the fifth — truly independent reporters at a time when public relations is said to have infiltrated news rooms.

“Corporatism and consumerism are laying to waste the breeding grounds of free, inquiring journalism when it has never been needed more,” he said.

“In these days of corporate ‘multimedia’ in thrall to profit, many journalists have become absorbed into a propaganda apparatus without consciously realising their true role.”

For Pilger, citizen reporters, or non-journalists, not only represent the future of good quality journalism, but they can also produce a superior product to that of the existing custodians; unaccountable to media organisations, citizen journalists report with neither fear nor favour.

But herein lies the problem — the lack of accountability of these so-called “citizen reporters” brings into question their credibility.

Stilgherrian believes this assertion is misguided, and that a shift from cultural acceptance of newspapers as the trustworthiest source is inevitable.

“We trust the story on page three of The Australian, not because we trust the journalist — in many cases they don’t even have a by-line — but because of the big masthead on the front of the newspaper which says ‘The Australian‘,” Stil said.

“The journalist is dressed up in the authority of the masthead. New trustworthy sources will emerge online, and have already.”

This seems a valid point. Stil’s own employer, Crikey, has over 10,000 paying subscribers, which might pale in comparison to current newspaper circulations, but the trend is in favour of sites such as Crikey and New Matilda.

While these sites are an excellent source of news comment and news opinion, and sites such as NineMSN are more up to date on events than newspapers could ever hope to be, there is one aspect conspicuous by its absence — investigative journalism. Which begs the question; will investigative journalism be lost with the last broadsheet?

As newspapers are killed off in the United States, the country from which Australia catches its colds, a new solution has emerged: not-for-profit organisations.

The Huffington Post has launched what is now one of several public funds for investigative journalism, the idea being that the fund is overseen by an editor who decides which stories need to be told, and freelance reporters are paid out of the fund to write the stories.

This seems a viable solution in the US, with a population of over 300 million and a philanthropic culture. But it’s hard to imagine enough funding for regular investigative journalism being forthcoming from our comparatively small nation.

Individual benefactors, suggested Stil, could be the solution.

“Bill and Melinda Gates are putting billions of dollars into African health, but I can see that there will be people that will want to put their money into things we call journalism now.”

But this would seem to throw up a major problem: having investigative journalism funded by billionaire businesspeople will inherently create conflicts of interest too large to overcome.

An investigative report into Crown Casino funded by James Packer, anyone?

Perhaps, then, it’s too early to call the demise of the newspaper — maybe it does still have a role to play, albeit in a far different form.

There may be hope for The Age, for Rule is far from the old hack, rigid in his ways, which Murdoch alluded to. He is willing to concede the reality that broadsheets cannot survive as they are.

“You can’t afford to carry all the forms of journalism that those classifieds paid for. We now have cost-cutting, and central to that everybody has to pay their way.

“In the past, there were people who weren’t the best at what they did — they were second- or third-raters — but they were cushioned by those classified ads.”

Time for some tough decisions, then. The Age is moving to new offices in September of this year, offices that are smaller and that occupy cheaper land in the CBD. The prestige of newspapers, one feels, has taken a whack with this withdrawal — perhaps a necessary one.

But newspapers, and in particular broadsheets, should tread very carefully when trying to reduce their bottom lines, lest they defeat their purpose for survival.

An article in the online edition of The Economist in August of last year pointed out that newspapers were like many industries, in that “it is those in the middle — neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist, that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.”

There would two seem to be two ways for a newspaper to survive, then.

The Herald Sun has so far done a remarkable job of being entertainingly populist; the highest-selling paper in Australia continues to increase its readership with uniformly tabloid content and format. Just don’t expect investigative journalism.

In contrast, Rule concedes that at the forefront of every decision made by broadsheets must be the need to maintain quality and depth of journalism. In doing so, they can hope to appeal to what to what he said will be a smaller but more discerning share of the market.

“You can’t really maintain quality when you are using cheap or amateurish material. Photographs and words are still as difficult to do well as they ever were. And I think, going forward, we’re going to have to compete to pay for the best talent.

“Ultimately there will be high price attached to the best talent. Because whether you’re running a newspaper, or a radio station, or a boxing gym, you need the best talent there to attract people.”

So is Rule saying that cost-cutting can only go so far, that the quality of the broadsheet must be maintained if it is to stand any chance?

“In my view that’s true. The only chance we have for survival is to go for quality and hope that people will want to pay for it.”

And herein lies the crux of the issue that is the broadsheet’s future in Australia — paying for it.

The online monster that threatens to consume newspapers has many advantages, not least of all that, generally speaking, it’s free. Calls for newspapers to go online ignore the fact that papers would simply become another online news site — and in doing so lose their inherent value.

While admitting the internet might be the future for newspapers, Rule is sceptical about it as a source of news, describing it as a “trash and treasure market”, full of misinformation.

“When it comes to something deeper, what we need in this cacophony of noise is to sit down and pay for expert people, the best of their generation, to analyse what’s going on around them and to write about it.”

There have been threats to newspapers before: television has saved a few trees in its time, as has radio.

But while these two media have in many ways complemented newspapers, the internet threatens to supersede them.

How is a broadsheet supposed to compete with words (without space limitations), pictures and videos?

The best chance seems to be with good quality, accountable investigate journalism. Online news sites are perfectly suited for what they are, but ill-equipped to cover stories beyond the reporting of facts and opinions; to “protect the public sphere”.

The masthead of credibility needs to be clung onto ferociously, whatever the cost, if newspapers are to survive and serve their purpose.

Without the rivers of gold, resources need to be used more efficiently. That may mean less focus on news telling, no more weekday papers and a raft of other cost-cutting.

Rule, for his part, is no optimist regarding the plight of the broadsheet.

“It took a while for surf boards and blonde hair to get to Australia and possibly, it’s just taking a little bit of lag time before we too start executing newspapers, putting them down like old Labrador dogs.”

Let’s hope Rule, and his broadsheet cohorts, are up for the fight.

For perhaps not all of us would miss getting up on a Saturday morning and spreading the world over our tables over a cup of coffee.

But if the old Labrador dogs of this country do get the green dream, investigative journalism will be the poorer.

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…

Responding to another commenter’s suggestion that Google should set up its own news operations, dolphin-avatar’d The Finnigans said:

Google doesn’t need to. News service is also an old hat. Citizen journalism via blogs, video posting à la YouTube, social networking sites and the latest Twitter-type news sharing. News service will also heading the oblivion path that is the print and classified media are heading.

As someone who was there from the beginning, Mosiac Browser V0.1, Web Server v0,1 and HTML V0.1 on Windows NT for the main streamers. Yes, I know the Unix guys have been hacking away for years, but it did take Mosaic browser to take it to the masses on Windows.

We knew from the beginning that aggregation will be the king. We actually built the first web crawler in Australia that aggregate contents across websites. But we didn’t have the resources to build a proper search engine. So good on Google for making billions because they do build the best search engine there is.

We also knew the Web/Internet will smash the monopoly and democratise the content creation, publishing and distribution. Especially distribution, the print media was supreme because it controls its own distribution channel via the newsagency channel. Any business that has control and monopoly over the distribution network, it’s a very good and profitable business, just ask Telstra.

But now, the distribution networks or channels are commodity, especially with the arrival of the wireless. The mobiles will be king in the next few years. In Japan, Korea, USA and some European countries, 50% of the internet traffic now are coming through the mobiles. It’s still early days for the mobiles, that is why I suggested to William that he should talk to his master at Crikey about putting together a mobile version of PB.

Rupert said people should pay for the contents. I am not prepare to pay for data, information, knowledge any more, they are commodity, they are available everywhere. I will pay for wisdom. Sorry Rupert, your publications do not have any wisdom and you have missed the bus many times and still missing. Adios Amigo.

BTW: I notice Microsoft has stopped selling its encyclopedia Encarta, obviously it has been killed by Wiki, just as it killed Britannica.

Pre-fucking-cisely! I explained this in my piece Journalism in a hyperconnected world, when I discovered I could track the Bangkok riots of 7 October 2008 through Twitter far better than through any “mainstream” news outlet.

Campbell Reid, the Group Managing Director at News Limited, got it right when he told the ABC’s “Quality Journalism” forum that “me-too journalism” is the cancer because it wastes resources.

Why do news editors send someone to cover a media conference which is already being streamed live?

Take a look at the photos of this week’s G20 demonstrations in London. Why is there a pack of photographers at every little violent incident, producing hundreds if not thousands of almost-identical images?

Some news sites have already given up.

Fairfax, for instance, produced Heatwave gets them all aTwitter simply by copying and pasting tweets — spelling mistakes and all — with the journalist doing nothing more than adding some weather data cribbed from AAP and elsewhere.

As Newsphobia points out, Twitter is not a Lazy Journalist’s Replacement for Vox Pop.

Fairfax gets away with this because Twitter users are still a minority. For now. But for those who do use Twitter, who do see the trending topics display and, since the Internet is so handy, to the Bureau of Meteorology‘s weather observations, Fairfax added nothing of value.

Who were these people? Where were they? What were they doing?

Where was the engagement with the community which demonstrated that the Fairfax was producing, as The Finnigans puts it, Wisdom?

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.

[Update: In the liveblog transcript, any text in black that isn't labelled is from me. The blue comments are from others.]

If you can’t see the CoveritLive tool immediately below, then you’re not using a compatible browser.

Check out the program, and feel free to add questions, comments or requests.

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.

Humans are inquisitive, social critters. We’re hard-wired to seek out an understanding of the world around us, to find out what others are up to and slot it into a coherent narrative. Society has always provided mechanisms to meet that demand.

At one end of the spectrum there’s the folk craft we call “gossip”. Granny bubbles over the dinner table about little Sally’s wonderful performance at the kindergarten concert, sharing the joy of her delight and reinforcing the narrative that we’re a good family and Sally’s doing well. There’s Brian at the pub, seventh beer in hand, asking if we’ve heard the news, “Davo’s banging that new bird Sharon in accounts”, reinforcing the narratives that David is a bit of a larrikin and that I use outmoded sexist stereotypes.

Up the other end we’ve got big institutions like the Church, Science and the Fourth Estate of The Media constructing narratives which they call, respectively, Belief, Knowledge and News. All of them, when feeling threatened, start referring to their narratives as “The Truth”.

Between them, the folk practitioners and the professionals (and everyone in between) manufacture enough news to fill our recommended daily intake. Yes, manufacture. A TV newsroom, for example, makes 15 minutes of news each evening to fill the gap between fanfare and sports desk, choosing from the myriad of events those which best support the narrative they wish to construct.

Back in the Industrial Age, only the big end of town was visible, with its cathedrals and newsagents. Everything else happened in small groups, and was ephemeral. Once Brian had made his drunken announcement, we laughed and smirked and, later, exchanged knowing winks, but it wasn’t written down anywhere.

But now, Quelle horreur!, the means of (media) production are literally in the hands of the peasants. Even Brian’s shaky mobile phone video of Sally’s Gimme more is on YouTube for Granny to show us — not just over dinner but also to relatives across the globe. And to complete strangers, too, who wear either a happy smile at the innocence of a playful child, or a creepy leer because they reckon they can just see Sally’s knickers when she bows at the end.

(Brian’s phone also came in handy re Davo and Sharon, but I digress…)

Journalists’ union thug Jonathan Este is right. He responded to my polemic against “old media” journos by reminding us that “whingeing, old son, is the past, the present and the future of journalism… It’s what we do. Journalists love whingeing and we’re pretty damn good at it.”

Yes, you are. But what else can you do?

By an odd coincidence, as well as the Fairfax sackings, Tuesday also brought Sydney’s first Media in the Pub night. Subject: The new shape of media careers. I bought Jonathan that beer I owed him and we both watched as the usual complaints about “citizen journalists” soon emerged — that “anyone with a computer” could now “just write stuff”.

Yes, that’s precisely the point, and why I reckon going on strike is precisely the wrong thing to do.

A strike reveals that you only see your craft as doing a particular kind of cog-in-the-machine job in a particular kind of media factory, manufacturing a particular style of media widget which your colleagues in the factory reproduce, distribute and sell. Well, those factories are in decline as people explore the wider range of narratives on offer, including those constructed by their family, friends and random strangers.

Journalism is, above all, storytelling. Journalists even call each other’s best efforts “good yarns”. The human passion for hearing good yarns isn’t going away, it’s just that factory-based employee-journalists are facing increased competition for everyone’s limited attention. New kinds of media factory are emerging too, requiring different skill sets.

Journalists should be fearful for their jobs. But as I told Media in the Pub, I don’t think your current employer will show you how to become gainfully employed in the new media factories.

I also suspect the most dynamic media factories won’t emerge from the old. After all, you can’t turn a steamship into an Airbus A380, you have to start from scratch. Maybe the 5% of Fairfax’s professional journalists facing the sack should see this as an opportunity, not a threat. Maybe the other 95% could join them and create something new and wonderful.

But no. What happened is a strike. A fight for the ever-shrinking supply of deckchairs on a sinking ship. 1500 people joined a Facebook group to “save journalism”. Once more the craft is confused with the factory where it was practised.

The euphemism for “going on strike” is “taking industrial action”. Dear Journalists, how about taking some post-industrial action? Or are you saying you’re not up for it?