The Digital Wing

Edit: been wanting to write this for a couple of weeks but its been crazy … so as they say ‘better late than never’!

Last week’s The National Press Club address by News Limited Chairman & CEO John Hartigan a couple of weeks back has set the cat among the pigeons in some pretty high-profile areas of Australia’s media – particularly after he took aim at blogs, labelling them ‘all eyeballs and no insight’.

You can see full text of the speech here, but I’ve taken the liberty of pulling out some of the more contentious quotes that had many bloggers and independent media outlets frothing at the mouth.

On news commentary sites such as The Huffington Post, Newser, The Daily Beast, Crikey and Mumbrella:

Most of the content on these sites is commentary and opinion on media coverage produced by the major outlets.  These sites are covered in links to wire stories or mainstream mastheads. Typically, less than 10% of their content is original reporting.  The sites that produce a high proportion of original content aren’t making a profit. Almost anyone can start one of these sites, with very little capital, no training or qualifications.

On Bloggers:

In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for – something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.

And the punchline on bloggers:

Like Keating’s famous “all tip and no iceberg”, it could be said that the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insight.

Hartigan also played the company line – throwing his support behind the notion that people will pay for quality content online.

Then just moments after deriding blogs he heaped praise upon News Limited’s own blogging venture The Punch.

The Punch has taken off like a rocket since it was launched in May – our target was to achieve traffic of 80,000 users in the first month. It’s actually achieved almost 200,000.

I know it’s early days. But I think the success of The Punch is because it’s different; it’s surprising, it’s entertaining and it’s relevant.

It’s a pretty big investment in something completely new in Australian journalism.

Unsurprisingly the blogosphere struck back pretty swiftly – Crikey leading the pack by first describing News Limited as the old Soviet Union, then backing it up with an article listing all of the ‘quality journalism’ they’d like to see behind a paywall.

Others like Lavartus Prodeo just sat back and enjoyed the sh*t storm as it unfolded via editorial pieces including this show of support by Mark Day in the News Corp owned The Australian.

While I admit I was a little fired up that News Limited could so obviously ignore the rise of these alternative, independent media outlets – with the benefit of reflection it’s pretty obvious that there is an agenda at work here.

Hartigan made some salient points in his speech – pointing out Australian newspapers continue to do well in the Australian market. But the real clue to the motives behind his attacks was his point on the tiny ad revenues generated in online:

The problem is, an online reader generates about 10% of the revenue we can make from a newspaper reader.

So, for every reader we lose from the paper we need to pick up 10 online.

Bottom line – online needs a better revenue stream as the newspaper business would crumble faster than a Mike Tyson opponent if all the readers abandoned the paper for the PC en masse. And News Corp reckons it has the content to attract the payments.

It’s a critical issue in this whole old media vs new media model and one that hasn’t been worked out yet. If anyone could make paid content work it would be News Corp with its huge resources.

Personally – I don’t think it will fly. It’s obvious we do need a new business model for online as the idea of ad impressions and the tiny revenue they deliver per thousand is hardly big fish.

I wonder whether a kindle-type device could garner monthly subscriptions – combining the best of the web with the best of the paper in a fantastic multimedia experience. But maybe its pie in the sky?

My speech to the Uni of Melbourne’s Future of Journalism conference goes into detail on how I see the role of journalists changing – I think it’s up to the Australian media to embrace this with open arms and start engaging with their audiences instead of just talking at them…