The hares are running on the proposition that the Fairfax Media board is considering a medium-term plan to give up on printed Monday to Friday editions of its main mastheads in favour of a digital-only strategy.
And while we’ve all been looking the other way, News Limited has quietly downsized newsrooms and subs benches at several of its titles, including the Geelong Advertiser and the company has outsourced some backroom functions.
The newspaper industry is quietly dying.
But will it matter to most of us? Avid readers will miss the pleasure of print, but the news will still be available in other formats.
It is fears about the dwindling bottom line that is driving talk of abandoning daily newspapers at Fairfax and the paywall strategy at News Limited. We can perhaps get an idea of the future from looking at recent events in the United States.
Closures, shuttering and digital only “newspapers”
At least 13 large US newspapers have closed since 2007 and 10 or more have cut back two or three editions a week, instead of publishing every day.
The argument is that by eliminating high-cost low-return editions the more profitable days can be continued and the newspaper brand survives.
Every man woman and child in New Zealand has just paid about $22.20 towards the production costs of Lord Porkpie’s The Gobbit. It’s not quite enough to give us Gold Class, but seriously: Shouldn’t we all now get a ticket to see this Warner Bros blockbuster?
After all, thanks to the Teflon Gollum we effectively sold Middle Earth for a song and a dance.
And what is the opportunity cost of handing over nearly $100 million to Hollywood moguls?
Well, one lost opportunity would be to hire 166 more teachers for ten years, or approximately the same number of nurses and radiographers.
Seriously, what’s more valuable to New Zealand: better health and education outcomes, or a handful of tourist shekels and a promotional DVD?
How can the Teflon Gollum justify the social cost of helping out Warner Bros against the future of Kiwi children?
At a time when the National government is crying poor and refusing to give pay rises to health workers and teachers where does the $100 million come from?
Effectively everyone who works on The Gobbit in New Zealand is on welfare!
We’re told the movie will create thousands of jobs and enhanced tourism opportunities, but where are the numbers? So far it’s just a hollow promise. I’ve seen one economist’s estimate that about $1.5 billion will be generated in New Zealand, but no source is given for the data [ANZ chief economist Cameron Bagrie]. And if you see the numbers below, that $1.5 seems wildly inflated to me.
Significantly, other benefits are harder to pin down:
Work by NZIER in 2002 suggested the Lord of the Rings trilogy created 800 jobs for three to four years, and brought in $300 million-plus in foreign exchange earnings annually, although polling for Tourism New Zealand found a very small percentage of tourists were motivated to visit because of the films. [Stuff.co.nz]
What we do know is that Lord Porkpie made about $10 million for the first three LOTR movies, so he’s likely to score another $5 million or so.
And the LOTR trilogy grossed well over $1 billion for the studios
Rottentomatoes.com provides the following statistics:
The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring:
Box Office: $313,837,577
VHS Rentals: $17,160,000
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers:
Box Office: $340,478,898
VHS Rentals: $9,460,000
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King:
Box Office: $376,958,965
VHS Rentals: $3,030,000
Taking those statistics for the film we can add them up and find a total:
$1,060,925,440
Other estimates place the total at well over $2 billion.
So why does Warner Bros need tax breaks anyway? The simple answer is to put more precious in the pockets of shareholders?
A further question if I may: Why are we led to believe that the budget for The Gobbit is $670 million when the total cost of the LOTR trilogy was under $300 million?
Another aspect of this is the irony of a free-market government and its libertarian partners in the ACT party helping to minimise the market risk for a multinational corporate giant.
The Teflon Gollum loves to talk up his free market and money market credentials, but he’s the first to dish out a tonne of cash in the form of corporate handouts.
Congratulations Middle Earth, you have won another bag of Piiiiie Napplumps.
New Zealand is Middle Earth, complete with archaic employment laws, ignorant tribes of Gobbits and a semi-rural, semi-feudal social system that honours caste by birth or by wealth.
Tens of journalists turned up today to absorb and repeat Lord Porkpie’s message of anti-Australian hatred and ultra-moral national heartiness.
Journalists swell the crowd at Lord Porkpie's Auckland witch hunt
I’m in that usual happy-anxious phase that authors get into when their manuscript is in the production process, but the first pages have not come back with editor’s queries and comments.
It’s a double-edged feeling because you are happy to have the MSS off your hands, but anxious because you don’t really know what the editor thinks and, even worse, stuff keeps happening. Stuff that would be good in the book. “Damn!”
This is really obvious in the world of News 2.0. The rate of change has not slowed, just because I’ve reached my contracted word length.
However, I’m also feeling a little smug (dangerous, hubris inducing, I know) because I see evidence again that one of my key theses is correct.
In my exposition about why I’m arguing for the term User Generated News-like Content (UGNC), rather than “citizen journalism”, I make the point that the once radical posture of Indymedia and citizen journalism and the innovative use of collaborative technologies has been superceded by the MSM’s attempts to monetize the stream of cheap and free content they get from consumers – iReport on CNN is the best example, but not the only one.
Now I am a bit disappointed, but not surprised, that one of the world’s leading media and journalism research institutes is touting a conference for news executive at which they can learn how to exploit UGNC for profitable ends.
Participatory journalism. Crowdsourcing. Pro-am. Whatever you call it, you’re probably debating how to create or expand user content for your organization.
…
Explore the benefits (and drawbacks) of enlisting volunteers or semi-professionals to cover the stories your professional team can’t. Learn how to maximize impact and create a system that makes sense for your newsroom.
Another interesting development from Poynter is a scheme to give some training to these UGNC newsroom volunteers.
Yes, lift your jaw up off the floor. It’s actually about training them to a level so that they can attain a Poynter Institute “certificate of understanding of journalism basics and skills”.
That is, turning them into real “journalists”. Perhaps not, it will be a low value qualification; probably more aimed at making your volunteer feel special and to not really mind being exploited.
In News 2.0 I suggest that monetizing and exploiting UGNC is going to become more common and that it totally undercuts any suggestions that UGNC will be a real defining challenge to the mainstream.
The MSM is fighting for its survival – this is no more than the dynamic of global capitalism – and it will do so by any means necessary.
The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over. The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph.
The writing is on the wall…but actually the content creators were not in Beijing with Rupert Murdoch; they’re scattered across the globe and Murdoch wants their content, he just doesn’t want to pay for it.
Can you imagine a future without journalism: a time in which journalists are replaced by “content directors” and amateurs?
As journalist and commentator Peter Kirwan put it in Wired magazine:
If traditional journalism is too expensive, and if user-generated content really is “good enough”, the way forward seems obvious.
For some news industry managers, this is a happy prospect: they can legitimately get rid of the expensive journalists, take your amateur copy for free and rake in the profits.
It’s only been 24 hours, but I think I’ve got a bit of post-writing depression.
I sent the manuscript for News 2.0 to my publisher yesterday and this morning a friend sent me a link to Michael Massing’s piece in the New York Review of Books from a couple of weeks ago.
It’s depressing when you work for two years on a project and just when you think it’s finished some new information comes along that you’d love to include. But I guess it’s the nature of books written about contemporary events; at some point the author and the publisher have to call a halt. Books that survey recent history and the process of ongoing change can never be more than a snapshot.
In this case Massing’s piece is about the financial health of the American news industry and the growing interest in paywalls (or, if you like “pay walls”) around online content. It seems that a number of publishers are now introducing them with some effect, though it’s not all beer money and skittles.
I’ve done a chapter on this issue and I’d have loved to get just one punchy quote from Massing’s piece in there; maybe I’ll get a chance during the editing process.
Either way “A new horizon for the news” is well worth reading, particularly if you have an interest in the future of journalism and the news.
“Hat tip” to Dave for the link; better late than never.
So the axe is falling again at TVNZ. Yesterday’s announcement that TVNZ management will shave $25 million from the national broadcaster’s budget was not a surprise. In some circles it’s what we might call a “pre-emptive buckle”.
That is, the organisation has chosen to chop off it’s own little finger, rather than have the Nationals’ Razor Gang do the job. The Yakuza has a similar punishment ritual, it’s meant to demonstrate iron discipline, instill fear and, through fear, loyalty.
Understandable really. Better to be in charge of your own destiny, even if it’s the death of a thousand cuts. At least when hacking into your own flesh (if it’s not a death wish) you can have a decent first aid kit on hand to stem the blood flow.
On paper (on screen?) it looks like the cuts are evenly spread.
The top executives have agreed to a pay-freeze (head-shaking, “Why?”). I guess this demonstrates their commitment to the organisation and it’s supposed to send a signal that the pain is being shared and that the top rung is leading from the front.
Though, if you’re lemmings heading for a clifftop fall, who wants to be in the front line. Tired cliche I know and lemmings don’t actually rush head-long off clifftops, but why let the truth get in the way of a good urban-myth-as-metaphor line.
New Zealand public broadcaster TVNZ is facing more staff cuts as it struggles to continue paying a dividend to the Government. One might think that given the public service aspects of TVNZ’s Charter that the government, as the major shareholder, might forgo some of its dividend in order to help the organisation weather the current financial storm.
Not so says Broadcasting Minister Jonathon Coleman.
According to news reports TVNZ is facing a $25 million budget cut and could shed upwards of 100 staff. At the same time the network’s advertising revenues are down $30 million, so the size of the black hole is fairly obvious.
Richard Wagstaff, PSA National Secretary was on Morning Report today outlining the situation from the staff point of view. What’s ominous in this is that redundancies won’t be voluntary, but rather strategically targetted. That has to be a worry for a number of reasons.
The Broadcasting Minister was also on Morning Report and he defended the government’s decision to insist on a “return on investment” from TVNZ – that is another large payout to shareholders for the current financial year.
Jonathon Coleman’s rhetoric is interesting. He was focused on the commercial aspects of TVNZ which highlights the problems you have when an erstwhile public service broadcaster is also treated as a commercial entity. The contradictions are huge, but Coleman stuck to the line that the government would insist on the dividend.
His argument – that it would set a dangerous precedent for other companies – is totally hollow. The idea that if the government allowed TVNZ to drop the dividend it would set a “dangerous precedent” for other businesses is just verbal twisting. While the government is prepared to offer “bail out” funds to other businesses, and incentives to retain jobs, it is prepared to let TVNZ cut to the bone an essential public service.
The idea that taxpayers should get a “return on investment” for the money given to TVNZ is philosophically suspect. Governments run public services on behalf of the public, not as business enterprises. The return for the taxpayers of New Zealand in having a strong public broadcaster is a quality news and current affairs service, innovative and entertaining programming and a national conversation that benefits all of us.
The idea that governments should run profitable enterprises is a hang-over from neo-liberalism, but it should be no surprise that the National government wants to run things this way.
Cuts to TVNZ are part of Nationals’ slash and burn policy towards the public sector. It is an ideological agenda designed to cut deeply into social services.
But as far as TVNZ is concerned, there’s a bigger worry.
A weaker news and current affairs service is less able to critically report on government policies. The regime of cuts also makes TVNZ politically vulnerable to interference.
Knowing that the budget is tight and that further cuts are likely, is TVNZ less inclined to criticise National and its coalition partners – a sort of silencing by stealth and fear?
End of the day update: For some history Chris Trotter’s Bowalley Road has a good piece today. TVNZ to be bled white
An interesting report in the UK Guardian media pages yesterday (26 Jan) regarding Tony O’Reilly’s troubled Independent News and Media.
INM is a 39% stakeholder in APN, publishers of the New Zealand Herald. This stake was on the market, but INM has announced that it has given up on finding a buyer at the moment because of the shaky gobal financial system.
Globally the INM group is undertaking a series of cost-cutting measures which have already affected APN’s New Zealand titles, including The Listener, the Herald and a range of suburban titles, such as The Aucklander.
According to a statement issued by INM yesterday (26 Jan) the company is committed to shedding “loss-making” assets, but there is no indication of which parts of the company these might be. In Auckland APN staff must be wondering about their fate too. It seems that, for the moment, they’ve had a repreive.
The group’s UK assets, including the Independent, are also in a state of flux as a merry-go-round of moves in the UK newspaper industry continues. A Russian oligarch and former KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev, was able to buy the London Evening Standard newspaper last week for just one pound, which shows just how much of a crisis there is in news media assets.
Perhaps Mr Lebedev’s British staff will have to follow the example of reporters on his Russian paper, Novoya Gazeta,who have taken to carrying guns since a young journalist, Anastasia Baburova, was murdered in Moscow last week (21 Jan).
Anastasia Baburova, a journalist for the investigative newspaper “Novaya Gazeta”, and leading human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov were shot by a lone gunman after a press conference in Moscow given by Markelov, report the Glasnost Defense Foundation (GDF) and other IFEX members.
Markelov represented the family of Kheda Kungayeva, whose murder led to the first prosecution for the killing of a civilian during the Chechen conflict, is believed to have been the main target. He had just publicly denounced at the conference the release of Kungayeva’s murderer from prison.
Baburova, who reported on the conflict in Chechnya as well as on the activities of neo-Nazi groups in Russia, had attended the press conference and was talking to Markelov outside a Moscow metro station when the gunman opened fire. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Baburova was shot in the head as she tried to prevent the killer from escaping and died a few hours later. [IFEX.org]
An interesting piece on Jafa Pete’s blog about the rights of journalists when it comes to trade unions. Particularly if their union, like the EPMU in New Zealand, campaigns on behalf of a particular political party during elections. [The freedom to belong]
The question is about union membership affecting the ability of reporters to be fair and balanced. Alternatively you could pose this as: Are journalists compromised by their membership of a union that aligns itself to a political party?
As you can imagine [dribblejaws alert] I don’t think it really matters. In fact, I’d go a step further and say that journalists natural class alignment is with the workers. Even more, journalism would be better if reporters recognised this basic class instinct and acted on it at all times.
My argument’s a simple one, journalists are proletarians. They have a typically proletarian relationship to capital and to capitalism. The ideology of professionalism masks this and creates all sorts of confusion.
Posted by Ethical Martini 
human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov were shot by a lone gunman after a press conference in Moscow given by Markelov, report the Glasnost Defense Foundation (GDF) and other IFEX members.
Ethical Martini 