newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Saturday, May 14, 2016
If Canadians can subsidize the CBC, why not other media as well?
It’s hard to be a fan of someone best know for shutting down newsrooms and laying off journalists. But Postmedia president and CEO Paul Godfrey just might have a good idea.
He appeared before a Commons committee to make a plea for more federal government spending on newspaper advertising. He also asked for a system of tax breaks for businesses that advertise in newspapers.
I know about this because I read it on CBC’s website. Yes, the CBC that is subsidized by Canadian taxpayers to produce news for TV, radio and the Internet — but not print. The CBC that reported it will receive a “cash infusion” of $675 million over the next five years from the Liberal government.
Apparently, those same Liberals who didn’t think twice about straight-up cash for the CBC had a hard time imagining even roundabout support for newspapers.
Said Liberal MP Adam Vaughan: “There have been no fiercer critics of subsidies to the media than the Toronto Sun and the National Post. How do you square your editorial position with your corporate position?”
Godfrey had to explain that newspaper columnists are allowed to express opinions that don’t jive with those of the owners. I wonder if anyone at the CBC (Rex Murphy? Rick Mercer?) has ever criticized the government.
We’re told that taxpayers should be glad to support the CBC because it promotes national unity. To varying degrees, Canadians have bought into this argument. Local newspapers promote democracy and community, so it shouldn’t be a hard sell for taxpayers to support them as well.
The problem is that newspapers aren’t the only ones in trouble. Local TV stations are also facing hard times. And what about all the little news sites eking out a living — should they get help, too?
It might be tricky, but I say yes. We could figure it out.
More posts in the Journalism category
Saturday, March 19, 2016
For the first time, I'm cheering for Hulk Hogan
Hulk Hogan is not one of my favourite people, but I’m glad he won his case against Gawker. We might not care much about the privacy of a larger-than-life celebrity, but we should all care about the example this case sets for our own privacy.
Gawker posted a video of Hogan having sex with his friend’s wife. It’s tawdry, salacious and appeals to the basest of human instincts. So of course it drew millions of viewers.
A Florida jury decided this was a violation of Hogan’s privacy and awarded him $115 million.
In Canada, Hogan would have had a clear-cut case — you can’t distribute someone’s private image without their consent. Although this law is aimed at protecting young people from cyberbullying, there is no reason why it wouldn’t apply to celebrities as well.
In the U.S. there is a grey area that can be argued. Hogan’s actions took place in a private setting and he claims he no idea that he was being recorded. Still, he is a public figure who often reveals details of his private life for self-promotion.
Gawker’s lawyers have argued that within this context, it is reasonable for other parts of Hogan’s life to be revealed.
Within the letter of the law, Gawker may have a good point. The case is going to appeal, so we will be hearing a lot more about a public person’s right to privacy.
From an ethical point of view, though, I hope juries continue to uphold the principal of privacy. If they do, it will mean that the bar is set high for what is considered to be off limits. And that creates more protection for all of us.
Gawker has tried to argue that this a freedom-of-the-press issue. The implication is that if the state impinges on their freedom then it’s a slippery slope to everyone losing their freedoms.
But here’s the thing — if Gawker published a video of the president accepting a bribe, could they be sued for invading his privacy? The answer should be no. Not only is the president a public figure, but his actions in this case would be in the public interest.
That’s a lot different from pandering to prurient curiosity, and juries are smart enough to understand this.
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Saturday, February 6, 2016
Good riddance to comment trolls
The Victoria Times Colonist is the latest in a long line of news sites that has closed down its comments sections.
Editor-in-chief Dave Obee says trolls have ruined hope for anything resembling civilized debate.
Stories about the homeless bring vitriolic comments. Anything about First Nations will bring comments that reveal a staggering, sickening level of racism.
Articles about people who have bared their soul to tell their stories, in the hope of helping others, have brought calls for the person to commit suicide. Home addresses have been posted by people trying to harass others.
There may have been a time when readers would have been disappointed, but not so much any more. There seems to be more a sense of relief.
Reaction published in letters to the editor includes “bravo” and “thank you.” And I can see why. The bad commenters have shouted down reasonable people to such an extent that real discussion has died.
In fact there are now paid trolls whose job it is lurk in comments sections and hurl invective at opposing opinions. It’s their job to kill debate, so the people who employ them can carry on with as little scrutiny as possible.
On a small site, the few comments that come in can be moderated without a lot of effort. In those cases, they work. But on larger sites, it’s too much — especially when trolls deliberately target them.
One letter writer pointed out that turning off comments hides the hate but doesn’t make it go away.
And Toronto Star columnist Desmond Cole says we still need to confront discrimination and oppression in real life.
The instinct behind the closing of comments sections is perfectly understandable, but looking away from the worst in our culture is generally not a path to progress, and can leave vulnerable people at the mercy of the haters.
He’s right, of course, but I don’t agree that by turning off comments we “dismiss oppression.” Haters feed off each other and reach consensus that what they say is acceptable. It’s not, and they need to know this.
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Saturday, January 30, 2016
Newspaper heads need to give us their why
Author Simon Sinek has a theory about why people become loyal to certain products or brands. He says it starts with why — the motivation of the people who run the company.
What makes the CEO get out of bed in the morning? What does he or she do to motivate the people who work for the company? Is it something we can identify with?
Apple is a good example of this. CEO Steve Jobs turned the company around in the ’90s with a Think Different campaign that had nothing to do with computers and everything to do with core beliefs.
Since then, many people have bought into this ideal. Most recently, they have rewarded Apple with a record-breaking quarter of $18.4 billion in profits.
Another example is Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX. He has big ideas about what the future should look like — electric cars, space exploration, innovative transportation systems.
Those who admire his foresight are the ones who buy his cars, and help make Tesla a success.
Which brings me to the great sadness of newspapers. Two more dailies — in Nanaimo and Guelph — have shut down. Postmedia, owner of most of Canada’s major dailies, including the Sun and Province in Vancouver, is laying off more employees and merging newsrooms.
I wonder what motivates Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey. How about the men who run B.C.‘s newspaper chains — Black Press chairman David Black, Glacier Media chairman Sam Grippo, Aberdeen Publishing president Bob Doull?
We don’t hear much from them, so it’s hard to say what they believe in. Newspaper readers would no doubt appreciate it if they spoke publicly about great journalism. If they’re getting out of bed, thinking about building communities and holding power to account, it would be incredible to hear this.
As it stands, we’re left to believe that the people who run newspapers are simply trying to eke out some revenue before their properties are no longer viable. There is nothing wrong with this, but it’s hardly inspiring.
For inspiration you would have to turn to websites such as The Tyee or the Vancouver Observer. The people who run these news sites are quite open about why they do what they do. You might not agree with it, but there are plenty of others who do, and they are willing put up their money to keep these efforts afloat.
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post with his own money, he made it clear that he did for the journalism. And now the Post is making a solid turnaround, close to surpassing the New York Times in readership.
There are no simple solutions for newspapers, but it’s hard to imagine anyone reading them or preferring them when the people in charge are silent on how they feel about the one thing that would make us want to use their product — good journalism.
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Saturday, September 19, 2015
Readers are rebelling, and publishers better listen to them
If you go to Apple’s web page to find out what’s new in the latest version of the software that runs its iPhones and iPads, you’ll find no mention at all about content blockers.
And yet this is the iOS 9 feature that appears to be the most popular. You can now go to the App Store and download an app that blocks all the ads on websites you visit. These apps, which you typically have to pay for, are already topping the charts.
So what does it say when people stampede to pay for something? In our free enterprise system, where consumers vote with their money, it tells me that there are a lot of people fed up with increasingly intrusive advertising.
I recently clicked on a link in my iPhone that took me to a website where an ad immediately took over the page and used up so many resources that it killed the battery and the screen went blank. I can’t be the only one who has an experience like this. No wonder ad blockers are popular.
The readers are rebelling.
Many publishers, of course, are worried that if fewer people see their ads then revenues will drop and they won’t be able to afford to stay in business. To be fair, advertising does seem to be the main way to make money on the Internet these days, but it’s also true that the customer is always right. It can’t possibly be considered a good business model to do things you know annoy your readers.
Even so, CNet doesn’t seem to have learned this lesson. If you try to watch one of their videos with an ad blocker enabled, you get turned away by an obnoxious black screen. All that’s going to do is convince people that they should turn elsewhere for their news.
The problem with the Internet is that there is almost infinite supply. Demand has gone up with the convenience of mobile devices but it will never be infinite. In a situation like this, it’s really hard to make money. So publishers and advertisers increasingly resort to desperate measures. With an abundance of content, customers respond by exercising the option of moving on. Or, as is happening with the iPhone, smart app developers give them what they want — a nice, simple reading experience.
Publishers will have no choice but to adapt to the demands of their readers. It’s always been that way.
Most websites get their advertising by signing up with a company that supplies the ads. The people who run these networks should be scrambling to come up with a solution that makes readers — and, by extension, publishers — happy. Otherwise they’ll become obsolete.
Their biggest obstacle is that they measure success with “views.” If someone sees a web page with ad on it, that counts as a view — even if they didn’t actually look at the ad or absorb what was in it. It’s a shotgun approach. If you keep firing randomly, you’re bound to hit something. There has to be a better way.
In fact we might already have a solution on the horizon based on the success of La Presse, a long-time daily newspaper in Montreal that has announced that its iPad app has become so successful that it is cutting back print publication to once a week in January. They are now in the midst of helping the Toronto Star follow in their footsteps.
What’s different about the La Presse model is that it concentrates on creating a wonderful experience for readers, with advertising integrated into that experience. The main selling point for advertisers is engagement. People are willing to spend a lot of time with an app that treats them like valued customers rather just another pair of eyeballs for products they don’t want or need.
Imagine a future where La Presse sells affordable turnkey solutions like this to publishers large and small. This is the kind of innovation that will win.
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Saturday, August 29, 2015
Despite threat of death and imprisonment, journalists want their freedom
It’s been a bad week for journalists — two shot dead and two sentenced to prison for three years.
On the surface, it may not seem that these to instances have much in common, but there are parallels.
A cameraman and a reporter were shot dead while they were broadcasting a live interview in Virginia. The killer was a disgruntled former employee who felt his grievances were best expressed by going out with a bang and taking two innocent people with him.
Those journalists were just doing their job like everyone else does their job. The difference from most jobs is that it involves putting yourself out there for the world to see.
Because these two were exposed, they became targets for someone with mental issues to create a splash with a big audience.
Mohamed Fahmy, a Canadian journalist working for Al-Jazeera, along with colleague Baher Mohamed, was also just doing his job — reporting on events in Egypt. The government felt that his pieces were too sympathetic to a group it was trying to destroy (the Muslim Brotherhood), so they were hauled off to jail and convicted of supporting a terrorist group.
Fahmy’s work, of course, was also something for the world to see. In this case, the government decided — in its zeal to stamp out the main opposition — to go after Al-Jazeera in the most public way it could. The resulting show trial was a warning to the Qatar-based news agency that they should consider self-censorship when reporting about Egypt.
Even if Fahmy had been favouring the Muslim Brotherhood in his reports, don’t forget that he was merely an employee of Al-Jazeera, which could easily have told him to make changes. But Al-Jazeera is out of reach in Qatar, and besides, going after a journalist with a public face is so much more likely to catch people’s attention.
There are some who say that TV stations are doing too many live reports, and putting their journalists in harm’s way more of than necessary. The solution would be to cut back on them.
Yes, news agencies could also cut back on reports that might piss off the government. It would certainly make things safer for their employees.
While we’re at it, we could also decide to let mentally disturbed individuals and military dictators set the agenda for the news cycle.
Like anyone else, no journalist wants to be shot or imprisoned, but all the ones I’ve known would be hard-pressed to agree to any infringement on their freedom to serve the public as they see fit.
And when I say it’s been a bad week for journalists, that only tells a small part of the story. There is bad news pretty much every week for journalists.
The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates 41 journalists have been killed in 2015 and 221 imprisoned in 2014.
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Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Kamloops has a chance to show the way in a post-print world
Despite being blessed with many wonderful attributes, Kamloops maintains the dubious distinction of being the largest city in Canada without a daily newspaper. It’s been that way for about a year and a half now.
The bright side, if you can call it that, is that this city of about 80,000 souls has become a laboratory for the post-print future.
When The Daily News existed, Kamloops residents could read eight newspapers a week if you included the twice-a-week Kamloops This Week. When the daily folded, KTW upped its game to three a week, but that still left us five issues short.
That’s not just a gap in news coverage, but also a gap in revenue. Between subscribers and advertisers, a bunch of money was left on the table. Certainly, the remaining media did their best to gobble it up, but others also moved in sensing they could get a piece of the pie.
InfoTel, a company formerly known for phone books, changed the name of its website to InfoNews. It has similar sites in Kelowna, Vernon and Penticton. Kelowna-based Castanet expanded its Kamloops coverage — joining spots on its website for Okanagan cities. KamloopsBCNow — a site patterned after KelownaNow — opened shop.
All are notable for being based outside of Kamloops, and for lacking depth in their news coverage. If they are examples of the future of journalism, I can only hope that competition and improved cash flows eventually encourage them to invest in better quality.
And now we have NewsKamloops — a stand-alone news site created from scratch by people who live in the community. Every aspect of the site has Kamloops written all over it. The best part, though, is that the owners are making a serious effort at providing good journalism.
I hope the people of Kamloops give this site a chance and don’t let it slip away. We need journalism that not only informs us about the community, but makes us feel a part of it. Good journalism takes the extra step of explaining how things work so we can form opinions and build consensus.
At the same time, I hope success for NewsKamloops doesn’t come at the expense of the other media in Kamloops. As far as I’m concerned, a variety of voices makes us stronger.
NewsKamloops will no doubt go through some growing pains, and they had better be serious about listening to suggestions from readers. Right off the bat, I have a few suggestions for improving the design.
Also, I wish they would stop referring to it as a newspaper site. Why weigh yourself down with a tired old metaphor? The future is coming whether we like it or not — so we might as well embrace it. In Kamloops, we have an opportunity to show how that’s done.
More posts in the Journalism category
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Increase in popularity of ad blockers another headache for web publishers
It’s tough enough for publishers to make money to run a website, but things are getting worse with the rising popularity of ad blockers.
Digiday has put together some charts that show Google searches for the terms “ad block,” “adblock plus” and “ad blocker” have been rising steadily in the past couple of years. And so have downloads.
An ad blocker, for the uninitiated, is a plug-in or add-on for your web browser that — as you might expect — blocks out ads. They disappear as if they never existed.
The tech savvy among us have long known about ad blockers, but the rise in searches and downloads suggests they are going mainstream. It’s not often anyone feels sorry publishers, but you have to see where they’re coming from. They need revenue to pay the bills, pay the staff and pay themselves.
In Germany, some publishers have pursued court challenges, claiming that Ad Block Plus is anti-competitive and hurt their revenue. They lost.
In any case, studies have shown that Internet users already block out anything resembling advertising with their minds. Designers know this, and make sure important elements on a web page don’t look like ads — otherwise people won’t notice them.
Advertisers know this, too, but they often go to the opposite extreme, creating ads that are ever more intrusive. Some take over the page for a few seconds before you can see the content behind them.
With irksome tactics like these, it’s no wonder people are turning to ad blockers.
You might think Google, which is essentially an Internet advertising company, would be upset about the rise of ad blockers. Not just because their ads go poof, but also because the makers of ad blockers have a nice little system of ransom — forcing companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft to pay huge fees to have their ads whitelisted.
Even so, Google CEO Larry Page is surprisingly sanguine. The answer, he says, is to make ads more attractive. Talking to shareholders recently, he said:
Part of it is the industry needs to do better at producing ads that are less annoying and that are quicker to load, and all those things. And I think we need to do a better job of that as an industry.
That’s good advice, but I’ve long thought that it would be better to go with a sponsorship model. I appreciate it, for instance, when I see that a company has sponsored an app for a month in order to keep it free. It shows they trying to do some good in the world, not just extract a few quick bucks from my wallet.
Of course, the downside would be that the sponsor might be seen as having undue influence over the content of the publication. This also happens with regular advertising, but at least publishers have more flexibility in turning to other advertisers.
The truth is, there are no easy or pat answers. The people have spoken: they love the Internet but they don’t want to pay for the content.
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Saturday, March 14, 2015
Newspaper errors have a way of living on for eternity
A newspaper mistake briefly made the rounds on Twitter last week — the results of a survey showed both answers as Yes.
It was kind of funny because the person who tweeted a picture of the error asked whether this was an indication of the decline of newspapers. The answer had to be Yes because, apparently, that was only answer available. And that’s the way Twitter is — have a chuckle then move on to the next thing.
A more serious answer, of course, would be No. Someone made a mistake, just as people have been making mistakes since the time humans evolved to develop cognitive abilities.
Cavemen no doubt had inaccurate depictions in their cave paintings. Egyptian hieroglyphics could be riddled with misplaced birds for all we know. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he also invented a way for blunders to be multiplied and kept as souvenirs.
The trouble with newspaper mistakes is that they have a permanence that makes them all the more cringeworthy. Historians hundreds of years from now will search through futuristic archives, find them and have a laugh at the paper’s expense long after it has ceased to exist.
The Internet has made things worse, allowing errors to live on in listicles so that mistakes by local papers become global phenomena for years to come. Type “funniest newspaper” into Google, and you get suggestions such as funniest newspaper typos and funniest newspaper errors.
I have to admit: they are funny. I just hope that one of mine never shows up.
But seriously, an argument could be made that there are more mistakes than ever in the news wherever the printed word is found. Misspelled words are not at all uncommon in newspapers, on the Internet or on television.
Unrelenting cutbacks mean there are fewer journalists in newsrooms and fewer eyeballs to catch mistakes before they are published. I can remember a couple of times when errors got by editors and were caught by a pressman. Yes, there was a time when newspapers had presses in the same building.
Nowadays, many reporters are expected to write a story and publish it straight to the Internet. And it shows — awkward sentence structure, misplaced words, and obvious typos are all there. In the past, an editor would have corrected them.
The problem with editing your own copy is that the brain often sees what you meant to write instead of what you actually did write. Even having editors isn’t a guarantee that flubs will be fixed. These people need to be trained and experienced — it’s easier to make a good catch when you’ve seen pretty much every kind of mistake that’s ever been made.
News organizations are well aware that errors — even something as minor as misspelling “forty” as “fourty” — hurt their credibility. After all, if they couldn’t get that right, then maybe they’re getting more important things wrong as well. The facts themselves can be called into question.
Journalists hate mistakes every bit as much as readers, but they need support. And that’s been slowly dwindling away.
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Saturday, January 10, 2015
Threats to free speech don't have to come from the barrel of a gun
The murders of 12 people at Charlie Hebdo in Paris were a sick attempt at curbing free speech. They failed dismally because that publication, which was on the verge of going out of business, is now more popular than ever.
The outpouring of support from the public is heartening for journalists everywhere because they see themselves defenders of an ideal that is at the heart of a properly functioning democracy — freedom.
We in Kamloops are lucky to live in one of the safest cities of the one of the safest countries in the world. Violence, or even the threat of violence, is not something journalists here have to worry about.
There are a few exceptions. Photographers have been threatened by people at the scene of an accident who don’t want pictures taken. I was once threatened by a commenter on the old Kamloops Daily News website. I’m fairly certain that these people were simply overwrought and would never have actually harmed anyone. Still, you never know.
The real threat to a free press in Kamloops comes from the soft power wielded by those with money and power.
Perhaps the best-known case of this was when Kamloops Blazers owner Tom Gaglardi tried to dictate how The Daily News covered the team’s games. He claimed the sports editor at the time, Gregg Drinnan, was too negative. Likely, he feared negativity would hurt ticket sales.
I’m proud that The Daily News stood up to this pressure and Drinnan was allowed to continue writing about the Blazers as he saw fit. I’m not so proud of the readers who chimed in their support for Gaglardi — as if a person’s style of writing were reason enough to suppress it.
People sometimes accuse reporters whose stories they don’t like of “just trying to sell papers.” The truth is that newsstand sales typically make up only a small portion of newspaper revenue. Closer to the mark would be an accusation that they are trying to kowtow to advertisers. That actually does happen.
Ask yourself when was the last time you saw an editorial or column criticizing the chamber of commerce or some other business group. It would take a very brave publisher to allow this, because the members of those groups are advertisers and they have a weapon that is more powerful than guns — the threat of pulling their ads.
This might seem like small potatoes compared with what happened in France. Just be aware that pressures on free speech are everywhere. It’s a matter of degree.
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