Will media survive? In what way?

The luminar­ies of the Aus­tralian media scene swan in and out of the con­fer­ence. Eric Beecher, young­est editor of the SMH ever then founder of Text Media (and hence once my ex-big boss) and now of course owner of Crikey; Mike van Niekerk, online chief at Fair­fax (and the man who head-hunted me for The Age); Karim Tem­samani, now Gen­eral Man­ager of Google Aus­tralia and New Zea­l­and, once group man­ager at Fair­fax Magazines and hence my ex-big boss; now on stage, Mark Scott, now Man­aging Dir­ector of the ABC and once Deputy Editor of The Age and hence the man who hauled me over the coals for a freel­ance writer’s con­flict-of-interest indis­cre­tion. I’ve met these men fleet­ingly, if at all (Karim was a voice on the phone, once). I want to speak to them in the breaks but apart from Eric Beecher, they flit in to present and then leave, far too import­ant to stay and network.

I am fas­cin­ated to listen to their pearls of wisdom. I am inspired and yet wist­ful that I feel myself so strongly to be an out­sider again. Then in the break, I find myself chat­ting to Tiy Chung, com­mu­nic­a­tions dir­ector for Green­peace, or Jenny Farrar, from the MEAA who’s going to Switzer­land on Sat­urday to cover the nuc­lear non-pro­lif­er­a­tion treaty because she’s involved with Mayors for Peace. 

Back to listen­ing to this ses­sion though. News­pa­pers are dead, appar­ently. And everything else is con­ver­ging. So far, old news.

Quote of the day, Roy Greenslade on Andrew Jaspan, editor of the Age: “I used to work with him at the Sunday Times in London. I’ve been fol­low­ing his career and I’m aghast at a man of such lim­ited talent rising so high.”

Facts of interest:

• The Guard­ian has more read­ers in the US than in the UK
• Aus­tralian online sites don’t care about being flooded with links from Boing Boing or Drudge because Nielsen only meas­ures Aus­tralian clicks and that’s what the advert­isers want.
• The major sites are all redesign­ing their story/article pages and see them as more import­ant than the home page because that’s the most likely point of site entry now, thanks to blogs, aggreg­a­tion sites, RSS feeds, newsletters.
• There is no longer a national con­ver­sa­tion in the home, that the news­pa­per used to engender – Roy Greenslade again
• Every minute of every day, 10 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.
• Teens atti­tude: if news is import­ant enough, it will find me.
• 10–25% of the net has changed every time Google indexes it.
• Google paid $4.5b in adsense rev­enue last year (? not sure of the timeframe)
• Mark Scott believes that many view­ers came to Summer Heights High through MySpace *because* they gave the char­ac­ters MySpace pages and referred to it in epis­ode 1. But how can this apply to journalism?
• Max Uechtritz makes a dis­tinc­tion between qual­ity journ­al­ism and ‘good tabloid journ­al­ism’. He says grow­ing the audi­ence is vital because pro­pri­et­ors will fund good journ­al­ism if the num­bers are there, so whether you get the num­bers through Face­book does­n’t matter because in the end you are still being able to fund the good qual­ity journalism.
• News­pa­pers have lost money over many peri­ods but are sus­tained by being part of diverse groups such as the Fin­an­cian Times sur­viv­ing because it was part of Pear­son. – Roy Greenslade.
• Wash­ing­ton Post now only makes 10% of earn­ings for the WP organ­isa­tion. It now makes most of its money from edu­ca­tion but the Post is still the spir­itual core of the organ­isa­tion. – Mark Scott.
• Five years ago, 75% of Fair­fax earn­ings was from Herald/The Age. Now it’s around 25% but bulk is still from print.
• Video is the next big thing.
• Mark Scott is really on the ball and I’m very impressed with him. “As editor you know a little bit, the news­room knows a bit more, but the read­er­ship knows the whole story. We’ll always be broad­cast­ing but increas­ingly we’re going to host the con­ver­sa­tion. We recog­nise that we are no longer the broad­caster as oracle, par­tic­u­larly with younger audi­ences who want to be par­ti­cipants.
  Still going to have report­ers, but we’re also going to have space. People want to con­trib­ute and be part of the media exper­i­ence. If you can manage that and com­ple­ment it with the journ­al­ism you’re doing, it can add up to more than what you were as the oracle.”

Most hated word of the day: Monetise.