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Opinion | Features
My memo to your boss
So let me guess?
You really want to come to Mumbrella360, but you’ve got to justify the time and cost to your boss?
Good news! I think I can help.
Woz not great
In this guest post Tony Prysten argues that the thousand dollar price of seeing out-of-touch Apple co-founder Steve Wozniack on his Australian tour was a waste of money.
This week, for the cost of two iPads (yep, two) I went to the Woz Live conference in Melbourne. I was not impressed.
What the hell is transmedia?
From advertising campaigns to online video series, the term ‘transmedia’ gets quite the work out. But what does it actually mean? Cathie McGinn trawls the media landscape for a definitive definition.
Transmedia, all media and multiplatform are terms often used interchangeably when referencing modern storytelling techniques. Yet, depending who you speak to, there are distinct differences between them.
According to industry experts Encore spoke to, the key elements that define transmedia can be summarised as follows: platform, time, audience, adaptation, and creative collaboration.
Innovation is the remedy for the ailing magazine industry
With magazine circulations plummeting, FHM closing and rumours rife on future ownership of ACP Magazines, Paul Merrill says the only way forward is launching new titles.Eight years ago in the UK, nearly a quarter of all magazine sales came from magazines that were less than four years old. In Australia, the figure was slightly lower, but still significant. Today, the situation is very different. For a start there are so few new magazines. Yes, Masterchef briefly flared, and Top Gear made an initial impact. But Grazia and Alpha fizzled, and now ACP has shelved their plans to launch Elle.
More than a game: broadcasting the Olympics
The 2012 London Olympics will be the biggest televised sporting event of our time. Brooke Hemphill discovers the logistical challenges and technical requirements of producing the event.
From July 27 to August 12, the Australian media will go sport crazy as the Games of the XXX Olympiad, aka the 2012 London Summer Olympics, unfold. The games will be the most televised sporting event of our time as broadcasters look to master every manner of technology at their disposal.
The Voice - Australia's best example yet of social TV
In this guest post, Sputnik’s Rodd Messent has a theory on why audiences have taken to The Voice .I am an addict of Channel Nine’s hit show The Voice. Such is the extent of my addiction I seriously think my housemate might kick me out of our apartment for the semi-frenzied yelling and tweeting that ensues in our lounge room each time the show airs.It’s the first time in almost three years that such disagreement has resulted in less than civil behaviour towards one another, and it’s made me think it might be a microcosm of the large volume of online debate about the show and, correspondingly, an explanation for its success as a social TV experience.Why brands are the US Army - and culture jammers are the Viet Cong
In this guest posting, Dave Burgess, who painted ‘No War’ on the Sydney Opera House, claims that ‘amoral’ advertisers have copied his idea.
Culture jamming is a 28-year-old term coined by the San Francisco-based band Negativland, who declared that the ‘Studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large’.
Branded content is dead. Long live branded content
In this guest posting, Anthony Freedman argues why branded content is making a comeback.
A few short years ago, probably concurrent with the advent of the PVR, a new term emerged within the marketing communications industry; branded content. This was really synonymous with advertiser funded TV shows where programming was created by brands and deals struck with networks to broadcast them.
There were varying degrees of success with this model.
Shock advertising: 30 ads that would give Australia's ad watchdog a coronary
Is shock an underused weapon in Australian advertising, asks Robin HicksToday, Sydney agency The Cabana Boys used an image of a mouth sewn together to shock people with the idea that problem gamblers lie to conceal their habit. Is it the most disturbing image ever? No. Will it get banned by the Advertising Standards Bureau? No. But it did make me wonder why shock is not used more often in Australia – and not just by charities and government bodies. (WARNING: NSFW)
The making of ratings blockbuster The Voice
Jason Mountney goes on the set of Channel Nine’s talent search series, The Voice, to see how the format, based on an international franchise, has come together. What ingredients have gone into making this certified hit that’s rated more than two million viewers on three consecutive nights?
Mike Goldman has one of the toughest jobs on the set of the Nine network’s new talent show, The Voice. He not only has to narrate the show, but also keep the audience from losing their enthusiasm as they realise shooting TV programs takes a lot longer than the one-hour bursts they see in their lounge rooms. A lot longer.
Nine problems stopping The Global Mail from getting an audience
While it’s a shame The Global Mail has failed to make an impact on the media landscape, the signs have been there for some time.I love the concept of a well resourced, philanthropically-funded independent news site. Anywhere in the world, that’s a rare and wonderful thing. In Australia even more so. So I hope that Grame Wood gets to see his investment make a difference.
And I have no inside info on whether Monica Attard’s sudden departure is linked to the site’s failure to find an audience so far.
Regardless, here are nine areas they can easily start to address:
Journalism’s new model?
Does the launch of philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail signal a new era for journalism or is the model destined to be a passing fad, asks Cathie McGinn in this article first published in Encore magazine.With little fanfare, philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail launched in February this year.
The online-only title received a generous five-year funding commitment from businessman Graeme Wood, founder of accommodation website wotif.com, who donated $15million.
Five things that make a great suit
In this guest posting, Gareth Collins argues that the role of a great account manager is to make the work betterI’m surprised at how many suits I meet who don’t know their role in the advertising business. The question ‘what does an advertising account manager or director do?’ is frequently met with answers such as project manager, relationship manager, plate spinner or go between … and those are the nice ones.
Success is judged on the ability to manage a process, be strong administratively and get stuff done. And while a good suit needs to do all of these things brilliantly, if these are the traits that define a great suit, then I’m in the wrong job.
What the hell is transmedia?
From advertising campaigns to online video series, the term ‘transmedia’ gets quite the work out. But what does it actually mean? Cathie McGinn trawls the media landscape for a definitive definition.
Transmedia, all media and multiplatform are terms often used interchangeably when referencing modern storytelling techniques. Yet, depending who you speak to, there are distinct differences between them.
The top seven...most patronising pieces of communication
Sometimes brands have big ideas. Sometimes marketers get so caught up with a grandiose idea that instead of finding engaging ways to sell breakfast cereal, they start to believe their own rhetoric. And sometimes it’s just lazy marketing. Here are my top seven inadvertently patronising pieces of communication…
1) Last night thousands of women gathered in Sydney’s Centennial Park to take part in She Runs the Night, an event created by Nike.
Australian newspapers ‘will stop printing by 2022′
Newspapers have 12 years or less left to live in print, the Newspaper Publishers Association will be told later this week.
Ahead of Thursday night’s Newspaper of the Year Awards, the NPA is holding a “Future Forum” during the day fronted with a keynote speech from digital consultant Ross Dawson.
In a release from the NPA, Dawson says: “By 2022 newspapers as we know them will be irrelevant in Australia. However the leading newspaper publishers of today may have transformed themselves to thrive in what will be a flourishing media industry.”
Dawson claims to have predicted tyhe rsie of social networking and microblogging in his book Living Networks which he wrote in 2002.
During the speech Dawson will claim that devices such as the iPad and its successors mark the future of newspapers, and that “by 2020 entry-level devices to read the news will cost less than $10 and often be given away. More sophisticated news readers will be foldable or rollable, gesture controlled and fully interactive.”
He also predicts that “Journalism will be increasingly crowdsourced. Substantial parts of investigative journalism, writing and news production will be ‘crowdsourced’ to hordes of amateurs overseen by professionals.”
Other speakers at the Sydney event include News Ltd boss John Hartigan and Foxtel CEO Kim Williams.
August 24th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
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Comments
24 Aug 10
3:16 pm
Thanks.
Correction: I did not say that newspapers “will stop printing”. As reported, I said that “newspapers as we know them will be irrelevant”, which is not quite the same thing.
24 Aug 10
3:18 pm
Hi Ross,
The headline on your press release was: “Death of newspapers by 2022, says leading media futurist”.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
24 Aug 10
3:19 pm
Hi Ross, what if the crowd are not reliable journalists? How does one distinguish accurate information?
Matt Balogh
24 Aug 10
3:22 pm
Crap, I’ve got 12 years to find a new job!
24 Aug 10
3:24 pm
More importantly – what will Puss do his business on?
24 Aug 10
3:27 pm
Hi – love your thoughts on Magazines and their expiry date?
24 Aug 10
3:33 pm
Bloggs development of a suitable arrangement for these sort of issues where amateurs are being supervised by professionals is already being done, for example, sites like the German Wikipedia are experimenting with having experts review amateurs.
Having said that, considering the current *reliable* journalists, I am not sure that the public might be better.
24 Aug 10
3:34 pm
Great article, but I really wish someone would put spell check on before publishing. Regardless or not whether it is printed on paper or online, there are no excuses for poor grammar.
24 Aug 10
3:38 pm
Matt, Theo:
Crowdsourced journalism is about many people sensing/ seeing/ reporting the news as it happens, filtering and selecting what is newsworthy, checking facts, providing content and analysis, and other functions. Many of these tasks can and will be done by amateurs. What makes the final output valid, credible and useful is the (sometimes) structured process in which all this happens, and the role of the professional in overseeing it.
So journalistic skills will still have a very important role – and a value which commands decent pay – while many contribute to creating richer, better news for all.
24 Aug 10
3:40 pm
@Keith has a rather excellent point there. Newspapers serve any number of useful secondary purposes. What would we do without them?
24 Aug 10
3:46 pm
Ross, sounds like you are describing exactly what has always happened – journalists distill information accessed from interview subjects and other sources. All that changes is the method of delivery from subject to journalist. The same thing happened when the first telegraph replaced messengers on horseback. The speed changed but the process didn’t.
24 Aug 10
4:11 pm
Bret, yes the overall news reporting process will be quite similar in many ways to what it has been, but I think it’s a stretch to say it is exactly what has happened before. When many of the ‘journalists’ involved in the process are both amateur, and able to disseminate all of their ‘news’ and thoughts about to everyone along the way, it does become a different world. I often look to Twitter as a great, though unfiltered, source of news and insight.
Keith, Kapinny, you’re absolutely right. It sounds like there may be a market opportunity for someone!
24 Aug 10
4:17 pm
12 Years? That long? Really?
24 Aug 10
4:19 pm
So when Ross says that “Crowdsourced journalism is about many people sensing/ seeing/ reporting the news as it happens, filtering and selecting what is newsworthy, checking facts, providing content and analysis” … is that like all the television stations treating the Clare (chk chk boom) Werbeloff concoction as real news. I can hardly wait.
But a bit of advice for Theo – forget journalism – go back to uni and start a degree in law majoring in libel and defamation (throw in a bit of copyright to cover all the bases) – you’ll be set for life.
24 Aug 10
4:27 pm
Peter, personally I believe that crowdsourced fact-checking and verification is going to be a lot better than what we have now. We will see.
John, if it’s earlier then I’m still right
It’s better to tell people less extreme things that they can believe rather than realities that they feel they can discard out of hand.
24 Aug 10
4:34 pm
Yeah 12 years huh…..im sure its inevitable that we all will one day read news online, ipads, phones etc BUT LETS NOT BE NOSTRADAMUS please mate and tell us 12 years.
12 Years, not 13…….not 11 BUT 12……..OK i will go and adjust my business plan fellas.
F…Me…Dead… folks lets just concentrate on this fin year and see what develops and let it all run its natural course.
24 Aug 10
4:39 pm
Wow – that 10 year “newspapers will be not as we know them in 10 years time” cycle came around quickly.
I was working at Fairfax in advertising back on the early noughties – and the doomsayers were saying by 2010 wait for…. wait for it…. “newspapers will be not as we know them” ta dah.
I am a digital guy through and through – but i keep hearing there has been repeated growth in newspaper circulation and readership year on year.
24 Aug 10
4:48 pm
What’s your definition of journalist compared with reporter, Ross?
24 Aug 10
5:00 pm
What worries me is the integrity of the reporting. You can argue that newspapers have agendas but I believe the facts when a professional journalist is writing for a reputable paper (or its website). These UGC-powered media coups like the Iran election coverage on Twitter were a load of rubbish. I was excited until I realised I was wading through repetition and little of it was founded. Exciting? Yes. Reliable? No. Citizen journalism is always going to be the same. How does the supervising journalist/editor check the validity of a story? How do we know the explosion at ground level isn’t a skilled example of photoshop manipulation?
24 Aug 10
5:09 pm
Would never have guessed … a digital consultant says newspapers will be dead in 12 years.
Astonishing. I assume Hartigan immediately starting planning the closure of Nationwide News and put Ross on a fat retainer to save News Ltd.
24 Aug 10
5:13 pm
Garth, I didn’t use to be that specific as the future is unknowable. But I have found that people respond better to specific predictions in shaping their thinking.
Hadley, I don’t think the distinction is too important, but in general reporters are lower level and journalists – who hold the important skills – have the experience to bring full context to a story.
Glenn, these are important issues, but I do believe we are moving towards a better system. I’ll be talking about these specific issues on ABC Sydney tonight around 9:20pm.
24 Aug 10
5:27 pm
Imagine reading your iPad on the loo in the morning, now that’s just wrong on so many levels.
24 Aug 10
6:06 pm
@Jacinta, I think you’re onto something there…ipoo?
In all seriousness, I dont agree with this prediction. We’ve recently increased our print run of mX in Melbourne Sydney and Brisbane to cope with the demand for our product. For us the paper medium is as popular as ever.
24 Aug 10
6:29 pm
Both cinema and radio were given ten years to survive decades and decades ago. Still waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
24 Aug 10
7:27 pm
This article “XXXX is going to die by XX year” reminds me of many of the consumer electronics technology stories I used to write 15 years ago – such as PDAs will take over and we won’t have dedicated phones any more. That didn’t happen – so many ‘homes of the future’ are yet to happen (like FTTH) – those stories were in about 2000 or so – and I doubt this will happen as quickly either.
There will always be room for quality journalism – whether or not that’s online or printed, demand for it will continue to exist. God help us if we lose our quality journalism and all the reasons why we studied media ethics at uni.
24 Aug 10
7:55 pm
Bad newspapers containing bad journalism will die. Always have. Good newspapers will stop printing only when their display advertisers get a better sales response, dollar for dollar, from a web equivalent. Still a long way to go down that road..
24 Aug 10
8:08 pm
Instead of paying Ross, perhaps News could have shown a few episodes of The Jetsons if they were looking for wacky futurist predictions.
http://www.techvert.com/6-curr.....predicted/
24 Aug 10
8:29 pm
What will we read at the beach?
24 Aug 10
8:41 pm
Good point, sand resistant passive screen PDA required urgently – but really, Jacinta, once you have tired a PDA or Ipad for Loo-reading, you won’t go back!
24 Aug 10
9:07 pm
@ Bret Christian, the future will not be determined by newspaper advertising, that is a bi-product of readership.
But as the consumption of media changes from traditional channels (books, newspapers, magazines) to digital formats (Kindle, iPad, laptops, and whatever else is around the corner) and therefor traditional readership declines, the only way for the media to survive is to migrate. It’s happening now and the curve is only upwards.
Check out the iPad sales in only a few months – driving a whole new category. Or the evolution of music consumption in the last decade – when did you last buy a CD? Remember the old video library? The worlds changing and the traditional media channels are far to slow on the uptake, point in case being the SMH iPad app. The only “app” part of that was short for ‘appalling’.
24 Aug 10
9:36 pm
The newspaper of my future is a home-delivered print-out, in broad-sheet format, personalised, containing quality journalism, articles & information that interest me and a limited set of ads that are relevant to me.
24 Aug 10
10:03 pm
Hi Leon, yes that’s part of what newspapers will become. And when e-paper finally has all the tactile and other great properties of paper, there will be no need to print it out…
Bret, don’t forget about the pretty hefty fixed overhead of printing presses not to mention distribution costs – the value has to be significantly higher than alternatives to justify this.
24 Aug 10
10:39 pm
Good point Matt. But the real question is whether you can wipe your arse with the iPad if the loo paper has run out!
24 Aug 10
11:45 pm
Hi Ross,
We have a crowd sourced news site [Streetcorner.com.au] which focusses on local news. People know whats happening on the other side of the world, but have lost our conversations about whats going on in our local communities.
Our contributors are reporting on issues and events that are important to them and which are local. But importantly they are authentic and they are getting a voice and are feeling empowered by this.
Many issues that get raised on our site end up being covered by main stream media and people tell us they are sourcing these stories from our site.
Sorry I wont get the chance to hear your thoughts on Crowdsourced journalism at the conference.
25 Aug 10
12:19 am
So who’ll win ? Brian or Jack ?
25 Aug 10
6:37 am
Hi John and Ross,
John! You know I would never ever do that to a newspaper, I have too much respect for them
Matt Balogh
25 Aug 10
7:02 am
What publications need to realise is that for people these days, the news should be free.
Television – free
Radio – free
WWW – free, and we can access the sources the herald copy & pastes without much scrutiny and quality journalism. And hear our opinion on it, not some red neck columnist.
As soon as someone (with quality journalism) can come up with a substantially sized, free paper their circulation will increase. Their advertising revenue will increase. They can pay distributers more.
And their papers will stop looking paper thin because a certain free paper that’s only headlines masquerading as news has pipped them to the post.
25 Aug 10
7:06 am
Oh no Bella, news is NEVER free. Sure, you can watch Channel 9 and watch the ads, or you can get better news coverage, ad free, on the ABC. Same with web site, I personally am more than happy to pay for online news with no pop up ads, and good quality. sure, there will be free sites with ads. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be a market for paid news.
Matt Balogh
25 Aug 10
10:03 am
so how are Mr Ross’ predictions any different from what was in Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing? And as far as predictions, for all those that haven’t give Being Digital a read – Nicholas Negroponte saw it all coming way back in 1995 – http://amzn.to/bedigi
25 Aug 10
11:36 am
@alwayssomatt: publications either printed or web that carry ads serve two parallel functions. They can’t be equated to downloading music, movies etc., although pay-per-view news sites can. Ross, display ads in credible printed publication are very powerful and in my experience their cost-effectiveness shows no sign of waning, despite the massive cost of killing trees, running printing presses etc.
Why this is so despite the obvious speed, cost and accessibility advantages of hand-held reading devices others can explain, but I suspect it has something to do with the fragmentation of electronic audiences.
25 Aug 10
11:38 am
I think 12 years is optimistic….
http://www.TwoCentsGroup.com.au
25 Aug 10
1:16 pm
Hadley: Reporters own one suit apiece, journalists two.
25 Aug 10
4:18 pm
He went on to say, “In 13 years media organisations will beam the news directly into subscribers’ brains before they wake up in the morning, eat their breakfasts-in-a-pill and fly to work in their aerial cars.”
1 Sep 10
3:55 pm
When Amazon.com launched there was gnashing of teeth as the pundits predicted “the end of the bookstore” cause everyone will be buying books online.
Well, yes, there have been major changes in book retailing & publishing but we still have bookstores. We still have books, albeit more ebooks now.
I’m sure there will be (are) major changes in newspapers, in magazines, in books, in music, but to make predictions about what / how things will be in the future is fraught with danger.
Whatever did happen to the flying car?
6 Sep 10
8:45 am
But Joey,
If amazon.com.au was allowed to launch (which it wouldn’t be, I’m sure, because of protectionism) it wopuld kill the local book market.
6 Sep 10
8:45 am
The last Australian monopolies – supermarkets, free TV and book selling.
10 Sep 10
1:28 pm
In defence of newspapers and why they will survive:
No battery, no screen, no operating system, no connectivity issues, no upgrades needed, authoritative due to its physical nature, readable anywhere, quick to navigate … the list goes on. Death within 12 years is very optimistic and sounds more like (successful) spin.