News Ltd boss Hartigan: Sites like Crikey and Mumbrella are less than 10% original
News Ltd boss John Hartigan has given a keynote address attacking websites such as Mumbrella and Crikey, while insisting that newspapers have a bright future.
In a speech to the National Press Club this afternoon, the CEO of News Ltd – who famously began his 2007 Andrew Olle Media Lecture: “My name is John Kenneth Hartigan. Occupation: journalist” took a different tack, beginning:
“My name is Pollyanna.
“I’m here to tell you about the bright future facing journalists, particularly newspaper journalists.
“I realise my proposition is wildly out of whack with accepted wisdom – that we are doomed.”
But he continued: “It’s true we are in the midst of the most traumatic and uncertain transformation in our history. But I see some strong and encouraging trends for the future. Newspapers can adjust to the digital age, adapt their business models and continue to reach mass audiences. What it will take is a complete rethink of the very essence of what is “news”. We have never been challenged as we are now, to justify why someone should pay for our content.”
He insisted that newspapers in Australia are still in strong commercial shape. He said: “Newspaper ad revenue in Australia has been growing – not declining over the past five years as it has in the US and the UK. Even in the past year, the decline in ad revenue in Australia is a fraction of what’s been happening overseas.
“The whole structure of our industry is different – we are far less reliant on classifieds. In the UK there are simply too many newspapers. In the US, newspapers haven’t kept up with television as a source of news, especially local news.”
But he said that his parent company News Corp was also investing in online journalism including the Wall Street Journal.
He said: “Obviously plenty of people are reading journalism online. But is it any good and what will make people pay for it? In fact the only ones making serious money are the sites that aggregate news, like Google and Yahoo. They pay nothing for content produced by newspaper journalists but make money by supplying it in easily searchable forms online. The major media outlets have encouraged them to take a free ride on our content. It’s called search engine optimisation.”
He then turned his attention to Crikey and Mumbrella. He told the audience:
“Then there are the news commentary sites, like The Huffington Post, Newser and the Daily Beast and in Australia sites like 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.”
He added:
“Almost anyone can start one of these sites, with very little capital, no training or qualifications.
“Then there are the 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.”
“Like Keating’s famous “all tip and no iceberg”, it could be said that the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insight.”
In another sideways reference to Mumbrella, he said: “Radical sweeping statements unsubstantiated with evidence are common. One Australian blogger who shoots first and checks facts later is proud to boast that his site is “Not wrong for long”.
Mumbrella editor Tim Burrowes has used that phrase on two occasions in the comments section of Mumbrella.
Hartigan concluded: “The internet is not the enemy of newspapers. It is a medium on which great journalism can reach a larger audience. The willingness of readers to pay for it will depend on the quality of the content.”
More coverage:
-
Hartigan on old and new media / Pure Poison
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John Hartigan’s Punchy attack on new media / Bernard Keane – Crikey
- The public want less negativity / news.com.au
- News Corp chief attacks Google, bloggers / The Inquisitr
- The future of journalism will not depend on bloggers / The Australian
- Heritage Hartigan attacks everyday Australian readers / Laurel Papworth
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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It’s not really an attack – he’s just commenting on what sites like this do. And probably he has been quite fair. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing. I love reading Mumbrella’s commentry on media issues. That’s why I visit the site.
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Well I was just thinking recently that online newspapers are just as much “commentary and opinion”, especially news.com.au. The number of spelling and grammatical errors on there makes them worse than blogs and commentary sites like mine.
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A little irony there, Mumbles 😛
Sure, some bloggers offer opinions on other people’s content (mainstream or community media) while others write in depth original content (and need distributors to get the word out). But it doesn’t matter if you are a “creator” or a “distributor”… Heritage Hartigan just doesn’t get it. His readership is going where the value-add is, and Hartigan just doesn’t have a clue what that value-add is. It’s called “community”.
Newspapers were always meant to serve the community weren’t they? Or do I have it wrong and it’s about serving the advertisers? Cos if the community is blogging and tweeting, dissing them is not the way to improve readership. Though come to think of it, it works for shock jock bloggers. Hah.
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i agree with Steve, and in a world where generic news is available from so many sources, it’s opinion and commentary that is valuable. mumbrella is now my key source for industry news….compared to the “here’s some info we gleaned from some press releases” I get via email from AdNews mumbrella provides a really rich service
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News Ltd is hardly a bastion of original reporting – PR releases and wire services would contribute a fair whack of their content.
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What did Mr Hartigan have to say about The Punch, News Ltd’s own foray into a news commentary site? The Punch also links to other mastheads outside of the News stable, I’m sure Fairfax would be thrilled. The Punch also relies heavily on video content provided by YouTube. Mr Hartigan and Mr Murdoch must be squirming about how to make a quid out of all this new stuff…
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Wait a minute… wasn’t it news.com.au which published the chk chk boom girl and her fantasy shooting report?
Nice that the big news sites have so much credibility…
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What’s the statistic, 80% of news comes from Public Relations? From looking at the quality of News Ltd. material, i’d say that’s a more than reasonable stat. And what about their articles basically following every update on masterchef? I saw a commentary article on the attractiveness of one of the hosts in their top 5 articles not long ago.
Plus, to have a go at ‘blogs’ in general is just ignorant.
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There is a great deal of mud slinging between traditional news distribution (TV/papers) and the more democratized ‘pipes’ (blogs/twitter) in Australia yet we miss the key point here that it is not about the medium anymore. There are great journos & online storytellers (bloggers) and there are crap ones. There are ones who will plagiarize anything that moves and ones who really try hard to develop original stories . The key point is though it doesn’t matter where their ‘words’ are distributed (paper, blogs, mobiles, chalked on walls) – good content will have a value and bad content will be free. Hartington is right on one thing – people will in the end pay for good content whether through subs, ad supported etc: but he shows an incredible lack of vision and relevance to anyone anymore by not acknowledging that the medium is not the message anymore – sorry Mr McLuhan but those days are long gone….
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Great work, I guess if you are publishing AP or Reuters releases word for word, that is creative??
It seems that News Corp is spending their time fighting with Google News and Bloggers maybe left out in the cold, what about publications like HuffingtonPost??
Stop crying and get along with turning the newspapers into a sustainable digitial platform, ignoring the fact that many of their best writers also have successful blogs!
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I was in a cafe the weekend before last. I picked up the Sunday Telegraph and there was an article, which featured tips on how to beat the financial crunch.
You are going to love this:
“Save money on toothpaste by squeezing it width ways instead of length ways on your brush.”
Wow thanks News Ltd!! I am totally serious this amazing publishing house came up with this groundbreaking money saving idea…
I sent in the following two tips, which have yet to be published:
Save a fortune on laundry bills. Give your dirty shirts to Vinnies. They
will wash and iron them and you can buy them back for fifty cents.
Save money on expensive personalised car number plates by simply
changing your name to match your existing plate. (My friend told me this one, his name is ANH 47P.)
news.com.au / the telegraph; where drivel can be found online …
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I’ve got some photos of someone who may or may not be a politician taken in a resort some years ago if he’d like to publish them.
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Oh you added some more stuff.
Love the last paragraph. Let me paraphrase: The internet is a big broadcast channel for proper news from News.com.au – and the internet is not our enemy as long as they shut up, stop chatting and pay $$$.
Am I being too harsh?
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What you’ve achieved in a very short space of time with Mumbrella in terms of content and audience pull is remarkable.
I was skeptical that in this already crowded media & marketing space there could be room for another voice. You’ve demonstrated that when it’s the right voice, and when journalistic principles are adhered to, the results can be powerful.
In fact, Mumbrella is a case study that news channels large and small would be smart to pay attention to.
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Harto’s speech was so lacking in perception it sounded like one of Dennis Shanahan’s famous pre-election Newspoll columns on how 2 and 2 really added up to John Howard. He praises the Huffington Post but fails to note that it is 90 per cent aggregation with a few columns on the side. Indeed Pembo ( I love all the O men at News Ltd) copied it for Punch. If Punch isn’t a news aggregation site ripping off the work of all and sundry then what is it. And they don’t pay their columnists so you get dunderheads like Bronny Bishop bloviating at length proving again that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. He wonders about political coverage without wondering whether it was the total twisting of reality during the 2007 campaign that had people wondering about the quality of journalism at News Ltd especially its “quality” flagship The Australian. His bleats about good news sounded like the old dears at the Anglican Church womens’ guild “oh dear if only they covered the good news the world would be so nice.” Except we suspect Harto’s idea of good news is, as one other said somewhere else, stories about blokes with their dicks caught in vacuum cleaners.
The disturbing thing is that the hatred of the blogoshpere, well that part of it not under the News Ltd umbrella, seems to be part of a corporate mantra. At first we may have thought it existed only in the foetid brain of Chris Mitchell and his butt monkey Christian Kerr. But now it seems to be official policy.
What Harto misses is the reason that Mumbles, Possum, Poll Bludger et al have a following is that they can read things like opinion polls and draw real conclusions unlike News Ltd which seems incapable of understanding its own polls. Then there is its vendetta journalism. Robert Manne is a favorite target but today The Oz did a reverse vendetta with pike by ripping off his cover story from the Monthly and making it the main feature. Good get Cameron.
Also today in the Oz we have day two of the union scare campaign harking back to 1981 for fuck’s sake!!! It is based on the myth The Oz is pushing that pattern bargaining is allowed under the new laws. It isn’t but hey why let that stop us?
We have the hysterical anti-green anti-global warming stance of the Australian which one would have thought is read by people who can makeup their own minds. They and the vast majority of Australians know the Oz is talking crap on this and a whole lot of issues They see it on the front page and then they get screamed at by the Albrechtsens, Sheridans (today’s, another fantasy piece) and any other loony they can get to write for them. Michael Costa on economics and governance?
Everyone knows he was hopeless as a treasurer and now we are expected to receive his pearls of wisdom as though they are holy writ. I could go on. The reason we read Crikey and the rest of the the blogosphere is we don’t like having our intelligence insulted by Chris Mitchell’s merry band of delusional lunatics.
And Crikey, how about making a note of every story the Oz runs (unattributed of course) which it read about first on Crikey. I think I see about four or five a week.
Finally, As Harto got his Walkley award for journalistic leadership he announced there would be no swingeing cuts at News Ltd, he would hold the line blah blah blah. At the time he spoke he was throwing journos out of the lifeboat and he hasn’t stopped since.
The Internet presented problems for newspapers but they could have been tackled. The fact that newspapers are failing has nothing to do with new journalism it is all to do with bad management and dinosaurs like Harto who thinks by making a few “bold” speeches to a bunch of sycophants at the Press Club will show he has the answers.
If Harto and his pronouncements are the answer we are asking the wrong question.
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Don’t agree – I thought Cumbrella was very original 🙂 https://mumbrella.com.au/mumbrellas-adult-brand-extension-6704
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I agree with John Hartigan.
News and opinion are two very different things, that are very much codependent.
Online opinion is generally choked with opinion that could not exist without news sources. This does in no way mean there isn’t a place for Mumbrella (which I love) or Crikey (used to love until Jonathon Green butchered it). Also, news needs opinion (and separated) to create discussion and debate.
Currently there are only a few news wires left in the western world (AP, Reuters, BBC, etc) which is very concerning to reporting diversity.. mainly due to declining profitability of MSM industry newsrooms who own most news wire services.
I would like to hear what % of ‘creator’ bloggers bemoaning ‘Heritage Harto’ say is news and what is ‘original opinion content’ on their own blogs – which are still different things. I agree MSM has been very late modernising to value added area of opinion/genuine blogging networks – it is a real dillema – but most independent bloggers are kidding themselves if they think they could exist without traditional MSM reporting to beef up their posts and have something to link to and make their blog posts ‘credible’. There are only so many posts you can do about social media or the new iPod 6.0 Software.
@KateRichardson News Ltd owns 45% of AAP so they are responsible for a large portion of reporting original content in Australia. Also – point taken in advance that AAP’s number of reporters have been cut significantly in recent years and News/Fairfax now rely more on O/S wires like AP and Reuters.
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I have been contacting news limited 100s of times to tell them about how a shonky cartel destroyed my business and seek an investigative journalist to have a look at my story, what happened? Editorial compromise! thank god for the digital revolution that in order to tell the world our story we don’t need people like Mr. Hartigan to decide which story to cover or which one not to. With my laptop I have become an investigative journalist for dummies myself and thousands of readers so far have read it.
I suggest Mr. Hartigan should reduce the size of his newspapers for the people who read them when they go to toilet or are traveling on trains, these habits are also rapidly changing and as we can see some people use their laptops in the trains as well. All we have to do is to wait for some cheap wireless internet services to be available then we can see some light at the end of the tunnel.
Wake up Mr. Hartigan. Wake up.
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Great response, Tim, and totally correct in saying that Hartigan has misdirected his comments at Mumbrella. As a member of the media industry I read Mumbrella for the same reasons that I watch Media Watch, join linked in media groups, attend media industry events etc. I get my regular news elsewhere – both online and in print.
Having said that, I read the full speech and thought it quite interesting; exposing the real struggle newspapers are facing. I’m just sitting here wondering when the big news publishers will start to grab the bull by the horns and raise their online advertising rates. Looking at Fairfax this year who, if I remember correctly, increased online ad volume but had profits fall, big publishers are a long way off making the difficult, entreprenuerial decisions necessary to remain commerciallly viable in an online media world. If people will pay for good content, as Hartigan proposes, then surely advertisers have to be persuaded to part with good money to support it?
BTW – I am a media sales rep selling across print, online and events – in B2B admittedly – but from my humble experience I believe making online commercially succesful can be done.
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the thing is, this guy is wrong. people are not prepared to PAY for news anymore… not when it readily available on the net… your not going to buy a subscription to a website for news… not when every other source is out there for free…
people still only barely buy the sunday paper, just cos its a relaxing method of news absorbtion. thats it.
sites like mumbrella do stuff that scares traditional print outlets…. it offers instant feedback from the public, which scares most journalists as they dont like to be told they are full of bull plop! lol
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LOL 10% is better than 5%.
Tim, if the evil empire is talking about you…you must be doing something right & hurting their bottom line.
Keep the good work-up matey.
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What seems to be missing in all of this is an understanding of the economics of news creation. Someone has to be paid somewhere – unless we are going to live in a world of amateurs (and I agree that some amateurs do a bloody good job). There is a lot of jealousy amongst content creators that services such as Google are able to make money without paying to create content. Google would argue that it drives traffic to the sites of content creators. Both are right.
The real problem is that online media eliminates one of the key economic supports of that the media has traditionally enjoyed – scarcity of inventory. There are only so many ad slots in a half hour of TV, so networks can charge a premium based partly on that. With online, the more pages we create, the less we seem able to charge for them. Hence we have falling ad rates. What happens when ad rates fall? We create more pages.
It’s a downward spiral, and one that I can’t see going away unless someone comes up with an easy and compelling service for highly targeted advertising that is also palatable for consumers.
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I’m eagerly awaiting some news provider who is willing to charge more for the scarce ads on their website.. does everyone remember how google started? Text only ads! That’s what brought everyone to google at the beginning of its ascension. Reconsider the possibility that some users (like me) HATE ads that push down the whole screen for 10 seconds or runs a car across my news page. Some of the most effective strategies of online marketing come from avoiding invasive advertising that are now being employed to run up ad revenue.
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Quick question when he talks about the fact that less of the content is “original”. I was in the UK when the Daily Telegraph broke the expenses scandal. They researched it, they wrote it, they published it.
For the next few days the News Int papers (The Sun, Times etc) all covered the furore, the disclosures made by the Tele and started their own research. In that regard don’t papers do that for a whole heap of stories when they are playing catch up?
How much newspaper content is that original?
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@Fionn im wondering if stories such as the death of MJ shows how low mainstream media has actually fallen into the gutters? I mean its seriously great journalism but it all seems to be rehashed from sources like TMZ angain and again…
I know there are people that are interested in the story but how many times can they reprint/playback the same information again and again…
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@David Simple – they’ll keep doing it as long as there is someone there to pay for it.
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Well just to prove the high level of stories covered by News Ltd, the recent “Best Job” winner makes a spelling mistake.
http://www.news.com.au/travel/.....90,00.html
The best part i like about this story is that it is covered by the Courier Mail, which is a QLD based paper, has now made our star for the tourism campaign look stupid! Great work supporting Tourism QLD after all the papers their tourism campaign has
sold since this “Best Job in the World” coverage started.
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Media has changed and the dust is far from settled. (no cr@p Sherlock you say…)
Go back 20 years and news was received via three channels:
TV
Radio
Newspapers
(Four including with Town Criers…)
There were ad slots and clear deadlines. Compared to now, media was easier to buy. I might be wrong?
Nowadays every consumer in Oz pretty much has access to the web and are on there all the time. There are an infinite amount of channels online and ever popular social sites, which can break news before the wires receive it…
Media land has changed and the dust has certainly not settled yet. Is anyone else, like me, awaiting for this killer app to come along and swallow up a heap of sites..? It would make buying a lot easier.
Big generic websites do offer reach. Niche sites offer quality and targeted views.
If somebody goes to a website all about cars – what a great place to advertise a car. If someone goes to a website all about weddings, what a great place to advertise a wedding dress.
Now, of course a car can also be pushed to the masses to create desire from the numbers and thus sales, however it is hard nowadays because there are simply so many channels and we want to push out on them all without missing out; (it makes 4 commercial terrestial tv channels look very nice and easy.)
Is this why the price is being driven down, because the channels are increasing so rapidly? If that is the case will media land suddenly become acquisition land to cater for supply and demand? Why have 50 sites breaking news when 5 could suffice…?
It will be an interesting 10 years 🙂
If so with more and more pages being added to the web every second of the day, where are we going to go?
Comrades it is us who steers a path to the future. i have a few idea’s however if I shared them with you – you might create this “killer app” before I do… “whooooa ha ha ha ha” – deep booming voice
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The fact that Mumbrella is actually talked about is the most exciting part of this. Well done Tim! I continue to read online and print newspapers. I see the issue as quality in that newspapers like the Australian which is clearly the only decent newspaper in Aust has small distribution compared to the tabloid Herald and the Daily Terror that have for a many years relied on classifieds and other crap that people can now get online for free. I see publishing be it mags and papers as becoming more niche and that’s an issue for ad sales but if publications can rightsize they may be able to survive.
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You took that well then Mumbrella! I think you should be chuffed John Hartigan even knows you exist. Like everybody in your real world, we should separate opinion from reporting the facts. Blogs are opinion, and that is not a bad thing. Accept your position on the media landscape that is forever fragmenting.
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Whilst we are on the topic of new media…
http://www.smh.com.au/articles.....20004.html
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