Finally, a media regulator for Banana Watch
I have not, in the hour or so since I began looking at the Finkelstein Independent Media Inquiry‘s 500 page report, fully digested it.
But like the bloggers it now seeks to regulate, that doesn’t mean that I lack a point of view. And it’s this.
Any person who seeks to regulate the internet, and then refers to hits, should immediately be disqualified from further comment as their digital knowledge is ten years out of date.
This for me, is a key paragraph of what what Ray Finkelstein had to say in the recommendations of the Finkelstein Media Inquiry:
“The second change arises from the fact that there are many newsletter publishers and bloggers, although no longer part of the ‘lonely pamphleteer’ tradition, who offer up-to-date reflections on current affairs. Quite a number have a very small audience. There are practical reasons for excluding from the definition of ‘news media’ publishers who do not have a sufficiently large audience. If a publisher distributes more than 3000 copies of print per issue or a news internet site has a minimum of 15 000 hits per annum it should be subject to the jurisdiction of the News Media Council, but not otherwise. These numbers are arbitrary, but a line must be drawn somewhere.”
Yes indeed. A line must be drawn. Let’s assume that Finkelstein actually means page views rather than hits (technically, a single page will consist of a lot of hits as each hit is a single request for a file to a web server).
15000 page views equates to less than 300 per week.
So what would you class as “an up to date reflection on current affairs’? Would you include satirical sites written in that style, if they were based on facts? You’d have to.
If so, then allow me to point you to Banana Watch. It’s the work of my colleague Colin Delaney, in which he amuses himself by publishing photographs of discarded banana peels (well, everybody needs to have a hobby).
Colin tells me that in the last week, he’s had 323 page views.
Take a read – Banana Watch is funnier than it sounds. But it also falls within Finkelstein’s criteria of the type of site that will be regulated in his new vision.
As indeed, thousands of other sites will be. Anyone who writes regularly about current events and had more than a handful of friends following them could well fall under the remit of the proposed super regulator.
If this part if the inquiry is so badly thought out, I already doubt that the rest will be any better.
Tim Burrowes
Linkedin
Is it not a 500 page report?
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Tim Burrowes, a great argument. (Mary Shelley’s?) Finklestein should take heed of slippery bananas.
Thank you, Colin Delaney, for creating the site that we will now use as the ultimate example of The Long Tail.
PS If he is still in the country filming Celebrity Apprentice, I think you might approach The Hoff to headline the TV pilot episode of Banana Watch. Or do you thin Pammy would be more appealing?
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I agree.
Any ageing senior executive, politician (not in an IT portfolio), celebrity or Tibetan monk (still living on a mountain in the remote wilds of Tibet) can be excused the use of the term ‘hits’ when referring to website pageviews, visitors or unique visitors.
However the head of a significant review of the media, and their staff, should have spent the time to build an understanding of the mediums they are considering regulating.
This might be passed off as an insignificant mistake. However it is not. The number of hits used refers to the crux of the report – the line drawn as to which sites would be regulated and which would not be regulated.
It discredits the report when a technical measure (the number of requests to a web server for files) is used as the key terminology UNLESS this is what was meant.
With webpages potentially consisting of tens, or even hundreds, of hits, perhaps Finkelstein did mean what he said. On this basis, any blog with a homepage consisting of 30 hits (graphics, CSS, text, etc) would only require 500 visits in a year (1.5 per day) to qualify for regulation.
What also needs to be clarified is whether search engines and other robot visits would count (we have to protect software from potentially dangerous images and words) and whether the site owner’s own visits to the count would count (thereby protecting them against themselves).
That’s not to mention the need to protect foreign visitors – even when content is legal in their own country (aka an Australian operated Manga blog discussing current events in Australia for Japanese people through the use of the most graphic Japanese manga styles).
And how will Australian-owned and operated blogs and news sites hosted overseas get moderated? Will we see a collapse in the Australian hosting industry as blogs and news sites move to international hosting so they fall outside of regulation? Will we see blogs and news sites owned by foreign entities and hosted international,h, but with the writing done by Australians? How would that fall under regulation?
Complete fail Mr Finkelstein.
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By the way, my apologies to Glen Fuller, and possibly others. We exchanged a couple of comments here on Friday night, shortly before we made a site migration. It looks like we may have lost an hour or two’s worth of comments – if that is indeed so, my apologies and please do feel free to repost if we don’t get them back.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
I thought it best to chime in as it seems our organisation has unwillingly been dragged into this argument all across the Australian internets and I managed to trace it back to this forum.
For the record, Banana Watch welcomes the proposed regulation. The internet is a chaotic place full of anarchists, perverts and hippies. The people who shout “Nanny State!” every time civilised people like Finkelstein try to bring some rule and decorum to the world are the same ruffians that discard banana peels willy-nilly.
M.S Murdoch
Editor at Large/CEO
Banana Watch
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