The digital news arena is like Jurassic World
Despite all the hype the news dinosaurs still dominate the plains of online news in Australia argues The New Daily editorial director Bruce Guthrie in an address to the Rural Press Club.
One way or another, as a journalist and editor, I’ve had a front-row seat at the migration of news from print to online over the past 20 years. And whenever I reflect on that sometimes painful, often clumsy process I am reminded of the joke about the man who walks into a bar with a frog sitting on his head.
“Geez mate,” says the astonished barman as his new customer fronts the counter. “Where did you get that?”
Replies the frog: “I don’t know really know, it started as a pimple on my backside and just grew and grew.”
Nielsen online rankings year-on-year comparison June 2014 – June 2015 (click to enlarge)
The latest Nielsen online rankings emerged last week, prompting the usual chest-thumping and hand-wringing among various “winners and losers”. I was left thinking about the frog.
As is the custom with such rankings, most of the reporting focused on the Top 10 news sites and the inevitable jockeying for top spot.
While this is understandable, it’s also regrettable given there are more than 200 sites on the Nielsen list.
When you pull back and consider a slightly bigger sample – the Top 40 news sites rather than the Top Ten – a troubling picture emerges of a news landscape still dominated in this country by legacy media, those publishers who made great wads of cash out of print before the internet’s arrival.
I call it Jurassic World.
Apart from legacy offshoots, there are only one or two independent outlets on the list that weren’t around when print publishers started putting news online in the mid-nineties. One of them is The New Daily and we only launched 20 months ago. The other is The Conversation which, until recently, depended partly on government funding.
While that is extremely gratifying in our case, I was left wondering why the Top 40 list is so bereft of other new local publishers. After all, the internet was supposed to remove the barriers to entry for those wanting to get into the news business so we’d look up in ten or twenty years and there would be all these fresh Australian voices enriching the national conversation.
But a glance at the Top 40 proves that although new entrants have had 20 years to try, save for TND and a handful of others – including brave but ultimately short-lived attempts The Global Mail and Hoopla – it just hasn’t happened. Which raises an important question: have would-be Australian publishers missed the boat? Do they not understand that the ownership model has changed as much as the business model?
Fairfax and News made a lot of mistakes migrating from print to online, but the latest Top 40 list suggests they’ve stumbled their way to success. They now provide, either directly or in joint ventures, five of the Top Ten news sites, nine of the Top 20 and 16 of the Top 40.
Foreign publishers are even more dominant. Whether through wholly-owned operations or joint efforts with, you guessed it, local legacy outlets, they account for 21 of the Top 40. (And that doesn’t include Buzzfeed which, for some reason, isn’t included in the news category by Nielsen.)
Given that not so long ago we blocked foreign publishers from owning more than 25 per cent of our newspapers because of national “sensitivity”, is this appropriate? (It’s the reason Conrad Black abandoned Fairfax in 1997.)
While I’m not suggesting regulation, shouldn’t we at least have had a conversation about the influx of foreign publishers and whether they’re a) crowding out potential local publishers and b) raising or lowering the level of public discourse?
While the success of many of the foreign sites is due to Australians reaching out to them, Britain’s Daily Mail and Guardian are well ensconced in the Top 10 with fully staffed local outlets.
Next month The Huffington Post will launch its local offering in a joint venture with Fairfax. Already knocking on the door of the Top 10, it’s likely to move up and get bigger. The fact that it’s owned by U.S. communications giant, AOL, has barely been remarked upon.
Incredibly, when you remove local legacy publishers and foreign owned or operated sites, Australia is left with just four other sites in the Top 40 and three of them are (or were until recently) government funded: the ABC at number three, SBS at number 33, and The Conversation (until recently partly-funded by government) at 38. That leaves The New Daily, owned by not-for-profit Industry Super Funds, at 36.
So much for the internet providing opportunities for strong, new Australian voices. Sadly, in this country at least, when it comes to news dinosaurs still rule the earth.
- Bruce Guthrie is a former editor of The Age, The Sunday Age and the Herald Sun who is now Editorial Director of The New Daily. This is an edited text of a speech he delivered last week to the Victorian Rural Press Club’s Young Journalists’ Forum
maybe it’s because the dinosaurs have trained journalists working for them not citizen journos or bloggers?
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So let me get this straight, foreign publishers can’t set up a newspaper in Australia but can set up a news website? More Australian voices please.
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Turn back the foreign publishers!
Perhaps the growth in foreign publishers here reflects the lack of ambition of Aussie publishers? (Apart from News Corp obviously)
The New Daily’s ownership is interesting – the super funds might be “not-for-profit” but I guess they have pretty strong views on things? It’s an interesting decision by them to set up a newspaper – has it been a success Bruce?
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Ludicrous to suggest foreign publishers should be excluded, if only because it’s technically impossible in the internet age. Many Australians were already reading the Guardian and the Daily Mail before they set up local operations (in fact, I think that’s WHY they set up local operations). Better that they actually employ some local journalists to do some local news rather than feeding their Australian readers the exact same content as their home country sites.
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Is this article aving a larf?? I’m not familiar enough with Mr Guthrie to know if that’s the case or not….
The internets has allowed for incredible diversity of voice – either found directly through websites, blogs, social media, tumblr, medium etc etc etc.
So I’m not sure if Bruce is legit saying “there have been no new digital news sites that have for some reason mimicked the antiquated approach of print media by aggregating all in one place curated news” with a massive dose of the irony, or he is just pitching to his Rural News audience.
If you want to see the 21st century “news aggregator” numbers, then Facebook in Australia has ~ 14M active users, Twitter 2.8M active users, instagram 5M etc etc etc.
Source – http://www.socialmedianews.com.....june-2015/
If you want to understand why this “portal” model of news is dead, take a peek at this article on buzzfeed and take particular note of the bang on analysis around dinosaur tactics of “pitching stories” and journos deciding what is newsworthy…..
https://stratechery.com/2015/buzzfeed-important-news-organization-world/
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It’s been in the traditional media best interest to manage their decline and shift to online over the past 15 years. Indeed they had the lions share of revenue and massive sales teams to support them which makes it very hard for new entrants to to compete.
When online was starting to get big no’s in 2003-06 media sales always favour large incumbents and to a degree still do I’d imagine as their sales teams have relationships with media buyers and traditional media doesn’t innovate they simply wait and buy digital business that add serious traffic no;s to their no.s and sales pitch.
The Daily Mail wasnt exactly a Start-up was it? It was funded by a couple of SuperFunds which takes out the stress of getting ad sales to pay for Jounos when you’re getting started and trying to compete.
Having attempted to get a hyper-local website (local user generated news) going on the smell of a oily rag its a hard slog.
I agree with the author about the dinosaurs in the market, but if I was the dinosaur and the largest player, its your only strategy to fight off competition and new models for as long as you can.
Who knows how the incumbents will cope with a free to market news offering thats top notch.
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What is Bruce Guthrie sad about? He should be celebrating the fact that so-called legacy news organisations are still relevant! After all, its the market that decides.
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Bad joke to start off with Bruce but you managed to muster some grunt towards the end
The Convo sucked $20 out of my particularly tight r’s and that speaks volumes as i rarely donate, and it was simply coz now, I trusted their voice (overwritten yes, need intro’s to Bullet Points, etc) but that’s what I like – it’s far from cash for comment or manicured “news” and I can pull to me what is newsworthy – which Edward G M (above) contends, IS the issue – backed by the data.
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The original joke mentions an anal cyst – too polite Mr Guthrie, spoils the joke. Otherwise fine article.
The real problem with Oz media, and particularly Fairfax is a deficit of imagination.. Fairfax should dominate today – they missed their chance, Unless their advertising staff get off their pimples and start learning of the tech out there that can benefit them, sadly they will continue to struggle.
Whe was the last time Fairfax, or indeed any local media invited ideas? The Jurassic period maybe. The only change with fairfax is a continual change in staff. . If they fail to listen they’ll be flushed away eventually.
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@George What reasons do you give for your assertion that Fairfax should dominate today (as a digital content company)? In which way do they display a deficit of imagination? How did they miss their chance? What tech are they not aware of (not sure if you mean advertising or content here)? How do you know Fairfax does not invite ideas?
All of those are sweeping assertions, typical of the bandwagon that reflexively bags Fairfax. I may be wrong, and you may have some very good data or specific examples of just how and where Fairfax, unlike all the world’s other newsprint-based content companies, lost the way. I’d love to hear more backup detail – that would make the debate more interesting, rather than encountering simple spleen.
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@ doug and @george – if anything, I’d say that Fairfax is more digitally progressive and advanced than most other traditional newsprint-based companies, to the point where some critics/competitors (most notably News Corpse) accuse them of going too hard, and too fast down the digital route.
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@Doug – I could start with Seek and end with the very “uninnovative” Stan {hard to see this making a penny}.The share price is a good barometer of performance – blaming the competition doesnt gel. . .
They still appear to operate “Fairfax Digital Ventures” – with a small team – but you won’t find contact for that on their site – try Crunchbase. The CEO of one of their investments lists his only interest on Linkedin as “job enquiries” It’s a marketing related firm..That says much.
I’m a consultant for firms that have tried to get them to even LOOK at innovation -and failed. Three have ended up in the US, happy not to have connected. One have innovative ad-tech – which Fairfax badly needs. . Mind you, with staff turnover so high, its unlikely a contact you make will exist a month later., .
No spleen involved Doug – I’m just rather saddened the way a great Oz co lost its way. – and investments like Stan show they havent learnt. It’s the old principle – invest in things others have already invested in – if it goes bad, well, there are more excuses when the proverbial hits. I guess negotiating a deal with Nine re Stan was much more fun than listening to a start-up seeking peanuts for an idea that had never been taken up by anyone else.
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thanks @George, everyone drags up Seek from 15 years ago but its in the commercial category. So is Stan. I was hoping to hear from critics why they thought Fairfax hadn’t done a good job in the digital editorial space – including Bruce Guthrie, who raises a non-specific “made lots of mistakes”. Sixteen years ago Fairfax made 80% of its revenue from two newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne, but had a circulation less than half of News Ltd in those two cities and no footprint in the rest of Australia. It very quickly became the leading destination for Australian digital audiences, allowing Fairfax to monetize those new audiences, and remains at the top of the ratings today. Why is that not a success?
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@Doug – launching a paywall as The Guardian arrived in AU was a stroke of suicidal genius by Fairfax?
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@Anonymous – your comment sounds clever, but at the end of the day is based on what statistical analysis?
ie, On the most simplistic level, decrease of FFX network usage, measured before and after, factored against increased or new subscription income, AND continued revenue from display (incl programmatic) advertising as well as branded content.
All taken as a calculated risk, of course.
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Most likely Nielsen does not include Buzzfeed in the news category because they looked at it and couldn’t find any news there.
For example, “Which Pop Princess Should Be Your Soulmate?” is not even attempting to report anything. It’s an invitation to fantasise.
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