Category: disruption

O tempora o mores!

Alison GowLeave a comment

I guess most of us were stunned by the News of the World announcement on Thursday. Of course it was a calculated move and, considering it now, I imagine it was business cased some considerable time ago, and placed in the ‘In Case of Emergency, Break Glass’ box. 

After all, multinational corporations don’t just have Plan Bs, they have an entire alphabet of contingencies. 
After Clive Goodman was jailed, Andy Coulson walked, increasing numbers of public figures came forward to complain about hacking, it’s hard to imagine there wasn’t a very frank discussion of just how dark this particular tunnel could turn out to be. The answer, of course, was pitch black.

So, shocking and yet unsurprising in equal measures. But Newspaper DeathWatch got very irate about the decision: 

“In a stunning example of corporate overreaction, News Corp. today announced that it will shut down Britain’s largest Sunday newspaper amid a growing scandal over voicemail hacking“

It went on 

“Whatever the motives, the decision strikes us as a massive overreaction. Scandals like this are usually addressed by a few high-level resignations and some corporate self-flagellation. It could be that the timing was simply bad for News Corp., but depriving 200 people of their livelihoods – and a couple of million Brits of their weekly celebrity scandals – strikes us as a bit over the top.”

I sympathise deeply with the journalists who have lost their jobs – just a look at the state of the industry in 2011 should make anyone think ‘there but for the grace…’ – but calling the closure ‘a bit over the top’ is to underestimate the mood of the British public. 
Hard to see how there could be any redemption once the names of Millie Dowler and the Soham families (and others) had been dragged into it.

David Higgerson has written a superb post on the role social media played in this drama – and it did play a significant one, as an angry Roger Alton told Channel 4 news earlier tonight:

“the comfortable middle-class mothers of MumsNet sitting down to their fair-trade tea and organic shortbread biscuits I hope are very pleased with the Twitter campaign they organised, getting advertisers not to advertise in the News of The World. They’ve done as much as anybody to close this paper and put 200 reporters, photographers, editors and young people just starting their careers out of work.. These yummy mummies have done as much as anybody to put them out of work. I hope they’re feeling pleased with themselves”

It wasn’t the most finely judged thing to say, and it isn’t likely to endear NI to those ‘yummy mummies’ – target readers of quality newspapers or online news sites? – Alton singled out. 
Maybe it should have been a case of least said, soonest mended. 

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The Gordian Knot of newspapers, journalism and making money

Alison Gow4 Comments
I have a lot of questions; I don’t have many answers.
Four years ago, I thought the questions I should ask were: Why aren’t we tweeting? Do we have a Facebook page? Shall we start a Flickr group? How do we go about running a 3-day liveblog? etc etc
About two years ago I started asking new questions. These were: Are we engaging enough? Why do we have so much online shovelware? Why are we holding that story for print? and – increasingly – Why aren’t newspapers doing more to help themselves? 
Twelve months down the line and there was another shift in questions. They became: Why are we still having this discussion? Does anyone really believe people will part with hard cash for what we currently offer online? Does anyone have any answers? 


Years of questions that went from being all about the shiny, dynamic world of digital journalism and engagement, to articulating concerns about the inability of the legacy end of the business to catch up, to frustration.
And you know what? There are a lot of people asking ‘does anyone have any answers?’ – you can almost hear the sound of cyber coughing, and the shuffling of digital feet, as we wait for someone to fill in the silence.

Last week, Alan Rusbridger had a go at filling the silence, and suddenly we all wanted to talk about it too. Kevin Anderson wrote this:

The Guardian needs an intervention. Digital first will not be enough to save it. It needs to remember that although they are supported by a trust, that is not a licence to completely ignore business realities. 

and sparked a pretty wide-ranging and long-lasting debate; even yesterday I saw on Twitter he was being challenged for this stance by Journalism Luminaries Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rose. However, as someone on the inside of the mainstream media (non-Trust), looking out, his thoughts on the need to be more commercially aware resonated with me.
I have sat through a lot of conferences where the future of journalism has been talked into submission but the survival of the mainstream media barely registered, which is fine if you don’t work in mainstream media but I do, and it’s a subject close to my heart.

When I read the Guardian announcement, my first thought was it seemed a slightly more elegant approach to the Gordian Knot that is the Future of Journalism/Newspapers than Alexander might have taken, but it was still from the same school of “FUCK THIS for a game of soldiers”. Maybe Rusbridger’s also had enough of asking Why are we still having this discussion? 

At the first News:rewired conference Marc Reeves spoke about the need for journalists to be more commercially savvy and aware of opportunities for their advertising departments. His message was misunderstood by some as saying journalists should sell advertising and he drew some criticism. Those people missed the point of his message.

I read this on Afrodissident today

I read with dismay a few days ago that Business Day was developing an app for iPad. I’m no Luddite, but I think it’s a crying shame knowing that money’s being wasted on a gimmick when it should be rather spent on improving the paper’s core product.

Personally, I doubt making an app will detract from the core product – resourcing an app is the tiniest drop in the ocean compared to keeping the legacy product afloat but it’s an eloquent blog post that poses some interesting questions.
Several years ago, when I first got to experiment with all sorts of digital tools for engagement, community building, conversation and interaction, for the first time I understood there was an audience waiting to talk to us about what we do, and had their own views about what we should and shouldn’t do. It was an exceptionally liberating and illuminating time. The Shiny doesn’t distract me from my job, it helps me do it better.
It isn’t the whole solution; perhaps it’s more important to work out much of the answer it could be. I don’t think The Guardian is going to act as a canary for the rest of the media in this – it is, after all, a unique beast – but the News International model hasn’t worked at regional level so far.
I guess it’s going to throw out a whole new set of questions.

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Image via maa.org 
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Back to school

Alison Gow2 Comments
I wrote a post about how I felt like it was time to start learning again in March 2010 and now, finally, it’s going to happen; next month I start up where I left off with UCLan‘s Journalism Leaders Course, with the ultimate goal being an MA.
The first assignment pack arrived this month, which has made the whole thing seem more real and brought home to me just how much work it will entail.
It’s a bit daunting but I think the pressure of studying, combined with getting to grips with my not-quite-as-new-as-it-was job, will probably be a good thing.
There’s a phrase I tend to overuse and it may not make much sense but it means a lot to me: “We don’t know what we don’t know”. 
Last time I was at UCLan, there was so much I didn’t know I didn’t know that it was a pretty life-changing experience – how I work, where I work, what I think about a job I’ve done for years have all changed as a result of a 12 month course. It propelled me into a future I hadn’t really thought about too much. 
And now I’m going to start finding out a whole bunch of new things I don’t know I don’t know. It should be fun; I hope it will make me a better journalist.

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Are you happy?

Alison Gow1 Comment
Just a quick post to share an image I found via a social work blog (the original source is here) because it has, I think, real resonance for newspaper journalists right now.
I’d say that currently there are more opportunities than ever before to change something that’s making you unhappy – whether it’s learning new skills to specialise, sharing information and telling stories in different ways, helping build and grow niche communities, or just striking out on your own in the spirit of entrepreneurial journalism. Anyway, it’s my new desktop wallpaper; I like the sentiment and it’s got me thinking – what do I need to change?

Newspapers facing Armageddon. Or possibly Deep Impact…

Alison Gow2 Comments
So now I know the worst; the newspaper industry is indeed doomed, broken beyond repair on the rock that is the internet.
And I can say this with confidence because greater minds than mine have pronounced its fate… for Ben Affleck has predicted the imminent death of newspapers.
He has a new film to promote, State of Play, and, while doing the media glad-handing that goes with such a project, told Hitflix:

“I think this is the last movie that will be set in a newspaper. I don’t know how this movie will be perceived, but I do believe that people will look back and say, ‘Oh yeah, that was the movie that came out right around the time the Internet destroyed newspapers,”

I’d be interested to see if he expands his theory when he’s talking to inkies – the above quote was made to online journalists, according to Hitflix – and I also think he’s maybe taking a little too much on his shoulders here.
After all, predicting no one else will make a film similar to the one you’re starring in is a risky business. Ben should know – who would have thought two films about asteroids hitting the Earth would show up in one summer? Yet in 1998 there was Deep Impact, and two months later along came Armageddon, featuring the matchless acting talent of… Ben Affleck.

Goodbye Press Gazette

Alison GowLeave a comment
Sad news today as Willmington announced the closure of Press Gazette.
I loved UKPG, as it was, and remember scanning it when the NCE results were published to see my name. Hell, I even remember when it had pages of real jobs in it; that makes me feel very old.

Even though it was experiencing tough times, I thought Press Gazette would struggle through and I’m sad to see it go under as it’s been a part of my reporting life.
When I started earning a daily hack’s salary (I thought it was a princely sum, too) I became a subscriber. I loved Dog to bits, the letters page was always excellent, and the industry news was relevant to me.

Then Piers Morgan bought it and it seemed to fill up with trivia, London-centric gossip or features with his mates; Press Gazette became something that, when it dropped on the doormat, I had little inclination to read.
Press Gazette staffers Martin Stabe and Patrick Smith had also worked hard and successfully at engaging Press Gazette’s readers and when they left for bigger, better things, I just lost interest in it completely.
Alongside that – and I just know I’m going to be dubbed humorless for this – I was really uncomfortable with the whole the Grey Cardigan ‘Crystal Tits’ joke. There are way too few women holding senior posts in this business and, even though the column was fiction, I found it unpleasant and snide.

My growing disenchantment, the dwindling jobs pages, and a growing tendency to read it online, eventually led to a cancelled subscription. Then it stopped becoming relevant online reading, with Journalism.co.uk proving such an excellent site that Press Gazette couldn’t compete, for me, in terms of relevant industry news, comments, blogs, links and entertainment. I’m not even sure I follow its Twitter feed any more – and how apathetic do you have to feel towards a news source to say that?

But, sentiment apart, there’s another reason I feel I should mourn the passing of Press Gazette. If we, as an industry, can’t drum up the interest to support and sustain an established trade magazine and website, what does it say about the future of newspapers? Press Gazette lost advertising, lost readers, lost staff, lost revenue and, eventually, just lost.
It is a decline and fall that I fear will be mirrored by a number of UK regional newspapers in the coming months.