Encyclopaedia Britannica, along with CEO of News Ltd John Hartigan, would likely not regard The Inquisitr Founder and Chief Blogger / Editor in Chief / Writer / Links Curator - Duncan Riley (whose personal blog is mission’d “blogging is not a spectator sport”) - a Journalist. Duncan (and probably every Australian with an active Facebook page) would probably fit into what Hartigan referred to when he said : “Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for. Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.”

Wikipedia on the other hand, does consider Duncan a person “worthy of notice” or specifically “significant, interesting, or unusual enough to deserve attention or to be recorded.”^[1] Now Wikipedia may not list Duncan as a “Journalist” (that is until someone updates Wikipedia as such - and then another party corrects/edits the update, and so on to infinity) - but Duncan, with a very small cadre of lean, sometimes mean, sometimes nice, but always fast, around the clock, and full of passion - is reporting, almost breaking, pushing the latest news - From Apple:Google:Twitter tech to 4chan:FTW:Fail:Youtube viral and even now some FanFooty founder fare.

Page 11* of Melbourne’s Sunday Age today devotes a full page of print to explore the “future of (high end) journalism” and whether a consumer pays model can be panacea for survival of (cue violins as David Simon creator of The Wire - whose cut short due to budget finale season 5 was about the decay of the media institution) is quoted “unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else.” - Funny thing I thought people like Duncan with Inquisitr were the new economic model that is being reborn on the web !

Dennis ‘Cutty’ Wise: The game done changed…
Slim Charles: Game’s the same, just got more fierce.

* Article isn’t online but the top level News Ltd charging for online content is’ere.

The feature article taps into the oft discussed debate that has been thrown around for years at Web 2.0 conferences - with very little difference to first year politics and philosophy undergraduate subjects I’ve sat thru - that define, discuss, debate :

Topic A. “Bloggers VS Journos” - Mumbrella covering Hartigan’s us + them Newspapers 1.0 approach : “My name is Pollyanna. “I’m here to tell you about the bright future facing journalists, particularly newspaper journalists...”

Topic B. Google vs Newspaper. This is where google is the virtual “cloud” media and software business. New York Times, News Ltd/Corp + Fairfax Newspaper businesses are referenced with their plush tens of millions of dollars overheaded physical newsrooms - with lots of bodies collecting, creating, disseminating “the news”. Mumbrella said it well in his (reply) letter to Mr Hartigan; “What Mumbrella does is just dowdy old B2B publishing, using newer tools. It just so happens that the B2B world we cover is the media and marketing industry. I suspect if I was doing exactly the same thing for the mining or medical industry (and as it happens, my sister title Thumbrella is already covering the travel & hospitality market), he wouldn’t even know I exist. Our readers are for the most part from within the industry, not the public.”

Topic C. Bloggers + Journos are one and the same Even though the Journo/Newspaper/MSM may be just another information source / feed / data provider - one of many providing a product with many substitutes; It’s best material - Either hyperlocal / opinion pieces / that with true creative power… that is unique / stickey etc - u get the drill. What u cant get from the other paper - that is the valuable stuff. And it’s not just editorial. A newspaper is it’s sale staff with relationships into advertising budgets bloggers can only dream about. This is where the monetisation story of social media hasn’t even begun.. and if newspapers could actually get a bit ahead of social media they would realise it’s a subset of their traditional media business… just with some crowdsourced elements, and distributed realtime content gathering and uses some new front end online tools for the end consumer. Yesterday’s news is a commodity but a breaking story or strong piece will get it’s own free marketing channel; Who under fair use summarises, collates, links, adds rich media, pushes to twitter, facebook, digg + gets “the news” to their “community” (formerly the “readers” or “audience”) - Who then in turn retweet / blog the item. The quid po quo is the media gets traffic and can ultimately do whatever they want with the cattle that is hearded to them - Charge / advertise / monetise / etc The Slumdog Millionaire effect…. one person saw it.. told another… then eventually it won more than a handful of academy awards.. Not because of marketing or production budget.. because of frenetic perfect 100 minutes of creative execution.. which created huge word of mouth where friends told the next to see it.. journalism online is no different..

So back to Duncan - he often via his personal blog (it’s not much of a globally consumer interesting news story - the future of Aussie newspapers.. unless like recently Rupert uses Australian markets first to test the paywall theory for his overseas properties) has mentioned how simple it is for newspapers - with one line of computer code : known as robots.txt protocol - to stop who it considers the largest parasite : Google to use it’s content (under fair use.. google doesn’t/cant republish the full article - unless it’s on a private page used by consumers such as Google Reader which the publisher has to publish in) But the newspapers havent yet banned google or bloggers from using it’s content.

Possibly as Duncan reports from a Harold Mitchell talk (Australia’s largest advertising media buyer) - News Ltd may go straight to suing Google; “Mitchell: the fight is on two fronts. One is to stop people like Google and organizations like Google from simply taking the information and making it available from inside their product. And the second thing is to get the product in such a way that subscribers are prepared to pay. It’s a fight that has to be won.”.

Either way, at the moment The Newspapers want it both way.

They want the traffic that comes from Google via it’s search engine and news properties. It is industry standard for Google to drive - at no cost (not incl google adsense advertising on right of search results page or any search engine optimisation costs) 30-50% of a website’s traffic. Given that the average cost per click averages 40c-$1+ depending on the consumer, and the newspaper groups each have millions of monthly online readers - Google is delivering millions of annual value in free marketing benefit to the print behemoths. So they have to decide in this equation the value of their content relative to the free marketing value a “parasite” brings.

Similarly, if you track the rise of Social Networks such as Facebook, and microblogging wireless friendly Twittering (click for Fred Wilson Twitter investor example)- a great amount of “parasitic” link sharing behaviour goes on; Many websites with audience in the social network sweetspot are receiving 10-20% of their traffic via Twitter and Facebook. In some cases traffic from these sources is overtaking Google as their main source of referrals. This trend will only continue over the coming years. And again, to date there is no cost to the newspapers for this free traffic. The techcrunch graph is 6 months old but u get the idea…

The irony is for a lifetime we have been subjected to millions of dollars of above the line advertising - for each of the major newspapers in Australia; The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun - who between them would likely have an annual 8 figure spend on Television Commercials, Print Ads and Outdoor advertising. But like political advertising who knows what effect it really has on consumer behaviour.

When I recommend to my 1600 twitter friends a link from a newspaper, a picture from my blackberry or possibly a pair of sneakers I like 50-125 people visit that link in under 60 minutes. You extrapolate that to millions of Australians on Facebook and Twitter - just in Australia. Then you combine that with an even bigger “parasite” in Google in terms of the free unique users it delivers to newspaper groups; It is insane that the newspapers consider Us - The 2006 Time Person of the Year - as the parasite.

The extra irony or perhaps the chess piece on the table is this potential sequence of Google litigation / increased newspaper paywalls / labelling of bloggers as parasites - is by the owner of the once leader of social networking - MySpace. In what is still considered one of the best value corporate internet takeovers in the noughties.

In a land of low innovation, slow moving disadvantage and cosy Kerry 2.0 + Rupert 1.0 oligopolies - what is disappointing but not unexpected is the transition straight from print rivers of gold to draconian solutions; Make the consumer pay; Sack staff; Sue competitors.

Wouldn’t it be easier to get on the front feet and follow examples that work in larger markets; Michael Wolff - the author of the best book about the Dot Com period - Burn Rate - recently wrote a Vanity Fair piece on Politico - the online business (with a print publication as a subset product) that has real numbers of staff; Real readers; Real revenue and profit and Huge amounts of Influence in Washington;

“Politico further alters the nature and effect of news by undermining the favorite view of old-line news organizations that news can be “platform agnostic”—a preferred phrase of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. This implies that content is content and it doesn’t matter how it’s delivered—hence, existing news organizations, with their existing content, can yet find a way to sell it. But Politico’s news is not like political news has ever been. Its Internet-focused version is some obsessive-compulsive mix of trade journal, Twitter feed, and, quite literally, real-time chat with seniormost newsmakers and leakers. It is constant, unrelenting, second by second. It exalts, and fetishizes, in breathless, even orgiastic news flashes, the most boring subject in the world: the granular workings of government bureaucracy. It is, arguably, in its hyperbolic attentions and exertions, in its fixations on interests that could not possibly interest anyone but the person doing it and the writer writing about it, something like a constant parody of itself.“

Michael Arrington Founder of Techcrunch.com (that Duncan Riley previously wrote for in between blog ventures) - a technology blog about startups originally and now a range of BigCo news  - that has Seven million monthly unique users - and alleged millions of turnover - wrote a piece about how the New York Times or a parasite willing to feed on it - could grab the Top 50 journalists from the paper, pay them $200k each and run the business on a far leaner overhead;

“So that got me thinking about the NYTimes. $3 billion in revenue. 16 million monthly unique visitors and 124 million page views (Comscore worldwide, May 2009). 9,000+ employees. 1,200 news staff, and just 400 or so writers, critics, correspondents and columnists. I’m still waiting to hear how many editors the paper has on top of those 400, but it’s probably a total full time news staff of no more than 450 people. I don’t really read the NYTImes beyond the technology section. But I’m guessing that the top performers in the news room, say the best 5%-10% of the writers and editors, produce 50% or more of the real value of the newspaper. The hungriest reporters. The best writers. The most competitive and aggressive editors. What if that group, the most valuable assets that the NYTimes controls, simply walked out of the building and started their own company? What would that look like? The New New York Times : The New New York Times, or NNYT, would have a writing staff of say 50 people. These are among the best journalists in the world, and let’s say they wanted to pay themselves $200,000/year, a top salary for a reporter of that stature. That’s just $10 million a year in payroll expenses. Call it $12 million with benefits. Plus, they all have stock options in the new company.”

D’Angelo Barksdale: Yeah, like my uncle. You see this? This the queen. She smart, she fast. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the go-get-shit-done piece.
Wallace: Remind me of Stringer.
D’Angelo Barksdale: And this over here is the castle. Like the stash. It can move like this, and like this.
Wallace: Dog, stash don’t move, man.
D’Angelo Barksdale: C’mon, yo, think. How many time we move the stash house this week? Right? And every time we move the stash, we gotta move a little muscle with it, right? To protect it.
Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: True, true, you right. All right, what about them little baldheaded bitches right there?
D’Angelo Barksdale: These right here, these are the pawns. They like the soldiers. They move like this, one space forward only. Except when they fight, then it’s like this. And they like the front lines, they be out in the field.
Wallace: So how do you get to be the king?

Not to mention what happens when you look at the verticals that newspapers once oned; Yelp.com own restaurant and small business reviews in the US - not written by journos but by consumers that have been to these establishments and written (by and large) about their experience - but no newspaper group has successfully attacked this space downunder; TripAdvisor.com owns holiday reviews - Again Fairfax has bought into the travel intermediary accomodation booking space but not the review area - which would make sense for an editorial business; In finance, you have a range of new real time finance players such as StockTwits; No activity in Australia in the stockmarket newspaper area.. just the same old boring stock finance charts in the paper - really whats the point : It’s wasted trees. And as for gossip - Australians are increasingly likely to get it from PerezHilton.com, TMZ.com or Duncan’s Inquisitr.

Some of the good examples downunder underheralded is CarAdvice.com.au - setup and staffed by wait for it - a group of ex journalists - It’s now the largest independent automotive editorial website downunder and a leader in that segment. All with simple daily blogging with great pictures about new cars on the Australian market. Read the automotive section of Australian newspapers recently, including Saturday ? It’s pretty barren like my name. Similarly a Melbourne company Streetadvisor.com are allowing people to recommend streets, suburbs and locations - a potentially valuable resource if it can get critical mass for home buyers.

D’Angelo Barksdale: Now look, check it, it’s simple, it’s simple. See this? This the kingpin, a’ight? And he the man. You get the other dude’s king, you got the game. But he trying to get your king too, so you gotta protect it. Now, the king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, ’cause he’s the king. Like this, this, this, a’ight? But he ain’t got no hustle. But the rest of these motherfuckers on the team, they got his back. And they run so deep, he really ain’t gotta do shit.

Next time you see an Australian newspaper exec who is asking for dollars from the consumer, or even better as a government bailout (that will probably be next) ask them what they are doing about Cutting Their Own Lunch. What are their new ventures in the spaces they previously owned; Politics ? Entertainment ? Finance ? Real Estate ? Auto Movies ? and so on…

Ironically - and I seem to be using that word in this post alot, the newspapers online are having to become alot more like the parasites they detest; The home page for News Ltd News.com.au, or Fairfax’s TheAge.com.au or SMH.com.au - are increasingly having to be titillating or oddspot news to try and get some of the internet / digg.com / facebook / twitter traffic. Which is really not satisfying anyone too much. The newspaper groups are increasingly as they should adopting the reverse chronological, opinion, bloggy format for its ‘journalists’ to write about whatever grabs them that day.

But when it comes to the main game - which is giving the printing press over to the Community - so they can contribute their own viewpoint - dont expect much more than the abilty to sometimes contribute a blog comment - that will then be moderated by an editor some time soon and maybe put up online. Not exactly market changing.

As AVC says tho, better to get on with it than be stuck in the middle.. “They already have a subscription model in place at the WSJ. I don’t like the WSJ’s model as much as the FT’s model and I explained why in the post I linked to above. But News Corp has a model they could propogate across their other news sites. It’s not clear to me that newspapers like The Sun, The Times, and The Post will be able to make the WSJ’s model work. And that’s what interests me. What will News Corp do for those properties? And will it work?”

Marc Cuban, Yahoo 1.0 Harvester, gets the salesforce ideas on : “You could offer a “Newsjunkies Subscription”  that includes:

a.  Access to every Newscorp news website from around the world (excluding the wall street journal). From the NYPost to the UK’s Sunday Times, Sun and more.

b. Your choice of any 2 books from our Harpers Collins collection. That’s right. Pick any 2, from our Best Sellers list, or from the special list we have put together specifically for newsjunkies like you. Its your choice if you want them in hardback, paperback or e-book format.

c.  A subscription to our news magazine, The Weekly Standard. The choice is yours whether you would like it delivered to your emailbox, printed and mailed to you or both !

d. A $99 credit at a special edition of  The Fox Store that we put together exclusively for our News Junkie Subscribers. You can pick from newly released to DVD movies or from our classics. Its up to you !

Cuban continued : “.. So to summarize. In addition to Fox websites from around the world, a $ 79 dollar annual value, you get: 2 books from our Harper Collins collection, with a value of up to $79. a subscription to the Weekly Standard, worth up to $ 64 (in a deal with its new owner) a special $99 credit at The Fox Store where you can pick from an amazing selection of movies and tv shows. For a total value of  $ 321. Because our Fox News Junkie Subscribers are critically important to us, we are offering this special package for a limited time only.  This amazing package can be yours for the low low price of only…

$ 9.95 per month with a minimum commitment of 15 months ! Add a subscription to the Wall Street Journal  Online for $ 5 more per month, or get both the WSJ online and daily delivery to your home for an additional $9.95 per month...”

D’Angelo Barksdale: Yo, what was that?
Wallace: Hm?
D’Angelo Barksdale: Castle can’t move like that. Yo, castle move up and down and sideways like.
Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: Nah, we ain’t playing that.
Wallace: Yeah, look at the board. We playing checkers.
D’Angelo Barksdale: Checkers?
Wallace: Yeah, checkers.
D’Angelo Barksdale: Yo, why you playing checkers on a chess set?
Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: Yo, why you give a shit?