Best of the Week: Moments of wonder; and stepping away from Facebook

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK [Cooperate]( And another thing... Waiting for Wynstan Welcome to a nostalgic Best of the Week, mostly written yesterday in sunny Cremorne. And during July, I’ve developed a new Friday morning tradition. I write BOTW from home while I wait for a man - let’s call him Wynstan, with a Y - to install a flyscreen. Central to the tradition is the belated receipt of a text from the gentleman installer explaining why he hasn’t shown up this time. Sometimes Wynstan has forgotten to put the flyscreen in his van. Sometimes he’s been held up on another job. And sometimes he’s got the day mixed up. Instead, he’d like to arrange another time. (As Samuel Beckett would say, “But surely tomorrow…”) However, the most crucial element of the tradition is that he never actually shows up. This week: The Tele’s 140 years, my 30 as a hack, and why we’re ditching Facebook for now Rolling back the decades As I’ve mentioned in the past, my favourite days at Mumbrella come when I do an increasingly rare newsdesk shift. Four or five times a year I’ll take my turn on the weekend newsdesk, and bolt on a couple of weekdays too. The job of whoever runs the Mumbrella newsdesk on the day is to live and breathe the output on the website, and our daily email newsletter. On my newsdesk days, everything else disappears from the diary. It’s that rarest of pleasures - to be able to focus on doing just one thing as well as possible. On Tuesday that included editing a piece that our media writer Hannah Blackiston had put together to mark [the 140th anniversary of The Daily Telegraph](. For any media nerd, it’s worth a read, particularly for the nostalgic, evocative writing of ex-staffer Bryce Corbett: “It was the days of shorthand classes and midnight-to-dawn shifts in the radio room, eavesdropping on police radio frequencies across the city and recording the nightly drama of Sydney-by-night. It was death-knocks and door-stops and being the first on the scene at catastrophic accidents – seeing things no journalism lecture could ever prepare you for. “It was eccentric, chain-smoking old reporters thumping away at primitive word processors, the constant rattle of the Telex machine and the occasional fax from London, ominously signed ‘KRM’. Over the last couple of weeks, The Tele itself has been running reworked articles from the last 1.4 centuries. “Ned’s dead”, anyone? The one piece missing though was the actual date of the anniversary, which took a bit more tracking down. Eventually we got hold of the masthead. The first edition was July 1, 1879. Had they actually missed the big day themselves, Hannah and I wondered? Certainly, I couldn’t spot a mention in the July 1 edition that this was the actual day of the anniversary. How on earth do you miss a big round number like that, I wondered? Then on Thursday, which was the 18th, something occurred to me. Hadn’t I just missed a big round number of my own? On July 17, I celebrated my 30th anniversary as a journalist. And I completely forgot. Actually, worse yet, I can never figure out if it was actually July 10 or July 17, 1989. But either way, it put me in a nostalgic mood. The thing I’ve been lucky enough to experience many times during a career in journalism are moments of wonder as yet another technology changes how journalism is delivered. And in one way or another, I can claim to have been involved in online journalism for 32 years of that. Still in sixth form college in the UK, I got involved in my home town’s pre-Internet version of the Internet. Called Grapevine, it involved free terminals installed at places like the local library. They were connected over a phone line system to my college and would be updated overnight. You’d build each page individually, using a basic pre-HTML form of coding. If you remember Seven’s old Austext service, the pages looked similar to that. One of my early entries into publishing was fake news: Amongst other things, I wrote Grapevine’s horoscopes page. Once I was on my first local newspaper, I was there just in time to witness the world changing, not that I realised the significance at the time. I trained on a manual typewriter, writing only two or three paragraphs on each folio. After going through the chief reporter and the news editor, the stapled folios would be walked out of the newsroom and into the smoke filled subs office. The sub editors would add hieroglyphics in pen, instructing the printers how to treat the copy, and a courier would arrive to take it to the printworks in the next town. You learn to write cleanly, when failure to do so means having to retype the whole thing all over again. You’d need to bang the keys hard, too. Old habits die hard; today everyone in the office can hear me bashing my keyboard. The arrival of computer terminals a few months after I joined didn’t seem as significant at the time as it clearly was. Getting my first mobile phone was a lot more exciting. It was one of those moments of wonder. The idea of being able to file a story back to the newsroom from wherever I was - and for contacts to call me - completely intrigued me. Just a few months before, I’d been on my journalism course and the lecturer had told us about the time he filed copy from a ship by writing his story long hand, tying it to a brick and throwing it to another boat hired by his newspaper. At first I was disappointed by how little my phone rang. Admittedly, nobody knew my number. Another moment of wonder came on my first daily paper. Mobile phone calls were still expensive, so you’d generally still use a public call box to file from. I filed a story that way late one bitterly cold winter night. I’d just been in the middle of a riot as veal calf exporters were ambushed by animal rights activists. My fingers completely frozen, I could barely hold the phone or turn the pages of my notebook as I read my story to the copytaker. Warming up back in the office, I sneaked down to the press hall, a floor below the newsroom. I was able to take a copy of the newspaper directly from the conveyor belt, with my byline on the front page. That was a moment of wonder. I still have a copy of that article somewhere. The pace of the revolution picked up. Email arrived, first just on one computer in the newsroom, and then everybody’s. A decade into my career, I was editing my first magazine, which was for hospital doctors - and called, logically enough, Hospital Doctor. The Internet was becoming a thing. I used to keep a notebook to write down the addresses of useful websites. A couple of years later, along came Google. It took a while to realise that Google meant my days of searching filing cabinets for cuttings every time I needed to research a story were coming to an end. I do miss the peace and quiet of the cuttings library. In 2000, we launched our own website for Hospital Doctor. Our company, one of the world’s biggest publishers, didn’t have the ability to do it inhouse. Some smart young doctors did it for us. We’d been beaten to the hospitaldoctor.com and .co.uk domains because I’d been unable to persuade my publisher that it was worth spending the £50 when they were available. It didn’t matter, argued the smart young doctors. Actually .cc was going to be the hot internet suffix of the future. Checking today, it would seem that hospital-doctor.cc is long gone, with only a few ghostly remains on the Wayback Machine internet archive. Yet journalism was still one-way transmission. If your readers had a point of view, they’d have to write to the letters page. And they did. Sometimes Hospital Doctor would carry 15 pages of readers letters. Thank goodness - the print ad market was booming for the last time, and we were publishing weekly 100+ page editions. On my next magazine, Media Week in London, things moved up another gear. There was a member of staff dedicated to our website. But it brought in no revenue. Half way into my career I found myself in Dubai, editing the Middle East edition of Campaign Magazine. I became obsessed with blogs, to the extent that, until the novelty wore off, it was a major distraction from the day job. In 2005, I started my first blog, for Campaign. Arguably, I’ve been a blogger ever since. (To me, blogger is a badge to be proud of, even if the term has gone out of fashion. In Mumbrella’s early days when AdNews updated its media kit to declare itself “more than just a blog” I couldn’t have been any more delighted.) That blog was where the world tited for me again. Suddenly those comments after a blogpost turned it into a two-way conversation. It meant that for the second half of my career, the feedback was instant. It was also the end of the journalist as gatekeeper of what’s important. Conversations with smart, funny people who know more about the topic I’m covering than I do have become a norm. Yet when I think about that interaction, it’s also something I treasure. Even arguing with those who disagree. I’ve never met, and don’t know the names of, many of our best commenters from down the years. Don’t believe the line about the internet being forever, by the way. That Hospital Doctor website is gone. So is the Campaign Middle East blog. And indeed, so is the B&T blog I created in 2006. I can find no digital trace. Over the last decade, the moments of wonder have, if anything, become more frequent. By the time I started Mumbrella, digital publishing had become so straightforward. I was able to buy a domain, jump onto Wordpress to create a site, and knock together a (terrible) logo in Microsoft Word, all in the same afternoon. Managing our email database was $30 a month, not the thousands it had been just a couple of years before. And then social media happened… I fell in love with Twitter and its ability to build communities. In the early days of Mumbrella I threw myself in. It drove traffic to our site, and conversations. And they became a real world community too. I’d never experienced anything like it before. It made me completely rethink the publisher’s place within its audience community. That place is not (first and foremost) having lunch with the captains of industry. It’s being part of the community conversation. And so many more moments. The rise of LinkedIn. We were talking about LinkedIn in the office this week. I reckon we could go for a week with LinkedIn activity our only source of news stories (and very possibly traffic - more on that later.) And more. Podcasts are still a thing of wonder for me. I love them as a listener, and I sulk every week where other commitments prevent me from being part of the Mumbrellacast. ([This week’s Mumbrellacast]( sees the team discuss Coles’ Little Shop return and the Instagram likes apocalypse. I missed it. I’m sulking.) Being able to easily embed video on the site was in itself a thing of wonder when Mumbrella began. To then produce our own video interviews was another huge jump. I’d love to get back to doing them more regularly again. And just as excitingly, live video streaming. To have the likes of Marco Pierre White or Guy Kawasaki on the couch in Mumbrella House: Moment. Of. Wonder. And devices of course. After my mobile phone shrunk from the size of a house brick to the size of a Mars bar, the BlackBerry’s full keyboard changed everything. I decided I’d never give it up. Then came the iPhone. And yet, it all feels connected to the basics of what good journalism has always been about: Putting the audience (we say audience, not readers now) at the centre of what you do. It was a front row seat for publishing’s changing print model. The print industry’s challenges started long before the internet went mainstream. At my very first newspaper the printers were taking industrial action because they were about to lose many of their jobs to computer automation. By the time I joined my next newspaper, it had moved out of the city centre and was in a factory at the edge of town while the old office, with its vast press hall, awaited redevelopment as apartments. At the next paper, the editor was made redundant as management centralised operations to make things cheaper. On magazines, it was the same story. As an editor, the redesigns I led on Media Week in the UK and then on B&T felt like the last throws of the dice that they were. Mind you, I was arrogant enough to try to turn back the tide. At Mumbrella we bought Encore magazine and tried to save it, which proved to be an expensive lesson. We couldn’t make it work as a print product, and our creation of an iPad edition was an exciting, glorious business failure too. Looking back, I realised that I’ve seen distinct phases for the publishing economy which I didn’t necessarily notice as they were unfolding. Thirty years ago, publishers were easily able to monetise their print audience through advertising. When the Internet came though, the ethos was to give everything away for free. Advertisers (and truth be told, advertising sales teams) were slow to adapt to the emerging digital audience. It often got treated as a bonus instead. Online ads were often given away to the print advertisers, who didn’t even want them, as creating the new ad was a chore. Eventually, the problem became one of over-supply of digital advertising inventory. Advertisers were taught to expect to pay a tiny amount to reach 1000 eyeballs. That price crashed further with the arrival of programmatic advertising. And very quickly, the arrival of crooks, polluting the system with fake ads and stealing a slice of the adspend as middlemen of the tech chain. Billions of dollars of venture capital distorted the market even more. A wave of digital publishing startups more focused on growth than profitability (think Buzzfeed and co) seemed unbeatable, until gravity caught them and their challenge faded as the VC funds dried up. Meanwhile though, the premium publishers were starting to figure out that it was time for the ten year free trial to come to an end, and to ask readers to pay. That’s been one of the battles I’ve watched during Mumbrella’s decade. I didn’t think they’d succeed, but I was wrong Only somebody with the long term commitment of a Rupert Murdoch could have pulled off the investment and focus that has resulted in News Corp’s titles around the world finding a route to a sustainable digital subscription model. That may prove to be his final big legacy. Other shifts are taking things back the publishers’ way. The push for privacy and the backlash to ad tracking through cookies has created the conditions for a logged-in consumer. That will swing things back publishers’ way too. The pace of change has increased, and I’m sure that will continue. And luckily for me, I also still get to experience moments of wonder connecting me back to the traditions of journalism On Thursday afternoon I moderated a debate on art versus science for Nine at their Big Ideas Store event in Paddington. It was a lot of fun. I arrived too early and popped into the second hand book store next door to kill some time. I found a book called The Journalist’s Craft. Published in 1965, it features chapters by famous and forgotten Australian journalists covering everything from how a newspaper is produced to the basics of libel. I can’t wait to read it. As I examined the book at my desk just now, I realised there was an envelope folded inside the back cover. It’s addressed to Adrian Ashton, editor of Construction magazine, with a 5d stamp and a 23 November 1965 postmark. Google tells me that Adrian Ashton had been recognised with a CBE for services to the construction industry just a few months before that postmark. I’ll never meet him though. He died in 1982, aged 74. He obviously had the respect of his industry - the Adrian Ashton Prize for architectural writing and criticism is still named for him. Inside the envelope was a formal invitation from the Australian Journalists Association to the launch of that book, held at the Journalists’ Club in Sydney. And the small moment of wonder came when I looked at the address of that envelope. It’s round the corner from where I write this. If I walked out of my front door now, I could be at that address in a couple of minutes. I’d missed the book’s first owner by 54 years, but when I look at the book in front of me, it doesn’t feel like it. Goodbye Facebook traffic This week, we made an editorial call. We’re going to become one of the first publishers in the country to stop posting links to our articles on Facebook. It will cost us a few hundred thousand page impressions a year, but I’ll sleep better. The decision follows last month’s ruling from Justice Stephen Rothman, which I’ve previously written about. Essentially, he ruled that if a media company shares a link to an article on its own Facebook page, then it automatically becomes responsible for any reader comments that appear on that Facebook post. Not just moderated comments back on the publisher’s own site, but unmoderated comments on the publisher’s Facebook page. This week, the detail of [Justice Rothman’s ruling was published](. Every publisher who uses Facebook would be wise to read the whole thing. The ruling was part of a libel action being taken by former Northern Territory youth detainee Dylan Voller against Nine’s The Sydney Morning Herald and four News Corp brands - The Australian, the Centralian Advocate, Sky News Australia and The Bolt Report. Having read the ruling, I’ve decided that in Mumbrella’s case the risk of sticking with Facebook as a traffic source while the law remains as it is, outweighs the reward. To spell it out, let’s take a hypothetical. Say The Sydney Bugle newspaper publishes an article about John Smith winning a cake baking contest and posts a link to the article on its Facebook page. And say somebody who doesn’t like John Smith gets drunk one night and just for a laugh writes in the Facebook comments that John’s a crook who cheats at cake baking. John would be able to sue The Sydney Bugle, even if they never saw that comment. Or to take the hypothesis one step further. An enemy of the newspaper who wanted to cause it trouble could create a fake Facebook profile and start writing defamatory comments on every post on the masthead’s page. The paper would be liable. Newscorp and Nine have already signalled that they’re going to appeal the ruling. And they seem confident that it can be overturned. That would be my guess too. Given that Facebook does not provide publishers with tools to pre-moderate comments it feels illogical that they should take legal responsibility. But one thing that becomes clear on reading the judge’s finding is that the newspapers did not cover themselves in glory in how they presented their case. I wonder if they were complacent. The journalists involved in comment moderation sound like they were ill prepared to go into the witness box. By sharing the hacks they use to create an unofficial moderation system by the back door, via profanity filters, they allowed the judge to conclude that there are indeed reliable ways of controlling comments. But the presentation of the case was worse than that. It’s hard to fathom how the Sydney Morning Herald’s deputy digital editor Sophia Phan - who has less than six years experience as a journalist - ended up as the person best suited to speaking for the company in the court case. It did not go well in court. As Justice Rothman put it: “Ms Phan was a difficult witness who was somewhat obfuscatory, if not obdurate... Ms Phan seemed to know little, or could recall little about the purpose or operation of the public Facebook page from the perspective of Fairfax.” If you’d like a more plainspoken word than obdurate, Google suggests stubborn. And if you’d like a definition for obfuscatory, Google suggests “intending to conceal the truth through confusion”. That damage to the reputation of a young journalist is as much on the management of Nine (or Fairfax as it was) for allowing her to go into that witness box so apparently ill-prepared in the first place. And there’s nothing in these findings to suggest that these publishers reached out to their frenemy Facebook in preparing their arguments. With battle lines drawn on what will likely be a big few days next week with the results of the ACCC’s platforms inquiry expected, I wonder if the publishers were too stubborn, nay, obdurate to ask for help. Instead the judge drew a lot of his conclusion from an expert witness - Ryan Shelley, from Pepper IT. His web page is certainly SEO-optimised to position him as a social media expert. Facebook, the actual experts, were not part of the proceedings. Regardless, there isn’t much other existing case law, so unless it is successfully appealed or the law changed, the judge’s ruling stands. And that’s why it comes down to risk versus reward for us. In total Mumbrella gets about 12m page impressions a year, across 7.7m sessions. And last year 372,000 of those sessions came from Facebook. So that amounts to about 4.8% of our traffic. Our business model isn’t based on a direct correlation between traffic and revenue. We charge a premium CPM rate so we rarely sell out of inventory. (And indeed we use that spare inventory to promote our own events.) That means the loss of Facebook traffic is not an existential issue for us, which makes the risk versus reward decision a lot easier. Indeed, since the ruling was first made, we’ve hardly been posting to Facebook, to see how it’s gone. Our traffic has held up just fine. For other publishers, the risk versus reward decision may go differently. That Facebook traffic is much more important to some business models. It emerged, I think for the first time, during the hearing that The Australian gets more than half of its unique monthly visitors from Facebook - that’s a much bigger proportion than I realised. So they may have to take the pragmatic view that there will be certain risky articles they won’t post to Facebook, but maybe they won’t go further than that. And actually the same does go for Mumbrella. We use Facebook as our main paid marketing tool. Outside of Mumbrella’s own on-platform marketing efforts, Facebook is our biggest source of ticket sales to our conferences. For us, in the case of our paid Facebook marketing posts, the reward outweighs the risk. So we’ll go on advertising on Facebook, albeit with our marketing team paying much closer attention to the few comments that our paid posts attract. In the meantime, the publishers have said they will appeal the ruling, and I hope they do a better job on making their case this time round. Australia’s defamation laws suck enough already. Weekend wonders Time to wrap things up. A big week lies ahead for Mumbrella. It’s our [Finance Marketing Summit on Thursday](. A few months on from the Royal Commission, it will be fascinating to find out the mood of the finance sector. Tickets are still on sale. As ever, I welcome your emails to tim@mumbrella.com.au. And our editor Vivienne Kelly is at the helm across the weekend. You can reach her at vivienne@mumbrella.com.au. By the time you get this on the east coast I’ll have just been on Seven’s Sunrise Masters of Spin segment. (In Adelaide I’m probably on about now.) As I’ve mentioned before, the request only comes in during the school holidays when all the first (and indeed second string) talent is unavailable. After a late night for The Streets at the Enmore yesterday (amazing…) and an early morning to finish this, it’s time to go back to bed for a while. Have a great weekend. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content Director - Mumbrella [Cooperate]( Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia This email was sent to {EMAIL}. If you would rather not receive Mumbrella's Best of the Week email you can [unsubscribe]( or [manage subscriptions](. [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](