Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The future is already here

NEW MEDIA

DES RYAN

THERE will not be a single breakthrough in the new media future. It will likely be a variety of transitions that arise through trial and error. Evolution, nor revolution.

Indaily is part of the transition. It arose out of the Independent Weekly newspaper, which closed last week, and we will continue to fight the good fight as an independent media voice in Adelaide.

Under the old media model, the mass market had a hunger for news, which a select few got to supply and made massive profits from it.

The technology for producing and distributing the news was expensive. Printing presses could only be afforded by the rich. Newspaper companies built glass office towers, symbolic temples that reflected their own self-regard. The smug message to everyone was: You don’t know anything about the world, so we are going to explain it to you and you are going to pay for it.

Then along came the internet.

For the traditional media, the internet was a permanent game changer, and the old players are still scrambling to come to grips with the consequences.

All around, meantime, non-traditional media sites are finding a massive market. Senior journalists are leaving the New York Times and The Washington Post to work at the Huffington Post, a content aggregating blog launched in 2005, which covers politics, media, business, entertainment, living, style and comedy. In addition to its core staff, HuffPo has 3000 bloggers who contribute material.

AOL, a tech company that started as an internet service provider, is currently the largest hirer of journalists in the US. AOL has 100 million users every month.

We also have the likes of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and Apple, which have grown into enormously powerful companies. They were started by tech guys and venture capitalists with no special knowledge or appreciation for news. But they now control what we get to see.

Yes. The likes of Rupert Murdoch have been usurped to an extent.

Take Apple, a consumer electronics company that produces such devices as iPhones and iPads. Apple sells 275,000 devices a day worldwide. It just recorded its first quarter of $20 billion revenue.

But if you are a newspaper owner and decide you want your app to be available to iPad users, here is what could happen. Apple might approve your app or might not, and will take as much time as it likes to get around to making a decision. It will also impose all sorts of arbitrary conditions, such as what name you can and cannot call your app. Then Apple will want 30 per cent of your subscription revenue and 40 per cent of ad revenue.

That’s what the newspaper and publishing industry is waking up to. That’s the new paradigm. If you want access to the smartest, latest technology, you’d better be prepared to pay plenty to get inside the gate. Apple is also rumoured to be floating its own model to become a distribution stream for news, not just for other people’s apps.

Happily, though, such power can cut both ways.

Apple introduced Ping – a social network for music – on its iTunes site. Ping allows people to follow their favourite artists and friends to discover the music they’re talking about, listening to and downloading. Trouble was, to join the Ping community, you first had to buy the music from iTunes. You couldn’t write a post about a song or a band unless you bought the product. The buy-first policy caused such an anti-iTunes backlash among customers that Apple quickly relented and changed Ping to now allow open, free access.

The lesson it teaches is you can monetise a site but try to squeeze out too much profit and it will come back to bite you.

In the background, the grumbling old media owners agonise about how to make money in the free media environment.

It’s a burning issue for the global empire of Rupert Murdoch, who so dominates the Adelaide media scene through The Advertiser, the Sunday Mail, The Australian, Messenger community newspapers, various magazines and AdelaideNow online, along with Fox, movies and who knows what else.

The News Corp business model is to erect paywalls around its news websites, or at least those “exclusive content” sections, for which the customers will have to pay to gain access. Plainly, Murdoch does not embrace a free, open system of content. His model is based on the belief that the way to make money is to isolate yourself from the rest of the web.

The new paywall at The Times of London immediately rubbed out more than 90 per cent of online subscribers. Maybe this was exactly what Rupert had in mind. Or perhaps not. The vital question, though, is will the remaining 10 per cent be sufficient to sustain the business at a time when his newspapers are in circulation free-fall?

Murdoch is an old media genius. No question. But that old model looks to be broken as a sustainable business.

Is the 80 year old a modernist media genius too? He once famously ordered his senior global executives not to spend any more money on website development since none of them could show him how to turn a profit online. Eventually, too late, he bought My Space, only to see it swamped by Facebook.

Unlike News Corp, Indaily believes in the open, free dissemination of news and information. Is this concept really so radical? Hardly. Radio, TV and community newspapers have been doing it for decades, and selling advertising off the back of it.

Innovative devices such as an iPad, ingenious though it is, are simply tools. The core issue remains the content and engaging the readers. The focus of Indaily is to search out the distilled essence of what makes Adelaide tick and present it in a convenient and easy-to-use format.

Indaily has gone through a transition point beyond the printed version of the Independent Weekly. We will build on the paper’s reputation by breaking our own stories rather than following the Media GroupThink elsewhere in Adelaide. To provide a different national slant we also have access to outside sources such as Fairfax Media, Business Spectator and Crikey! And we are constantly searching for new ways to plug into the voices of our readers. One example is the Imagine Adelaide forum, our ongoing debate about the future of the city.

Our readers, we believe, are influential, connected and committed to making things better in this city. So is Indaily.

The future is already here – it has happened – and you are reading one version of it with Indaily.