“Real news is what somebody is trying to hide from you. All the rest is just advertising.” – Lord Beaverbrook.

Thanks to Gerry McCusker at PR disasters

What is real news? : PR Disasters.

The signals coming from Fairfax may be slightly jumbled, but the message is clear. Australia and New Zealand’s largest publisher plans to follow Murdoch and charge for online news.

I describe the signals as confused because on Friday, Stephen Hutcheon at the Sydney Morning Herald wrote a story about readers’ reluctance to pay for online news. On one level Hutcheon’s Not happy, Rupert: readers say they won’t pay for online news was a simple dig at the rival News Corporation – complete with an unflattering photograph of Rupert Murdoch. He says News’ announcement was followed by 140 reader comments – mainly from angry readers threatening to go elsewhere the moment charges are applied.

Clearly Fairfax’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing because Sunday saw Tom Hyland write Fairfax, News to charge for online at The Age website. He also wrote the longer Stop the presses. Hyland had the unenviable job of quoting Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy who told him; “charging for online access was essential if publishers were to maintain their newsroom staff.”

You always know things are going to get tricky when a newspaper executive uses a word like ‘monetising’ and Hyland quotes McCarthy getting his teeth around that in the very next paragraph. He went on to talk about a two-level model at the The Age and the The Sydney Morning Herald websites.

Of course Fairfax is no stranger to charging for online content. The company’s The Australian Financial Review has long been one of the regions few major titles to eschew the free online model and charge readers. By all accounts the AFR’s paywall hasn’t been very successful, but it will have taught the company some useful lessons about how to turn reader clicks into real money.

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• Crunching newpaper online paywall numbers (billbennett.co.nz)

Julie Starr’s Evolving Newsroom is a great New Zealand website about journalism and what we once thought of as the newspaper business. Starr writes as much about the technology underpinning modern journalism as the nitty gritty of the subject itself. While I doubt we’d agree on everything, I count her among the people who ‘get it’.

Recommended recent taster: Who pays for investigative journalism?

There’s no serious New Zealand counterpart to The Australian’s weekly Media section, which also appears online as part of the paper’s website. Given the section is part of Australia’s national daily newspaper, the focus is firmly on that country’s media, but there’s a huge overlap with New Zealand’s media industry and, anyway, the Australian does a good job of covering the big picture stories which affect us all. It’s not entirely unbiased — after all The Australian is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited — and often shows Fairfax in an less flattering light and pulls its punches over News’ properties, but overall the coverage is well balanced. While the print section is weekly, the online news is updated regularly throughout the week.

Recommended recent taster: Free-to-air TV advertising income plunges

Another great Australian resource is the online-only mUmBRELLA which covers media and marketing. The site takes a much more light-hearted approach than the Australian, which can be a bit heavy at times. It also tends to focus on short, snappy pieces with a healthy dose of reader comments. From my point of view there’s a lower signal-to-noise ratio. Nevertheless it’s on my daily read list and I love it, although I hate the typographic silly buggers with the name.

Recommended recent taster: PRs turn focus to bloggers rather than journos

As the name suggests the anonymous writer of Freelance Unbound is a freelance journalist. He worked in the trade press in the UK and does a little teaching as well. I like the site, partly because it moves smoothly between big picture ‘think’ pieces and snappy little items — there’s often some fun and plenty of good reader comments. There’s some great material covering the point where the world of traditional journalism collides with social media and other online communications tools. The site also has an excellent voice, although I suspect that’s just the author’s natural voice.

Recommended recent taster: Blogs are dying. Great news for bloggers… and journalism graduates

Publishing 2.0 is an American site with a heavy focus on web publishing, it’s blurb says it is about “how technology is transforming media”. A lot of the material appears to be aimed at people managing traditional media companies – which in American tends to mean large corporation. Nevertheless there’s plenty of valuable ideas and news.

Recommended recent taster: Why we link: A brief rundown of the reasons your news organization needs to tie the Web together

So far I’ve carefully trying to avoid using the word ‘blog’. This isn’t because I’m some print era fogey in a state of digital denial. As far as I’m concerned it’s a term that conjures up the wrong image. But there’s simply no getting around the online journalism blog which appears to be written and edited by professionals exhibiting the very skills most bloggers seem to disdain. The site is primarily British, with correspondents from around the world. A lot of the material is aimed at showing switched on journalists how to use technology to improve their work.

Recommended recent taster: Chris Anderson’s ‘Free’: Not worth buying

I don’t always agree with Martin Hurst who sporadically makes entries on his Ethical Martini site, but his ideas are usually worth reading. Hirst is an academic who teaches at Auckland University of Technology and specialise in media ethics.

Recommended recent taster:The revolution will not be Twitter-ized

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A month ago I had a short but interesting online conversation with Australian journalist Renai LeMay who says Twitter is journalism. He has written a few posts on the subject on his blog and elsewhere. The best jumping off point for new readers is his Twitter’s impact on media and journalism.

LeMay is a visionary. For my money he has a great grasp of where news journalism and online media may go.

In my earlier post Can Twitter be journalism? I said I agree with him in principle. However, I few twittering journos use the technology as an interactive news media.

Most simply use Twitter as a broadcast medium – rather like an RSS feed. A number have Twitter accounts, but say nothing of value. Perhaps 40 percent are serious Twitter journalists.

I may have been over optimistic with this estimate. Yesterday the Online Journalism Blog reported on how British newspapers use Twitter. In Newspapers on Twitter – how the Guardian, FT and Times are winning Malcolm Coles writes;

“newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across their 120 official Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10.”

This sounds encouraging. Buried further down the story is the comment:

“Out of 120 accounts, just 16 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 114 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc”

Coles also points out the newspaper sites rarely follow Twitter users.

Cluetrain barely stopped here

Both these points apply to the bulk of Twittering publications in Australian and New Zealand. My guess is managers encourage journalists to promote stories using the technology, but they are actively discouraged from replying and retweeting.

There’s a precedent for this. After all, hardly any online publications in the region ever link to titles owned by other publishers – which means they are missing the point of online publishing. Until publishers encourage reporters and editors to engage with their audiences, they are going to miss out on the potential of Twitter.

Of course, the journalists who do really well at this will become media brands in their own right, which will worry the bean counters. But that’s another story…

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• A guide to newspapers on Twitter (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
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Here’s one I’m pleased I had nothing to do with.

From Mumbrella: Embarassing typo in The Australian after News Limited boss speaks about the health of the industry

See: With newspapers you’re wrong forever at Mumbrella.

Incidentally, this is why newspapers need skilled, experienced sub-editors.

Use capital letters for proper nouns. Avoid them for common nouns. Proper nouns are the names of things. So you’d use capitals for the names of people, places, months, days of the week, companies and so on. You wouldn’t use capitals for common nouns.

People often run into difficulty with capitals because there’s a temptation to use one for important words. In business writing people often use capitals as a way of avoiding offending someone or something by implying he or it isn’t important.

Another difficulty is with titles. Newspaper typically use a capital letter when the title is used with a person’s name but not otherwise.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is correct, but it would be the prime minister’s desk.

In his book Newsman’s English British newspaper editor Harold Evans says; “Avoid using them unnecessarily. The Parks Committee, but subsequently the committee. The South West Regional Hospital Board, but then the hospital board.”

One piece of advice I had early in my career as a journalist is: “If in doubt use lower case unless it looks wrong”.

Lastly, do not use capital letters for emphasis and avoid writing words in all capitals.

Related articles:

• Companies are singular
• The inverted pyramid
• Better writing: Keep it simple
• Better writing: And
• Better writing: Go easy on the adjectives

Dan Conover at Xark has written a great piece arguing against the newspaper publishers’ campaign to charge readers for on-line news.

Conover describes the move as a suicide pact. While describing the idea that readers should pay for the professionally created content they consume as reasonable, he says attempts to force them to pay are “post-rational”.

He points out some of the main flaws, including the fact that consumers don’t want to pay for news and that previous attempts to make them pay have failed. But Conver points out newspaper publishers are no longer listening to reason and are determined to plough ahead with paid content.

Speaking as someone who has spent more than 30 years working as a journalist – most of that time on newspapers – I’d love to see publishers find a way to make on-line news profitable.  But it’s a fantasy.

If Fairfax can only convince a handful of Australian business people to stump up cash to read the highly-targeted and immensely useful Australian Financial Review on-line, what chance to other newspaper publishers have?

You need nerves of steel to bet against Rupert Murdoch, but this time, he and the other newspaper owners are going in the wrong direction – readers are not going to pay to read news. And they definitely will not do so while there are free alternatives.

Xark!: The newspaper suicide pact.

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Simon Owens at Bloggasm writes music magazine Paste appealed to readers to help it out of its money troubles. The magazine needed $300,000 and after ten days received $175,000 in reader donations.

Some public broadcasting radio and TV stations raise money through donations — mainly in the US.

Can this model work for print?

The answer is, in a way it already does. Most print magazines already earn a portion of their revenue from copy and subscription sales. If there’s less advertising, the cover price is higher.

Many publications already carry no advertising and just make money from copy or subscription payments.

For example, New Zealand’s Consumer Institute magazine Consumer doesn’t carry advertising. The same applies to Choice in Australia and similar titles elsewhere in the world.

This means the magazine’s readers know its articles are written without any pressure from advertisers.

It can a good business model for publishers. Subscription revenue is more reliable than advertising and you get it before paying for publishing costs. I think we’ll see more subscription-driven print titles in the future.

Bloggasm » Can Paste’s success with reader donations be duplicated?.

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