Crawford Media Consulting
“The machines have acquired language. The ability to express ourselves in complex prose has always been one of our defining magic tricks as a species … we have crossed an important threshhold.” This is a quote taken from a well-researched article in the New York Times, not science fiction. At the beginning of the year I asked […]
Today I am “doing an Economist” on The Economist, with an investigation into the august publication’s global pricing for digital content. The same kind of analysis that has seen The Economist rank nations by the cost of Big Mac burgers shows that publication itself varies by more than 300% between the cheapest and most expensive […]
It’s been interesting to see Rod Sims speaking in the lead up to his retirement as the Chair of the ACCC (Australian Consumer and Competition Commission) on March 20. In the interviews I have seen or read, Sims is talking about the Media Bargaining Code as a career highlight. “It’s been one of the most successful bits […]
Today in the Crawford Media podcast I have a conversation, recorded last week, with visiting US journalist and professor Bill Grueskin. Grueskin is in Sydney at the invitation of the Judith Nielsen Institute (JNI) to investigate the Media Bargaining Code. The code, you will recall, passed into Australian law a year ago amid much clamour and […]
I find the process of putting together the Crawford Media podcasts immensely satisfying, and never more than when I have beautiful material to work with. It’s like woodworking with good timber. That’s the situation I found myself in this week with this week’s conversation with Paul Henry, a New Zealand broadcaster of long experience and great […]
Welcome back to Crawford Media, coming to you from a soggy Sydney summer where for the past month is has been more likely to rain than not. A great season for leeches, particularly here on the outskirts of the Royal National Park. While I wait to record my first podcast of the year, I thought […]
Michael Anderson was the CEO of Mediaworks and my boss for more than three years. We talked a lot together, particularly about the difficulties of managing people within media companies, and two days before I left my news director job in 2020 I asked his permission to record our final conversation. At the time, I was […]
This week I’m gazing into the crystal ball, an undertaking that usually ends badly. Nevertheless … I have written a piece for The Spinoff predicting the movement of New Zealand news outlets away from the political centre and towards the periphery. My argument is pretty simple: in a recently consolidated national market for attention, there are strong […]
Gautam Mishra is the founder and CEO of Inkl, a Melbourne-based news aggregator that has been quietly building audience for the past seven years. Years ago Mishra and his news app were mentioned to me by Jack Matthews, the former Fairfax Metro CEO, and I went and downloaded Inkl. Mishra had worked with Matthews at Fairfax, where he […]
Today, I present you with Margy Vary, former marketing director at The Guardian Australia, and the possessor of a keen analytical mind. Vary has applied that mind to the thorny and important question of how to coax money out of news audiences. In the podcast, Vary explains how she and her colleagues at The Guardian began […]