In my newsletter last week I mentioned the Australian High Court decision in the Dylan Voller defamation case, and how it was freaking a lot of people out. The High Court found that three news organisations being sued for defamation were in fact the publishers of comments attached to their posts in Facebook, despite the fact they […]
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The case of the dead doctor
Last week Facebook released data showing the most popular content and pages in its news feed between April and June of this year. After a leak to the New York Times, it turned out the company had prepared the same data for the first three months of the year but shelved it because the most popular link […]
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Forget about news echo chambers
In a fascinating study out of Oxford University, researchers have found that people who only get their news from highly partisan outlets are small minorities almost everywhere. In short, the “news echo chamber” isn’t really a thing because regardless of political affiliation, most people are exposed to centrist and contrary news sources. The important exception to this […]
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Reporting from the metaverse
I live south of Sydney, on the fringe of the national park, and most often on these cold, late-winter mornings there’s smoke on the air from wood heaters. We’ve been watching the “empty Olympics” on TV, we’re locked down, and see only the neighbours. Afghanistan is falling, the climate is warming, and I can sense […]
UK media industry site Press Gazette has named 9news.com.au and ABC News as the fastest-growing sites in its monthly leaderboard of global English-language news. I have been reading the Gazette since the beginning of the pandemic, and I have enjoyed its construction of a news traffic competition through the use of SimiliarWeb data. The recognition of the […]
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The Crawford Media podcast
I have added a podcast to the Crawford Media newsletter and have been speaking to some fantastic thinkers in news media in Australia and New Zealand. There are a number of ways to subscribe and listen to the podcast. You can search for “Crawford Media” in your favourite podcast app, like Apple Podcasts, Downcast or […]
Analyst Benedict Evans has built a global following understanding and explaining how tech is transforming the world, and this week I had the opportunity to talk to him specifically about the business of news. I know Evans through his insightful and wide-ranging Benedict’s Newsletter, and in person he turns out to be intense, fast-talking and dismissive of news […]
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In conversation with Tim Burrowes
For the first podcast of the Crawford Media experience I have the honour of presenting Mumbrella founder Tim Burrowes. The discussion covers the tumultuous last decade in Australian media history, as told in his book Media Unmade. Please find the link to the audio here. I went deep into the book in my review. Here you have […]
I have just finished reading Tim Burrowes’ book “Media Unmade” and my head feels ready to explode. Burrowes is the founder of Australian media industry site Mumbrella, and he tells me that when he gets into something, he can become obsessed. He got into this book. It’s 432 pages long and covers the past decade of […]
This is a photo of the Philippines Star printing room in the port district of Manila from my friend and former ninemsn and Newshub colleague Shaun Davies. This photo was taken in 2013 when Davies was striking a deal with the Star to get its content on MSN for Microsoft. “This place was so old school. […]