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 […]
Category: News about news
Posts on news media, journalism and technology subjects, with a focus on Australia and New Zealand.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It seems a very sensible idea: paying only for the news you read, article by article. At a few cents apiece, there is no cost barrier, and publishers are compensated by readers directly, in direct proportion to the popularity of content. This is the micropayment model. The idea has been around as long as the […]
I have struggled with the reporting of the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine giving rise to blood clots. Not because I am wary of the vaccine. On the contrary, I’m conflicted because there’s a good argument that the blood clot risk should have not have been reported at all. There is a higher chance that the earth […]
Substack is supposedly worth $650m USD, about half the market cap of Air New Zealand. How does a company with just 50 employees based on decades-old email newsletter technology become that hot? It’s all about who you work for. Substack works for writers. If you are not already a subscriber to the Crawford Media newsletter, […]