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 […]
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Big money for a small audience
Many Crawford Media readers work inside the companies I write about, and today that is particularly relevant. Some of you will have much better knowledge of the deals for news content made in the shadow the Australian News Bargaining Code than both me and this week’s podcast interviewee, William Turvill. These deals are something we need […]
Back in 2012, marketing innovator Jonah Sachs published “Winning the Story Wars”. The book had a big impact on me and some of my colleagues. It’s directed at marketers, but the message applies to anyone in media: stories are how people understand the world, and to truly captivate an audience, your story should cast the world in […]
Recently I had a great discussion with the CEO of The Conversation in Australia and New Zealand, Lisa Watts. I wanted to dig a bit more into the success of the university/news hybrid that began in Melbourne 10 years ago, and how it has expanded globally. The idea of using subject matter experts within academia to […]
Patrick Gower, or Paddy as he is known, was one of my first and favourite New Zealand news discoveries. Not that I discovered him in the sense of a talent scout. As you’ll hear in the podcast, Paddy moved years ago from print to broadcast, where he established himself as one of the most well-known […]
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 […]