Crawford Media Consulting
Media sage and consultant colleague Gavin Ellis, the former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, sent in this classic hovel picture from more than 50 years ago. Thanks Gavin. This is the New Zealand Herald reporters room in 1966-7. In the foreground is chief reporter (NZ equivalent of the Australian chief of staff) Gerry Symmans who later became […]
I received some great photos already, please keep them coming. Let’s celebrate shonky dives. And I don’t object to the odd news palace as well. This week’s hovel is a picture told in words, from Sarah Dunn, seen above on an overseas news internship circa 2014, after she began working at the Nelson Mail as described […]
When it comes to news output – as opposed to newsrooms – I’ve always known that appearances are important. The visual design, the presentation of news, is a language in itself, full of meaning and indicative of the care with which the news has been created. The story behind the Crawford Media logo design is […]
I spent last weekend researching a piece for The Spinoff that advocates the establishment of a publicly funded national video streaming platform in New Zealand. The platform is pitched as an antidote to the global streaming wars. I have faith in Kiwis. I really believe they can do things other people can’t. The argument for “Platform NZ” […]
Today I’m introducing a new section of the Crawford Media newsletter that I hope works out: Real Hovels of News. It’s for photos of newsrooms or places of journalistic endeavour, and I’m relying on readers to send me the images and the stories. The stories are what’s important. Newsroom environments tend to be down at heel, […]
Around the world, democracies are waking up to a market failure in news. We’ve been talking about it for more than a decade. Now things are starting to happen. Governments are becoming involved in financing public interest journalism. This will become one of the big picture developments in news, the kind of development that marks […]
Last week I looked at paid search startup Neeva and the implications it might have for news. In the interview with CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy we touched on the search engine’s use of copyrighted content within the interface and the possibility Neeva would share some of its revenue with content creators. Now Neeva has formally announced it will be allotting […]
In late 2020 the Australian government handed out over $53m in more than 100 grants as part of the Public Interest News Gathering (PING) programme. The overwhelming majority of the money (87%) went to the 10 biggest recipients. The funding distribution is pretty clear in the treemap above. For a more precise breakdown of the […]
In researching my interview with paid search engine enthusiast Sridhar Ramaswamy, I wanted to know exactly how many search queries Google answers every second. It turned out that neither Google nor the internet wanted to share its secrets with me: the Google comms team came back with a vague answer about “billions of queries every […]
There’s a company in California, well-financed and growing, working busily on a business that at first glance is doomed. Neeva is a subscription search engine. They want you to pay $5-$10 USD a month to use a service that at the moment we treat like air. I spoke to co-founder CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy about his […]