The Evolving Newsroom

Earlier this year I was invited to attend the international Reporting New Realities media conference in Hong Kong. With financial help from the Asia NZ Foundation I was able to not only go to the conference but also spend a few days exploring Hong Kong and, very briefly, Guangzhou in southern China. The latter was an experience I intend to repeat at some stage when I have more time to look around. It was fascinating and deserves a post of its own. Hong Kong impressed me too.

I promised Asia NZ a narrative report on my trip, and more particularly on the conference, and have somewhat belatedly come to write it. So I thought I’d blog it here too. Here goes (in no particular order).

New media business models

I was invited to speak on a plenary panel at the conference about new media initiatives since I’d launched my online news marketplace allaboutthestory.com a few months before. I was happy if somewhat nervous to find myself sitting alongside veterans Steven Gan, founding editor of the large and successful Malaysiakini.com; Tarun Tejpal, editor in chief and publisher of the investigative magazine Tehelka in India; and Chen Juhong, editor in chief of qq.com, part of Tencent, a Chinese messaging service, blog platform and news portal which is one of the largest internet companies in the world.

It was interesting to hear about the business models of each. Malaysiakini.com started out as a free site supported by advertising but came close to crashing during the dotcom bust and ultimately decided to charge a US$6 monthly subscription. It was not an ideological move, Steven Gan said, but simply a question of survival: “We had no choice. Either you try it or you close up shop”. Traffic dropped, as expected, but has since rebuilt fairly well and the site now gets around 60% of its revenue from subscribers and 40% from advertising and has been “more or less profitable for the past five years”.

Tarun Tejpal was a passionate speaker who described something of a hand to mouth existence, as advertising waxed and waned, grants arrived and ran out, and issues of Tehelka were started with no money in the bank but somehow funds arrived in time to pay the printers. He has had some success encouraging patronage by tapping into “the conscience of the middle class of India” using catchphrases such as “be a good citizen and get a subscription” and “If Tehelka dies, investigative journalism dies”. Print is the strongest medium for spreading a message in India, he said, adding that Tehelka was one of few publications in a crowded media market willing to brave political fallout to break original national stories.

Qq.com, meanwhile, has volume on its side. The site, which is a bit like Twitter and runs alongside Tencent’s blogging platform and news portal, has hundreds of millions of users. There’s no charge for a basic account but the company earns millions from selling add-ons such as pimped out avatars and blog themes. Chen said 60% of users don’t get news on paper, only online, and it has 600 editorial staff in its newsroom.

Allaboutthestory.com is a much younger site which comes under the heading of infrastructure rather than publisher. It aims to connect writers and illustrators with editors of newspapers, magazines and websites and make it easy for them to do business with each other using a simple online marketplace . It’s free to join and upload content and registered buyers have a number of ways to browse and search for stories and cartoons, which they can buy and download for immediate use. Allaboutthestory.com does not charge for membership or commissioning efforts, but takes 20% from each sale. It’s early days for the site, which is based in New Zealand, but it is growing steadily and attracting interest from writers who need a foot in the door or help reaching more than one editor at a time, and from editors looking for new talent and material to fill gaps in their pages.

The plenary sessions were videoed and can be seen on the conference website, put together by organisers the East-West Center’s Asia Pacific Center for Journalists and The University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. There’s also a write-up of some of the sessions.

Pacific issues

I also spoke on a smaller panel in a breakout session about issues in the Pacific alongside Elliott Raphael of NBC in Papua New Guinea, Shailendra Bahadur Singh of the University of the South Pacific School of Language Arts and Media, and Philippa McDonald  from Australia’s ABC TV. It was sobering to hear about the media restrictions in Fiji, which have since tightened and seen the Fiji Times put up for sale under a new requirement that foreign ownership of any media outlet must not exceed 10 % . A useful site to keep up with Fiji coverage is Pacific Scoop, which has stories about much of the Pacific along with a list of news sites and blogs. It was also interesting to hear Raphael’s reflection on how little of the foreign investment and mineral exploitation of Papua New Guinea has flowed into the local economy, which remains underdeveloped.

Chinese economy

It was unusual to have a media conference with a dual focus – on the economies and media of Asian and Pacific nations – but I thought it was the richer for it.

The chief economic messages were about growth in India and China, with more of a focus on the latter. Two key points were that China was well on its way to becoming the second largest economy in the world (which it’s now done) but that the powerful growth of the past years would not continue indefinitely or without setbacks.

With the growth came an influx of rural workers into cities where authorities were struggling to keep up with associated infrastructure requirements – housing, heath, sanitation and transport, for example. This will be an expensive issue for years to come. In addition, workers over time are demanding higher wages and better working conditions, which will affect margins for both Chinese and foreign companies, some of whom will ultimately jump ship to whichever country can provide a cheaper workforce and sufficiently palatable trading conditions.

Another point made several times was that China’s population growth would slow over time, which would affect its economic growth. The number of child-bearing women in China was in decline and the fertility rate was 1.2, according to Jing Ulrich, a dynamic speaker who advises foreign companies in China for JP Morgan. She said China was producing fewer babies than India, adding that “wealth and education are great contraceptives”. China would, like Western nations, find itself with a burgeoning elderly population supported by a decreasing workforce.

She spoke of  three notable changes in China: a shift in government policy from expansionary in 2009 to more neutral now; the government shifting away from accommodating the real estate sector and trying to control the asset bubble; and a shift from state driven investments to more private investment. She said China faced many sizable issues but they would be resolved with political will and large amounts of money.

A note of caution was raised by Kristi Heim, a journalist based in Washington State, about US attitudes towards doing business in China. While most businesses were bullish on China in 2006, she said, fewer were now.  A sticking point was a Chinese government decision to restrict bidding on government procurement projects to companies with Chinese-owned IP, effectively locking out foreign IT firms from a substantial market. That, along with China’s depressed currency and the fact that China was now building aircraft which meant it was a competitor for Boeing, a big player in Washington State, was tempering appetites for investing in China.

Changing media in China

The chief media messages that came out of the conference were about the effect of the internet, the difficulties of funding and publishing investigative journalism, and the rapid changes taking place in the media in China. I wrote about some of those issues in a blog post earlier this year, including the three main drivers of change identified by panellists:

• The internet – harder to control, faster, further reaching, changes people’s expectations. (See Asia NZ’s Charles Mabbett profile of Chinese blogging here.)
• Private ownership – many new media companies are privately owned and the likes of Tencent are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. These companies are driven to do business in new ways and respond to what their customers want. (Charles Mabbett looks more closely at Tencent and other new media companies here.)
• Pragmatic central government – understands times are changing, wants to retain credibility with populace, wants to open up albeit in a measured way.

Takeaways

The main takeaways from the conference for me were a greater understanding of the economics of the region, some terrific contacts, appreciation for the relative privilege we enjoy in New Zealand regarding freedom of speech and low corruption rates, and a stronger sense of wanting to do business in Asia. I have subsequently watched Asian-Pacific news more closely and remain interested in developments.

A couple of books I’ve since grabbed to better understand the dynamics of the region are: Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan will Shape our Next Decade, by Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist; and The Elephant and the Dragon, by Robyn Meredith, a Forbes foreign correspondent who chaired one of the sessions and whose approach I liked. She talked about the importance of looking behind the impressive facts and figures of the region’s growth and focusing on the human stories therein, and on the building blocks: health, housing, transport, infrastructure etc. I would welcome suggestions of other books and blogs to read.

Lots of pictures on flickr.com.

A couple more links from this morning’s tab-clearing activities.

Semantic BBC

Been meaning to point to this for a while. Interesting post about how BBC used dynamic semantic publishing on its World Cup 2010 website.

The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content – metadata. The published metadata describes the world cup content at a fairly low-level of granularity, providing rich content relationships and semantic navigation. By querying this published metadata we are able to create dynamic page aggregations for teams, groups and players.

The foundation of these dynamic aggregations is a rich ontological domain model. The ontology describes entity existence, groups and relationships between the things/concepts that describe the World Cup. For example, “Frank Lampard” is part of the “England Squad” and the “England Squad” competes in “Group C” of the “FIFA World Cup 2010″.

The ontology also describes journalist-authored assets (stories, blogs, profiles, images, video and statistics) and enables them to be associated to concepts within the domain model. Thus a story with an “England Squad” concept relationship provides the basis for a dynamic query aggregation for the England Squad page “All stories tagged with England Squad”.

The journalists use a web tool, called ‘Graffiti’, for the selective association – or tagging – of concepts to content. For example, a journalist may associate the concept “Frank Lampard” with the story “Goal re-ignites technology row”.

In addition to the manual selective tagging process, journalist-authored content is automatically analysed against the World Cup ontology. A natural language and ontological determiner process automatically extracts World Cup concepts embedded within a textual representation of a story. The concepts are moderated and, again, selectively applied before publication. Moderated, automated concept analysis improves the depth, breadth and quality of metadata publishing.

Rest of post is here.

Linking Out

Martin Belam looks at linking out from news sites and raises a couple of interesting issues. Here’s an abbreviated excerpt:

I see too little debate about what the audience want or expect in terms of links. Just because deep inline linking is the cultural norm for bloggers, it doesn’t follow that ‘links are good’ should be adopted as a religious mantra.

There are several clear use cases where additional links on news stories should be added as a matter of course, though – stories that reference medical or scientific reports, stories that reference published consultation papers, stories where quotes and pictures are sourced directly from the web, and stories specifically about websites.

There are some other key user experience considerations though.

Should external links be signalled in a different way from internal links? You can do this easily if you have a ‘Related links to this story’ component, but what about inline links? Using different colours on different types of links within an article won’t make it obvious to the user what is going on, and littering body copy with icons and (External link) parentheses doesn’t make for a great reading experience.

Another issue to consider is the consistent requests from a number of users for external links to open in a new browser window.  Chris Wheal says:

“I prefer external links to open new windows. This means no matter how many further links people follow, your website remains open in their browser.”He links to the RNIB’s advice on the matter. Not only for accessibility reasons, but the good practice of leaving the user in control of how their browser is behaving, opening links in new windows is to be avoided with almost everything except an audio player. But should you build a little widget that allows users the option of turning on ‘external links open in a new browser’ during their session on your site?

Rest of the post is here.