News Limited: "Australian bloggers are ignorant parasites"
It’s no secret that the traditional method of copying news feeds verbatim and lacing them with ads isn’t working as well as it used to. You only need to look at News.com.au’s increasing use of aggressive advertising strategies to see this this.
A few days ago one of their Holden ads completely detached me from the article I was reading and what’s worse for them just wound up pissing me off. Similar to the square google ad box I have on the right, News.com.au had one for a Holden car and after about 10 seconds of the page loading the car “drives” out of the box to the left over the article.
Through flash programming code the ad proceeds to take over the entire viewing space and in just a few short seconds you’re left staring at a full screen image of some car you don’t care about. The ad does not go away until you click a ‘close’ button.
Then there’s the increasingly being used triple banner advertising where they have a banner on the left, the right as well as one on the top. Not only are these banners animated they are usually bright clashy colours and make it ridiculously hard to focus on the content of the article.
Such invasive use of online advertising is a sign that revenue must be down significantly as annoying the hell out of your user base generally isn’t a smart business decision.
Apparently it’s not low effort, low return tactics of news sites that are to blame though. News Limited’s chief executive John Hartigan instead places the blame squarely on the shoulders of Australian blogs.
In a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday Hartigan painted a pretty parasitic view of Australian blogs and seems to be under the delusion that we are somehow competing with the media.
Mr Hartigan attacked sites such as Crikey and Mumbrella for their heavy reliance on the work of newspapers and news wire services, claiming less than 10 per cent of their content was original reporting.
His most scathing attack was reserved for bloggers, who, he said, lacked resources and access to key decision-makers.
“In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for – something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance,” he said.
He said blogs often gave a platform for “radical sweeping statements unsubstantiated with evidence”.
Instead readers are left to comment on articles and squabble amongst themselves with no further input from the news site. Presumably they are too busy chasing up the next story to rip off from AAP’s headlines.
As for unsubstantiated evidence, well one only needs to look at the recent death of Michael Jackson to see just how substantiated the mainstream press are. One day Michael Jackson is a ’50kg needle hole ridden bald corpse who’s ex wife never had sex with him and claimed his kids aren’t his’ and the next day we get to read about how practically everything presented as fact the day before turned out to be a load of unsubstantiated and unverified rubbish.
Oh and I don’t need to remind you of the Pauline Hanson nude photos scandal which were printed as 100% genuine by the SMH without an ounce of verification.
News Ltd boss John Hartigan admits his newspapers were wrong to publish nude photos that falsely claimed to be of Pauline Hanson.
“The media does make mistakes, as some of our newspapers realised last week … and more mistakes will happen,” he said.
“But in my 40-odd years working as a journalist, I can say with conviction that most mistakes happen because journalists are fallible like everyone else and very rarely do these mistakes come about because of malice, or an arrogant disregard by the media.”
Hypocrisy much?
What needs to be realised is that blogs like Crikey, OzSoapbox and Mumbrella aren’t in direct competition with major news sites. Rather they fill a void that the mainstream media has been unable to succesfully capture.
People love to discuss news and current events but they don’t neccesarily want to be only discussing it with other readers.
Despite the harsh comments from Hartigan regarding blogs, News Limited themselves have recently started up an attempt at a mainstream blog of their own, The Punch. Only they don’t call it a blog, they call it a ‘news commentary site’.
A blog is a blog is a blog, and The Punch is clearly presented to look like a blog. Call it what you want guys but I doubt ‘news commentary site’ is going to stick any time soon.
Sadly The Punch follows practically the same format as the rest of News Limiteds attempts at blogs in that readership engagement still isn’t there.
The SMH article quoted above mentions that in their first month The Punch recieved 200,000 visitors although it doesn’t specify if they were unique hits. As far as readership success goes however you only need to look at their latest ‘Friday Punch On’ post to see just how little connection readers feel with the content.
The ‘Friday Punch On’ is an attempt to let readers ‘take the stage’ and discuss whatever is on their minds. This weeks post was posted sometime early morning.
As of 10am it contains 0 replies.
Apart from trying to increase marketshare in and simultaenously attack the Australian blogosphere, Hartigan has also suggested that News Limited is looking into charging for their content as well as getting their content out there without the help of search engines like Google.
Charging for online news hasn’t worked anywhere and never will. There’s always going to be a captive free alternative, it’s how the internet works. People aren’t buying newspaper anymore which is a tangible product, so why would they pay for content online that is otherwise freely available.
I wish News Limited the best of luck in trying to pull off a subscription model whilst simultaenously congratulating whoever takes over their entire marketshare in the Australian media market.
As for not relying on search engines. Is Hartigan serious? Any site owner will tell you the bulk of traffic is 99.9% directed by search engines and has been since they existed. People use the internet to search for things and search engines go hand in hand with this. I’d love to see just how much more News Limited revenue would bleed should Google remove them from all search results.
What Hartigan seems to fail to realise is that the blog’s biggest drawcard is the ability for anyone to put in a little bit of effort and get their opinions and thoughts out there. Sure there’s a million blogs about people’s cats that nobody is ever going to read but there are a lot of blogs out there filling a very real void in how news is engaged and discussed by the public.
Not to mention that Google et al. already give a search preference to news articles anyway as they break. 99.9% when a legitimate blogger references an article they also provide a backlink to the source which bolsters search engine ranking again. The reality is if anything, blog articles which discuss news stories actually drive traffic to their original sources.
Bloggers who rip content verbatim from news sources and fail to credit the source are usually penalised for duplicate content and thrown into search engine results oblivion anyway. Not to mention most of these sites are often nothing more then backlink generators for the owners various sites smothered with legitimate looking paraphrasing entries of other people’s work.
Of course things like this are way over the head of a coporate media CEO.
At the end of the day if the blog format is nothing more then a platform for “unsubstatntiated radical sweeping statements” with “limited intellectual value”, then why are the Australian media trying so desperately to imitate it?
July 7th, 2009 at 11:35 am Fitzroyalty(Quote)
Ha ha. If only these middle aged suits would choke on their own egos. Why is it then that News Ltd and its ignorant journalists and editors stole a local news story I broke on my blog? http://indolentdandy.net/fitzroyalty/2009/04/28/i-fought-news-ltd-and-i-won/