Thoughts on the digital revolution

The future of mass communication is digital. Although tech evangelists from the 1990s onwards such as Postel, Negroponte, Gibson, O’Reilly, and John Perry Barlow have long imagined various paths forward towards digitaldom, the Australian media industry is struggling to cope with the emergence of new realities.

The boss of Australia’s leading media player News Ltd, Rupert Murdoch, does understand those realities. In 2005 he told the American society of Newspaper Editors that “as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent”. He knew that the future course of news was being altered by “technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways”. Yet Murdoch’s foresight and deep pockets are struggling to deal with the constant quarterly business need to turn a profit.

Doing relatively well at minding the future is the ABC. The public “broadcaster” (now a multi-media publisher) is in a strong position to ride out the approaching digital storm with its online entity, its successful podcasting and its proposed uptake of digital TV channels. Managing Director Mark Scott said last month “No other media organisation is doing more with user‐generated content or using the web more to encourage robust local content.”

Fairfax Media however, is in a very state of health. The company is struggling with half-year losses of $365 million and haemorrhaging money as it loses its “rivers of gold” classified advertising to Internet sites. Last week Tim Burrowes pointed out the stupidity of Fairfax’s miserliness with outgoing links. Fairfax Digital thrashes the quality of the brand with aggressive chasing of downmarket content driven purely by number of hits to the website.

Australian commercial television is no healthier. The shares of Channels Seven and Nine are virtually worthless. With analogue television to be phased out by 2013 and the proposed National Broadband Network (NBN) on the way, the future does not look bright for Australia’s two main commercial networks. Media commentator Mark Day has called the NBN a “television killer”. The only hope of digital survival for these networks is their portal alliances with Microsoft (Nine) and Yahoo (Seven).

Channel Ten will survive the digital transition despite current financial difficulties and the lack of a digital alliance partner. Its controlling shareholder CanWest could face bankruptcy under the crippling weight of $4.5 billion debts it mostly incurred when buying Conrad Black’s empire in 2000. Yet Ten has the brightest future of the commercials and remains an attractive takeover target thanks to its investment in digital technology (Channel One) and its dominance of the 16-39 audience demographic.

Telstra’s infrastructure casts a huge shadow over the Australian digital media landscape. The telecommunications giant may beat the NBN to the punch if it starts building its own high-speed network. As well as its massive phone business, it is also Australia’s largest ISP and owns half of Pay TV operator Foxtel which provides de facto digital television coverage for two million Australians.

While these big players fight it out in the Internet High St, there is a growing ‘long tail’ of other participants in the back alleys. The change to the information architecture is reflected in the growing range of tools available to get messages into the public sphere. The world can be “googled” and Google itself has become a multi-national communications giant. There is also a growing personalisation of news in the tools of Web2.0 which is all about sharing, collaborating and pooling resources. These tools include blogs, wikis, videos, RSS, file sharing, social bookmarking, and social networking which all enhance creativity and interactivity. The microblogging facility Twitter takes viral networking to the next level allowing users to follow leaders in their field as well as network with peers in real-time speed.

Blogging is rapidly becoming a mature technology. Technorati says they are pervasive and part of our lives. By June 2008 they had indexed 133 million blogs in six years in 81 languages. While the vast majority of blogs are used as personal online diaries and social interaction with friends, it is the news-related blogs that have become prominent in recent years in J.D. Lasica called “random acts of journalism”.

Usually written by media outsiders, one of the great virtues of blogs is their ability to aggregate distributed knowledge and challenge accepted media narratives. Ward and Cahill called them a “fifth estate” with their fact checking and analysis of mainstream news media output. Newspapers still do the heavy grunt work. Clay Shirky said society doesn’t need newspapers. What it needs is journalism.

Margaret Simons says there are four types of journalism: investigation, storytelling, basic reporting, and conversation. Of these four, blogs do conversation the best. A discussion on one blog can quickly spread across the web with bloggers referring, linking and commenting one another. Mark Bahnisch says the value of Australian political blogs is the public and political conversation they create, which migrates beyond the blogging platform itself.

Thinking like a journalist involves making sense of large amounts of information, making products out of it and then marketing these products. Blogging makes the first two parts of that production chain easier with its hyperlinking functionality and the ease of publishing. Getting a name is the hardest part. Industrial journalists have reputations but they are also dealing with the consequence of blogging. The only thing differentiating them from independent bloggers is how they use a contacts book. Michael Schudson says news in America is a form of a culture; a “strategic ballet” produced by exchanges between journalists and sources. This is true also for Australia. Schudson defines interviews between reporters and those sources as “the fundamental act of contemporary journalism”.

Kevin Kawamoto says the reason the rules of journalism are in a state of flux is because of the difficulty of how to define the “real media” in a digital age. In Far North Queensland Michael Moore runs the muckraking Cairnsblog.Net site. The site provides valuable fourth estate coverage of local politics in a town where there is not much competition. Moore is in every sense a journalist and is on the circulation list of Cairns Regional Council media releases. But he says he has been barred from attending their media events. Council told him media conference alerts are only issued to “accredited news agencies and their representatives”. But as Moore commented, accredited news agencies are a “modern invention, up there with crop circles”. There is now no universal codes for establishing who qualifies as a journalist.

Anyone can call themselves a journalist but few will be trusted to act. One way of getting that trust is via Jurgensmeyer’s influence model for newspapers (quoted in Meyer’s The Vanishing Newspaper). Hal Jurgensmeyer (1931-1995) was a business-side vice president of publishing company Knight-Ridder. His maxim was newspapers were not in the news or information business but in the influence business. Jurgensmeyer’s influence diagram posited a direct relationship from content to credibility which in turn provided influence and circulation. It is the combination of influence and circulation that makes profits. Profits make quality content.

None of this depends on the medium, but on regular, accurate, and newsworthy content from someone an audience deems credible enough to provide it.

An Uncertain Maritime Incident: boat explosion survivors arrive in Australia

Thirty-one casualties from yesterday’s boat explosion of asylum seekers are being treated in Australian hospitals. The boat carrying 50 people exploded near Ashmore Reef after being intercepted by the Australian Navy the previous afternoon. Three were killed and two more are missing. Another five of the injured are in critical condition with burns to 70 per cent of their bodies. The incident was politicised by Western Australian Liberal Premier Colin Barnett and Federal Immigration spokeswoman Sharman Stone creating anti-immigrant hysteria reminiscent of the unsavoury mood that enveloped Australia after the 2001 Tampa crisis.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave further information about the refugees at a doorstop in Sydney. He said 31 passengers were transferred from HMAS Childers and HMAS Albany by helicopter to Truscott in Western Australia. Eight refugees with serious injuries were sent to Darwin and another was sent to Broome while the rest went to Perth. Another 13 passengers remain on HMAS Albury sailing to Darwin. Rudd refused to speculate on the cause of the explosion. “It’s still too early to confirm the cause of the explosion on the vessel,” he said. “I will not be speculating on the cause of the explosion today until that investigation is concluded.”

Within hours of the incident, WA Premier Barnett claimed the cause was sabotage. Barnett said refugees doused the deck with petrol before igniting it. Today he was in damage control saying his information was from the State’s Emergency Operations Unit, relaying information from Northern Command. “I was asked a question on this, I had only 20 minutes earlier had a briefing on the situation and I simply conveyed in good faith the information that had been provided to me,” he said.

Opposition front bencher Sharman Stone blamed the Government for the explosion saying “You can’t announce a soft policy and expect people not to lose their lives through people smuggling efforts”. She told Lateline the Government had created a dangerous situation with its policy on asylum seekers. She said asylum seekers were coming in larger numbers by sea since the August 2008 changes which ended the so-called Pacific Solution and got rid of Temporary Protection Visas. Since then, she said, “a green light flashed in a lot of people smuggling business headquarters, and we saw these boats begin to come on down.”

Her comments set off a firestorm of radio talkback reaction mostly hostile to asylum seekers redolent of the 2001 days of the Dark Victory.  Stone admitted she did not want to see a return to the Pacific Solution where detainees were held on Nauru and PNG’s Manos Island. She couldn’t explain what a Liberal Government would do differently other than telling Indonesia Australia was serious about people smuggling. Stone was assisted by articles in The Australian which sought to beat up the asylum issue.

Foreign editor Greg Sheridan agreed it was “softening Australian border controls” which had to “act as a magnet for illegal immigrants.” But he also admitted there is a general rise in asylum seekers around the world. The UN High Commission for Refugees says there were 383,000 asylum applications worldwide in 2008 up 12 percent since 2007. Barely 4,700 of these came to Australia the vast majority by air.

China accounts for 24 percent of the 2008 total (Sri Lanka and India are second and third). Because they arrive by plane, the Chinese immigrant are not demonised by the media as Andrew Bartlett notes. A secondary reason, says Bartlett, is there are “diplomatic sensitivities in our politicians drawing too much attention to the fact, which would mainly serve to remind people of how appalling the human rights record of the Chinese government continues to be.”

There are no sensitivities about those who take the perilous sea journey. In 2000, John Howard called them “queue jumpers” appealing to the Australian sense of order. The implication is those who arrive without documentation take unfair advantage over those who have completed applications for refugee status overseas in order to enter Australia with a valid visa. However many refugees (such as Afghan Hazaras) come from places where there is no orderly asylum process and risk imprisonment or death in leaving their own countries.

It is a small problem. Just 18 boats (including 6 this year) have been intercepted since 2005 carrying 300 passengers. There is a new $400 million immigration detention centre at Christmas Island’s North West Cape while the government proposes to spend another $120 million on detention operations this year. Refugee Council President John Gibson said it was important to learn from past mistakes before discussing asylum seeker issues. Gibson reminded commentators and the public the act of seeking protection from persecution was sanctioned under Australian law. “As a mature democratic nation…we need to treat asylum seekers and handle their claims in a manner which is consistent with the ‘fair go’ ethos of which we are rightly proud”, he said.

Thailand slowly returns to normal

Bangkok and surrounding districts are returning to normal despite a fifth day of emergency rule. The government has extended the Thai New Year’s holiday for the rest of the week for “public safety” in case the opposition movement regroups. Today Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva pledged to call elections once stability is restored. Yesterday was the first day since the weekend, Red Shirts have not been on the streets demanding the resignation of Abhisit’s four-month-old administration. The Prime Minister was appointed in December after a constitutional court banned the former government loyal to Thaksin Shinawatra.

The red shirts are officially called the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD). They wear red to distinguish themselves from pro-monarchical urban elite followers of the Peoples’ Alliance for Democracy (PAD) who wear yellow. PAD protests were instrumental in the overthrow of Thaksin’s rule by military coup in September 2006. Thaksin retains widespread support among Thailand’s rural poor. His UDD followers claim Abhisit is a puppet of the military.

Last month 2,000 protesters held sit-in protests outside government offices and prevented the cabinet from meeting. On the weekend, Red Shirts caused international embarrassment when they stormed a venue in Pattaya forcing the cancellation of a 16-nation regional summit of Asia Pacific leaders. Abhisit responded by declaring a state of emergency. On 12 April, the Thai government revoked Thaksin’s passport in absentia.

Matters worsened on Sunday when protesters took over the major Din Daeng intersection in the capital. The choice was strategic as it blocked the crossing that led to Bangkok’s main military base. At 4am Monday morning, the army made its first charge which drove away the red shirts. By sunrise, the army had control of the intersection while protesters retreated to the roads to Victory monument and the city centre.

For several hours there was an uneasy truce. At mid-morning, the troops were on the march again. Using a drum beat from their batons and riot shields, they advanced on the protesters. The red shirts greeted them with petrol bombs and rocks and set fire to buses and tyres. Soldiers fired at the demonstrators causing dozens of injuries. The protesters scattered among burning vehicles while the army gave chase. The UDD claim two people were killed and 113 injured in the clashes, though the government denies this.

Protesters were then surrounded by heavily armed soldiers for almost 24 hours, prompting the leaders to give in to avoid further bloodshed. On Tuesday protesters finally ended a three-week siege of Abhisit’s offices. In a televised address to the nation later that day, Prime Minister Abhisit said people were dispersing and the situation was returning to normal. One UDD supporter admitted the military had made it too dangerous for him to wear the red shirt. Pairoj Chotsripanporn, a 52-year old trader, said he had now swapped the colour for something more neutral. “We will be attacked by this military-backed government,” said Pairoj. “But we will not stop.”

The man behind the demonstrations eludes Thai authorities. Thaksin has been on the run from a Thai arrest warrant since 2006. Yesterday Associated Press reported he had been issued a diplomatic passport by Nicaragua. AP said he was appointed an “ambassador on a special mission.” Thai online site Matichon disputed this claim quoting a letter from the Nicaraguan embassy in Mexico to the Thai embassy saying the report was unfounded.

Thaksin spoke to France 24 overnight but did not comment on the passport rumours. Instead he urged King Bhumibol Adulyadej to intervene. “He is the only person that can intervene in this incident, otherwise the violence will become wider and also the confrontation would be more and more,” he said. He also pledged to continue “moral support” for protesters.

The Hillsborough Disaster: ‘They’re killing us, Bruce, they’re killing us’

Today’s article commemorates the 20th anniversary of Britain’s worst football disaster: the Hillsborough tragedy which claimed the lives of 96 Liverpool fans. The facts are mostly drawn from the official Taylor Report (in zip file) and the personal recollection of Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar.

On Saturday 15 April 1989, Liverpool were drawn to play Nottingham Forest in an English FA Cup Semi-Final. It was a repeat of the 1988 semi between the same two clubs and the FA chose the same neutral venue that was a “success” the previous year: Hillsborough, Sheffield. Liverpool fans were not pleased. South Yorkshire police would only agree to the 1989 game if they repeated the 1988 arrangement where Liverpool fans were held in the smaller “away” end of the ground so they could be funnelled quickly to the motorway back to Lancashire.

As a result Liverpool were allocated 24,000 tickets compared to Forest’s 30,000, despite Liverpool’s average home attendance being substantially higher than the Nottingham club. Because there was less standing room at the away end, Liverpool’s allocation was also more expensive (it cost £12 to sit and £6 to stand). Liverpool had tried to switch ends in 1988 but police were adamant. They said it would have involved rival supporters crossing paths and “creating a risk of disorder”. When the teams were drawn to play again in 1989, police held to the previous year’s precedent saying “any change would lead to confusion”.

The change that did lead to confusion was in the South Yorkshire constabulary itself. In 1988, policing was the responsibility of Chief Superintendent Brian Mole but he was replaced as local commander three weeks before the 1989 game. His replacement was newly promoted Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield. On the day, the new man at the helm had control of 1122 police officers (38 per cent of South Yorkshire’s total force). Duckenfield had not policed a match at the ground in ten years.

Hillsborough’s owners Sheffield Wednesday also had 376 stewards on duty. They were assisted by computerised operations which issued a warning pulse when any section of the ground got within 15 percent of its permitted capacity. But the system could not monitor the distribution of fans in each pen within the section. Unlike the Kop end where the Forest fans stood, the away end at Leppings Lane was divided into pens so home and away fans could be segregated if both had to be accommodated at that end of the ground. In theory the stewards were responsible for seating arrangements, but in practice police managed it. Police procedure was to let the fans “find their own level” within the ground.

It was a warm sunny spring Saturday as fans as approached Hillsborough. The 3pm kickoff was a 54,000 sell-out and many more came without tickets. Some Liverpool fans drank heavily before the game, but there was no sign of any alcohol trouble. The mood was good-humoured. An hour before the game, Forest fans greatly outnumbered Liverpool inside the ground. The train from Merseyside arrived at 2pm and 350 passengers were escorted to the ground by police. Those who drove were also in the area and the crowd was congesting in the narrow streets around Leppings Lane. There was no longer a separate queue for each turnstile but one great phalanx of people across the whole approach area.

Police monitoring the situation on cameras at 2.30pm reckoned they could get everyone inside the ground by 3pm. Superintendent Duckenfield reminded his officers a delay could only be authorised in the event of fog on the Pennines or traffic jams on the motorway. It would not be countenanced, he said, just because fans were arriving late to the ground – even in large numbers.

In the next 20 minutes it all went horribly wrong. Most Liverpool fans wanted to congregate in the central pens behind the goal. By 2.50pm they were seriously overcrowded although the wing pens still had room. The crush outside the gates grew worse as more people arrived. The seven Leppings Lane terrace turnstiles could not process the numbers quickly enough as people outside fretted they would miss the kick-off. As the pressure grew, women and children began to faint.

At 2.45pm police outside the ground called for reinforcements. Appeals to the crowd to stop pushing were ignored. There were now 5000 people trapped in the phalanx. A constable radioed superiors asking for the game to be delayed. His request was turned down. Worried that fatalities could occur, a superintendent outside the ground requested Duckenfield three times for the gates to be opened. At 2.52pm Duckenfield acceded to the request.

In the next five minutes 2000 people stormed through the central gate and most headed straight to the central pen. There was a subtle downward gradient easing their passage in that direction. Fans spoke of being swept off their feet and unable to resist the push towards overcrowded pens. At 2.54pm the two teams took to the the field creating a roar and surge of anticipation among the crowd. Most fans in the two central pens were uncomfortable and many were in distress. Some were already finding it difficult to breathe. Still the flow continued through the tunnels. Those at the front were being crushed against the perimeter fencing and asked for the gate to be opened onto the field. In the deafening noise, police patrolling the perimeter did not realise the problem and ignored their requests.

More gates were opened under intense pressure of people outside, some of whom did not have tickets. The game kicked off at 3pm. Fans crushed inside the central pens began climbing the fence to escape to the less crowded pens. Others attempted to climb onto the field but were pushed back by police fearing a pitch invasion. Near the front, those weakened to the point of collapse were dying on their feet.

At 3.04pm Liverpool striker Peter Beardsley struck a shot against the crossbar at the other end of the ground. The Liverpool fans roared and began surging forward. Normally after a surge, the fans retreat but this time there was nowhere to retreat. The force of numbers smashed two crash barriers in the central pen and propelled many fans into the front fence. Police watching on video cameras assumed it was a pitch invasion. Instead of summoning ambulances, they called for dog handlers.

One senior policeman, Superintendent Roger Greenwood, realised something was horribly wrong. He ask those at the front to move back. When he saw that was impossible, he radioed superiors for the game to be abandoned. The control tower did not receive the message and he signalled wildly with his hands. Without waiting for further orders, Greenwood ran on to the field and told the referee to stop the game.

The game was six minutes old when it was called off. The damage had already been done. The steps to the central pens were congested with bodies alive and dead. Fans on the upper tier dragged up those they could. Police called to preserve public order suddenly found a catastrophe. They found victims blue in the face. Their mouths were open, eyes starting and vomiting. The dead and injured were laid out on the field. As the scale of the carnage unfolded, fans turned their hostility to police and began abusing, spitting at them, and assaulting them. Press photographers who took photos of the dead were also a target.

Although St John’s Ambulance staff were on the scene, there was no public address call for doctors and nurses until 3.30pm. There were only six stretchers so fans tore down hoardings to carry casualties. Superintendent Duckenfield stayed in the control room, unaware of the scale of the disaster until he got the request for a fleet of ambulances. His boss Assistant Chief Constable Jackson was at the game and went to ask Duckenfield what was happening. Duckenfield could not tell him. Jackson had to go down to ground level to find out for himself.

Duckenfield deliberately withheld giving information out over the public address system for fear of everyone leaving together hampering rescue efforts. Forest fans assumed it was a Liverpool pitch invasion and began taunting them. This infuriated Liverpool fans on the field who rushed towards the Forest end. Their path was blocked by a row of police officers on the halfway line. Those needing help regarded these police actions as further insensitivity.

When fire officers arrived at the ground, no one knew why they were called. One inspector told them “I don’t really think we need you”. By the time they arrived on the field with resuscitation cylinders and cutting equipment, it was too late. At 3.56pm Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish spoke to the crowd and called for calm. After another 15 minutes the game was officially abandoned and the crowd left in an orderly fashion. By 4.30pm ambulances had taken 172 people to two nearby hospitals.

The Sheffield Wednesday gymnasium was transformed into a makeshift morgue and casualty clearing area. As more bodies arrived, the atmosphere became more chaotic and harrowing. Recriminations and scuffles broke out as people looked for missing relatives and friends. Ninety-five people died on the day and one died four days later. All were Liverpool fans. Another 765 people were injured. Blood samples showed only six of the dead had more than 120 milligrams of alcohol.

Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar was the closest person on the field to the tragedy as the game kicked off. From behind his goal, anguished fans shouted for help while he prepared to take a goal kick. He could hear them say: “They’re killing us, Bruce, they’re killing us.” As Grobbelaar took the kick he wondered who was killing them. He looked around and saw frightened faces through the fence and asked a policeman: ‘Is there any chance that you can open the gate here?” But Grobbelaar had to concentrate on the game as Forest shot went towards the corner flag. He takes up the story: “I went to retrieve it, and I said to the policewoman – I thought it was a policeman – ‘Get the effing gate open. Can’t you see that they need it’? And there were screams coming at the time. I kicked the ball upfield, and I went back and said, ‘Get the fucking gate open’. I turned back and the ball went out of play on the left, and that’s when I shouted to the referee. The policeman came on to the field, and the game stopped.”

The Hillsborough disaster ultimately revolutionised the game in England. The Thatcher government set up an inquiry under Lord Justice Taylor to “inquire into the events and to make recommendations about the needs of crowd control and safety at sports events”. Taylor heard evidence from families of the bereaved, supporters, the football association, Sheffield council, Sheffield Wednesday staff and their insurers, police, fire and ambulance authorities, and a consultant engineer. After 31 days, the Taylor Report recommended all top division stadiums in England and Scotland phase out their perimeter fencing and concrete terraces, and become all-seater. By the 1996 European Championships in England, the game and its grounds had changed utterly. Ninety-six people paid the ultimate price to make the game safer for Britain’s millions of football fans. Their sacrifice, while preventable, was not in vain.

UPDATE: In July 2021, a coroner ruled that Andrew Devine who suffered severe and irreversible brain damage at Hillsborough and died 32 years later, was the 97th victim.

Amazon: a catalogue of fails and glitches

Amazon has apologised overnight for blacklisting gay and lesbian books. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said it was an error and called it “embarrassing and ham-fisted.” Amazon claims they have now fixed the problem. The story began a few days ago when Amazon removed sales ranks for a number of offerings, many gay and feminist-related. Without a rank, books will not show up on Amazon’s bestseller lists or recommendation engines. So you won’t see the words “If you like this book, you might also like this book based on what others have bought”.

Over Easter thousands of books lost their sales rank. Amazon uses the rank to show how well one title sells compared with another. According to The Guardian, the change occurred as the company sought to make its bestseller lists more family friendly. It says the change of rules affected not only high profile writers such as Annie Proulx, EM Forster and Jeanette Winterson, but also thousands of other gay and lesbian titles regardless of their sexual content.

One of the authors affected was Mark R Probst. When he inquired about why his gay teen novel The Filly was stripped of its ranking, he was told by Amazon “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.” But Probst noted the hypocrisy of the move saying a multitude of “adult” literature was continuing to get a ranking including such authors as Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins. “[Amazon] are using categories THEY set up (gay and lesbian) to now target these books as somehow offensive,” claimed Probst.

The LA Times blog Jacket Copy contacted Amazon Director of Corporate Communications Patty Smith. Smith told the blog there was a glitch with the sales rank feature which was “in the process of being fixed.” Jacket Copy asked whether Smith had a comment on why gay and lesbian authors were unduly affected by the “glitch”. “Unfortunately, I’m not able to comment further,” she said. “We’re working to resolve the issue, but I don’t have any further information.”

Smith’s unconvincing defence did not wash and it didn’t take long for a backlash to occur. Before the weekend was out Amazon had a PR disaster on its hands. People using the #amazonfail hashtag inundated Twitter with calls for Amazon boycotts. Many users say they have cancelled existing orders, and others are threatening to close their Amazon accounts. As The Inquisitr writes, Amazon could lose millions. “Even if Amazon spins their heart out now, the damage has already been done, and there will be no stopping lost orders; the only possibility is to mitigate the flood,” it says.

Even though the release of subsequent information backs up the ‘glitch’ thesis, it remains a PR disaster . It will be interesting to see it will have serious financial impact. Up to this weekend, Amazon had continued to defy the economic downturn. Their Kindle 2 product is starting to take off after it was released to fanfare in February. Version 2 is a significant change from the original and supports text to speech threatening the lucrative audio book industry. It didn’t hurt when Oprah Winfrey announced that the new Kindle e-book reader was her “favourite new gadget” and said it was not only “life-changing” but also “the wave of the future.”

This was music to the ears of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The 45-year-old Bezos is CEO and the leading shareholder with 24 percent of the stock. Bezos took Amazon public in 1997 and it was one of the few companies to survive the dot com crash. Books drive the virtual mall’s $14.8 billion sales and Bezos was worth $8.2 billion last year. He was Time’s person of the year in 1999 and he was still on their top 100 list in 2008. Bezos claims his mantra is: “Try to give your customers the biggest selection at the best prices, delivered cheaply and easily.” After this weekend, he will find out whether best prices are the only thing that drives customer behaviour.

Mark Scott, the ABC and the future of Australian media

On Good Friday, Melbourne documentary maker John Safran went to the Philippines and emulated the feat of a more famous Jew when he had himself nailed to a cross. As well as making headlines, the stunt will also make good television for the ABC in a new series, John Safran’s Race Relations to be aired later this year. It brought howls of protest from vested interests in the crucifixion business. Catholic priest Gary Rawson hopes Safran did the stunt for the “right reasons” though did not specify what those reasons might be (dying for our sins? rebellion against the Romans?).

It is unlikely ABC Managing Director Mark Scott cared about those reasons (unless they were TV ratings) or had Safran in mind when he gave the Annual Media Studies Lecture at La Trobe University in Melbourne on Wednesday. But perhaps Safran was reacting to one of his boss’s opening remarks: “Each month brings a new twist on this revolutionary road”. Scott’s lecture was a wide-ranging and insightful look at how the “digital revolution” in the Australian media industry is playing out.

The Age saw its own crucifixion in the speech. They said Scott painted “a bleak picture” predicting the death of newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney (with the Fairfax mastheads likely to lose out). Scott should know, he worked for The Age for ten years before taking over the ABC in 2006.

But Scott’s speech was no more about The Age than it was about Safran. Scott saw three factors affecting commercial media in Australia. These were the parlous state of the global economy, the shattering structure underpinning the business model, and business blunders. The faltering economy has badly affected the media’s lifeblood: classified advertising. Normally in a recession media companies cut costs and ride out the tough times. When the good times returned, said Scott, “the staff came back, the travel plans were dusted off and the long lunch returned.” But he does not think this will happen after the current crisis ends. That is because of the second problem: business structure.

The commercial broadcasters were “remarkably lucrative oligopolies” with exclusive access to large audiences. Scott says owners such as Murdoch and Packer could afford to sacrifice some profit in return for influence. Packer subsidised the Sunday program while Murdoch ran the loss-making London Times and The Australian. Now the moguls have lost exclusive access to the audience and fragmentation is rapidly eroding profits. “And that profit,” said Scott, “kept cover prices low, funded international and investigative journalists, cranky columnists, eccentric cartoonists…all the things that made papers great.”

The changing paradigm has led to the third of Scott’s market failures: business blunders. Private equity companies began buying up media entities when prices were still high. Fairfax has been loaded up with debt after its purchase of Rural Press. Poor media acquisition decisions have occurred overseas too. Billionaire Sam Zell purchase of The Tribune group saddled it with massive debt leading to savage cost‐cutting at iconic papers such as the LA Times.

Despite the “triple whammy” Scott saw grounds for optimism. He said there never has been more active debate around the future of media, the path ahead for journalism, and the search for sustainable business models. He noted initiatives such as Jay Rosen’s “Flying Seminar in the Future of News” and the ABC’s own recent Future of Quality Journalism seminar as examples as “active concern and engagement” in media issues.

Scott also says there is plenty of “bold and creative thinking” but it is happening beyond the mainstream which were too busy “putting out fires”. But Scott was reluctant to predict too much. Newspapers face further rationalisation, he said. The fate of News Ltd may depend on the plans of Lachlan Murdoch. The proposed National Broadband Network will impact media delivery (media writer Mark Day agrees, calling it a “television killer” today) but says Telstra will remain a major player. “It pays to watch the organisation that is set to dominate IPTV, owns half of subscription TV, and has the cash to buy a free to air channel at the drop of a hat,” he said.

Scott said the ABC was in good health with iView, high ratings, digital channels, user-generated content and leading the way in podcasting. He pitched for further government money ahead of the ABC review and Triennial funding round later this year. “Everyone I meet in government speaks with optimism and enthusiasm about the ongoing importance of the ABC and stresses this in light of all that is happening to others in the media landscape,” he said. “I hope the dollars follow the noble sentiments.”

Scott praised the way Web 2.0 has transformed the media experience. Audience expertise is now being “injected” into the news process via Youtube and Twitter. The technological revolution means users can exercise media choices anytime they like on any device they want. Scott says things may be lost as media organisations adapt to the revolution, but the effect will be “profound and transforming and empowering”. Scott ended his speech by calling the journey “a remarkable ride to an extraordinary place”.

CanWest, bankruptcy and Channel Ten

The CanWest Global Communications Corp has extended a bank deadline to renegotiate a $243 million credit facility. On Tuesday its subsidiary company CanWest Media Inc (CMI) reached a deal with its main lenders to extend the waiver of certain borrowing conditions for two weeks to 21 April. The revised terms means CanWest will get additional credit in the interim fortnight. Discussions will continue with lenders to look at terms to extend the waiver to allow CMI to pursue a recapitalisation transaction. A lot of wheeling and dealing lies ahead for the Canadian media giant to avoid bankruptcy.

Lenders and hedge funds have been remarkably flexible so far over several missed deadlines to make repayments on their $4 billion debt. CanWest faces another crucial deadline next week on a $30m interest payment to hedge funds on risk sensitive 8 per cent senior subordinated notes it failed to re-pay last month. If CanWest does not meet this deadline, they could be in default on $761 million of notes plus missed interest and associated default interest. This would leave the company trying to offload assets in a time when media stocks are virtually worthless.

As Boyd Erman points out, CanWest has two serious problems when it comes to selling assets. The likely prices are dwarfed by the debts tied to the assets, and the company’s convoluted corporate structure makes it almost impossible to make sales work. Erman says broadcasting assets would need to be sold for five times ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) to meet the debt of those assets and such a deal would be extremely unlikely in the current market. “CanWest is almost like a landlord with a rental house that’s fallen so much in value that selling it wouldn’t cover what’s left on the mortgage,” he says.

If CanWest does go under, it will provide a tasty meal for asset strippers. The Canadian company owns the Global Television Network, the cable network E!, the Southam newspaper paper chain, and is the majority shareholder of Australia’s Channel Ten. CanWest is controlled by the Asper family (CEO Leonard and his brother David) based in Winnipeg. Much of their debt was accumulated in buying the Southam chain in 2000 from Conrad Black’s former company Hollinger International.

CanWest owns 56.6 per cent of Channel Ten and owns stations in the five mainland state capitals. The uncertainty over Ten’s parent company has affected the local share price and the bottom line. Last week, Ten posted a first half net loss of $57 million and cancelled its fiscal 2009 final dividend. Television revenue was down 12 per cent and the share of its key 16-39 demographic fell 5.5 per cent this year. This Easter local staff have been instructed to take extra leave and asked to restructure their hours to a permanent shorter working week.

CanWest have informally put the feelers out to sell its stake in the channel. They hope to raise $280 million if they can sell out at 75c (Australian) which was the floor price in an unsuccessful capital raising project in February, and which was the closing share price going into Easter. CanWest have sounded out possible buyers who already have a stake in Ten including the Commonwealth Bank (6.5 percent) and fund management company 452 Capital (5.7 percent).

The wildcard may be Ten’s second biggest shareholder Birketu. Owned by little known Bermuda-based Bruce Gordon (described by Margaret Simons as “Australia’s forgotten TV mogul”), Birketu control 13.3 per cent of the network. The 79-year-old Gordon already has extensive interests in Australian television. He owns Nine Network stations in Adelaide and Perth and the WIN regional network and is free to extend his interest in Ten in the wake of the 2006 loosening of Australian media ownership. While CanWest are saying they are not talking to Birketu, Gordon has long expressed an interest in increasing his stake. If CanWest’s creditors lose their patience, expect Gordon to make his move and become Australia’s most powerful unknown television mogul in the process.

The demise of El Chino: Peruvian court jails Fujimori for 25 years

A special court in Lima has sentenced former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori to 25 years imprisonment. A three-judge panel found him guilty yesterday of ordering death squads to carry out two separate massacres of civilians during the early 1990s. Fujimori is the first ever democratically elected president to be found guilty of rights abuses in his own country. He was convicted of the killings of 25 people in two separate massacres, in 1991 and 1992, and also for the kidnappings of journalist Gustavo Gorriti and businessman Samuel Dyer in 1992. The massacres were carried out by the Grupo Colina unit, a squad of military intelligence officers under the then-president’s orders. He is already serving a six year sentence for abuse of power and the 70-year-old could now spend the rest of his life in prison.

Alberto Fujimori ruled Peru between 1990 and 2000. Despite being the son of Japanese immigrants, the Peruvian media nicknamed him “El Chino” (the Chinaman). After a career as an academic in engineering and mathematics, he was the surprise winner of the presidential election in 1990. He defeated the favourite, renowned novelist Mario Vargas Llosa by successfully portraying the writer as the candidate of the Peruvian elite. At the time Peru suffered from severe hyperinflation and political violence. Fujimori succeeded in fixing both problems but at a cost of abandoning human rights. He temporarily assumed dictatorial powers in 1992 closing the opposition-controlled Congress and courts. Critically however, most Peruvians approved his actions.

He also led the government through a bloody internal war with the Maoist rebel group, the Shining Path. In 1995 he won a second term of office defeating another high profile candidate former United Nations secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar. According to Time, Fujimori’s success was based on an image of the populist caudillo “just as the continent was ridding itself of the legacy of dictators who had turned ‘disappear’ into a verb when dealing with their political opponents.” The war with the Shining Path led to the deaths of 70,000 people and Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has estimated 37 per cent of those were killed by armed forces.

Fujimori remained popular and won a third term in 2000. This time there were strong suspicions of election irregularities. The new government did not last long and was overthrown in the wake of a corruption scandal involving the head of Peru’s intelligence service, Vladimiro Montesinos. Secret videos showed Montesinos bribing opposition congressman Alberto Kouri to join Fujimori’s party. Montesinos fled the country and Fujimori followed him shortly after. The disgraced president fled to Japan, where faxed in his resignation.

In 2005, Fujimori took a gamble on resurrecting his political career. He flew to Chile where he was promptly arrested. After a two year court battle, he was extradited to Peru to face human rights and corruption charges. In December that year he was sentenced to six years for ordering the illegal search of the apartment of Montesinos’s wife in 2000. The separate human rights trial continued all through 2008. The prosecution successfully linked him with the Grupo Colina, a top-secret army death squad whose mission was to suppress any activity the regime thought subversive. Grupo members testified they were following Fujimori’s orders in the two massacres.

Human Rights Watch called yesterday’s conviction a “major advance for human rights accountability” in Latin America. HRW said Peru’s national court system demonstrated “the will, capacity, and independence” to try its former president. Maria McFarland, senior Americas researcher at the New York-based rights body said the ruling showed “even former heads of state cannot expect to get away with serious crimes.”

Fujimori’s daughter Keiko maintains her father’s innocence saying she was “a direct witness to his work and his accomplishments”. She told Al Jazeera there was no proof of any dirty war and the government’s strategy was to get the support of the people whom they provided basic infrastructure to improve quality of life. “We created this group called ‘ronderos’ or ‘comites autodefence”, she said. “We provided the poor people with small guns to protect themselves from terrorism.”

Other Peruvians were less forgiving of the president and preferred to praise the justice system. Political activist Monica Miranda told the BBC Fujimori had committed many crimes and violated human rights and she was proud Peru tried him while he was still alive. She also said Fujimori violated the constitution, and committed crimes of corruption and embezzlement. “I understand he did positive things for many Peruvians who had been abandoned by all the previous governments, but that doesn’t absolve him of his crimes now and it never will,” she said.

AP threatens web users who quote their articles

The world’s biggest newswire agency Associated Press said yesterday it would sue websites that use its members’ articles without permission. Speaking at the company’s annual meeting in San Diego AP chairman Dean Singleton threatened to “pursue legal and legislative actions” against websites that do not properly license news content. He said AP would develop a system to track its online content (as well as the content of its 6,700 fee paying member newspapers) to determine whether it is being legally used. “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” said Singleton. Singleton riffed off Peter Finch’s character Howard Beale in Network: “We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.”

In an interview with Paidcontent.org’s Staci Kramer, Singleton expanded on AP’s proposed new rules of engagement. He said the media industry had been “timid” about protecting content in the good times and “didn’t recognise that misappropriation is as serious an issue as it is”. In these tougher times, Singleton said they must protect the rights of their content. “We own the content but we’ve let those who spend very little, if any, get the most advantage from it,” he said.

Kramer said AP already had an aggressive reputation with lawsuits on aggregating content and intellectual-property protection “so the idea of suing isn’t new.” It is not yet clear who Singleton’s targets might be. Google signed a deal three years ago with AP for the use of its stories and photographs. Google claimed it was for a product that complemented Google News not Google News itself (though to my knowledge no such product yet exists in the public domain). This deal expires at the end of 2009 and AP may be putting in an ambit claim for future negotiations. As TechDirt points out, Google News drives traffic to news providers’ sites, where they’re free to monetise that traffic however they see fit.

It will prove difficult under US fair trade laws to persuade news aggregation websites they should pay for content they currently get for free. It is this “fair use” application that Singleton calls a “misguided legal theory”. Last year, AP announced what they called a “quotation licence” for bloggers and journalists for use of AP articles. The fees start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words and rise to $100 for over 251 words. Boing Boing called it an attempt “to replace the established legal and social order with a system of private law”.

Given these impractical conditions, what AP may really be after is a guarantee that their originating story appears first in a Google search about the content. AP’s director of strategic content, Jim Kennedy, gave an example of the problem to Forbes. “When the Red River in Fargo rises, we want to people to go to the Fargo Forum. But searching for the Red River on Google might also send you to the London Telegraph.”

Kennedy also acknowledged AP should accept responsibility for directing traffic to its member sites. He said they are developing software that improves tags and, also crucially, tracks content. This latter functionality will assist AP find out who is using their content that shouldn’t be. The main culprits are the search engines and blog sites who use (and link to) AP content on a regular basis. As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka says, stopping this traffic won’t solve the underlying problems affecting AP’s business. Kafka notes three basic issues 1) too much undifferentiated information 2) the disappearance of classified and local retail advertising and 3) debt-ridden investors who have paid too much for media assets in the last decade.

Roy Greenslade says Google and bloggers are not going away. He believes the news agencies need to find an accommodation with them “to ensure journalism survives”. Peter Kafka also points out the dangers of quoting Howard Beale: “You are aware [he] gets shot to death at the end of the movie, right?”

Australian Press Council throws out Fiji judge’s ‘main burden’

Today’s edition of the Fiji Times had an article about a recent Australian Press Council judgement of interest to the troubled islands. It wasn’t great journalism from the Times and had no by-line as it was almost a direct word-for-word steal from the council judgement itself. The one addition by the Times sub-editor was mostly incorrect. The headline read “Judge’s gripe upheld”, however according to the APC, the gripe was dismissed “in the main burden”. The case says a lot about the murky world of the Fijian political and judicial system.

It was brought by Australian-born Justice Jocelynne Scutt, a judge of the High Court of Fiji. The WA-educated Scutt is a distinguished human rights lawyer and former Anti-Discrimination Commissioner for Tasmania. She raised the complaint with the APC about an article in the Australian on March 10, 2008. This article by Nicola Bercovic was entitled “Judge criticised over Fiji posting”.

Bercovic’s story related how Scutt was appointed to serve on Fiji’s High Court in November 2007 hearing primarily family law matters. Scott was offered the job after six expatriate judges from the Court of Appeal resigned the year before over concerns about the acting chief judge appointed by the “interim” Bainimarama government. The article quoted Fiji Women’s Rights Movement spokeswoman Tara Chetty who said they could not support judicial appointments by the interim government. The article quoted two other prominent Australian lawyers who also questioned Scutt’s decision to take the role.

A few days later (APC says March 15, but I can only find an article on March 13), The Australian followed up with a second article from Chris Merritt entitled “Jocelynne Scutt named in human rights report”. This article gave Scutt’s background and implicated her in “a major report on the rule of law in Fiji prepared by the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute.” Merritt claimed Scutt was involved in proceedings that were “a chilling use of judicial powers” against free expression. Scutt was unavailable to comment.

However my reading of the IBAHRI report (available here in pdf format) does not fully support Merritt’s insinuation Scutt was responsible. In the matter cited, Scutt was one of three judges who had judicial concerns about a Fiji Sun article criticising the interim government’s choice of judges. Justice Shameen had four issues with the article but they did not find against the paper. Scutt did not comment and nothing further came of the case (though I agree it does have “a chilling effect”).

Merritt’s article and the IBAHRI reports quote Angie Heffernan, the director of Fiji’s Pacific Centre for Public Integrity. Heffernan called on Scutt to resign after she (Scutt) commended the Fiji Human Rights report which cast doubt on the credibility of the 2006 Election (and provided Bainimarama the excuse he needed to launch the coup). Heffernan said the report contents were now sub judice and Scutt compromised her position “reflect[ing] the disturbing developments within the judiciary since the December 5, 2006 military coup.”

Justice Scutt complained to the APC that the Australian articles were “highly critical”, “highly defamatory” and “damaging”. She sought a retraction and an apology. She claimed her appointment was not political as it was made by the Fijian president on the recommendation of a Judicial Services Commission and not by “the military-backed regime”. The Australian dismissed this complaint as “disingenuous” and the APC agreed.

They also agreed with the paper that Scutt’s high profile made her a genuine subject of public interest. Her acceptance of a judicial appointment in a country under the control of a military regime was a newsworthy story, it stated. It was also unimpressed by her claim the matter of judicial appointment in Fiji was sub judice meant the articles should not be published. The APC said “[t]his provides no effective or convincing justification for her complaint.”

The APC was critical of the Australian’s inability to obtain a quote from Scutt prior to the publication of the first article. But even then they noted she declined to comment when finally contacted. “This refusal by Justice Scutt to provide comments based on her belief that, as a judge she was ‘not able to speak on the matter’,” wrote the APC, “did not preclude the newspaper from continuing to report, and comment on, her appointment.”

The only complaint upheld (and with it the dubious rationale for the Fiji Times headline) was that the Australian went too far linking Scutt with the military regime. These were the statements about “links with Fiji’s military rulers” and “is involved with the military regime”, which incorrectly implied collaboration with the regime. The APC said the newspaper offered no evidence to justify these statements. Scutt can take little comfort from the judgement. The political situation in Fiji is too damaged for a truly independent judiciary to function properly. I agree with Greg Barns in another article in The Australian from August last year that Scutt should resign. “If she does that, she will be helping to restore democracy to Fiji and will enhance her standing in the eyes of her peers and the Australian community,” wrote Barns.