Sound bites, political speak, media spin, tabloid sensationalism, propaganda and misinformation are the media's language. How do you see through the lies and discover the truth? Be discerning; critically analyse what you are being told. The media does not have a responsibility to report the news honestly; profit is the purpose of the media corporation. They answer to their shareholders. News and advertising is their product. The viewing public are their consumer. No Conspiracy theories here.
Hunter S Thompson would have been 75 today, had he not blown his brains
out one cold winter’s day in 2005. Thompson was a brilliant and
exuberant writer, who may have been the last great journalist to inspire
generations of wannabes to follow in his footsteps - perhaps more for
the drink, drugs and counter-culture life-style, than a dedication to
the solitary toil.
Thompson’s best writing came between 1965 and 1980, with Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and The Great Shark Hunt.
These books contain the essays, articles and tales that revolutionized
the contents of every editors in-tray, and spawned a flood of Gonzo-lite
writers.
Sadly, the life of excess took its toll, and by 2005, Thompson’s
writing was read with the affection one has for an old and trusty dog,
now too gone to run and hunt through the woods, but one is warmed by a
sense of longing for those past adventures shared. The problem for
Thompson was he became, or was perceived to be his alter ego Raoul Duke,
and a point he raised during a BBC documentary in 1978:
“I’m never sure which one people want me to be [Thompson
or Duke], and sometimes they conflict… I am living a normal life, but
beside me is this myth, growing larger and getting more and more warped.
When I get invited to Universities to speak, I’m not sure who they’re
inviting, Duke or Thompson… I suppose that my plans are to figure out
some new identity, kill off one life and start another.”
It left Thompson the writer little scope to progress with his
literary ambitions. He became cuffed to the drug-addled doctor, firing
handguns into the reddening twilight.
Yet, for all that, Thompson has been and still is a major influence
on journalism and blogging and literature. How long for, is up to those
who can come fresh to his work and see the brilliance of the man and his
talents. But today, let’s celebrate the great Gonzo’s 75th anniversary.
Happy Birthday Hunter S Thompson!
Below is Buy the Ticket. Take the Ride a profile of HST,
with some fine moments, with rare archive, a selection of interviews
(including John Cusack, Johnny Depp, Ed Bradley) and a bizarre opening
sequence with the inimitable Gary Busey.
If Twitter allows us to follow (and share) our interests, then can it make a reliable measure of influence for media groups?
AAP/Tracey Nearmy/Twitter
News of significant job losses and organisational restructuring at Fairfax has thrown new spotlight onto the continuing transformation of the Australian media landscape.
It’s clear that newspapers in their traditional form are approaching a
point of no return, as news consumption habits are changing for good.
It’s all too easy to blame (or praise) the internet for this
transformation of the media landscape; the simple fact is that it now
plays an important role as a medium through which news is accessed and
shared by the general public.
One side effect of this shift is that traditional metrics for
tracking the market share and influence of media companies no longer
provide the full picture. Newspaper circulation figures are no longer a
relevant or reliable metric (if they ever were).
But what measures of importance are really available to us in the
online space? Particularly when news is now distributed across a variety
of platforms from aggregators like Google News and Flipboard to social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter?
Indeed, how do we understand “importance” in this context – is it important for a website simply to attract visitors, or should we also take into account how those visitors react to what they encounter, for example by sharing links to the content through their own social networks?
New measures
Only a very limited amount of independently verified information is
available on how Australian news websites perform in this context; what
internal click-through data they may gather is rarely available to the
general public.
To add to the mix, and to generate a reliable, comparative index of
the resonance for the major Australian online news and commentary sites,
my colleagues and I at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
at Queensland University of Technology have developed a tool which
tracks the circulation of links to these sites on the social media
platform Twitter.
Day by day, we track all tweets which contain links to any of the
country’s leading national and regional news sites, as well as to the
various opinion and commentary sites such as Crikey and The
Conversation; we capture those tweets even if the original link has been
converted into a short URL (using bit.ly, t.co, or any other shortening service).
The only tweets we are unable to capture at this point are “button”
retweets, but we do track “manual” retweets (e.g. “RT @user …”), which
serve as a reasonable basis for extrapolation.
Counting these links for each of the sites is a measure half-way
between newspaper circulation figures and TV ratings: link circulation
figures on Twitter don’t simply indicate the size of these sites'
audiences (as paper circulations do), but also point to readers' levels
of engagement with the content they encounter (as TV ratings can). It’s
one thing to read a story on a news Website – it’s another to go to the trouble of sharing it with your social media followers.
A measure of engagement
As with print circulations and TV ratings, though, there remains room
for interpretation here, too: what users share and what they read may
diverge to some extent. As a professional on Twitter, for example, I may
not want to let my followers know about all the sports news I read;
conversely, I may pass on links to stories which I haven’t read fully
(or at all) myself, just because they sound interesting.
But such margin of error exists in most ratings systems – the
newspaper we buy to put under the cat’s litter tray still adds to The
Sunday Mail’s circulation figures; the TV running while we make dinner
still adds to the ratings for ABC News.
What’s unique about our Twitter news circulation index, though, is
that it’s neither based on simple sales figures (like print
circulations), nor on an extrapolation from the media consumption
patterns of a small number of more or less representative households
(like ratings).
Rather, apart from “button” retweets, we capture all tweets
that contain links to Australian news and opinion sites – that is, we
track active, visible, deliberate engagement with Australian news
content.
18-25 June 2012
The first weeks of this Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX)
were momentous for the Australian media industry, of course; Fairfax
announced some major job cuts, and News Ltd revealed plans to follow
suit.
This may well have boosted the circulation of links to Australian
news sites on Twitter – and especially perhaps to Fairfax properties
themselves. Over the course of the week from 18 to 25 June, we captured
some 150,000 tweets:
In a week of bad news for Fairfax, that’s a very strong result for
its two major sites, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. The
marketshare of News Ltd sites is also interesting: individually, these
sites don’t command positions as prominent as those of the two leading
Fairfax papers, but in combination, the four top News Ltd sites news.com.au, The Australian, The Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph still account for almost exactly 25% of the news links shared.
Finally, I’m also somewhat surprised that Fairfax’s online-only news site Brisbane Times outperformed its local News Ltd rival, the print-and-online Courier-Mail,
by some 900 tweets – although it remains to be seen how much of this is
due to the news about Fairfax itself this past week. If it is able to
hold its own against the long-established News title, though, that would
be an indication that Fairfax’s future “digital first” strategy can indeed work, at least in the absence of a paywall.
(And a quick note on the ABC and SBS figures: we’re counting only
links to broadly news-related sections of these sites here – clearly,
both public broadcasters' sites cover a lot more than the news alone.)
Let’s also have a look at the attention share of opinion and commentary sites, then:
Here, too, the opinion pages of Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
play a significant role – but The Conversation also put in a remarkable
performance that week. This, too, is due in good part to the Fairfax
upheavals – stories addressing the job cuts at Fairfax and their impact
on the Australian media (including an article by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser) accounted for a very significant chunk of the Conversation links being shared on Twitter that week.
Crikey and the ABC site The Drum
round out the leading sites, which together account for more than three
quarters of the opinion and commentary links in our dataset. (Note,
though, that URLs for The Drum are difficult to detect comprehensively,
because of how they are formatted; we may well be undercounting The
Drum, therefore.)
26 June – 1 July
The following week was a slightly slower news week – we tracked some
140,000 tweets containing URLs, compared to over 150,000 the previous
week. Here’s now the mainstream news sites compared:
ATNIX week 26/2012 – news sites CCI; http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
No great changes from the previous week. The Australian overtakes the
Herald Sun, and there is some reshuffling of the minor places. But at
the top of the leaderboard, placings and proportions of marketshare
remain remarkably stable.
Could this be a sign that – for all the talk that social media (and aggregators like Google News)
are “cannibalising” masthead sites – there still is considerable brand
loyalty amongst those who read (and share) the news? We’ll keep an eye
on this.
On to the opinion and commentary sites:
Here, too, the top of the leaderboard remains relatively stable, with
one major exception: The Conversation falls back from second to fourth
place, losing five percentage points in marketshare amongst the opinion
sites. Note that the percentages of the other leading sites don’t vary
much at all from the past week – it really is the dissipation of the
Fairfax factor which accounts for The Conversation’s slide.
Starting point
These first weeks of ATNIX data point to some interesting patterns,
but to what extent they were overshadowed by the events surrounding
Fairfax remains to be seen.
Over the coming weeks and months, as we see a picture emerge of the
Twitter link circulation marketshare for major Australian news sites, it
will be worth it to further reflect on what these figures mean.
Clearly, we cannot assume that these observations translate
straightforwardly into an indication of hits on these sites – the
Twitter userbase is too unrepresentative of the wider Australian
population for this.
In future, we hope to connect and compare these ATNIX metrics with
other information available to us, to generate an even more
comprehensive picture – to begin with, perhaps, with the number of
followers each sharing user has: a link shared by a users with a few
dozen followers will necessarily have less impact than one shared by a
leading account in the Australian Twittersphere.
Cory Doctorow is a sci-fi author, hero of the open source and creative
commons movements, and co-founder of boingboing.net. In this compelling
Vivid Sydney keynote, Doctorow speaks about the culture of copying and
how it has been co-opted by copyright. He looks at the barriers to
creativity that copyright creates, for creators and consumers, and the
increasing control of cultural production and abuse of copyright law by
modern media and technology corporations. Presented by Vivid Sydney,
June 2012
There is no explanation for it. It must have been a bump on the head,
or drugs. How else to explain the speech the Opposition Leader Tony
Abbott made to the Heritage Foundation in Washington?
Admittedly Abbott was speaking to the converted in his
outpouring of conservative love – the Heritage Foundation is a leading
thinktank of the right in America – but there are parts of his effusion
that simply don't add up either in the sum total of Abbott the
politician, or Abbott the interpreter of history and social affairs.
First, (and it's hard to select which should be first), there
is this, taken from a transcript of his speech on his website:
"English-speaking countries have beckoned to people everywhere,
especially in troubled times, harkening to the immortal words inscribed
on the Statue of Liberty: give me your tired, your poor, your huddled
masses, yearning to breathe free."
The remarks were presaged in the context of the quest for
freedom, which is fair enough, and Australia is an ideal and example of
multiculturalism at work, but the sting in the tale is the speaker. Tony
Abbott cites one of the most famous phrases in history about refugees
as a beacon to which to aspire for a country? Make sure all the asylum
seekers heading our way for a better life get a copy.
And then there's this: "The United States and Australia are separate
legal entities but few Australians would regard America as a foreign
country. We are more than allies, we're family. Around the world we seek
no privileges, ask no favours, crave no territory."
Few Australians would regard America as a foreign country?
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt, and say that he has only
clumsily articulated the view that there are close similarities in our
way of life. Again, that would be fair enough. We're both democracies.
We can understand each other when we speak, Australia imports most of
its popular culture from there. We help them out when they get in a
fight. We copy their trends because if they do it it must be good and
great. Thus we will become good and great.
But in the alternative then lies the question, which has just
a touch of fear-of-aliens shading to it, of quantity. Few Australians?
Forty-nine percent? Thirty percent? The No. 96 tram when it's full?
Maybe Abbott is just being all warm and fuzzy for his host's benefit. No
harm in that, if it were done privately. But now the world knows - via
perhaps this country's next Prime Minister - that we don't think of
America as a foreign country. Well done.
Also it is a huge mistake for this country's well-being, and
self-worth, to view America as anything but a foreign country. We have
similar interests. We have alliances. But if they weren't of benefit to
both parties, they wouldn't exist.
For Abbott to bring in the image of familial connections
evokes Tolstoy's aphorism from Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all
alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
This is particularly relevant in relation to this: "Around
the world we seek no privileges, ask no favours, crave no territory."
Which folds into this line: "Not since the war with Mexico, has America
used force to extend its territory."
This is breathtaking in its simplification, and obscuring of
history. The Mexican-American War was 170 years ago. It ended with
America victorious and gave it California and Texas. Fifty years later,
in 1898, America was at war with Spain, in which it got Puerto Rica,
Guam and the Philippines. There was also the long conflict known as the
Indian Wars, where the Native American nations came off the worst.
Throughout the 20th century and into this century America may not have
demonstrated a craving for territory to invade, but ipso facto, it has
used its military force to increase and bolster its sphere of influences
to safeguard its interests. A Middle East royal family anyone?
Abbott said that if the United States had been motivated
purely by "narrow self-interest" it would not have invaded Iraq. This
was absolutely the right to thing to say to the audience and the wrong
thing to say to history. The invasion was based on a lie, and we, being
all part of the family, went along with it.
No doubt the Opposition Leader was warmly applauded after his
speech. There's nothing as comforting as being among like-minded
friends. Why he may even have felt he wasn't in a foreign country.
As to those of in the 51st state, we're seeing stars and stripes all right. And it isn't from a bump to the head or drugs.
Subscribe in a reader
