Crawford Media Podcast

Zara Seidler has taken The Daily Aus in a different direction from most youth news publishers: it's straight-down-the-line, objective news. Zara, as co-founder, has seen her Instagram-based service grow to more than 400k followers, receive substantial investment and begin considering expansion beyond Australia. Subscribe to the Crawford Media podcast for this 1:1 discussion. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Spotify's Head of Studios ANZ Ben Watts has always been fixated on audio, whether music or spoken word, and now he's bringing the two together at the global streaming giant. In this conversation Ben traces his moves through the digital platform and publishing industry and how his thinking has evolved around the use of metrics. Along the way there are a few valuable pointers for successful podcasts and how the world's dominant podcast platform, Spotify, is thinking about “talk”. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Lucy Blakiston might be young (24), but she's been publishing to big audiences for the best part of a decade. The force behind youth news brand S**t You Should Care About is a one-person social media phenomenon: 3.6 million Instagram followers and tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers want to hear what she has to say about world affairs, Formula 1 and Harry Styles. In this Crawford Media conversation, Lucy shares her thoughts on corrections (good), TikTok (so-so) and cancelling people (bad). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Tim Griggs is the force behind Blue Engine Collaborative, a company that has run accelerator programs all over the world helping businesses make digital news pay. One of the first things he tells program participants is that there is no magic bullet. As the guy behind The New York Times' early foray into news subscriptions, Tim is well-qualified to give advice. He prefers not to, instead encouraging people to break their problems down into manageable pieces. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Genevieve Jacobs believes she and her company, Region Media, have cracked the secret to doing local publishing profitably. If so, why are so many other outfits struggling to stay open? In this Crawford Media podcast, the Canberra-based publisher describes a business model that leans heavily on search traffic and local business reviews, along with integrated sponsored content. Genevieve is not short on confidence: as she says, “I talk a good game, Hal”. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Dan Stinton is the Managing Director of The Guardian in Australia and New Zealand and is forthright in this podcast about the main thing holding growth back: "half the country hasn't heard of us". To that end, The Guardian is launching a new marketing campaign with a new tagline around "the fight for progress". Stinton also dives into the need for top-of-the-funnel focus and his optimism about news' continuing role in digital advertising. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everybody,Here is the much-anticipated second part of my journey into AI-land with OpenAI's GPT-3 language model. In addition to continuing my conversation with The Open University's Mike Sharples, I spoke to another education scholar: Stephen Marshall, Director of the Centre for Academic Development at Victoria University in Wellington.In this part, I ask Stephen and Mike how universities are going to deal with students using AIs to generate plausible essays with a single mouse click. The answer: stop thinking you can just assign an essay and mark it at the end. Wake up teachers!Hope you enjoy this one,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyone,This week is the first part of a two-part podcast on AI language transformers in general and GPT-3 in particular. First up, I am dealing with general impacts and impressions and next week I'll go deeper into the effects of text generators on education. All of this is a follow-up to The Machines Have Acquired Language, which I wrote two weeks ago. It also touches on an article I wrote for The Spinoff, AI Writing Has Entered A New Dimension.I have to make this succinct, because last time I published a podcast, Substack decided to use the text of my newsletter as the blurb for my podcast episode. That was new - usually it takes the post summary - and unwelcome.Have a listen to the podcast, it's in a new style for me, using a lot more of my voice rather than just a recording of an interview. Let me know if you like it!Here is the link to Mike Sharples' new book, Story Machines.Have a great week,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Kia ora koutou,In this week's podcast I am speaking with journalist, entrepreneur and author Tim Duggan. Today just happens to be the day he is launching his new book, Killer Thinking.I won't summarise the book's thesis, but I will let you know that I enjoyed reading it, and that it is full of information to challenge you and help take your idea (which he defines as a solution to some problem) from ok to awesome. Or in Tim's parlance, KILLER.As an experiment, I am cutting and pasting below the questions that I planned out for Tim before the interview. I always make a list of questions, both for myself and to give the interviewee time to prepare themselves, and I never stick to it. It's there for when I need to get the conversation back on track, or to remind myself of something I really wanted to know.Showing your handInterestingly, when I wrote daily news years ago I rarely prepared questions, and certainly never shared them with interviewees beforehand. To do so would have forewarned and forearmed the subjects, a breach of news protocol. Like showing your copy to people before publishing, god forbid.I have greater distance from that news culture now, and I recognise that treating people as “sacks of information” to be plundered is a limited and damaging worldview. Naturally, there are situations where you cannot show your hand. But a lot of times you can. You just have to remember that almost no one likes hearing their voice on tape, or seeing their spoken words as text. I think that's because truth makes people vulnerable. I empathise now. I always feel like I am walking a tightrope when I am interviewed by someone else.Apologies for the delay between postings, I've been doing some fascinating work for a number of organisations. I'll ask you to take that on trust for now!HalQuestions for Tim* Tim - could you say your name and introduce yourself?* You started with Cult Status, and now you've written Killer Thinking - how do the books differ? Are you advancing ideas?* Was this book easier to write or was it like your second album?* The book is about KILLER ideas - which means Kind, impactful, loved (the cult status part), lasting, easy, and repeatable.* I was particularly taken by the easy bit - you stress a couple of times that ideas should be simple and able to be explained to a kid. Why is it that good solutions are simple solutions?* I'd like to apply your eight-step framework to some of the problems that news faces globally and in Australia and NZ.* Say we are talking about the inability of commercial markets to meet the needs of public interest journalism in regional areas.* Your first step is to be your problem's therapist. I think my problem might be the worst client ever .... someone I don't want to treat ... where should I start?* Do you think "launching into a rising tide" might be the hardest thing with news? The tide seems to have been out for a long time. Is it every coming back in?* You're a very positive person - the book is energetic and useful. You've made it as useful as possible. There is one bit where you take down an idea - the idea of using brainstorm sessions at work. I came across the HIPPO idea - can you explain that?* Have you been a HIPPO? (I know I have)* I have noticed that ideas are thick on the ground, but well-executed ideas working in real life less so. Why is this?* What is is the number 1 mistake people make in trying to bring their ideas to life?* You recommend becoming bored. Tell me more about that.* Your background is as an entrepreneur, you co-founded, built up and then sold Junkee, and you started as a music journalist writing for Rolling Stone. In the book you mention that you had to write very short music reviews - what did that teach you?* You wrote the book in a campervan with Ben travelling around Australia - during COVID? (And made a beautiful 42 second video!)* So where are you heading? What's next for you? More ideas about ideas? Are you building a new business? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Happy Friday all,Gideon Haigh is in the Crawford Media spotlight today.If you're any kind of Australian cricket fan at all, you will be familiar with Haigh's writing. He's been covering the game for more than three decades, but that's far from his only area of activity. Haigh has become a specialist in the longest form of journalism available: books.He's very good at it, and he seems to be able to turn his hand to any subject.The trick is to do things that you're really interested in, things that you're really curious about. And the things that you don't know anything about.Take one of Haigh's most recent books, The Brilliant Boy. I knew nothing about 1930s High Court judge Doc Evatt before I began reading and had no particular interest in finding out more. I am halfway through - yes, I am a slow reader - and I am totally into this strange, small world of judges, politicians, artists and activists. These characters quote poetry, keep houses in the Blue Mountains, believe in stuff and run the country.Everything is about journalism. I use journalistic methods. I pick and choose stories where I can be tested and really stimulated and learn stuff and learn how to do things better. It's a pretty simple ambition, really: to be better at my job a year hence than I am now.Haigh is currently working on a piece about the birth of marine archeology in 1950s Western Australia following the invention of scuba. Dutch shipwrecks were discovered up and down the coast. He still doesn't know where it's heading exactly, or if it might become a whole book, but I'm looking forward to reading it. Of course. I'm from Perth.Have a listen to the podcast. Haigh has carved out a space that allows him to do great work at great length.Enjoy the weekend,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyoneSpecial treat for you today if you're a Crawford Media podcast listener: I'm speaking to Victor Vlam, a Dutch journalist who also happens to curate the world's biggest collection of news theme music.I wrote earlier in the year about the power of audio, and how the majority of news publishers intend to increase investment in podcasts and other audio products this year. They would do well to pay attention to music. There's nothing like it for setting an emotional atmosphere, grabbing attention, and efficiently branding a piece of audio or video.Have a great week,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

As noted in this week's newsletter, the latest Crawford Media podcast is an interview with Sarah Bristow, News Director at Discovery in New Zealand. Bristow is a former colleague and an interesting character: I wanted to ask how she's finding things, the practical difficulties trying to transition from TV to digital (still happening, even if the story is old), and what it's like to lead a 24-hour national newsroom. I was Bristow's predecessor, when Discovery was not on the scene and the operation was owned by Mediaworks, so the kinds of questions I ask her are informed by my experience.As you'll hear, Sarah is open in her emotional reactions. She talks about the sense of spreading herself too thin and feeling as though she's failing everyone. She also talks with great pride of the achievements of her Newshub newsroom and the security that has come with ownership by a global media brand.Next week on the podcast: I finally get a chance to pick apart news music - you know, evening bulletin themes etc. - in an interview with a guy who I think could accurately be described as the world's biggest news music fan. Bye for the second time,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyone,Today in the Crawford Media podcast I have a conversation, recorded last week, with visiting US journalist and professor Bill Grueskin. Grueskin is in Sydney at the invitation of the Judith Nielsen Institute (JNI) to engage with Australian journalists and educators - delivering lectures and sitting on panels - and to investigate the Media Bargaining Code. The code, you will recall, passed into Australian law a year ago amid much clamour and has subsequently lain dormant while Google and Facebook finalised deals with big and medium-sized Australian media organisations.It is a measure of how significant the code is as an international precedent that someone like Grueskin has turned up specifically to examine its effects first-hand.In the podcast we don't go into much detail about the code because Grueskin didn't want to pre-empt the report he is compiling for the JNI and the Columbia Journalism Review. I plan to check in with him in several weeks time, when he's finished interviewing and writing. He has already spoken to ACCC boss Rod Sims and I have the feeling that even if I don't agree with his conclusions - Grueskin is currently positive about the code - he will have some very interesting information to share.I enjoyed talking to Grueskin about his experiences managing newsrooms and the personal impact of the 9/11 attacks. We also spoke about Sarah Palin's recent libel case against the New York Times and the dysfunction it exposed at that august news operation.Grueskin has worked in senior positions at the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and the Miami Herald, among other publications. You get a comforting sense of solidity when you speak to him.Alan Moorehead and Cooper's CreekJNI have a double-streamed journalist-in-resident program, for Australian and international journos. Grueskin is the first recipient of the international fund, which is named after Alan Moorehead.Alan Moorehead - sounds familiar, right? When I heard Moorehead's name I just sort of nodded and carried on. But, having spent five minutes on Google, I now know the guy was extraordinary, and I also twigged I had read one of his books and loved it. My wife is Dutch, and her father was a great collector of books. After he died one of the books she salvaged from his collection was a battered copy of Cooper's Creek, packed up and sent back to Australia. Well, not sent back exactly. It was printed in New York in 1963, somehow ended up in The Netherlands, changed hands at least twice (there is an unfamiliar Dutch name scrawled inside), then came to my notice. I was mystified at what was described on the cover as “the magnificent nation-wide bestseller” (this was a US edition, remember).I set out on the literary journey without a great deal of conviction. A book from the 60s, much admired by the Dutch and Americans, about Burke and Wills and camels?Just magnificent, and hardly a jarring note. I now really want to make it to Cooper Creek myself one day. And no, I didn't spell that wrong. Somehow over the years, Cooper lost possession of the waterway.Until next week,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyone,I find the process of putting together these podcasts immensely satisfying, and never more than when I have beautiful material to work with. It's like woodworking with good timber. That's the situation I found myself in this week with this week's conversation with Paul Henry, a New Zealand broadcaster of long experience and great skill.This podcast is a companion piece to my interview with Michael Anderson, which was published at the end of last year. In both I have used a list of 10 encouragements drawn from the work of Alfred Adler as a framework for the conversation. Please have a look at the note that accompanied Michael's podcast for a written list of the encouragements.Paul's an interesting guy. You will probably find his statements about poor people to be offensive, and his attitude entitled. I don't have that reaction, because I have found that underneath his elitism is a basic decency and humanity, and a great deal of vulnerability. In the podcast, Paul says he spends a lot of time “waiting to live” and that the times he has been happiest is when he is alone. We didn't work together long - Paul told me he was quitting the same week I started as a news director in NZ - but we stayed in contact and I always enjoyed our discussions.If you are interested in going deeper on the Henry psyche, have a look at his books, the last of which was written about Trump's America.On the podcast: it takes quite a bit of time to put together, and I would love more people to be sharing it. Please pass on if you are enjoying it!Have a great week,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Michael Anderson was the CEO of Mediaworks and my boss for more than three years. We talked a lot together, particularly about the difficulties of managing people within media companies, and two days before I left my news director job in 2020 I asked his permission to record our final conversation.At the time, I was much occupied with the ideas of Alfred Adler, an early 20th-century Viennese psychologist. Adler's ideas form the basis of The Courage To Be Disliked, and after reading that book, I distilled his wisdom into 10 short encouragements I thought might be useful for a manager. The encouragements are:* You have chosen to feel the way you feel* Being normal is ok* You have a job to do* Forget about being liked* Forget about recognition* Forget about approval* Every work problem is a people problem* Stop providing solutions* Making a contribution is the key to job happiness* Each person needs a place to belongThese ideas need explanation, in that many of them seem intuitively wrong or empty. I'm not going to do that now, but I would urge you to read The Courage To Be Disliked and its sequel, The Courage To Be Happy. To be clear, these encouragements don't appear in the books, but if you read them you'll get the context. These are not normal self-help books.It was all part of me trying to understand how to be a good manager, how to be effective in a newsroom, how to work with people who were distrustful. I found myself moderating my need to have answers, and my belief in hierarchy. It is easier to recognise fears in others when you have recognised them in yourself first.So two years ago, I began bouncing the encouragements off certain people. Michael Anderson was one of those people. He was also someone I had been in the trenches with, as we fought a rearguard action to mitigate the effects of lost TV audience and build a viable media business. Anderson was a great boss for me: strategic and interested in developing people and ideas.During the conversation I asked Anderson what I had been like as an executive, and he replied at length. I have cut out that part for the podcast as I decided it was too self-indulgent. The essence was that I had been a good report and could be relied on to get a job done, but I was too black-and-white and that I led “potentially from an extreme”.I hope you find value in this one, it's a departure from a strict news media focus.Have a great holiday season,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyoneAndrew Jaspan is the founder of The Conversation and the “force of nature” behind a new news startup called 360info. 360info is conducting a closed trial right now, but will open for business in the new year.In the podcast this week Jaspan reveals his thinking behind what is best described as an academic wire service, or news agency. While playing in the same space as The Conversation, which he began in 2011, his new venture avoids going head-to-head with it.Yes, 360info is a research-fuelled content creator based at a university (Monash), using journalists to decipher the obtuse language of the academy. But as you'll hear in the interview, unlike The Conversation, 360info does not provide a direct-to-public site or interface, instead distributing articles and graphics through a content management system (CMS) to partner publications. Anyone can partner, provided they abide by the Creative Commons rules associated with the content.I really enjoyed meeting Jaspan. I think you'll appreciate his experience and how he comes at the problem of providing information to the masses. I wrote about 360info at length for The Spinoff, and the CM interview with CEO of The Conversation Lisa Watts is also highly relevant.Pinging the trollsThe ANZ media atmosphere has been thick with good media stories of late. In Australia, there is the fascinating development of Social Media (Anti-Trolling) Bill 2021, an early draft of which has just been released by the government. It's not long - 23 pages - and it's pretty straightforward, or at least seems to be.The bill completely reverses the situation created by the High Court decision in the Dylan Voller case, where news companies were held to be the publishers of third-party comments on their social media pages. You will remember the case caused global headlines and furrowed the Crawford Media brow for a couple of weeks. Being “the publisher” means you are responsible for defamatory comments made by people you don't control on a platform you don't own. It didn't seem right.This law is super clear: “An Australian person who maintains or administers a page of a social media service is taken to not be a publisher of a third part comment posted on the page”. Instead, the proposed new law flips it so that  social media companies are the publishers of comments, with several defences available to them to avoid being on the hook for every idiot's utterances.I think I should go back to the razor sharp Hannah Marshall for comment on this one.Bye for now,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyoneToday I have a podcast with University of Canberra Associate Professor Caroline Fisher for you. Fisher is a former broadcast journalist working at the News and Media Research Centre - with Professor Sora Park among others - and she has some important data on who is willing to pay for news. She's also currently researching whether trusting news sources influences your willingness to pay (the answer seems to be a little bit, but not nearly as much as being into politics).Because Fisher's interests are diverse and because she is the co-author of the Digital News Report Australia, the conversation moves around quite a bit. As discussed in the newsletter last week, I am particularly interested in the ideological leanings of news outlets, and the Digital News Report is the original data source for the graph I made showing the ideological ordering of Australian news outlets as determined by the politics of their audiences.During the conversation, we reference page 105 in the report, and in particular two graphs. Here are they are:Enjoy the conversation and have a good week,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyone,Funding news is not easy.It's tough to commercially fund news. Everyone know this. In fact, we've heard so much about how hard it is to fund news commercially that it's become a bit dull. Advertising is owned by the digital platform companies and only a small percentage of people subscribe.What you may not realise is that funding news is difficult in the non-commercial world too.Here, there are a huge range of options: philanthropy, independent not-for-profit (like The Conversation), public broadcasting, contestable government funding (the NZ PIJF) and subsidy. There are also a few very interesting experiments in the not-for-profit, community-owned news area (see my interview with Simon Crerar of *PS for more on that).Why it's difficult varies with the models. Philanthropy is fraught in terms of funding security, and can serve egos ahead of audiences.As public broadcasters evolve into all-platform public media they open themselves up to criticisms of using public money to compete with commercial media, distorting the market unfairly. Direct government funding of independent and otherwise commercial media can lead to accusations of political interference.In these circumstances, a local news funding scheme that has been operational in the UK now for four years is a very useful precedent. The BBC's Local News Partnerships project provides money to regional news outlets to cover local governance reporting, and also runs a data journalism training program.As you'll hear in this week's podcast, the scheme is run by Matthew Barraclough, and has led to the employment of 165 journalists and the training of more than 200 data journalists. Barraclough is dynamic and helpful. His insights are frank, and what he and his team have built is admirable. I enjoyed the conversation immensely.How well do you know headlines?As part of a small and unscientific experiment, I have put together a series of quizzes that will test your ability to identify the source of a headline. I'll level with you now: my thesis is that it will be harder to tell the NZ headlines apart than the Australian ones. There are only two choices for each nation, The Australian and The Guardian Australia for Oz, and the NZ Herald and Stuff for NZ. Yes, I know I have cooked the books in the selection. That is all part of it.It would help me if you could give this your best shot. The quizzes are completely anonymous and take at most a couple of minutes. If you are not familiar with one set of publications, just complete your own nation's quiz. All the headlines were gathered at a single moment, and represent the top 10 stories at that time on the desktop sites of the mastheads.AUSTRALIA PART 1 and 2https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MCTSVJ6https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MCJRS23NEW ZEALAND PART 1 and 2https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MGJVLKVhttps://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MG75ZFTGo well. Anyone who gets 100% will be immortalised in this newsletter, so let me know how you get on.Have a great weekend,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyoneAs promised, this week I have marketing and storytelling guru Jonah Sachs on the podcast. Sachs wrote “Winning the Story Wars” back in 2012, following up with “Unsafe Thinking” in 2018. Both are excellent books. I wanted to speak to Sachs in particular about what has been happening to Facebook in the story arena: I thought he would have an interesting take on how and why the social media giant was getting narratively beaten up.As you'll hear in the interview, Sachs is negative about Facebook and alarmed about humanity's trajectory in general. Back in the 90s he started out with the then-common optimism about the impact of the internet. He thought that the fragmentation of narrative authority would be a good thing, and that democracy would be more representative in a world where everyone had a voice.Along with the rest of us, he has seen that dream fade into the reality of incredibly powerful global platform companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) and the consequences of media fragmentation and a loss of shared truth. Sachs stresses the importance of being able to agree on a set of facts.“When we look at people who are storming the Capitol or believing Q Anon and all this stuff, we hear about the stories they're consuming, but we're not actually consuming the same media that they are. We have no source of shared truth, and therefore we can't even really contest these stories.”One thing I note when I speak to and listen to Americans: their society is much more divided and partisan than Australia and New Zealand. It's in worse shape. We live in a world where American preoccupations dominate the cultural milieu, and some of the best US thinkers are convinced the world is on fire. It's easy to take on attitudes and obsessions from the dying empire. I think it's worth keeping a bit of mental distance.Nothing is more important than …I was reading a book by 18th-century philosopher Johann Goethe the other day, looking for the actual wording of one of my favourite quotes (“Nothing is more important that this day”). Goethe was brilliant, very much a person of his time, and this book - which incidentally the internet served up to me free and at almost no effort - was a collection of his maxims. Page after page of declarations about the way things are. You can imagine relatives avoiding Uncle Johann at Christmas.Couple of things that might be useful to you, and to the kind of anxiety that Sachs and many of us are experiencing. The first is that Goethe was convinced he was living in a mad time where things were changing with blinding rapidity. He was born 272 years ago.“Who will be able to come up to the claims of an age so full and intense as this, and one too that moves so rapidly?”Either Goethe was mistaken about his “intense age”, or he was right and the pace of change has been accelerating for 200-odd years. There is a third alternative I think more likely: change always appears to be accelerating regardless of circumstance. Can anyone back me up with a scholarly reference here?The second discovery is relevant to our perplexity faced with the barrage of ill-informed beliefs and conspiracies apparent on social media.“Superstition is a part of the essence of humanity. When we think we are getting rid of it altogether, it takes refuge in the strangest nooks.”The revelation for me here was to understand online idiocy as superstition crawling out from a new nook. It may not bode well for the future if superstition is part of our essence, but it is comforting to know we have faced these demons before.The really immediate futureFor next week I am working on a podcast in a slightly different format - more of my narration, less interviewee - on the topic of management, and in particular managing newsrooms. Sounds dull, but don't worry, you'll be intrigued. I have also got the BBC's Matthew Barraclough talking about his incredible local news and training program. The BBC is spending six million pounds a year and getting a lot of bang for its buck.Bye for now,Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Gautam Mishra is the founder and CEO of Inkl, a Melbourne-based news aggregator that has been quietly building audience for the past seven years.Years ago Mishra and his news app were mentioned to me by Jack Matthews, the former Fairfax Metro CEO, and I went and downloaded Inkl. Mishra had worked with Matthews at Fairfax, where he set up the paywalls on The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and Matthews was pretty enthusiastic about him. For whatever reason, the product wasn't what I needed at that point, and I never got in contact.It turns out I wasn't alone. Inkl was ahead of the curve, in that the pressure of news paywalls hadn't kicked in for Australian audiences when it started in 2014, or even when I first used the app in 2016. But now things are different. As you'll hear in the podcast, Inkl is building audience in the UK and US and Mishra is looking at putting money into marketing. The app solves a common problem for engaged audiences: a desire for a varied news diet, but an unwillingness to add more and more subscriptions to your personal pile.The conversation with Mishra is fascinating. He's thought about a lot of things that are central in the Crawford Media view of the world. For example, the importance of reducing cognitive load in product design, or the problems of building business models only around the most passionate segment of your audience. Mishra is also surprisingly candid about just how difficult the Inkl journey has been, with venture capitalists pulling out of deals at the last minute and constant pressure to relocate to the US.Here's the link to Mishra's blog I mention at the beginning of the podcast.Unmade, the newsletterThe first Crawford Media podcast was an interview with Tim Burrowes about his book Media Unmade. Since then, Burrowes has launched a newsletter that can safely be described as compulsory reading for all of us. I wanted to draw your attention to it, and also tip the hat to Burrowes for the sheer volume of necessary information he is surfacing. Nice work.Have a great week,HalNote: The Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyone,Today, I present you with Margy Vary, former marketing director at The Guardian Australia, and the possessor of a keen analytical mind. Vary has applied that mind to the thorny and important question of how to coax money out of news audiences.In the podcast, Vary explains how she and her colleagues at The Guardian began with the belief that they had to offer objects and tangible benefits in order to get people to contribute, but they quickly found their assumptions were incorrect.“We started with this big grand plan of a sort of multi-tiered membership model with different types of discounts for events and, and other soft benefits. And we very nearly even bought a big events venue in London. But the problem was the cost of sale and the confusion.” In the end, it was more effective to target the core believers in The Guardian editorial mission who were happy to contribute without extra benefits. Their payoff was the good feeling of supporting a brand they believed in. After looking after this core, a publisher can expand the model with benefits.“Bringing it back to my hard-headed data mind: It's about optimizing across the demand curve, right? So you've got to make sure that you've got messaging and product that enables everybody, from your real individual high-level donors, right through to your small $5, $1 a month people, that you can satisfy them all and understand their needs.”At one point in the interview, Vary mentions The Membership Puzzle Project. This project, initially started at New York University with Jay Rosen, looked at how memberships for news sites different from subscriptions and donations. It closed operations a few months ago.Have a great week,HalThe Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello tribe,Many Crawford Media readers work inside the companies I write about, and today that is particularly relevant. Some of you will have much better knowledge of the deals for news content made in the shadow the Australian News Bargaining Code than both me and this week's podcast interviewee, William Turvill. These deals are something we need to talk about, because around the globe, two of the world's most powerful companies, Google and Facebook, are handing over cash to news media.The terms of the deals are confidential.Turvill, who is the UK Press Gazette's North American Editor, recently conducted an investigation into Google News Showcase. News Showcase is a strange product, announced in 2020, that lives within the Google News interface and presents stories grouped by publisher. This distinguishes it from the normal Google News experience which groups news by story.In announcing the product in June 2020, Google News VP Brad Bender described Showcase as “an enhanced storytelling experience that lets people go deeper into more complex stories”.So far, there is no indication of any enhancing or deepening. If you come at Showcase in a mobile or desktop browser, it's just a link hiding a poor interface. In my version, the mastheads are arranged in no particular order - it seems vaguely alphabetical - and the page stretches on and on. You can follow mastheads, but then it's not clear where Showcase ends and the normal Google News product begins. Showcase apparently provides free access to some paywalled content and may also be fuelling the Google News app. But it doesn't feel like a product that is vital to Google, and I would be concerned if this was an indication of the search giant's design expertise.Rather than a serious news product in its own right, it seems that Showcase is a way for Google to give money to news publishers without setting the disastrous precedent of paying for content links. It's a “licensing program”, as Google described it in the launch announcement, not really a product. This would explain why news publications who are part of the program are not seeing a great deal of traffic from Showcase. This is what Turvill found in his investigation.“You do wonder whether there are lots of people using it or not. It doesn't seem like it. And certainly the publishers I've spoken to for this investigation, a lot of them said, we're getting a bit of traffic from this, but often it's not much.”After my conversation with Turvill, I wrote an opinion piece for the Press Gazette about how the News Bargaining Code is a poor global precedent. It was prompted by the fact that Turvill and his colleagues at the Gazette think the Code is a good thing, because it has caused money to flow into news. I don't see it like that.News Showcase is just one symptom of the inauthenticity that the Australian media and governments' “playing dirty” has encouraged within the ecosystem. Now we have a news product that's not really a news product, and payments for news content that aren't primarily payments for news content. It's not surprising that in this situation the loudest media voices in the most troublesome market are getting paid the most. That's another one of Turvill's findings: big Australian media are receiving something like 10x the global rate.Where do we think all this will end? If you are running a news business anywhere, the lesson is clear: lean on your politicians hard, complain loud, investigate platforms zealously, and wait for your deposit.News of things to comeI have spoken to some wonderful people recently, and in the next couple of weeks I'll be able to share these conversations with you as podcasts. Margy Vary, former marketing director at Guardian Australia, will shine some light on the best way to ask people for money for nothing.Gautam Mishra, the charismatic founder of Australian news aggregator Inkl, will give us an insight into the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into his startup. Finally, there's Jonah Sachs, who I promised you last week. Sachs has written a couple of books I consider to be compulsory reading for anyone in our industry: “Winning The Story Wars” and “Unsafe Thinking”.One thing I've learned is that you're only as good as the data going into your system … which is why it's so important to keep listening to the right people.Have a great weekend,HalThe Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyone!Recently I had a great discussion with the CEO of The Conversation in Australia and New Zealand, Lisa Watts. I wanted to dig a bit more into the success of the university/news hybrid that began in Melbourne 10 years ago, and how it has expanded globally. The idea of using subject matter experts within academia to explain the issues behind current news stories seems like an obvious content play now that The Conversation has been successful, but as Watts points out in the podcast, it would not have worked if the platform had begun at a single university. As in so many matters digital, the details of how The Conversation works are vital to understand why it works.A couple of explainers that aren't covered in the podcast: The Conversation was co-founded by Andrew Jaspan and Jack Rejtman. Both have now left the organisation, Jaspan after local staff and international partners revolted against his leadership style and direction.There's also an omission from the interview that I want to mention. It emerged last week that The Conversation and SBS are not going to get content deals with Facebook in the Australian market. These are lucrative arrangements big media players like Nine and News Corp have made with Facebook and Google in the shadow of the News Media Bargaining Code. As I have opined elsewhere, the deals are flawed because the code is flawed, and the whole thing amounts to a government-facilitated shakedown without any guarantee of public benefit. I didn't ask Watts about it because our conversation occurred before the news broke.Facebook is getting pummelled in the story warsI have had a close look at The Wall Street Journal's case against Facebook (paywall), prompted by an extensive leak of research and debate within the company: the opinion piece is here on The Spinoff. I think Facebook's Nick Clegg is probably right when he says the facts and opinions quoted in the WSJ have been cherrypicked and misrepresent the situation inside Facebook. On the other hand, the articles do surface big problems that extend beyond just one company. How do we regulate social media to moderate the drive for engagement, reduce social division, and harden our pathetic cognitive and societal defences against manipulation?There's no point whining about Facebook if we don't have the first idea what we would change to make it better.Have a great week,HalThe Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Patrick Gower, or Paddy as he is known, was one of my first and favourite New Zealand news discoveries. Not that I discovered him in the sense of a talent scout. As you'll hear in the podcast, Paddy moved years ago from print to broadcast, where he established himself as one of the most well-known and loved NZ TV personalities.What fascinates me about Paddy is that his on-screen persona is so close to the off-screen reality. Also that he has no discernible “TV voice”, is a master analyst and communicator, and seems to love the constant attention that comes his way. For all his comfort in the limelight, however, Paddy is a sensitive guy and regularly goes through torture, often self-inflicted, in the course of his profession.A great example is Paddy's public self-examination over a poor interview he conducted in 2018 with far-right commentators Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern. I was standing by as he conducted that interview, and I can verify it was not good. Most journalists would have buried it: Paddy made it a key element in his riveting documentary Patrick Gower: On Hate.Text versus audioSubscribers to this newsletter are building steadily, which is wonderful. Please share, or let people know they can subscribe to the podcast by searching for “Crawford Media” in their podcast apps. If you would prefer I dedicate more time to text-only newsletters, or you are getting more out of the podcasts, let me know. At present I don't have enough time to make both full-length newsletters and podcasts, so I've chosen audio for now. It gives you such a clear view of character!Have a great day,HalThe Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyoneLast week I mentioned the Australian High Court decision in the Dylan Voller defamation case, and how it was freaking a lot of people out. The High Court found that three news organisations being sued for defamation were in fact the publishers of comments attached to their posts in Facebook, despite the fact they didn't write them, approve them, or possibly even know of their existence. News of the decision has spread all over the world. In many cases, it is being taken as evidence of the bizarre state of things digital in the Antipodes: first the government legislates to force a transfer of cash from Facebook and Google to news, then the nation's highest court rules that you are responsible for other peoples' comments on social media.In my newsletter last week, I said the High Court justices “got it wrong”. Well, I discovered it's not as simple as that. The first step for me was to read the 71-page decision, and the second was to speak to someone knowledgeable. The good news is that Australia's legal destiny is not in the hands of fools: even in my layman's reading of the case, I could see that the decision to hold the three news companies responsible was historically consistent (they are Sky News, News Corp, and Fairfax). That being said, there were two dissenting judges, and the dissenters' arguments were convincing.I wrote about the matter for The Spinoff, and concluded that the majority High Court view made legal sense but not practical sense. The problem lies not with the High Court so much as with defamation law itself. In both Australia and New Zealand it's horrible, used by entitled people to intimidate the media and suppress information, knowing that to defend a case is beyond the budget of many operators. Now the risk of being sued for defamation is spilling out of news media and into the wider public, as everyone creates content for digital networks. There is nothing inherent in the High Court ruling that protects everyday users from being the “publishers” of other people's comments on their posts. Ignorance and lack of nasty intention are no defence. To quote the majority decision:“A publisher's liability does not depend upon their knowledge of the defamatory matter which is being communicated or their intention to communicate it.”The good news is that defamation law is currently being reformed in Australia, via legislation, and there have already been big changes for the better. In most Australian states there is now a protection against trivial claims and a “public interest” defence for serious journalism. The issue of responsibility for third-party content on digital networks will be covered in the next round of reform, which is happening right now.Hannah Marshall, a partner at Marque Lawyers in Sydney, provided me with a calm and extremely knowledgeable take on the High Court decision. If you are publishing anything, you need to listen to this week's podcast and get Marshall's insights into the implications of the decision. She describes Australia as “the defamation capital of the world”, which gives you an indication of why you should be paying attention. Tell your friends and listen to the podcast!HalThe Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyoneA few weeks ago News Corp and Google announced the creation of the Digital News Academy in Australia. The Academy is a 3-year, 250-student program for working journalists within News Corp and other smaller media companies. It has been championed by News Corp Australasia Executive Chairman Michael Miller. As you'll hear, I didn't manage to get many more concrete details about the course, which could be because they don't yet exist. What I did get, however, was an insight into how Miller thinks about the business of news, including the decline of advertising and Miller's theory that social media platforms are suppressing creativity.The commenting nightmareThe recent High Court decision that clears the way for publishers to be held responsible for comments on social media posts is bad for news media. Actually, it's a bit worse than that, and it's not nearly as reasonable as it sounds. It will need either legislation or a Facebook intervention to fix.I am preparing a longer piece that explains why. Usually I'm all for responsibility and seeing things from a perspective outside the industry's narrow self-interest. In this case, the court got it wrong.Bye for now,HalThe Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyone,This week I bring you Simon Crerar, the founding editor of Buzzfeed Australia and now the co-founder of a local news startup called PS Media. To date Crerar and crew haven't publicly disclosed details of how PS Media is going to work, so I relished the opportunity to get him talking.I'll leave you to listen to the podcast to find out more. My advice is to stick with it as the picture of this new concept in news publishing takes shape during the conversation.What I will tell you here is that PS Media involves co-ownership by the community, is based on Local Government Areas (LGAs), and wants to be very different from traditional models where reporters and editors dictate the news agenda.This startup is taking shape at a critical time for local media, with lockdowns hitting advertising revenues even harder than last year in many areas. For the record, the PS Media co-founders mentioned in the podcast are: Karen Mahlab, Rob Wise and Margaret Simons.For those into news mediaPS Media and The Walkley Foundation are running a virtual event, “Why philanthropy is backing local journalism” on September 15. It's free and it's got great speakers including Elizabeth Green (Chalkbeat), Daniel Bornstein (Solutions Journalism Network), Dan Stinton (Guardian Australia) and Lisa Watts (The Conversation). Register hereNext episode: Educating journosI am going to discuss News Corp's new News Academy and other matters with Executive Chairman Michael Miller. Can't wait.Have a great weekend,HalThe Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

I first met Schwartz Media CEO Rebecca Costello en route to a news industry “offsite” in Tasmania: we were flying in on a tiny plane. Small, dangerous-feeling spaces are good for creating connections, and I immediately took to Costello's straight-talking approach to the event we were about to attend.Costello has presided over the independent, high-end and low-cost publisher as it gradually carved out a bigger and more stable position within the news industry. In this conversation we cover the logic behind launching a print-based newspaper in the middle of a digital revolution (The Saturday Paper, 2014) and the uses of Schwartz's 7am weekday podcast.We also touch on what it was like for Costello working for the AFL, and the lack of women in CEO roles in the Australian media.If you enjoy this conversation, please subscribe to the podcast through your favourite podcast app (search “Crawford Media”).Have a great weekend,HalThe Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Earlier this week I wrote about Nine and the ABC being recognised internationally for their fast-growing news sites. I took the opportunity to examine the ways that metrics can be used and abused in newsrooms, and from the comments I received on that piece it's clear that I hit a nerve with many people who have worked in digital. If you've been inside a focussed, competitive big general news website you don't forget the pressure, and many people wanted to back up what I said about insulating reporters from metrics.For the record: I have been a big pusher of metrics inside newsrooms and have presided over editorial cultures where numbers are important. I have mellowed over the years and learned a lot from the newsrooms I've worked in. There's a short story by Jorge Luis Borges where he meets his former self and isn't impressed. I'm not sure about that, but I definitely wouldn't want to work in some of my old teams.Today I'm speaking to ABC News Director Gaven Morris about the long-term trend which underlies his brand's globally recognised performance. Morris took charge of ABC news in 2015, and since that time the ABC's digital news audience has been growing steadily. In a statement that may horrify commercial operators, Morris says ABC news digital is not done growing. So how did they do it, and how hard did he have to push the numbers?Please support Crawford Media by passing this email on to people who would enjoy the newsletter or podcast.The Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

Hello everyone - and happy Friday.This is the podcast follow-up to this week's newsletter, and you'll find it incredibly dense with interesting ideas. Benedict Evans is one of the smartest tech analysts in the world, and in this interview he's turned his mind to the business of news.We cover:* How the internet not only changed advertising, it changed businesses to the extent that many gave up using advertising, and how that impacts the news industry* Subscriptions and how they work for big brands and niche titles* Micropayments (hot in Crawford Media land right now)* Privacy and cookies* King Croesus and oraclesI would advise you to limber up, as Evans is a fast and thorough thinker and his speech matches his thinking. I have chopped out most of my questions in the interests of brevity, and I have edited Evans' answers in places - for length.Have a great weekend.Hal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com

For the first podcast of the Crawford Media experience I have the honour of presenting Mumbrella founder Tim Burrowes. The discussion covers the tumultuous last decade in Australian media history, as told in his book Media Unmade.I went deep into the book in my review. Here you have a chance to hear Burrowes explain his thinking around the book's structure and subjects, and also go into some of the bigger characters in recent media history.While I intend to publish interviews where possible, I can't promise podcasts with the regularity of the newsletter. Where I have high-quality audio, I'll do my best to make the interviews available.In this conversation I assumed a great deal of knowledge on the part of the listener, which is no doubt annoying. Apologies. Please see my earlier newsletter for context. Here is a list of some of the people mentioned in this podcast:* Greg Hywood, CEO of Fairfax Media from 2010-2018* Chris Janz, Chief Digital and Publishing Officer at Nine, soon to leave that post and formerly a Fairfax executive* Chris Mitchell, former Editor-in-chief of The Australian newspaper* Scott Galloway, US podcast host and marketing professor* Cathy O'Conner, former CEO of Nova Entertainment, currently CEO of oOh! Media.* Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son of Rupert Murdoch is also the Executive Chairman of Nova.* Alan Kohler, finance journalist, former editor and founder of Business Spectator* Phillip Adams, ABC radio host and commentator* Paul Whittaker, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, now CEO of Sky News* Mia Freedman, former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and co-founder of digital publisher MamaMia* Jason Levine, CEO and co-founder of MamaMia and Freedman's husband* Sarah Wilson, Australian journalist and author of “I Quit Sugar”* Neil Ackland, CEO of youth publisher Junkee (currently owned by oOh! Media, for sale) and CMO of oOh! Media)* Tim Duggan, co-founder of Junkee and author of “Cult Status”* Chris Wirasinha, co-founder of youth publisher Pedestrian TV, co-founder of Linkby* Oscar Martin, co-founder of Pedestrian TV* Harold Mitchell, Australian ad agency founder and chairman of Free TV, among other thingsIf you know someone who would be interested in this podcast or the Crawford Media newsletter, please pass this email on so they can subscribe. It's free - for now!Have a great weekend,HalThe Crawford Media podcast music is"Ethernight Club" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com