It used to be the case that the news media’s engagement with social media and the commercial web was once reminiscent of Dr Samuel Johnson’s quote about women preachers ‘..like a dog walking on its hinder legs.It is not done well, but you are surprized to find it done at all’. Not any more.
Rupert Murdoch’s gift to the rest of the ailing packaged media this New Year was his sudden, spontaneous and apparently authentic appearance on Twitter . It is astonishing to see (apparently) a man that the world’s media media has spent decades trying to decode, announcing as a casual aside that he favours Rick Santorum in the GOP race . The feverish delight at his debut gave way to slow news day speculation about his interest in Twitter in general. I was one among many wondering (on Twitter, naturally) what would happen if Rupert Murdoch liked Tweeting so much, he bought the company?
A Murdoch purchase of Twitter is not the point of the thought experiment. The point is really to sharpen focus for journalists on what their use of third party platforms really means for the long term.
News organisations are placing an increasing amount of their interactions and journalism, their own and their users data, into the hands of third parties such as Twitter, Facebook and Google. Tweeting Rupert is a wonderful meta metaphor for what is happening to us all. The bargain here is implicit; these platforms scale so well to the open web, they allow media to reach, research and interact with audiences at close to zero cost. In exchange you surrender well, quite a lot. Even Arthur Sulzberger Jnr., the publisher of the New York Times recently spoke with great enthusiasm about the power of social media and how the Times has benefitted by embracing it. Journalism schools routinely teach the use of third party tools as a way of creating valuable and high quality journalism quickly, at low cost, for a world which increasingly demands and reacts to real time news through distributed networks.
This dilemma in choosing between connectivity and control is normally viewed through the commercial prism. But how many editors can answer detailed questions about what is happening to their journalism and the information about people who read it on any one of many platforms they use?
The famous New York Times graphic on the expansion of Facebook’s privacy policy was created before the controversial launch of Timeline and Profiles, and there continues to be a trickle of thoughtful people who are deleting their accounts as a result of the unpredictability of data use by the befriending behemoth. Google produces a laudable transparency report, but the fact that Google complies with 93 per cent of the 6,000 requests it receives for user data from law enforcement agencies is very different from the approach news oganisations would take to handing over sources. Or as cyber security student and activist Chris Soghoian pointed out in this article last year in the New York Times, security is often so lax around sources and communications in news a subpeona isn’t necessary.
The world of securing your publishing platform, your archive, your sources and even the confidentiality of your readers or viewers has been transformed by commercial companies whose primary purpose is not journalism. It is not a binary choice either; if publishers choose not to participate, they risk editorial irrelevance and commercial isolation. We have to absorb some of the technology lessons from these services and think through what needs to happen to make them more predictable and suitable for journalism.
Every day we give away more, but understand less about the ultimate consequences of the action. News leadership needs to do more thinking about these core questions. A task for many editors that seems about as interesting as reading through a print contract or becoming au fait with the compliance standards of a broadcast licence; dull work to be done by another department . Not true. The use of third party tools and platforms is key to developing reporting in a digital environment, it is at the heart of reporting and not a wrapper for it . These are not just distribution networks, they record the fragments and fingerprints of how your readers and sources interact with what you do. As we rapidly enter the ‘post geographic’ era of news, journalists also need to know what the same issues look like in different territories where the risks and vulnerabilities are far more apparent.
One of the big themes for this year is likely to be computational journalism. I really hope we see more and more courses like the joint degree we run at Columbia for computer science and journalism , and an influx of engineers into journalism to tackle some of these complex challenges. Maybe Rupert Murdoch, or the plethora of other media businesses which embrace Twitter and other services, are already working on interesting solutions. Maybe they will buy them. If the prospect of Rupert Murdoch buying Twitter makes you rethink your digital strategy,chances are you should be rethinking it already.
*with apologies to Jeff Jarvis.
I am not a journo but Seeing Rupert & Nike arrive in the same week, I fear it’s time for me to go.
Excellent. This is a clear illustration of the line between “adoption” (masquerading as innovation) and true “innovation.” We have a whole lot of the former, and not much of the latter. Setting up a twitter account or a blog isn’t innovative. Building the next Twitter or the technology/platform for a new mode of digital storytelling — those are innovative.
I agree there should be more programs like you’re developing at Columbia.
Thanks Jeff, you have written on this really well too. It still seems to me that all news organisations love projects (stories!) which have a short lifespan and then expire but can’t strategise so well on platforms. I think it is the DNA of the business …but has to change
[…] Emily Bell(wether) | What Would Rupert Do?* The Lessons of a Tweeting Murdoch […]
Glad you brought up the “story” end product. I gave a talk at a recent conference in which I argued that the basic unit of information/storytelling is changing from the “document” in all its forms (“story”/”article” being one of them) to the digital “application” in all of its forms (I’m not talking “apps” but something broader). I defined “application” as 1) interactive, 2) computational, 3) responsive/dynamic, 4) uniquely digital (impossible in any other medium). I think I’d now add your long-lifespan attribute to that list.
If we’re only teaching/doing is production of static “documents” I think we’re failing. That’s why I’m so intrigued by the journalism+engineering model.
I was already composing a response in my mind to the first part of your blog (which I think was great) when I got massively sidetracked on your mention of computational journalism.
Working in digital and social media I understand the connection between the two, but the mention of Engineering and Journalism faculties in the same sentence, let alone in harmonious co-existence, is so foreign. But yet so cool.
While J schools across the globe have integrated digital journalism into their course offerings, the idea of teaching the art of storytelling and then equipping them with the power to build the platform with which to tell that story takes it to the next (albeit logical) level.
I agree – I hope other schools pick it up too.
[…] What if Rupert Murdoch owned Twitter? And what third party platforms mean for the future of media? Share and Enjoy: […]
Can you edit out ‘But yet…’ 🙂 Terrible!
thanks Dave …yes 🙂
I added a whole section on the pros and cons of using third party services to the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing. The harsh truth, I think, is that we cannot avoid using them in the shorter term, and the longer term problem goes beyond the publishing industry to broader issues around privacy and what corporations can reasonably do with data.
Underlying this are issues around the balance of power between those who manage relationships (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Google), and the parties that constitute those relationships (i.e. publishers and readers). Throw in a little US-Europe cultural tension over the rights of the individual against those of the state and corporation and you have something that could rumble on for decades yet.
This is a very good thought experiment. I find Twitter an extremely useful surce of information and serendipity. It has reduced my reliance on my daily newspaper in a way that earlier internet services never did. The print and broadcast media’s response to Twitter has been to view it through the lens of celebrities and gossip. What i think they have missed, is its use for conversations that can be serious, and extended, and realtime.
The paradox of Twitter is that everybody “gets” the 140 limit, because of sound-bite news bulletins and short attention spans , and yet Twitter allows us to do things that print and broadcast media couldn’t, because it allows people to curate our attention spans and manage our appetite for content on a story-by-story basis. No more channel-hopping.
I’m less sure what to do with your thoughts about third-party platforms. I see the important developments in web publishing as being new genres, rather than new outlets or titles.. Murdoch’s investment in MySpace was significant, because he wanted to understand how younger people consume media, but I think the venture had limited success because they curated the outlet and not its audience, and the audience moved on. I think the future of (profitable) publishing is probably more in knowing how to keep an audience.
are you aware what a bellwether is?
yes. I know a surprisingly large amount about sheep.
The name was chosen for me by the lovely Guardian colleagues who set it up as a leaving present….
Lots of fascinating questions in this post.
A few thoughts:
– I think third party ownership and use of a tool is only relevant if one believes the relationship between, say for example, The Guardian and Twitter is akin to that between Zynga and Facebook. I don’t believe it is in this case.
– Your spot-on re. the need for media to more meaningfully use tools like Twitter (and associated data) not just for distribution and engagement, but to more deeply understand their audiences.
– And an even greater challenge imo is to then understand the meaning and implications of such data as it should change (almost) everything, from how success is measured to using that data to imagine, design and build services i.e. not just more targeted ads or ways to increase PVs, but actual products. iPlayer-type innovations vs 20-page slide shows with ads every five and mobile articles spread over 10 pages.
I believe It’s a product and design challenge before being a journalists’ or even an engineering one. There’s a great para in Clay Shirky’s latest piece (http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and-core-users/) about bundled vs unbundled – with exceptions, I think lots of media is still stuck at the true implications of the profound difference between the two.
Hi Alberto – very interesting point about product and design. We are now teaching students about data, not just for journalism but about journalism. Understanding what happens to information in a networked environment I think is so important for journalism for both commercial and editorial reasons. I agree too about how far we have to go to really understand what the changing ecosystem means and how the ‘journalism layer’ is expressed.
[…] Emily Bell drew a valuable lesson from the Rupert-joins-Twitter episode: As they wade into the social web, news organizations, she […]
[…] Emily Bell drew a valuable lesson from the Rupert-joins-Twitter episode: As they wade into the social web, news organizations, she […]
There’s a certain irony to Tweeting this but here goes…