Avsnitt
-
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 -
Saknas det avsnitt?
-
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 hand
Interestingly, 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!
Hal
Questions 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 everyone
Special 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 Creek
JNI 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 belong
These 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 everyone
Andrew 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 trolls
The 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 everyone
Today 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 2
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MCTSVJ6
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MCJRS23
NEW ZEALAND PART 1 and 2
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MGJVLKV
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MG75ZFT
Go 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 everyone
As 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 future
For 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 newsletter
The 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,
Hal
Note: 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 - Visa fler
