How the web is changing how we watch the Olympics
August 16, 2012 § Leave a comment
The London Olympics have ended and the post match analyses have begun. A significant part of that is always how many people were able to view the world’s biggest sporting show and how that compared with previous games.
An important aspect is how are people viewing the games. Just as these have been billed as the first social media games (the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver notwithstanding), they are also perhaps the first major internet games.
The changing viewing patterns are being driven by the explosion in smart phone numbers, the emergence of tablets and the increasing uptake of internet television.
Due to my last post which was broadly about the Olympic games and social media, I was asked to appear on the new incarnation of Media 7, a media-issues programme that used to be hosted on TVNZ7 before the plug was pulled. The new programme, Media 3, now screens on TV3 and is available on demand. You can check out the first episode here.
In segment I appear in, I made the observation that there was an increasing proportion of viewers in the United Kingdom who were using tablets and mobile phones (and not geo-blocked as the rest of the world was to the BBC’s extensive coverage of the games) to access live streaming of Olympic events.
That combined smart phone/tablet statistic is 41 percent. Contrast that with television with 3 percent. Internet television may be growing quickly but it is still small, and the computer is still the default setting for online viewing with 56 percent. But what’s clear is that a significant number of people used the internet to access one of the BBC’s 24 live streams to do their Olympic viewing by.
A friend of mine, Ajay Murthy, who is a digital producer, confirmed this. He anticipates that the components of the pie chart will change quickly in the short to medium term as the computer segment declines as the others take an increasing share – particularly internet television.
The interesting part is that more and more people want live events available on mobile platforms and they want increasing choice. To its surprise, the BBC found that each of the channels narrowcasting particular competitions live found significant niche audiences.
Ajay told me:
“There is a story about the ascent of connected TV here. The percentage is much higher than even I expected. So many viewers chose IP streams despite there being multiple dedicated channels on TV with the same coverage. The streams had geo-blocks in place so the majority of views will have been in the UK, except for the minority outside who have virtual proxy networks setup.”
According to this article by the Auckland-based technology writer, Juha Saarinen, the BBC delivered over 2.8 petabytes of video data to viewers on a single day during the London Olympics which is some kind of record. To put this into context that exceeds the entire online traffic for the coverage of the FIFA World Cup in South Africa in 2010, an event that comes a close second to the Olympics as the world’s most watched sporting event.
The International Olympic Committee also concluded that social media was driving interest and viewing among groups that previously had relatively little interest in the games. It says that NBC viewing statistics in the United States showed teenage viewers up 29 percent when compared with the Beijing Olympics four years ago.
When broken down, the IOC says its figures show that there was a 54 percent increase in the number of teenage girls watching the games – something it attributed to social media peer sharing.
Meanwhile in New Zealand, it appears that mainstream free to air and pay television still rule when it comes to live sports, mainly because there is little choice unless you organise a fast broadband connection and a VPN. Otherwise, it was no good trying to watch BBC, NBC or the Nine Network’s online coverage because all that content was blocked to New Zealand viewers.
Instead, we had to rely on six extra Olympic channels (if you are a Sky Sports subscribers) and one free to air channel – Prime – which dedicated most of its air time during the sixteen days to bring us 24 hour coverage – some of it live and some of it recorded – and which included a 90 minute highlights package every evening.
And the lack of video on demand catch-up coverage to see the breadth and depth of sporting competitions that didn’t involve New Zealand athletes was frustrating, unlike the extensive bank of videos that TVNZ provided during the Beijing games when it had the rights four years ago.
For Rio in four years time, New Zealand’s ultra-fast broadband network will be embedded and we can hope for a quantum leap in online Olympic coverage. It will be a good yardstick of where we are in the digital stakes in 2016.
I want to thank Russell Brown, Lacey Graham and Sarah Daniell for the opportunity to be on the first programme of Media 3. Oh, and did I already say where you could watch it?
[photo credit: Canadian Press / Rex Features]
Making Olympic-sized gaffes on social media
July 31, 2012 § Leave a comment
Every four years, the Olympics arrive with its outsized baggage to set up camp in a host city, while disrupting the lives of residents, changing the character of entire city precincts, and sucking in attention like only a media sinkhole can. I should know. I lived in Sydney for and leading up to the Olympic Games in 2000. London appears no different but, interestingly, some aspects ARE different.
For each of these titanic cast-of-thousands, audience-of-millions productions, the actors change but the plot usually remains same. There are the standard stories about athletes passed over for selection, and fears over transport, security, the weather, drug cheating and empty seats.
This year, there’s a new subject that is stalking the games and will continue to shadow it in this new era of personal mobile connectivity. The first big clue dropped during the men’s cycling road race on day one.
After numerous complaints from television viewers about confused and confusing commentary during the race, it has emerged that the volume of tweets and texts generated by mobile phone using spectators absolutely bamboozled the race organisers’ GPS information that should have accurately logged the progress of individual riders. So much so, that the International Olympic Committee issued a plea to Olympic crowds to ration their tweets and SMS messages during road racing.
Good luck with that. London has been described as the first ‘real’ social media games because of the growth of social media usage in the four years since the Beijing Olympics. The opening ceremony even went out of its way to portray British youth culture as highly connected (did you notice the touch screen props?).
Twitter says there are now more tweets about the Olympics on a single day in a week than the total number of tweets sent during the whole Beijing Olympics.
Social media and the Olympics is a growing new thing – and lessons are being learned that will apply to future games. High profile athletes are endorsing products using social media (and fallen foul of International Olympic Committee guidelines) and many are simply using it to talk directly to their home support. The majority of athletes are of a generation that has integrated social networking into their daily lives.
But for games organisers and team managers, it has become a new scenario for a potential public relations nightmare.
Has anyone warned the athletes? In a word, yes. Every team will have issued guidelines on how to use social media safely and appropriately. The last thing the team managers and communications professionals want is to go into damage control over an errant tweet or Facebook post.
It’s worth a reminder that Facebook only became public in 2006, Twitter broke out in 2007 and China’s weibo platforms only hit the mainstream in 2009. Today, Facebook has 900 million users (compared with 100 million in 2008), Twitter has 140 million users (six million in 2008) and Sina, China’s most popular micro-blogging network, now has 300 million users.
The International Olympic Committee has issued social media usage guidelines and central to them is this directive:
The IOC encourages participants and other accredited persons to post comments on social media platforms or websites and tweet during the Olympic Games, and it is entirely acceptable for a participant or any other accredited person to do a personal posting, blog or tweet. However, any such postings, blogs or tweets must be in a first-person, diary-type format and should not be in the role of a journalist – i.e. they must not report on competition or comment on the activities of other participants or accredited persons, or disclose any information which is confidential or private in relation to any other person or organisation.
You can find the full document here. If only Hope Solo, Michael Morganella and Voula Papachristou had actually read it.
Morganella is the most recent casualty. In a fit of sour grapes after his team lost to South Korea, he tweeted the Koreans were “mentally handicapped retards”. Don’t bother looking for his Twitter account – it’s no longer available and he’s no longer available for his team’s next game.
Solo, the goalkeeping star of the American women’s football team, used Twitter to pick a public fight with a former United States international player turned commentator, Brandi Chastain, over what she called unfair criticism of the team. It’s become a distraction for her teammates because she’s become the story, not the team.
Papachristou, a Greek triple jumper, found herself going home before the games began for tweeting “with so many Africans in Greece, at least the mosquitoes of West Nile will eat homemade food”. In country where immigration has become a sensitive political issue and non-Greek minorities are under attack from far right groups, her ‘joke’ got her expelled.
Meanwhile, Australian swimmers, Nick D’Arcy and Kenrick Monk, won’t be joining their teammates for the end of games festivities. They’ll be going home after their events – their penalty for posting photos on Facebook of themselves posing with guns in an American gun shop.
Journalists are also not immune to social media blowback, as happened to Guy Adams, a journalist at The Independent, when he took a tilt at the official American Olympics network, NBC, over its coverage.
All of this simply heightens the need for athletes and anyone involved with the Olympics to take a 360 view of what they intend to post on social media. They must realise their posts can be seen by everyone and anyone. But as we know, common sense can only be learned and not necessarily taught.
To quote George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Like four yearly controversies over empty seats, drug cheats, transport and security, social media is now also an embedded fixture at the Olympics. It is also a guaranteed prospect to win Olympic gold for online gaffes.
Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom gives PR master class
March 2, 2012 § Leave a comment
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has given his side of the story on TV3’s Campbell Live programme in New Zealand and it is proving to be a master class in public relations. The man accused of being a piracy king made some excellent points during the interview last night. He denies being a flight risk because he says everything he owns has been seized by the authorities and he wants to fight the charges.
As Dotcom pointed out, there are hundreds of other file sharing websites that do what Megaupload did. They include Mediafire, Filesurf, Rapidshare and others. “We are not responsible for the problem. Where does piracy come from? Piracy comes from people – let’s say in Europe – who do not have access to movies at the same time as they are released in the US. This has been born within the licensing model and the old business model that Hollywood has where they release something in one country but they release trailers around the world pitching that new movie …. If the business model is one where everybody has access at the same time, you wouldn’t have a piracy problem. It really is the Government of the United States protecting an outdated business model that doesn’t work anymore in the age of the Internet.”
He claims that content owners had ways of removing links to any content that they said was infringing copyright. Megaupload enabled them to have “direct delete access” to all its servers and they could remove links to content that infringed their copyright. “So they could access our system and remove any link that they could find on the Internet without us being involved – and we are talking about 180 partners including every major movie studio, including Microsoft and all big content producers – and they have used that system heavily… They had full access.”
One of the biggest contributors of evidence against Megaupload, the Motion Picture Association of America, had never taken legal action against Megaupload during its seven year existence. “If you are a company that is hurt so much by what we are doing – billions of dollars of damage – you don’t wait and sit and do nothing. You call your lawyers and you try and sue us and try to stop us from what we are doing.”
Dotcom says it is because Megaupload was not responsible for the actions of its users. The same United States law that came to YouTube’s defence in a law suit taken by Viacom, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, shields online service providers from the actions of their users. “We are a lamb compared to what was going on at YouTube at the time.”
He says the amount of traffic going through Megaupload made it impossible to police for copyright infringement. He cited the figure of 800 file transfers every second.
You can watch the John Campbell interview here (nearly half a million views in less than 24 hours!).
Whether Kim Dotcom is guilty or innocent remains to be seen but his performance was a masterful exercise in public relations. The instant reaction on Twitter and Facebook showed how effectively he has turned some public opinion his way.
Hayden Raw of The Common Room posted this comparison taken from Campbell Live’s Facebook page.
Here are some Twitter reactions – both for and against Dotcom. There is also praise for Campbell Live for attempting to balance excitable and one-sided news coverage of an issue that has become emblematic of the Internet era and the current war between the legacy content providers and the digital insurgency.
https://twitter.com/hogsatemysister/status/175160319268757504 https://twitter.com/suburban_ennui/status/175116601987829760 https://twitter.com/stevenjwoodman/status/175103595103002624News, journalism and the digital abyss
November 5, 2011 § Leave a comment
The news industry is looking for a life jacket in a storm. No one yet has a complete answer to make journalism float in the digital wave that is wiping out the news media’s traditional business models.
One of the biggest fears for journalism is how to maintain the separation between an editorial process and the money making side of the business. As the old news media models begin to collapse in the digital era, the danger is that the news will become all about clicks on pages because that’s what is most attractive to the advertising side of the business.
If news is determined by what gets the most clicks, the many issues that are serious, complex and unsexy (think climate change, changes to the way schools are funded or new surveillance legislation) would not be able to compete with stories about international rugby players caught in a sleaze.
How then do we as a society mitigate against changing news priorities that are primarily driven by commercial imperatives, made even more acute by an increasing desperation in news media publishing? How can good journalism be profitable when classified advertising in newspapers is drying up and free to air television news faces falling audiences and increasing competition for advertising dollars due to online competition?
The fact is no one yet knows. As American internet commentator, Clay Shirky, puts it, we are in a period of creative destruction and it is still too early to predict the kind of emerging media architecture that we hope will spring Phoenix-like from the ashes of the old business models that have served journalism for so long.
Shirky’s referencing of creative destruction is actually the idea of an Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter who described it as an essential part of business cycles. As companies grow and become leaders, they eventually become overtaken by other companies which adapt to the changes in the business environment by being smarter and more innovative.
In the current media environment, the pervasive mood is fear. Many news organisations are more concerned with clinging to their declining audiences than building new ones. It’s a strategy borne out of pessimism. There is a lot of waiting to see what happens next.
That’s why the experiments implemented by Rupert Murdoch’s News International have attracted so much media attention and commentary. The pay wall that ring fences news content on The Times website and Murdoch’s digital subscription newspaper The Daily were designed to stem the free content digital tide but the prognosis is not a hopeful one.
On the other hand, the New York Times appears to be enjoying some success with its pay wall as it records a significant increase in subscribers.
Meanwhile, The Guardian is a newspaper with an entirely different strategy. Editor Alan Rusbridger told Al Jazeera that a decision had been made a few years ago to turn the Manchester newspaper into a digital first organization.
The Guardian is betting that it will become a commercially viable strategy even though the transition to digital is literally costing it millions. Last year, it lost over 40 million pounds and it is even reportedly weighing up opening a lifestyle shop in Covent Garden to create another revenue stream.
But in journalism terms, The Guardian has been buoyed by its part in breaking two remarkable news stories – the Wikileaks documents and the News of the World phone hacking scandal. Even so there must be misgivings among its shareholders over how long it can continue to run at a loss while hoping its bet on a digital future for news pays off.
Rusbridger told Al Jazeera that the media companies that will succeed will be open ones. “This is the biggest transformation in the last two to three hundred years and not many media organisations have twigged it yet.”
The key appears to be finding ways of doing things that the competition is not doing. While it may be an expensive strategy, The Guardian is trying to seize a first mover advantage. Recent innovations include opening up its news lists to readers to contribute story ideas and@GuardianTagBot, a “Twitter-based search assistant”. There’s also nOtice, an “open community news platform” which is heralded to be launched soon.
While these experiments may not yet add up to a clear picture of the future of news, they give us glimpses of new directions for journalism and offer further clues of how media organisations need to evolve to survive.
Some might say it is simply a matter of rearranging the deckchairs but The Guardian’s guiding vision is a courageous one. That’s because it is intrinsically optimistic about quality journalism and the internet, despite the prevailing fear and pessimism that now grips the news industry.
The day Occupy Wall Street came to Every Street
October 22, 2011 § Leave a comment
October 15 is being hailed as the day that Occupy Wall Street went global. In New Zealand, demonstrators in Auckland and Wellington joined hundreds of thousands around the world in adding their voices to the anger aimed at the financial institutions and hapless regulators that plunged the world into deep economic crisis.
For the backdrop that got us to where we are today, watch the marvelous documentary Inside Job. You may also be awestruck by these frank admissions by share trader Alessio Rastani who told BBC News 24 that he “goes to bed every night dreaming of another recession”.
It’s no wonder many Americans are feeling angry and disenfranchised and this is resonating around the world, especially in Europe where the debt crisis is also hurting millions. As well as in the United States, it is no coincidence there have been significant October 15 protests in Spain, Italy, Greece, Britain and Portugal, all of which have been badly affected by Europe’s debt crisis, economic stagnation and government spending cuts.
And how the movement has grown since it began in anger in New York on September 17.
It goes without saying that the Internet and social networking tools have played a vital part in sustaining the Occupy Wall Street movement and given rise to many autonomous but loosely connected protest offshoots. It could even be a textbook illustration on how to successfully grow a Protest 2.0 movement.
Occupy Wall Street activists have taken to creating a myriad of websites and using an entire toolbox of social platforms as well as the usual standards of YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook to start a contagion that has spread through the United States and abroad.
According to this New York Times blog, the growth in the movement’s social media audience has been spectacular. “On Facebook, the overall audience has grown to more than 1.2 million in the last two weeks as hundreds of Facebook pages have been created around the country and now around the world. There are dozens of global Facebook pages now, including Occupy Brazil, Occupy Berlin, Occupy Sidney and Occupy Tokyo. Users also turned to Meetup.com and FourSquare … to help find each other and organise protests.”
It is also being called a movement without a leader, a genuine outpouring of grass roots activism. Check out this video made of the protesters occupying the movement’s symbolic Ground Zero – a temporary protest camp within a block of Wall St in Lower Manhattan. Some are motivated by increased personal hardship in difficult times while others are more articulate as to why they are calling for an end of what they call a culture of corporate greed which profits at the expense of everyday people.
One important lesson about web enabled protest is that it means having to give up control or never to attempt seizing it in the first place. For a rather good articulation of what drives Occupy Wall Street, watch this interview with Jesse LaGreca, who has become something of a reluctant spokesperson. Fox News did not air this interview but it has since been viewed nearly one million times on YouTube.
Another observation is how social tools have been very effective at challenging the official narrative of events, such as the October 1 protest on Brooklyn Bridge that resulted in hundreds of arrests. Demonstrators were able to use the social media and alternative new websites to post images and accounts that contradicted the New York Police line that the marchers had disobeyed City Hall instructions.
In a parallel story, protesters are also innovating, taking natural advantage of the possibilities of the mobile web. Today’s guerilla activists are increasingly using the natural cover of the Internet to wage protest campaigns. Websites have sprung up to support the movement, and platforms not previously used for political activism like Tumblr have been co-opted.
CleanTechnica reports that “Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have begun to forsake Twitter as an organising tool in favor of a mobile phone app called Vibe which enables users to post information anonymously and temporarily”.
We already know the internet allows protest movements to organise, network and share information in real time. We’ve seen it in Iran, China and in the Arab Spring. But it is also proving vital to crowd-sourcing contributions from individuals with stories to share. Take the images and stories being posted on the WeAreThe99Percent Tumblr page where people are are posting pictures of themselves with a handwritten letter explaining why they are one of the 99 percent.
The images and stories are moving, testimonies by real people affected by reduced circumstances. These are disillusioned people, angry that the architects of the financial and economic meltdown have emerged with bonuses while millions are left poorer, many of them on the breadline for the first times in their lives.
The web allows movements to coalesce and organise but it is individuals that make them grow. I am reminded of this Maori proverb. He aha te mea nui o tea o? He tangata! He tangata! He tangata! What is the most important thing in the world? It is people! It is people! It is people!
This is why the stories of the 99 percent are so important and now, they have ways to tell them.
The information war that rages on the Chinese internet
August 30, 2011 § Leave a comment
There’s an intensifying struggle in China over information and at the heart of it is the internet. As we all know, controlling the internet is virtually impossible. But that doesn’t stop the Chinese government, backed with a very sophisticated system of censorship, from trying.
In a new development, the country’s popular Sina Weibo micro-blogging platform has informed its users that they risk having their accounts suspended if they spread rumours that provoke social unrest.
You may already be aware that Sina Weibo is China’s equivalent of Twitter. It has grown rapidly in a few years to have 200 million users, many of whom rely on it as a way to stay connected to their online communities and also as an alternative source of news and information. Here’s the China Digital Times story.
This threat of suspension has angered many of Weibo users, many of whom are suspicious that the kinds of rumours that the government refers to could be anything that runs counter to the state’s spin on news and events. There’s a feeling that government pressure is being applied to Weibo to reassert some control over the unruly world of the Chinese social net.
This is the latest turn in a battle over information and expression that is being waged on the Chinese side of the Great Firewall (GFW). The government has been shaken up by some recent scandals that have gone viral among Chinese netizens. As one experienced China watcher observed, one of the most recent cases even felt like a tipping point, as you can read in an earlier post here.
The Chinese state media fosters and promulgates news and the types of stories that are by and large ideologically supportive of the China’s ruling communist party. But increasingly, the Chinese online public is in turn becoming more sophisticated and increasingly sceptical in its interpretation of pro-government rhetoric and spin.
With a thriving independent commercial media scene, social media, soaring numbers of internet users and meteoric numbers of smart phones, Chinese netizens now have unparalleled access to alternative sources of news and information. This mercurial flow of independent information that has not been sanctioned by the government is inflicting a deepening credibility crisis on the authorities and the dutiful state media organisations.
Take this recent embarrassing episode. A hoaxer planted a fake government media release in the state media system and it was reported as fact. This fiasco, claimed many Chinese netizens, was a perfect demonstration of how one of the biggest disseminators of falsehoods was the state itself.
So the battle lines are drawn. On one side is the state which is selling its vision of a China that is making rapid advancements in improving people’s livelihoods and restoring China to its rightful place in the world.
On the other side is the mob – the rapidly growing numbers of connected Chinese who use the internet to share and organise. Among them are activists, dissidents and ordinary people with a grudge against the state. They have the tools to collaborate online to create physical world protests and publicise them before government censors can react, like in this recent protest in the city of Dalian.
From the government’s view, these kinds of incidents threaten to derail its vision for China. China’s leaders biggest fears are social chaos and overthrow. Hence the emphasis on the GFW and the system of net censorship which they argue are necessary to maintain social harmony, protect China’s territorial integrity and promote Communist Party rule.
This is why information in China often vanishes. Here’s a wonderfully illustrative China Geeks post which observes “news has a habit of disappearing; from state media, traditional media, personal blogs, microblogs and Internet forums alike”.
“After an important incident, citizens have roughly a day to opine before the government apparatus catches up. It is then that directives are issued to media outlets, outlining what can and cannot be reported; it is then that posts you swore you wrote vanish; it is then that new “sensitive keywords” are entered into a blackout database.”
For those of us outside China, perhaps the single biggest manifestation of net censorship in China is the GFW. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are blocked in China (but interestingly, LinkedIn is not).
To get around the GFW, many foreigners in China use virtual proxy networks. A Singaporean friend living in Beijing says it is easy to buy a VPN service by paying with a credit card. “Most people find out which service to use through word of mouth. It’s not openly discussed because the services have specifically told us not to write about anything they do in a public forum. The government has recently been clamping down on the VPNs and any extra information that we give them just allows them to shut the services more easily.”
A Shanghai-based New Zealander says censorship policies and directives change all the time. “The internet is just a bit goddamned slow here anyway, due to all the filtering, so sometimes it’ll take a few days before people realise that a site has been added to a blocked list. An interesting case is with Google+. This wasn’t blocked, but foreign media reported that it was. But now it is.”
Another New Zealander confirmed Google+ was blocked and that it “also happened to be the platform (the Chinese dissident artist) Ai Wei Wei first contacted netizens through, several weeks after being released from prison”.
But there are thousands of Chinese netizens already using Google+ and they say there are many other techniques for jumping the GFW. According to them, these techniques are not difficult and cost nothing. They include Secure Shell or SSH, Telex, GoAgent and hosts file modification. Here’s an informative video of how to modify the hosts file on a computer to disguise IP addresses. There’s also this useful guide on the myriad ways to access a blocked website.
It seems getting across the GFW is easy, once you know how. China has 485 million internet users and some of them joke that the internet in China is really one big intranet. But for many of China’s internet users, the GFW is not an insurmountable barrier to access that which is banned on the mainland.
The minority of Chinese netizens who cross the GFW on a daily basis are a microcosmic representative of China’s vibrant and restless internet scene. The staggering number of online citizens, exponentially growing quantities of user generated content, evolving mobile technology, improving communications infrastructure and a host of other factors all point in one direction. The inescapable conclusion is that the booming Chinese internet is increasingly difficult to control and censorship will continue to be subverted because the expectations of millions of Chinese people – many of them young and tech savvy – are changing.
The empire can’t strike back and Rupert Murdoch is not Luke’s father
July 18, 2011 § Leave a comment
Journalists are never highly regarded at the best of times. They’re not in the same league as nurses, fire fighters and tree surgeons and sometimes not even held in the same esteem as lawyers, used car sales people and real estate agents, depending on which rankings you see.
The truth is the profession has good journalists and bad apples like any other and a decisive factor is ethics – an issue that appears never to have entered the minds of the News of the World editors who gave their journalists free rein to go on phone hacking missions.
This complete disregard for the law and people’s right privacy at the flagship Rupert Murdoch-controlled tabloid newspaper can only be described as an utter failure of journalistic ethics and a betrayal of the privilege of media freedom.
The seriousness and scale of what’s alleged means the abuses committed by NOTW journalists were systemic and must have been sanctioned by very senior news executives – one reason why the current fallout is having such deep and wide ranging repercussions.
What set in at the NOTW news room was a culture of law breaking – the hacking into the information of people’s private lives to uncover scandal. For the past five years, allegations of phone hacking by the newspaper’s journalists have been simmering. There was a police investigation that led to two convictions and revelations that News International, NOTW’s parent company, paid two important phone hacking victims for their silence. But the nature of NOTW’s usual targets – celebrities, politicians and members of the Royal Family – had failed to elicit much sympathy from the public. This all changed this month.
The hunger for exclusive content haunts weekly tabloids like the News of the World to a greater extent than their daily counterparts like The Sun because they only get one shot a week to break a story and set the news agenda for all its competitors. Forget the website, the hard copy Sunday print version is what really matters.
In its reckless pursuit of exclusive stories, News International, by dint of being NOTW’s owners, is culpable and stands accused of breaking British law – to be precise, the interception of communications, contrary to Section1(1) Criminal Law Act 1977 and bribing police, contrary to Section 1 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906.
The game changer was a bolt from the blue. The Guardian revealed News of the World journalists had hacked the voice mail of 13-year-old Milly Dowler in 2002 while the search was on to find her. She was later found to have been murdered. It was also revealed a NOTW journalist or journalists deleted voice messages to make room for new messages from the girl’s worried friends and family members.
The reaction to the story has been one of universal disgust. NOTW had sunk journalism to a new and ultra-despicable low and heads are now rolling at News International. What’s also been laid bare is the company’s carefully managed and strategic relationships with key British politicians and even senior members of the police which has helped to protect the company like Teflon protects a non stick pan.
The founder of the News Corp empire that owns News International, Rupert Murdoch, has now personally apologised to the Dowler family and to the British public. In other developments, the NOTW has been closed down, journalists and former news executives are being arrested, Britain’s top policeman has resigned, an eight billion euro deal to buy satellite network BSkyB has been abandoned and Murdoch and his son James have been summonsed to appear before a parliamentary select committee. Meanwhile the threat of more criminal charges hangs on both sides of the Atlantic.
There are now other troubling allegations – that NOTW journalists hacked the phone accounts of the victims of the 2005 London tube and bus bombings. The US government will be carrying out its own investigations, including a probe on whether victims of 9/11 were also targeted by Murdoch journalists.
The blowback goes all the way to New York-based mother ship, News Corp, and what started with NOTW has become a defining crisis in Rupert Murdoch’s 50-year career as arguably the single most powerful man in news who has ever lived.
How then did News International get it so wrong? Here are four decisive factors.
Firstly, it seems certain that fierce competition for sales and profits in what is ostensibly a sunset industry was a fatally corrosive factor. The drive to scoop the opposition is the lifeblood of journalism and especially so for a Sunday tabloid. Tabloid newspapers are not called scandal sheets for nothing.
Secondly, NOTW was used as a career stepping stone by two ambitious young editors. Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson cultivated a very aggressive, risk taking news room that regularly got the stories the competition wished it had. Both were later rewarded with spectacular career advancement but given what we know now, there can be no greater failure of leadership than what went on under their stewardship. Brooks has since resigned as chief executive of News International and both she and Coulson have been arrested.
Next, a strategy of short termism was everything. What happened at NOTW happened against a backdrop of gloom because newspapers are dying. The hugely profitable and intensely competitive world of Britain’s tabloid market is only sustainable for another decade or so. The digital time bomb is destroying the hard copy tabloid and desperation has infected the industry. It’s simply a matter of trying to buy as much time as possible in the hope that a digital way of profitably delivering mass media tabloid content is created and soon!
One last critical factor in the News International debacle is the impact on privacy that has been caused by the internet, mobile and surveillance technology, as well as social media. New complex multi-dimensional issues have sprung up that are changing our concepts of privacy and the enforcement and passing of new privacy legislation has failed to keep pace. Definitions of privacy and what is an invasion or breach of privacy are challenged on a daily basis by the news media. Newspapers like NOTW have knowingly exploited the confusion to push at the boundaries of privacy and in this case to fatefully cross them.
There you have it. The declining years of newsprint, ruthless editors, a reckless and exploitative news room culture, confusion over privacy issues, the onslaught of the internet, new enabling technologies and a corporate culture of hubris and arrogance have conspired to create one of the biggest media stories ever.
Now there will be a reckoning. The news media in Britain faces the prospect of greater regulation and there will be a rebalancing of privacy and media freedom. Media freedom is vital to transparency and democracy and to show truth to the powerful. But that freedom takes a mortal blow when society’s self-appointed watchdogs indulge in behaviour as corrupt as some of those they watch.
The future is wireless and ruled by zettabytes
June 24, 2011 § Leave a comment
Omens of the digital apocalypse are everywhere. Ask any 20 something if they buy newspapers and the answer is almost certainly no. At my local art house video shop, the staff say their clientele is increasingly 40 and above. At my local alternative radio station, the station manager observes the shelves for flyers are nearly empty. My favourite music shop has closed and another I go to has savagely reduced its stock of CDs.
This is how it is. The daily hard-copy newspaper faces annihilation as new cohorts of news consumers go online. Video shops are staring at the end because young people download their viewing and music shops face the same threat. Radio stations and other popular culture hubs have fewer flyers because advertising increasingly goes online.
This creeping redundancy is extremely bad news for people who have based their business models around the old legacy media. We have also been here many times before with the advent of technologies that have irrevocably changed the way we do things. The printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, radio and television have all consigned older, slower, less efficient media technologies to the dustbins of history.
But I don’t think we have ever witnessed such wholesale change to the way we create, connect, communicate, consume and share content as we are now seeing in our lifetimes.
This cycle of destruction we are living through is contrastingly illuminated by a blossoming of online energy that is positively dazzling. How about this for a watershed moment? Sometime before the year 2015, the quantities of digital data flowing around the planet will cumulatively reach the one zettabyte threshold.
This projection comes from a forecast by the Cisco Visual Networking Index, an initiative that tracks global internet traffic and extrapolates those trends. The latest VNI says global internet traffic has increased eightfold in the past five years and will increase fourfold over the coming five years.
It also predicts by 2015, the number of devices connected to the internet will be twice as high as the global population. This is a doubling from 2010 when it was estimated there was one device per person. Correspondingly, internet traffic will grow from three gigabytes per person in 2010 to eleven gigabytes per person in 2015.
But let’s just go back a bit. Consider a byte is one unit of digital information, and 1000 bytes is a kilobyte. A zettabyte is a kilobyte to the power of seven. Multiply a zettabyte to the next power and we arrive at another frontier signpost – the yottabyte. By then, we will have truly and well entered the realms of science fiction and quite feasibly, a yottabyte world, given the exponential growth in digital data traffic, may be closer than we might expect.
If the Cisco VNI forecasts are accurate, 2015 is shaping up to be a pivotal year in the evolution of our digital civilisation. Assuming the Mayan prophecy of some kind of global apocalypse is averted in 2012, we can look forward to the point that traffic from wireless devices will exceed traffic from wired devices; increasing internet traffic will continue to come from non-PC devices (think smart phones, internet television, tablets); and mobile data to increase 26 times between now and 2015.
In another salient trend that demonstrates how things are changing, we will soon witness Asia surpass North America as the region that generates the most internet traffic, confirming how the world economy is shifting away from the West. It is with interest I read that the already super connected South Korean capital Seoul is working on becoming the world’s first complete free Wi-Fi city while we in New Zealand wait for ultrafast broadband to begin to roll out in 2015.
While these forecasts are stunning, they’re also unsettling. The present is increasingly digital and the future is wireless. That much we know. We also know the digital world is accelerating away from the non digital world and the gulf between those who have access to digital communications technology and those who are denied by any mix of geo-politics, deprivation and lack of opportunity will be excluded further. As the futurist writer William Gibson said: “The future is already here; it is just distributed unevenly.”
Governments, organisations, businesses, communities and individuals have a growing responsibility to ensure that as many people as possible have access to the digital world. It provides access to education, information, healthcare, political rights, creativity and freedom of expression. The United Nations recently declared that internet access is a human right. If our wireless future is inequitably shared and distributed, millions will be consigned to poverty and lack of opportunity in a world that is increasingly defined by the internet and mobile access to it.
While we embrace the wonderful advantages of digital living and the social web, we need to think about the risks posed to society and human civilisation if millions of others remain locked out of this digital century despite the increasing ubiquity of the technology.
It is my sincere hope that our wireless, inter-connected digital future is an increasingly inclusive one.
Fight! Ryan Giggs versus Twitter users
May 30, 2011 § Leave a comment
If you’re intending to leak the identity of a famous celebrity in defiance of a court ruling or suppression order, don’t expect Twitter to defend your right to challenge the law under the guise of freedom of expression.
In what is proving to be a high profile legal case but not without precedent, British lawyers representing Manchester United player Ryan Giggs have taken legal action against Twitter to compel the California-based social media platform to hand over details of tweeters who have defied a privacy injunction preventing the publication of the football star’s identity.
It is the latest flow on effect in a row that has blown up over claims of an affair between the Manchester United veteran and reality television star Imogen Thomas. Giggs’ lawyers convinced the High Court that a gagging order was necessary to protect the footballer’s privacy and reputation, and on April 14, a privacy injunction was issued.
This has been a red rag to a bull, especially to those angered that the woman in question was being pilloried but a footballer with millions of pounds could employ considerable legal resources to hide his identity. Then there were those simply in love with celebrity gossip but the upshot is that within days his identity was no secret on Twitter.
After a month of Twitter gossip, if there was one speck of doubt left as to the identity of the footballer, British MP David Hemming used parliamentary privilege to open the floodgates for the news media. He named Giggs to highlight the futility of privacy laws when by his estimation 75,000 people on Twitter had already breached the injunction. This allowed journalists to report Giggs, who is married with two children, as the celebrity accused of infidelity although Hemming has been accused of abusing parliamentary privilege.
And as a backdrop to the ensuing and confused media circus, the gagging order remains in place!
It’s all a big legal mess but one that Giggs’ legal team intend to use to make an example of a representative number of those that flouted the injunction, and in a symbolic way claw back some of the privacy ground that has been lost to social media. Central to this strategy is to get Twitter to comply with British privacy and media laws.
Schillings, the firm representing Giggs, is seeking a court order known as a Norwich Pharmacal order that could force Twitter to reveal the name, email address and IP address of a person or persons behind an anonymous account that has attracted over a hundred thousand followers for revealing a list of prominent people who had taken out media bans to keep their affairs secret.
Other tweeters also face the possibility of a legal action for outing Giggs as the player in the Imogen Thomas case. Britain’s Daily Mail has spoken to this tweeter who faces the possibility of being fined, having his assets seized or even going to jail for breaking the cloak of court imposed secrecy.
The social network’s general manager of European operations, Tony Wang, said last week that Twitter would respect British law and that people who used Twitter to break the law would need to defend themselves. In other words, Twitter would not shelter individuals who use anonymity to defy privacy rulings.
Twitter’s legal counsel Alexander Macgillivray later used Twitter to clarify the company’s privacy policy: “Our policy is notify users & we have fought to ensure user rights. Sadly, some more interested in headlines than accuracy.”
One interesting feature of the case is that it is not ground-breaking. Twitter has already complied in this precedent setting case in which an anonymous British man used Twitter to libel a local authority using a series of anonymous Twitter profiles so it would have come as a huge surprise if they were to decide otherwise.
Twitter will also be mindful of a number of considerations. It has plans to open an office in Britain to chase advertising and there’s a reputational risk if it falls foul of British law. It will be concerned about developing its reputation as a mature and responsible business, not an outlaw beyond the territorial jurisdiction of nation states.
But what hasn’t emerged yet is if there will be a user backlash against Twitter. A public relations consultant and Huffington Post blogger Mario Almonte told SMNZ that it would be bad public relations for Twitter to comply too readily. “It would be a bad PR move for Twitter to immediately comply – it’ll leave a very sour taste. Twitter will need to drag its feet and defend its users’ right to privacy, using whatever arguments it can muster.”
Almonte predicts that Twitter shouldn’t have to fight for too long. “The public backlash against Giggs will be tremendous that – if he is smart – he’ll call off the lawyers. Celebrities behaving badly and having affairs with attractive women – once exposed – need to just grit their teeth and let the feeding frenzy blow over.”
Post script: You may remember the Taiwanese anime news service NMA and their animated rendering of the Tiger Woods story that went viral. Now here’s their take on the Ryan Giggs affair. Same issue, different sports star.
Zettabyte Chronicles 