Hello everyone
A few weeks ago News Corp and Google announced the creation of the Digital News Academy in Australia. The Academy is a 3-year, 250-student program for working journalists within News Corp and other smaller media companies. It has been championed by News Corp Australasia Executive Chairman Michael Miller. As you’ll hear, I didn’t manage to get many more concrete details about the course, which could be because they don’t yet exist. What I did get, however, was an insight into how Miller thinks about the business of news, including the decline of advertising and Miller’s theory that social media platforms are suppressing creativity.
The commenting nightmare
The recent High Court decision that clears the way for publishers to be held responsible for comments on social media posts is bad for news media. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that, and it’s not nearly as reasonable as it sounds. It will need either legislation or a Facebook intervention to fix.
I am preparing a longer piece that explains why. Usually I’m all for responsibility and seeing things from a perspective outside the industry’s narrow self-interest. In this case, the court got it wrong.
Bye for now,
Hal
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/
