This article was written for The Advertiser of Adelaide amid a public outcry against a move to change South Australian electoral laws that limited free speech. The Attorney-General had legislated that anyone making political comment in a blog, through social media or any type digital platform, within 25 day of a state election, must declare their full name and address with the posting. And the publisher must hold those details for six months. The legislation has been withdrawn this week.

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FREE speech should never be taken for granted. Someone, somewhere is always trying to silence an inconvenient truth or contrary opinion.

Community outrage at new state legislation that effectively curbs political debate on the Internet is a stark reminder that even in a proud democracy such as Australia’s, the fight for individual freedoms is one of vigilance.

Too often, it is left to media companies, especially newspapers, to wage this constant war to maintain what Australians see as their right to say to make free and fair comment.

Currently, we lobby government over obtaining documents under the Freedom of Information Act; we have even had to go to the ACCC to try to ensure our press freedoms when we report on cricket and other sports.

The latest amendments to the South Australian Electoral Act are a new low for this country, and the worst seen by the regional industry since police decided to make nightly visits to the newsrooms of Fiji’s newspapers to control information.

Australia is not Fiji. Adelaide is not Suva. So what on earth is going on? While our society and legal system rightfully draw a line at abuse such as racial vilification, no citizen in this country would believe they could not criticise or analyse the performance of their own government. 

But we had all better believe it now. 

South Australians will soon risk a fine of $1,250 for igniting or participating in political debate on the Internet within 25 days of a state election – unless they state their full name and postcode. And if they make that comment on a news-driven website, such as adelaidenow.com.au, then they must provide a full address.

 The penalty is $5,000 for a “guilty” organization.

The presumed aim of the legislation is to hold someone responsible for political comment on the Internet.  

If this article makes its way from print to the Net during an election campaign, it is protected because the law says it is published in a “journal”. If a reader wished to respond to it in a political manner as feedback on the Net, they would need to state their details or risk the fine.

If they come clean, the publisher must hold that information for six months. And if they don’t, either their freedom of speech is denied, or the publisher will be responsible somehow.

No media organisation should have to go to the trouble and expense of capturing such details for the sake of accepting feedback via a website – especially when individual privacy is a society-wide concern. 

The idea of a newspaper editor dobbing in a reader for making an online political comment that somehow offends the government of the day is laughable and Orwellian. The newsroom would hang the editor from the nearest lamppost, unless the proprietor managed to do it first.

Whatever way one looks at this, it is bad legislation and incompatible with democracy in a digital age.

The intimidating effect this is designed to have on South Australians’ freedom of expression is a national scandal.

Legislation already exists to protect individuals from defamatory statements on the Internet and elsewhere. That is sufficient, even for the politicians of South Australia.

Politics is not for the thin-skinned. 

State MPs who have spent time, effort and taxpayer funds to silence or intimidate bloggers and a legion of voters who like to make comments on the web, have make their state and our nation appear as a cultural and democratic backwater of a most un-Australian kind.

 

AUSTRALIA’S national broadcaster appears hell-bent on becoming a news organisation at the cost of other obligations to its charter and the people.

While TV viewers are served up by the Australian broadcaster an endless stream of murders in a British village, and the “or-right, guv” clichés of The Bill andother assorted British cultural clap-trap, our national broadcaster spends ourdollars replicating what privately-owned media do perfectly well.

The announcement by the ABC of a 24-hour TV news station is a complete waste of money – finance that would be better spent encouraging and enhancing the nation’s talent in TV acting, scripting and production.

Those with pay-TV in Australia are already awash with 24-hour news channels, which all pretty much struggle to find 24 hours worth of news, and so repeat the same things endlessly through the news cycle.

The ABC charter says that it may act having taken account of “the broadcasting services provided by the commercial and public sectors of the Australian broadcasting system”.

It’s a ridiculously broad statement that says it can pretty much do whatever itlikes in this area.

A fair interpretation of the intent would be for the ABC to act where the market might fail. Yet, there is no failure in this space. Only last week, Austar agreed to carry the Al-Jazeera signal – so, there’s another 24-hours’ worth of burbling TV journalism for the newsaholics.

Any major news story that does occur – the Haiti earthquake being the first one to springto mind – then, free-to-air stations, including the ABC, interrupt normalprogramming to bring everyone the big story.

Mark Scott, a former editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald and a very decentchap to boot, appears to be focusing on where his strengths lie, rather thanwhere the ABC can be its most potent.

In announcing the 24-hour news channel this week, he said “we have witnessed theABC’s capacity to cover breaking news with the crisis in Haiti”.

Dude, we watched everyone’s ability to cover Haiti; and yours was no better thananyone else’s, though I’d say CNN’s was disappointingly slow when compared with SKY and the BBC.

For such events, we don’t need an Australian perspective – in fact, that kind of cultural cliché is tiresome. We just want the truth of what has happened, and I believe the likes of CNN and SKY are perfectly capable of delivering that without any need to use our taxpayer dollars for the ABC to duplicate the service.

The issue is not just the direction of ABC funds and the priorities of news ahead of other cultural imperatives to which the ABC is expected to contribute.

An equally relevant question can be raised about whether the ABC is using its government-secured funding to set up in competition with private enterprise.

While it is perfectly acceptable for the national broadcaster to provide core media services to the people, and I’d include its internet presence in that, it seems irrelevant and misplaced for it to start niche media products for audiences already well-served.

A pound to peanuts, the ABC will eventually begin to launch localised websites, using its local radio content to compete with local newspapers.

The BBC has been doing this for the past five years, and it was so aggressive in its strategy that the British Government had to step in.

The regulatory body Ofcom now insists the BBC present a media impact study to demonstrate a clear audience need, and the effect on privately-owned publishing houses, before undertaking a local website.

The Australian Government needs to be mindful of the ABC’s ambitions under Mr Scott. Media executives can see him coming from a mile away.

We all want a vibrant and relevant ABC news service – goodness knows, I’ve seen enough editors watch the TV news before deciding finally on their own frontpages.

But an ABC determined to set up in competition with viable local media players is a highly questionable use, if not a misuse, of taxpayer funds while we continue to import British drama by the truckload and ignore our own arts talent and the widely-held desire to support it.

THE opportunity to travel to Saudi Arabia is rare.

Tourism visas are pretty much non-existent and Westerners need a business sponsor to visit the world’s most traditional Islamic country.

In the past week, I have been fortunate enough to spend time in Riyadh with the Saudi Research and Marketing Group, the largest publisher of newspapers and magazines in Saudi Arabia with a market share of almost 50 per cent.

I attended and presented to a business meeting of editors and senior executives of its newspapers and magazines from across the kingdom, as well as Dubai and London.

The issues we discussed – both in the meeting and while smoking shisha in those fantastically ornate pipes at the CEO’s retreat (quite an experience in itself) – were remarkably similar to those faced by association members.

Integrity of editorial was one of the foremost issues on their minds. Like other parts of the world, even the seemingly super-rich Saudis have felt the pain of an advertising downturn.

What is the role of the Editor in terms of changing this situation around? They were pleased to learn that the editorial integrity of newspapers in our part of the world has held very firm during this period of fiscal challenges.

Indeed, we have made a point of underscoring the quality of our journalism; its integrity and the trust that our readers have in our work.

Putting aside the more challenging environment of publishing in an Islamic culture, the executives of SRMC were just as firm on the editorial independence of their publications – and delighted to learn we felt the same way.

The prediction of News Ltd chairman and chief executive, John Hartigan – that journalism will evolve and writers with specialist knowledge will underpin much of the value of newspapers – was roundly welcomed by Arabic editors.

Like publishers the world over, readership trends are a challenge and there is a strong desire to ensure their newspapers remain relevant. Hartigan’s prediction made sense to them.

A lot of interest was shown in the different ad shapes that our newspapers have been offering to clients in an effort to break out of the traditional rectangle-box-ad. The Herald & Weekly Times has been good enough to offer and send a presentation of advertising alternatives that it has taken to Australian ad agencies in the past years or so.

Editors also wanted to know about the attitude of Australasian publishers to launching new titles. Of course, I had many examples to offer on the commercial and editorial innovation of members even in tight times.

They were impressed by the activities of Singapore Press Holdings, The Australian and Fairfax Media in relation to launches of prestige publications.

SPH’s strategy to exploit subscriber databases and offer a controlled circulation model for its new prestige title, Moments, really sparked lots of questions.

Sport & Style – a glossy Fairfax publication licensed through L’Equipe, might naturally find its niche in sports-crazy Saudi Arabia at some point.

My time coincided with SMRC’s launch of The Robb Report – a hyper-prestige publication licensed from the United States. I have never seen a magazine printed so beautifully with spot varnish, five colours throughout and hundreds of pages featuring watchers and boats so expensive that I had never even heard of them.

I brought a few copies home. If anyone is interested, I’d be happy to loan a copy.

The area where Arabic publishers are now starting to explore properly is the Internet. By comparison with Western publishers, this has not been a priority.

Saudi editors are all well aware of the difficulty of making money from the Net – they’ve heard the global war stories - but are starting to build up their presence, using publishing and workflow software that will make their initial experiences much smoother than the trail blazed by Western publishers 15 years ago.

Plans are in play to use the Net to licence their copy to other publishers around the world. I’m sure that will be a treasure trove for those who could use travel and cuisine articles by journalists who call the -Middle East their home.

SRMC is a fascinating company. If anyone would like to know more, or have an introduction for whatever reason, let me know.

WHO did Google really think it was dealing with when it entered China four years ago, swallowing its pride and accepting it must censor its service?

Google’s idealistic view of information and how it should be used has always been in conflict with the prevailing political philosophy of the Chinese government.

No one should be shocked that the Chinese government has broken into the Google accounts of pro-democracy dissidents. By all means be outraged or indignant but not shocked, surely.

China is exposed time and again for human rights abuses, so breaking into Google accounts of those that its government see as acting illegally has never been beyond the realm of possibility or predictability.

US president Barack Obama said repeatedly during his election campaign that American (and global) corporations and individuals were vulnerable to cyber attacks.

He won’t bang on about that so much now, as his government needs to conjure up a political response to this mess and maintain business confidence both in the internet and the West’s ongoing relations with Beijing. 

The response of Google, and its chief legal officer David Drummond, has been naïve to say the least. The threat to pull out of China is shrill. If it really believes in access to information for all, then it needs to stay the course.

Some commentators, especially a handful of editorials in the emerging economies of Asia and the Middle East, see this as China enforcing its censorship regime.

Censorship is not seen as such an evil in these parts. Many editors in the Middle East and Asia recognise it as necessary to help maintain an economic-political harmony. Even in the West, including Australia, our governments don’t mind a bit of censorship and information control when it suits them – no matter how much it riles journalists.

What has happened with Google in China is not censorship but political suppression.

When News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch stated famously that the Internet would bring democracy to all corners of the planet, he was referring to the ability of publishers to share their journalism and principals of political accountability that would result in the erosion of totalitarian regimes.

The impact of the Internet is difficult and it is social media applications, rather than access to a foreign, free press, that appears more threatening to those who hold power with iron fists.

Social media allows individuals and groups to communicate in ways such governments cannot control.

Google’s Gmail is one method but not a particularly efficient one.  More powerful are Twitter and Facebook. The Iranian riots to protest last June’s presidential election result were organised and co-ordinate in real time by messages on Facebook and Twitter. The same technologies have been used for protests at the G20 and the joke of a climate summit in Copenhagen.

YouTube, owned by Google, brings pictures to the world that conventional media cannot provide in censored environments.

If Google is as concerned about the democratic access to information as it says, it needs to work from the inside in China.

Grand statements of indignation might make the search engine folks feel better, but it will do little for dissidents in China who risk their lives in the belief that access to information, a free press and new communication tools are vital for the progress of democracy.

A LARGE electronics show in Los Angeles earlier this month has been enough to send technology lovers and no small number of newspapers into a state of e-reader frenzy.

E-readers have been around for yonks but only in the past 12 months have newspapers started to explore their possibilities with companies such as amazon.com, PlasticLogic, Apple and Sony.

Many of the world’s largest publishers, including News Corporation, have stated they are exploring technologies and commercial avenues.

 I love the possibilities of e-readers and e-papers. Possibly, they may replace the printed word. Possibly not. But a market will emerge and publishers would be foolish to ignore the opportunity.

A moment of caution: our industry needs to learn the lessons of our experience with the Internet. Let’s not buy into business models that we will start to complain about later.

What do I mean by this? Well, our content is only free on the Internet because we have made it so. And Google and other search engines categorise it, deliver it and commercialise it because we have let them.

Most publishers are only now learning the value of our work. News dates; content less so. Today’s journalism is no longer tomorrow’s fish and chips paper . . . and it has not been for almost two decades. Yet, only in the past two years have most publishers realised this. Google’s bottom line and share price should have helped them get the message earlier.

So, we need to be careful about the business models we create or accept for e-readers.

Last year, Amazon.com recruited 13 newspapers publishers to take part in a trial of newspapers for its well known device, the Kindle. Amazon partnered with the telecommunications company MCI, and between them they created the platform for subscribers to receive electronic newspapers on the Kindle.

It was only a trial but already commercial traps were set: platform-specific (the Kindle) and exclusive distributor (MCI). And there is one more thing: they took 70 percent of the cash, leaving the publishers with a minority revenue position and locked into a device and a telco.

Regardless of whether the technology worked, or the devices were a good platform to read our journalism, that business model sucks.

We are flirting a little with a similarly controlled environment - the iPhone. While newspapers around the world have taken about 18 months longer than innovation-driven companies to embrace this platform, with so-called “apps” it should not be forgotten that Apple decides who offers an “app” and who does not.  That’s a lot of power.

E-Readers give newspaper publishers the chance to help create business models in which we have a substantial control, but only if we are sufficiently early to market.

If we are late to this opportunity, the business models may well be locked and loaded, we will be but a content supplier while the real money goes to those who control the pipes and platforms.

Publishers should look at whether a 1^st mover advantage exists. It has existed in the classified space for cars, jobs and real estate; so no one should be so sure that it is not important for e-readers.

Some of the other questions might be:

§  Where is the business value and return?

§  What are the infrastructure costs – do the likes of Atex, CCI, Woodwing, et al have software now that we can plug in to do e-reader content quickly and cheaply?

§  With whom do we partner – are Telstra, Optus or Vodafone worth talking to?

§  Can we sell e-readers like mobile phones?

§  How do we share revenue?

§  Who will own the customer?

§  Who does the billing?; and

§  What happens if we ignore e-readers?

As always, there is no single answer for every company, except maybe the answer to the last question.

IF you didn’t get the memo, this is just a heads up that newspapers have started to stop chasing circulation as if their commercial survival counted on it.It wasn’t much of a strategy, anyway – printing on expensive paper and then giving copies away or selling them at a fraction of the price.

A download on value-based pricing is perhaps best for another time but it doesn’t take a first-year business student to work out that if the price of your goods doesn’t cover the cost of the raw materials, then something is not right.In days gone by, we would justify such circulation strategies by saying it helped our advertising rates and was a good reader-sampling exercise.

In my former circulation experience, I was happy to go along with that logic as my employer was prepared to pay the newsprint bill. Today, it’s not much of an argument. And it always was a poor sampling strategy. Shovelling newspapers into hotel rooms and airplanes, selling cut-price papers at special events in the name of circulation is too expensive for the benefit.

Part of the structural challenge for our industry is to deliver audiences valued by the advertiser –the web does it, so do digitally-printed papers and e-readers and handhelds will do the same.

Free and cut-price newspapers are also counter-intuitive when you consider the prevailing philosophies of all CEOs in this region that we must protect our content from thieves and plagiarists, and find better ways to turn newsroom output into popular, profitable products.

You can’t make a cohesive argument that on the one hand our content is valuable, and then stack hundreds of newspapers at the boarding gates of domestic terminals for passengers to take for free.The Brits and Americans are winding back their “bulk” sales at a fierce rate.  News International has just announced it will no longer deploy such a strategy for The Times and Sunday Times.

Nearly 9 percent of The Times’ circulation relied on these copies. Others, such as The Guardian and Sunday Telegraph, are about to take the same action.

That will result in a hit to their circulation numbers – but not to the detriment of an advertiser looking to target key reader segments not passers-by.USA Today just lost its No.1 spot in part because it has decided to stop scattering its editions under every hotel room door, piling copies a mile high in the breakfast rooms and, just in case you missed them, sticking 100s more in foyers for good measure. (I haven’t finished… take a chauffeur-driven car, and a copy is on the backseat, and if you are bored in the airport lounge, you can always read… USA Today. A copy of the Wall St Journal never looked so good!)

Such a strategy is a nonsense when where our industry must focus on audiences, quality and context, while reducing overheads through efficiencies, and building profits to be reinvested. No wonder USA Today is in a bad way.

Another struggler is the San Francisco Chronicle, which lost 27 percent of its sale in the last six-month audit period. The Chronicle took the bitter pill, culling its freebie and cut-price copies. “We feel the readers have to make a conscious decision about the paper,” said publisher Frank Vega said.

They sure do, Frank. Otherwise, what sort of reader is your journalism seeking; and who are you delivering to your advertisers?

THE 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is a reminder about how much our world has changed since that night of East German defiance.I was on the foreign desk of The Australian and had been watching the saga unfold, editing dispatches from our own man, Nicolas Rothwell, plus Reuters, AFP and UPI. The East Germans didn’t need Twitter to organise a good protest.

A few peculiar things stick in my mind about that day, and subsequent events.

Firstly, I remember the late-afternoon news conference, in which the Canberra bureau chief rang in to sell "his" front page yarn. Editor Frank Devine let him bang on before finally responding, "we’re just wondering at this end whether you think the fall of the Berlin Wall is a bigger story!"

The wall literally crumbled as we went to press.

A couple of UK papers, once the dust had settled, reprinted their 1961 editions of when the wall went up. I recall a copy of the old, broadsheet Daily Express.

On the front page was a photo of an East German soldier standing next to the wall, a short story that spilled inside. That was it.

Newspapers were not huge beasts then; not full of ads and pages of writing.

Print newspapers had surely changed more during the time of the Berlin Wall than they have since its fall.

Perhaps now, with digital advertising alternatives, we are seeing print come back in scale. Papers will adapt, compete and be no less relevant. The Berlin Wall offers lessons of change for us all.