Media Directions

Print is Dying

• Ads moving online• No ad revenue, papers are becoming thinner, so

less people want to buy them• Tablets are fantastic and will take over• Current picks are by 2025 there will not be a

newspaper left in the United States– It may be earlier if tablets really take off and come down

in price– Seattle no longer has a major print newspaper– Duplication of information provided by journalists is

being reduced as costs need to come down – why does Fairfax need a Parliamentary reporter for both the Dom Post and The Press?

Repeater Syndrome

• MSM repeat articles posted first on blogs as if they are their own

• Savvy media operators know this and get blogs to post stories for them

• Bloggers control the message much more effectively than trying to plant messages in many media outlets

Online Media• People follow bloggers not mastheads• Bloggers with prime mover advantage have the traffic• Prime Mover advantage means ability to build staff to

increase the number of posts• Posts don’t all need to be thoughtful, meaningful pieces,

they can just be a cut and paste with a few comments• Traffic is what is bought up by media outlets• Times has made more money behind a pay wall with not

many subscribers than it did in when it was free selling online advertising

• Sullivan going to Time, the Atlantic and the Daily Beast. Fivethirtyeight going to NY Times

• Facebook drives traffic to sites, and will become a mix of real news and posts from friends.

Traffic – Weekly Pageviews

Name Suppression

Labour Web Story

SIS Sacndal

Traffic – Monthly Pageviews

Name Suppression

Labour Web Story

SIS Sacndal

Personal Relationship with Bloggers

• Very different from relationship with mastheads or journalists

• Frequent blog posts beat the MSM by providing information regularly to get people back to blog sites

• Bloggers often work with journalists to break stories

• Comments and interactivity help build the relationship, which is reinforced by communicating directly with the blogger– Farrar’s story about Sophie Elliot’s former boyfriend

and the false accusation of Sophie attacking him in the Weatherston trial.

– Tipline

Partisan Media

• Neutrality is not respected• People follow media outlets that reinforce

their views• Rupert Murdoch has exploited this with Fox

News• In New Zealand expect to the see the

centre right read Kiwiblog and Whaleoil. Centre Left is messy although most of the political commentators are centre left, they just don’t blog as effectively as WO and KB

Implications for New Zealand Business

• Current PR strategies will have to change

• Bloggers need to be included in media briefings

• Individuals should develop friendships with bloggers that will endure over time

• Pick the relevant bloggers to your field, and the big bloggers, and work with them

Questions?