Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

05.30.13
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HSBC: The suckage never stops

Oh, HSBC, I can’t untangle my personal finances from you fast enough. After my last post about firing The World’s Most Incompetent Bank, I unfortunately still have a couple of credit cards with them because changing my credit cards might impact my credit rating, and Suw and I are hoping to buy a house in the next six months. Once that happens, I’m closing these cards. I have lost all confidence in HSBC’s security, and they need a root-and-branch review of their customer service and communication processes.

Coming up on two weeks ago, my HSBC UK credit card was declined on a routine purchase on Amazon, and then a couple of days later, it was again declined again when I tried to pay for my British citizenship ceremony. (Yay!) This was the first indication that there was a problem. I logged into my account, and there was no indication that anything was awry. No big warning that my card had been compromised or messages asking me to call the fraud department on the internal messaging system. Business as usual for HSBC, which means some level of inconvenience and incompetence.

I sent a message asking for clarification about the status of the card on the internal messaging system. They informed me that there was a block on the card and that I was to call the fraud department but otherwise, they couldn’t actually do anything for me.

The call was enlightening and infuriating in equal measure. On the 23 April, HSBC detected that the details of my card were “copied by a known fraudster”. This is at least the second time that this has happened with HSBC. Wah? I hadn’t used the card since the 15 April. Was it part of a massive credit card theft online? Dunno. They have special software that lets them know about such things but provides them with no other details.

After finding out that my card had been compromised and that yet another new card would be sent to me, I asked to speak to a manager. (I think I’m up to four of five compromised debit or credit cards with them in the seven years I’ve done business with them.) He said that they tried to call me on the 23 April when the software flagged up the issue. I was in the US at the time, and my phone registered no call or voice mail.

I suggested to the HSBC manager that they had an internal security problem, and the manager assured me that they abide by the Data Protection Act. Fine, but what are their internal security procedures?  I’m sceptical about the tightness of those procedures due to the high level of fraud that I’ve experienced as their customer. I told the manager that if I have serial fraud on cards with them that they might want to review their internal security protocols as well as investing in shiny anti-fraud software.

However, I also said that they needed to improve their customer communications. Put bluntly, I found out that they broke their own procedures. The manager said they should have tried to call me 10 days later, and if they couldn’t reach me, they were supposed to send me a letter. The call wasn’t made. The letter was never sent. There was no communication on the internal messaging system, which HSBC has but seems loathe to use. Instead, I found out my card had been compromised because it started to be declined. They assured me that a call was on their to do list today. Uh-huh, that’s nice to know. I have a lot on my to-do list today too.

As with so many of the issues that I’ve had with HSBC over the years, they didn’t solve my problem. I did. That’s what you can expect from HSBC, the world’s most incompetent bank. Customer service? Yes, absolutely, you the customer will have to provide your own service.

PS: This will hopefully be the last time I rant about HSBC. After heavy travel in May, we will return to our regularly scheduled media blogging immediately.

05.22.13
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Want to get paid for journalism? Don’t be afraid to ask your audience

Last autumn, I was talking to a colleague and we were discussing the economic challenges the news industry, and really just about every other content industry, faces. I finally just boiled it down to this:

Anyone can write these days, but getting paid for it is a bitch.

We live in a world where 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (as of May 2013) and between 600,000 to 1 m books were published this year in the US alone. The amount of content available creates a challenge that not only journalists but also musicians, film makers and writers face. There is just so much stuff competing for people’s attention. National Public Radio’s On the Media asked recently: Who’s gonna pay for this stuff? 

Here is how the hosts framed the discussion:

BOB GARFIELD:  As far back as we can remember, media was among the most lucrative industries on earth. The symbiosis of mass media and mass marketing was a path paved with profit for the  entertainment and information industries.

But today’s cheap and relatively simple technology have lowered the barriers of entry into that world, yielding a nearly infinite glut of stuff, brilliant and otherwise, to compete for audience and funding from every other thing out there, whether made by Warner Bros., or a Korean pop singer whose video was the first to hit a billion views on YouTube.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  The “Big Bang” in content has exploded the mass of mass media into a zillion fragments, most of which lack the critical mass to survive solely on ad revenue. So, who’s gonna pay for this stuff?

It’s a great show, well worth listening to if you’re passionate about finding the new business models to support journalism and other media in this age of abundance.

It’s a great programme that unpicks some of the issues, and if journalism is your passion, it’s well worth listening to the section on crowdfunding, including a Kickstarter campaign by Roman Mars, the host of 99% Invisible, to fund his third season. I loved this bit:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Has your success using Kickstarter changed your view of your future?

ROMAN MARS: Definitely. I did Kickstarter because I needed a problem solved. I needed to, to pay myself a little bit of something and pay my contributors to do this show, because I was going broke paying them and not paying myself. It was just about that.

What I got from Kickstarter changed the way I viewed like my audience and how I can operate in this world. It gave me time. There’s a perversity of money that money follows money [LAUGHS], and so like when I raised money on Kickstarter, I got more underwriting support.

…

Exactly, that’s exactly it. You know, I realized in this process, and part of this is, you know, me enjoying the success of the Kickstarter campaign, is that I kind of like solving the problem of funding the show. I didn’t think I would ever enjoy this part.

But I kind of like it. I kind of like this idea of entrepreneurial journalism. It’s just a puzzle, like anything else. And I’m a producer, and my job is to solve problems. And this is just the most immediate problem that we have.

Listen to the entire segment. It’s worth it just to hear Mars’ enthusiasm.

I really loved this for so many reasons. He became passionate about solving the problem of funding his journalism, but in the end, he found an authentic, honest way to involve his audience not just in creating the podcast but also in supporting it. US public radio has long history of listener pledge drives so crowdfunding projects is just a natural extension of that. The crowdfunding campaign showed that there was demand for what he was doing. That’s important, and crowdfunding isn’t just about raising money but also seeing if there is demand for what you’re doing.

What really grabbed me about this was Mars’ passion about solving the problem of sustainability. It’s great to hear, and I hope that Mars’ passion is infectious. It certainly rubbed off on me.

04.17.13
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HSBC: Firing the world’s most incompetent bank

Dear reader, I’m going to beg your indulgence as I take a brief editorial detour from my normal writing about new media, journalism and innovation. I promise I won’t make a habit of it.

But, hey, blogging is about personal expression, and I need to vent about my former bank, HSBC. I promise to return to return to our regularly scheduled blogging after this.

Sorry it’s so long, but HSBC is just that crap. Skip to the bullet points, and if you’ve experienced horrible service with HSBC (or another bank), feel free to share. Retail banking customers deserve better than we’re getting, and it’s time for our governments to not just bail out banks but also to work with consumers to ensure we’re well served. Many banks are not just too big to fail but also simply too incompetent to survive.

To relevant regulators, I ask that you start doing your job and look out for retail customers too. Retail banking may not be a high margin business, but like or not, people need banking services. It’s long past time to clean up this industry.

Again, if this story or even parts of it are familiar, share this and share your stories. A little social media action might help. We need retail banking reform now.

Dear HSBC CEO Mr Stuart Gulliver:

I thought about sending this letter to relevant banking regulators, but I don’t have faith that they’d actually do anything so I thought that this public letter might be more effective.

HSBC, you’re fired. I wish I had the power to fire you, the CEO, personally and not just the divisions of your bank that I had the infuriating misfortune to bank with since 2005. I would have fired you long ago, but you know that switching costs are high. I actually thought about buying some HSBC stock and leading a shareholder revolt, but after my experience as your customer, I see you as a very bad investment. Besides, I’ve got better things to do with my time and my money.

Why am I firing you? Where to begin. If it were one branch of your global empire that was totally incompetent, I might write it off, but no, my experiences with HSBC UK, HSBC Expat and HSBC US (or what is left of it) were so uniformly bad that I came to believe that you have serious systemic service and security issues at your retail banking and credit card divisions. On that point, I’m not joking at all. I am completely serious.

I’ll try to make this brief, but it’s hard to summarise all of the crap I put up as one of your customers.

• Moving to the UK in 2005 for what I thought would be a brief work assignment, I opened up an HSBC US account. Things started off well enough, although as I would come to find out, the whole “world’s local bank” looks good on the ads at the airports but is actually nonsense.
• In 2006, I opened up an HSBC Offshore (now Expat) account because I needed an account quickly and needed multi-currency services. I had the money to open the account, and the minimum balance to avoid paying fees was better than your competitors. Then it started to go all wrong.
• You sent me my first credit card and cancelled it a few weeks later. You said that I must have used it online on an insecure site. Nope, and then when I asked how a card could have been compromised so quickly, your staff said it was “a known Milanese fraudster”.
• Several months after opening the account, you sent your customers a letter saying that “in order to serve you better” we’re jacking up the minimum balance required to avoid fees. You didn’t increase it a few thousand pounds, which would have been high. You didn’t double it. No, you increased the minimum fee-free balance 5 times to £25,000. The better service never materialised. As a matter of fact, over the next several years, your service got worse and your fees just got higher. I don’t mind paying fees, but I do expect good service in return. You didn’t hold up your end of the customer contract.
• In 2008, I was in the US on business, and my PayPal account was compromised. PayPal immediately snapped into action calling me on a Saturday. The thieves rang up purchases of $1800 in less than 24 hours. I called HSBC alerting you of the fraud and asking what I could do. The answer? Nothing unless I came into a branch. The nearest branch was a seven hour drive away. On Monday, I watched helplessly as my bank account was drained. You then you slapped an overdraft fee on me. World’s local bank my backside. Weeks later when I was near a branch, I demanded a refund of the overdraft fee. You gave me one, but I should have fired you then and there.
PayPal was excellent, and having been a customer of theirs for several years, they waived the fee for a security token to help me prevent this from happening in the future because I had been with them for years. That’s customer service and a business repaying customer loyalty. You didn’t help me solve my problems at all.
• In 2011, I was woken up in the middle of the night in Australia on business. I had an automatic payment scheme setup on my HSBC UK credit card to pay for my storage space in the US. For some reason, that stopped. Fortunately, Public Storage rang me, and I was able to process a one off payment. I still don’t know what happened.
• In 2012, HSBC’s incompetence was on full display. In January, my employer was unable to pay my wages. To be fair to HSBC, my employer’s bank, Lloyds, was pretty useless too, but HSBC really took the biscuit. You screwed up changing your sort code to the new faster payments system, and my employer couldn’t pay me. You didn’t inform your customers. Why not? You were so kind to allow my employer to pay me via free SWIFT transfers. Normally, you charged £20 a crack for that service. For emphasis, your screw up meant I didn’t get paid for a month. Most people don’t have that luxury.
• Despite the fact that I’ve travelled 310 days out of the last three years, for some reason, HSBC UK started blocking my credit card when I travelled outside the UK, even when I called or left instructions on the website. HSBC blocked my card after a flight to Dubai because the WiFi company on the flight had a US billing address, and I had only said I was travelling to Dubai and Indonesia. You’ve got those cute ads with the kids taking multiple currencies at their lemonade stand, but yet, you’re thrown by a US company providing WiFi on an Emirates flight? The reality doesn’t quite live up to your ads, does it now?
• Last summer, HSBC UK blocked my credit card while I was on a business trip to New York. I’m a US citizen. I travel there at least once a year, and I had an HSBC US account at the time. What would be suspicious about that?
• As my credit card was blocked, I then had to use my debit card, which was compromised. WalMart alerted you to the fraud, and you blocked the payment or so I was told. You might want to change the script that your foreign call centres use. They didn’t tell me that £400 would go out of my account for up to eight weeks until I called them up and asked them about it. I had totally lost my patience with you and your bank.

Saving the worst for last

By this time, I had already decided to fire you. I was tired of paying your exorbitant fees, which by this time seemed a perverse way of rewarding you for being utterly useless. Moreover, your serial incompetence and poor security were too much of a risk to my personal finances.

I did some research, and Citibank had a managed transfer service. They brought the switching costs down, and I couldn’t risk banking with you anymore. However, you still had a few opportunities to shine as the masters of suck, and you didn’t miss a single one.

It took me months to fire you. Citibank worked with me, and you did not. I had more communication from Citibank in the first month of being their customer than I did in years of being a customer of HSBC. HSBC Expat didn’t even mention that Citibank had requested information on my direct deposits and transfers. As a security issue, I would have expected that much.

When I was in the US on business, I fortunately was in one of the last remaining cities where HSBC US has a physical branch so I could close my account. I went to the branch, and you were going to charge me $12 for a cashier’s cheque. It shouldn’t be standard procedure to charge for a cashier’s cheque when closing an account. Lovely, I have to pay you to get my money so I did the very insecure thing and withdrew the cash. Fortunately, the Citibank branch was just across the street.

But wait for it, your worst is yet to come. Several years ago, my HSBC US credit card was compromised. Sigh, who runs your security operations? A known Milanese fraudster? The card was cancelled, but for some reason, it had a one cent balance. I had tried to pay it off several times, but you only allow payments of one dollar or more online. Knowing HSBC’s level of stupidity, I had the foresight to bring a penny to the branch with me when I closed my bank account. The teller struggled a bit with what to do because the credit card account was closed. Bless her. She tried to sort it out and meekly asked if I had a penny.

I tried to cancel the credit card too, but I was told that I couldn’t do that at a branch. Face palm. Was the mystery one penny balance sorted? Hardly. I now have a one cent outstanding balance on the old card and a one cent credit on my existing card. I’ll give you points for consistency, the consistency of never missing an opportunity to screw up. Seriously, this is a global financial institution?

Sir, I wouldn’t trust you or your managers to run that little girl’s lemonade stand in your ads. Let’s make a deal. You got an $11.1 m bonus last year. Flip me that penny, and we’ll call it even.

Your utterly incompetent service and your farcical security has cost me time and money. I’ve got a choice in banking, and you have come up wanting over and over and over again. You left me with no choice. You. Are. Fired.

Sincerely, your former customer,

Kevin Anderson

04.05.13
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News, advertising, subsidies and revenue streams: Disentangling products and profits

Yet again, I started to write a comment and then decided that it was a blog post rather than a comment. I was responding to a post that Jeff Israely, a former Europe correspondent for Time magazine and founder of Worldcrunch, has written for Nieman Lab. I love Worldcrunch, and when I was thinking of doing my own news startup, we had a chat or two. I completely understand the point that Jeff is making in his post, and this isn’t a criticism of what he wrote, but a conversation that we need to have amongst journalists trying to get our heads around the business of what we do. 

Journalism! We don’t need no stinking subsidies!

Ok, so that’s a tongue-in-cheek summary of Jeff Israely’s post for Nieman Lab, Don’t you call me subsidised — people are paying for news. Jeff, please take that in the good-natured way in which it is intended. 

I agree people are paying for news, and I understand how the idea of subsidy grates as a journalist. It’s offensive to think we’re taking handouts. However, in business terms, a cross-subsidy isn’t a handout but a revenue stream, often but not always, closely aligned with the core business, that generates net profits to support the entire enterprise. It happens in a lot of businesses. I can see the problem that Jeff has with the term subsidy, but I think it’s helpful to think of this in a different way. Does Gilette subsidise its shaving business  by selling the blades? No, but it’s become the way that it keeps the entire business profitable.

The journalism business debate is littered with unhelpful terms, and we’re not using the business term subsidy accurately. It bleeds out the business nuance of what’s really going on. Journalism is the business of news, but that business is supported not by a number of subsidies but rather by a number of revenue streams, some more lucrative than others. So, let’s stop using the term subsidy, or at least stop using in inaccurately. Let’s think about revenue streams, with the idea that a revenue stream may not necessarily be a profit centre. (I know that’s stating the bleeding obvious, but I often think that Econ 101 should be compulsory for journalists.) Reframing the discussion in terms of revenue streams rather than subsidies is a lot more productive. That’s why I like Jim Brady’s formulation that the business model problem for journalism isn’t going to be solved by a silver bullet but rather shrapnel, a bundle of revenue streams that support the mission. 

Jeff mentioned Google. Is it in the search engine business? Sure, that’s one of its products, but its business, it’s main source of revenue, is advertising, with 96 percent of its revenues coming from ads. Just like the news business, Google wouldn’t be able to dominate online advertising the way it does if it didn’t provide the search product. Google saw off other search engines – Hotbot, Altavista, etc – because it did a better job of delivering results, but it has excelled as a business because it has developed (well acquired really) an incredibly lucrative revenue stream tightly integrated to its core business of search. It has attracted a huge user base, one that dwarfs that of most news sites, so while CPMs have plummeted, it still is able to be profitable.

That’s why the MailOnline is pitching itself as competing not as other news sites but against internet giants. It’s in the volume business, and it wants what Google has. Smart, I say begrudgingly. We need a world where the Mail’s brand of journalism and its fellow travellers aren’t the only ones with good business models. Yes, I’m looking at you, when I say that. 

Back to news and in particular print media, we used to have a Google-sized fat revenue stream that more than paid for news and information that we journalists provided, and it happened to be advertising. The US newspaper business was especially dependent on advertising to pay the bills. Newspapers in other countries had a much larger percentage of  a lot more on news stand sales or subscriptions. In the US, the big problem for print media is the collapse of advertising for print newspapers, especially newspapers. Alan Mutter makes a lot of really terrifying graphs that put this collapse in the stark terms. From 2005 to 2012, first half newspaper ad sales dropped between 23 percent to 86 percent, depending on the type of advertising. Advertising used to be 80 percent of revenue for most US newspapers, what Ken Doctor called the 80/20 rule of newspaper revenue. Newspapers, like a lot of other post-industrial businesses, are just struggling through a transition where their primary source of revenue has been disrupted. 

To tie this up, I would say that hopefully with a wider range of revenue streams, we’ll end up with a more resilient journalism eco-system, one that isn’t so reliant on a single point  revenue failure, advertising. The over-reliance on advertising was especially problematic because it so cyclical. Newspapers have always taken a big hit during recessions because ad budgets are often the first to get slashed. 

Ok, this is a relatively dispassionate, rational look at the news business. Why does this entire discussion pose a problem for journalists?  The economic decline of the print business, with thousands of jobs lost, already has us feeling very vulnerable. The collapse of the business that supported journalism in many developed countries feels like a critique of the value of journalism. Why won’t people pay us for the valuable service we provide? It feels painful even writing that, and I don’t mean to dismiss or diminish the cultural upheaval we’re going through. It feels like an attack on the value of journalism, and we have to recognise the emotional side of this to work through it. But again, we’re letting the imprecision of our language get in the way.

I keep going back to some advice that was given to my college classmate, Theo Francis, when he was working for a news startup. A business-minded uncle said:

You know you’re creating value. But can you capture it?

For those of us who believe in the social value, and the economic value of journalism, what we need to rethink is how we capture economic value to support the work we do. We need to think of revenue streams to support the mission. I believe in journalism, and to quote Kunda Dixit at MDIF’s Media Forum last (MDIF being my day job):

To be truly independent, media needs to be financially viable. 

We’re already creating value, and now, we’ve got some heavy lifting to do in terms of figuring out how to capture value in the digital age. 

03.27.13
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Data journalism: A simple tip to get started

As a young reporter, I went to a National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting conference in 1998. I’ll admit that I found the pivot tables in Excel of 1998 a bit daunting. A lot has changed since then, and when I do data journalism training now, one of the things that I stress is how the tools have gotten so much easier, especially in the last few years. Even pivot tables, which can be hard to wrap your head around, are really simple in Google spreadsheets and the current versions of Excel. With Google Drive (Docs), almost any journalist can be trained to produce simple graphs and charts in a day.

Aron Pilhofer, the Interactive News editor at the New York Times, has put it this way:

I teach and have taught for years basic computer-assisted reporting and I do it in this one-day class. Nobody believes me, but it’s totally true: In one day – ONE DAY – we can teach you the skills that if mastered would allow you to do 80 percent of all the computer-assisted reporting that has ever been done. This is importing a spreadsheet, doing some basic math, knowing what a sum is, what a mode, a median, what an average is. I mean, being able to take a dataset, to do some basic count. I mean, this is not rocket science, for the most part.

I did data journalism back in the 1990s when it was called computer-assisted reporting (CAR) in the US, and it was only when Simon Rogers launched The Guardian data blog after one of our internal hack days, that I got a chance to return to it. Thanks Simon.

And I was reminded of how easy it is to get your start again today with an interview by WAN-IFRA with Steve Doig, truly one of the CAR pioneers. What does he use for data journalism?

His toolbox has five items: a web browser, ability to access public records, Excel, in rare cases a heavier programme such as Microsoft Access to bring different tables together and a geo mapping tool.

Those are tools that most journalists use every day, apart from Access, and it really is that easy for you to dip your toe into data journalism. To be honest, I haven’t used Microsoft Access in years, and you can do most things just by using Excel, Google spreadsheets or Google’s Fusion Tables.

As a matter of fact, here’s one tip to get you going. If you want to find the sum, average or count of a column of numbers in Google spreadsheets, simply highlight the column of numbers and look in the lower right hand corner. You’ll see a small box. Click on it, and you’ll see a summary of the biggest number (max), smallest number (min), the average and  the number of numbers (count numbers) or of words (count). It’s that easy. You can start right now.

Gdocssummarise

It’s just a simple little feature, but over time, it can be a huge time saver. Of course, sometimes this quick little summary won’t be the end of the process but just the beginning. However, it’s the first step in interrogating data. Sometimes it will give you the answer you’re looking for, and other times, it will uncover a key question for your story, and that’s when data journalism really gets exciting.

03.23.13
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To John Paton: I’m still dedicated to journalism and I damn well didn’t quit

I woke up this morning to what could diplomatically be called a bit of digital journalism friendly fire on Twitter. In response to my post about coming to terms with my decision to take a buyout from The Guardian in 2010, John Paton, the CEO of Digital First Media and a vocal advocate for the need for digital transformation at newspapers, said this on Twitter:

Not everyone is out of energy, ideas or dedication “@kevglobal: Coming to peace with journalism http://bit.ly/XxblUQ … thanks @allysonjbird”

Needless to say, I take umbrage at the implication that I’m not dedicated to journalism and out of ideas or energy. Suw leapt to my defence, but I was angry, well shaking with rage to be honest. He went on to say:

@Suw @kevglobal’s post – I think is too self-serving. Large news organizations are struggling to make the changes he discusses.

Suw brought up the post by Mimi Johnson about the problems Steve Buttry, her husband who now works at Digital First Media and is a good friend, had experienced in journalism, to which Paton replied:

@Suw Which is why I admire @stevebuttry – he didn’t quit. He fights forward everyday, teaching our staff, trying to find solutions.

And then:

@Suw @kevglobal I disagree. I tire of the one-man-against-the-machine posts like this not just his. They are strawman arguments.

To which, I said:

@jxpaton @suw You’re projecting your own experience onto my post. Your comments are about you not me.

That hopefully provides some context for what I’m about to say. I know Paton by reputation, but I’ve never met the man. However, as he is a powerful voice for  digital change, I found this exchange depressing as well as infuriating. I didn’t appreciate having 140-character pot shots taken at me by the CEO of a major media company. I didn’t say anything about Digital First Media, nor did I say that it was impossible to achieve change at a big company. I just said that I was feeling more successful and satisfied outside of one at the moment. Paton chose to make this personal and question my commitment to journalism, which is why I feel the need to rebut some of his implications:

• To imply that I quit journalism is both factually inaccurate and insulting. I didn’t quit journalism in 2010, I voluntarily took a buyout from the financially troubled Guardian. Paton is straying dangerously close to implying that the thousands of journalists voluntarily or forcibly (or often a mix of both) taking buyouts are quitters.
• In the two years after I took the buyout I did plenty of freelance journalism, although in this market I joked that I did other things – training and consulting – to support my journalism habit. I would have loved for freelance journalism to have paid the bills, but we’re in a terrible media market and many freelance journalists must supplement their income with other work.
• To imply that I lack dedication to journalism because I’m not still working on staff at a news organisation is insulting. Whilst I was consulting, I worked with many major news organisations around the world, helping them make the digital transition and even launching new and innovative news sites. I’m proud of what I’ve done both on the staff of major news organisations and as a consultant.
• To imply that I lack ideas and energy… well, just ask the major news organisations I worked with when I was a consultant and trainer.
• I now work for an organisation that invests in independent news organisations in countries with a history of media oppression. I help these news organisations navigate the digital transition.  In my spare time (literally during spare vacation days), I do the odd bit of training and consulting with major news organisations and with journalism training organisations.

Lack dedication to journalism, my arse!

I may have just risked sounding “self-serving,” but this is just the latest time in my almost two decade career when I’ve had to list what I do just so that journalists, mostly in print, will accept me as a one their own. I am tired of justifying my journalistic credentials and commitment to journalism to traditionalists, but I didn’t really expect to have to do it with the CEO of a digital first journalism company. We’re both working towards bringing much needed digital transformation to journalism, which is why I found this attack so baffling and counter-productive.

The decision to take the buyout from the Guardian was incredibly painful and difficult. The post that Paton commented on was an attempt by me to work through some of the emotions surrounding that decision. It wasn’t a statement about the state of the industry as it was me working through those emotions as I, as with thousands of other journalists, try to navigate these difficult times. It was a tough decision for me to make at the time, but looking back it was absolutely the right decision. I wrote that post to share my experience, to connect with other journalists who have been either made redundant (laid off) or who chose voluntary redundancy (a buyout) because they saw no real future where they were or needed to make a career change. It’s a tough thing to go through and we shouldn’t shy away from talking about it, and what it means for us as individuals.

I know, only too well, how hard cultural change is in big news organisations. I know the tough fight that Paton is fighting, but I don’t see how taking pot shots at another digital journalist still fighting the fight helps anyone.

03.22.13
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Kickstarter-funded Read Matter finding subs do better than singles

Bobbie Johnson by Jeremy Keith from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Bobbie Johnson by Jeremy Keith from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Building sustainable journalism is a topic near and dear to me as it is core to the work that I do now, and Hacks/Hackers London on Wednesday provided one of those rare times when you get to hear someone a real journalism entrepreneur talk about what has worked and what hasn’t with their start-up. Of course, it’s also great to see a former colleague at The Guardian, Bobbie Johnson, find success.

He and co-founder Jim Giles launched Read Matter with a campaign to raise seed capital on crowdfunding site Kickstarter. They set a goal of raising $50,000, but in less than 48 hours, their goal was firmly in the rear view mirror. In the end, they raised almost three times their goal, brining in $140,201. As Bobbie told The Next Web, crowdfunding can be a great bit of market research. It allows you to find out whether there is real demand for your project.

One of the things that I think really helped their Kickstarter campaign was a great video that clearly explained what Read Matter was in a highly engaging way. It was a great bit of marketing, and if you believe in your journalism, I believe that you have to be ready to sell it. It’s not enough to have the conviction that journalism should win in the marketplace of ideas, you do need to work to make sure that it cuts through the overwhelming torrent of things competing for people’s time and attention.

However, taking a step back before the campaign, Bobbie and Jim did business plans. Bobbie quickly flashed the Excel spreadsheets they used to try to figure out if there was an actual business with how they planned to produce one long-form science and technology piece a month. For a lot of journalists trying to do start-ups, I’d strongly suggest speaking with someone with business experience. It’s not something that we were taught in J-school, but in this new world for the brave, this is something you’ll either need to develop or get via a partner in your project.

Bobbie and Jim are learning as they go along, and one of the things that really stood out for me was lessons that surprised them. They had expected most of their sales to be single sales, but they are actually getting more of their revenue from subscriptions. I read Bobbie’s experience that single sales were too high friction. It’s much easier to set up a subscription through iTunes, Amazon or your own payment system than it is to remember to buy something every month when it comes out. I think that has a profound implication for how news groups are packaging up their long-form, high-gloss, high-cost pieces. Does this mean that instead of trying to sell Kindle Singles, that it might be better for news groups to sell subs for long-form journalism? Should they have several packages that target niches? Read Matter covers only science and technology. Would they be as successful if they tried to sell “investigative journalism” rather than a single topic? My gut says that investigative journalism as a class of content might have more value to journalists than it does intrinsically to audiences. What I mean is that audiences are usually interested in topics, not classes of content. That is why I’m sceptical about the sustainability of trying to strip out deep investigative journalism from a broader package of content.

I’m doing a lot of thinking about how to support long-form, often investigative journalism. As  another speaker at Hacks/Hackers London on Wednesday – David Leigh of The Guardian – pointed out, the cross-subsidy in journalism businesses, mostly fat advertising returns, are going or gone. To me, the real question is not how to support investigative journalism on its own but how to find new sources of cross-subsidy to support it.

That aside, kudos to Bobbie and Jim. I know that their future success will take a lot of work and more learning, but it is encouraging to see people succeeding with new models to support the real heavy lifting of long-form original content.

03.20.13
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Coming to peace with journalism Part 1

This is a blog post that has been a long time coming. I simply hadn’t known where to start, and I’m the kind of blogger who doesn’t like to leave threads dangling. I need to get over that, and a journalist in the US inspired me with her courage in discussing why she left news. Allyson Bird, a woman in her late 20s in the US, said when asked why she wasn’t married and why she left news, she answered with one word: Money.

I can relate to that. I remember as an early 20-something reporter in western Kansas in 1994 that I made $2,000 less than a first year teacher, which is commonly used as the benchmark for low pay in the US. I remember going to a local TV station in a much larger city in Michigan after that job, and I was shocked to find that a junior producer made $3,000 less than I had in western Kansas.

Allyson then said that journalism didn’t seem like a “sustainable career path”, and she meant not only financially but also personally. She went on to explain:

This is the real reason why I left news: I finally came to accept that the vanity of a byline was keeping me in a job that left me physically and emotionally exhausted, yet supremely unsatisfied.

I did and continue to find journalism quite satisfying, but I know what she means about emotional exhaustion. For me, it wasn’t the hassling by editors late at night or during personal events. I’m probably a little too much of a workaholic for that to have bothered me. I still need to find a better balance between work and play.

To me, the emotionally draining thing was knowing exactly what I should be doing as a digital journalist and being almost completely powerless to do what needed to be done while I was working in a traditional newsroom. I have had a lot more success being an external agitator rather than a Barbarian Inside the Gates, which is what I called myself and was the title of a short lived internal blog when I was The Guardian.

Why did I take a buyout from The Guardian? I often get asked that question. A little over a year after Suw and I were married, I threw myself back into my job, giving myself one more chance to make a difference. I worked from the moment I got up until the moment I went to sleep. Then one day, Suw said to me, “I don’t get to see my husband anymore.” I refused to be a statistic of yet another journalist with a failed marriage.

The real reason I took the buyout though was that powerlessness and its corrosive effects. I was giving into the dark side; I was growing bitter. I knew that the lost marriages were only a side effect, not only because of too much work, but bitterness that I had seen in too many journalists. I was getting into middle life, and not only was I not going to lose my Suw, I wasn’t going to lose my soul. I didn’t want to become that bitter old man I had seen a fair number of times sitting in the newsroom alone not because there was a story to cover but because he had nothing better to do.

Fortunately, I’ve never feared course corrections. I miss being in a newsroom, but Suw reminds me that in the two years in between when I left The Guardian and when I joined the Media Development Investment Fund, I trained and worked with more than 800 journalists around the world.

But I still miss being in a newsroom. Suw has asked me what I miss. That is another blog post. I need to answer that question, but I needed to be honest and open about why I left the newsroom first.

Thanks Allyson for inspiring me with your courage. This is a good conversation to have.

03.18.13
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The bully barons of the British press fight to remain unaccountable

Of course, true to form, only hours after I published my previous post, three British press groups threatened to boycott any new self-regulatory body which might be underpinned by statue, the Guardian reported. Classy. As Alex Andreou at the New Statesman wrote, this really is a toddlers’ tantrum.

Much of the press seems to be belly-down on the supermarket floor, punching the linoleum, kicking out and screaming WAAH WAAH BUT I DON’T WANT TO BE REGULATED.

The three groups, News International (aka Hackers ‘R Us), Daily Mail owner Associated Newspapers and the Telegraph Media Group all portrayed themselves as the defenders of freedom of the press and democratic liberty. It should be pointed out, that when Operation Motorman looked into the use of private investigators by the the press and other industries, including the financial and insurance industries, topping the league table by a country mile was the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail says that every one of its 1218 requests from private investigators was legal. I would prefer if a proper investigation determined that rather than take it on the self-interested word of Mail man Paul Dacre.

The Guardian quoted a source close on these efforts who said:

We wouldn’t join the regulator. It would challenge the government to go for full state licensing. This is definitely under active consideration: to stand up against the politicians and for the media and say ‘we’ll go it alone and what are you going to do about it?’ They will just end up fighting for years and newspapers might rediscover a common purpose around press freedom and become a beacon of liberty. This is definitely a fallback position.

Lord Black, a Conservative peer and executive director of the Telegraph Media Group, said any regulator underpinned by statute would be constantly challenged by law. Translation: We’ll unleash our dogs of law.

This isn’t about the freedom of the press. This is about press corporations that want freedom from accountability. This is not about liberty, unless it is the liberty to continue to live outside the laws, ethics and standards of a democratic society.

Journalists, editors and publishers are citizens.We are not above nor outside the law. These three press groups are not defending press freedom, a freedom that exists to support and be balanced by other rights in a democratic society. They are rather fighting for their own self interest . They are not fighting to hold power to account but rather are fighting to hold onto their own power. Shameful.

03.17.13
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British journalists need to take responsibility for press reform

With respect to proposals over to reform the British press in the wake of ever widening allegations of phone hacking, computer hacking and utterly unethical behaviour, we’re seeing Greener’s Law in operation:

Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.

The British press have been spilling a lot of ink and pushing a lot of pixels in an attempt to avoid any change to the status quo. If the press was covering any other industry fighting so vociferously against a new regulatory regime, journalists and columnists would accuse them of special pleading and double standards. In a brilliant piece piercing some of the puffery of the press, Alex Andreou, writing for the New Statesman, put it this way:

The lack of self-reflection is truly staggering. The Leveson process is not something which was done to us. Nobody woke up one morning and thought “I know what I’ll do today – curtail the freedom of the press.” This is something entirely caused by the industry being, on the whole, out of control; engaging in occasionally illegal and often unethical practices. Take responsibility.

The response from journalists? Lord Justice Leveson put it best:

Not only are the press powerful lobbyists in their own interests, but they wield a powerful megaphone with considerable influence.

The press in the UK doesn’t want any interference by the government in what they do, which I support up to a point, but the press has talking a lot of nonsense about the proposals for reform and self-regulation for months.

With all of the spin in the press, it’s important to review what Leveson actually proposed. To quote a BBC explainer, Leveson recommended:

• Newspapers should continue to be self-regulated – and the government should have no power over what they publish
• There had to be a new press standards body created by the industry, with a new code of conduct
• That body should be backed by legislation, which would create a means to ensure the regulation was independent and effective
• The arrangement would provide the public with confidence that their complaints would be seriously dealt with – and ensure the press are protected from interference

Not to gloss over some of the finer points of the just announced proposals, but the main difference now appears to be whether the new self-regulatory body will be backed by regulation or a Royal Charter. I would like to know what happened to Leveson’s recommendation that in addition to the new self-regulation body, a new law “should also place an explicit duty on the government to uphold and protect the freedom of the press”. That would be a great addition to the proposals.

What has been troubling to me is that instead of reaffirming their commitment to professionalism, fair play and living within the law, too much of British journalistic commentary about the proposed reforms has been over the top, invoking the name of Stalin, Mussolini and other dark dictators. Anti-hacking campaigners are accused of bullying politicians simply by meeting them. Really? As if press barons never met with politicians? Indeed, as the FT recently said, all of the closed door meetings between powerful editors and politicians gave the impression that the press had something to hide.

A democracy cannot have an institution, governmental or otherwise, that operates with no accountability. Commercial press barons would say that their audiences hold to them account with the power of the pound, but commercial success is not equivalent to or a substitute for accountability.

The scope of this press corruption scandal continues to grow with hundreds of more revelations about not only Rupert Murdoch’s papers but also now at Trinity Mirror. At some point, voices within the press need to stop playing hardball defence and start getting to grips with how to respond affirmatively. I’m a journalist who has worked for the BBC and then the Guardian for most of my career, and I have been waiting for British journalists to stand up and categorically condemn the behaviour and commit to renewed professionalism. Certainly, some have, but mostly, I just saw reflexive grandstanding about the essential democratic role of the press. True, freedom of the press is essential to democracy, and the role that we play in supporting free societies it is one of the reasons why I’m proud to be a journalist.

However, we cannot turn a blind eye to how corrupt and corrupting certain parts of the British press became. Operation Motorman showed how widespread the problem was. However, the best way to put distance between the vast majority of journalists and these criminals within our midst is to stand up for our professional standards and ethics. The press cannot hold power to account if its own power is unaccountable. We cannot protect democracy while allowing a criminal class to grow within our midst. Our efforts at self-regulation cannot be taken seriously if the serial abuse is so obvious to everyone outside of our professional tribe, yet denied by so many people within it.

It was cheering this week to see Charles Blackhurst of The Independent, Lionel Barber of the Financial Times and Alan Rushbridger of The Guardian join together and call for a sensible compromise on press reform and regulation. According to Roy Greenslade in The Guardian:

All three editorials suggest that statutory underpinning will not inhibit press freedom. It doesn’t amount to statutory control of the press, says the Guardian. It need not impinge on press freedom, says the FT.

This is long overdue, but it should not just be left to editors to take this stand. If we really want to defend the freedom of the press that we enjoy in the UK, we have to stand up against the almost comically criminal hacks and stand up for professionalism, ethics and standards. The wretched excesses of parts of the press have been tolerated for too long, but now, a total lack of ethics and criminality by a not insignificant number of hacks is threatening freedom of all journalists. It’s not a joke anymore. It is threatening the precious freedoms we enjoy.