Vanessa Otero - thegoodwills.com

media-bias-quality-news — Media Bias Chart by Vanessa Otero, Ad Fontes Media

A couple of years ago I wrote an essay called ‘In search of quality news” which many people told me they found educational. The piece was sparked by a media bias infographic invented by US patent attorney Vanessa Otero.

Vanessa supplied an updated media bias chart for today’s main picture. It is self-explanatory in that the quality news outlets are clustered around the middle. The worst of the fake news and extreme right (or left-wing) biased outlets are consigned to the fringes, as they should be. If you want to see who’s who in the (US) online zoo, open this image in a new window and enlarge it.

She is currently working on a project to expand the Media Bias Chart into a dynamic, interactive web version with a lot of additional sources and features. If you are interested, a recent (lengthy) forensic analysis on her blog tackles President Trump‘s frequent claims of media bias.

My February 2016 essay introduced a few readers to an Australian collaboration between academia and journalism. The Conversation, funded by Australian universities, was launched 11 years ago to broaden the depth and variety of informed journalism. Like online news portal The New Daily (2013), The Conversation is free. Moreover whole articles can be reprinted elsewhere, with proper attribution the only proviso. The Conversation now reaches 10.7 million readers a month.

Bloggers need news and research sources like this which allow citation and lengthy extracts via Creative Commons. It’s quite an advance on the ‘Fair Dealing” provisions of the Copyright Act.

What doesn’t work is finding a likely article in The Australian only to be met with a paywall. You can’t blame them for trying, but The Guardian does not do this, nor does the ABC, SBS or Fairfax/Nine papers in general, although I have elsewhere seen ‘you have had your three free stories’ messages.

The latest Deloitte Media and Entertainment Survey (2018) found that the notion of paying for news was met with considerable reluctance. Only 10% of respondents said they would pay for news, consistent with findings over the past four years. Moreover, 22% of those who said they would pay for news would do so only if they could avoid advertising.

Gosh. So who were we selling all those newspapers to in the 1980s? That was possibly the last decade when newspapers owners could rely upon the ‘rivers of gold’ derived from classified advertising, From then, through the 1990s into the new Millennium, portals like realestate.com, domain.com.au, eBay, gumtree, carsales and ubiquitous travel sites like bookings.com or trivago.com ripped much of their traditional revenue away. Traditional media invested in these portals (investors call this hedging) but it is akin to cannibalism.

Nevertheless, news and magazine subscriptions are surviving, owned by 17% and 11% of respondents respectively (in 2017 both were 16%). “As residual hard copy subscriptions endure, there may still be non-digital opportunities for both mediums,” the Deloitte survey found. “This is especially true for magazines where print remains our most popular format.”

So yes, like me, 38% of respondents still prefer to read printed hard copies, with 51% favouring traditional news formats (2017: 55%).

I’m one of the last diehards, waiting for that Friday evening when the print edition of the Guardian Weekly arrives in my letterbox. Never mind that some of the stories in the magazine were published online up to seven to 10 days earlier.

I send links to people I think might have an interest only to be told they ‘read it last week’.

I have serious doubts about the definition of ‘read it’ in this context as a Pew Research Center survey of US online activity estimates the average time people spend ‘reading’ on a news site visit is two minutes 40 seconds. Crikey, it takes me that long to read a recipe for spaghetti bolognaise (and nip over to the neighbour’s place to borrow some parmesan).

In the US, 93% of people get some of their news from online browsing so that two minutes-something statistic is a little worrying.

So if news outlets are not attracting paid subscribers, how do they make money when online users are clearly ad-phobic? Deloitte’s 2017 survey found that one in three respondents employed ad blockers to preserve their online news feed. Almost 80% when perusing short videos skip the introductory ad and 50% abandon the video altogether if they cannot shut down the ‘pre-roll’ ad.

The most telling statistics from the Deloitte surveys (IMHO) are the ones that demonstrate how people have backed away from social media. In 2018, 55% said they use social media on a daily basis, down from 59% in 2017 and 61% the year before. Moreover, 31% say they have either taken a break or disconnected from social media.

There is increased awareness of the perils of fake news with 66% saying they were concerned about it and 77% believing they had been exposed.

As the Federal election is now just a minimum 50 sleeps away, this would be a good time to review where you are getting your news from and who can be trusted. It’s also a good time to look hard at opinion columnists of the right (and left), both in print and on TV/radio programmes.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to place Australian news outlets on Otero’s media bias chart, although be aware of your own biases! For mine, The Australian is becoming increasingly strident, its pet conservatives trotting out predictable rhetoric. Unhappily the takeover of Queensland’s regional newspapers by News Ltd has seen some of those polemical essayists (Paul Murray, Andrew Bolt), airing their views in rural papers.

Fair go! The preoccupying new stories in these country papers ought to be (a) “drought enters third year’ (image of dead sheep in dried up dam), or (b) ‘rain boosts crops’ (farmer in gumboots jumping for joy over muddy puddle).

Further reading (s) means paid subscribers, some free news

The New York Times (now with an Australian section) www.nytimes.com offers some free items and an affordable introductory subscription (s);

Investigative financial journalism www.michaelwest.com.au Michael’s expose of Australia’s top 40 tax cheats is compulsory reading;

www.thenewdaily.com free Australian news portal funded by Australian industry super funds;

www.newmatilda.com left-wing independent Australian website of politics, Aboriginal affairs, environment and media, active since 2004;

The Conversation www.theconversation.com.au as discussed above;

www.crikey.com.au. Launched in 2000, Crikey offers hard-hitting commentary on politics, media, business, culture and technology. Soon to include an investigative unit funded by John B Fairfax. Crikey used to have First Dog on the Moon (s);

The Guardian www.theguardian.com.au the go-to investigative newspaper, favoured by 7 out of 10 retired journalists and fans of FDOTM who defected there in 2014;

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au notable for being launched in 2014 as a printed newspaper. TSP and The Monthly are paid publications, owned by Schwartz Media (s);

The NYT keeps a good handle on what’s happening in the US, but so too does www.politico.com;

https://bobwords.com.au/further-reading/ My list includes blogs and websites that specialise in long form journalism, interviews, reviews and creative non-fiction.

Maleny-sunset-tree — Where I go to escape the news, fake or otherwise

Some of my Facebook friends have been on a search for quality news – and a way to divert Donald Trump stories and memes from their news feed. There was just too much analysis, too many suspect ‘news’ stories from unfamiliar sources and hundreds of derogatory memes which only serve to confirm readers’ biases.

Australian comedian and folk singer Martin Pearson had evidently had enough too. He shared an insightful infographic (see below) which makes plain where media outlets sit in terms of quality news and partisanship. Pearson shared Vanessa Otero’s media infographic with a plea to his 1,520 friends to check the sources of news, especially if it is about Donald Trump:

“Please, you should all follow SNOPES on FB straight away; you get a good supply of reporter-checked news and fact-checked news straight to your page. And take a look at the info-graphic. If a news story confirms your bias, check its source.”

Vanessa Otero is a US patent attorney who enjoys snowboarding, reading, writing and observing communication patterns. Her infographic, originally posted on Twitter, was re-posted and shared so many times Otero went to her blog to explain in detail the reasoning and methodology.

quality-news — News Infographic by Vanessa Otera (Creative Commons)

The infographic places media outlets on a chart which clearly suggests where the publication or electronic media outlet sit in terms of quality news and partisan bias. The ‘utter garbage/conspiracy theory’ news outlets, be they conservative or liberal (that is, left of centre), end up on the extremes of the chart, grouped as ‘don’t read this’ or ‘Just no’. I note with a chuckle Otero places local TV news, US Today and CNN (dressed in partisan blue), as ‘sensational or clickbait’, though apparently relatively unbiased, so earning the category – “better than not reading news at all”.

Otero writes: “I wanted to take the landscape of news sources that I was highly familiar with and put it into an easily digestible, visual format. I wanted it to be easily shareable, and more substantive than a meme, but less substantive than an article.”

That much worked – the infographic was shared 20,000 times on Facebook and viewed one million times on Imgur. Otero said this is evidence that she accomplished the goal of reaching people who hardly ever engage with lengthy editorials. And as she self-deprecatingly acknowledges, very few will read her “boring-ass article” about the methodology behind it.

“Many non/infrequent readers are quite bad at distinguishing between decent news sources and terrible news sources. I wanted to make this chart in the hopes that if non/infrequent readers saw it, they could use it to avoid trash.”

Otero has said that considering all feedback, she’d make some changes to future versions of the chart (like moving The Economist more to the centre).

Otero’s chart is no one-off, though. Business Insider cited the Pew Research Centre to compile an infographic on the most (and least), trustworthy media sources in America. The most trusted news outlets, that is, purveyors of quality news, are British, topped by the BBC and The Economist.

Conversely, BuzzFeed and The Rush Limbaugh Show are at the bottom.

There’s a difference between trusted and most popular, however. Pew polled 3,000 Americans in a random sample to find that they get most of their news from local TV, Facebook, and major networks like CNN and Fox News.

Some Australians who reacted to Otero’s publication wanted to know when someone would do a similar exercise on the highly concentrated Australian media market.

I suspect an Australian version of the search for quality news would look quite different; less crowded and lack the dubious news sources which appear to flourish in the US. There have been attempts in recent years to loosen the stranglehold a handful of media companies hold over Australian media audiences. They include Crikey, The Monthly, the Saturday Paper, New Matilda and The Conversation, the latter a collaboration between academics and journalists. Whatever subject you wish to research has probably been turned over there at least once and if not, send them an email and suggest a topic.

In this article from December 2016, authors Tim Dwyer and Denis Muller explore the concentration of media ownership in Australia.

They cite market research firm IBISWorld’s findings that the industry’s four largest players, News Australia, Fairfax Media, Seven West Media and APN News and Media, accounted for more than 90% of industry revenue in 2015-16. A very small list of owners, notably News Australia and Fairfax Media, publish content that reaches the large majority of Australians.

Since then, 12 Queensland and NSW regional daily newspapers and 60+ non-dailies and 40+ websites were sold to News Corp for $36.6 million. APN News and Media agreed to sell Australian Regional Media (ARM) last June (News was already a 14.9% shareholder). It was approved by the foreign investment and competition regulators in late December. For Queenslanders, this means that Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd owns every substantial newspaper in the State, from the Cairns Post in the north to the Tweed Daily News in the south and the Toowoomba Chronicle in the west. News also publishes Brisbane’s suburban weeklies.

Only the Fairfax-owned online newspaper, Brisbane Times, stands out as a daily voice of difference.

The latest iteration of newspaper monopoly in Queensland has received surprisingly little coverage or analysis − much less so than when Rupert Murdoch took over The Herald & Weekly Times group in 1987. That transaction delivered him ownership of every daily newspaper in Brisbane. The competition watchdog ruled that Murdoch must sell one of these to an ‘independent’ owner. So he kept the Courier-Mail, The Telegraph and Sunday Mail and sold the Daily Sun and Sunday Sun.

As for the ARM/News merger, The Australian quoted Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chairman Rod Sims:

“The ACCC reviewed the acquisition very closely, as News and ARM are the two largest newspaper publishers in Queensland. However, feedback from readers raised very few concerns and suggested that there is not close competition between the paid daily Queensland papers published by News and ARM.”

Having said surprisingly little about this, the ABC’s Mediawatch made its 2017 return on Monday with a special on ‘Fake News,’ a term now so pervasive it has wormed its way into the Macquarie Dictionary (and FOMM).

As Mediawatch host Paul Barry said:

“Fake news is hardly a new phenomenon, nor is believing stuff that defies all evidence.

“But in a world where anyone can set up a website and so many are on social media, it can spread like wildfire. Almost 2 billion people log onto Facebook every month. And Facebook works by giving them the news they want.”

Craig Silverman of National Public Radio (NPR) said in December, fake news works because “we love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe.’

“It tells people exactly what they want to hear. It makes them feel very comforted and it gets them to react on the platform. And the platform sees that content does really well and Facebook feeds more of it to more people.

So as Martin Pearson advised, and I concur, be sceptical, subscribe to a source that fact checks (Snopes, The Conversation).

Above all, don’t immediately share something on Facebook or Twitter without reading first, thinking about it and doing some checking.

We can only hope that’ll happen…LOL

http://bobwords.com.au/elephant-captured-nullarbor-plain/