Half way house

I’m currently half way through an 18 month master’s of journalism at QUT. I am actually slightly over the exact half-way mark as the mid-term break that arrives next week is strangely week 11 out of 14 (something very Irish about that!). Mine is a three semester course-work degree, so the end result will not be treated as highly as if it were a research masters. However a third of my work is thesis. That will be due in late May 2010 and I want that to be treated and examined as if it were a full research thesis. (pic: QUT Kelvin Grove "Education A Block Building" by Derek Barry)

Though I’ve yet to nail down a decent journalism-related research question for the thesis, I have chosen to broadly situate the study within blogs and their place in the world, But whatever the question will eventually be (and I’ll need to get that sorted by the end of this year) it makes sense to discuss it within the context of my own blogging. Reflective analysis means applying an honest blowtorch to my own work prior to making any grand statements about the wider world.

So this post is the first attempt to publicly verbalise the journey. I will be trying to do this on a weekly basis between now and June 2010 (though there might be a few weeks off between semesters). It will be as open and self-critical as I can make it. This won’t be easy - I made the decision to discuss blogs back in February and for reasons I cannot yet easily explain I’ve been dragging my heels on mentioning it in my own blog.

Or blogs plural. I currently spend several hours every day running three blogs (or two and a half to be more accurate). I maintain two versions of Woolly Days. The original started on Blogger in September 2005 and a new one started on Wordpress in February this year. The two are almost exactly alike in article content. My third site is Irish I’s which I started in June 2007 to post jokes, pics, and oddball stories I stumble upon on a daily basis. Irish I’s is also on blogger (though is possibly an ideal candidate to move to a newer platform such as Posterous).

But Woolly Days is my major preoccupation and I can often spend four to six hours a day putting to a post together. I am currently persisting with two versions of Woolly Days because I cannot decide which one to go one with. I like the more professional look of WordPress Woolly Days but I’m still fond of Blogger Woolly Days on the Google-owned platform that gave me a public voice four years ago. So I put up with double-entry bookkeeping (though typographical errors fixed up subsequently in one are not necessarily retrofitted to the other). If I were unsentimental I should be seriously considering leave the Woolly Days brand behind and start blogging under the label of Derek Barry or else at some other “Days”. This might well happen when I physically leave Wooloowin (where I’ve lived since 2004).

I don’t think it would greatly matter wherever I publish next because it is the blogging form that matters not the brand. It is as a blogger I think I am establishing an authentic, articulate and unorthodox voice that is slowly getting recognition in the wider community.

That pleases me because blogging is important. Don’t be deceived by the claims that it is so 2004. The fact that the early adopters have moved on means is that it is a maturing product with tens of millions of active exponents. These people blog because it gives them as a long-form and free platform of communication on the Internet. If democracy could be defined as the freedom to express your opinion widely, then the rise of the blog is a good thing. For me that means over a thousand articles and a million words over four years at a rate of six or more posts a week.

So is anyone listening to this widespread distribution of opinion, is anyone paying attention? Who is reading my million words?

To answer these questions, I need to analyse some audience metrics for my blogs.
After 20 days this month (approx 3 weeks), my sites have received the following number of hits (in brackets number of hits a day)
Woolly Days Blogger 32, 927 = average 1,646 hits a day
Irish I’s 1, 319 = average 66 hits a day
Woolly Days Wordpress 378 = average 19 hits a day.
For a grand total of 34, 624 at an average of 1,731 hits a day.

Hits aren’t humans and I don’t have breakdown of hits to visits on a monthly basis. However on a daily basis the number of visits averages between 65 and 90 percent of the hits total. If we go with the lowest figure of 65 percent that would mean an average total of 1,125 human visitors come to my blogs every day in September 2009. The actual figure that read my work is higher than that as Woolly Days blog content is also available to read in Facebook (to 94 people) and all are available as RSS feeds (to 42 subscribers on Google Reader and an unknown number on other RSS readers). But lets assume however this number is low and adds merely another 75 or so visitors, to give a nice round total number of 1,200.

This means I am talking to about twelve hundred people every day. But nowhere near this total are listening or indeed reading the same material. Far fewer still are actually talking back, but I might have to save the analysis on that for a later time. Because I wanted to concentrate on how people get to my site now. Why, when there are tens of millions of blogs to go to, do they come to mine?

90 percent of my traffic arrives serendipitously – well, its pleasantly surprising for me, anyway. But most of these people aren’t interested in Woolly Days at all. Four out of every five people come from Google Images (and increasingly Bing). They’ve clicked on the picture and may or may not stay to read the text in the lower pane. I’m reasonably high in a surprising number of Google image searches in my increasingly long tail. The most popular page at the moment on Woolly Days is a 2006 article on Magna Carta. For reasons entirely unknown to me, it is currently number in Google Images for that search.

I thank Google for their algorithms but it is the one in five that don’t come for the picture that are most likely to pay attention to the words. Half of these come from Google searches (10 percent of the entire total). These searchers usually do not hang around for long once they found an answer (or a lack of answer) to the question they have asked Google though occasionally are hooked in to explore a bit further.

The last 10 percent are people who come via bookmarks, links, Twitter, Facebook, RSS and other recommendations. It is these 120 or so people who come regularly to the site as part of their regular media consumption who are most likely to be reading what I’m currently writing. Given that most of the posts here at Woolly Days break the cardinal rule of short blogging and are often quite dense and political, it is likely that at least two thirds of these will not have the time or inclination to read this far into the post. Let’s assume then that there are just 40 readers left at this stage.

I humbly thank this mathematical derived forty that have stayed the course and hope that they find the rest of this journey interesting. I would also love to hear back what people think about blogging or what they think might be an interesting research question. I would like this quest to serve as much meaning as I can cram into it. But if it there is no meaning or if none of this matters, I’d like to hear about that too.

Next week I’ll be looking at how much journalism is in my work.

Cheers
Derek Barry

One-day strike action affects Qld unis

Industrial action affected three major Brisbane universities last week in an education union’s national campaign to seek better terms and conditions for its members. [Photo: Derek Barry]

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) asked its 3,000 members at the University of Queensland (UQ), Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to join 13 other tertiary institutions across the country in a 24-hour strike last Wednesday.

Union national organiser Michael Evans said agreement was reached with a fourth Queensland university - James Cook University - prior to the action and the NTEU is now “close” to agreement with Griffith University as a result of the strike.

Evans said the union has yet to conclude negotiations with UQ and QUT.

The NTEU is seeking pay rises of between 16 and 18 per cent over three years and also an end to the casualisation of staffing at universities, which Mr Evans says is affecting job security.

One QUT striker who did not wish to be named said the big issue was removing the WorkChoices provisions from the enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) and ensuring fair workloads for workers, as well as more employment security.

The EBA expired in 2008 but continues to be in effect while negotiations for a replacement continues.

Evans said the union was looking to regain rights it had lost in the last round of EBA changes under the previous federal government including the right to represent staff in disciplinary actions.

UQ executive director of operations Maurie McNarn told the Courier-Mail last week the impact of the strike would be minimal because the NTEU represented only 5 per cent of the workforce.

Evans acknowledged that Griffith University and QUT also experienced minimal disruption due to the action.

But he also said there was anecdotal evidence that car parks and campuses were emptier than normal and many classes were cancelled.

“Academics rescheduled classes for other days to ensure that students would not be disadvantaged,” he said.

Evans said the one-day strike was valuable publicity for the union campaign and sent a message to the institutions that members were prepared to forego a day’s pay to show how serious they were about the issues involved.

But Australian Higher Education Industrial Association executive director Ian Argall said Evans was “too optimistic” in his assessment of the industrial action.

He said the strike did not make any difference and that negotiations were likely to drag on for many months to come.

“There has been no agreement with any Australian university beyond 2009 except with New England University,” Argall said.

He denied the workplace changes made during the Howard administration had impacted unions’ rights to represent their members.

Argall said the issue for universities was how to organise the performance management and workload of staff.

“Unions have not been pushed out but don’t have an automatic right to be involved” he said.

***
This story was originally written for the new QUT magazine Sub-Tropic

The future of news: Next gen journos prefer digital

In news from Brisbane in the last few days, a QUT study has found that most student journalists don’t read newspapers. The problem with newspapers, say the students, is that there are too many long-winded articles, there's no search engines and worst of all they get ink on your fingers. The study says a lot about the future of news, while the way the study was reported says much about the present.

But I need to begin the story with the recent past. Last Monday, QUT issued a media release entitled “Stop Press: Forests Saved. Next gen journos prefer digital”. The release was about the results of a survey QUT Journalism Professor Alan Knight ran to find out how first year university students got their news.

The full results of the survey are not yet in the public domain. Professor Knight intends to present them to the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre annual conference in New Delhi in July. However the results summary from the media release showed two important findings. First was the fact that 95 percent of them enjoyed keeping up with news - as you’d hope and expect with journalists. But the second fact seemed to contradict the first: more than half of those surveyed read a newspaper “once a week or less often.”

Though at that stage I hadn’t read the release, I attended a Newswriting lecture at QUT on Tuesday where Professor Knight spoke about the future of news. During his wide-ranging talk he painted a fairly bleak outlook for newspapers, though said some specialist papers such at the Australian Financial Review (which hides most of its content behind a paywall) would survive. He also mentioned his survey findings in passing and pointed accusingly at his audience who, he said, now preferred to get their news from commercial TV.

On Wednesday ABC picked up the story that Journalism students “don’t read papers". Except it would appear that the ABC “don’t read media releases properly”. The ABC article said, incorrectly, the survey found 90 per cent of students don’t like reading newspapers. Whereas, what Knight actually said in the release was "More than 90 per cent of the respondents were aged under 21 and many of these want-to-be journalists don't read newspapers.” Many of 90 per cent does not equal 90. The actual figure was 60 per cent.

However I did not realise the ABC’s error until I spoke to Knight. Other media, such as the Brisbane Times article linked in the opening paragraph, replicated the error. Techwired duly reported 90 per cent of students do not like reading the newspaper, despite Ben Grubb hearing it was only “a majority” in an interview with the professor. It would appear that none of the articles in the Brisbane Times, the ABC or Techwired were sub-edited.

But I don’t want to gripe too much, I also make mistakes as I don't have the luxury of a sub-editor. And as for the number quoted in the articles, well if is not 90 percent now, it will be in another few years. Digital transmission is the way forward and the Techwired podcast I listened to was excellent quality. Knight rightly praised Ben Grubb for what he was doing. But the QUT professor did make the point that while it was all well and good for Grubb to interview him, he (Grubb) would need support if he was to do a story about something more complicated, say, on organised crime on the Sunshine Coast.

What Knight is saying is that stories like these are difficult to do, and often require investigative journalism that is mainly the province of newspapers. But if hardly any young journalists are reading them, then it is likely the take-up rate is even smaller among the young generally. In 2008, The Pew Research Center found the internet overtook print for the first time as an outlet for national and international news. And newspapers in most parts of the world are contracting or dying as their readership gets older.

Here in Brisbane, the Courier-Mail has a total readership of 646,000 of which almost half are over 50. Its rival the Fairfax Brisbane Times is digital only. Meanwhile, down in Melbourne Andrew Bolt is openly predicting the death of The Age in “a few years”. He might be right. It and its sister paper the Sydney Morning Herald are part of the crumbling Fairfax Digital empire which is rapidly turning into the sick man of Australian media despite its reverse takeover by the toecutters at Rural Press.

Yet although the Fairfax mastheads might disappear, Gen-Y will continue to read their digital imprints. Professor Knight said his study reflected cultural bias which in his view “results from using computers and not accepting print”. That is not wholly a bad thing. The State of the News Media 2006 report found that the Internet is often the richest source of information and is quickly gaining ground as a source for news. I got a personal inkling last year of how young journos get their news at the 2008 Future of Journalism conference when two out of the three students who spoke said they never read newspapers. Professor Knight accepts universities cannot reverse the trend but he added, “we can require journalist students to address all forms of media.”