*contains graphic material

This is not a political blog, and I don’t want it to be. But once again the behaviour of the country’s most infuriating newspaper, The Australian, has antagonised me, this time with a piece about the role of the national broadcaster. Put simply, the argument is that the ABC is biased towards the Left, although ‘argument’ is overstating it a bit. Written by former Liberal Party staffer and aspiring politician Chris Kenny, it’s more a shallow container of decade-old Liberal Party talking points that have been hosed down and presented as hard-won conclusions. Economist Christopher Joye accurately called it “lightly researched, highly opinionated, anonymously sourced, and quasi-ideological.”

The hypothesis of ABC bias is not only an interesting one, it’s also one that a serious media outlet or commentator could attempt to dis/prove, instead of subjecting us all to a rehashed collection of anecdotes and prejudices. Kenny quotes as supporting evidence five anecdotes, stretching all the way back to 2004. Considering the ABC comprises ~40 radio stations, 4 TV stations and a sprawling online presence, producing thousands of pieces of news content every day, I’d call that insufficient sample. Kenny continually refers to ‘mainstream values’, and the views of ‘inner-city elites’ without bothering to qualify this in any way.

[Incidentally I found it strange to see News Ltd now criticising Scott for describing the ABC as a "market failure broadcaster" - filling in the gaps in content which the market could not supply - when they've also in the past strongly criticised the corporation for entering more competitive markets. Damned if they do, damned if they don't!]

I don’t believe it’s possible to conclusively prove bias, since perception of bias is largely subjective, but I think you could at least nudge the conversation along. Others have put serious effort into this in a way that puts The Australian to shame, such as economists Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh in 2009. (Guess what? They found the ABC to be biased towards the Coalition!).

My preferred methodology would be to use text analysis on ABC News content and compare it with analytics on what the main political parties themselves say. You would then draw out clusters of shared language which frame issues in obvious ways – i.e. highly-loaded terms like ‘asylum seekers’ vs. ‘illegals’, ‘carbon tax’ vs. ‘carbon pricing’ etc – and theoretically see how close the ABC’s choice of language is to either side of Gov’t. You’d also need to analyse other media outlets as a control sample.

It may or may not be valid, but at the very least it’d be a serious, concerted attempt to move the conversation along. Until then, any more bloviating on the topic by The Australian or any other newspaper, is to my mind a waste of my time.

Two stories from yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald offer what I think makes a pretty good case study in schizophrenia.

The first was a typical ‘moral panic’ piece on Facebook privacy – something which the SMH has specialised in for years. There is no counterpoint presented, i.e. from a representative of Facebook.

Facebook trade in female images

Images of scantily clad women are being widely circulated without their knowledge through a private “men’s only” Facebook group, reigniting the debate for stricter privacy laws for social media in Australia.

Tillii, a 21-year-old student who is pictured in a bikini with her friends, wasn’t aware that her photo had been circulated via the page.

“It makes me feel sick that people would go to the effort of taking [uploading] the picture and posting it up,” she said.

There are no privacy laws governing the sharing of private images through social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Australian Privacy Foundation vice-chairman Dan Svantesson said no crime had been committed. “Few people understand how weak privacy protection is from a legal perspective in Australia,” he said.

[second victim] Jade agreed: “I just hope it’s shut down and something is done about it so it’s not done again.”

The second story comes from the very same day, and concerns an SMH technology writer called Ben Grubb.

Journalist arrested at IT conference

A Fairfax journalist was arrested by Queensland Police yesterday after an article he wrote about vulnerabilities in Facebook’s privacy controls was published on smh.com.au.

Ben Grubb, the deputy technology editor of the Herald website, was attending an IT security conference at a resort on the Gold Coast where a security expert, Christian Heinrich, demonstrated how he had gained access to the privacy-protected Facebook photos of the wife of the HackLabs director, Chris Gatford.

Mr Heinrich told Fairfax Digital he gained access to the photos to show that people who use social networking sites should not trust their privacy settings.

[It should be noted here that Ben Grubb republished these Facebook photos - accessed through hacking exploiting a Facebook vulnerability, without consent from the account holder - in his piece]

Grubb reported that it was well-known in the IT security community that the two security experts did not get along.

The police told Grubb they were acting on a complaint from a person whose Facebook photo had been accessed without a password.

Darren Burden, the general manager for news at Fairfax Digital, said: ”Ben was a guest of AusCERT at the conference at the Gold Coast. He was at a conference, reporting on something actually said and presented at that conference. It’s fundamental for journalists to be able to report these events.”

Got that? Access people’s public Facebook photos, through simple copy-pasting,  without users permission, and then circulate on Facebook: WORST THING IN WORLD. Time to indulge in some hand-wringing over our “weak privacy protection,” and close with a quote that says “I hope something is done about it.”

However, publish an article in a national newspaper featuring private Facebook photos, obtained through exploiting a vulnerability password cracking: PERFECTLY FINE.

I really should point out here that I do not support the role of the Queensland Police in this instance, given that apart from the civil matter of copyright infringement, it’s not clear what powers they had to arrest Grubb in the first place.

But what has bemused me is that the SMH does not see the role they have to play in encouraging over-zealous police action like this, through their own ‘moral panic’ reporting. In the first piece, the SMH appear to be agitating for stronger protection for Facebook users, and even closed by saying “I hope something is done about it.” This kind of rhetoric – which is standard for Australian mainstream media reporting on Facebook and privacy  - creates an urgency for parliament, for government bodies, and for the police, to be seen to be doing something. Which seems now to have happened, rather clumsily,  and not to SMH’s benefit.

As we all know, Twitter has broken the biggest news story of the year, embarrassed countless public figures, and even announced presidential campaigns, but to my knowledge it has never been credited with bringing down a bad law. That may change soon, however, as the UK considers whether the practice of super injunctions (more on that later) even makes sense in the social media age.

I was interested to read a legal perspective on these matters from Mark Cohen in The Drum, but when you write an article entitled ‘Twitter needs to grow up and join the real world’, you’re asking for a response from enraged Tweeters. Cohen’s argument in  is as follows:

It does not seem to be too wide a generalisation to observe that many users of social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook by reason of their ubiquity, believe that social media on some basis (that never seems to be clearly articulated) is qualitatively different from other media and not subject to the operation of laws which otherwise operate.

Cohen concentrates largely on the Robin Hood Airport case, where a Twitter user got a criminal conviction for a loose tweet in which he jokingly threatened to blow up the airport. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but even I can see issues with Mark Cohen’s characterisation of the case as an everyday application of British English law. For an informed alternative perspective on the case I recommend the Jack of Kent blog – not only is the author an eminent media lawyer, but his excellent coverage of the case resulted in him being brought in to advise on an appeal. In Jack of Kent’s view, the conviction was a clear injustice and “not how our criminal justice system should be working.”

But the Paul Chambers is but one example of where Twitter has bumped up against (arguably bad) laws. A better one might be the saga currently unfolding in the UK over a slew of ‘super injunctions’ issued on behalf of celebrities. This deeply illiberal law is a press gag (injunction), but with additional terms that forbid even mentioning the existence of the injunction. It costs a 6-figure sum to bring a super injunction in the UK England, meaning it’s out of reach for anyone bar the very rich, such as the celebrities, MPs, sportsmen and financiers who have obtained them to date. As Bernard Keane points out in Crikey, there is no precedent for super injunctions in Australia, but the same “clash between privacy concerns and media irresponsibility may provide one before too long.”

Over the past couple of years, British English courts have sent a number of super injunctions to the press, gagging them not only of writing about something, but gagging them of writing that they had been gagged. At the same time, to the frustration of traditional media, Twitter was going crazy with the details contained in the super injunctions. On the 8th of May someone opened a Twitter account (I won’t provide a link) and sent out just 6 tweets revealing the contents of selected super injunctions – celebrity and sportsman infidelities, mainly – and one tweet with apparently false information. The tweets were then retweeted thousands of times by more than 100,000 followers, quickly reaching an audience rivaling many mass media outlets.

Mark Stephens – lawyer for Julian Assange, strangely enough – warned that the person behind the account was in contempt of court and ought to pack their toothbrush for a long stint in prison, but this is a hollow warning. Not only is Twitter’s San Francisco head office outside of the British English courts’ jurisdiction, but users of the service are unlikely to be sanctioned for breaking a super injunction. Under the terms, you are only bound by the court order if you are aware of its contents – that’s how you know what you can and can’t publish. As none of the casual Twitter users would have seen the court order, which was sent to the legal department of British newspapers, it seems a difficult thing to prove. Especially as one of the tweets was false – a red herring – which no layperson would know was not contained in a super injunction. The newspapers in the UK are now becoming restless, and before long one of them will surely take a deep breath and publish, arguing that the injunctions have been broken by Twitter.

As Mark Cohen will know, creating a law is one thing, but enforcing it is another, and an unenforceable law is a bad law. Traditional media creates economic bottlenecks that make it possible to enforce certain laws – printing presses and broadcast spectrum are all prohibitively expensive, drastically limiting the number of media operators. If you wish to serve an injunction on the Australian media, as did a St Kilda footballer when nude images began circulating, you need only send a few letters to a couple of premises in central Sydney and Melbourne.

But social media – indeed, the internet – has changed this for good by lowering the barriers to entry for would-be publishers. Anyone with a blog, a Facebook profile, a Twitter account, is now in some sense a publisher. How do you serve a super injunction on social media, where the proprietors of the service are not only located in another country, but are not remotely in control of the millions of users (i.e. publishers) on the service?

Mark Cohen is right when he says it isn’t true that Twitter is “qualitatively different from other media and [therefore] not subject to the operation of laws which otherwise operate.” However, Twitter is quantitatively different, to such an extreme that enforcing some laws is now a pointless exercise. Even in the Paul Chambers case, while Chambers himself was convicted, many thousands of Tweeters repeated his exact same threat about ‘blowing up’ an airport, with no repurcussions. That is 99.9% of identical violations of the Communication Act (I may have enacted one myself, I can’t remember) went unpunished. Is that a bad thing? Would it have been sensible to pursue all such violators through the courts, clogging up the system for years?

The British government has grudgingly announced they will look into the regulation of social media, specifically with regard to privacy law and super injunctions. The way I see it, if the government wishes to reconcile social media with traditional media law, they really have 3 choices:

1. Form an international super-government to enforce laws on social media

2. Ban the internet (possibly in addition to option #1)

3. Change, or ignore, the law

I think you know which is most likely. I’m not one who believes anyone should be able to say whatever they like about anyone else with impunity, but for better or worse, this is now the ‘real world’ we are living in. It’d be great if the legal profession grew up and joined it, instead of defending bad laws.

[Update: PaidContent.co.uk reports today that the first super injunction has been granted which specifically calls out Twitter and Facebook. It's not a case likely to attract much media attention, but it creates a precedent for future court orders. Of course, issuing the court order is one thing, but the question is how they could go about enforcing it.]

If you work or are otherwise interested in the media industry, we live in interesting times. Digital distribution has drastically changed the landscape, creating a new state of play almost every day. For media professionals, keeping up with this change is incredibly challenging, but fortunately there are many excellent sources enabling you to do so, ranging from traditional media, to consultancies, to blogs.

While not very widely read (it is the 8th most popular newspaper), The Australian is the most serious-minded paper in the country. So it should be the best place to go for intelligent, comprehensive and knowledgeable analysis of the media industry, right? Not, unfortunately, on the latest evidence.

The right-leaning Australian has in the past become sidetracked by its own partisan political obsessions and petty vendettas, to (I believe) the detriment of its readership – as I’ve argued elsewhere. The latest example of this takes place in the paper’s Media Diary section, by veteran journo Caroline Overington. It’s a short snippet so I quote in full, but read it here:

ERIC Beecher’s nasty little website Crikey continues on its foul way. On Friday afternoon, it published the following comment from a reader: “The Australian will soon be deader than Frank Devine. Looks like it’s going to be a prolonged death, too, just like Frank’s!”

Devine was an editor of The Australian and father of Miranda Devine and a kinder, gentler soul you could not hope to meet.

Crikey has allowed readers to post disgusting comments before, but allowing a reader to gloat about a good man’s death is perhaps a new low.

Then again, it was just weeks ago that Crikey readers posted slurs about James Packer’s wife and children so foul and defamatory they could not be republished anywhere.

This was followed up again the next day. I quote in full again so you can appreciate the full idiocy, but read it here:

So, essentially, The Australian’s Media Diary – “this week’s take on Australian media” – has taken to trawling through the comments section of another website in search of offensive material, and then holding the site accountable for its readers’ comments. Let’s take this point by point:

Crikey has allowed readers to post disgusting comments before, but allowing a reader to gloat about a good man’s death is perhaps a new low.

Crikey uses a post-moderation commenting policy, which means they check reader comments only after they’ve been published. Criticising Crikey for ‘allowing’ this reader to comment is meaningless – you are essentially criticising them for allowing any reader to comment, or for allowing reader comments full stop.

There’s more in the same vein: it’s not our fault, it’s readers who don’t know how to behave properly; we do our best to pull them up when we catch them at it.

Well, yes, Caroline. Crikey would say that – because it is true. Check Crikey’s Code of Conduct, which is freely available if you’re curious.

One problem: The comment about Frank Devine went up on Friday afternoon. Nobody in the comments thread said: `Hang on, that’s just awful’’ or “Hey, that’s cruel’’ – they just kept adding new comments.

Is it the job of Crikey readers to police other readers’ comments? To be fair, Crikey respectfully ask their readers to do just this in their Code of Conduct. And if they fail, is that Crikey’s fault? If there’s a factual error in The Australian do you blame your readers for not ringing you up and telling you?

On both occasions, Crikey acted only when The Australian called them on it – which, when you think about it, tells you all you need to know. 

Well, it tells me all I need to know: Crikey have a post-moderated commenting system that seems to work, in that they actively remove offensive comments in response to complaints. Job well done.

It doesn’t tell me all I need to know about Caroline Overington, though: does she have a massive personal vendetta against Crikey that she can’t confine to her personal life, or is she just incredibly dense, and not remotely across current issues in her field of media? The former seems to me the most likely: unless I missed it, Overington failed to disclose in either piece that she apparently has an active threat of legal action against Crikey(!).

But evidence of the latter is powerful as well. The question of pre-moderation vs post-moderation of reader comments on a publisher website is a fascinating one. It’s also increasingly integral to modern news outlets, as reader comments make up a powerful element of a publisher’s appeal to readers.

Post-moderation, as employed by Crikey is the most popular choice for publishers. There are significant benefits not only in saving labour, but in reader engagement – readers can see their comments immediately, and so the conversation flows. That’s the reason why the last holdouts in the newspaper world such as the UK’s Daily Mail are moving towards this system. Some sites, such as Gawker and the Guardian, have turned reader comments into an art form – the comments section of these sites are among their most powerful attractions.

The drawback of course is that you cede some control to readers – and that can be dangerous, because internet people say all sorts of terrible things, and that reflects on your brand. Read the Twitter feed for @HeraldSunReader, made up exclusively of comments on News Ltd’s Melbourne tabloid. Or if you’ve got the stomach for it, head over to the blog http://foxnewscomments.com for the worst from Overington’s News Corporation stablemate, e.g:

“all americans need to take action against mus lims [sic]. do not do business with them, do not hire them, do not allow them respect or equality. it is up to the people to rid ourselves of this social cancer.”

Yeah.

The alternative of course is to have a stale, sterile site where comments are pre-screened and reader engagement is much lower. Such as … *drumroll* … The Australian. I’ve posted a number of crafted, careful comments at The Australian’s website and yet to have one make the cut onto the website. I am completely and utterly at a loss as to how you go about getting a comment on to the site. It’s extremely rare for the site to have a piece with more than 100 comments.

The point I’m trying to make is that this is fascinating area of discussion with powerful arguments for both sides. In many ways it intersects the key themes of today’s media landscape, with new internet norms butting up against traditional media values. It’s the kind of discussion I’d hope a media industry journalist in the country’s most serious broadsheet to bring value to, or at least signal an awareness of. But, for a media industry journalist, Caroline Overington seems uniquely ignorant and uncurious about current media industry debate. As a media professional, why would I bother reading Media Diary?

The good news on the horizon is that the Australian have imported former Guardian journalist Stephen Brook to edit the Monday media section. Brook is a great journalist, and if there’s one paper that genuinely contributes to these discussions, its the Guardian. I look forward to changes in The Australian’s coverage, and hopefully, a lifting of standards.

***UPDATE: the geo-block has now been applied – you can no longer watch full episodes through the website. I’m sure that both Foxtel and Apple have noticed that this show, which they paid good money to distribute, is freely and legally available on the web, and put in a complaint to Comedy Central. The next best option seems to me to be the iPad app, where you can watch segments. And if you have an Apple TV (which I recommend) you can stream it wirelessly to your TV screen, which works great. But if you really love the show (I do), buy an iTunes multi-pass for $9.99 which gives you access to about a month’s worth of shows. I don’t think that’s too bad.***

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report on ABC2 were pretty much the only things, outside of Q&A, that I’d make time to watch on TV. The 2 shows had only niche appeal for Australian FTA TV viewers, but were watched by a hard-core of dedicated fans. In early 2011 Murdoch’s Foxtel gained the rights to both shows due to a new deal with the Comedy Channel, and they disappeared from FTA.

It was annoying, but it was also hardly likely to make anyone switch to a $100 a month pay-TV package. More likely, I suspect would be fans subscribing through iTunes or reverting to the Torrents.

But at the same time as both shows switched to Foxtel, it seems that the Comedy Channel in the US switched off the geo-block on their online streaming service. You can in fact watch full episodes of both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report for free, in Australia, going back several days. So you don’t need to pay iTunes, and you certainly don’t need a Foxtel package, as long as you’re comfortable watching through a laptop or have the hardware for internet-connected TV.

Which is great, but nonetheless strikes me as weird. The Foxtel audience is relatively well-off and tech-savvy, and the TDS and Colbert audience even more so. If any group is going to be savvy with internet TV it’s this one. It seems odd that Foxtel didn’t sew up a digital rights restriction as well. But who’s complaining?

News this morning that Warner Bros. have acquired Flixster, a social movie service which lets you share movie reviews etc with your social network. Interestingly, this also gives WB ownership over Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review website, leading to interesting questions over its ability to remain impartial.

[Personally I don't think this is much of an issue. RT is an aggregator of reviews, it doesn't produce reviews itself. If there was a bias it could only be by selecting the reviewers who appear in the 'Top Critics' list, and there's no way of knowing a critic's response to a film in advance. The only (minor) potential conflict of interest I think comes from being part of a larger media conglomerate - Time Warner - which also owns TV stations and magazines that review our own films. Same goes for 20th Century Fox, and others].

This is an interesting acquisition. God knows what the company will do with Flixster [NB: working in the Australian office, I have no involvement in this whatsoever], but with WB recently partnering with Facebook to turn the social network into a transactional video site, there’s some interesting possibilities.

And recently the company launched app editions for The Dark Knight and Inception, which offer both films in full, plus special features, bonus content and social elements all within an iPad app. I urge you to check it out, it’s pretty interesting, and TDK is cheaper as an app edition than to but through iTunes.

No other movie studio of scale is doing anything anywhere near this interesting. Sony released their Crackle app, which gives totally free iOS streaming for some of their less desirable content, and it’s OK, but apart from that there’s not much else to talk about. WB are genuine innovators, and it’s pretty good to work for a company like that.

This post is in part a development and exploration of Seamus McCauley’s blog on the subject. Read it here

Having worked for a newspaper in the past, I hesitate to second guess anyone in the industry making difficult business decisions. The newspaper business is uniquely challenged. The symptoms are the same the world over: steep declines in paid-for circulation and advertising revenues from the print product, coupled with relatively puny revenues from the online version, and little reason to think any of this is going to change in the future.

No newspaper group worldwide seems to have settled on a strategic direction that will deliver sustainable profits. Some, such as the New York Times and Times of London have thrown up online paywalls to drive an additional revenue stream. Others, such as the Guardian and Daily Mail from the UK, have concentrated on building audience scale globally in an effort to increase their advertising revenues.

While it’s early days, especially on the paywall question, neither of these strategies have shown any evidence they might drive long-term profitability. So it’s no surprise that many newspaper groups are driven to what is often called ‘managed decline’ – the continual trimming of costs (including staff) in order to maintain profit margins, and in the hope that consumers don’t notice the difference in the end-product.

As new CEO of Fairfax, Greg Hywood’s decision to outsource sub-editing to Australian Associated Press’ Pagemasters service is one such difficult decision. Made for cost-saving reasons, it will not have been an easy one to make, involving as it does more than 100 potential redundancies. This is balanced by Hywood’s announced commitment to investing some of those cost-savings in reporting and writing.

As you’d expect, the staff at The Age and SMH are furious and are discussing possible strike action. And as always, there’s been a strong reaction from outside observers as well, with Hywood taking strong criticism from media commentators, bloggers, and Tweeters.

But Hywood’s need to cut costs in the long term is very real. At the same time as announcing the outsourcing of subbing, Fairfax declared their revenues were down almost 5% in the calendar year to date. As James Chessell has said in The Australian (which by the way already shares a centralised sub-editing hub with other News Ltd newspapers), “The massive challenge Hywood faces is convincing staff that he has no choice. But it is a good argument because it is mostly right.”

But was it right to outsource sub-editing, rather than make some other type of cut?

The first thing to note is that, despite apocalyptic forecasts of the impact on quality at The Age and SMH and descriptions of AAP’s Pagemasters as ‘Pagef*ckers’ and a ‘sweatshop’, they are a professional organisation with genuine credentials. As AAP journalist Josh Jerga said on Twitter to the ABC’s Mark Colvin, there “seems to be this idea Pagemasters employs inexperienced illiterates & will be based in Taiwan … Pagemasters runs out of Syd, Bris, Melb … so I don’t buy the local knowledge argument.”

Pagemasters has performed the subbing function for the UK’s Daily Telegraph for a couple of years now. This is a paper widely known as a bastion of quality – it won the British Press Awards top prize in 2010 and broke the massive story of the MP expenses scandal in the UK, all since outsourcing subbing to Pagemasters.

Media blogger Tim Burrowes wrote a thoughtful piece on the value of sub-editing in Mumbrella called ‘Why sub-editors matter’. The irony, not lost on his commenters, is his own piece was both (a) riddled with grammar and spelling errors and (b) nonetheless very good. On that basis, you might conclude he completely undermined his own intentions, and that sub-editing is completely overrated!

Bloggers and online commentators, competing with newspapers for audience attention if not ad spend, have different standards when it comes to grammar and spelling, not to mention sourcing, fact-checking and accuracy. But what is the value of grammar, spelling and fact-checking? If a blogger can write a piece riddled with spelling and grammar errors, and it is still a perfectly enjoyable product for consumers, does this not lower the bar for newspapers and diminish the value of sub-editing? To take but one example, in it’s online version the Guardian often eschews sub-editing for it’s ‘live-blog’ pieces, preferring to correct errors on the fly. This does not damage the product in my opinion, since it rightly places a greater value on immediacy than accuracy. So while a newspaper would not abandon sub-editing completely, can they not afford to cut a few corners? Everyone else is doing it.

This for me leads to the most powerful argument against outsourcing subbing: fact-checked, accurate, error-free, authoritative news is all newspapers have got left. When rumours of Osama bin Laden’s death began circulating on Twitter yesterday, I read thousands of tweets on the subject. But I didn’t definitively believe it until I read a tweet from a New York Times journalist, because I know that the New York Times will have verified the accuracy of the rumour with informed sources before even tweeting about it.

The always-worthwhile UK blogger Seamus McCauley puts it best when he says:

Newspapers don’t break news – news breaks on Twitter, then on blogs, then on radio and TV. Newspapers don’t have the only or the best writers, they don’t own the only printing presses, they aren’t the only way to find out what’s going on or what it means.

A news organisation’s unique selling point is the process by which it verifies and legitimates information, a process on which their reputation is built. Anyone can write anything they like, on Twitter or their own blog or in the comments on the BBC, but it’s not until a recognised news authority checks it out that anyone takes it as more than an ubsubstantiated rumour. If the recognised news authorities out-source that validation, taking the subbing function outside the building, all they’re doing is publishing words and letting someone check if those words are true.

Being seen to be authoritative is critical for differentiating the newspaper product from other categories of comment in the marketplace. By giving that up, newspapers would be giving up their competitive edge. They will never compete with blogs for immediacy, and never compete again with social media for audience reach. But the enduring value of the newspaper product is in the perception of its authority.

The problem for Greg Hywood and Fairfax is that the perception of The Age and SMH’s authority can not be relied upon in perpetuity. It is not a magical property that comes from something being printed on paper. It is something that the brand needs to enact every single day in order for it to remain true.

And the loss of this perception has genuine consequences. McCauley gives the example of the Daily Mirror in the UK (a paper for whom I used to work), which in 2004 ran a front cover story about Iraqis being abused by British soldiers which turned out to be fake - a horrendous fact-checking error, which a good sub might have picked up. The result, in McCauley’s words was an “immediate and evidently permanent loss of about 10% of readers”, and which could well be seen as the beginning of the end for this 100 year old newspaper. Time will tell. While Fairfax will argue there won’t be any deterioration in the quality of their product, and they may be right, they would do well to heed this example.