Norgdom

Just to let you know that we have fixed a voting glitch that happened after we upgraded our servers that caused voting not to be halved after 24 hours.

It has meant some stories have been stuck at the top for a longer period, but this should rectify in the next day.

Thanks to everyone who pointed it out. Let me know if you notice any other issues
Cheers and hope to read you round the norg.

Could a piece written on the Norg ever compete for a Walkley?

Well I think so, and I was more than happy to sign a Walkley entry form for WA blogger and Cit J Liz Murray who wrote some compelling articles for PerthNorg on Aboriginal deaths in custody.

As Liz put it, “I thought I’d push some boundaries & am entering the deaths in custody story & photos for the Walkley”.

It’s not an issue that receives a lot of mainstream press coverage and Liz took it upon herself to highlight the issue and she got a great response.
You can read Liz’s original pieces  here and here.

Good luck Liz, we’re all behind you!

On Thursday night I’ve been invited to be a guest speaker at the Walkley Media Forum.

I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on The War of Attrition: Influence and Diversity. It’s hard to keep up with who owns what in Australian Media at the moment with a new deal announced just about every day, so I’m looking forward to thrashing out where the future of Australian media is headed.
For those interested in attending the details are:
6.30pm Thursday August 23
The Ernst & Young Building
11 Mounts Bay Road
Perth WA 6000

Entry: FREE − drinks & food provided
Others joining me on the panel will be:

• Gary Adshead, Snr Reporter Channel 7
• Danielle Benda, ABC Radio
• Martin Turner, Community Newspaper Group

RSVP to the Alliance at 1300 656 513 or email melissa.mcallister@alliance.org.au

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMbLoUlLYYk

www.podcamp.info is running a competition to bring Podcamp to the Australian city with the most votes. So far we’ve managed to stay ahead of other Australian cities. But with the competition closing this Friday, we wanted to save a few votes until the last days in order to claim the title as the new media capital of Australia.

So, it’s up to the Cit Js and readers of PerthNorg to bring us over the line.

Go here to stake your claim on behalf of Perth.

Content should be free.
That’s why it’s significant that The New York Times is rumoured to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content including archives.
There’s nothing I find more frustrating than following a link to a paid subscriber story and it’s not just The New York Times that is guilty.
The largest offender in Australia is the Australian Financial Review.

It’s hard to know what may have pushed The New York Times to make the change, but maybe they realised that they were damaging their own web readership and a number of theories have been floated including that their own online subscriptions were in decline.
My personal opinion is that as news consumers we either pay for content or we put up with ads. As I’m a strong believer that content should be free, I’m happy to put up with ads as the trade-off.

It’s an important point for publishers with the headline today in the Financial Times that online advertising will overtake US newspapers by 2011.
It’s a scary time for traditional media stalwarts, but it’s good to see they are waking up to the industry they are now playing in.

I suppose the fear that moving content online could mean people stop buying their paper, becomes a little mute if people are not buying it anyway.

Give people what they want and you will be rewarded in the long term.

Here’s what CNet has to say on the issue, and as always Scott Karp has some interesting observations as well:

The new economics of media make charging for content nearly impossible because there is always someone else producing similar content for free — even if the free content isn’t “as good as” the paid content by some meaningful metric, it doesn’t matter because there’s so much content of at least proximate quality that the paid content provider has virtually no pricing power.

UPDATE: Argh! Just realised the Financial Times is another offender, hit on online this story after reading its piece on line advertising.

I feel like a bad mother, but yesterday was PerthNorg’s first birthday. I only realised this morning in a meeting when someone asked me how long ago we launched.

I’ve never been good remembering with dates
It has been an amazing year- the best thing for me personally has been the opportunity to meet so many brilliant people. I’m not an overly sentimental person and I’m not prone to one of those  “looking back over the year” posts. Right now I’m happy where we are, but even more excited about where we are going.

And by “we” I mean all of us. Long live Cit Js