talking about big media companies...

others have pointed to the apparent paradox that over the same period tha  the Internet opens up the one to many world of mass media, that world itself has been consolidating. I just found this interesting info graphic from frugal dad on US media (thanks to my friend Faiza Ambah). While he tells the story front he point of view of an American media consumer, the same companies have grab sway across the rest of the world, including South Africa. (I speak as a father to a girl who's television viewing is monopolized by the Disney Channel).  His sources are listed at the end of the graphic.


Source: Frugal dad

Reading the Writing on the Wall

In Business Day today are two stories about the health or otherwise of South African newspapers.

One reports on the decline in newspaper and magazine sales shown in the latest data from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC).  It reports that: "Overall, 72000 (5,1%) fewer newspapers were sold than in the same quarter last year". It also quotes Gordon Patterson, Vice-Chair of the ABC: "The loss year on year is equivalent to the closure of an average- sized title. And this is in spite of an increase in questionable distribution at less than 50% of cover price."

The other story (on the same page by the same writer) is rather more upbeat. It claims that "Research shows that advertising spend across all media channels in the nine months from January to September is up almost R3bn compared with the same period last year" - an increase of 14%. Pretty good given the state of the economy. And the article makes clear that while print may not have benefitted as much as television, it is a winner: "since January," it goes on, "advertising expenditure had increased ... 55% for print" As the UK Satirical Magazine 'Private Eye' used to put it  - clearly a call for "trebles all round" for those in the print (newspapers and magazine) industry.

So can both stories be true? And what do they tell us about the state of South African newspapers?

The ABC data  - available on its website - shows that daily newspaper sales declined in the last quarter. This is part of an established longer term trend. Daily paid newspapers sales have fallen from 1,6m in the 3rd quarter of 2008 copies per day to a little over 1,3m in the third quarter of 2011. Of the top six titles, the Daily Sun (number 1) is down almost 9% year on year, Son (number 3) is down over 9% and The Star (number 5) is down 15%. Only Isolezwe (number 2) is up (over 9%). All the top weekend newspaper titles are down also, year on year with the exception of Ilanga (up over 6%). In addition, the ABC report notes an increase in discounted sales.

So if newspapers sales are declining can they really be earning (lots) more money from advertising? Well the first thing to point out is how nonsensical Business Day's reading of the data was. This is a graph from the Media Shop report they credited in their story.



From http://www.mediashop.co.za/Press-Room-News.aspx?id=29

It shows data of total ad spend across all media over the last three years from January to September. In all of them, January is the lowest month and September the highest or close to the highest (last year was the world cup so unsurprisingly, May and June were higher then). So stating that "advertising income has increased... by 55%" by comparing September to January is not the best way to look at whether newspapers are doing well.

It's more useful to compare the period January - September this year against last, which shows that, across all media, ad spend was up 14%. And 14%, in our current environment still looks a healthy figure. So, in spite of the circulation declines, is this good news for the earnings of newspaper publishers? Well I'm not convinced.

To take a view, you need to understand a little bit about how these figures are generated. Neilsen produce these figures by measuring the number of adverts in newspapers, on radio and television and then multiplying these by the Rand rates published in media channel's rate cards (their price lists). But media channels do what many retailers do from time to time, they offer discounts and special deals. Especially when times are tough. These deals are not published, so not available to Neilsen. In other words, we have no idea in fact whether the media owners actually got 14% more income this year.

And even if they did, the ABC data shows some interesting things about print inflation that put into question newspapers ability to sustain their earnings.


ABC Report 3rd quarter 2011


This chart shows that Daily newspapers advertising rates have increased by 7,86% year on year while their readership has declined by 7,67%. As a result the cost of newspaper advertising when measured by how many people are reached per R, has gone up by 17,46%. The comparable increase for weekly newspapers is 12,77%.  The story in free to air television is the reverse, with their increase in prices being less than the increase in their audiences. Bottom line: print is becoming m(a lot) ore expensive compared to other media at the same time as it is loosing audience.

This puts a big questionmark on their ability to sustain their earnings.

And a last point on these stories. If professional journalism is going to survive, let alone thrive in the brave new world we need journalists to get a lot better at reading and writing about data. Business Day's ad spend story doesn't cite the original source of the data it uses (Neilsen). It takes the apparent increase in income on face value without demonstrating any understanding of what the data actually means . The comparisons of September and January figures is entirely misleading. And this is a publication writing about their own industry. Everything I've written here would be common sense to the advertising sales staff sitting a floor away from the desk of the journalist who wrote the story. And this is Business Day, a paper that deals daily in numbers - stock prices, economic data and more.

Guarding the Guardians - transparency, censorship and online spying

Which governments are most active in restricting information online?

Last week Google published an interesting report on government requests for removal of content on their sites. So which countries come top of this list? Well you may find it suprising that China comes in at number 16 with only 3 requests, well below the US, which comes in at number 3 with 92 requests. Brazil made the most requests (224).

Also revealed by Google are the numbers of requests for information on users. Russia made 42 requests. The US, at the top of this list, made 5,950 requests.

Google should be applauded for publishing this information, which also includes data on how many of these requests Google acceded to (93% of US requests for user data). As Google point out on their site though, to get a real picture, we will need many other organisations (Facebook, Visa, Mastercard and Amazon come to mind) to publish similar information.

And which institutions are leading in letting information free?

I've been attending some sessions at  'Power Reporting',  an African journalism conference at University of Witwatersrand, where I research and teach. A number of sessions have focused on online datamining and how useful it can be for journalists. Journalists from the New York Times, the BBC and News 24 have all shown very interesting work. One things I've noticed though is  that media organisations, even where they mine and present important data to their audiences, too often they do not make the data itself available to their audiences.

Andrew Trench, who heads the investigations unit at News 24 is a leader in using data-mining techniques in South Africa - essentially freeing information that is either secret or so inaccessible as to be hidden from the public. He presented a very interesting study on using government information on the awarding of mining licenses to create stories and maps that tracked the process which has been a source of significant political and economic controversy. You can read his blog on how he did it. But the database that he created by scraping official websites is, as yet,  unpublished. By contrast, Google's transparency report also offers users the ability to download the data so they can undertake their own analyses.

If journalists are going to maximise their contribution to 'guarding the guardians' in our societies we need to see them liberating more information. Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog,  is credited as the source of the meme that 'information wants to be free', an idea that media owners, unsurprisingly, respond negatively to on most occassions. But whether information is made free in the financial sense or not, what all journalists and academics for that matter should be committed to is 'free' as in 'freedom'  and as in 'freedom of information' - the rights to which  investigative journalists rely on in getting access to the information in the first place.

south africa is not keeping up!

In discussing internet connectivity I've used the analogy of the development of the global train network in the 19th Century before. What the analogy helps to bring to the fore is how connectivity is important not only in absolute but in relative terms. Towns or countries that didn't get connected, started to be disadvantaged relative to those that did. In the case of trains, a major impact was on enabling trade (or not). In the case of the internet,  its enabling communication, social networks and transfers of knowledge, ideas and information.



So the issue of internet connectivity in South Africa is not (just) how far are we in getting people connected, and at what speed and price, but how connected are we in comparison to other countries. The graph above is based on World Bank data up to 2008. It shows the number of people connected per hundred people. In 1999, South Africa sat at 4.2 people per hundred, close to  the world median of 4.7 per hundred. But by 2008, though the density of connections had more than doubled, South Africa's comparative performance vs the world had fallen to little more than a third of the world's internet density, with a lower figure than many other countries in the continent, including Zimbabwe, and about the same as the West Bank and Gaza.

As concerning is the rate of growth. The steepness of the line running through 2008 shows the growth rate up to that time and South Africa's was slower than any of the other African countries shown in the chart. A recent study by World Wide Works indicates that this growth rate may have picked up recently, and the introduction of uncapped access also give some hope for an improvement but this is now off a low (comparative) base.

Why Keeping Up Matters
Ive written before on why connectivity matters to development. But the graph itself offers a great example of why this matters. It was generated using public data explorer from google labs. I read about this tool reading Hans Rosling on the TEDblog. Professor Rosling developed Gapminder, a beautiful way of representing data which he sold to Google a few years ago.

Here's some of the data above, based on world bank data again, presented using his software. I've added information on mobile density. Click on play!

His blog mentions an exciting development that he and others campaigned for - making all the World Bank's published development data available online for free. Last week the World Bank did just this!

But, you need a connection...

So now (based on 2008 data), eight out of ten Americans, more than one in four Tunisians, and about the same proportion of Mauritian's can get access to some of the best data available on economic and social development in Africa. But even taking the latest ITU data into account, less than one in eight South Africans can do the same.