Sludge Report #191: Publish And Be Damned

Wednesday, 10 June 2009, 11:37 pm
Column: C.D. Sludge

This afternoon a package of treats arrived in the Scoop offices with a selection of treats and sweets and a note wishing us 10 more years of fun and success.

The package was ordered for us by Rosalea Barker - our very long serving US based expat columnist.

It was a very pleasant surprise from a very appropriate source on a day which is very special for Scoop, our 10th Birthday.

Rosalea is emblematic of what makes Scoop Scoop. She is one of the large dedicated group of content producers who send us articles, releases, commentaries, feedback, images and cartoons day in day out. (Rosalea has in fact over the years submitted all of these things excepting cartoons.)

We here at Scoop.co.nz publish that material, usually fairly swiftly as is our way.

Consequently there has been a lot of material published over the past decade.

As of this evening over that 10 year period (3652 days) Scoop's team have posted 292,466 stories/press releases/speeches and commentaries under 15,000 different bylines- an average of 80 a day, though these days we are running much closer to 200 items a day.

In addition we have loaded have 69,367 media files - images, audio, videos and pdfs - online.

All the information ever posted to Scoop remains online. And we intend to leave it there forever - a permanent record of NZ political and business history available, to all, for free.

There is a little too much information for Google to index, and so to view it comprehensively you will need to have a look in our brand new Library search.scoop.co.nz, launched in November last year.

Using the Scoop Library it is possible to do some more detailed research into Rosalea's contributions to Scoop.

For example you can see that Rosalea first started writing her column "Stateside with Rosalea" in September 2000. Since then she has penned nearly 700 columns for Scoop.

We first met Rosalea back in the pre-Scoop days when we were working on a similar website with a different name. Then Rosalea volunteered to produce transcripts of the Parliamentary Questions and Answers during the great superannuation debate of the late 1990s when Winston Peters was working on a plan to get compulsory superannuation in place.

In November 1999 Rosalea issued this press release as part of her campaign as an independent candidate for Wellington Central in the 1999 election.

More recently Rosalea has been able to pursue her ambition of becoming a reporter. She covered the 2000, 2004 and 2008 US Presidential elections for us, and in March 2007 visited the Oval Office with Prime Minister Helen Clark as an accredited member of the NZ media party.

So far as I know Rosalea is the only online columnist (blogger) in NZ to have visited the Oval Office and attended a press conference with a US President, one of a bunch of firsts which Scoop has achieved over the past decade.

Yes it has been a while - but there is much more to come!

Scoop's Tempestuous Childhood

When Ian Llewellyn, Andrew McNaughton and I founded Scoop in June 1999 we expected it would be a lot easier for us to become online media magnates than has turned out to be the case. And when the fourth Scoop founder - Scoop co-editor Selwyn Manning joined us a few weeks later, he clearly hoped that would be the case also.

But fortunately patience has its rewards.

These days new media companies appear to be popping up like daisies all over the place. We at Scoop are always as encouraging as we can be to the new entrants to the game. That said, when asked, I also try to explain the realities of the business, which at present mainly revolve around jam-tomorrow scenarios rather than jam today.

But while managing Scoop has certainly been a struggle at times - it has also been hugely exciting, rewarding and educative.

Selwyn and I - and our wives Angela and Wendy - sometimes joke about Scoop's tempestuous childhood. Soon we will be entering Scoop's teenagehood!

Scoop Today

Some interesting things about Scoop which readers may not know:

- Scoop has an audience of roughly 500,000 unique browsers (readers) a month in NZ and around the world according to Google analytics. Our NZ monthly readership 240,000 odd is comparable on this measure to one of the large metro newspapers;

- Scoop is staffed by a core team of 13 with the bulk of the editorial work done by a core team of just 3 duty editors and four part-time assistants;

- Scoop has now been through two dot.com booms and busts, and we are planning to be around for the next two or three;

- Scoop.co.nz is only six months younger than NZHerald.co.nz and is older than Stuff.co.nz. (And if you count the time spent by Scoop's founders in a previous venture - which was remarkably similar - then we started this business at the beginning of 1997, making us the oldest online news service in NZ);

- And thanks largely to that longevity, Scoop is now part of a exclusive group of New Zealand websites with a Google Page Rank of 8. (The others in this club are Stuff.co.nz, NZHerald.co.nz, TVNZ.co.nz and Richard McManus's remarkable globally recognised blog ReadWriteWeb.com. By comparison NZ's biggest website by a country mile Trademe has a Google Rank of seven and 3News.co.nz has a PR of six.)

Then and Now - The Future Of News

Scoop's 5th Birthday Cake in 2004

Five years ago we celebrated our birthday in very different circumstances to today.

Back then we had only just begun to actually earn a living from Scoop and it seemed as if the online world was brimming with opportunity. We were on the eve of a period in which our big competitors in the Newspaper business were about to start taking their online presence seriously, and the online advertising boom which continues today was about to begin.

Five years and several million dollars of investment later these same newspapers are struggling to understand what is happening to their business models.

While everybody can see that online news is clearly the future - try as they might, the executives in the formerly untouchable news giants cannot see a way to make sufficient money from the new medium to enable the production of real journalism.

Solving this conundrum in order to maintain a functioning democracy is rapidly becomeing one of the key constitutional challenges of the 21st century.

Now in the middle if 2009, 10 months into the Global Financial Crisis, the transformation in the news business is well underway. In the states Newspaper companies are falling like flies.

For Scoop this means a period of opportunity.

However it is also a time of considerable threat.

Keeping up with the game is something that Scoop has always prided itself in doing and that is our strategy.

For years we were the main source of breaking online text news in NZ. We were the first to introduce live ratings "most read" tables and continue to provide more comprehensive ratings than any of our competitors.

More recently we were the first text news publishers to introduce podcasts as well as video and images.

These days in order to stay in the game we need to be on top of blogging, social media, conversational media marketing, new methods of advertising, syndication and an increasing myriad of new technologies.

Notwithstanding the global financial crisis the pace of change in online media - both on the production side and, importantly, on the commercial side - continues to accelerate.

Werewolf - A New Journalistic Beginning

Scoop's latest move in this tradition of innovation has come this week with the launch of Werewolf.co.nz edited by Scoop's Political Editor Gordon Campbell.

Scoop is honoured to have Gordon on board, not only as a colleague, but also as a shareholder and creative collaborator.

Gordon's NZ and international political coverage - since April 2008 - has provided a sharp leading edge to Scoop's editorial efforts.

[Sidebar: Gordon's decision to come and work with Scoop last year completed a circle for me personally. As a teenager I had read Gordon's work in the Listener very keenly and it was what inspired me to become a reporter.

Later in 1989 - as a young would-be-reporter with no experience or qualifications - I took a freelance story about an industrial accident to Gordon in the offices of the Listener, then located in Wellington in the Bowen State Building.

Gordon - as acting Listener features editor - read the article, quickly added a new intro, and sent it off to the chief sub Simon Wilson for publication. He then commissioned a second article from me - on airport noise - and as a result of the publication of these two articles and Gordon's recommendation I was hired by the Dominion Post a couple of months later.]

Starting this month Werewolf will become a new key element in the Scoop story - an extension of Scoop's mission back towards where it came from - the world of journalism and reporting.

Over the past year we have been developing ways in which to collaborate with reporters who have been caught up in the media transformation process.

While Scoop cannot yet pay these independent reporters proper salaries - we can work with them to help them to create value and invest in their online careers with a view to commercial viability in time.

Scoop's intention is to help independent artisan journalists invest in their online futures in the expectation that as the news transformation process continues, they will keep a stake in the game.

Werewolf is intended to be a standard bearer for this aspect of Scoop's development.

It will bring together the best writers who contribute to Scoop - as well as hopefully some new ones who are yet to approach us.

Werewolf will endeavour to publish real journalism and reporting - to provide probity not simply punditry.

Werewolf is also intended to explore the new frontier of seeking direct financial support from our readers to fund real journalism.

[To find out more about how you can assist Scoop as a reader see… Scoop Announcement: Werewolf Launches 8th June!
http://scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0905/S00277.htm ]

The Heart Of Scoop - Allowing Voices To Be Heard

Being 10 years old means that Scoop has had plenty of time to think about things like our mission.

We settled on a form for this some time ago [http://www.scoop.co.nz/about/mission.html ] - and while it is still evolving at the edges - the core remains constant:

"Scoop believes in the power of information to transform lives. It believes in the power of the internet to resolve conflict. And it believes in the power of compelling ideas to propel themselves into political consciousness if they are able to get exposure and be debated. Scoop is, necessarily, a forum that is neither censored through its own prejudices nor controlled by a multinational media conglomerate.

Scoop's mission is: “To be an agent of positive change.”

Practically speaking this means Scoop sees its role as allowing ALL voices to be heard.

Scoop does not discriminate a great deal. We have built a big tent and we do not exercise our prejudices or opinions as gate-keepers to this tent.

We publish things - often - that we disagree with. And in doing so we let the ideas of others compete on a level playing field.

But that said, the true heart of Scoop comes from where it originated - in the world of journalism. Scoop is staffed by professional journalists and it always will be.

One of the greatest pleasures we have had at Scoop over the past decade has been to give other journalists the same opportunity that Gordon gave me in 1989 - the opportunity to write and to reach an audience.

Journalism is a calling. People are driven to become journalists, to tell the stories around them, to right wrongs and to correct injustices, to shine light into dark places and ask curly questions of the powerful.

For many this desire is seated in a compulsion to try to make a difference, to participate in a world in which too often we feel powerless.

While theoretically the opportunity to speak is now available universally - we call it blogging - unfortunately most blogging occurs in an echo chamber.

People can speak, but is anybody is listening?

Where Scoop's Google Page Rank of 8 really bites - is that once published on Scoop, material often reaches its intended audience. On numerous occasions Scoop has made a real difference.

Over this past decade - thanks to our willingness to embrace talent and in many cases publish difficult stories - Scoop has had the pleasure of publishing some momentous material..

Examples include:
- the unanswered questions in the official story of what happened on 9/11/2001,
- the manipulation of intelligence which led to the Iraq War,
- the gaping hole in US democracy created by black box electronic voting machines.

And here at home in NZ:
- the injustice in the imprisonment and persecution of Ahmed Zaoui;
- the media and police hysteria around the October 15th Terror raids;
- child poverty and the continual failure of all governments to address it.

In each of these stories reporters and writers stepped up to the plate and submitted important pieces on these subjects for us to publish. Sometimes we wrote them ourselves also, and at times we tracked down material and sought permission to give it extra exposure.

Scoop's audience is not huge, but it is influential - and the internet being what it is, once an idea with merit is exposed to even a little bit of sunlight it tends to propagate far and wide with a bit of a nudge.

Here at Scoop we intend to remain true to these principles and to our Mission over the next ten years.

We also intend to continue to have fun, to foster talent and to be both fiercely independent and fearless.

As for you dear readers, we would welcome any and all assistance that you are willing to provide. Depending how this financial crisis goes we may need it.

We would also be interested in any feedback and suggestions you have for improving the way we do things. Just email editor@scoop.co.nz

Kia Kaha
Alastair Thompson
For the Scoop team
June 10, 2009

P.S. A big thanks to all the people who make Scoop happen on a daily basis: Selwyn Manning, Lyndon Hood, Spike Mountjoy, Gordon Campbell, Jackie Little, David Mclellan, George Mclellan, Chris Blundell, Steven Wood, Billy Naylor, Shelley Smith, Andrew Thompson, Janet Gudman, Pattrick Smellie, Jonathan Underhill, Paul McBeth, Lindsay Shelton, Phil Bilbrough, Jeremy Rose, Wendy Cooper, Margaret Thompson, Finlay Thompson and Andrew McNaughton.

P.P.S A big thanks to those who have served us well in recent times but who have now moved on: Kevin List, Ngaruna Kapinga, Wade Bishop, Jim Cousins, Chloe Thomsen and Murray Potts.

P.P.P.S. Also a big thanks to our key suppliers and partners, Simon Blake and Rachel at Katipo, Andrew Caudwell, Rick Findlater and Gavin at Catalyst IT and Toni, Andrew and Kate at 3Di.

P.P.P.P.S A huge thanks to all our contributors including: Rosalea Barker, Michael Collins, Suzan Mazur, Jason Leopold, Catherine Austin Fitts, Martin LeFevre, Karim Sahai, Al Giordano, Sam Smith, Chris Ritchie, John Minto, Sherwood Ross, Bill Berkowitz, Greg Palast, Brad Freidman, (the late John Gideon), Ellen Theissen, Sol Salbe, Uri Avnery, Michael Lockhart, Connie Lawn, Daniel Hopsicker, Kyle Hence, Richard Ehrlich, Binoy Kampmark, Bernard Weiner, Jim Miles, Martha Rosenberg, Evelyn Pringle, Paul Buchanan…. (and too many to name, apologies for anyone missed from this list).

P.P.P.P.P.S And finally a big thanks to our readers, subscribers, advertisers and supporters without whom none of this would be worthwhile or feasible.

© Scoop Media

Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

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