Kersh Media's blog

The BBC is the neighbour at the end or your garden with a giant leylandii. He smiles at you and is a nice enough bloke. But the problem is his tree. It’s too big. It greedily sucks in nutrients from the soil and blocks out the sunlight. It’s an impressive tree by any standards, but it casts a massive shadow. And in that gloomy, publicly funded shade, other peoples’ plants struggle to get a foot hold. Some wilt and die. For years the community’s been talking about what should be done. Some people want the eylandii to be severely lopped.

So What Lessons Are There for  Online Video and How an Organisation Communicates?

When the first railways were built, they used horses not steam engines to pull the carriages. Everyone could see the benefit of rails, compared with the inefficient, muddy roads of the day, but not everyone was convinced that the new fangled steam engines were the way forward. Yesterday Kent County Council announced it was axing its online video channel Kent TV.

The popcorn cost nearly as much as the tickets, but taking the kids to see James Cameron’s movie Avatar in 3D last week really was a terrific experience. The film’s breaking all box office records and it’s easy to see why. In case you haven’t seen it, it’s an amazing 3D spectacle which transports you to an imaginary planet called Pandora.
The 3D is not gimmicky, but engages you, draws you in and makes you feel you’re really there. I certainly felt I was watching something innovative and significant.

Did an apple fall from a tree and hit Issac Newton on the head thus prompting the great physicist to discover the law of gravity?

Almost certainly not.

But watching a falling apple did concentrate his mind and lead him, during the late 1660's, to formulate the theory that gravity operates in an inverse-square proportion. If this was true, Newton deduced that it would be possible to predict the planet's orbital periods. He therefore named the force "universal gravitation".

When the mighty snows came to Kent (18th December 2009) I posted a couple of videos to YouTube showing what it looked like at Chart Sutton near Maidstone. One of them was spotted by the Guardian newspaper's Adam Gabbatt who linked to it on the newspaper's live snow blog. I think he liked the way an 11 year old measured 23cm of snowfall while eating a snowball! After the Guardian linked to the video, we had more than a thousand views within a couple of hours! It constantly amazes me how different media are converging.

At the end of May 2009 the Kent on Sunday freesheet started charging 90p a copy. At the time I blogged how this was an curious experiment and one I thought unlikely to succeed. People seemed unwilling to pay. Worse still, newsagents were unwiling to stock them.

Six months later; guess what? They're giving them away again!

Yes folks, as of today the Kent on Sunday is free.

A journalist who works for the paper told me, "It was a disaster. You can't give something away and then suddenly start charging for it. No-one was buying them, it was too confusing".

(Continued from Part 2).

Rupert Murdoch makes a false distinction between his “expensive and distinguished” reporters, whom he claims create original journalistic content and the evil online “aggregators” who merely “rewrite – at times without attribution” information from other sources.

It’s simply not true. Journalists report news or comment on it, they don’t create news. Today journalists, including Murdoch’s, spend more and more time online “aggregating” their stories.

(Continued from Part 1).

Rupert Murdoch is no fool and surely realises that the internet is rapidly destroying the traditional journalistic function of newspapers, radio and TV (i.e. to break news stories and tell us what’s going on).

But his speech to the Federal Trade Commission’s Workshop seemed reluctant to admit it.
This is what psychiatrists call “cognitive dissonance”. Cognitive dissonance is when you refuse to accept the impact of new information because it’s too overwhelming.

PART 1.
“Feisty”, “combative”, “shrewd”, “pugnacious”, “clever”.. All words I’d use to describe Rupert Murdoch the owner of News International, Sky TV, The Times, the Sun and more. But I’d never have described him as “desperate”.. until this week.

This week Murdoch launched an attack on online journalistic thieves who steal the stories of his “expensive and distinguished journalists” who he says invest “days, weeks or even months in their stories”.

Murdoch brands these parasitic vultures “aggregators”

Rupert Murdoch: "The future of journalism is more promising than ever – limited only by editors and producers unwilling to fight for their readers and viewers, or government using its heavy hand either to over-regulate us or subsidize us."

Here's the full text of Murdoch's recent speech.