What a load of tosh.
It is simply a way of blaming the audience for your failure to communicate.
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It is all the rage to say that the modern attention span is decreasing because of the online world.
What a load of tosh. It is simply a way of blaming the audience for your failure to communicate.
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Generation X, Generation Y and Millennials are a myth. They are a delusion we have used to pit old against young and to build a book, research and media industry filled with platitudes that somehow claim to be insight.
It is time for the so-called experts in media and communications folks to cut the crap and stop building stories and characteristics around those imaginary generations. For too long we have quietly accepted the idea that there is a clearly delineated and characterised line of generations when even the most casual glance shows us how ridiculous this is. A great change is coming. It will impact politics, media, business and all aspects of life, primarily in Western democratic societies. There have already been early hints but when it arrives it will be sudden, unexpected and destabilizing for the status quo.
This change will be caused not by the arrival of something but a disappearance - the loss of baby boomers. When they dwindle and disappear, power will shift to the generations that come behind them. It has already started to happen, as the 2016 obituaries of the famous show. The publishing model for academia is so broken it verges on satire. Globally, it costs taxpayers and researchers hundreds of millions of dollars every year that could be far better spent on research.
The only people benefiting are the publishing companies themselves. The five largest publishers, which make up 53% of all academic journals published, have profit margins ranging from 23%-42%. To give you a sense of how much this is, the total turnover of academic publishing in 2011 was $9.4 billion a year. Yes, you read that right, billion. And most of that money came from the public purse. Yes, we have just had the hottest February ever (and, wow, what a spike it was) and 2015 was another record warm year but it is enormously important that global warming advocates and climate scientists don’t overplay this. Remember 1998? Remember the spike in temperatures that El Niño brought? Then you must remember how that became the cherrypicked gold standard for climate change deniers and a decade of discussion and research into a “pause” in global warming that recent papers now suggest didn’t exist. Newspapers and broadcasters continue to fail online because they won't let us in. Here's how they can be profitable again.
Australia is on track for a new swathe of media laws that appear to even further concentrate media power into fewer hands. These changes to legislation forced by declining profits in legacy media continue to be a fact of life simply because newspaper management here and around the word are incapable of adjusting to the online world. And that is because they don’t understand its most fundamental ingredient. Over the past few days at the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society's annual conference I have found myself pulled deeply into concerns of climate scientists in regards to savage cuts to climate science jobs at Australia's premier scientific body the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). I have arranged a media conference and many many interviews for Australian scientists responding to the announcement by CSIRO Chief Executive Officer Larry Marshall that most of the organisation's researchers working in climate modelling would lose their jobs. Of the 140 researchers working specifically in this area, 110 would go. I may be watching from afar, but the US election is turning into a case study of one of the fundamentals of communication — that of having a clear message and endpoint at the core of your communication plan. I find this is particularly relevant to the Democrat candidates where the contrast in the core message couldn't be more obvious. A year ago, Hillary Clinton was considered a walk-up start as the likely candidate for the Democrats. Today, as happened two terms ago when Barack Obama stormed to the lead, Clinton finds herself with a real fight on her hands just to get the nomination. This time she is not pitted against a grand orator with a vision but a grumpy old man with a vision, Bernie Sanders. As you can see, her competitors may be very different but they both have one thing in common, a vision. Both Obama and Sanders went into their campaigns with a clear goal for change. By contrast, Hillary Clinton appears to again be running on the idea that it is her turn. In science communication we always talk about getting to know your audience but we seldom, if ever, deal with a more important question for experts in the media, who do you want to be in public? It's a vital question for anyone with plans to be a public communicator of science or even a good presenter in academia. The public persona you choose for yourself will shape your audience, your credibility and the way different sectors of your profession and the public perceive you. It has been a long time coming but this year has seemed to be the turning point for the usefulness of media releases in Australia. Around six months ago, I noticed that there was a definite change in the way media releases were being picked up by local publications. Internationally that has not been the case this year but I suspect this will change sooner rather than later. |
AuthorAlvin Stone edited newspapers and other magazines for 15 years before moving across to media communications where he now works with more than 100 climate scientists in Australia. Archives
June 2016
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