TPN :: No Illusions with Cameron Reilly | Tag Archive

Unfortunate Imagery

Posted on 15. Mar, 2011 by Cameron in Australian media

Reading Zite on my iPad tonight and saw this headline:

Drilled down into the story to discover the young guy in the photo is actually NOT a victim (or perpetrator) of pedophilia, but is, instead, an Aussie in Japan:

TrueLocal Advertisers Deserve A Refund

Posted on 09. Oct, 2009 by Cameron in Australian media

I went looking for a house cleaner today and ended up on News.com.au’s TrueLocal site. I found someone in my area, clicked on their ad, then tried to send them an email. Up popped the below contact form. But I COULDN’T contact them because the verification captcha is broken.

When I mentioned this on Twitter, @truelocal replied

@cameronreilly Thanks for brining it to our attention, it’s an issue from our end with Firefox3.5 and will thankfully be fixed v soon

Well that’s all fine and dandy, BUT, I asked, are you going to be refunding your advertiser’s funds? It seems to me like you aren’t delivering your promised services.

So far, no response from @truelocal….

It’s not acceptable when billion dollar media companies can’t get a freakin website to work properly. My suggestion? Stop hiring monkeys.

If I was a journalist for Fairfax, I’d probably do a story on this.

Bad news for newspapers

Posted on 01. Sep, 2009 by Cameron Reilly in Australian media, media 2.0

Bronwen has written a great piece explaining, once again, why newspapers (and the companies behind them) are at the end of the road.

Of course the argument for paid content is about defending commercial news organisations and not journalism. Problem is the two aren’t mutually exclusive anymore.

For starters, it excludes the competition from government subsidised media – SBS and ABC – who probably can’t wait for News Corp and Fairfax to start charging for their content. A senior news person at SBS told me just yesterday that he “WANTS those sites to charge!” – not because he believes in paid content, he doesn’t, but because it certainly brightens his future.

Here’s my thinking about news “paywalls”

Posted on 24. Aug, 2009 by Cameron in Australian media

Pick any mainstream news brand site – News.com.au or TheAge.com.au – and take a look at the front page. Now, tell me – if you had to pay to read each of those articles, how many of them are SO RELEVANT to your life that would you pay to read them right now?

Here’s my quick analysis for today’s sites (click to zoom):