Wide Area News
Captain Kirk’s mission
by Russell Brown
How will David Kirk fare as CEO of Fairfax Publishing?
Local coverage of former All Black captain David Kirk’s appointment as CEO of the Fairfax media company was surprisingly soft. The Dominion Post ran a puff piece on its new big boss, and the New Zealand Herald resorted to a Sydney-based journalist for its analysis. Given the influence Fairfax has on the media market here, it seemed half-hearted.
Across the Tasman, however, the news website Crikey detailed wobbles this year at Kirk’s previous employer, contract printer PMP – which saw its shares crash 35 percent on one day in February – and revealed that a week before Kirk was named in his new post, he took delivery of a “scathing” report on the culture and organisation at PMP.
The Bloomberg agency story noted that Fairfax shares fell on the Kirk news; even the Fairfax-owned Australian Financial Review said Kirk, 44, had “useful experience of the media, but not in the media”.
The Financial Review itself will likely be near the top of Kirk’s agenda. Crikey recently advanced the theory that two profitable Fairfax financial magazines – Shares and Personal Investor – were being killed off to try and protect the company’s “declining” business flagship, the Financial Review.
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When was the last time you consulted an encyclopaedia? No, a real encyclopaedia – one of those weighty books that persuasive men used to sell on your doorstep? Thought so. The Internet has become the average home’s first recourse for research, whether it be for school projects or simply to settle a dispute on the difference between crocodiles and alligators. But, strikingly, it’s not only the format of the venerable old encyclopaedias that is being pushed back but also their brands.
The great name in reference, Encyclopaedia Britannica, embraced the Internet in 1995, after an unfortunate attempt to sell itself on a poorly produced CD-Rom. But – in part because most of its riches require a $US70 annual subscription – Britannica has fallen behind an upstart in the reference game: Wikipedia. The web- measurement service Alexa.com says that Britannica.com’s traffic has fallen 42 percent in the past three months. Wikipedia’s has climbed 32 percent; it currently attracts more than five million individual visitors a month.
The remarkable thing about Wikipedia is that it is written not by academic mandarins in ivory towers but by you and me. Anyone (including mandarins in ivory towers) can contribute, at any time. In January of this year, more than 13,000 individuals made at least five edits to Wikipedia.
This offers it some notable advantages. One is timeliness: the rapidly evolving Wikipedia entry on the day of the London bombings on July 7 was an extraordinary demonstration of the power of the concept. On the other hand, at the time of writing, nearly two weeks after the event, the online Britannica has failed to register David Lange’s passing – whereas the Wikipedia page for Lange was updated within a couple of hours of his death and has blossomed since.
Another advantage is sheer breadth. I have used Wikipedia for information on, among other things, the historical background of Uzbekistan, the 1997 Mazda Capella and exactly what the Chinese swear-words in the TV series Firefly mean. It’s all there. More than 687,000 articles, in a constant state of update. And then there are the non-English language versions, including one in (really) Klingon.
But if any fool can get involved in Wikipedia, well, any fool can, so there is a constant danger of misinformation. The Wikipedians, as they like to be called, point out that the whole process is self-correcting. Bias or bad information will swiftly be amended by other contributors. On any Wikipedia page you can click a tab to see its editing history: who added what, when, and every previous instance of the page. In general, it works well enough for the site to be a great first port of call for general knowledge.
Robert McHenry, Britannica’s editor-in-chief, begged to differ in a rather spiteful article in February, in which he dubbed Wikipedia the “faith-based encyclopedia” and compared it to a public restroom where the visitor “does not know who has used the facilities before him”.
The flak flies both ways. Wikipedia maintains a page of errors in Britannica that have been corrected by Wikipedia, on topics ranging from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to the career of Frank Zappa and the true number of dialects spoken by the Dogon people of Mali. (It also keeps a page of errors in Wikipedia that have been corrected by Britannica.)
Last month, Britannica appeared to signal that something had to change. For the first time in a decade, it appointed an editorial board. Its 15 members, including Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka and Murray Gell-Mann, were trumpeted to the press as “some of the smartest people on Earth”. The editors may have winced, however, at the comment of one of the three women appointed to the board (the first woman ever, in fact), Chicago University’s Wendy Doniger, who said: “We’re deciding what people are going to think.”
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