One of the best things about having new people joining your team is that they ask new questions, and force you to think about old problems in new ways. Bronwen (who joined us a couple of months ago to drive growth for inkl) recently asked what I think is the…

We were too. Here’s how we made sense of it all, and figured out what to follow and what to ignore. *** No one — other than surviving WWII veterans — has seen anything like this. Trade, movement, finance, education, labour, health, retail — there is nothing this virus isn’t…

Fake news is an enormous problem facing both society and media companies. It is a problem that, despite many efforts, no one has yet cracked. There are two reasons for this: First, the solutions proposed so far tend to be zero-sum — one or more groups must lose for the…

In the last few posts we’ve talked about the underlying drivers of fake news and why it is inexorably linked to the publisher economics problem. This time let’s focus on how we can solve these problems. First, a quick recap: Fake news is decentralised. It is a completely disaggregated problem-set…

Although the consumption of news has become free, the task of creating it has not. Journalism is, and will continue to be, a paid profession. This has led to a dichotomy between the free consumption and the paid production of news. …

One of the best lectures in my undergrad course was on the history of financial regulation (and its circumvention) in the US banking sector. This might seem like a dry topic but seen through the lens of human history regulation becomes a fascinating game of cat and mouse. One that…

This whole Cambridge Analytica situation is going to get worse. A LOT worse. And it’s not going to happen because of a lack of regulation — it’s going to happen BECAUSE of regulation. Here’s why. Historically regulation favour incumbents over new entrants, not least because incumbents get a seat at…

Five years ago I was part of the team at Fairfax Media that set up online subscriptions for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. As part of that project we developed a series of reports and analyses to measure and improve the performance of our new subscription business. …

courtesy of theguardian.com That’s not exactly what happened. The Trump tweets merely referenced Assange. Which is not to say that Trump DOESN’T support Assange. But it’s also not fair to say that he does. The only thing this story actually proved is that Trump was happy to cherry-pick statements by someone else to lend credibility to his views — never mind that the person he quoted has his own issues with credibility.