Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist/ author of seven books. Margaret [pictured] writes on the online media The Content Makers:
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Fairfax/Rural Press – Caught Out Again
Rural Press has once again been caught out churning out media releases as if they were real journalism.
Agmates – a trading and news site founded by Steve Truman because of frustration about the “multi-national $14.5 billion dollar Fairfax Media / Rural Press strangle hold over what rural & regional people read & see” has pinged Queensland Country Life for reprinting word-for-word spin from the Meat and Livestock Corporation as though it were genuine journalism.
Agmates says the resulting “article” is really quite misleading, leaving a “warm and fuzzy feeling” about how marketing dollars are being spent, when the truth is that Aussie Beef sales are slumping in the face of US competition.
Read the Agmates post, and the comments, to get an idea of the rural fury about Rural Press.
I rang Queensland Country Life this morning to get some comment, but was told that nobody from editorial will be in until Monday. I’ve left my phone number and email, and If I get any response, I will post it here.
The Agmates site points out that this is not a first offence. The ABC Media Watch program gave Queensland Country Life a shellacking for exactly the same sort of thing last October.
Now, for context, it should be remembered that Agmates is in competition with Rural Press. In fact it represents exactly the kind of new media competition that Rural Press has cause to fear. In the United States, citizen led “hyperlocal” journalism is emerging as a competitor to media organisations that have promised little and delivered less to regional audiences. Remember that Rural Press gave the need to get competitive online as one of the reasons for the merger with Fairfax all those months ago – since when Rural has put a lot of work into its online presence.
Truman claims that Rural Press refused to take advertising from Agmates, but that nevertheless word of mouth saw him collect 4300 subscribers in 12 months. Those behind the site include Liberal Party figure Bruce Flegg and Cattlemen’s Union identity John Carter. I’ve asked Truman for his current audience figures. [UPDATE: See Steve Truman's comment below for a correction of this point. These people have written for the site, they are not "behind" it. Also see Steve's comment for more up to date audience figures.]
Fairfax/Rural Press say a great deal about quality journalism being the thing that will distinguish them from Citizen journalists and bloggers. This doesn’t appear to bode well.
END
(Source Crikey – The Content Makers by Margaret Simons)
Have Your Say!
Here is the comment published on The Content makers that Margaret refers to above:
G’day Margaret,
I was just in the middle of replying to your email, but see that I’ve missed your deadline. So I’ll respond here.
Agmates is an online rural & regional community, in fact Australia’s largest. At Agmates we are 100% biased toward anything that is good for rural & regional communities. We make no apologies for that.
Your article is correct in most instances. You are exactly right in saying that Agmates is in direct competition to Rural Press. We are to rural and regional Australia what Crikey is to the Urban Mainstream media. Agmates was founded because we were sick of the bias and manipulation of rural & regional news by the commercially driven rural press. The Agmates article that you have sighted above is part evidence of what the problem is.
Agmates started as a simple blog 2 years ago with no readers. Today we have over 10,000 registered members in Australia and just over 3,000 members in other countries with the USA being our second largest market, the UK our 3rd, Canada 4th and New Zealand our 5th.
As you correctly mention our growth has been entirely by word of mouth. We advertised for 3 weeks in the rural press publications The Queensland Country life and the Land before I received a phone call from QCL General Manager John Warlters who advised me that Agmates had been black banned by Rural Press across Australia.
John’s advice was that they saw us as competition and that they had taken a commercial decision not to take our advertising. At the time our membership was just over 1,000. It does not have appeared to have hindered our growth and has probably saved us a lot of money in wasted advertising.
Finally let me clarrify the issue of who is behind Agmates.
It would indeed come as a surprise to Dr Bruce Flegg and NSW Cattle Producer John Carter that they are ‘behind the site’. You have based that on the fact that both have written articles for Agmates. That is their only association with the site. If that is what you base your opinion on than you would also have to include the following people who also write articles for Agmates.
Senator Barnaby Joyce, Senator Ron Boswell, Senator Nick Xenophon, Senator Steve Fielding, GM Commentator David Tribe of Monash Uni, USA Cattleman Joel Gill, Economist Tim Curtain, Environment Activist Syd Walker, Journalist John Mikkelsen and dozens of farmers across Australia and the USA.
Agmates is an independent media owned by myself and a number of others (mostly farmers) across Australia. We have no political affiliations, no corporate backing, our ethos is that we are 100% biased toward rural & regional communities and we make no apology for that.
We support any organization or political party / politician be it Labor, Liberal, Green, National or independent who stands up for rural and regional communities.
In fact I make no secret of the fact that I voted Labor at the last federal election.
Thanks for your interest and coverage. If you wish you can join us in the Agmates community here http://www.agmates.com/register.php
It’s free to join and become a subscriber to our regular emails.
Happy New year,
Your Agmate – Steve Truman
Agmates Founder
