Not that I’ve read it anytime in the past two years but it’s still important to note the passing of The Bulletin.
Australia’s longest-running magazine, The Bulletin, has been shut down, ending its 128-year history.
The magazine’s publisher ACP Magazines - part of the PBL Media empire part-owned by James Packer - announced this morning that the edition of The Bulletin that went on sale yesterday would be its last.
ACP chief executive Scott Lorson blamed the closure of recent circulation figures of 57,039 - about half the sales from the mid-1990s - and “the impact of the internet” on the magazine’s demise.
The internet is killing the print star.
Very interesting.
A couple of years ago there were rumours it would migrate online. It would have been a good move - a very well established brand would have given it a big leg up.
Jamie Packer said he wanted a magazine that was either profitable or influential. It was neither.
To be honest, I don’t think the internet killed it - there are many niche magazines that have been going gang-busters since the advent of the internet. ‘Cross the sea, the New Yorker is doing better than ever, and The Atlantic (who just opened up their archives for free btw), Foreign Policy, etc. etc.
The market for subscribers is there, you just have to give them what they want.
What killed the bulletin, imho, was the rise of similar (and better) mags like it, both in Australia and outside of Australia (but available here, either in print, or… online. Perhaps he has a point).
As good a time as any to recommend this:
http://www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/catalogue/0-522-85249-1.html
Yeah, you can’t entirely blame the Internet. I still buy hard copy magazines regularly but I can’t say the Bully has done anything recently to make me look twice at it.
Indeed, Klaus K. That is a terrific book — and written, very appropriately, by a descendant of Henry Lawson.
Fouding editors and Aust Lit legends AG Stephens and JF Archibald will be turning in their graves. Not to mention Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin, Barbara Baynton, Christopher Brennan, Mary Gilmore, John Shaw Neilson and who-all else.
Big news, and sad news. I was never a regular reader, but it was nice to know it was there. An important part of Australian media.
Having said that - there could be positives ahead for Aussie media. The Monthly is still around, and the Quarterly Essay. They may be able to make big gains. And New Matilda could benefit from this as well, obviously. Not to mention blogs!
And thankfully, as Patrick has pointed out, there are many fine English-language mags like the New Yorker (I subscribe), the Atlantic, and the Spectator. Globalisation and the predominance of English-speaking cultures really does benefit readers in Australia, who are obviously an important part of that market.
I’m wondering: could this signify the intentions of the Packers to jettison some of their old media connections and focus on gambling and gaming revenue (ie, BETFAIR, etc)?
One of the nice things the New Yorker (and to a lesser extent the Speccie) does is give an outlet for artists/writers. Regular fiction pieces, poems, cartoons, and my favourite ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ column (humour). The Bulletin has certainly jettisoned this in previous years, making it seem a dry and rather boring news magazine. Again, maybe another opportunity for future Australian publishers?
128 continuous years of publication and the Bulletin bites the dust. One of the reasons given by a spokesthinggy was the surge of online competition. This is Oz Blogdom’s equivalent of a notch on a gunslinger’s belt.
From spinning yarns around caves or campfires, the word has evolved from papyrus scratchers to quill-twisters, from Guttenburg pressers to inter-tube keyboard tappers. But the junior woodchuck manual for time poor 21st century Oz execs is now extinct.
For a magazine that has displayed excellence in shilling for wars, it is a sweet irony that it succumbs to one because it is an inferior communicator.
Maybe Jamie needs a bigger grubstake for his new venture with Lachie, and shelling out to keep a flagship loser afloat is not the ecomomically rational way to approach things. How can One.tel?
Also worth thinking about is the significance of Donald Horne’s time as editor (’61-’62, ‘67-’72), where the magazine was revitalised into its modern form. During his time there the ‘Australia For the White Man’ bit was removed from the masthead, and Horne had the compositor melt it down.
I had hoped for many years that The Bulletin would partially return to its literary roots and once again publish short fiction, poetry etc.
That, of course, was never going to happen when its owners were more interested in polo and gambling.
The demise of the dead-tree Bulletin was inevitable, and other similar print publications will follow.
Of course print media will inevitably go online. Of course we hope that citizen blogging is going to take control of who gets what news and commentary and how is it presented away from the MSM and its owners. That hope may be a faint one however.
Of more critical interest given the state of media ownership at the moment - what is young Packer up to with Lachlan Murdoch? A bit of male bonding (you show me your bling and I’ll show you mine) as revealed in the notorious kitchen scene? To be brought up later as yet another instance of “memory failure” on the part of our lounge lizard class?
The potential is there for media moguls not only to publish online (Rupert knows that) but to attempt to control access to and distribution of online media. They are not going to succeed, but the average non-tech savvy punter may be presented with the option of handing over control of his/her Web experience to them. I can see it unfolding thus…in order for instance to access, say, the Foxtel TV Guide you will have to agree to a Borg-like takeover of your browser. AOL has done it already (”Internet for everyone” as long as they control the content), Microsoft has long mooted such a model for its operating system, and has in fact gone part of the way there with Vista and Google has the dreaded toolbar. So rather than downloading Windows and the appropriate version of Office then ruthlessly getting rid of the Fisher-Price crap as we were able to do up until the release of Vista, you will only be able to run some stuff from their server.
Then you have the potential for global control of other media devices such as phones, hand-helds and integrated television. Imagine a scenario where you sign up to “Krayvision” which takes the hard technical slog out for the non-geeks, but you cannot get the ABC, SBS or community media on your TV or as streaming media.
Graeme Samuel, please take note.
Thanks for that Sorcerer.
I don’t understand if or how these moguls can take control of parts of the web that don’t want to be controlled by them.
Is it possible, for example, that Larvatus Prodeo can be prevented from having a web presence and/or persons wanting to find Larvatus Prodeo can be prevented from doing so?
Or alternatively is the Web a huge, limitless, unregulatable space?
What is the nature of this terrain? To what extent can it be owned?
PC,
Agree with you about all those late 19C-early 20C literary notables turning in their graves. The early Bulletin’s contribution to the foundation of a great Australian literary tradition, and by the by, publication of short stories to equal Chekov, was immense, and should never be forgotten. Where would any of us be without them? Of course it had its faults - White Australia and all, but that’s seeing it through our eyes, not the eyes of those early contemporaries.
It had to go belly up once those Philistine Packers started to use it as a shill for the Libs.
Strange isn’t it that you would close and take a complete loss? The brand must be worth at least a million. It is worse than pulling down a heritage house so you can build a tennis court. The end of an extraordinary part of Australian history, just before celebration day, because Jamie the brat can.
I’m not going to be quite so hasty as Paul Burns in singing the praises of the early Bulletin - although it’s significance can’t be disputed, and neither can the quality of some of the contributions - and I’m not going to dismiss the Packer era so readily either. The magazine was at the forefront of White Australia, and it was at the forefront of its demise. Its respective peaks also symbolised two important, though different, forms of mass media communication as they took hold in Australia, linked to two different ways of conducting media business and business in general. That it never found a third peak is a blow against symbolic cultural continuity, but it is not especially lamentable.
sorcerer @ 12: ‘of more critical interest at the moment’
aren’t you confusing the immediate and transient, with the enduring and significant?
well, unenduring in the case of ‘The Bulletin’, but that magazine will stand as a colossus in the nation’s history long after Jamie and Lachie have cashed in their chips, IMHO
‘
Katz, they can do it - if network neutrality laws get passed.
Basically, they won’t be able to push LP off the net, but they vcan make it dial-up speed to access, whilst everything else is faster.
I’m not convinced it will happen, but it’s being advocated for very strongly in the states, and quite strongly here. I suspect - if it does get through - it will be a result of ill-informed opinion and public ignorance.
Without getting dewy-eyed about it, I do think the chances of net neutrality disappeared have reduced now Rudd’s in charge.
Paul Burns @ 14
…”once the Packers started using it as a shill for the Libs”
- there was an earlier period, mid-sixties, when “The Bulletin” was strongly in favour of Aussie involvement in South Vietnam’s war. I think such a magazine was called ‘hawkish’ or ‘pro-US’ or worse in those days. It didn’t seem to harm their circulation then….
Having suffered through a slightly randomly given gift subscription and read it for want of news over breakfast I can give a clear opinion on the current demise.
The Bulletin has been unbelievably dull. Consistently. For eighteen months. With articles reprinted holus-bolus from Newsweek. Whatever the history, the future was uninspiring.
Well I’ve been considering subscribing to the magazine for some time but I discovered the best bits of it I wanted to read were online.
I am not aware of any similar or better magazines like it. Perhaps you are referring to Quarterly and Monthly (virtually the same thing) - I find the essays in them somewhat lacking and the magazines themselves not as good. That is just my opinion though.
Rather than end its run, perhaps they could sell it.
No I confuse nothing. I must confess I gave away the Bulletin as a regular read when it became a haven for the Right-wing commentariat and have not gone back apart from brief encounters on international flights.
The Net is not transient. Anyone who thinks so is in peril of being as
dumbdopeychallenged as Jamie Packer is. However it is in a way easier to censor online reading than it was when you could sneak around with a concealed book or magazine.Of course, no one denies that, nor do they deny its occasional ability to come up with great stories. However, a news magazine which seeks the quality market can no longer rely on purchases by the thoughtful and literate to financially support its existence, especially when you can read the likes of Online Opinion or New Matilda on the Net for free.
Jamie the brat will do more than that before he is finished. Hence my comment to the effect that Graeme Samuel needs to keep an eye on both the Toxic Twins.
Thanks sorcer,
I didn’t mean the Net was transient, I meant the latest brat-scams or business ventures by Packer Junior Junior and Murdoch Junior Junior were likely to be transient. I agree that a news magazine has to offer something interesting to deserve a readership
Vee @ 21
I agree, bot the “Quarterly Essay” and “The Monthly” are a bit dull.
At least we no longer have to put up with Peter Craven spruiking his selected essay, taking the wind out of the author’s sails, in his editorial monologues. [He made the editor of “Quadrant” look like a shrinking violet. Quite a feat. Quite effete.]
“The Monthly” is dull because it’s smug, I think. No fearless reporters. No contributor ‘transgressing’ the groupthink.
Correcting my earlier post, the Bulletin is now owned by a private equity firm, not Packer.
These private equity guys can be accused of many things, but sentimentality isn’t one of them. The Bulletin’s long history (often disreputable, it must be said) means nothing to them.
““The Monthlyâ€? is dull because it’s smug, I think. No fearless reporters. No contributor ‘transgressing’ the groupthink.”
Yep.
Klaus @ 10, re Horne’s tenure. Isn’t that when Horne went after a nest of ‘communists’ at Melbourne Uni based on Frank Knopfelmacher’s paranoid rumour mongering? Not one of Horne’s finer moments, me thinks.
The Monthly isn’t really the same sort of thing anyway, whatever you think about it. It’s not a weekly news magazine which does original reportage and offers (relatively) contemporary comment, but a sort of essay vehicle.
In my view, part of the problem with the Bully was not just competition from the net, but also (in a declining print market) it didn’t do anything more than the Saturday review sections in the major papers did. If it had cultivated a sort of anarchistic irreverence, it might have been different. But that’s what the intertubes do well.
The Bulletin crosses my desk but I rarely open it - awful design, tiring just to look at it. Trying to think of something similar looking I just compared it to The New Statesman - but NS is slightly larger, the pages have a cooler look, and the sections are more defined.
Pity they didn’t try a new format - maybe monthly, with articles that didn’t date so quickly. The Bulletin looks like something you wouldn’t choose to pick up in the dentist’s waiting room. Given that they would have thousands of certain library subscriptions, they might have been able to keep the prestige of having the magazine while producing a cheaper, yet classier product.
The NS is an excellent mag. In part, it’s tried to do what I’m suggesting print should be doing - liven itself up, and has a great website. But it also publishes a lot of stuff from a wide range of people, not just journos on staff, and has a distinct political and ethical position. Again maybe there’s something here that’s interesting with regard to the blogosphere. The British press has a tradition of political partisanship, whereas on the whole, Australian print has tried to do the “balanced” or “impartial” thing. Maybe, as with blogs and mags like the NS, openly taking a stand makes for a much more interesting read than bland reportage (which inevitably conceals some bias anyway).
Yes, that sounds about right Anthony. Horne was involved in many things I consider dubious - the pro-Vietnam War line was his also, for a time - and was a self-identified conservative as late as the beginning of the ’60s, but his role in challenging Australia’s dominant culture cannot be underestimated. Part of that challenge was his successful editorship at the Bulletin.
That’s probably why I never considered buying it regularly or subscribing to it, because it didn’t really have anything radically different to it, and it didn’t seem to do any one thing fabulously well. For me it’s often the regulars and the sections that make a magazine stand out - the columnists, the ongoing cartoons, the games section and competitions, the book reviews. The Bully didn’t seem to do any of these brilliantly, just competently.
I think Blair did have some flair in his Continuing Crisis column (a stand-out was his Mark Latham board game), but that never really caught on. Patrick Cooke also brought an elegance to his regular column. Evidently not enough to save the mag.
Yes, but Blair stopped writing for it after the last editor left, when he quite as associate editor. It really was pretty bland. Do you really need a Laurie Oakes when you can have a Paul Kelly? A lot of the political analysis was commentary by rote.
Indeed, Mark - I agree, and was pondering about doing a short post on it this evening. I think you’re right about the NS, too. One interesting point is that the Aussie MSM still don’t seem to have got blogs, by and large. Many mainstream magazines and papers for the British market seem to be somewhat more successful in this respect.
Been away for a bit. Yep it’s the new flint eyed ownership wot did it, no Packer to blame here, though they are not blameless in ignoring the mags decline, but I don’t really care because the horse has already bolted as far as print media is concerned.
I get more now from a mix of my social media peers who are involved in any number of technologies and platforms, from indy blogs like this one, to Twitter and emerging video conversation tools like Seesmic
Many of us are consuming media as snackers and the sum total of those snacks add up to a large number of calories, some protein, some sugary but we still get the requisite number of calories to survive media wise.
Delivery platforms are also important, mags like the Bulletin need to make their offerings suitable for what’s coming, unfortunately these hidebound institutions are slow to move and not weblike in their approach to new technologies.
Yep.
Today, decision making on new stuff needs to be quick, grab a technology and integrate it into your offerings now, that’s irreverence too, an irreverence toward the things that brought you there, you have to get rid of the vestiges and evolve if you want to survive.
BTW and slightly OT. As I see it, one of the current problems with big time media as they transition to the web is that they are not mining the blogosphere and new media sites for the kind of talent that would give then that needed spark in presentation. Still the same fucked journos spinning the same fucked shite.
Laurie Oakes is a vestige…..I can name a whole bunch I hardly ever listen to anymore, print and television.
Bring on the creative destruction.
The Bulletin hasn’t lived up to its historic position for years, I regret to say. Kerry hung on it it like a broken down race horse, put out to pasture, but he was never game enough to send it to the knackery because he was sentimental enough not to want to be “the bloke that killed the Bullie”.
Jamie and the flash money men who own the title could not care less.
Could it survivie under different leadership - of course, but not as a imitation of Time magazine. But as a real journal of writing and ideas, it could easily pay its own way.
But of course we will never now know…
The way ninemsn was set up also played a part. It was given near complete authority over internet operations, which precluded media staffers in the print and television groups from the type of experimentation that saved quality magazines in the US and the UK.
“One of the reasons given by a spokesthinggy was the surge of online competition. This is Oz Blogdom’s equivalent of a notch on a gunslinger’s belt.”
Yep, one less forum in Australia where writers can get paid for their work. Yippee kai-ay, EC.
The Union is blaming the Howard Governments Media Laws and the equity trust that ran the Bulletin.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/24/2145859.htm
I think Mark’s initial comment is on the money - when everybody else smart in the print industry was getting online and doing what they could to turn a dollar, The Bulletin did not really do very much at all on the online front. It’s a shame, because there was no need to go down with the deadtree ship, and even though its well arguable that the Bulletin was well past its prime, it still served a purpose and occasionally had an interesting interview or column.
I think it probably also says something about the state of the media (and society?) in this country that one of its very few native political periodicals has been shut down, due to lack of interest.
Seems about right steve, private investment company cvc Asia Pacific grabbed a 75% stake of PBL according to above links. The Bulletin looked very out of place in this stable regardless of what one thought about it personally.
http://www.acp.com.au/MagazineTitles.aspx
I was still reading The Bulletin. Have to say I’m not surprised it’s gone. Suffers too much from Baby Boomeritus. The Oz media’s like this little club of self-important blowhards who just have to tell you (again sigh) how cool it was three decades ago when they didn’t have to use botox. Yawn.
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Hello media barons these people are not interesting anymore.
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Besides which the planet is today’s territory. An Australian cultural producer needs to target overseas readers/viewers if they wanna be anything but plankton.
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And Philip Adams. It’s time to go sunshine. Your skills are no longer applicable in this field. Where were you when Heath Ledger needed natural healthy sleep?
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PS Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer. What a winning combination. Worked so well last time.
“PS Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer. What a winning combination. Worked so well last time.”
Oh, indeed, these blokes have had such a past together. Once Ruppy has passed on, and with him his rather restrictive views on teh marriage vows, might we expect an even closer relationship between the pair.
Brokeback Media Cowboys.
I used to be a magazine addict (New Yorker, Economist, Spectator, Private Eye, occasionally Time or Newsweek - even BRW). The Bulletin rarely made it to the top of the list, because when I did buy it, it rarely had much more than the Saturday papers.
And once I got into blogs, even the little differentiation it had in Australianness from the excellent overseas titles available reduced compared with what was available online.
Sad that its gone, but it had really lost its relevance.
“Yep, one less forum in Australia where writers can get paid for their work. Yippee kai-ay, EC.”
Jack Robertson, while I’m sorry for those who’ll lose their jobs at Teh Bully, people pay tolls to read Crikey and New Matilda. They don’t join to read the commercials unless they’re adlanders. Unlike Playboy and other leafed dinosaurs, people pay to read the articles. A few years ago these opportunities for writers didn’t exist. In a few more years, as print declines, there will be furthur opportunities. In America for example, Salon has grown sreadily since 1998 while the Huffinton Post has gone from bubkes to Player in less than two years. These online magazines employs a staggering variety of writers.
Yeah; Mad Max became a worldwide cult hit because the team spent its budget on making sure Mel was driving a Lincoln…
I’ve no time for that attitude, it’s just Cringe in another guise. Foreign economies have more than enough cultural content to occupy them year-round. If a foreigner seeks out culture beyond their borders it’s because they’re after new experiences, not a pantomime that bends over backwards.
We wouldn’t watch a Jap flick on SBS for a Bruckheimer rush.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
When it wasn’t spouting right wing nonsense it was pushing Kerry Packer’s commercial interest - I still remember a story from 1998 stating it was ‘just simpler’ to let the current free to air networks get all the digital TV rights for free.
So many comments already, queueing up to dance on the grave. Well, I liked the Bulletin, I read it regularly, and I will miss it greatly.
It’s quite pathetic for people to rant on about the internet taking over, that the blogosphere is the future, etc. Excuse me? Please show me the blog that has something close to the 58,000 weekly readers who weren’t enough to keep the Bulletin afloat. And, while we’re at it, where’s the source, online or otherwise, that will deal with the issues that the Bulletin dealt with from an Australian perspective? I don’t care how well-written the New Yorker is, or how engaging the articles are in Time. I get American points of view everywhere: I relished reading something that was Australian, and not pretentious.
That the Bulletin is dead when New Idea is still alive: that is the real tragedy.
“These online magazines employ a staggering variety of writers.”
No, they don’t. They employ almost no writers at all. This is why:
By and large writers make a living because of advertising. With the exception of commercially-viable books, the vast amount of words churned out by writers are losses on the balance sheet. People may well buy a magazine for the articles, but what they pay for it (collectively) won’t go anywhere near covering costs of production, let alone paying the writers a living wage. Ha! No-one gives a fuck about circulation in terms of dollars pulled in at the newsstand. Circ revenues are a mere pissdrop in the ocean of overhead offsetting. Circulation matters for one reason only: as a lever to flog ad space, which is where the kind of revenue ommph that’s gunna allow you to pay writers more than the pittance the onliners will offer can alone come from.
Not even the biggest and most successful online outlets can afford to pay writers more than a virtual gratuity. You’re delusional if you think that’s ever going to change. Advertisers are not interested in putting huge amounts of money into online publications for one simple obvious reason: they can do far better building their own websites and doing whatever online advertising they’re inclined to do inhouse. What you forget about the internet is this: it’s actually one great big freely-published magazine that anyone can open up their own ad-space in, now.
Why waste extra dollars sub-wrangling your ads into a ‘branded’ space when with smart cross-pollination, a few net-savvy writers bought in-house and a clever use of your established real world brand, you can create an instant online profile of your own? What the hell can Huffington Post offer a big ad-spender online that it can’t create itself? In the ‘dinosaur’ world big corporations can (and do/did) at a pinch run their own inhouse magazines. But they lack the resources, time, expertise, distribution networks and publishing nouse to run ‘The New Yorker’, say. To now they’ve needed the New Yorker to exist so they’d have somewhere to put their ads - what the New Yorker alone has/d that Toyota want(ed) is/was a big-spending AB audience all looking reliably at the same pages every week, many of which had a blank page opposite for sale. The reason they had/ve that audience is in part because Martin Amis fills the un-blank pages with flair and brilliance, while the reason The New Yorker can afford Martin Amis is/was because Toyota fills/ed the blank pages with its shingles.
But as the Net supercedes hard copy publishing, the real winners are going to be the big ad spenders. Because, like I said, the internet is like one great big free linked bunch of magazine pages, and anyone can come along and add his. And, with clever search engine and marketing techniques at their fingertips those big dollar companies no longer need the demographic ‘corralling’ and ‘marshalling’ function once provide by good writers/reputable mags with high demographic readerships.
People like Packer have been trying for decades to figure out a way to reach a big print advertising audience without having to put up with fucking writers, editors, ‘content providers’. The internet is it. Cheer the death of hard copy publishing, by all means, but be aware that what cheering is the end of the professional writer - at least in any sense other than a pejorative one.
Well put Jack. Or as I’d put it the tail doesn’t even need a dog to wag anymore it.
Look at what’s happening with the music industry. Few smart, current and emerging artists make much money out of their base product anymore. Hell, they literally give it away now (I’m using “literally” quite literally here - cf Radiohead’s last album) -before it’s taken from ‘em anyway.
But what they are doing is building up a brand that they can monitise in other ways. Eg: in the past, concerts were staged to sell the records. Now the downloads are basically ads/trailers for the concerts. That’s why now iTunes et al is so cheap and why live performances are so expensive. Anyone can get their hands on the original boogie data at low cost but few can share the live experience. Led Zep at O2, OK?
Look at Hollywood. Today it’s all about creating, reviving or refreshing a franchise/brand name that you can leverage beyond the original medium. They used to write good stories which made for a good film. Then they started creating characters which were also good for a sequel. Then they started creating whole worlds which were great to be spun off in a bunch of mediums, each with separate marketing angles. From respectful 2001 coffee table books to clunky Star Wars toys and cartoons to supernerd Matrix manga MMORPGs.
Returning to your original point Jack R, I do agree that cluey online media can get their copy for free and their virtual chicks for nothing. But as the crap and clutter swamps web cruisers, they’ll be looking for brand names they can trust or have been recommended to check out. You don’t click on everything in a fave site blogroll do you? No, you do the rounds of your regulars that you feel are worth a punt. It’s the Attention Economy baby!
So where does that leave professional and wannabee pro writers? Aside from a heap of surprisingly lucrative yet boring and insecure “invisible literature” options like copywriting, manual writing, corporate annual reports and scuffling with moonlighting MSM journos for inflight magazine gigs?
Bust a gut and take a punt on being the next JK Rowling, Bryce Courtney, Terry Prachett or Matthew Reilly? (I think their books are crap but there’s no doubt they worked bloody hard to make their product work as a killer franchise/brand)
Translate your online brand and material into a literary product for a cool publisher? Well ‘Anonymous Lawyer’ and ‘Belle De Jour’ amongst others did, and sold enough books to pay for a nice holiday in Tahiti. But not enough for a living.
Build a long term highly distinctive online brand entity and wait to see who bites? They never do unless you’re so super fucking good you cut through 200 million other online voices. Fafblog did and then just when everyone wanted more, disappeared - to our limited perception.
Now where was I? Yes, pathetically mewing longhaired kittens strapped into early Martin-Baker ejection seats testing the zero-zero concept. Opps, sorry wrong thread.
Now were I?. Yes, returning to Jack’s original point, I agree with him that no one’s gonna make a full time living out of crapping on first and foremost online. On the other hand, it’s a superb tool for building up and cross-marketing yourself as a personality -and then score tasty little writing gigs as part of the overall project.
But the only people really making money out of the web now in ways they couldn’t do otherwise are the middleman brokers and fixers like Google, EBay, PayPal, MyFaceBook et al. And I bet you they short-sheeted the pro writers they brought in to pen and massage their pitch docs, business plans and prospcti.
Also, regardless of what medium you’re writing in or for what audience, never forget to wrap it up tightly like this. Never let it dangle around and slowly sorta fade into a meaningless conclusion or even worse some sorta ‘whatever’ ending that goes nowhere beyond just trying to prove how smart you are about pointing out that that’s what you shouldn’t be doing.
Laughing my ass off at this headline in todays Oz.
Who’s Lyons and the foreign owned Oz kidding.
Anyway, I thing the death of the professional writer and musician as Nabs mentioned is greatly exaggerated, we are transitioning to a new model of production/consumption in a digital world, monetisation will come, just not in the way we know it now. This is disruptive stuff and all to the good. We are entering a world of mass consumption of niche content in small packets. Get used to it and as writers prepare for it.
Stuff the writers for the Bulletin. Tawdry hacks doing the bidding of a particularly odious corporation (PBL). I much prefer this private equity mob. Seems they have taste.
The Bulletin made the mistake of not knowing who its audience was. Was it a business magazine? (We already have BRW). Was it a policy publication? (Not specialised or pointy-headed enough.) Was it just a good news mag? (Not going to break many stories as a weekly.) Or was it a media/personalities rag? (Who Weekly serves that shallow role.)
The Bulletin’s strengths were built on the political insights (in terms of gladitorial day-to-day bearpit politics) of Laurie Oakes. If they’d been smart, they would have become a sort of political weekly with a number of name columnists from left and right and with a few young ones thrown in. A Possum Commitatus would have widened their market. They could have used this to leverage into online content - like blogs and forums. They tried at the end, but their audience was too old and it was all too late. They needed to be dirtier and scrapier and ballsier.
No doubt, Michael Gill and Glenn Burge at the AFR, who are notoriously paranoid about the internet and have burnt tens of millions in recent years trying to find a way to make paid online content work, will use the Bulletin’s demise to make it even harder for the paper’s already overcharged deadtree subscribers to access digital content.
In the meantime, another couple of dozen out-of-work sub-editors will hit the streets and the wages in professional journalism will scrape even lower than they are now. No cause to celebrate.
‘tail, dog, etc’…stop squishing my screeds into single sentences so aptly, Nabs, you’re making me feel like your word bitch.
“They needed to be dirtier and scrapier and ballsier.”
Yes, I’d agree 100 percent. Phil’s probably right about me over-egging ‘the death of’ hyperbole, I’m probably just projecting my own corpsing writerly aspirations onto a bigger canvas. But I am convinced that the key to the survival of writing as a viable trade - beyond those invisible sectors Nabs cited - lies in writers getting their writerly rude bits out and waving them in the faces of those, like the CCV bean-calculii, who would self-defeatingly santise and rationalise just that very ‘value-adding’ essence out of the equation. Make writerly bolshieness and preciousness and pretension and epistemological arrogance etc…a selling point to the suits. Because that, in truth, is what is. That’s why the Mark Steyn’s make buckets. Not because their politics matches corporate alignments. Because they write in concrete, bold colour language. They write like they mean what they write, not stricken with detachment and equivocation, caution, reasonablness, the paralysis of the circumspect bet-hedger keeping all tomorrow’s commission-bridges open.
When I rant at ‘professional’ writers, as I often have here, I’m talking about ‘careerist’ writers, who never take chances, never turn over the furniture, never use no-escape-clause verbs. In Oz, it’s a small pond so the pressure to write wallpaper like the dreary kind that killed The Bully’s circ is I suppose immense. Isn’t it?
Writers apparently think so, anyway. So, bullshit qualifiers abound in local serious writing: ‘perhaps’, ‘appropriate’, could be, sometimes, on the other hand…and all those mangledy-empty noun-verb neologisms - ‘impact’ the situation, ‘tease out’ the ishoo, ‘look to’ an election victory (ahem)…designed to say everythin (ie nothing), to cover all bases…passive voice, mushy phrasing, softly-softly tip-toe writing.
Muzak, is what it mostly is. Style over substance. Get a load of that Broken News satire to see the logical endpoint to which that sort of anti-writing leads.
On the love that dare not speak its name, Richard Ackland says it all in today’s SMH.
Its good news dammit. 20 years ago , our media was Murdoch Packer Fairfax and thats it. The journalists for Murdoch and Packer wrote what their proprietor wanted. People here are confusing lots of writers being employed with lots of independent voices. They were about as independent as Pravda.
The internet is sweeping away all that old rubbish, and about time too.
Everyone:
“Every cloud has a silver lining”. The destruction of “The Bulletin” is a wake-up call for all the influential people in Australia.
“The Bulletin” was a national institution, an icon. Its abrupt unheralded demise shows the utter contempt the high-flyers of business community in Australia have for the general public. It was losing money for a little while so they just junked it. Bet they didn’t even bother approaching the government or the non-business sector to take it over and continue it in one form or another.
Nobody is suggesting the directors continue carrying a loss-making part of their business - they are running a business, not a charity - but the way they ditched “The Bulletin” showed both their contempt for the public and their inability to come up with innovative solutions - if I was a shareholder, I would be worried about how much bang-for-the-buck the shareholders were getting out of these business boofheads.
There were win-win-win alternatives to scrapping “The Bulletin”; pity these overpaid dunderheads didn’t have the wits to look for them.
“It was losing money for a little while so they just junked it.’
it was losing money for a lot of while and I suspect that its fate was sealed with Kerry Packer’s demise. I’ll miss Patrick Cook and no-one has mentioned the “Maxine McKew lunches with”……feature that broke a number of stories in recent years in a way that couldn’t happen in a daily paper. But…..a weekly MSM news magazine in a relatively small circulation domestic market is a difficult proposition in the 21st
century.
For years, we had Murdoch Packer and Fairfax and nothing else. The power of the media barons was immense, and they used that power to get a number of crony capitalist decisions made - Packer got Aussat, Pay TV was carved up, Microwave TV was blocked, Packer got night criket, Murdoch got foreign ownership lifted etc etc. And we all paid for this rubbish.
Magazines like the Bulletin were used by their proprietor for influence, they were as independent as a chorus line. Its really pathetic how these journalists now kid themselves that they were independent thinkers when they werent.
We should not be mourning the loss of the echo chamber, but welcoming the new voices.
Geoff Honour [57]:
That “the Bulletin” was continuing to lose money for so long speaks volumes about the abilities - or otherwise - of the directors.
Why was no bold action taken earlier?
Either to give it away to, say, to a group of universities, or to inject sufficient money and technology into turning it into an innovative profitable 21st Century weekly news magazine [whether on papers, on disk, on the web or all three].
Give it away to a group of universities? A puzzling suggestion. I can’t think of any University magazine that specialises in general interest/current affairs magazines, something more or less seen as the province of private owners and companies. And unis don’t really compete in the mainstream media market in the way that the Bulletin and other publications (The Monthly, The Age, etc) clearly do. The ARB, Meanjin, and other uni publications just don’t seem to aim at that sort of thing, or display any interest, and quite rightly - they focus on academic and scholarly matters, debates, in-depth analysis. The Bulletin was quite clearly focused on changing events in Australia/the world, opinion, entertainment, games. Again, this sort of thing falls clearly into the remit of private publishing interests.
So the question, as I see it, is why The Bulletin wasn’t sold to other private groups interested in publishing in Australia. Was it due to lack of interest? Are the media-ownership regulations too tight for that sort of thing? Audiences for current affairs magazines are fairly small, but then again, the competition is fairly small, too. Why no apparent interest? Or were there interested investors that we haven’t heard about yet?
Could be some interesting investigative reporting on this sort of thing in the weekend papers! Media always loves to gloat over the end of opposition, so we’ll certainly see something.
“But…..a weekly MSM news magazine in a relatively small circulation domestic market is a difficult proposition in the 21st century.”
“Audiences for current affairs magazines are fairly small, but then again, the competition is fairly small, too.”
No, what is a ‘difficult proposition in the 21st century’ and ‘fairly small’ are, respectively, ’shithouse writing sustaining an audience’ and ‘the audience for shithouse writing’.
We might as well all give up if we start to talk about the ‘audience’ for this or that ‘genre’ of writing as something that can’t be increased by…better writing. It’s as if ‘writing’ is a fixed product these days. The Bulletin’s circulation dropped, and its capacity to bring in ads dropped, because the writing was boring. Start, middle, finish. If your writers can’t pull in readers, get them to write different and better. If they can’t, get new writers.
*Clears throat. Lifts sign saying ‘Will suck cock for space.*
TimT[60]:
That a group of universities couldn’t pick up a long-established publication - The Bulletin - and run with it speaks volumes about their inability to be innovative too [but that’s hardly news; they are flat out attracting full-fee-paying overseas students these days as well].
Just because a thing hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it cannot be done.
Why on earth couldn’t a racy current affairs and arts magazine run in tandem with esteemed scholarly journals? …. Quite apart from giving some serious in-house real-world training to students.
Universities have no trouble handling some pretty racy extramural consultancies; why would turning out a magazine be that much different? Yeah. I know. “We’ve never done that before …. “.
The Griffith Review!
http://www3.griffith.edu.au/01/griffithreview/
My opinion as an ex-subsriber, for what it’s worth, is that any magazine/newspaper that chiefly reprints overseas sourced material is doomed. I’m looking at you next Fairfax.
I found the Newsweek articles to be pretty lame, and frankly there is better analysis and understanding to be found at more than a dozen amateur sites. Any ‘zine lives or (more often) dies on the quality of its original material.
I think the death-knell was sounded when they hired Rob Hirst as a columnist, which is like giving a tourettes sufferer a megaphone (who, indeed, is the sufferer?). The problem is how do you generate high-quality original content in volume when your readership and market are so small?
That’s all aside from the inevitable erosion on more than one front by the internet.
Thanks Mark. I’ll check it out!
Craig, you do as Quadrant and publish less often than weekly.
Mark [63}:
Ooops. Sorry. Forgot the Griffith Review.