A few months ago, folks might recall that I spoke at the Future of Journalism conference in Brisbane, organised by the MEAA and the Walkley Foundation. Last week, Melbourne took its turn hosting an event in the series, and Margaret Simons was there:
If it’s possible to draw a consensus from the Future of Journalism conferences, and from yesterday, I would say it is this: Newspapers in print form are in decline, some say dying, and will certainly be less important and influential in the future. But content remains important. A lot of old journalistic roles and skills, including sub editing, remain important. And, on the bright side, there is no evidence of diminished appetite for news and quality content among the public.
But everything else is changing. There is a bomb under the business models for all of our established mass media companies, and if we want to preserve what is good and important in journalism, it is a time for bold experiment.
Some of the symptoms of the decline of the business model for the mainstream media can be discerned from the state of the Walkley Awards themselves, where fearless reporters for each media org either pass over awards won by competitors in silence, or give them a passing mention. At the same time, as Simons observed today, many of the awards went to staffers of media outlets which have since collapsed – Sunday, The Bulletin, and now the Australian bureau of Time. Fairfax’ woes have been highlighted for some time, but there have also been deep budget cuts at News Limited, with staff cuts to follow. The recession will accentuate the current decline in print media.
Personally, I now only buy the Fin Review. And I don’t even read a lot of the content from the Australian papers online any more. And I’m very far from being alone. I think it was Guy Rundle who remarked recently that reading a newspaper now feels almost like an archaic habit. It’s a habit that a lot of people have never taken up, and many others have found it very easy to break. The social and structural causes are complex, and go beyond the issue of content, but while a recent theme by MSM types has been that there’s some sort of crisis if people only take an interest in what they’re actually interested in, no one is going to spend a buck on a newspaper out of some sort of notion of civic responsibility. One of the many ironies in the decline and fall of the newspaper is that editors, columnists and proprietors who happily trashed public interest concerns and championed privatisation and consumer choice for so many years now find themselves on the receiving end of the blunt logic of the market. It’s hard to summon up much sympathy, and denunciations and exhortations will have no effect if consumers don’t wish to consume the news product. So, if there is a continued need for independent journalism and investigative work, what is to be done?
Margaret Simons and some of her colleagues as freelance journos, including Melissa Sweet, have one of the possible answers. Simons and Sweet are establishing a Foundation For Independent Journalism, to transpose some of the ideas that have been tried out in the United States to an Australian context. Simons writes:
Founded by a cohort of freelance journalists, including myself, it will include partners from academia and from independent publishers, and will explore new methods of commissioning and organising journalism, including models by which members of the public can directly commission journalists without the intervention of big media — although we are not against having big media involved as well.
This idea is new, but next year we will be pushing forward with it, and naturally we are looking for support and interest and, ultimately, funding.
There has already been a lot of interest in this concept. A number of potential partners – such as Griffith REVIEW and Crikey’s publishers Private Media Partners – have indicated a willingness to be involved. LP will also be a partner of the Foundation. So watch this space for more.
It was inevitable that a MSM that is so out of touch with the people and has become a more and more partisan field was going to fall from grace. This is the final result of a corporate owned media that runs concurrently with the gradual decline of public broadcasting.
If the ABC were to be truly revived then it would almost certainly garner many, many viewers who just want the truth untarnished by a political message.
I’ve gave up on buying The West last year as a personal protest against its deplorable tackiness, shallowness and mendaciousness, though I do still read the major papers online daily. As a Saturday morning coffee and ciggie accompaniment, however, The Weekend Aus still has its appeal, particularly for the colour supplements.
Newspapers, commercial TV and commercial radio (or MSM as it is hereabouts known) have a single function which is to make money for their owners. This goal has never varied. These entities are now migrating their business models to a world where the internet must be considered. Those that fail to adapt will obviously disappear. But commercial media will remain. To argue otherwise is to ignore that people still want to be entertained, distracted, titillated, edified, exposed to advertising and to be informed of certain events.
Journalism (or The News as it is called on TV) is one small facet of commercial media. It is a mistake to equate a newspaper’s function as being synonomous with journalism. A newspaper is much more than journalism.
Experiments with finding niche and alternative next generation outlets for journalism on the internet other than only in print and on TV and radio make for good times and are already well entrenched. But this has little to do with the fate of commercial newspapers, TV and radio which have only ever been partly concerned with journalism.
The medium is not the message. The delivery of mainstream messages, which will always be delivered on time and at profit because of our communal need for shared experience – whether that be a canvassing of the identity of our next political leader or the latest footy scores, is agnostic as to the medium. And neither does it require any brave new journalism.
More’s the pity.
“One of the many ironies in the decline and fall of the newspaper is that editors, columnists and proprietors who happily trashed public interest concerns and championed privatisation and consumer choice for so many years now find themselves on the receiving end of the blunt logic of the market.”
This point would make (some, tangential) sense if there had been a process of privatisation within the press. Happily there was never a need for such a process. In short, media owners have been on the receiving end of citizen choice since the year dot, and in any case long before their editorial positions on some of the elements of neoliberalism. So here’s some (admittedly tenuous) irony: the papers that have not championed privatisation and have reserved to themselves, as you have done, the judgment about what is in the so-called ‘public interest’, ie. the Fairfax papers, are the ones who are most likely to suffer from the 21st century ‘market logic’ now unfolding. There’s something in that, I think.
By the way, I take it that you think we need someone who will formulate what is the ‘public interest’ in relation to journalism and who will make sure that some of more damaging consumer choices are done away with? I’d be up for that role but I’m not sure how others feel about it.
BBB
No, BBB, I think you’re wrong on both counts.
Historically, there was some degree to which other imperatives supplemented market logic in editorial decision making – the story of Fairfax is really the story of the effective privatisation of those imperatives. I don’t think there’s much controversy about this in terms of media history – I’m not making some ideological point, but tracing a history.
And secondly, the point, as you’d know if you’d bothered to investigate what Simons is actually saying rather than confining yourself to flip snark, is not to set up some sort of diktats to define or circumscribe what public interest is. But I’ll leave you to follow the links, if you’re genuinely interested, which the tone of your comment suggests might be in doubt.
I understand what Simmons is on about (it’s a great idea, I think), I am dealing with your minor additional point re: the supposed irony of newspapers championing privatisation and consumer in spheres other than the press and then being subjected to market forces, as if there were a valid connection and more importantly as if one followed the other. I mean, if one doesn’t follow the other it ain’t that ironic, right? If the point is really that market imperatives have supplanted the more noble editorial policies of the past, then you’ve a funny way of expressing it.
And I didn’t mean to be snarky, so apologies if I came across that way. Rhetorical questions aren’t always asked with a sarcastic tone, you know. To be fair (on myself) the internet is great at reflecting intended tone, isn’t it?
BBB
I find it interesting the way that aggregators such as Google News (which is now my major method of checking headlines for current events, and which I use for email alerts on coverage of particular subjects) are adjusting to an increase in online non-corporate, independent and alternate news organs, as reflected by the way they choose whether a site offering commentary/opinion is “a blog” or “a news site”.
For Google News, the basic publishing metric is whether a site has multiple contributors and publishes on average 4 articles a day over a period of about 6 months, and a technical metric regarding the way permalinks are structured to include unique numerical sequences for articles. A site that ticks these boxes can then be submitted for consideration for inclusion in Google News listings, with a final human review.
This opens up many avenues for independent journalism covering specialist areas of “news” to still be classified as news organs for the purpose of online aggregators, which will become more and more the landing-page of choice for people keeping up with the news, and by which the front-page headlines become a display generated by “collective intelligence” i.e. the stories that are covered by the most news outlets get the top spot in the headlines.
It is a mistake to equate a newspaper’s function as being synonomous with journalism.
Example 1 – mX – the free but unreadable[*] afternoon paper produced by Murdoch for Queensland Rail. The primary function of that is to make money through advertising. To form the newspaper, I gather News Corp took existing journalists for the Courier Mail and told them outright “You’re now working for mX.” Take lots of AP and Reuters pres releases, throw in the dregs from the gossip presses, add a little bit of “actual” journalism (a bit of free riding on the Courier Mail), and the result (I gather) is a very successful business model.
Maybe this is the future of print journalism, even if few people care about the results. The recycling bin at Mitchelton station is always full of unwanted mX papers. For many passengers, their first action off the train is to dispose of their copy.
An excellent idea and I can’t wait to see how Simons and Sweet’s foundation hangs together.
As for the state of newspapers, I’ve been travelling a lot in the Middle East and Eastern Europe recently and have been impressed by the vibrancy of the print culture in almost every country I’ve been to. This is definitely a cross-cultural thing, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, all the former Yugoslav countries, Czech Rep, Slovakia and Poland, all have numerous newstands and newspapers. Maybe its just a lower takeup of Internet, but I like to think that these cultures still enjoy the tactile experience of newsprint.
What exactly are would fill the gap? Reliable, privately (or government) owned, establishment institutions like the former WSJ or how the (B/A)BC apparently used to be? Or minuscule, radical, unreliable but fascinating mini-papers/blogs/political papers? I think the term “independent” is too vague — does it just mean “not owned by a big corporation”, or something more?
BBB @ 6 – apologies – yes, tone can be in the eye of the beholder online! Btw, Sunday, Time, The Bulletin, etc. are all examples of a commercial logic trumping other considerations – prestige/status, power as well as some sort of public interest in “quality journalism”.
tigtog @ 7 – that’s very interesting!
Terry Flew on the media jobs crisis in the UK:
http://terryflew.blogspot.com/2008/12/media-jobs-crisis.html
This parent, whose children can apparently here the click of a computer power button from a mile away, will enjoy pulling the Saturday Herald to pieces for many years to come. Until the kids start wanting to read it anyway.
Maybe its really simple: on the one hand we watch politicians lying and spinning on TV, more intent on politics than policy and the people they are meant to serve. Absolutely childish and irresponsible behaviour. On the other journalists too are caught up in the play and can be just as self-centred. People call this the ‘rough & tumble’ of the game, or ‘rigorous intellectual analysis’: I would simply like to point out that it is childish and that people are far more important and deserve far more than endless posturing and selfishness – politicians are supposed to be running a country for Chrissakes!
Perhaps nobody is reading journalists anymore because their stories reflect the monotony of a lamebrains’ game: and screw the media as a ‘business’. Who cares? How responsible is ‘the media’? What people need is hope, that there is somebody there that even half looks like they could clean up just some of the mess (like the economic melt-down, or pollution driven climate change, the dire need for new and clean energy technologies) the lamebrains created, or let slip. How much support have journalists given our scientists, humanitarians and visionaries who do have the welfare of the planet and people at heart? Most journalists seem to me to be caught up in the muck!
Otherwise they would be out in force condemning, lampooning, caricaturising and humiliating childish behaviour, highlighting the consequences of selfish and destructive behaviour and the negative effects of governments and corporations on the real problems we all confront, and encouraging and rewarding those who are genuinely working for the welfare of their fellow human beings.
I have just a few words for journalists which may surprise those who have been supposedly trained in effective communication to a targeted audience: “Guys and girls – you just don’t come across”. Where are you? If you are becoming irrelevant then instead of blaming everybody and everything and every circumstance around you – take a look in the mirror? I don’t think the need has ever been greater for journalists who can frame the problems of the day and present them to people.
Quality and cost stopped us from buying newspapers in the top end. The Australian was too expensive. The NT News was unreadable. The West Australian was one-eyed rubbish most of the time. Couldn’t bring myself to buy a paper even when they published one of my letters.
The online dailies leave me cold. They are not really interactive unless you count comments on boltish blogs or Lindsay Tanner’s Age business blog.