Crikey’s Eric Beecher was quoted in this Sally Jackson piece as saying online media will not be able to bridge the quality gap that’s being created by the long emergency we’re seeing in the usual MSM outlets.
Mr Beecher warned that Fairfax’s decision this week to sack staff at its flagship broadsheet newspapers — The Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney and The Age in Melbourne — would blow a hole in this country’s traditional quality media that all of the new media’s bloggers and websites would not be able to fill. He said that included the online publications he was involved in, such as Crikey and Business Spectator. “What’s at risk here is the role of well researched, serious journalism to act as a check and balance in the system of democracy,” he told ABC. “Online media can replace part of it. The four websites I’m involved in employ 30 or 40 full-time journalists, which is quite a lot in independent media terms, but compared with 300 or 400 journalists on big daily newspapers it is fairly small.
I don’t necessarily think he’s wrong but I do think it’s way too early to tell, after all we’re still in a period where a thousand flowers have yet to bloom.
But he warned that few observers had predicted the current threat to quality journalism.
Odd, I distinctly remember seeing Philip Knightley speak on this exact topic a few years ago here in Sydney, and he wasn’t the only esteemed MSM survivor to sound a warning, it’s been said for years.
Returning for a moment to letting a thousand flowers bloom we get this from Beecher.
It would be controversial, he said, but politicians “need to look at it now and think, if we don’t do anything, then in a decade’s time the idea of well-resourced, quality journalism — with hundreds of journalists covering parliament and business and investigative journalism and the courts — will be gone”.
We can have hundreds of journalists covering these things, the problem for guys like Beecher is that they can’t see past the old model of what a journalist should look like.
I’ve always had an answer for this and yes, it does go to the old blogger/journalist question – let bloggers into the loop and the best of them will bubble up as a new form of distributed journalism takes hold. Give them access, the same access, to the courts, the press gallery etc.
Bust the old cozy arrangements the usual suspects have with each other. Lets not stand on ceremony or credentialism, let even more flowers bloom. Sure the transition is uncertain but what other choice is there to to the current malaise?
I must say the quality of the discussion on this question on Q&A tonight was absolutely appalling. With the interesting exception of Sharman Stone.
The last time we’ll see John Pilger nodding in agreement with a Liberal Party MP, I’d wager.
BBB
BBB, btw, and o/t, sorry you were in the way of my snark the other day at Troppo. I was finding that thread quite frustrating to put it mildly. I shouldn’t have directed that at you.
Hundreds of quality journos?
Where pray tell?
Hiding their bushel under a light or something?
You know I got so fucking tired of opening the fucking Age and seeing Tony fucking Parkinson getting paid for writing rank fucking gibberish that I finally stopped buying the godamn fucking thing!
AND I’d been a daily regular since I started work in 1970!
There never was hundreds of quality journos any-fucking-where and that includes The Nation-fucking- Review, the Living fucking Daylights or the National fucking Times. Hundreds of journo’s my arse.
@Mark, yep, grating was the word, and next week we get Beecher himself, along with Bill Shorten, Chris Pyne, Kerry Chikarovski and Jane Caro, expect more grate.
They covered media issues last night, including references to blogging, but it’s like real bloggers doesn’t exist on Q and A or anywhere else in the MSM.
The MSM talk a lot about blogs and bloggers but never seem to have an actually independent blogger available to speak about the realities of doing what they do….maybe they think we’ll show up in our PJ’s guzzling V’s and spend the entire session Facebooking or Twittering our friends instead of interacting in meatspace.
As has been said before on LP, the “quality” of “The Age” online has been very low grade and going lower each year it seems: celebs, goss, celebs, lifestyle; apparently pitched at 15-33 year olds; celebs, did I mention the pop stars and celebs??, [mundane news], goss, films, TV, sports, goss, columnists, goss, ads, etc
I thought the general discussion on QandA was better than usual, apart from the blogger part, and there were some good questions for a change. In a decent society John Pilger would be a national treasure instead of the semi-outcast he is. We just can’t handle outspoken and articulate ‘radicals’ in Australia so we seek to marginalise them.
Someone made a good point on ABC radio this morning that the problem with Fairfax boils down to incompetent management whose only business model when faced with falling circulation is to reduce costs and trash the brand through reduction in quality.
The claim by the opinion editor of The OO that they had invested in quality jouranalism and were reaping the benefits was treated with the contempt that it deserved from Pilger. Strange definition of quality.
Ambigulous @ 5 – I think the problem is that if you look at the most popular stories, the celebs, goss, lifestyle, baby with two heads stories is what people look at and gives the site revenue through ads.
The big question of the viability of “real news” on the internet is whether individual reporters/bloggers or companies can find a revenue model which works. I don’t think its something that can be done really well part-time and at the moment the blogger world does rely heavily on the MSM for information.
“In a decent society John Pilger would be a national treasure instead of the semi-outcast he is.”
He was that good! I just wanted to see and hear more of him on the show but I guess he was given a fair go given the crappy format.
Might I just add that if John Pilger, for instance, was given a regular spot in a local paper, circulation would likely increase. Just like left wingish books sell very well, while tired right wing, Costello type books need so much tedious community paid promotion.
Chris (a different one): I’m sure you’re correct about the current business model. But it was noticeable over the last 2 yerars or so, that “The Age” online site ‘headed down market’ – I mean that in terms of ‘type of story’ [tabloid vs serious commentary], rather than in terms of average-income-level-of-readership. Mark B has expressed similar views here on LP.
Pilger would never get a gig, heck they sacked Carlton today for refusing to cross the picket.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24260555-7582,00.html
By the way was it just me that was really annoyed when Emerson chided Pilger for being an expat Aussie who criticised Australia.
“By the way was it just me that was really annoyed when Emerson chided Pilger for being an expat Aussie who criticised Australia.”
No.
“Let a thousand flowers… etc etc” is so often misapplied – I’m not sure that is the intention of Phil’s use of this phrase in this thread but the actual meaning is to describe a ploy where you flush out your enemies by encouraging others to speak out about ideas they have to improve a situation and then holding them and their ideas in contempt and it’s original user then executed those who spoke out.
From Phrase Finder – “Let a thousand flowers bloom is a common misquotation of Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Let a hundred flowers blossom”. This slogan was used during the period of approximately six weeks in the summer of 1957 when the Chinese intelligentsia were invited to criticize the political system then obtaining in Communist China.
The full quotation, taken from a speech of Mao’s in Peking in February 1957, is:
“Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.”
It is sometimes suggested that the initiative was a deliberate attempt to flush out dissidents by encouraging them to show themselves as critical of the regime. Whether or not it was a deliberate trap isn’t clear but it is the case that many of those who put forward views that were unwelcome to Mao were executed. “
Q & A gives me the shits. When you have Emerson and Stone fraternising on the need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on so- called ‘educational’ advertising I lose all faith.
Um, It’s gardening, not Mao, Ok?
No problems – pass the compost please.
Gardening by Mao: snip, snip, pluck, dead head, snip, prune, pull out by roots, snip; pass the secateurs please; what IS in that compost bin, Lin Biao?? snip, pluck, prune, trim, lurch; two hundred more shears from that backyard steel plant please; dodder, bullets, trample, snip…… blood and bone: nothing like it, crush, cut,…..