As noted here and here, I attended the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism event in Brisbane yesterday. Courtesy of the lovely folks at the ABC, the sessions were all recorded and will be viewable online, so that absolves me from the difficult task of trying to reconstruct a session in which I was a panelist after the fact. So what I wanted to do in this post is thank the organisers of the day – particularly Jonathan Este of the MEAA – and of my session – particularly Cristen Tilley from the ABC as Chair and my co-panelists Axel Bruns from QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and blogger/journalist Marian Edmunds – for what I found was a stimulating and enjoyable experience. I also wanted to note some reflections which were prompted by many of the discussions.
The caveat I want to enter before proceeding further is that there’s a real sense in which I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m not a journalist or a journalism educator, and I don’t think “citizen journalism” is the best way of conceptualising what I do in my online writing, even when it most closely approaches reportage. My stake in all this is really that of a citizen and that of a media participant, and precisely because participation is a better model for engament in/with the media now than “audience” or “reader”, I don’t regard myself as being a privileged participant in these conversations, let alone in some way representative of the figure of “the blogger” which is in a real way a mythical one. A lot of what I bring to all this is probably more to do with my background and worldview as a sociologist.
That takes me to the first point I want to make – as I argued previously, I think the “bloggers v. journos” stoush is badly framed and misses most of what’s actually going on. It’s also worth noting, as I did at the outset of the session yesterday, that the debate as it plays out in the opinion columns and (ironically) the “blogs” at The Australian is more accurately seen as a subset of the culture wars and a struggle for hegemony and control over information and analysis than anything much to do with either the conditions of media work or the “fourth estate” role that the media supposedly plays. But more on that later. A lot of actually existing journos aside from columnists and right wing editors aren’t actually suffused with antagonism for blogs. It’s also interesting, and here I’d refer to the paragraph above, that some bloggers or “web evangelists” have an equal stake in continuing the “journos v. blogger wars”. (But for those interested in the latest series of “blogs are no longer the future of journalism” pronunciatos from the “fact and balance” crew, see this post from Stilgherrian, and my previous post.)
Cameron Reilly, for instance, appears to have perceived an antagonism in the session that he was a panelist in which entirely escaped me as someone watching it from the floor. He also takes an unjustified swipe at QUT’s Jean Burgess, who I think totally correctly debunked the “catastrophist” narrative, as I later dubbed it, about the death of the newspaper. And that theme is reproduced in another key by another participant Perth Norg‘s Bronwen Clune, who also recently wrote the obituary of the (Fairfax) newspaper. I don’t want to be reductive about the contribution that Reilly and Clune have to make, and the latter in particular had some interesting things to say which I’ll come back to, but this “web evangelist” stuff does seem to me to unhelpfully define itself against its Big Media Other, and to need sustaining through constant boosterism which then moves on to some “new killer app” almost at the same speed as the permanent revolution fails to deliver what’s claimed for it, and as the media empires resist their predicted collapse into ruins. Self “branding” and entrepreunerial writing bring in their wake real costs as well as benefits, and citizen media is not the transparently democratic exercise it’s purported to be.
But one good point Clune made, and one which was echoed by other participants yesterday, was that the “control media” have missed the boat and been swamped by the tide. This is where I think the concentration on media ownership is misplaced – it’s certainly not unimportant that there’s a concentration of ownership in the Australian MSM (and Axel Bruns is right in my view to question whether that’s not a large part of the reason the Australian media have been so resistant to, and inept in, the web 2.0 takeup), but in many ways it’s a debate of the 1980s and the 1990s. I’ve never understood the focus on Rupert Murdoch as teh evil that seems to obsess so many. As a social democrat, I don’t expect capitalist corporations or media “barons” like Murdoch to act in the public interest or to be without a political agenda, and the recent Fairfax shenanigans surely put to bed any residual sense that Fairfax was or is some sort of temple of fourth estate goodness. A simple proliferation of papers – which all define “hard news” in the same narrow sense of crime and day to day politics – never provided us with the golden age of journalism some like to wistfully misremember, and there’d be a better bang for the buck from initiatives other than starting an ABC newspaper or whatever.
I think Jason Wilson was the first to make the point last year at the height of the Government Gazette vs. blogosphere wars that the angst that accompanied the pseph blog dissing was a reflection of the fact that the ownership of opinion and analysis had slipped from the proprietorial grasp of the punditariat. That sort of ownership is gone, and it ain’t never coming back, and that’s a really important shift. And there’s a broader shift at work where media corporations can no longer control their audiences, which does totally disrupt the equation of a conversation among pundits at the summit of the media heights with a representative role for a unitary public. That point was made by MEAA secretary Chris Warren. That was never true, and it’s clear that it’s increasingly impossible to maintain the pretence that it is true now. A democratic public sphere needs to privilege participation over representation by a putative fourth estate.
And that’s a problem with a lot of these debates about the future of journalism. They’re based on pretence and a threatened professional identity. Again, Clune and others had some worthwhile things to say – particularly to many of the young and student journalists in the audience – about the need to focus on interactivity and a different conception of “sources” than is captured by the traditional models – a point also made by Edmunds on our panel. But for someone who’s not actually part of the media industry, what’s striking is the degree to which a groundswell of workplace change has come so late to the attention of journalists.
A lot of us have been working in an environment for many years now where the “nine to five” job is totally a thing of the past, where it’s actually vital not to identify too much with one employer, and where fluidity characterises work practices and career patterns both. Industrial realities and workplace restructuring driven relentlessly by the bottom line seem suddenly to have jolted a lot of journalists into a realisation that this is not the hypothetical way of the twenty-first century or something (for instance something happening in “society” outside the media workspace), but the reality of the present. It struck me that the distancing from “society” proper to a certain conception of the journalist as a professional, the reification of change, and a mindset that privileges the observer are actually huge barriers to both a constructive approach to change and to resistance to its more deleterious dimensions.
A lot more could be said about all this, but I was left thinking that the first steps towards mapping out a future of journalism involve a rigorous and probably unsettling confrontation with the harsh realities of the changed conditions of possibility for professional practice. I think that also entails – paradoxically – a stronger identification with the profession itself (and a weaker identification with employers) and a shift in disposition towards radical questioning of what entails doing “being a journalist” in the world we now live in.
Note also: Related posts at LP from Kim and dk.au, and from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.
Update: Ken Parish on the future of newspapers at Troppo, Derek Barry provides a comprehensive summary of Margaret Simons’ session at FOJ, and Andrew Elder responds to Christian Kerr’s “balance and fact” rant and Mark Day.
Update: My fellow panelist Marian Edmunds has her say.
Update [by Kim]: Derek Barry has now posted his notes on the third session at which Jean Burgess and Cameron Reilly spoke.
I’ll be reductive about that Bronwen Clune post: it’s a nasty piece of work.
Yeah, it’s really unhelpful. I should have added that some of this “entrepreneurial web 2.0 writing” boosterism coincides neatly with a management anti-union downsizing agenda, and that’s blatant in that post by Clune. It’s kinda like picket crossing by blog post. It’s a good illustration of how the “bloggers vs. journos” debate can mask a sort of neo-liberal consensus.
Update: Ken Parish on the future of newspapers at Troppo, Derek Barry provides a comprehensive summary of Margaret Simons’ session at FOJ, and Andrew Elder responds to Christian Kerr’s “balance and fact” rant and Mark Day.
As someone now straddling the media worlds I say yes to everything here Mark.
I jump back and forth on all of this daily but one thing that has always puzzled me is why so many MSM folks appear to look down on the very people more likely to read them and link to them.
Bloggers are the MSM’s best friend we spread their stuff add to it and yes, hook into it with an axe too.
Blogging, new media and an open web is not going away so peaceful co-operative co-existence is gonna have to happen eventually.
I liked Simons’ reference to Gutenberg because there’s many parallels there. He printed the Bible for the first time and in German. Suddenly ‘anyone’ could read it in their own time and interpret it how they may, without a Roman priest required to translate the text. That and the plague were probably the main drivers for Protestantism to follow.
Great post, Mark. I also got the sense at FOM08 that Journos would benefit from some Sociology of Work 101.
And that Elder post is a corker:
dk, yep!
It was a little interesting that a number of people had the impression that the discussion was of better quality and less antagonistic than in Sydney – obviously, though, Cameron Reilly came along with a certain preconception, while there were others of us who thought it would be much more productive to short-circuit and disrupt any restaging of the “wars”. But I still think a lot of what circulates in these discussions is highly compromised by being dichotomised and a failure to be underpinned by reality as opposed to a large element of projective fantasy.
Phil -
Indeed! We’re among the people most interested in aspects of what they’re interested in!
If we’re talking journalism we also need to talk about television, radio and that dreaded cliche ‘convergence’ as well.
Journos will need to be camera operatorors, video and audio editors in the very near future. In fact, many of them are already. Broadcasters all talk about not being ‘broadcasters’ any more. Instead they talk about being ‘content providers’ with the content needing to work over a variety of media.
I see great possibilities for online media sites which combine:
* professional news gathering,
* analysis/comment like crikey,
* multi-media production, both amateur (such as CurrentTV and LinkTV) and professsional stuff generated by the site itself,
*plus a fair dose of citizen journalism.
Norg?
WTF?
The thing that really bothers me about this “debate” in general is the assumption about what journalism is. For me the problematic thing is that both bloggers and journalists see themselves performing the same ‘fourth estate’ role and the dick-waving then becomes about who’s best equipped to do that. Whereas I tend to see ‘journalism’ as a particular methodical approach to writing a story that favours research, evenhanded treatment of a subject, and accuracy in quoting and subediting. But what if we imagined, just for starters, a terrain for this kind of storytelling that’s different to what commonly identified players like Crikey provide. It’s actually been interesting over the last year or so to see how Crikey is attempting to squeeze more varied topics (eg healthcare, sport, aviation) into its politics/media/business model.
Why be so fair and balanced Mark?
We’re young, their old and that’s life.
Pleading for understanding with swine like Kerr is like asking sex-workers to kiss their clients. Ain’t gonna happen.
FDB,
norg = news organisation.
Yes, I’d kind of worked that out. I just have trouble fathoming some business’ name-choice. A norg, after all, being also a boosie.
What’s a boosie?
/thread drift
Simple, Kim.
A boosie is a norg.
Oks!
I should perhaps explain that it’s an Australianism (I think) and I cast about for a bit before settling on that spelling, only because ‘boozy’ has a meaning already. Think “short-for-bosom” as a pronunciation guide.
Youse are weird. But, then, norg is an odd word.
Update: My fellow panelist Marian Edmunds has her say.
But you were both were you not? Lots of people publish stuff online. Most of them don’t get invited to address such events as the Future of Journalism. So you have, for want of a better word, privileges. You are also there representing bloggers in some way or regarded as such.
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In short you’re wielding power.
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It’s my opinion that when you wield power it’s important to do so explicitly knowing that you are doing so and acknowledging this. Whenever I’ve had the misfortune to be treated to a boss who wants to be my friend and thinks we’re all one big family I head for the door smartly. Such people will abuse their power and expect me to do more than just my job.
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Journalism is not a profession. It’s a trade. Professionals who do a bad job get sued and/or go to jail. If journalists were held up to the standards that lawyers and doctors are, well, we’d need a lot more jails.
Adrien, fair enough, but I’m certainly resisting the representative role. I acknowledge there’s some exercise of power and therefore privilege, but it doesn’t mean that I have to accept the terms of that privileging without contesting it.
As to the comments about professionalism, that’s precisely what’s at stake. A “craft” is difficult to practice in a Taylorised world, and professionalism is a claim to status not some eternal essence. It’s been a long time since the “accountability/self governance” definition captured the distinction properly. But it can also be an identification that can be turned to a positive use as well as serving as a form of social closure, which is certainly one aspect of how it’s been employed in all these debates.
Mark I tend to resist the professional label. I’ve known too many journalists who use it to mask the fact that they are lazy mediocrities; it’s a form of credentialism. I wouldn’t go so far as to say anyone can be a journalist. But the craft itself is about assembling information, critically evaluating it and expressing this in an accessible form. You don’t need any qualifications except good language skills and critical facilities.
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That’s actually pretty rare these days. And there’s not much of a market for it. What’s in demand is someone who can cherry-pick data in order to totally distort any issue to the advantage of their masters. Maybe the word journalist is redundant:
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WANTED:
Cadet Bullshitartist
No, journalism is not a trade. Try being on the end of bad journalism, and ask yourself if what went wrong is just a bit of bad plumbing. The mistakes are a lot more horrendous than a pile of poo in the front drive.
You can be shat upon from a much higher place, and feel much worse. Journalists have the power to define us in our public roles, and they chooose the narratives by which this is done.
This is not to denigrate trades, but to acknowledge that good journalism is a matter of judgement and insight which does not come from a textbook or a simple set of procedures.
I guess reporting is closer to being a trade, but even that makes me wonder. Gideon Haigh was on ABC radio recently claiming you can train a journalist in six weeks, and I truly thought he had taken a side trip into the land of ultra-dumb. Most of the three hundred odd Fairfax journos earning over a hundred grand (and no, I haven’t checked the reference and if this was my day job I would toil until I knew for sure) are not just getting the spelling right on the members of a suburban basketball team.
Mark – interesting post and I look forward to listening to the panel sessions at a later date. Just my general responses…
1. Journalism really has nothing to do with blogging and never did. They are entirely different media, one being about reporting, the other being about reflection and debate, so it’s like comparing apples and oranges. The very idea of blogging being the death of journalism is, quite frankly, absurd.
2. The so-called ‘death’ of journalism is an economic debate. Reilly may have been wrong to brand Jean Burgess as an antagonist, but he’s right that the production costs of journalism and potential revenue generation from journalism have shifted dramatically. Costs may have reduced, but the appetite for immediate and detailed reporting to news items has actually increased the staffing costs for journalism. Further, the rise in the use of blogs by traditional media sites has produced an entirely new range of staff costs in moderation and editing. And any business owner will tell you that when staff costs rise dramatically, reduced production costs do not even go close to offsetting increased staff costs.
3. Rupert Murdoch isn’t evil. However, the activities of News Corp on a global scale to eliminate competition are at best, monopolistic and anti-competitive. But if you create a private media sector with privileged access to public assets (ie: radio frequency spectrum) you risk developing a market where only those companies with access to licences for media production having the capacity to compete in that market. This goes for print media too, as even though there is no public asset being used to distribute content, there is a licensing system for media production and there are distribution exclusivities in place.
4. Journalism isn’t just about interactivity. Actually one of the things that’s annoying me at the moment is the notion of editing and debate being confused with journalism. If you mean ‘community facilitation’ then call it ‘community facilitation’ or ‘editing’ or ‘moderation’. You’re not a journalist, you’re an editor/blogger, and that’s not a bad thing, it’s just different. Where journalism is interactive it should be so for the improvement of information dissemination, error correcting, and information updates. It shouldn’t be about arguing the point. That’s community engagement and blogging, and while it may well be a close relation to journalism, it’s not, technically speaking, reporting.
Anyway – hope this is provocative and that a tirade of journalists and blogger advocates respond to my fairly firmly stated ideas. I look forward to the biffo.
1. Journalism really has nothing to do with blogging and never did. They are entirely different media, one being about reporting, the other being about reflection and debate, so it’s like comparing apples and oranges. The very idea of blogging being the death of journalism is, quite frankly, absurd.
Joanne, thank you. THANK you!
You sound like you’ve actually taken the trouble to read a blog- unlike many commentators!
Well, Jo’s a blogger too, Helen!
Seems to me Journalism proper is shifting in focus from the public to the private, in a way, possibly in line with pluralisation in matters of ‘society’.
Its going the way of being less and less focused on the big issues from a critical holistic perspective to being focused on what ‘me’ as an individual reader might enjoy and how some current affair will affect ‘me’ and my personal life: Me with my busy life, job, and, quite frankly, lack of interest in the nuts and bolts and holistic implications of an issue.
Wider social critical analysis is hopefully not dissapearing – by finding its way over to bloggs, and if this is true it could represent a significant break away of intellectuals from the ‘confines’ of having to please the masses at the same time as doing their thing.
Great post Mark, you sum up the good and the bad from the day pretty well. As for my writing an obituary for Fairfax, I think you are mistaking my assertion that it can’t continue to exist in the way it does for its death knoll.
I’d love to hear the explanation of your point in the comments that:
“entrepreneurial web 2.0 writing” boosterism coincides neatly with a management anti-union downsizing agenda, and that is blatant in Clune’s post”. Huh? Did you read all the comments I’ve made in the post as well?
Joanne, on point 4 that you make, you’re forgetting that journalism as we know it is just on of its incarnations. It has and will always continue to be an evolving art.
I know it’s hard to come away from these days feeling like we’ve been saying the same things for years, but I think these conversations are important and for me personally, an opportunity to refocus on what I’m doing and why.
David – No, journalism is not a trade. Try being on the end of bad journalism, and ask yourself if what went wrong is just a bit of bad plumbing. The mistakes are a lot more horrendous than a pile of poo in the front drive.
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You prove my point for me. You’re simply saying that journalism is a profession because it can have bad consequences. But bad plumbing and bad building can likewise have bad consequences. There’s some disagreement as to the definition of the word ‘profession’ but it has something to do with being a highly trained specialist. I’d therefore assert that plumbers have more right to be called professionals then journalists.
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Being a journalist doesn’t require that much specialized knowledge. A carpenter needs more. The hubbub about journalistic training and skill level is pure credentialism. The ability to read, write, ask questions and subject the whole thing to critical review is all that used to be required. Nowadays what is required is much much less.
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Most journalism these days consists of pompous filler.
Jo @ 24, a few responses:
(1) Agreed. As I said here and in the session, there’s a difference between reportage and analysis that is often missed in all this – and the latter is often more significant a skill and more porous a practice.
(2) Hmmm. Yes and no. I’d like to see some empirical studies on costs and cost shifting, rather than top level assumptions. Comments moderators are cheaper than sub-editors, for instance, who are in any case often now outsourced or contracted – as are most of the weekend sections in a lot of the Australian papers.
(3) Agreed – though I’d shift the emphasis a bit from anti-competitive behaviour – in part to cost of entry, but also to editorial approach. Proliferating papers isn’t the answer, but see Margaret Simons’ book on “public journalism” initiatives by some US papers which have been a success in some instances.
(4) Yes and no again. While I’d agree that I’m not a journo (hence the bit in the post and my scepticism about the too easy equation of blogging and “citizen journalism”) see also the bit in the post about the different attitude towards “sources” and indeed the reflexivity of the position of the reporter.
I doubt that’s stoushworthy though! But thanks for the input!
Bronwen @ 28 – thanks! I’m glad you liked the post.
Re – yours and my comment – no, I hadn’t read the thread at the time I wrote the post. I’ve now noted your clarifications. I do think the language you used in the orginal post was objectively a bit hostile, regardless of your intentions. As a sociologist, I don’t just look at intention but also at the way positions in a debate speak people, as well as the other way around! So it’s not meant to be a personalised comment.
I do think that there’s a bit too much dichotomising in all this, and I don’t think that there needs to be the degree of polarisation that there appears to be.
However, while as I said in the post I’m somewhat dumbfounded that a lot of journos are only now realising that changed conditions of work are a reality and not just something to write about as a “social issue” or on the biz pages, I don’t think that there’s any panacea for people in a sort of entrepreneurial working life. It can work – for a small minority. You only have to look at the difference between MEAA rates and the actual pay for freelancers, and the way Fairfax recently tried to basically prevent its freelancers from working for anyone else, or the pathetic remuneration on offer when you read the Pro Blogger job board to see that. The “new economy” represents a significant shift in power as between capital and labour.
Analytically, a shift to a different style and disposition towards what’s involved in media work is separable from changed conditions of employment and the conditions of production for content. And that’s a distinction we should all be fighting for!
It’s a distinction Fairfax, in their campaign to keep the digital arm free from pesky union interference, seem keen to blur.
They’re helped in that by bloggers like Sam Brett, who scabbed during the strike.
Update [by Kim]: Derek Barry has now posted his notes on the third session at which Jean Burgess and Cameron Reilly spoke.