I’d be very sad to see Possum become a less regular blogger, but I have oodles of respect for his insistence on quality control, and the amazing amount of effort and time he puts into his psephological writing.

I think there’s a bigger point here about being a writer outside the mainstream media – some people make significant sacrifices elsewhere in their life to do it, and even if you see a few ads on a page, you shouldn’t make any assumption that anyone’s making a living wage from it.

It’s a big ask to do day in day out for years.

The holiday national road toll count was a godsend for journalists at the national news agency, AAP.

When the nation was asleep at the beach, news was at a premium. Thinly staffed radio stations around the country depended even more at these times on the steady flow of “rip and read” headlines from the wires.

So it was that the 24-hour news production desk at AAP, using a rudimentary chart on a wall, had responsibility for collating a national holiday road toll count from the individual counts of state and territory police forces.

This “death chart”, as it was called, became the hook for hundreds of largely internally generated news stories over the long, slow summer slumber.

Fresh angles could be created almost at will as overnight rewrite teams sought to freshen the file for the morning TV and radio bulletins:

* “Police are stepping up warnings over excessive speed after a spate of high-speed car crashes….”
* “The road toll is already closing in on last year’s record just three days into the holiday season….”
* “A fatality-free 24 hours on our roads has been welcomed by traffic authorities, but police say they remain on alert….”
* “A run of three fatalities on a horror stretch of road has triggered a slanging match between federal and state politicians over funding…”

It was an exercise in creating news out of very little. For sure, there were real human tragedies behind the raw death count. But telling those stories would require reporting resources and it was simply easier to conjure up a new lead by jamming together ritual phrases around the headline number.

The same effortless riffing is currently evident in the national media’s commentary on political opinion polls. It’s even easier in this case, though, because the event itself is orchestrated by the media.

Indeed, in the case of Newspoll – the most influential of the major polling organisations – a media company owns the poll. News Ltd can gear its entire editorial spin around a single number in a poll created by one of its own subsidiaries. In business, they call this vertical integration.

There is much discussion on Larvatus Prodeo and other blogs about News Ltd’s shameless political agenda. But the untold story is the economic efficiencies generated by “owning” the news.

The increasing squeeze on editorial resources in the mainstream media in the past decade is well documented. Legacies include an intensified focus on efficiency and shareholder value and a reduced sense of journalism as a “public good”. Event-driven news has been commoditised in an online world, leaving mainstream, capital-intensive outlets looking for new ways to create differentiated branded content.

These established outlets are filling the vacuum left by expensive reportorial journalism with cheap analysis and opinion built around in-house columnists.

This is why the front covers of our newspapers are now less about “what happened” and more about what someone says it all means.

News Ltd has taken this a step further by using its own Newspoll to advance its agenda. In this sense, the polling is not so much a reactive tool, but a proactive one. It drives the news cycle in such a way that journalists, once mere spectators, become actual players in the political game.

For a business organisation looking for a new business model in an online world, this makes a lot of sense. Instead of being hostage to externally-driven events that everyone can cover, you now “own” the news itself. The additional costs are very little. The polling is being done anyway. The “journalism” is just someone’s cheap opinion laid over the top.

Hence, we see The Australian dictating that the future of Rudd’s prime ministership hangs on its next Newspoll. Being so influential with such little investment is a sweet result for a margin-squeezed news organisation looking for a new reason to exist.

For an old journalist, it seems a logical extension of the holiday national road toll…..but with our own democracy as the road kill.

Editor Marni Cordell sums up the website’s achievements, and discusses its financial plight, in an editorial published this morning:

The online media environment we’re leaving is vastly different to the one in which we started. Since we launched, several mainstream opinion and analysis sites have joined us, including The Drum, Unleashed, The Punch and the National Times. Although we hope that the newspaper presses keep on clattering for decades to come, it’s clear that the role of online media outlets will only grow in the future — whatever business model they follow.

This is very sad news, as NM did indeed provide an excellent counter-point to the mainstream media, publishing stories based on genuine research and analysis and featuring a range of writers on a range of topics rarely seen in print.

Cordell writes:

The big media players are struggling to find a workable online business model that allows them to pay their writers and maintain high standards — and so are we.

We’ve noticed that too at LP. When we began taking advertising, it brought in revenue probably sufficient to support one person in frugal comfort. Now it’s pretty much running costs and beer money.

Phil Gomes, an LP blogger, has this to say at his eponymous blog:

But there can be renewal after death. What I’d like to see is all contributors to New Matilda who don’t already blog turn their energies to that form so that we can build a genuine independent new media ecosystem – one that unfortunately died before it had a chance to fully develop.

The tools are now even more refined to connect that ecosystem. Unfortunately everyone will have to get a real job, but you can’t have everything and dying for your art is a noble gesture.

I think he’s right. The NM model, though indeed run on the smell of an oily rag compared to big media, in some senses mimicked the business model of a magazine: a physical office, five or more paid staff. It’s always going to be difficult to sustain that sort of cost structure. The cost of running a blog, by contrast, is minimal – mainly consisting of the somewhat incalculable and largely unremunerated energy, passion and time of its contributors and writers.

We’ve been publishing since March 2005.

In that time, the portion of the Australian blogosphere devoted to public affairs has shrunk, with a lot of the independent blogs hoovered up by Crikey, and others leaving as their lives and priorities change. Feminist blogs remain extremely lively, but there are fewer independent voices writing about Australian electoral politics.

I’d like to see that change.

Some of us have been tossing around some ideas for some time about how we could expand the established readership of LP, and the scope of its contributors and content, in order to fill a gap I believe still exists in commentary and analysis of Australian public affairs, a gap which has just got bigger.

That’s not to diminish the value of many of the contributors and contributions to some of the sites mentioned in this post. But I do think there’s a need for independent commentary and analysis from a site which does not see itself as a media organisation, and whose energy and verve derives as much from its commenters and readers as its writers.

That wouldn’t come for free, as I think that marketing is necessary, and I also think that people’s commitment of time and knowledge has to be recognised financially. But I don’t think it necessitates replicating a model with full time paid staff and a physical space they work in.

Watch this space.

In the meantime, we’d be delighted to talk to any NM contributors who might be looking for a new outlet for their writing.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett:

There has been an increase in online sources of commentary and news in recent years. As their announcement on NewMatilda.com notes, this has included sites such as The Drum (funded by the ABC), Punch (funded by News Ltd) and The National Times (funded by Fairfax media). Whilst these new sites have provided new vehicles for commentary, I believe it is still very important to have independent operators in the media and online environment.

Crikey is still rolling along as the main independent web-based source of news and views, and Online Opinion continues to provide a wide range of articles and comment each day. There is also still a number of reasonable quality blogs around which focus on social and political commentary. None the less, the pending disappearance of New Matilda will certainly leave a hole in the fabric of independent social and political commentary, which is already much too threadbare.

Elsewhere: [by Kim] Spike.

Elsewhere: [by Kim] Qed.

Rusbridger’s topic was “Does Journalism Exist?”. It’s a long piece by online standards, but one of the very best I’ve read on all the vexed and often repetitive debates on the future of journalism. Gary Sauer-Thompson summarises the talk’s themes by arguing that it maps out a path towards “a mutualised news organisation”.

Rusbridger is concerned to interlink the debates about media business models with those about the role of journalists and their public responsibilities in a more sophisticated way than most writers on this set of related topics. But he does make it crystal clear that the model he believes is in the process of emerging can only do so on the basis of a business model which incorporates open access. For The Guardian, then, the economics of Rupert Murdoch and the New York Times‘s paywalls just doesn’t stack up:

My commercial colleagues at the Guardian – the ones who do think about business models – want to grow a large audience for our content and for advertisers, and can’t presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content. Last year we earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business, but not trivial. My commercial colleagues believe we would earn a fraction of that from any known pay wall model.

They’ve done lots of modelling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded. They’re looked at the argument that free digital content cannibalises print – and they look at the ABC charts showing that our market share of paid-for print sales is growing, not shrinking, despite pushing aggressively ahead on digital. They don’t rule anything out. But they don’t think it’s right for us now.

There’s more on this at the Reuters blog.

Make of it what you will. It seems pretty incoherent to me. I think Cory Doctorow’s pretty much right – these musings are fantasies, and his editors are going to have a horrible time trying to implement all these confused thought bubbles.

Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson.

Posts today at Crikey, Larvatus Prodeo and The Oz’s Mark Day.

Day amused me with this in his piece.

More than anyone else, Hartigan is plugged into worldwide trends, information, research, experiments, technologies, think tanks and consultancies. As part of the global News Corporation (publisher of The Australian) he is at the cutting edge of the media experience.

This fact alone makes Hartigans earlier comments on media even more alarming. How can you have so many resources at hand and still not understand the changes that are occurring – not to mention insisting your old business model still has legs.

It’s interesting watching the smart, small and quick take down a giant.

Once again I’ll repeat, the mistake being made by the media giants is in thinking they are the destination, but with aggregation via whatever method you choose (RSS, Google, Social Media etc) the web itself is the destination – I see specific sites as just a subset of that destination.

I don’t go to News Ltd sites, I go online.

And it’s not that they are getting smaller, it’s that the web is getting bigger.

As someone who straddles the media divide, I have to say that my money is on the smart, small and the quick because we’re quite happy to plug whatever we do into the web media stream and ride it – not attempt to hoard it for ourselves.

That’s the cutting edge of the media experience.

Tim has some reflections on the role online media plays and its value and potential vis-a-vis the mainstream media which I think are clearly heartfelt and incredibly important, so I’m going to take the liberty of quoting his last post at some length. In particular, I want to endorse Tim’s sentiments about the necessity of supporting and growing the independent online mediaspace, and I want to point out how those comments have direct implications for the sort of work we do at LP, and how that work could be enhanced. But more of that later.

As difficult as this decision is, there is nonetheless something apt about the timing. The blog began life not long after I moved to the US at the end of 2001. It got up and running in the strange twilight period between the events of September 11 and the disastrous decision by the Bush Administration to launch a war in Iraq in March 2003. With the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency that period has come to something of a natural and symbolic end and thus, for me at least, some of the central motivations for this sort of writing has dissipated. This blog, and others like it, have seen off the end of the Howard Government and the Bush Administration and on that score I couldn’t be happier.

This is not to say that there isn’t now a role for the sort of work blogs do, only that I, personally, am not in position to take on that sort of commitment at the moment. In fact, the need, especially in Australia, for wise independent voices to discuss and dissect the great issues of the day is as great as it has ever been and so that’s what I want to go out with: a plea for people to support — genuinely support — independent media in this country.

The fact is, Australia’s mainstream media is moribund. Although there are great journalists and other contributors out there, the institution itself is stuck in a hopeless, self-serving, tenured cul-de-sac and is failing in its job to properly inform, discuss, debate and entertain. Not to mention, reinvent itself. The form is dominated by a handful of insiders who have grown so content with their own lot that they are immune to sensible criticism and lack the self-awareness to reassess what it is they are doing. They are supported in this self-satisfied loop by a political class that is happy to exploit the status quo, feeding them leaks and other tidbits to keep the whole charade ticking over in such a way that nothing really changes.

The narratives, the memes, the discussions of our political and social life are set in concrete and endlessly recycle. We have learned to accept the daily, largely manufactured, controversies of political and social discussion in lieu of genuine examination. The same voices — and there are only about 20 of them — continue to define what is important or useful or worthy of discussion and the few organs of the mainstream media keep churning them out. Their lack of seriousness is only matched by their lack of courage.

To say that a fully-functioning independent media is the answer is glib. It is not that easy. And yet, there it is. The idea is not for such independent groups to replace the mainstream media but merely to get them to lift their game, to lead by example.

The situation as it currently stands is not completely hopeless. For all their failings, there are some new voices out there trying to make a difference. Some of them are thinktanks, some of them of grassroots organisations, some of them are blogs or other forms of online media. None of them has really “broken through” in the way that is necessary to make a real difference, but they are a start.

At the end of the day, though, they will only succeed if, firstly, they can organise themselves and offer a genuinely professional product and, secondly, if we-the-people properly support them. That means not just reading them and cheering them on but, by and large, financing them. And I don’t mean a few bucks in a tip jar once a year: I mean serious ongoing financial support. For as long as I have been blogging I’ve been hearing people tell me how wonderful blogs and other new media are and how much they enjoy and appreciate them. But I have very rarely seen those fine words and sentiments backed up with hard cash. It is about time it was.

I don’t mean you should toss a whole lot of cash at some guy with a blog. But at some point, enough of you are going to have to take a bit of a risk and invest a decent sum in this or that site so that they can genuinely operate as independent media. And the online media itself is going to have to get organised to the point where they can offer a product that is going to attract that sort of contribution, as well as money from other sources, advertising, or whatever.

Until this happens, stop whinging about the mainstream media. Spare me the heartfelt cries of how much you love this blog or that blog and just accept the fact that if you really want a functioning independent media you are going to have to pay for it. It’s that friggin simple.

Tim goes on to thank everyone for the support given to his various online endeavours, and I want to thank him for them too, but I’d mainly like to riff off these comments I’ve excerpted.

First, I really don’t think that anyone could disagree with his diagnosis of the media, and of its multitude of failings. One could add to that the observation that Australia fails to support many outlets for writing on public affairs outside newspapers themselves – while there are some exceptions such as The Monthly and Overland, we have nothing like the rich culture of magazine journalism and commentary that exists in comparable countries. That’s not just a factor of the distribution costs involved in a big country and the relatively small market. It’s also a product of the monopolisation of public space – and here Fairfax are equally at fault with News Limited – and this is why the dumbing down of ABC news is so lamentable. But it’s also a product of our own culture – a failure to engage publicly which is one of the worst aspects of the Australian political landscape.

If you wanted to make a living as a freelance writer in Australia, you could do so by writing about gadgets or travel or writing for teen mags (and I’m not knocking…) – but it’s just about impossible for anyone bar a very small hermetic circle to do so in writing about public affairs. And that’s one of the reasons why our “public intellectuals” are largely such a lacklustre lot – the “marketplace of ideas” is literally anti-competitive because of the lack of viable pathways for anyone to put the time and effort into breaking into it.

Ideally, online should be the place where this can be remedied. To some degree it is, but Tim’s quite right to say that there are barriers to the improvement and progress of what we’ve got (whether we’re talking about things on the internet like Crikey or New Matilda or the blogosphere.) I’m constantly thinking about how we could make LP a much better place in terms of all sorts of features and depth of analysis, but what blocks us from doing that is time. And therefore money. In trying to “monetise” the site, we’ve discovered that it’s possible to maintain our current readership levels and earn enough small change to supplement the income of one of us – me. But we’ve been set back by the state of the economy and the decline in advertising sales and the price at which ads can be sold, and that’s also made it more difficult to go ahead with the various strategies we have in mind for expanding the reach of the joint as quickly as we’d like (though there will be some movement on this front in the new year). I’ve always been of the view we could relatively easily triple the size of our readership just through some straightforward marketing, but that costs.

But – not to put too fine a point on it – if we really wanted to try to provide the sort of independent media we think we deserve in this country, we’d need several people working full time on such an effort. There is just no other way.

The frustrating thing is that I know we’ve collectively got the expertise to do it, but we can’t, because we don’t have the seed money to even get started. (And I very much include the LP community in that “we”.)

Now that I’ve got more time post-PhD, I’m planning to take the work I did on how we could grow online independent media a couple of years ago (and as some will know, quite a lot of dosh and about six months’ work was put in to mapping this out) off the shelf and see what we can do with it. At this stage, it might be necessary to find an “angel” or two to fund startup costs, but while I’m convinced that could be done, I think that process in itself might be quite a lengthy one.

So what can you do if you want to see a better and enduring online independent media?

If you like what we do here, please do take the opportunity to promote LP to friends and colleagues. If you know of anyone who you think might want to support an expansion of the online mediasphere, get in touch with me! And please consider unblocking ads on this site, and/or giving us a donation.

I’m sure LP will be with us for a long time to come, but we need to think about whether we want to grow and expand, do a holding operation, or scale back to amateur blogging. The latter always has a bit of pull, because the amount of work that goes into multiple daily posting, and making sure that quality is maintained (though it could be improved with more time!) is considerable, and carries an opportunity cost. Although I’ve flirted with the “blogger cherry-picked by bigger media” thing in my time, I’ve become increasingly convinced that’s not the way to go – it’s much better if we can collectively decide that we want to provide a bigger and better online alternative to the mainstream media. But I think Tim is quite right about this – if you don’t show you love it, you could lose it!

Elsewhere: Surfdom’s end is also noted by Terry Flew.

Update: Some excellent reflections on this topic from Guy Beres. Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion.

Update: Guy Rundle in Crikey.

Update: An Onymous Lefty and The Interpreter.

Update: Robert Corr. John Quiggin.