Tag Archive for 'future of journalism'

The Author of A Blog v Times Newspapers Limited

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Authoritarianism, Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Crime, Law, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 10 Comments

At Skepticlawyer, Legal Eagle has written a fascinating post on the bizarrely named case cited above, which was heard recently in the British High Court. As she writes:

“The Author of A Blog” cited as the claimant was the pseudonymous author of a blog known as “Night Jack”. He was a police officer whose blog provided an inside view of police procedure, the seamy side of life and the law. In April this year, the Night Jack blog received the Orwell Prize for political blogging. However, after this, Patrick Foster, a journalist from The Times, determined to work out the identity of the blogger using internet research. Foster has justified his actions on the basis that the Night Jack blogger “was…using the blog to disclose detailed information about cases he had investigated, which could be traced back to real-life prosecutions.”

The blogger sought an interim injunction to restrain Times Newspapers Ltd from publishing any information that would identify him. Although an injunction was granted up until the time of judgment, the High Court ultimately refused the claimant’s application. The officer has been revealed to be Richard Horton, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary.

Legal Eagle draws an interesting inference from all this about Foster’s motivations:

I can’t help finding the action of The Times rather petty and malicious. For some reason, some journalists seem to despise blogging and bloggers (eg, an article in The Australian the other day to which I can’t even be bothered linking). There’s a suspicion in my mind that this journalist thought to himself, Let’s bring down a blogger who is writing something that is interesting and exciting.

Analysing the anti-analysts: Christian Kerr deconstructed

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by
Mark
2 weeks, 4 days ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Media, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 154 Comments

In the wake of the strange anti-analytical spray from Christian Kerr in The Australian against blogs yesterday (discussed here), my QUT colleague Axel Bruns has posted a comprehensive analysis of his rant:

Amongst the standard-issue ammunition in the journalism industry’s defensive skirmishes against those pesky citizen journalists and news bloggers is the deceptively simple claim that there’s a clear difference between reporting the news, i.e. breaking stories (which is what professional journalists do) and commenting on the news, i.e. “endless talk” (which is what everyone else does).

It’s a line repeated in the latest missive from Christian Kerr in The Australian – a rabid, self-serving rant against all those online commentators from Possum’s Pollytics to Larvatus Prodeo whom he doesn’t like, curiously claiming in its title that “our blogs [are] too analytical”, as if intelligent analysis is somehow a bad thing. Still, if nothing else, it’s got one thing going for it: if ‘real’ journalists are the ones that break stories, then Kerr himself isn’t a journalist.

One problem with that neat definition, though, is that breaking stories isn’t a particularly common trait of mainstream newsroom practice these days: much of the content of our daily newspapers and broadcast bulletins comes from a diminishing number of global wire services, and is simply processed by journalists to fit the local context. Similar to citizen journalists’ common practice of gatewatching – following the news passing through the gates of mainstream news publications, and then commenting on it – this is a kind of industrial gatewatching, where agency feeds are constantly monitored for new items to be inserted into the locally-produced publication. So, news bloggers and citizen journalists don’t tend to break stories – but neither, for the most part, do professional journalists.

That’s spot on, I think, and the rest of the post is well worth reading.

I’d also observe that the anti-intellectualism is curious. Continue reading ‘Analysing the anti-analysts: Christian Kerr deconstructed’

Punched out II

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Media and The Web
. 17 Comments

There’s been an excellent discussion on a previous thread here by Phil about News Limited’s new online venture The Punch.

To add to the reflections on that thread, it’s worth discussing what The Punch says about the future of big media and the business models that support major corporates. Brisbane journo and editor Jason Whittaker has written a nifty piece on The Punch in this context at Importance of ideas.

Whittaker’s conclusion:

News Limited is now betting the house on charging for online subscriptions to its mastheads, putting a price on the parochial, populist tabloid content it currently gives away for free. If The Punch is its only Plan B, god help us all.

The whole article is well worth reading. I’m in broad agreement with Whittaker that “incompetence, not [the] net, has killed media”.

I don’t necessarily agree that there isn’t a place for a site focused mainly on opinion online. Blogs aren’t the only comparator here. The success of On Line Opinion over quite a few years demonstrates that. But it is true to say that an opportunity to invest in the future of journalism has been missed by News.

Incidentally, as one might expect, I’m sure competition is uppermost in News’ mind. I think The Punch is probably meant to be a Crikey killer, particularly when one has a look at the redesign of the Crikey website to incorporate news aggregation and a wider variety of topics (and bloggers – most recently the welcome return Tim Dunlop on music). I doubt – if I’m right that that’s their ambition – it will put much of a dent in Crikey.

Elsewhere: Jacques Chester at Troppo.

Update: Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

Update: Terry Flew.

Mark Scott and the future of Australian media

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Film, TV, Video etc, Media, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 13 Comments

The ABC’s managing director, Mark Scott, has proved a much more interesting pick than many anticipated at the time of his appointment. Over at Woolly Days, Derek Barry summarises a speech Scott made in giving the Latrobe University annual media studies lecture last week [full text in pdf here]. Scott gives the best read I’ve seen from a senior media figure on the impact of the “digital revolution” on the Antipodean news biz. Importantly, he pings flawed business decisions as a key cause of the decline of traditional media – something which is absent from a lot of the ‘future of journalism’ discussions which tend to assume that media orgs are being buffeted by inexorable winds not of their own making. And if Scott is right, those winds are going to wreak havoc – he predicts the disappearance of The Age and the SMH within a decade.

It isn’t noted often enough that the most innovative players in the Australian media scene are the public broadcasters – the ABC and SBS. While I think both still have some way to go in taking full advantage of the current potential of the web and mobile digital media, they’re streets ahead of the commercial competition – a fact which in itself should cause many to rethink some lazy assumptions about the nature of innovation. With the appointment of Griffith REVIEW’s Julianne Schultz to the ABC Board, it’ll be intriguing to see how some expertise at board level plays into the reconfiguration of public broadcasting – Schultz was intimately involved as an ABC executive with the first round of planning for ABC Online which hit a brick wall in the disastrous Jonathan Shier regime.

Newspapers.biz

Published
by
Mark
5 months ago
in Media
. 14 Comments

For anyone following the declining fortunes of the newspaper (and perhaps of journalism), there’s some interesting reading on the intertubes today. At Inside Story, MEAA communications director Jonathan Este takes a look at the trends – and the different strategies of media moguls (now making a comeback, it seems) and public companies. Meanwhile, Robert Corr examines Nicholas Sarkozy’s bailout of the French press and discusses the arguments for government intervening in the newspaper business to correct market failure that have been proposed recently.

Future of (independent) journalism

Published
by
Mark
7 months ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Consumerism, Culture, Markets, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 15 Comments

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?

Continue reading ‘Future of (independent) journalism’

The future of journalism – or its vanishing present

Published
by
Mark
9 months, 2 weeks ago
in Media and Sociology
. 0 Comments

As a supplement to my post on the Walkley Foundation Future of Journalism event I recently spoke at in Brisbane, here’s a link to the thoughts of my colleague and co-panelist Axel Bruns.

The Future of Journalism – reflections

Published
by
Mark
9 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Media, Politics and Sociology
. 33 Comments

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.)

Continue reading ‘The Future of Journalism – reflections’

The future of journalism in Brisbane

Published
by
Mark
9 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Brisbane, Media, Notices, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 13 Comments

As Kim mentioned the other day, the Future of Journalism roadshow is coming to Brisbane on Saturday, and I’m speaking on a panel at 2pm called “Bloggers: amateur netizens or professionals of the future?”… Full details of the program are here if you’d like to attend. Starting points (at this stage, anyway) for my contribution are over the fold. They’re very rough notes, pasted in with just a bit of an edit from an email thread with my co-panelists, so I’d be really grateful for input.

Continue reading ‘The future of journalism in Brisbane’

The future of quality journalism

Published
by
Kim
9 months, 4 weeks ago
in Activism, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 31 Comments

There’s a bit of an irony in the fact that News Ltd columnist Malcolm Colless chooses to take a swipe today at demands that Mike Carlton be reinstated as a columnist in the Sydney Morning Herald because of his popularity with readers. [Carlton, as folks may recall, refused to file his copy because of a journos' strike at Fairfax.] The irony in question lies in the fact that Colless’ own usually impenetrable stream of consciousness efforts are no doubt read by very few, so incomprehensible most of his musings are. Possibly that extends to sub-editors. Surely “rebirthing” is a crime against the English language?

But there’s something more at stake here. Colless’ mind dumps very often give readers an insight into what passes for thought among the managerial minds of the press. Perhaps precisely because no one is reading his stuff, he’s departed from the News Limited correct line and failed to decry the Fairfax cost-cutting as a threat to the quality of journalism. What you can make of this tangled paragraph is probably up to you:

McCarthy cannot afford to be blindsided by sweeping and emotional claims that change, of itself, will necessarily destroy quality journalism. Quality, after all, often can be the exclusive prerogative of the creator. But at the same time he should be careful not to confuse muscle with fat as he wields his cost-cutting scythe.

But, unwittingly, with his union bashing schtick, Colless has actually exposed a fault line that bedevils and cripples the quality of the quality journalism debate. Continue reading ‘The future of quality journalism’

The state of political blogging II

Published
by
Mark
11 months, 1 week ago
in Culture, Federal Elections, Media, Politics, Polls, Sociology and The Web
. 2 Comments

Last year I shared some thoughts on the state of political blogging in Australia. Trevor Cook has just examined the claim that the blogging phenomenon is “losing impetus”. I’m not sure that’s so, and coincidentally, I’ve just sent off a write up of the talk I gave at the Public Right to Know Conference at UTS last year, for a special issue of the Pacific Journalism Review being co-ordinated by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. You can read it here [link to pdf].

Continue reading ‘The state of political blogging II’