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.

Mark Scott’s announcement was accompanied by the now ritualised shots across the bow from News Limited columnists. As Margaret Simons observes:

…it is another example of how one of the chief battles of the media decade will be between public broadcasters and commercial viewer-pays services.

Indeed. But it also raises the question of whether the ABC’s limited resources should be targeted towards jumping into the same space already occupied by Sky News. Mark Scott’s strategy for the ABC, when you substract some of the bells and whistles about ‘user generated content’, is increasingly looking like turning the ABC into a major competitor in a range of news and public affairs spaces.

The temptation in these debates is to default to a simplistic response, something along the lines of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. But profound shifts in the public broadcasting landscape require a more nuanced evaluation. As Simons herself notes, the question of the ABC Charter will be raised, not least by commercial vested interests.

However, as Jason Wilson argues at New Matilda:

…as news consumers and taxpayers, we’re entitled to pause for a moment and wonder whether it actually makes sense for us.

Go read the rest of Wilson’s piece.

His conclusion:

Indeed, if the ABC really wanted to honour its charter and address market failures, it would seek not to provide the kind of shallow continuous coverage that, intermittent, “event” stories aside, characterises 24-hour news services and freely available online alternatives.

Instead, they’d be going for that more elusive quality in the contemporary information landscape: depth. By renewing the investigative remit of 4 Corners in order that it might pursue a greater number of important, complex national stories, the ABC would be providing something that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere — and which Australian democracy urgently needs.

And if Kerry O’Brien had the support of an investigative team, he might be able to confront politicians with new information and curly questions, instead of leading all comers through the same, tired pas de deux. If additional resources were provided to local radio, collapsing local public spheres might be revivified. A continuous news service will not address these entrenched difficulties, which are problems for Australia’s democracy as much as they are for the ABC.

True thought leadership from Mr Scott might recognise that what’s lacking in Australia’s public sphere is not another source of basic news coverage, but a commitment to providing new information, context, synthesis, analysis, and tough questions. More information on the new channel will reveal the extent of his awareness of these problems.

Simons then looks at the cult(ure) of personality attached to high profile journos, and questions whether non-witty, non-pretty, non-Tweeting writers are perhaps missing out in a new age of “audience engagement”. She also worries about objectivity, which is another distinction which is hard to maintain.

I was thinking about this again yesterday, prompted partly by the renewed criticism of the right wing balancing act on the ABC, and partly by a snippet from a Crikey reader (more of that later). Annabel Crabb also popped up to discuss her practice as a ‘political sketch writer’ [deconstructed here by Andrew Elder].

This is what an anonymous writer in Crikey’s tips and rumours section had to say yesterday:

Notwithstanding the important role played by ex-Crikey editor Jonathan Green, the ABC’s new journos’ play pen The Drum is a lacklustre affair, which seems to be based on the assumption that anyone who can talk can write and vice versa, thus newspaper writers have become broadcasters and broadcasters are writing columns and opinion pieces. Is this the new journalism?

Annabel Crabb, who earned something of a reputation as a perky sketch writer for Fairfax, is now making regular appearances on ABC local radio shows to update listeners on “what’s going on in Canberra”. Clearly nobody thought to give her a few tips on how to be a broadcaster, so her Q&As with such luminaries as Steve Cannane and Richard Glover have been peppered with elongated “ums” and “ahs” and other irritating hesitations to the point where she sounds as dull as the ever-grey Michelle Grattan on Radio National Breakfast show.

It’s sad, but one wonders why those who dreamed up The Drum really thought that ABC online users would want to read the writings of “top” broadcasters such as Tony Eastley, Leigh Sales, Jonathan Holmes, Mark Colvin (probably one of the few who can write) et al. It’s a sort of media junkies’ dump bin that assumes we all want to read what these people have to say — and most of that is about “the future of journalism” — although it seems to be a generation of has-beens trying to prove they are with it.

Time for a generational change, but the ABC has not invested much in training young talent in the arts of writing or broadcasting, so the online venture will remain frumpish and dull. The only place where the real money is going is to is the cutesy Kids TV channel expensively promoted as a funky lolly show with sparky young teeny presenters doing that jump-and-grin thing that was all the go when the Dave Clark Five were trying to oust the Beatles.

There was a time when the ABC was ahead, but as each new CEO takes over, they behave as if talking up the future and associating the brand with “new technology” as if the ABC really understood it.

Whether or not you agree with this critique (and I just post, not endorse, unless noted otherwise), there are a couple of real issues here.

I was also thinking about Chris Uhlmann’s dire performance as the summer host of the 7 30 report. I tend to think of Uhlmann as a bit of a shill for the News Limited commentariat line du jour, and as one of those journos who believes that it’s appropriate to adopt a post of ‘above the fray’ irony and cynicism. His predecessor as the 7 30 Report’s political editor, Michael Brissenden, was much the same. But, whether you agree with that or not, I think it’s reasonably uncontroversial to say that as someone trained in the craft of a radio reporter, he doesn’t really do tv interviewing very well. So, while it’s highly fashionable at all levels in ABC news and current affairs to suggest that journos have to be able to cross various media, I don’t think it’s as easily said or done.

Secondly, we can circle back to the point about journalist as celebrity that Simons made. While various ABC types might have more followers on Twitter than the average Joelle or Joe, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the most authoritative analysts around.

There are some real questions for the ABC to ponder, I’d suggest, which need a much deeper, well, analysis, than Mark Scott’s techno-cheersquad provides.

It’s edited by Jonathan Green, formerly of Crikey, to whom congratulations are due, as they are to Sophie Black who’s had a very well deserved promotion to the top gig at that thing on the internet.

Margaret Simons, writing at her Content Makers blog, discusses two inter-related aspects of this ABC initiative. She first riffs on a piece by Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes, which questions the distinction between analysis and opinion, which apparently grounds the ABC’s dictates to its own journos (“analysis good, opinion bad”). Simons then looks at the cult(ure) of personality attached to high profile journos, and questions whether non-witty, non-pretty, non-Tweeting writers are perhaps missing out in a new age of “audience engagement”. She also worries about objectivity, which is another distinction which is hard to maintain.

All these are worthy points for discussion, though I’d also be interested in what people think of the quality of the writing and analysis to date. I’ve already noted some Crikey writers, such as Greg Barns, who may have come across with Green, featured (though Barns does have a tendency to pop up in a lot of places). Whether the ABC should cast its remit rather wider is another issue – which, of course, circles back to the glam/Twitter/name issue…

My own view is that it’s harder than some might assume to find good writers with different takes. It might well be that identifying, developing and mentoring such new voices would be a most valuable contribution. But that’s almost a full time publishing/editorial gig in itself, and it may be incompatible with the ABC’s desire to have an immediate impact. We shall see.

It might also be something we could make a small contribution to here…

Similarly, we’ve seen a classic case of the calling into being of a phantom public in all the emails and texts sent to Liberal MPs – polarised between categories (“denialists”, etc) which hardly have any resonance in most Australians’ vocabularies or lived experience. Yet it’s taken for reality, and it seemingly has had a real effect in that alternative universe that is the Liberal Parliamentary Party.

So what of the role of the media in all this?

With some exceptions, such as Laura Tingle on Lateline tonight (and, for that matter, Annabel Crabb the other night), the legacy media has intoned very predictable scripts (and as I’ve emphasised, forgotten an alternative one – “strong leader stands up to party dinosaurs and appeals over their heads to public” – which Malcolm Turnbull has been busily reinscribing).

Even in alternative media, such as Crikey, we’ve seen Bernard Keane (aside from his strange obsession with talking up virtues few others can see in Andrew Robb) swing from the standard “dead man walking” talk to “Turnbull is actually going to fight!”… why the latter was a surprise, I have no idea. I’d been suggesting some days earlier it was characteristic of his persona, and also politically rational. Yet the commentariat in their massed battalions seemed to anticipate his folding in the face of the Minchin putsch.

As Andrew Elder asked, could this be the week the journosphere failed?

Let’s not forget Turnbull may win on Tuesday.

What, then, of the frenzied expression of common press gallery wisdom?

Will the shorter Peter Van Onselen still be “Hockey can unify the party because he’s Minchin’s sock puppet”?

Perhaps the only “high level sources” they talk to are the ones who have an agenda. Like I said recently, it’s a bit like Imre Salusinszky having his fill of Chinese lunches at various eateries in and around Sussex Street and then retailing the latest goss on who’s going to overthrow Nathan Rees, only to find that Nathan Rees overthrew his detractors, and no journo saw it coming. Perhaps because something actually happened, as opposed to the endless non-event of leadership talk.

Sometimes politics doesn’t play to script.

Turning to Twitter, as Worst of Perth commented here, it’s been very interesting indeed. For anyone assiduously following this thing, it really has been the best real time news source, and quite amusing and fun too. It’s very well suited to these sorts of fast moving events, and the degree of inaccuracy and rumour is precisely the same as what makes it into the press and the telly. Not least because a fair bit of it is Sky News as it happens…

Interesting also to me has been the fact that a lot of the journos in Canberra who’ve been of greatest value are ones whose bylines are not well known. Maybe they’re working a bit harder than the tv stars and ubiquitous commentators?

On the other hand, as I’ve already alluded to, seasoned, intelligent and insightful commentators such as Laura Tingle prepared to buck the herd, whose work in the Fin Review is only available to those who spend 3 bucks on the paper, and who gets less air time than the show ponies, have shown their worth – as on Lateline tonight.

But, let’s get all this in perspective.

It’s also significant that while #spill is now the most popular tag on Australian Twitter, the fifth is #xmedialab – which is a discussion about a cross media conference that is on in Sydney at the moment. This medium doesn’t have much of a reach, and it has less of a reach than blogs, and slower moving media generally. And that may be because a lot of people are simply not interested in the scoop of the second (83 new tweets since you started searching).

At the same time, the core audience of political junkies, if Twitter is any indication, haven’t been clicking through to MSM stories at all. As Stephen Feneley commented at #spill, journos tweeting is a double edged sword.

That’ll be related to a shift where those who are most engaged around issues are finding their own spaces to interact, often private – lots of the old core of the web is shrinking as people highly attuned to particular communities of interest resort to discussing their own take on stories on social media sites such as Facebook without even looking at actual media reports, preferring to rely on others’ quick summaries of links through social distribution. Whether or not this becomes a wider trend is, at this stage, moot, but something is underway. But it replicates ancient social and cultural patterns – talking about stuff you’ve heard, which is different from silent reading, or even a more organised and structured discussion of what is read. The first is Twitter writ large.

Both practices have their value, but the assumption that reading and reflection is superior has had its day, unless it’s a normative pronouncement as opposed to a description of social reality.

So there may be a role for slow and fast in this fast moving media world. But slow needs to catch up, and fast needs to slow down and be more reflective if it’s to compete with the best of slow.

But that needs to be understood, and the limits of the publics who are both being invoked and created through these discourses have to be recognised too.

I will say that it is a bit of a worry that a heap of stuff that needs to have been factored in, including but not limited to the actual policy shift involved in the CPRS amendments, what’s happening elsewhere in the world in the lead up to Copenhagen, the new dimensions of climate change, and even what the government has at stake, has completely dropped off the radar. At LP, we’ve tried our best to keep that stuff in focus. But it’s been slim pickings anywhere else, with only a few distinguished exceptions such as New Matilda.

Some lessons need to be drawn from all this which transcend the tired dichotomies of legacy and social media, and I hope they will be.

Ps: LP can be followed on Twitter here.

Elsewhere: Axel Bruns at Gatewatching.

Update: The Newspoll results analysed tonight certainly suggest a disjunction between press commentary and voters’ sentiments, and indeed, the view from the Canberra political class and Liberal voters in the cities.

QWC’s final Wordpool for 2009 is The Content Makers: the future of journalism presented by award-winning writer and Crikey blogger Margaret Simons, and moderated by author and journalist Matthew Condon.

This is a FREE event, co-presented with the State Library of Queensland, on Thursday 22 October at 6:30pm.

I urge you to get to this one, not just because Margaret Simons is a brilliant and charming speaker, or because her book The Content Makers lays out a frightening assessment of the future of media in Australia. She is and it does.

I urge you to get to this one because you work in the content industries and if you’re a writer, or a publisher or a bookseller or an academic or even a conscientious blogger and you think the issues affecting newspapers and journalism are limited to the Rupert Murdochs of the world, then this presentation will make you think pretty hard about your own industry’s future.

Margaret Simons is well known in Australia for her journalism with The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly, Griffith REVIEW and her blogging for Crikey.com.au. But she doesn’t get up our way very often and I encourage you not to miss this fantastic opportunity to hear her speak.

Matthew Condon’s scribblings in The Courier-Mail are of course familiar to us. He is also the author of ten novels and short story collections including A Night at the Pink Poodle and The Trout Opera.

Wordpool: The Content Makers

When: 6:30pm, Thursday 22 October
Where: The Studio, Level 1, State Library of Queensland (South Brisbane)
Cost: FREE

Info and bookings: 3839 1243 or online here.

As Jason Wilson observed yesterday in New Matilda, Murdoch’s previous business plays were built on positioning himself for oligopolistic market shares in emerging media. This strategy doesn’t work in the world of online content, so Murdoch is trying to reshape that world to suit his modus operandi. Cutting public broadcasters out of the equation would be an essential component of such a strategy, but despite the fact that he’s leveraged political influence in the past for his own private interests, Murdoch finds himself isolated. Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd are hardly likely to do him any favours, and the very fragmentation of audiences and platforms he’s seeking to counter has reduced any potential for his implicit political threats to have teeth.

Public broadcasters, in other words, have a unique role to play in preserving the openess and competitiveness of new media ecologies.

There’s been lots of commentary on Scott’s speech. Margaret Simons writes at Content Makers, Gary Sauer-Thompson chimes in at Public Opinion, while Ethical Martini and Trevor Cook both put somewhat different and interesting perspectives to work in analysing Scott’s lecture.

Update: Guy Rundle.

Update: Sophie Cunningham.

Update: More from Margaret Simons in today’s Crikey.

Update: Ben Eltham in New Matilda:

As I watched Scott’s speech and the ensuing questions, I began to get a sense of how clueless many media executives really are. I’m fairly certain Scott knows more about this stuff than, for example, Roger Corbett does. In fact, Scott pointed this out later in his speech, arguing that old thinking and internal barriers to reform are the biggest problems for media organisations. “We have seen the enemy, and it is us.”

If Scott is among the savviest — and he may well be — then the path ahead for big media organisations in this country will be rocky indeed.

In the land of the blind, the man with a print-out of a Clay Shirky blog is king.

Via Margaret Simons at Content Makers, a cri de coeur from Le Monde Diplomatique:

The internet has not destroyed journalism. It has been stumbling for some time under the weight of restructurings, marketing-driven content, contempt for working class readership, and under the influence of billionaires and advertisers. It wasn’t the internet that propagated the allies’ untruths during the first Gulf war (1991) or Nato’s during the Kosovo conflict or the Pentagon’s during the Iraq war. Nor can we blame the internet for the media’s inability to publicise the collapse of savings banks in the US in 1989 and the collapse of emerging nations eight years later, or to warn of the housing bubble for which we are all still paying the price. So if the press really needs to be saved, public money would be better spent on those who purvey information reliably and independently rather than those 
who just hawk malicious gossip. Those who want to make money from investments or 
from being pens for hire can find resources elsewhere.

Accusations against the internet often reveal more than legitimate concern about the ways in which knowledge is disseminated: the fear that the reign of a few powerful editorial figures is ending. Dispensing favours in a feudal style, they have created their own domains, arranged sinecures and had the power to make and break ministers and reputations. Unanimous approval greeted their projects and opinion columns. Here and there a few irreverent papers held out. But then one day hordes of the unwashed appeared with their laptops.

If the public remains unmoved, it’s in part because they have realised that the talk of freedom of expression is often just a smokescreen for media owners’ interests.

“Imagine”, says US academic Robert McChesney, “the federal government had issued an edict demanding that there be a sharp reduction in international journalism, or that local newsrooms be closed or their staffs and budgets slashed. Imagine if the president had issued an order that news media concentrate upon celebrities and trivia, rather than rigorously investigate and pursue scandals and lawbreaking in the White House… Professors of journalism and communication would have gone on hunger strikes… entire universities would have shut down in protest. Yet, when quasi-monopolistic commercial interests effectively do pretty much the same thing, and leave our society as impoverished culturally… it passes with only minor protest in most journalism and communication programmes”.

McChesney asks: “When, exactly, did Americans approve of the idea that a handful of corporations selling advertising were the proper stewards of the media or that it was inappropriate to ever question their power?

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/10/09/the-internet-has-not-destroyed-journalism/feed/ 9 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/10/08/political-media-fail/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/10/08/political-media-fail/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:32:28 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/?p=10272 Richard Farmer:

No government this morning. For the first time since I have been preparing the breakfast media wrap for Crikey I could not find a story to list this morning that quoted a Federal Government Minister. The whole attention of the news media is now concentrated just where Kevin Rudd and his team want it to be — on the Opposition. The press gallery really does have itself in a feeding frenzy as it stirs the leadership challenge pot. The only observation I can add is that surely Joe Hockey is not so silly as to succumb to entreaties from his colleagues to take over. He has no more chance of unifying what is now a rabble than does Malcolm Turnbull.

… and that’s the same press gallery which will pontificate, at the drop of a hat, about the noble role of the fourth estate in ensuring government accountability.

Let’s combine Farmer’s take with some other recent commentary.

George Megalogenis:

Consider climate change, which Rudd says is the greatest moral challenge of our time. I could count on one hand the number of journalists who are across the detail of the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. (I am not one of them.) This is not for want of trying on the government’s part; it needs the public aroused so it can intimidate the opposition into passing the scheme through the Senate.

But the media can’t hold this policy conversation long enough for the community to have any sense of how their lives would change and how the economy would function. I can’t think of a bigger reform that has generated so little public demand for scrutiny.

With the exception of the claim about “public demand for scrutiny”, which wrongly elides the expression of public opinion with what is refracted or created by the press (and that’s the big problem), Megalogenis is right (and he himself is often a notable and praiseworthy exception to the rule).

Greg Craven, ACU’s Vice-Chancellor, writing in the Fin Review the other day, observed that governments, at some time in the 1980s, decided to use all the resources at their command to destroy oppositions through the media. Whether or not there was some sort of golden age of political journalism in Australia prior to that, I’m too young to say (though I doubt it). But these sorts of diagnoses, while close to the mark, beg the question of the complicity of the media in all this – as do frenzied attacks on Rudd spin.

The foolishness of the federal opposition in destroying itself through the pages of The Australian (and surely Joe Hockey would be just next in line to be torn down by the punditariat, as a moderate) also points to the “inside the beltway” phenomenon – as does some of the weird jargon and the general outlook of Paul Kelly’s The March of Patriots, which entirely identifies his perspective with that of the “political class”. The public are walk on extras, represented only by proxy through that poll News Limited owns. Live by the media, die by the media.

Is it any wonder, as Bernard Keane remarked fairly wryly the other day, that no one much outside the self-same political class listens to this stuff anymore?

The big unanswered question is whether something else will come along to fill the gaping hole in serious discussion of public affairs. For all the best will in the world, various ’spheres’ and ‘verses’ (blogosphere, twitterverse, and so on) just aren’t resourced well enough to do it.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/10/08/political-media-fail/feed/ 23 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/17/win-a-free-pass-to-the-media140-conference/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/17/win-a-free-pass-to-the-media140-conference/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:19:11 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/?p=9952 There’s a big confab on in Sydney on the 5th and 6th of November on all things social media and future of journalism – Media140. Rachel Hills is running a competition to win a free pass to the conference. For details, please see her post!

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/17/win-a-free-pass-to-the-media140-conference/feed/ 5 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/16/the-web-everyday-life-and-the-future-of-media/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/16/the-web-everyday-life-and-the-future-of-media/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:18:58 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/?p=9945 A lot of the most reliable data on web use and social media comes from the World Internet Project. Most of the findings from the project derive from rigorous quantitative research, and unlike a lot of what purports to be analysis of the web and social media is therefore free of commercial or ideological and boosterish agendas.

WIP’s founder, Professor Jeffrey Cole, is currently in Australia.

Margaret Simons observed in today’s Crikey email that he’d given a briefing to a Fairfax strategy meeting on Monday:

So when Cole speaks, media executives tend to listen, even if they don’t like what they hear. Cole told me yesterday that Fairfax’s Melbourne chief executive, Don Churchill, was “at one with me” on the future of print newspapers, but that some other members of management seemed to think, or at least hope, that the bad times for Fairfax papers would fade with the end of the global financial crisis.

Yesterday afternoon Cole expanded on his views at a public lecture at Swinburne University. He said that print newspapers will cease to exist in the United States within 3-6 years. The rate of decline in Australia is more gradual, but he gives us a maximum of 10 years, with the only possible bright spot being weekend newspapers, because they are more like magazines, some of which will continue to do well.

Simons has posted a longer summary of Cole’s thoughts at her blog, Content Makers.

For me, this the most important trend of those to which Cole refers:

The internet, he said, is now so all pervasive that in the developed world just about anyone who wants to be online is online.

As I’ve been arguing recently, the crucial implication of the massification of the web is that it has become part of everyday life, and therefore ‘internet traditions’ (which in many cases predate the web itself) are now the province of a small minority of users. Not everyone is, or wants to be, a ‘content creator’, or – in the case of the vast majority of those online – interacts with content and with other users in the ways in which the ‘digital pioneers’ did. In other words, for most people, the web, and social media, are just there – part of everyday culture, and not a particular practice which has its own folkways and norms.

In terms of the social uses of technology, reaching something close to saturation point implies a future which is likely to be more stable in terms of uses, and the way users interact. The era when new frontiers seemed ever open is probably over. As Cole observes, particular social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook may come and go, but the practices which take place on them are here to stay.

Cole also implies that the shape of things to come might be more perceptible now than it has been for quite some time; essentially, content has been radically disaggregated. However, the business models which will put the pieces together will look far more like social networks than media organisations (and will be far more user driven in terms of their niche reaches than publisher centred). My take from his analysis is that there are very few players who’ve picked up on this, and that a few more boats may be missed before the economics of the creation, distribution and social sharing of content reform a pattern.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/16/the-web-everyday-life-and-the-future-of-media/feed/ 9 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/14/the-national-times/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/14/the-national-times/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:41:02 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/?p=9920 Fairfax has revived an old masthead for its new opinion site. In some ways, that’s probably the most interesting aspect of the launch – those who remember the old National Times might well also recall the days when genuinely hard hitting investigative journalism in the public interest was the stock in trade of at least one Australian newspaper.

Commentary and analysis on the new commentary and analysis site has concentrated on the claim made, in this instance by Darrin Goodsir, that this sort of online opinion vehicle somehow represents ‘the best of journalism’. Something similar was said by David Penberthy when News Limited launched The Punch.

Jason Whittaker:

Enough spin, from publications that also boast their commitment to cutting through it. Let’s call these websites what they really are: another cheap web platform for advertising.

Margaret Simons:

Everyone has been asking me what I think of Fairfax’s new National Times website.

The answer is: not much. From Fairfax’s point of view, I can see the sense. Why wouldn’t you slice and dice your content in a different way, given the opportunity and the low costs involved? By doing so you maximise the national audience and create more real estate for advertising. As for the content, so far it is unremarkable – a mixture of stuff aggregated from the Fairfax papers’ staffers, and extremely variable content from other contributors.

Simons also hones in on the practice of not paying contributors who aren’t staffers. I guess that’s the logical extension of hoovering up traffic through encouraging long comments threads by writing provocative content as a ‘blog’, which has been the typical approach of the MSM mastheads to interactivity. Unless this stuff disappears behind a paywall, it looks like it’s the proverbial citizens (and a motley crew of pollies and academics and interest group folks) who are going to be the putative financial saviours of Big Media.

I also wonder if they’ve been skimping on web designers. What is it with these sites and really busy layouts that break most of the rules of design?

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/14/the-national-times/feed/ 13 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/01/will-anyone-pay-for-online-news/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/01/will-anyone-pay-for-online-news/#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2009 01:11:02 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/?p=9796 There’s an interesting take in Australian Policy Online from my QUT Creative Industries Faculty colleague, Terry Flew, on the whole question of business models for online news, which has had quite the airing of late. My own view is that the reports that competition regulators were concerned about Rupert Murdoch’s attempts to corral a number of American news corporations into an “alliance” might constitute a cartel are telling. It’s redolent of a certain mindset which goes far beyond the nuts and bolts considerations of revenues and costs.

Flew riffs off an argument made by Shaun Carney in The Age:

What Shaun Carney points to – as does Rupert Murdoch – is that the business of getting news is not free. As economist Tyler Cowen puts it, all of the major news providers have found that their revenues are falling below their average costs curves, and they are not prepared to make losses indefinitely. The problems are that no-one knows what the price should be, what is the best approach to charging (subscriptions, pay-per-view, freemiums, or what?), or whether enough consumers will pay to offset the losses arising from those who will inevitably opt out once some form of charging for news is introduced.

At this point, two further complications emerge. One is the possibility that new opportunities may emerge for commercially viable free news services that capture the convenience users who opt out of pay models. This may be a new provider who also captures the imaginations of those who are now vocally critical of what they term the “mainstream media”, and who access sites such as The Huffington Post in the U.S.

The second is that it is unlikely that the public service media providers – ABC, BBC, SBS, NPR etc. – will charge for news, as it is contrary to their Charter obligations of providing universal access. At any rate, I doubt that Shaun Carney is right that consumers will simply accept paying for what they are currently getting for free simply because they recognise the costs that exist for the established news providers.

It’s also worth considering the value readers receive from particular types of news. Rupert Murdoch, according to Wired UK, had his thinking shaped by the propensity of Wall Street Journal subscribers to pay a premium for online news. But there’s a fundamental category error here.

It’s unlikely that these readers are prepared to pay for the paper’s commentary on public affairs, or for that matter for “news”, but rather for up to date information which materially affects their investment and business decisions. There’s always been a market for such information – legal publishers exploit something similar when they charge companies for updates and guides to domains such as employment law, where that information is crucial to organisational success. Celebrity gossip, or political speculation, or crime reports, are just not the same category of product.

Update: Robert Gottliebson on the role of the public broadcasters.

Update: Bronwen Clune.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/01/will-anyone-pay-for-online-news/feed/ 46 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/08/18/rudd-vs-the-australian/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/08/18/rudd-vs-the-australian/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:45:01 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/?p=9568 Some time ago, I made some observations on the significance of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s attacks on various News Limited papers, and on The Australian.

The thrust of that commentary was that – the immediate antecedents of the stoush aside – there had been a recognition in Government circles that the damage newspaper campaigns can do is much over-rated, and has significantly diminished with a change in the mediascape. This is often ascribed to the internet, but in fact – as with the misconception of the problems facing print media (which lie more with advertising income than declining sales) – its causes are both more profound and of much longer lineage. It’s more that a tipping point has finally – and belatedly – been reached where perception has caught up with reality.

Over the fold, I’ve excerpted some paragraphs (with permission) from Bernard Keane’s piece on this in today’s Crikey. It’s very much to the point, particularly the comparison with Fox News – rather than the “heart of the nation”, the News Limited flagship actually increasingly operates on a business model where a small minority of hardline partisans get their worldview catered for. Politics – in the sense of the partisan stoushing that dominates political coverage – is the concern of a very small minority of Australian voters. For all the claims about “spin”, Rudd’s message is resonating not because of some particular cleverness in its conceptualisation and execution (though that’s there) but because he’s speaking to a mass electorate using the only mass media available – radio and tv – and speaking to concerns that are real. That needs to be recognised.

The broader context to the feud, however, is that this is a Government which has learnt from and gone well beyond the example John Howard set in his media communication. Howard, who was burnt by the incessantly negative coverage he received from the Press Gallery in his first stint as Opposition Leader, refined the art of going over the heads of the Press Gallery and communicating directly with voters, primarily via AM radio.

Rudd has gone much further, embracing any medium that allows him an unfiltered opportunity to convey a tightly-constructed, and highly repetitive, message. FM radio, long essays and light entertainment programs, as well as regular appearances on AM radio programs like Neil Mitchell, are favoured by Rudd. Rudd and his team are focussed on ensuring they control the content of the handful of seconds’ attention most voters give to politics each day — and shape events when voters are fully tuned in.

There’s also the basic media reality that newspapers carry only a fraction of the significance of commercial television news. The Australian sells around 140,000 copies each weekday. The Seven, Nine and Ten network news bulletins, which all use the same Canberra-generated political content no matter where the licensee is located, can offer audiences many multiples of that each night; in Seven’s case, up to 1.4m people on a weeknight.

It was instructive that on the night of Monday 22 June, after the Grech email had been revealed as a fake, Rudd went live on Nine News, and then Today Tonight — another million-plus audience. It gave him a mass audience platform to get out an unfiltered message attacking Turnbull.

Newspapers are influential with other journalists and “inside the beltway” but are no longer a viable means of mass communication for politicians even if they were disposed to use them. They’re a wide-scale boutique media form, a relic from a more literate and less visually-oriented society.

One of the traditional roles of the media in political journalism — in some ways, the entire raison d’etre of the Press Gallery — is to act as intermediaries between politicians and voters. That role is being rendered irrelevant as this Government, even more than its predecessor, pursues a communication strategy in which the Press Gallery is only one of many communication tools and, having a mind of its own, generally not the preferred one.

In that mix, newspapers can offer specific benefits — they can run long-form essays, for example — but don’t even provide a mass audience anymore. Moreover, the audience they deliver, being better-educated and better-informed than most voters, are far less susceptible to spin and propagandising.

It may be that Rudd shares the view of Jeff Blodgett, the Obama campaign director who visited Australia to speak at the ALP National Conference at the end of July. I asked Blodgett about the impact of conservative media. His view was that they simply fulfil their business model, which is to serve a conservative base, and have minimal impact beyond that.

Blodgett had in mind Fox News, but the same reality check applies to The Australian, whose readership is smaller, older, richer, more white-collar and more male than even other newspapers. The Prime Minister may feel having an ongoing feud with a media outlet like that is never going to hurt him.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/08/18/rudd-vs-the-australian/feed/ 59 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/19/the-author-of-a-blog-v-times-newspapers-limited/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/19/the-author-of-a-blog-v-times-newspapers-limited/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:58:10 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/19/the-author-of-a-blog-v-times-newspapers-limited/ 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.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/19/the-author-of-a-blog-v-times-newspapers-limited/feed/ 10 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/16/analysing-the-anti-analysts-christian-kerr-deconstructed/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/16/analysing-the-anti-analysts-christian-kerr-deconstructed/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:44:55 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/16/analysing-the-anti-analysts-christian-kerr-deconstructed/ 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. On one hand, there’s probably some sort of a throwback to the “journos are hard men of the streets” school of romantic delusion – which still has its reflections in internal conflicts within universities over the respective value of journalism education and media and cultural studies. That’s the only context in which suggesting that “analysis” is a dirty word makes even a smidgeon of sense.

Obviously, on the other hand, there are some battle scars on display too, as demonstrated by Kerr’s attack on Possum. [His response provoked a rare 'laugh out loud while reading' moment for me.] And probably some echoes of the culture wars – tribunes of the people versus the latte sippers, blah blah blah.

But the dissonance between what one presumes is the target market of the print version of The Australian and the curses piled on those with three university degrees just reflects the dysfunctionality of the mindset that inspires these remarks. Perhaps The Punch is aiming for a more tabloid market, but David Penberthy’s now notorious comments about his desire not to edit a “fancy, la-di-dah site” are cut from the same cloth. [In passing, I'd note that Penberthy also takes a swipe at coffee shops in his post... a strange obsession.]

The related dissonance between “celebrating journalism” through publishing an opinion site has also been widely noticed. As has the irony of supplying ‘content’ for free to News Limited.

I think it is the mythos of the dedicated and hardened journo pounding the mean streets that unifies all the apparently irrational and contradictory assertions bubbling up from the News Limited cauldron. Axel Bruns has demonstrated how out of synch such a mythos is with present reality. I’d add that any profession, industry or organisation which resorts to a fantasy of origins as a modality of defence against reality is going to have a very difficult time indeed in adjusting its practices to current and future actuality.

Elsewhere: Don Arthur at Troppo.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/16/analysing-the-anti-analysts-christian-kerr-deconstructed/feed/ 154 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/02/punched-out-ii/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/02/punched-out-ii/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:00:26 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/02/punched-out-ii/ 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.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/06/02/punched-out-ii/feed/ 17 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/04/14/mark-scott-and-the-future-of-australian-media/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/04/14/mark-scott-and-the-future-of-australian-media/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:36:37 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/04/14/mark-scott-and-the-future-of-australian-media/ 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.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/04/14/mark-scott-and-the-future-of-australian-media/feed/ 13 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/01/29/newspapersbiz/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/01/29/newspapersbiz/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:58:15 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/01/29/newspapersbiz/ 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.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/01/29/newspapersbiz/feed/ 14 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/12/01/future-of-independent-journalism/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/12/01/future-of-independent-journalism/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:53:37 +0000 Mark http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/12/01/future-of-independent-journalism/ 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.

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