Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Rupert Murdoch on Sky News:
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.
We’ve been discussing issues about the future of the media and of journalism here at LP over a sustained period of time, and many will be aware of Margaret Simons’ work and commentary on these issues. She, along with Queensland writer and journalist Matthew Condon, will be speaking in Brisbane on Thursday night. Blurb provided by Kate Eltham from the Queensland Writers’ Centre:
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.
Continue reading ‘Simons and Condon on the future of journalism; Brisbane event’
ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has created quite the stir with his A. N. Smith Memorial Lecture in Melbourne last night. Scott took a pot shot at Rupert Murdoch, characterising him as a “frantic emperor”. Decline and fall of old media empires, and all that.
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.
It’s interesting to see some realism emerging in the media about the causes of the woes of newspapers and journalism as a profession. I can well recall speaking at a number of professional fora over a couple of years where suggestions that something other than changes in the mode of publication and technological shifts might be at the root of the crisis of the media and journalism met with quite hostile or dismissive responses.
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.
Continue reading ‘“The Internet has not destroyed journalism”’
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.
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.
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!
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. Continue reading ‘The web, everyday life and the future of media’
At New Matilda, Jason Wilson takes on the prevailing wisdom about the News Limited paywall plans:
The notion that News Corp’s proposed paywall “won’t work” is in danger of becoming common sense. The problem with this is that, on the contrary, I can see how it might well work.
While some of the caveats Wilson enters about the received narrative are no doubt valid, I don’t know that he is actually providing “facts” that have been “overlooked” – as the tag line says (though that may be a bit of sub-editing, rather than Wilson’s opinion). Among other points, he argues that bundling selected niche content might find a market, in a similar way to Foxtel style channels.
I can (just) believe that there’s a chance that people might pay for sport, but I think if there was a huge paying market for right wing opinionistas, they wouldn’t be giving Quadrant away free to so many libraries.
The missing question that needs answering is how much of the content News generates is actually stuff people want at all, and then how much do they want it… I suspect MX is a better representation of what most people want to read, but I doubt anyone would pay for it. You can bundle up celebrity stories with a heap of other stuff and make a magazine that will be purchased at the check out, but I’m still not sure that most of this ‘content’ has any market value online – in part because the way people read online is very different from print.
Elsewhere: Debra Adams.
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.
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.
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’
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.
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.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
The media, social media and the Liberal thrills and spills
Having talked to a few friends over the last few days who aren’t political junkies (but are more taken with politics than perhaps the average voter), I’m not at all convinced that the Liberal leadership shenanigans are of anywhere near the same interest to most folks as they are to those of us who’ve been as transfixed as we become during election campaigns. I’ve already commented that there’s a strange forgetting (or perhaps a return to the default truth) among political journalists that politics – and the nation which will be confronting climate change – exists outside a few rooms in Canberra.
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?
Continue reading ‘The media, social media and the Liberal thrills and spills’