It’s been noted before in comments here at LP, but continuing the Tim Dunlop theme, it’s also worth highlighting the initiative of commenters at the former Blogocracy in establishing Blogocrats. It’s a very powerful reminder of the importance of community in the blogosphere and online media more generally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Guy Rundle in Crikey.

Update: An Onymous Lefty and The Interpreter.

Update: Robert Corr. John Quiggin.

Mr Beecher warned that Fairfax’s decision this week to sack staff at its flagship broadsheet newspapers — The Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney and The Age in Melbourne — would blow a hole in this country’s traditional quality media that all of the new media’s bloggers and websites would not be able to fill. He said that included the online publications he was involved in, such as Crikey and Business Spectator. “What’s at risk here is the role of well researched, serious journalism to act as a check and balance in the system of democracy,” he told ABC. “Online media can replace part of it. The four websites I’m involved in employ 30 or 40 full-time journalists, which is quite a lot in independent media terms, but compared with 300 or 400 journalists on big daily newspapers it is fairly small.

I don’t necessarily think he’s wrong but I do think it’s way too early to tell, after all we’re still in a period where a thousand flowers have yet to bloom.

But he warned that few observers had predicted the current threat to quality journalism.

Odd, I distinctly remember seeing Philip Knightley speak on this exact topic a few years ago here in Sydney, and he wasn’t the only esteemed MSM survivor to sound a warning, it’s been said for years.

Returning for a moment to letting a thousand flowers bloom we get this from Beecher.

It would be controversial, he said, but politicians “need to look at it now and think, if we don’t do anything, then in a decade’s time the idea of well-resourced, quality journalism — with hundreds of journalists covering parliament and business and investigative journalism and the courts — will be gone”.

We can have hundreds of journalists covering these things, the problem for guys like Beecher is that they can’t see past the old model of what a journalist should look like.

I’ve always had an answer for this and yes, it does go to the old blogger/journalist question – let bloggers into the loop and the best of them will bubble up as a new form of distributed journalism takes hold. Give them access, the same access, to the courts, the press gallery etc.

Bust the old cozy arrangements the usual suspects have with each other. Lets not stand on ceremony or credentialism, let even more flowers bloom. Sure the transition is uncertain but what other choice is there to to the current malaise?