So, Margaret Simons, writing in today’s Crikey, probably rightly, suggests that the latest revelations in the #notw phone hacking saga imply that to Rupert’s crown, no woman or man of Murdoch born will succeed.

No great surprises there – Guy and I were saying the same thing here back in July.

You don’t need to be a prophet to see that the logical end of the #notw story is a News Limited without a Murdoch at its head. You don’t need to be a media analyst to see that combining that with the endless failures of the “killer app to save journalism” quest and the impending death of dead tree news, that papers like The Australian aren’t likely to be around all that much longer. (Same goes, double, for Fairfax’ broadsheets.)

So, again, Margaret Simons:

Be careful what you wish for? Without Murdoch, we will probably soon lose The Australian. Meanwhile Fairfax is weak.

Those who care should begin to think about what Australia will be like without any broadsheet newspapers. And I am not talking only about their print iterations, but about the journalistic capacity they represent.

Time to stop gloating, lefties, over what is happening in the UK, and get to grips with the emerging civic crisis at home. Or at least mix the gloat with some plans for action.

Alright, it’s headdesking time.

When will journos realise that there is a reason that they are positioned somewhere along with pollies at the tail of the field in all those surveys about professions the public respects?

What does “journalistic capacity” even mean if what is served up is heavily opinionated News on one hand and anodyne and bland click-driven non-news on the other?

I mean, really.

There are good reasons why the readership of broadsheets is in decline, and they are not all about the internetz. People don’t want to read the product, and those who do don’t see it as worth paying for. That must imply something about the actual content, not just about readers.

I’m also not sure that lefties are under any particular obligation to formulate a “plan for action”. But I am sure that the professional mouthpieces of journalism don’t have an effective one. Professions change. Professions die. Approaching the problem by posing the question “how can we find a business model to support what we do now?” is the way to ensure the second outcome.

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…

That’s a topic Marni Cordell takes up at New Matilda:

Scott’s speech was warmly welcomed by most if not all of the journalists, new media pundits and academics in attendance at Media140. Not a single hard-hitting question was asked of him at the time — or indeed, since, in any coverage of the event that I have read (people seem to be too busy firing shots at the very soft target of News Ltd journalist Caroline Overington who dared to talk about her own media organisation’s digital ‘vision’). I find this bizarre.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Scott’s efforts to align himself with the cutting edge of digital technology are commendable — a good public broadcaster should keep on top of new media developments and the ABC has mostly done so pretty well.

But how is that going to contribute to the production of “quality journalism” that these very same punters like to fret about? Missing from this debate — and from the uncritical applauding of Scott’s foray into community-driven content — seems to be a collective recognition that Scott oversees a very large part of a dwindling resource: that is, money to be spent on good, original journalism.

In comments on the piece, Cordell recognises that she ommitted to mention one question put to Scott at Media140 by a commenter on the thread – whether the ABC’s new local community hubs (for which 50 digital media producers are being hired) will pay people for their contributions, and if not, what that does to the income opportunities of freelance journos, film makers, and so on. The answer, as she notes, is probably obvious. In that context, it will be interesting to see whether the new ABC Online opinion site – to be edited by Jonathan Green, currently Crikey‘s editor – will follow The Punch and The National Times and not pay contributors.

The hackneyed debates between social media proponents and opponents usually tend to obscure the central fact that both big and small media are contributing, whether consciously or otherwise, to a trend to outsource the production of content to unpaid or poorly paid labour. That’s recognised by some contributors to the debate, but tends to be obscured when the big guns are fired. Notions that “journalism will become an avocation” are tossed off too glibly, and in such a way as to obscure the political economy of the emerging media space. It should not be so, and ethically, I would strongly argue that public broadcasters have a duty not to be complicit in this trend.

Elsewhere: Margaret Simons.

Disclosure: I applied for the gig Green got, which was advertised. The one week period for applications suggested to me that there was probably a preferred candidate. I would be very interested to learn if there was ever a shortlist, or if he was in effect the only candidate considered (and effectively head-hunted for the role). I am not casting any aspersions on Green himself, for whom I have worked and for whom I have a liking and considerable respect. But I think there’s a potential issue here about the ABC’s practices in this regard.

Update: Margaret Simons on Green’s departure and the current shake up at Crikey.

Further update: Margaret Simons:

However, I understand that despite appearances, the job was NOT stitched up before hand. Green was interviewed only recently, along with other candidates, and was informed of his appointment late last week.

I’m happy to accept that, but I think some questions remain. The job ad specified that the position could be taken up in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane. I was surprised to see an announcement made 6 working days after the applications closed given the logistics of organising interviews with candidates from several cities. Having worked in HR myself in a previous incarnation, I am somewhat bemused – though stuff ups are always a plausible explanation, too.

I’d reiterate that I think Jonathan Green will do a top notch job. But he’s not been done any favours either, when his appointment was bound to come under political fire. Decision makers at the ABC – who we’re constantly told are savvy to how information travels online – need to understand how important good process and transparency are, and there’s a little bit of an object lesson here.

Another update: Margaret Simons has the answer to the question of whether contributors to the ABC Online opinion site will be paid (yes) and has more on the idea of the thing, and the ABC’s digital strategy generally.

Elsewhere: qed on the corporatisation of ABC culture.

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/2009/09/16/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 Bahnisch 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 Bahnisch 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?

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