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.

The caveat I want to enter before proceeding further is that there’s a real sense in which I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m not a journalist or a journalism educator, and I don’t think “citizen journalism” is the best way of conceptualising what I do in my online writing, even when it most closely approaches reportage. My stake in all this is really that of a citizen and that of a media participant, and precisely because participation is a better model for engament in/with the media now than “audience” or “reader”, I don’t regard myself as being a privileged participant in these conversations, let alone in some way representative of the figure of “the blogger” which is in a real way a mythical one. A lot of what I bring to all this is probably more to do with my background and worldview as a sociologist.

That takes me to the first point I want to make – as I argued previously, I think the “bloggers v. journos” stoush is badly framed and misses most of what’s actually going on. It’s also worth noting, as I did at the outset of the session yesterday, that the debate as it plays out in the opinion columns and (ironically) the “blogs” at The Australian is more accurately seen as a subset of the culture wars and a struggle for hegemony and control over information and analysis than anything much to do with either the conditions of media work or the “fourth estate” role that the media supposedly plays. But more on that later. A lot of actually existing journos aside from columnists and right wing editors aren’t actually suffused with antagonism for blogs. It’s also interesting, and here I’d refer to the paragraph above, that some bloggers or “web evangelists” have an equal stake in continuing the “journos v. blogger wars”. (But for those interested in the latest series of “blogs are no longer the future of journalism” pronunciatos from the “fact and balance” crew, see this post from Stilgherrian, and my previous post.)

Cameron Reilly, for instance, appears to have perceived an antagonism in the session that he was a panelist in which entirely escaped me as someone watching it from the floor. He also takes an unjustified swipe at QUT’s Jean Burgess, who I think totally correctly debunked the “catastrophist” narrative, as I later dubbed it, about the death of the newspaper. And that theme is reproduced in another key by another participant Perth Norg‘s Bronwen Clune, who also recently wrote the obituary of the (Fairfax) newspaper. I don’t want to be reductive about the contribution that Reilly and Clune have to make, and the latter in particular had some interesting things to say which I’ll come back to, but this “web evangelist” stuff does seem to me to unhelpfully define itself against its Big Media Other, and to need sustaining through constant boosterism which then moves on to some “new killer app” almost at the same speed as the permanent revolution fails to deliver what’s claimed for it, and as the media empires resist their predicted collapse into ruins. Self “branding” and entrepreunerial writing bring in their wake real costs as well as benefits, and citizen media is not the transparently democratic exercise it’s purported to be.

But one good point Clune made, and one which was echoed by other participants yesterday, was that the “control media” have missed the boat and been swamped by the tide. This is where I think the concentration on media ownership is misplaced – it’s certainly not unimportant that there’s a concentration of ownership in the Australian MSM (and Axel Bruns is right in my view to question whether that’s not a large part of the reason the Australian media have been so resistant to, and inept in, the web 2.0 takeup), but in many ways it’s a debate of the 1980s and the 1990s. I’ve never understood the focus on Rupert Murdoch as teh evil that seems to obsess so many. As a social democrat, I don’t expect capitalist corporations or media “barons” like Murdoch to act in the public interest or to be without a political agenda, and the recent Fairfax shenanigans surely put to bed any residual sense that Fairfax was or is some sort of temple of fourth estate goodness. A simple proliferation of papers – which all define “hard news” in the same narrow sense of crime and day to day politics – never provided us with the golden age of journalism some like to wistfully misremember, and there’d be a better bang for the buck from initiatives other than starting an ABC newspaper or whatever.

I think Jason Wilson was the first to make the point last year at the height of the Government Gazette vs. blogosphere wars that the angst that accompanied the pseph blog dissing was a reflection of the fact that the ownership of opinion and analysis had slipped from the proprietorial grasp of the punditariat. That sort of ownership is gone, and it ain’t never coming back, and that’s a really important shift. And there’s a broader shift at work where media corporations can no longer control their audiences, which does totally disrupt the equation of a conversation among pundits at the summit of the media heights with a representative role for a unitary public. That point was made by MEAA secretary Chris Warren. That was never true, and it’s clear that it’s increasingly impossible to maintain the pretence that it is true now. A democratic public sphere needs to privilege participation over representation by a putative fourth estate.

And that’s a problem with a lot of these debates about the future of journalism. They’re based on pretence and a threatened professional identity. Again, Clune and others had some worthwhile things to say – particularly to many of the young and student journalists in the audience – about the need to focus on interactivity and a different conception of “sources” than is captured by the traditional models – a point also made by Edmunds on our panel. But for someone who’s not actually part of the media industry, what’s striking is the degree to which a groundswell of workplace change has come so late to the attention of journalists.

A lot of us have been working in an environment for many years now where the “nine to five” job is totally a thing of the past, where it’s actually vital not to identify too much with one employer, and where fluidity characterises work practices and career patterns both. Industrial realities and workplace restructuring driven relentlessly by the bottom line seem suddenly to have jolted a lot of journalists into a realisation that this is not the hypothetical way of the twenty-first century or something (for instance something happening in “society” outside the media workspace), but the reality of the present. It struck me that the distancing from “society” proper to a certain conception of the journalist as a professional, the reification of change, and a mindset that privileges the observer are actually huge barriers to both a constructive approach to change and to resistance to its more deleterious dimensions.

A lot more could be said about all this, but I was left thinking that the first steps towards mapping out a future of journalism involve a rigorous and probably unsettling confrontation with the harsh realities of the changed conditions of possibility for professional practice. I think that also entails – paradoxically – a stronger identification with the profession itself (and a weaker identification with employers) and a shift in disposition towards radical questioning of what entails doing “being a journalist” in the world we now live in.

Note also: Related posts at LP from Kim and dk.au, and from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

Update: Ken Parish on the future of newspapers at Troppo, Derek Barry provides a comprehensive summary of Margaret Simons’ session at FOJ, and Andrew Elder responds to Christian Kerr’s “balance and fact” rant and Mark Day.

Update: My fellow panelist Marian Edmunds has her say.

Update [by Kim]: Derek Barry has now posted his notes on the third session at which Jean Burgess and Cameron Reilly spoke.

I’m keen not to restage the “bloggers v. journos” debate as I think it’s wrongly framed for a number of reasons. First, blogging is in fact a much richer suite of practices, norms and communicative styles and interactions than is usually captured by positing it as an alternative or supplement to journalism, and I think is interesting and in many instances laudable in its own right. Margaret Simons, who’ll be one of the speakers on Saturday, has a useful taxonomy of blogs published this week at Creative Economy Online, which captures much of the diversity of the range of practices that make up the blogosphere.

Secondly, I think the actual subtext to much of the so-called debate is a threat to the professional identity of journos. That probably gets me close to the topic – because I agree with my co-panelist Axel Bruns (who previewed his thoughts at Gatewatching the other day) that in many instances the sorts of work bloggers do prefigures what is now required of journos. There appears to be a misperception that blogging just happens, that all it takes is a keyboard and an internet connection, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ll probably talk a little about that from my own experience, and I think it’s important to see it within the context of a broader challenge to the boundedness of professional identities and practices which is one of the key characteristics of work generally at the present time.

There’s been a bit of discussion about blogging and journalism around the traps recently, in the context of the “quality journalism” debate kicked on by the Fairfax sackings and strike. Where Mark Day gets it wrong, I think, is that he recites another cliche of the journos v. bloggers wars – the claim that blogs don’t “break news”. That’s sometimes untrue, but even if it is largely true, it misses the point. There’s a difference between “news gathering” and analysis, commentary and interaction which is what the blogosphere provides – and transparently. That’s where its value, I think, lies. Again, there’s a sort of mythology at work here with fearless journos pounding the streets in search of a story which rarely reflects contemporary media work practices. On the other hand, bloggers like me do have our own networks and people we talk to – in the context of political blogging including contemporaries who are active participants, party strategists, etc. But they’re not regarded as “sources”. It’s more a matter, I think, as Kim said, of reconfiguring, analysing and throwing open bites of information as it were and particular perspectives.

The other point I probably want to make – and this goes also to Axel’s point about where skills and capacities can be found and disrupting the pro/amateur distinction – is what I and others at LP argued in a recent discussion over two threads with George Megalogenis … which is that it’s interesting that when News Ltd began its co-optation of the blog form, (and I still think that most if not all of the MSM ‘blogs’ are better characterised as message boards), it didn’t appear to occur to anyone concerned that the facilitation of community and interaction is itself a skill and a potentially transmissable one.

I’m not sure where all this leaves the “quality journalism” debate but I’ve got a strong feeling it’s actually completely unrelated to the whole question of the blogosphere. Others may of course have a different view!

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

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

But, unwittingly, with his union bashing schtick, Colless has actually exposed a fault line that bedevils and cripples the quality of the quality journalism debate. It’s still too much about ownership – either a faceless public company with corporate buccaneers focused solely on cost cutting like Fairfax, or a private(ish) media fiefdom run by an almighty Proprietor like Murdoch’s News Limited. According to News, the latter allows quality journalism to be funded, while the impersonal mavens of corporate capitalism sacrifice the fourth estate to the lowest common denominator – the bottom line of the buck. And indeed, there’s another irony in the defence of Fairfax – for several years the venerable mastheads have been the go to place for celebrity trash on the intertubes while their print editions have increasingly adopted a tone narrowly tailored to an inner city and Eastern suburbs audience.

What we really need to be thinking about here in the new media landscape is less about ownership and more about an information and analysis commons. Part of the argument in the journos v. bloggers wars is often a reiteration of a tired meme that bloggers are parasitic on content created by journalists. Maybe so. But that’s actually ignoring something central to the information architecture of an innovative and creative economy – value is added by re-arranging, analysing and deconstructing bites of information and opening them up rather than acting as a one directional transmission point from authoritative reporter of “news” to “consumer” or “reader”. There have to be viable options other than a dependence on either the God Proprietor or the corporate megalith which professional journalists of good will and citizens can work together on facilitating.

Maybe some of these issues will be discussed at the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism shinding on Brisbane on Saturday. There’s some discussion of the event here from Axel Bruns, and as Mark is one of the speakers, I’m sure he’ll be writing something about it too.