Tag Archive for 'Media'

Rudd’s ratings come down to earth; but he shouldn’t worry

Published
by
Mark
2 days ago
in Media and Polls
. 30 Comments

In comments on my thread on the failure of the Abbott parental leave thought bubble to halt a move back to Labor in the polls (and the reasons why), I observed that Possum’s observation provides further confirmation that it was probably private polling inspired in the first place:

Tony Abbott should consider himself a little lucky today with the Newspoll sample, as other unpublished phone polling that was in the field last week and over the weekend picked up movement more akin to Essential than Newspoll. So saying, it all comes out in the wash given enough time. (And no folks, that isn’t a Newspoll conspiracy, it’s simply normal sampling error – put it back in your pants).

So, I still think we’re seeing some movement back to Labor in public opinion, despite the apparent stasis in Newspoll.

Despite the fact that Abbott’s been having a dream run in the media (always seemingly ready to be amused and entertained with something or someone that can be represented as providing colour and movement), it’s actually much more difficult (and probably more unwise) to run the ’seize the attention’ opposition strategy than sometimes perceived. It has a pretty short use by date. And it doesn’t necessarily work; just ask Mark Latham.

I think that the true (if more prosaic) story about the narrowing of the party vote in the polls over the last few months is that it’s a return to partisan normality. Federal governing parties have very rarely enjoyed the sorts of overwhelming advantages state incumbents have had, and not surprisingly so, as the nation is a much more variegated and complex beast. That, and the perceived end of the GFC, leaves less room for Kevin Rudd to adopt the ‘above politics’ stance beloved of Labor premiers (and of ‘New Labor’ administrations more generally); or rather, it doesn’t succeed in hoovering up as much of the soft vote when the opposition unites behind a leader and rejoins the partisan game.

The spin on Newspoll this morning – in the absence of any movement in the two party preferred – was the banner headline of doom for Kevin Rudd’s approval ratings. That’s more or less a waste of newsprint. If we had a breakdown of the Newspoll figures, I strongly suspect we’d find that Rudd’s drop over the last few months has mostly come from Coalition voters. That reflects the perceived increase in strength of leadership and unity among Coalition partisans in the electorate; Rudd’s ratings are still higher by a significant degree than the ALP party vote, which implies that he’s still rated by undecided and soft voters; as does his advantage over Abbott and his commanding lead in the PPM stakes (once upon a time, of course, the all important indicator according to Shanahan and crew). I doubt, therefore, that he’s got much further to fall, all other things being equal, or that there’s any remaining drag effect in the party vote.

So, how about that hospitals plan?

Published
by
Mark
1 week ago
in Education, Government, Health, Industrial Relations, Media, Policy, Politics and Polls
. 7 Comments

Tony Abbott’s performance in question time today, and the timing of his parental leave thought bubble more generally, suggest that his major imperative was to switch the topic of debate from health. That’s despite the Coalition running a very active scare campaign about hospital closures in the bush, but it’s probably because of the polling on Rudd’s initiative. I suspect also that it wouldn’t be going out too far on a limb to venture a modest prediction that that Labor might be headed for an uptick in the polls.

Some Coalition MPs have suggested that this plan came about so suddenly because Abbott had become privy to private party polling.

I strongly suspect that the Labor Party might have had a bit of a turnaround – perhaps related to the National Curriculum and health, and Abbott might be responding to that. It could also explain why he felt he had to release some ‘positive policy’. It could well be that his negativism has had an impact; I note that Labor Ministers have been reiterating the ‘Senate obstructionism’ line again this morning.

In short, on where the parties actually stand, one shouldn’t believe what one reads in The Australian.

Meanwhile, whether or not Abbott makes health a focus of his parliamentary attack, the Premiers continue to ponder the National Health and Hospitals Network. Kevin Rudd has wrought his own ambush, confident that there’s no political skin to be lost picking a fight with the states on this battleground. But that doesn’t mean that some of the Premiers haven’t been posing some good questions – interestingly, probably more from Kristina Kenneally than John Brumby.

And while the headline politics might have been the primary focus of media attention, some good work continues to be done on analysing the policy itself. I’ve posted some salient links over the fold. Continue reading ‘So, how about that hospitals plan?’

Government: Don’t feed the trolls

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 6 days ago
in Authoritarianism, Crime, Ethics, Feminism, Life, Media, Politics, Race, Sociology and The Web
. 24 Comments

The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. Nick Xenophon suggested an Internet Ombudsperson, a suggestion Kevin Rudd applauded. There’ve also been numerous controversies about high school students posting racist groups, or offensive ones (for instance, effectively calling for attacks on sex workers). All this no doubt warrants condemnation – but it’s also worth observing that only a certain subsection of offensive content (usually involving children in one way or other) comes to the attention of the media and politicians. Little outrage is directed to the much larger subset of racist groups on Facebook (which don’t happen to be set up by high school kids), or the everyday misogyny that permeates much of the online space.

There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold:

(a) Social networking sites are far more akin to phone networks than a traditional publishing model. A huge multiplicity of users constantly and simultaneously post content. Unlike talking on a phone, it leaves a permanent trace, but it’s a much better analogy;

(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.

The noise coming from politicians, and the ’solutions’, make one wonder whether they understand at all how social networking works. Part of the problem is one very easily resolved through taking more responsibility on the part of group creators for the little bit of the internet they set up, and using privacy and content management tools intelligently.

There’s an interesting take on all this from Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this post, and for a deeper examination of the issues, I’d also recommend the Oxford Internet Institute’s report on balancing freedom of speech and child protection online, which seeks to find some common ground between interlocutors who often seem to talk past one another.

Germaine Greer trashed in The Monthly

Published
by
Kim
2 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Media, Politics and Women
. 245 Comments

I don’t know what qualifications you need to be a public intellectual. I think you get such a gig because readers of The Age have voted for you, or something. But apparently playwright Louis Nowra is one.

In 2007, he wrote a short book, Bad Dreaming, which to put it mildly, met with some legitimate criticism. Nowra, disavowing the work of Indigenous women, took it on himself to solve all the problems of Indigenous Australia himself. Last month, he published what could reasonably be described as a laudatory piece on the life and character of one Tony Abbott in The Monthly.

He’s now followed that up with an amazing rant about Germaine Greer, to be published in the same mag on Friday. Allegedly, it’s to mark the fourtieth anniversary of the publication of Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

You can get a taste of it from this article in The Independent:

In the essay… Nowra not only attacks Greer’s work, but criticises her appearance, her character and even her sanity. “She will do anything to get noticed,” he says, adding that when Greer appeared on the reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, she looked like “a befuddled and exhausted old woman” who reminded him of “my demented grandmother”.

Yet Nowra has the gall to accuse Greer of misogyny. Nowra says that Greer doesn’t understand “what makes women tick” and that her work is too “middle class”. Presumably he is immune to such criticisms because:

Nowra… lives a studiedly bohemian life with his writer wife, Mandy Sayer, in Sydney’s red-light area, Kings Cross…

To allege that because women still wear make-up, Greer’s work had no value at the time it was written is risible.

This is not the first *controversial* editorial decision Monthly editor Ben Naparstek has made. What possessed him to commission such a piece of abusive raving? Were there not any women who might have written a fair and measured reflection on Greer’s influential book? To build sales? I won’t be giving him the satisfaction of buying a copy. I’ve already read more than enough of Nowra’s “intellectual” contribution.

Elsewhere: tigtog at Hoyden and [H/T Gummo] Philippa Martyr at Quadrant.

Rudd unwhacked

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 2 days ago
in Elections, Media, Politics and Polls
. 61 Comments

Newspoll came in last night with essentially a status quo result, with both parties one point up on primaries (and the 2PP changing one point down each way to 52-48 because of a measured fall in The Greens’ primary.)

I doubt that Kevin Rudd ever expected the ‘whacking’ in the polls he trumpeted. Rather, this was part of the rhetorical structure of the weekend of apologies – convincing the public that he’d already taken his medicine, and that they should think again about the government’s virtues (which he, and Ministers, have used the sorry-fest to remind everyone of) and think harder about the Coalition. A very similar line has been working wonders for Gordon Brown of late.

In other words, rather than offering the proverbial commentary on the polls, Rudd’s remarks are part of a set piece of political manoeuvring aiming to draw a line in the sand, and to establish a contrast between the government’s new policy announcements (the national curriculum and health) and the opposition’s negativity. That’s potentially quite an effective play when everything we’ve seen of of Abbott et al over the last few weeks has been pure opposition.

Incidentally, I’d repeat the point I’ve made a number of times before – among all sorts of other influences, commentary on the polls has an underlying and perhaps unexamined premise that a Liberal majority is the natural state of affairs. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain the narrative of trouble and crisis when Labor is still comfortably ahead. It’s as if the Coalition ever overtaking Labor spells doom and destruction for the Rudd government. It would not. It’s worth underlining the fact that governments are often behind in the polls, and come back to win elections. John Howard frequently appeared headed for defeat in each electoral cycle after his first win.

Trevor Cook provides a useful reminder another point of comparison – to the Rudd opposition of the late Howard years.

Speaking of which, those who talked about Howard’s comments and policy changes around the time of the Aston by-election in 2001 were making the better comparison than the chorus of ‘Beattie reborn!’ songsters. The difference, of course, is that Howard appeared headed for a genuine whacking in early 2001, while Rudd is sitting pretty.

While we’re talking polls, I’d also recommend a squizzy at Possum’s fascinating tables on the Essential Research questions about the assessment of leaders’ attributes.

What is truth?

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks ago
in Activism, Climate change, Disasters, Ethics, Language, Media, Politics, Science and Sociology
. 105 Comments

The other day, I mentioned Clive Hamilton’s series of posts on climate change denialism at The Drum. In today’s edition, Hamilton comments:

Indeed, those who study the climate itself rather than the bogus debate in the newspapers and the blogosphere understand that climate science and popular perceptions of climate science are diverging rapidly, not least because the news on the former is getting worse.

Indeed. But there’s something of a perception lurking around here that ’science’ is one thing and ‘politics’ another, which I think is false.

It’s certainly the case that whatever ammunition denialists use against climate science is not itself part of the ’skepticism’ which is said to be integral to the scientific method. Rather than proposing an alternative hypothesis which would better explain the range of observations made, any line of attack is used, no matter how contradictory with others it may be. So, what we have in denialist discourse is all politics, and no science. No scientific method.

It’s important to underline this point. What denialists cannot provide is anything which can approximate to a truth statement. Methodological doubt, Cartesian style, is supposed to be a prelude to the uncovering of a truth, not a rhetorical strategy of dismissal. Climate change skepticism, contrary to the claims of some of its proponents, has absolutely nothing to do with ‘The Enlightenment’. Quite the contrary.

Their other classic move is to hold science itself to an impossible standard. Somehow the findings of climate science have to be unequivocally true. What we actually see, then, in this contre-temps is a debate over what constitutes truth. Statements made by the IPCC, for instance, are couched in terms of Bayesian probabilities, rather than ‘predictions’. It’s the same form of statement as with genetic predispositions individuals may have to particular diseases; having such a predisposition does not imply that one will necessarily develop the disease. Probability is not destiny or fate. But probabilities of 90%, as in the IPCC’s Fourth Report, are very strong indeed.

But asking science to articulate truth, if truth is understood as incontrovertible knowledge, is asking it to do something it cannot do.

Continue reading ‘What is truth?’

Possum dissects risk and incompetence in the insulation affair

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 1 day ago
in Policy and Politics
. 77 Comments

A number of commenters have drawn attention to a couple of very interesting posts from Possum on other threads about the Peter Garrett/pink batts imbroglio, so I thought it was worth setting up a dedicated thread.

In his first post, Possum examines the incompetence of the media in assessing the Minter Ellison report provided to Garrett’s department.

He then takes a look at:

some actual numbers suggesting that far from the insulation program being the cause of a dramatic increase in hell, fire and brimstone breaking out in the nations ceilings, it actually reduced the rate of installation caused fires. Yes, you read that right.

Intriguing stuff.

Balance?

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 6 days ago
in Disasters, Media and Politics
. 37 Comments

I’m not sure how this one slipped through:

What the longevity of almost all state and territory governments suggests is that it is difficult for an opposition to come to power except through the electorate’s view that it is time for a change… It is unlikely, however, that this will stop the Canberra press gallery working itself into a state of excitement over this year’s national and state votes.

From The Australian today.

In related news, I was somewhat heartened by Greg Hunt’s declining to start ranting and raving over the ’solar panels will burn your house down’ thing last night on Lateline, when effectively invited to do so by Tony Jones. The question followed a story which was clearly framed to build momentum for the ‘Peter Garrett Must Go’ campaign.

I thought, and still think, that Garrett’s position is worth debating, and as Roger Jones noted, the comments thread on the post here has been quite illuminating compared to the media coverage. But I’m not so sure that the press has the responsibility to collude in a campaign to take a ministerial scalp. My memory may well be faulty on this score, but I really don’t recall the same level of intensity and pursuit of Howard government ministers. Given recent admissions by AWB, it might be instructive to go back and look whether Alexander Downer faced constant front page stories on the Wheat for Arms scandal.

Sure, all the ingredients for a press frenzy are there in the insulation debacle, including human interest stories from relatives of those who tragically lost their lives, or workers who were injured themselves. But perspective seems sadly lacking, or even basic research, as Bernard Keane observes in Crikey today.

International climate change policy after Copenhagen

Published
by
Mark
4 weeks ago
in International, Media, Politics and Polls
. 43 Comments

Last night on Lateline, Ross Garnaut pointed out to an apparently taken aback Tony Jones that 57% support for the ETS – as a major reform – was actually extremely impressive. Today in New Matilda, Ben Eltham rightly says that “the Government is not in nearly as much trouble as many believe. It leads in the polls on nearly every issue that matters, including preferred prime minister.”

The clear implication is that this isn’t the impression people would form if they went by the coverage and commentary in the Australian media.

Similarly, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Copenhagen spelt doom for any concerted international action on climate change (despite the fact that the Coalition’s policy is still tied into setting emissions targets, no matter how ineffectual it would be; and that it also provides Liberal moderates some leverage if the Abbott truck hits an electoral blackspot). There’s been nary a word published about the targets that states agreed to submit post-Copenhagen. It’s as if the event’s only significance was its ramifications for Australian domestic politics.

The Economist links to The Sustainability Institute’s interactive Climate Score Card, which enables a picture to be drawn of the probable impacts on average temperature of the various nations’ commitments. The paper also points out that:

countries can express their intentions in different ways, and that many have provided two or more levels of commitment: a low one that they say they will pursue regardless, and one or more higher ones that they will try for if enough other countries are also going high.

For those whose horizon is wider than the prism of the Australian partisan debate, the whole thing, as they say, is worth reading.

Do the polls support the political narrative? Or; how to build a commentariat-bot

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Federal Elections, Media and Polls
. 69 Comments

I’ve previously highlighted Dennis Shanahan and Malcolm Colless as barometers of the new new political narrative (‘Rudd in trouble! Gloss comes off! Action Man Tony Off To Vigorous Start!’). Michelle Grattan provided another twist on the mechanics of constructing such a story on the weekend.

Rudd’s political style, whether his prolixity or his obsession for control, was always destined to be viewed more harshly when the politics became tougher.

Eventually it might work, but it’s not so far, because Abbott, blemished as he might be, is seen as ”authentic”, just as people are starting to ask ”will the real Kevin stand up?”…

But the dynamics have changed, the government is worried and the public, for the moment, seem to be hoping the underdog makes it a contest.

There’s lots, lots, more, and in fact the whole piece is something of a mind dump rather than a considered analysis. But what’s worth highlighting is the elision between “the public” (referenced anecdotally), the polls (alluded to) and “people”. The story is largely written in the passive voice beloved of such authoritative pronouncements – stuff just happens, and it’s unclear who thinks that it has, and who has been doing the doing. Who is doing the viewing of Rudd in the para I’ve excerpted? What is this destiny?

What it really adds up to is a picture of the commentariat-bot at work.

Not everyone is as artless as Alexander Downer, claiming to detect a sea-change in public opinion on the basis of random airport encounters, quickly morphed into “people think”, and “people say”, but the underlying illogic is the same. Public opinion has changed because the commentariat says it has. The absence of much hard data, or even reference to such data as exists, only serves to highlight the constructedness of the narrative.

For a corrective, one might try Possum.

Continue reading ‘Do the polls support the political narrative? Or; how to build a commentariat-bot’

Whatever happened to the vision thing?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Federal Elections, Health, Media and Politics
. 84 Comments

George H. W. Bush was famously incapable of projecting what he termed “the vision thing” in his unsuccessful campaign for re-election in 1992, but at least he knew what he needed to, but couldn’t, do.

I noted the other day that Dennis Shanahan was something of a barometer for the current state of the ‘political narrative’. I should have remembered that an even better one, whose often indecipherable columns frequently seem to be pure stream of consciousness, is Malcolm Colless.

Writing today in The Australian, he seems to think he is delivering some sort of killer punch:

Returning from Copenhagen, where he failed to make any ground, Rudd calmly began unveiling a whole series of new visionary canvases depicting future challenges around issues such as health services, population growth and the need for greater productivity to support an ageing community.

One thing that impressed me about Rudd on Q&A last night was that he quite rightly conveyed the message that the government, any government, can’t fix everything. That’s surely just truth, but Tony Jones response in the interchange on the alcopops tax and the drinking age showed the media reflex where the government is expected to have solved every problem yesterday in spades – “But then they’re just drinking something else”. As Rudd pointed out, the stats actually show a fall in alcohol consumption in younger demographics, but apparently that’s immaterial if a policy measure which has some impact doesn’t act as if it’s a magic wand?

What, exactly, is wrong with debating what sort of infrastructure, skills and services are needed for a growing population now? If you stop to think about it outside the drum beat of the political narrative, it’s a hard question to answer.

Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election, in part, because he could articulate a longer term vision. John Howard didn’t have one for even a single term, let alone one for the nation. What sort of Australia would Tony Abbott like to shape? We simply don’t know, if we were to go on his current public statements. His timescale is the eternal now, the cost of milk, today’s political opportunity, a soundbite from question time. Lost in the endless stream of applause for his being “pugilistic”, “authentic”, “interesting”, etc. is any debate about what he might actually do as Prime Minister, let alone any public debate on what are urgent questions which we must address as a nation.

Sure, Rudd can be criticised for raising expectations about a quick fix to the health system. But why are so many so critical when he actually does have to negotiate his way through a complex policy domain with multiple stakeholders? What would Tony Abbott’s “decisive” or “direct action” on health actually imply? Do any of the commentators even stop to think about what the answer might be?

Shock! Horror! Political journosphere shocked by the ALP playing politics!

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Federal Elections, Media and Polls
. 98 Comments

Ben Eltham has a wrap up of the week in politics at New Matilda. It’s certainly fair to say that it certainly didn’t go all the Coalition’s way. What surprises me about the commentary we’ve seen in the lead up to and after the resumption of Parliament is some sort of default assumption that Tony Abbott would release his climate change policy, and happily elope with the voters, and that’s the last we’d hear of politics in an election year. Dennis Shanahan is, as always, indicative:

THE Rudd government has an unhealthy obsession with Tony Abbott’s obsessions. As parliament prepares to resume on Tuesday for the first sitting in an election year, some Labor ministers are spending so much time reinforcing adverse stereotypes of the new Liberal leader they run the double risk of appearing to be in a panic and of actually validating his policies and leadership.

KEVIN Rudd’s emissions trading scheme is dead but he can’t let it go. Politically he should shift ground to alternative action on climate change, blame Tony Abbott for the failure of a scheme previously favoured by Liberal leaders, and use the global failure to agree on a concerted plan as a reprieve before the election.

There’s some sort of bizarre alternate reality here, where the Opposition is constantly at the centre of events, and any sort of response which doesn’t play to the ‘media narrative’ from the Government is somehow electoral poison.

It’s just nuts. I suspect, in part, it derives from a belief that if the Liberals could unite behind one leader, all would be plain sailing from there on in. In fact, as one week of Barnaby-isms demonstrates, even without leadership speculation, they’re still shambolic. I think there’s still some sort of weird assumption that the Liberals are the natural party of government, and that the electorate are finally waking up to the mistake made in 2007; hence Labor is represented as being panic stricken after a single poll where their two party preferred vote is 52-48. (John Howard’s first term government, by contrast, spent a large part of the time behind in the polls.)

So we also get a bizarre perception that Labor is some sort of immovable object, locked in behind last year’s politics, and unable to shape the political landscape. This is reinforced by constant generalisation on the basis of anecdote – “voters are concerned by debt and deficit”, “Rudd is untrustworthy”, “climate change skepticism is on the increase”, very little of which has much support in any relevant polling. And the descent of Rudd’s own approval rating from its stellar heights is seen as an avatar of doom, without any particular attempt to correlate it with the party vote.

All very odd.

Like I said early in the week, watch the political narrative change.

Breaking the CPRS deadlock

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Federal Elections, Media and Politics
. 72 Comments

Almost two weeks ago, I suggested that something positive might come of The Greens’ suggestion that Ross Garnaut’s interim measure on carbon emissions should be the circuit breaker for the CPRS impasse.

In the intervening period, I’ve been surprised that so little attention has been paid to the negotiations between Senator Penny Wong and Senator Christine Milne on behalf of The Greens, which began last week. I’ve sought to emphasise that there are possibilities of Senate passage via a Liberal floor crosser (perhaps Judith Troeth, who is retiring) and Nick Xenophon. In any event, I’ve argued that there are political benefits for Labor in staking out a new position which could demonstrate the desire for immediate action, and perhaps take a different bill to a double dissolution.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the media would ignore these developments, but I’ve also been surprised at the attitude of a number of commenters on several threads, which seems to assume that Labor’s posture is somehow frozen in stone.

So, in light of all this, I was very interested indeed to hear Bob Brown give a very articulate and well argued interview to Tony Jones on Lateline tonight where he discussed these negotiations, and revealed that he had also been talking to other non-Government Senators.

The Women’s Weekly and politicians

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, Education, Federal Elections, Feminism, Media, Politics and Sexuality
. 83 Comments

Over at Gatewatching, Jason Wilson references Andrew Elder’s very good question about the Australian Women’s Weekly being a graveyard for politicians, and asks another good one – given the magazine’s truly huge readership, were Tony Abbott’s comments ill advised?

The Weekly is a colossus, that really does reach an incredibly wide sweep of Australian voters. Looking bad in it means looking bad to a lot of people. For a man who is struggling with women voters, Tony Abbott has at the very least taken a huge risk with his comments. If they really were off the cuff, and really do hurt him, he will come to regret going unprepared to an encounter with the Weekly, one of Australia’s most important political publications.

To reiterate Mr Elder’s question – one that of course many feminists asked before either of us did – why aren’t magazines like the Weekly taken more seriously, more often, by more journos, scholars and political junkies, as both public sphere institutions, and as places where politics happens?

As summer holidays end, and Parliament prepares to resume, we’ve seen two stories this last week which have had lots of normally not so engaged voters talking; Abbott’s remarks about young women’s sexuality (quickly spun away as ‘private advice’ to his daughters when their potential for embedding a negative perception of his persona became clear) and Julia Gillard’s launch of the Myschool website.

Despite my own reservations about the latter, I have no doubt whatsoever it’s been a big political plus for the Government as the election year begins in earnest. Can the same be said for Tony’s thoughts about sexuality?

The Guardian does its paywall math

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Economics and Media
. 9 Comments

On the recent thread about the ABC’s intention to offer a 24 hour news channel, commenter SCPritch linked, with appropriate approbation, to the text of a lecture by the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger.

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.