Larvatus Prodeo

Crikey’s Eric Beecher was quoted in this Sally Jackson piece as saying online media will not be able to bridge the quality gap that’s being created by the long emergency we’re seeing in the usual MSM outlets.

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.

Continue reading ‘Too early to tell’