Editor Marni Cordell sums up the website’s achievements, and discusses its financial plight, in an editorial published this morning:

The online media environment we’re leaving is vastly different to the one in which we started. Since we launched, several mainstream opinion and analysis sites have joined us, including The Drum, Unleashed, The Punch and the National Times. Although we hope that the newspaper presses keep on clattering for decades to come, it’s clear that the role of online media outlets will only grow in the future — whatever business model they follow.

This is very sad news, as NM did indeed provide an excellent counter-point to the mainstream media, publishing stories based on genuine research and analysis and featuring a range of writers on a range of topics rarely seen in print.

Cordell writes:

The big media players are struggling to find a workable online business model that allows them to pay their writers and maintain high standards — and so are we.

We’ve noticed that too at LP. When we began taking advertising, it brought in revenue probably sufficient to support one person in frugal comfort. Now it’s pretty much running costs and beer money.

Phil Gomes, an LP blogger, has this to say at his eponymous blog:

But there can be renewal after death. What I’d like to see is all contributors to New Matilda who don’t already blog turn their energies to that form so that we can build a genuine independent new media ecosystem – one that unfortunately died before it had a chance to fully develop.

The tools are now even more refined to connect that ecosystem. Unfortunately everyone will have to get a real job, but you can’t have everything and dying for your art is a noble gesture.

I think he’s right. The NM model, though indeed run on the smell of an oily rag compared to big media, in some senses mimicked the business model of a magazine: a physical office, five or more paid staff. It’s always going to be difficult to sustain that sort of cost structure. The cost of running a blog, by contrast, is minimal – mainly consisting of the somewhat incalculable and largely unremunerated energy, passion and time of its contributors and writers.

We’ve been publishing since March 2005.

In that time, the portion of the Australian blogosphere devoted to public affairs has shrunk, with a lot of the independent blogs hoovered up by Crikey, and others leaving as their lives and priorities change. Feminist blogs remain extremely lively, but there are fewer independent voices writing about Australian electoral politics.

I’d like to see that change.

Some of us have been tossing around some ideas for some time about how we could expand the established readership of LP, and the scope of its contributors and content, in order to fill a gap I believe still exists in commentary and analysis of Australian public affairs, a gap which has just got bigger.

That’s not to diminish the value of many of the contributors and contributions to some of the sites mentioned in this post. But I do think there’s a need for independent commentary and analysis from a site which does not see itself as a media organisation, and whose energy and verve derives as much from its commenters and readers as its writers.

That wouldn’t come for free, as I think that marketing is necessary, and I also think that people’s commitment of time and knowledge has to be recognised financially. But I don’t think it necessitates replicating a model with full time paid staff and a physical space they work in.

Watch this space.

In the meantime, we’d be delighted to talk to any NM contributors who might be looking for a new outlet for their writing.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett:

There has been an increase in online sources of commentary and news in recent years. As their announcement on NewMatilda.com notes, this has included sites such as The Drum (funded by the ABC), Punch (funded by News Ltd) and The National Times (funded by Fairfax media). Whilst these new sites have provided new vehicles for commentary, I believe it is still very important to have independent operators in the media and online environment.

Crikey is still rolling along as the main independent web-based source of news and views, and Online Opinion continues to provide a wide range of articles and comment each day. There is also still a number of reasonable quality blogs around which focus on social and political commentary. None the less, the pending disappearance of New Matilda will certainly leave a hole in the fabric of independent social and political commentary, which is already much too threadbare.

Elsewhere: [by Kim] Spike.

Elsewhere: [by Kim] Qed.

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.

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…

The argument about consumer benefit was always spurious – the purported reduction in prices would have been small (and well run public libraries exist precisely to stock books for those for whom marginal prices are a real impact), and the effect would have been to reduce the range of titles available – both because it would have enabled large retailers to further dominate the market and because of its impact on local publishers.

Nevertheless, Guy Rundle is right to say that the interests of authors and publishers are separable, and to highlight the fact that it’s the provisions in the US-Australia free trade agreement preventing particular support for Australian literary production which are the real – but largely ignored – issue.

However, it should be very pleasing to see that governments are not so prone to accepting all free market ideological arguments on trust. And to see the Labor backbench able to influence government policy.

It also might be an appropriate moment to consider what good the Productivity Commission actually serves.

Update: Spike.

Wallace, in her review, describes the Kent book, The Making of Julia Gillard, as a “political quickie”. I’ve read it, and that’s fair comment, though Kent does cast a fair bit of light on aspects of Gillard’s rise through Labor ranks which are not well known, such as the effects of her long term rivalry with Lindsay Tanner and Kim Carr.

In his defence, Naparstek points to a similar review by Michelle Grattan.

However, Michelle Grattan has not written a book which is in direct commercial competition with one she is reviewing.

Naparstek also claims Wallace is best qualified to review Kent’s book – by virtue of being the author of a rival biography of Gillard. Bizarre.

There’s a fair bit of obfuscation in Naparstek’s defence of his editorial decision. Whether or not Dr Sally Warhaft, a former editor of The Monthly, is a friend of Kent’s (and in the public realm, the fact that she was somehow involved in launching Kent’s book can’t be taken as evidence of that) seems to me to be entirely irrelevant, and to only serve to revive the pointless and inward looking arguments about the ramifications of her relationship with Robert Manne as chair of the magazine’s editorial board. It’s unwise, I’d have thought, to even give this sort of thing the remotest airing in public. And particularly unwise for Manne himself to appear to be the one conjuring this spectre. It’s only going to reinforce the (reasonable) perception that the affairs of The Monthly are still driven by impenetrable circle jerk arguments of no interest or relevance to its readers.

The last thing anyone wants to read is another 3000 word treatise on who said what to whom in some Melbourne restaurant. It’s about as interesting as an email exchange between Gerard Henderson and Robert Manne.

Leaving that looming potential pr disaster aside, how difficult is it actually to understand that Wallace doesn’t get a free pass for trashing a book in direct competition with her own by disclosing that she’s writing one?

To frame this as a “biography war” surely only draws attention to the ethical vacuity behind the decision to commission Wallace’s review in the first place. It’s pretty much an admission that what is really going on is trolling for a controversy, and that – as with all the other “wars” – the putative subject of the interchange will be lost in the fog at the moment of its declaration. This silliness should not be allowed to obscure the basic fact of the elicitation of a blatant conflict of interest by The Monthly. It’s as simple as that.

Elsewhere: Andrew Crook in Crikey.

Update: Andrew Norton writes:

While editors do need to exercise judgment about what impact apparent conflicts of interest will have on a review, avoiding them entirely is very difficult.

Perhaps, but that’s not an argument in my view, for not leaning over backwards to avoid conflicts. Norton appears to give some solace to Naparstek in his claim that Wallace was somehow uniquely qualified to review Kent’s work by virtue of being in the process of writing her own (rival) book. That seems to me to be an entirely spurious claim, because any purported expertise Wallace might bring to the scrutiny of Kent’s work could not – in the eyes of any reasonable reader – avoid the trap of being vitiated by their opposing commercial interests.

Though the chief opponents of PIR have been the large book chains and their tame flacks, the main game in terms of radically cheapening and improving the flow of information and culture should be the abolition of territorial controls altogether.

History shows new and wider modes of circulating knowledge, debate and information are the means by which entrenched power and unquestioned authority is challenged. Just as the printing press destroyed the monasteries, and made possible the Reformation.

This seems genuinely liberatory, so why are so many of the cultural left against it?

In Australia, it’s because the cultural left has long seen progress as a coalition between left-liberal intellectuals, the state, and regulation and subsidy. In a backward postwar society that was accurate enough. Not only has technology changed our relationship to the world, but state regulation has become the barrier to wider cultural growth. In the meantime, a left-liberal clique have come to control the cultural institutions now being threatened – and find themselves in the position of defending a system that retains no logical basis whatsoever. Their progressivism has become the conservative status quo, linked to their cultural power.

It’s a valid point, and as always with Rundle, argued with his cutomary flair and elan. It’s true that the executives and cultural managers running Australia’s cultural institutions – and I’m guessing here that Rundle means the big cultural businesses and organisations such as the ABC, Fairfax, the major performing arts companies, state-funded libraries and art galleries and so on – are predominantly “left-liberal” in their political outlook, if only by a kind of default owing to neo-liberal assault on non-market cultural institutions and expressions and the general perspective of many conservatives and economic libertarians that state support for the arts is unjustifiable.

But has state regulation reallly come at the expense of “wider cultural growth” in Australia? On the whole, it’s difficult to argue that it has, especially at a time when many of the most vibrant organisations in Australia’s mixed cultural economy are the state-owned or funded ones, like the ABC and the big city cultural festivals.

Of course, the heavy hand of state regulation is certainly felt in copyright law, where western legislatures (including Australia’s) have enthusiastically enclosed the cultural commons at the bidding of multi-national music and movie industries – not to mention Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s quixotic tilt at internet regulation .

But does this mean Australia’s comparitively low trade barriers and liberal publishing regulations are really holding back Australian publishing? The evidence from the sector says they are not. In fact, if anything, Australian publishing appears to be thriving under present conditions. This may mean that the industry is healthy enough to survive in a liberalised trade environment. Or it may mean, as the Productivity Commission report on the subject suggests, that the meagre trade protection afforded by parallel importation restrictions has provided a small but valuable cross-subsidy, particularly to the sorts of smaller publishers that support interesting Australian novelists and non-fiction writers. If that is so, then why unilaterally liberalise PIR?

It’s interesting that Rundle finds himself to the right of the Productivity Commission (which ironicallly recommended a public subsidy as a more “efficient” solution to retain the “positive cultural externalities” provided by PIR) on this issue. He is normally quite suspicious of neo-liberal solecisms like the “left-liberal clique” or the “stone-cold absurdity” of cultural protection, and in other contexts, Rundle has railed against the damage wrought on the American middle classes by pro-market, deregulatory policies. Perhaps in this case, his cultural libertarianism is trumping his far more collectivist and radical views on economics.

As for the monastaries, political action by the state was far more influential in their decline than the printing press.

Cross-posted at my blog.

Flew riffs off an argument made by Shaun Carney in The Age:

What Shaun Carney points to – as does Rupert Murdoch – is that the business of getting news is not free. As economist Tyler Cowen puts it, all of the major news providers have found that their revenues are falling below their average costs curves, and they are not prepared to make losses indefinitely. The problems are that no-one knows what the price should be, what is the best approach to charging (subscriptions, pay-per-view, freemiums, or what?), or whether enough consumers will pay to offset the losses arising from those who will inevitably opt out once some form of charging for news is introduced.

At this point, two further complications emerge. One is the possibility that new opportunities may emerge for commercially viable free news services that capture the convenience users who opt out of pay models. This may be a new provider who also captures the imaginations of those who are now vocally critical of what they term the “mainstream media”, and who access sites such as The Huffington Post in the U.S.

The second is that it is unlikely that the public service media providers – ABC, BBC, SBS, NPR etc. – will charge for news, as it is contrary to their Charter obligations of providing universal access. At any rate, I doubt that Shaun Carney is right that consumers will simply accept paying for what they are currently getting for free simply because they recognise the costs that exist for the established news providers.

It’s also worth considering the value readers receive from particular types of news. Rupert Murdoch, according to Wired UK, had his thinking shaped by the propensity of Wall Street Journal subscribers to pay a premium for online news. But there’s a fundamental category error here.

It’s unlikely that these readers are prepared to pay for the paper’s commentary on public affairs, or for that matter for “news”, but rather for up to date information which materially affects their investment and business decisions. There’s always been a market for such information – legal publishers exploit something similar when they charge companies for updates and guides to domains such as employment law, where that information is crucial to organisational success. Celebrity gossip, or political speculation, or crime reports, are just not the same category of product.

Update: Robert Gottliebson on the role of the public broadcasters.

Update: Bronwen Clune.

Books in the Digital Age:The Future of Writing

With the rapid changes in Australia’s writing and publishing industry, where will books fit in the digital future and how will this affect how we read and write?

As part of QWC’s Wordpool series of three lectures for 2009, we’re looking at the the future of… books, writing and journalism.

Digital publishing invites writers and readers to think differently about the dynamic relationship between content and the container in which it’s consumed and shared.

Join Mark Bahnisch in a discussion as to what this means for Australia writers and readers, as he attempts to answer… what is the future of writing?

When: Tuesday 11 August, 6:30pm

Where: Room KG-B-304, Queensland University of Technology,

Kelvin Grove Campus

Cost: Free for QUT students, or $15. Bookings required

Bookings: Phone QWC on 07 3839 1243, or via www.qwc.asn.au

Cross-posted at BrisCulture.

And will anyone actually buy the thing?

Possibly the only winner in this publishing deal is Labor (and maybe News Limited…)

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett.

Posts today at Crikey, Larvatus Prodeo and The Oz’s Mark Day.

Day amused me with this in his piece.

More than anyone else, Hartigan is plugged into worldwide trends, information, research, experiments, technologies, think tanks and consultancies. As part of the global News Corporation (publisher of The Australian) he is at the cutting edge of the media experience.

This fact alone makes Hartigans earlier comments on media even more alarming. How can you have so many resources at hand and still not understand the changes that are occurring – not to mention insisting your old business model still has legs.

It’s interesting watching the smart, small and quick take down a giant.

Once again I’ll repeat, the mistake being made by the media giants is in thinking they are the destination, but with aggregation via whatever method you choose (RSS, Google, Social Media etc) the web itself is the destination – I see specific sites as just a subset of that destination.

I don’t go to News Ltd sites, I go online.

And it’s not that they are getting smaller, it’s that the web is getting bigger.

As someone who straddles the media divide, I have to say that my money is on the smart, small and the quick because we’re quite happy to plug whatever we do into the web media stream and ride it – not attempt to hoard it for ourselves.

That’s the cutting edge of the media experience.