The Goanna had a crack at Mark Scott’s poetry which I thought is a trifle unfair. Unfair to poetry that is. Does the goanna, a metaphorical name complete with illusions of tough sun-leathered skin and reptilian cunning, secretly harbour some poetic sympathies? Could it be envy that speaks when the goanna observes -
Poetry, of course, was always the love of those who don’t have to worry where their next dollar comes from.
Or is it simply journalistic bitterness; too many years spent subservient to the craft of mangling sentences at the behest of a seemingly chaotic and absurd production system that exists to propagate a version of reality that is deemed socially acceptable.
However, the goanna’s observations is no less meritorious for its disdain for the poetic art. Behind the superficial pronouncements of Scott and Murdoch lurks some “real politics” with regard to the Australia Network specifically and TV news more generally here in OZ. The two horse race used to be between the ABC with its established service as the government broadcaster with its highly regarded radio news arm adding weight to its TV credentials and Sky News, backed by the commercial TV operators and leveraging the extensive print resources of News Corp.
A demise in News Corp in print must eventually affect Sky, whereas the internet is a boon to the ABC as it delivers some of the audience/market to the ABC servers virtually by default. A fat government paycheck to rebroadcast Australian content via TV and radio with an associated internet presence would indeed be a prize for the increasingly pressured bottom line of Sky and News Corp, one which would possibly have the benefit of saving a few journalistic jobs.
That such a decision might be made purely on the basis of cost/benefit is indeed a quandary for businessman Mark Scott who is required to advance the interests of the ABC. Still, one suspects that Mark Scott’s concern with manipulating the new media agenda for the internet illiterate on Capital Hill is blinding him to the potential of a Sky takeover of the broadcast news sphere. The surprise announcement by Kevin Rudd of the A-SPAN network late last year was a matter of serious concern within the ABC hierarchy who had long been planning a similar venture of their own. Perhaps the true value of Mark Scott to the private sector players in the media space is his capacity to use the ABC to refine and articulate a potential public service that can then be undercut by shrewder commercial operators.
Mark Scott’s simple and poetic analysis of the decline of empires also lacks another perspective, one that businessman Mark Scott should be aware of. Simply put, the news media industry is just that. An idea that has developed with the helping invisible hand of Adam Smith into the massive industry it now is. An industry that serves a purpose, to regulate and disseminate a somewhat limited point of view. Different voices have over time offered minor variations to the themes and it is this capacity for these different voices to exist that will be tested in the years to come. Unfortunately for the believers in big M media, the forces at work are largely financial and in any economic market, a contraction in the size of the pie means less people get something to eat.
Scott’s prophesy was understated but implicit in his speech is the obvious conclusion that jobs will go, businesses will fold and what’s left will be more simplistic and conforming than what we had before. And until a new way of making money out of telling people what to think emerges, the best we can look forward to is a hope that something will turn up.
Which brings me to this checklist which is a fightorflight adapted version of a Cory Doctorow original. I’ve applied some Australianisms to it 
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced
approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)
( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) No one will be able to find the guy
(X) It is defenceless against copy-and-paste
(X) It tries to prop up a fundamentally broken business model
(X) Users of the web will not put up with it
( ) Print readers will not put up with it
( ) Good journalists will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Readers' unwillingness to pay for just news
( ) The existence and popularity of the ABC
(X) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives
( ) Sources' proven unwillingness to “go direct”
( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism
( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
(X) The high cost of investigative journalism
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting
( ) Legal liability of “citizen journalism”
( ) The training required to be even a shithouse journalist
(X) What newspaper readers want, in the main, is sensation, scandal, celebrity and football
( ) The necessity of the editing process
(X) Australian’s huge distrust of professional journalism
( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by people with a blog
( ) Inability of two people with a blog to demand anything
( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two people with no income
( ) Rupert Murdoch
( ) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering
( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting
( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) The tragedy of the commons
( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing
(X) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) That the press dropped the ball on Iraq is a symptom, not a cause
(X) Print advertising pays so well because advertisers *can't* work out the return they're getting.
( ) Information does not want to be free
( ) Corollary to above, lots of people don’t want you to know certain things, apparently we need gatekeepers
(X) Society depends on journalists producing news that few readers are actually all that interested in, quite honestly
( ) That your friend was misquoted once in a paper does not mean journalism is bunk
( ) Everybody reading the same story is a feature, not a bug
( ) Having a free online “printing press” doesn't turn you into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
(X) Wall Street won’t allow newspaper groups to back off from 20% profit margins
(X) Newspaper executives are second only to record industry executives for short-sighted idiocy
(X) E-paper still doesn't give publishers back their ad monopoly and hence its revenue
(X) You can't charge for online content unless all your competitors do it too, all at once.
( ) Ethics are hard to hold up when your bills are due
( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
(X) Publishing less often makes you even less relevant
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Free society depends upon a free press
( ) Democracy is bad enough with the press we've already got
( ) You think print is bad? Imagine Sky News as a blog. Or Today Tonight. That's what your idea will turn into.
( ) Reader-generated content is to professional news what YouTube is to big-studio movies.
(X) Have you read the comments on news websites? They make YouTubers look like geniuses.
( ) You already work for Crikey.
( ) Its my ABC, it tells me what to think.
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry friend, but I don't think it would work.
( ) Okay, you can string a few sentences together but stick with the day job.
( ) Interesting, you post a huge pseudo factual rant backed up by your life of experience, anonymously.
via How To Save Media | MetaFilter.
