Mass media preaching the new orthodoxy
As the casualty list grows following yesterday’s Fairfax announcement, you get the feeling that the rest of the local media heavy weights are gathering tips for their own “business improvement initiative” . It seems we live in an age of management speak, where cost saving is used to describe sacking people and going forward, a term of evasion that avoids acknowledging what’s happened before. And it also seems that the disease is spreading, so we now have promises of periods of consultation that are both extensive and one on one. The door is always open, unfortunately it is fast becoming the door you show people out.
One of the amazing things you find in media industries is just how many people work in managing the people who make the content that fills whatever media space you happen to choose. That not to say that management is unnecessary, but it is a fact that the lion share of numbers and wage growth in media employment over time is in management, the people who tell other people what to do and sometimes how to do it. Something doesn’t seem right if the CEO of Fairfax can send 500 odd people in search of other jobs and then collect a performance bonus at the end of the day.
At the ABC similar thoughts must be running through the mind of a former Fairfax man, Mark Scott. Mark doesn’t collect a performance bonus, but he is busy driving a reform agenda designed to streamline content production and improve utilisation of resources. It will also mean quite a few people lose their jobs (mostly operational staff), but you don’t hear management use terms like redundancies, it is all about going forward and gearing up for the new age of media. For the record here is Mark Scott in march 2008.
Now although I confess to a certain cynicism with regard to the idea of a 4th estate, there may well be a problem for the notion of democracy if we end up with next to no one actually generating the stories that were previously thought of as journalism. This might be sold as the price of progress, but the cost savings deserve to be challenged. It is most unlikely that media organisations in the throes of retrenching staff will be very interested in commissioning expensive in-depth journalism. Trivial lifestyle features or cooking shows are much easier and cheaper to make. This is a view illustrated in more depth by Nick Davies, a Gaurdian journalist and author of Flat Earth News on the 730 report. As we move to a new world of fractured news distribution via the internet, there are clear signs that those people who once were seen as champions of the press (journalists) are being replaced with content producers who have little time or interest in pursuing the traditions or ethics that guided their predecessors. Which suits who?
Footnote
Orthodoxy - if you think about the implications of this definition from Wikipedia, it seems obvious that we are indeed losing a radical and dissenting voice in this media revolution.
In general intellectual contexts, the terms “orthodox” and “orthodoxy” are commonly used in an unfavorable sense, similar to that associated with “dogma” and “dogmatic”. The implication is that orthodox beliefs are not rationally justified but are imposed by some overseeing body, such as the dominant group in an academic discipline. For example, the term orthodox economics is commonly used by critics to refer to the dominant approach to economics, which its supporters would more commonly call mainstream economics. In this sense, orthodox economics is commonly counterposed to radical or heterodox economics.