Qed

Post NM and procrastination

Fast flipping through Google this morning tripped the dread alert. The consumer culture was strutting its stuff amid the apocalyptic economic landscape and I was reminded of a line of thought regarding NewMatilda. Sure NM suffered occasionally from ordinary writing or facile arguments but one of its strengths was the plurality of opinions. It provided a soapbox for people who ordinarily might have anonymously blogged about something and that message had a chance to reach a larger audience. It also paid a skeleton staff and some of its contributors.

By comparison, Crikey is a fully professional publication and it shows, the writers, the ads, the presentation etc but such professionalism costs money. Meanwhile, blogs like LarvatusProdeo that have an associated commentariat, throw up a topic and get a variety of opinions but at the end of the day their broad appeal (an hence their market reach) is limited. It generates debate amongst a few and the process is enabling for those voices who come to LP looking for a left of centre perspective. NM seems to sit somewhere between Crikey and say the blogs like LP as a very cheaply run professional organisation that offered a regular-ish publication schedule, a more polished look and paid for some of its content. Interestingly its feedback or comments were less numerous than say LP which seems to suggest that people who go to LP do so to engage in the debates, whereas the Crikey and NM reader is more passive.

Now it also seems to me that the silent majority like their news and opinions pre-packaged because the mainstream media has been delivering it this way for some time and the hordes seem to accept that as a legitimate form of information. Debating sites such as LP or Anonymous Lefty argue a position vigorously but does this have any substantial effect on public opinion in general? On the other hand Crikey mightn’t generate as much debate on its main site but is it more broadly influential? I suppose it boils down to whether you think its politics or Politics.

Anyway these musing have a point. Mark at LP hinted at some moves to pick up the slack potentially left by NM’s expected demise. It could be an aggregation site like the Domain. The advantage of aggregators, like Google FastFlip or The Domain, is that they simply collect what’s already there, package it up neatly and give advertisers a bigger target. The cost of aggregating is relatively minor since things like RSS are geared towards such syndication and the headline front page virtually self edits.

But there’s a down side and it relates to the people actually generating the content in the first place, the writers. Now there are two fairly distinct categories of bloggers or writers. Some grab a topic, a quote or some news and post a paragraph or two offering some particular point of view supporting or criticising the original item. Quick, simple. Others like to structure an argument in detail, some of them actually do a bit of research, and their contribution is usually longer and the language can be more dense. It boils down to time.

Now if no one is getting paid for their time or if the pay is not a reflection of the time spent, ie by article rather than by length, then such a market situation is likely to lead to a dearth of in-depth writing. That is not to say that good writers wont write or that good in depth stuff wont occasionally make its way into the public domain, but it is to say that the tendency will be for more quick and dirty postings that rely on the audience to debate the issues.

Again some might see this as a good thing. But it does pose a few problems, not the least being the financial situation for writers. One issue that comes to my mind revolves around the business model. Let’s say an aggregation site is successful in its aims to deliver a variety of interesting content to a suitable number of eyeball, the sites generate lots of public debate, people fire off their comments and everyone seems happy. The advertisers see a potential market and plonk down so dough, the hosting company gets their bit and the owners of the site are happily turning over a profit. But what is the source of their content? Other sites, and if they are relying on voluntary guest posts or free quick and dirty little one liners, the bulk of the content is actually supplied by the public to the sites for FREE. In other words the audience who generates the content that drives the aggregators which in turn enables the advertisers to ply them, the audience, with ads. And the business that puts the deal together collects the loot.

Whether or not those businesses then decide that quality matters in their content is up for grabs. It might be that business comes first which risks undermining the public concerns about the future of journalism and writing often expressed in these very forums.

just my 2c.

The revolution might be twittered, but don’t count on it.

While Julie Posetti wants us to believe in the power of the twitterverse to achieve significance in the way news is reported, I think her comments overlook some aspects of how news is made and she asserts a significance for twitter which seems to gloss over some of the “noisy” aspects of that particular internet space. Although a claim that Twitter was the centre of the media universe during a week of political/media hyperbole seems extravagant it certainly is another avenue for media dissemination.

Mark Bahnisch at LP seems more circumspect in his comments. He describes the read/reflect approach to reporting news as

a normative pronouncement

compared to twitter,

a description of social reality

without advocating one as better than the other while still acknowledging the relative strengths of each. What Mark seems to be saying is that the social aspect of the new media landscape, its degree of interactivity that is perhaps illustrated by Twitter and blogs, represents another equally valid form of news reporting. Julie’s and Mark’s comments both reflect a shift in the reporting of some news but while tweets have become another instant message that can alert us to something and social interactivity can drive to a certain extent a political agenda, I think both points of view ignore the role of the professional gatekeepers and PR bots.

In a comparison between old media or MSM and the new media world, the role of the gatekeepers and key players play in disseminating news does not appear to be significantly different. Our sources of news are still filtered by privileged media professionals and media savvy players who can manipulate their particular media strength to reflect a particular agenda. The tools might have changed but so far there seems little evidence that the changed tools have actually produced a more participatory democratic system. Not that a rumoured 100,000 emails from the Bolta camp in support of Tony Abbott isn’t significant, but just how many emails and messages flow from the public on this issue is really hearsay and therefore cannot be confidently articulated.

The popular adoption of twitter as a conversational tool amongst media makers does seem to allow the public to see a broader picture of the news, one which seems to overlap generally with other internet media, if they so choose. The new media makers who engage with the web as their primary tool also tend to overlap in various new media platforms even if they are also active in traditional non-internet msm. For the new media makers, tools like twitter, blogs, websites, fb and so on differentiate the message and audiences to a certain extent, but that’s just the push-model side. The speed of adaption and change is much faster in the online space which is why I think some traditional msm media makers are perhaps not as keyed into things like twitter. Their interests are ultimately not particularly well served if they break their news on that medium since it has a very limited reach and if they do break news on twitter it is almost always as a pointer to a more significant source.

The news coming out of Parliament house is a strange beast in one way. Elsewhere, if something newsworthy happens in the public domain then members of the public have pretty much the same level of access as a professional media maker to the basics of the event, the when, where and who, for example a large public demonstration. On the other hand, Parliament House and the associated private media spaces that are the sources of this political story, and others like it, are largely off limits to the public. Sure the public can attend the chambers of parliament, but the business side of Parliament House is restricted. The Press Gallery occupy a privileged position courtesy of the political system and they are not likely to sabotage that.

Why is this relevant? Well it seems to me that the much vaunted democratisation of the news media via things like twitter fails to acknowledge that in some areas, the public is utterly dependent on professional media makers to tell them what’s going on. Sure we can tweet and blog about what we see or hear or read in the msm but that information is already filtered. I suspect the discretionary tweets from a few journalists out of Parliament House is more about building audiences (followers) than it is about dissemination of information to the wider public even if that is a by-product. Things like the Liberal Party leadership woes are significant stories only because the media says so, and we must rely on the media to provide almost all of our primary information. Social commentary while important is still dependent of the gatekeepers to break the news. If David Spears had not read out a sms live on air half the tweets on #spill would never have been written but if he did so and twitter didn’t exist then we can only speculate about how his peers in the rest of the MSM would have responded. In this scenario (a parallel universe where twitter doesn’t exist) it seems far-fetched to assume that other news sites who are most likely also watching Sky would not have reacted in a similar fashion to the newsworthiness of David’s impromptu news break.

Whether or not any of this new media or old media coverage of the subtleties and nuances of a political party’s internal machinations makes any real difference to what the public ends up thinking in a week’s time when the dust settles is doubtful. The headline news come monday or tuesday on the leadership is probably the only thing of real interest to anyone outside of the small coterie of political junkies that comment on blogs or tweet their hourly thoughts and especially when the story in question has little bearing on anything affecting the public’s daily reality. What the last week has demonstrated to this writer is that PR and media professionals are quickly adopting and adapting to the new forms of media without a substantial change in the fundamental relationship between politicians, the media and the public. The political bunfight is still an event publicised and produced by media professionals (would be or actual) for the distraction of the public. Compared with real issues such as climate change and keeping body and soul together, who said what to who and why during a week of political cloak and daggery in Canberra and Sydney is, a relatively small matter.

The ABC spreads its tentacles

The background. ABC presser then Crikey in bed with Smart Company plus New Matilda and of course LP.

So what monday! Chris Wallace takes an early break and misses the big media story of the day. Mark at LP dips out on a plumb gig over at Aunty and Crikey gets set for shake-up, meanwhile Media Watch is also on holidays. Is there something going on here, could the ABC be carefully avoiding scrutiny by waiting for the watchdogs to take a break or am I just overly paranoid? Either way it’s an interesting development.

Perhaps Margaret’s story about Crikey is code for a broader malaise in the Australian news media. So “not vastly profitable, Crikey is now a significant media presence” may well sum up the state of play but it alerts us to the key factors, making money and being significant. I’m not significant and the pay is crap so I often wonder how in this day and age private media companies can afford to pay big salaries to people just to write stuff. Is it about reputations? Certainly reputation is important, naming names is part of the game otherwise we wouldn’t be interested in Jonathan Green. He has an impressive track record and no doubt will add a certain gravitas to the ABC, however is this a good thing? Will Australian’s be served by an increasingly dominant ABC any better than by a Murdoch monopoly? I think there is a huge danger in media monopolies regardless of whether they represent corporate interests or the state.

I going to make an argument that comes from recently working at the ABC for 8 years. During that time the ABC completed a move, started with the infamous Dix report, from a largely disparate and unwieldy organisation to its current centralised corporate structure. Certainly some of those rationalisations were overdue, however the extravagant ivory towers that now represent the ABC seem to lack some of the diversity that used to be a hallmark of the ABC. I think in a very real sense, the swanky new ABC buildings are about the public perception of the ABC and self-glorification of those that work in them. Lacking in the new ABC is the larrikin element that used to inhabit the dusty corridors of the older sites around the country.

When I started, ABC Canberra consisted of an old building circa the late sixties that housed some distinctive and uniquely designed radio studios, a small TV studio and some office space. Attached to the old building was a terrapin hut and adjoining the TV studio was a beautiful enclosed garden where they once made a gardening program. Inside, the place was a bit of a mess. The TV studio had been gutted after the local news service was axed in 1991. At that time Canberra was well served by a long running commercial TV news service from what was once Australia’s largest regional TV station, Capital Television and the new system of aggregation was about to unleash even more local TV news content so the ABC’s departure was, although contentious, only missed by a few.

In 2001 the long running campaign of The Friends of the ABC coincided with market place rationalisations and a new ABC agenda for providing state based TV services which resulted in a restoration of TV news for Canberra. It also signalled an overhaul of ABC buildings around the country and money was diverted into an expensive building program which saw towering edifices like Ultimo assume pride of place in the middle of Sydney. These buildings, the physical manifestation of the ABC, are accounted for in the ABC annual report but I would argue that the intangible products, the quality and nature of the media the ABC produces is more valuable to its audience. These days any media can be produced almost anywhere but production environments, the physical, the social and the general locality still contribute distinguishing features to the symbols embedded in modern media.

The bland consensual pap that has become a hallmark of the ABC in recent times not only reflects a very Sydney centric view of Australia but also embodies the spirit of an expensive and centralised ABC corporate structure, one which rewards subservience and punishes dissent. Despite a significant spread of staff and facilities around the country, most decisions are made from comfortable offices in the middle of the Sydney CBD and most TV, Internet and News content originates from Ultimo. Other than the Parliament House bureau, the ABC in Melbourne and some regional radio, the states provide only marginal input into the mix of media that is your ABC. Importantly, this is not a question of ability or capacity which exists in abundance, rather it is a predictable outcome arising from such a centralised corporate structure.

One exception that is often cited as proof of a wider more representative ABC is its regional radio network however this network is threatened by the convergence of technology and shrinking demographics. It should also be noted that the regional radio presence rarely contributes to the national media mix and has become largely a symbolic flag flying exercise frequently couched in terms of regional disasters. The Town Square idea is simply an extension of this flag-flying with an added gatekeeping role on a smaller budget. I’m sure it is hoped by Scott and others that the addition of online to certain radio sites will help transition the organisation as their traditional audience declines but another key management consideration is maintaining the ABC brand and mindshare.

Here is where we arrive back at Simon’s quote. Significance and profit. The ABC is a significant player both in terms of reach and in terms of resources, particularly financial. In the past the ABC has been somewhat held in check by a relatively robust and viable privately owned media sector but with a rise in corporate concerns for profitability, there is a corresponding shift in favour of the ABC. The claimed new media revolution cannot deliver overnight an alternative to the 800lb gorilla that is the ABC but it can be harnessed by the monolithic media organisation as it seeks to extend its influence. It’s a clever ploy, the ABC becomes a self appointed gatekeeper for local opinion and simultaneously, by virtue of its tax payer infrastructure, undermines alternative points of view which must rely on some form of advertising or subscriptions to survive.

The Scott vision from his comfortable office high up in fortress Ultimo is for a powerful centralised ABC that avoids contention and panders to the cultural elites while continuing to pay lipservice to the ideas of diversity as evidenced by the spread of ABC online and digital TV. Part of the Scott vision also includes an element of self aggrandisement and he clearly wants to claim he did something big for the ABC. As CEO and board member he is very much involved with the internal rationalisation of the ABC getting rid of legacy artefacts such as inhouse documentary production for TV and specialist radio programming like the Religion report. Then there are the attacks on the culture of the ABC disguised as the new management sanctioned “ABC Values” and the earlier plan for “editorial balance” driven through news rooms across the country which complements the famous ABC management decree of “refer upwards”. Mark Scott’s tactic is to push the ABC in terms of aspiration goals such the online Town Squares and the international blueprint while simultaneously undercutting dissent within the ABC by a softly softly approach to outsourcing.

Outsourcing occurs on several levels within the ABC. On one level is the outsourcing of key parts of the ABC, such as TV production and technical distribution. Then there is outsourcing of staff. In a recent article the Age canvassed the number and fiancial success of Australians now working as contractors. Contracts are very popular with management because (generally) they return power to management and remove the onerous restraints of the award system as well as the potential for industrial action. The ABC use of employment contracts has been strategic, for instance entry level work is often filled with short term contracts breeding compliance and in other instances key positions in news are filled by contractors with suitable financial and editorial rewards.

While the ABC is probably no different to any other organisation in Australia with regard to managing its workers and risk, the net effect is an ABC that is more responsive to the wishes of senior management. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing when management is committed to providing pluralistic and dissenting points of view but obviously a management philosophy that reflects a narrow right wing viewpoint and is unable to cope with internal divisions except by way of top down directives is intrinsically not going to deliver a broad range of opinions or points of view.

You cannot simply attack dissent internally and then somehow expect, as if by magic, for your news media to be cutting edge or breaking new ground. For all of Scott’s theatrics on the new media front, what’s really at work is an expensive exercise in getting rid of subversion in the mainstream of the ABC and broadcasting the same message of conformity to rest of Australia. The ABC is fast becoming the messenger for Sydney’s North Shore, aided and abetted by an image sensitive government in Canberra. Neither is really interested in genuine journalistic values or in robust public debate, it is all about perception management and they are able to get away with it because the private media sector is struggling to stay afloat.

Australia’s democracy would be better served by providing funds that support a wide variety of expressions and enables the pursuit of truth and quality. There is something quite chilling in the extraordinary high level of popular support for the ABC while the private media cannibalises itself and the community sector starves. Anyone who thinks critical analysis can happen when only one voice speaks loudly isn’t thinking. The vast sums of money squandered by the ABC creating its impressive steel and glass facades seeks to hide the fact that quality content, material that challenges audiences and questions the orthodox has been replaced by the soothing balanced perspective that is your ABC.

Is Content King?

Is this a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend?

When Rupert talked recently about thieves he referred to Google and Microsoft as well as Ask but this seems like a obvious development, one that probably favours Microsoft because they gain more than just the business in search, it also strengthens their ongoing efforts to monopolise the server OS landscape. It’s probably Murdoch’s last card but it fits in well with how the debate has shifted in recent years away from the monopoly that is Microsoft to the the scary Google monster. Of course that debate has in part been driven by opnions and IT departments that are already firmly tied to the Microsoft product.

Particularly worrying is the idea that you might just have to use Bing to find something, just like you have to use Windows to run certain software. Gates and Balmer must be drooling, their shared vision of ruling the world might still come true.

How To Save Media – a checklist, some poetry and an idle thought or two

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.

Scott via Simons – Crikey

Margaret is over-hyping the ABC’s role in innovation and experimentation with the web, a role the ABC claims but cannot truly deliver for the simple reason that the ABC must always strike a balance in favour of protecting its existing audience. Playschool still runs at 3pm, the evening news still comes on the TV @ 7.

The ABC’s position is definitely enhanced by the New_Media landscape, it is not burdened with an expensive but declining newspaper arm and it owns a huge and under-utilised content library. Add to that a highly respected brand name and its easy to see why the Oz might say as they did,

“We will rule the Digital Age”

The ABC can afford to pick and choose what user content to add to its own, just as it can afford to dabble with new distribution tools that spread the ABC word around. But will we, the public, be any better served by an all powerful authoritative voice even if it speaks as humbly and benignly as Mark Scott and the ABC. Might public discourse be better served by more media voices, not fewer? Surely the challenge is not how to further strengthen the already strong position of the ABC but how to ensure the growth of other new media voices?

Your ABC and their News Limited: the media’s empire games – Crikey.

Mark Scott on Journalism

Mark Scott delivered a blunt assessment on the future landscape for traditional media in his A.N. Smith Memorial lecture at Melbourne University. He acknowledged that all the rules have changed and those media players that survive will be the ones that accept and embrace the challenges posed by the new circumstances.

In a speech that portrayed the 20th century as the golden age of media empires, Mark Scott predicted a contraction in old world media. While he said that some iconic mastheads like the New York Times will be able to command pricing power for online material, presumably through advertising and selling premium content, many other newspapers will decline. In an indirect reference to News Corp and the Murdochs, Scott linked declining old-media dominance and power with the old-media management style of command and rule, a habit that Scott said “is hard to break”.

Scott said of recent Murdoch statements that “you sense this rage at the injustice of what the online world is doing to his traditional model” yet as Scott also observed the success of Murdoch in print grew out of a deliberate policy to drive down the cost of content. Given the prediction that Scott and others have made that internet content will remain largely free for the foreseeable future there is something ironic in the current Murdoch move to paid content.

Scott did not avoid mentioning the fortunate position of the ABC or its relative freedom to pursue an internet audience. He did however underline some of the challenges confronting the ABC in the new age; how to maintain the integrity and quality of the ABC while at the same time allowing for more user generated media, how to maintain distinctly Australian stories in a global media market and how to provide a shared national experience.

In response to these challenges Scott alluded to a greater editorial and curatorial role, citing the current ratio of editors to journalists (62 to 4) on the Huffington Post. Hardly numbers that would inspire potential journalists at Melbourne Uni but Scott also predicted an ongoing need for quality investigative journalism, possibly produced cooperatively with other media players. He also predicted additional tools that will allow users to share ABC content and extend the distribution of ABC media into the social network space.

He also touched on the ongoing internal restructuring taking place within the ABC and suggested the ABC was not immune to the need for change. The now familiar ABC new media approach with its continuous news centre and local radio media hubs were again mentioned as Scott focussed on the exciting potential for the ABC to shape its own future in the new media landscape. If the ABC is still around in 33 years and occupying the same privileged position, Mark Scott may well be remembered for his role during these trying times.

The speech is available here for download.

WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism

Amusing blog post on the perils of blogging which I think illustrates a couple of things about the blogsphere. The lack of editorial oversight implicit in the system obviously produces problems now and the speed of propagation is a friend to the headline. Less obvious is the role of “a thousand eyes” in correcting any obvious falsehoods. Its a form of quality control, one mind and a pair of eyes might not see a problem if there is one, but scrutinise something with a million critical minds and if there’s a problem there is a much better chance of someone spotting it. Obviously this form of oversight can work well for high volume content but getting it right before something goes live is still a better option IMO.

Clearly the system is evolving and as news continues to shift to a decentralised shared environment away from the rigid structures of the past, more issues are bound to arise from the lack of pre-publication editorial oversight. Sites that depend on their credibility will have to move to address the problem or lose their audience. Sounds very much like journalism 101 needs an editor.

WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism.

Welcome | News21 | Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education

In the US even as the mainstream media thrashes around in its death throes people are still turning to media production as a means of expressing themselves and seeking to do so in sophisticated and innovative ways. Take a look at News 21.

Welcome | News21 | Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.

War 2.0 – day 2

Hugh White talked about new media from a long term historical perspective, questioning whether “new media” is really a major gamechanger when it comes to prosecuting war. On feature that emerged in Hugh’s short talk that is overlooked in the new media landscape is the role of broadcast mass media and the difference between what’s knowable from available sources of information and what’s inescapable.

This ties into a similar difference between active and passive media consumption. In an active mode, a person might seek out information or data to fit a certain parameter. In this mode data is selected or discarded according to its relevance to the task at hand. Perhaps someone is looking for dinner recipe or doing research on a school project.

In the passive mode, our criticality is less active. Browsing YouTube is an obvious example, but so too might be social networking via Facebook where there is no specific agenda directing the use of the media. TV is of course another such example.

So (according to Hugh) what’s inescapable in terms of public knowledge still carries far more weight in political terms than the simple fact that some knowledge might exist. This idea seems to have some merit in terms of common sense because while we might indeed be able to find out things about the war in Afghanistan that aren’t necessarily on the front page of a newspaper or in a TV bulletin, unless we know the information is available, we are unlikely to search it out.

Of course obscurity is no guarantee that information or data that might have serious political information will always remain virtually unknown but it does raise the question of just who will take on the role of informing the public when the existing authoritative sources collapse. And in such a void, how will the public be able to make informed choices about the truth of any such information. Is viral marketing (or similar) the answer?

In discussing the role of the media generally with regard to war and the potential of media to exert influence over the political agenda, Sebastian Kaempf explored the symbolic representation of war in the media with a particular focus on the US military’s role in the the battle of ideologies.

With particular regard to “the war on terror”, he described the Pentagon’s media campaign as “perception management” striving to portray Iraq and Afghanistan as “costless” wars which avoid spilling blood, are humane and surgical, and only involve killing the “other”. Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the other hand avoid a direct confrontation with the US and its allies, preferring instead to engage in a media war where they seek to counter the information agenda of the Pentagon with such deliberately provocative images such as the beheading of captives and the aftermath of US bombings thus effectively putting bloody death back into the US public sphere.

PART 3

Two journalists made interesting presentations, one from Paris via Skype which underlined the web2.0 twist to the conference. Not only was Sophie McNeil about 10 hours behind, she was also jet lagged following her sudden relocation to Paris. Sophie’s skype presentation was at times marred by the technology but despite the technical glitches Sophie manage to convey some of the issues confronting a video-journalist in areas of armed conflict. She described her documentary style as observational, implying perhaps less interaction with her environments. This more passive approach may well be due to some of the constraints imposed by the multi-disciplinary roles a modern VJ must perform however it is seems reasonable to point out that in most cases she is probably assisted by some sort of local handler who speaks the language and allows her to acquire her material without the minute by minute journalistic intervention that might otherwise take place.

Sophie’s ideas about the need to balance embedded sources with on the ground investigative material is obvious and it begs the question why so few of her colleagues fail to pursue such an obvious line of inquiry. She also made a good point about the advantage organisations such as Al Jazeera derive from their embrace of alternative news sources, such as mobile phone material. This point was also mentioned by Paul McGeough who observed that mobile phones are often the first source of information available to a journalist in war zones.

However, the technology that powers almost instant worldwide communications for journalists, drives their impressive acquisition tools and enables local users to collect uncensored media also exposes the people in any subsequent media story to possible repercussions at home, a point Sophie was keen to emphasise. Given all the pressure and stress that a video journalist has to operate under in a war zone, it seems hard to imagine them doing the same job for thirty years.

Paul McGeough, a five time Walkley award winner and former editor of the SMH spoke passionately about the demise of quality journalism which he acknowledged is partially self inflicted. His address echoed the sentiments Andrew Keene with concerns about accuracy, context and historical perspective that come with the Web2.0 version of news. In retrospect it is easy to see the missteps that have created the current problems for newspapers, but the future has now arrived. Despite the problems plaguing old media players like newspapers, Paul’s observations about the need to physically bear witness as a basic requirement for journalism continues to resonate. Adopting new media platforms ( as exemplified by Sophie) is surely a requisite part of that notion.

As with other similar debates about the future of journalism, it is sometimes hard to see how the traditions of truth telling with the craft of building narratives and representing stories from areas of conflict can survive in the new media landscape but perhaps it is just a simple matter of believing that such things are too important to disappear, so a way must emerge.

A final thought or two
In the context of war, conflict is driven as much by ideology as anything else. The new information age creates an additional front for players to contest. Historically the relationship of the mass media and its impact on war has changed over time. In some instances the power of the press has been beyond the control of the state but in the modern age, not only is the public media space a battleground for competing players seeking to undermine the “message” of the other, it is also the case that some of the new Web2.0 media tools subvert the capacity of players to control the message in the first place.

Podcasts of the conference are now available.