At the end of October the House of Representatives passed the Evidence Amendment (Journalists’ Privilege) Bill 2010, which is all about protecting the confidentiality of journalists’ sources. In the usual jargon, it’s a “journalist shield law”.

Australia was apparently the only major democracy without such a law in place or in progress, so it’s welcome. And, in the words of the new Greens MP for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, “this bill is a good example of how all parties can collaborate on a worthwhile initiative in a way that would not have happened without the currently composed parliament.”

Bandt continued:

To facilitate its passage, the Greens will support the bill in its current form in the House, but I indicate now that we will seek minor amendments to it in the Senate. In particular, we believe that it should be made explicit that the bill covers bloggers, citizen journalists and documentary filmmakers, and that the privileges provided by the bill cover anyone engaged in the process of journalism, no matter who they are or in what medium they publish.

Well I reckon it’s great that the new law might cover more people, not just those who work as employee-journalists in the industrial media factories. It’s great that it might be technology- and medium-neutral. But…

What the heck is a “blogger” or a “citizen journalist”?

As the bill currently stands, the definitions of “journalist” and “news medium” are already quite broad. In Schedule 1, section 126G:

informant means a person who gives information to a journalist in the normal course of the journalist’s work in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium

journalist means a person who in the normal course of that person’s work may be given information by an informant in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium

news medium means a medium for the dissemination to the public or a section of the public of news and observations on news

My understanding is that “observations on news” is meant to cover the analysis and opinion (“op-ed”) that typically appears in newspapers and current affairs programs. But many blog posts would also fit that description.

Heck, you could even argue that my Twitter stream is a news medium because it contains news (of what me and others are doing) and observations thereupon, conveyed to “a section of the public”.

What I don’t know is whether “in the normal course of that person’s work” implies that a journalist has to be paid. Any media lawyers want to have a go at that?

In my view, “journalism” and “blogging” are two activities amongst many that end up producing certain kinds of media outputs. Whether you’re paid or not is a separate issue.

As I’ve expounded at length before, journalism is the job of producing the media objects needed by industrial-age media factories. That’s why I love John E McIntyre’s description of his work at The Baltimore Sun as sub-editor — “copy editor” in his American English — as “a shift at the paragraph factory”. On his blog.

Blogging evolved in a different environment. It produces a more fluid kind of media output — one that involves the readers in discussion. Indeed, I’m one of the people who thinks that the dialog is what makes it blogging — as opposed to an essay or a polemic.

There are other definitions, of course. I won’t list them all here except one. The idea that a proper capital-J journalist is a member of their professional association. In Australia that’s the Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance. Like most professions it has a Code of Ethics.

Is a Code of Ethics what turns writing about current events into “journalism”?

Labor MP Graham Perrett supported the bill but was concerned about extending protection to those unruly bloggers:

I do support this bill and I support shield laws which provide a presumption in favour of journalists privilege. However, I believe that this bill could be improved by providing an expanded definition for ‘journalist’ or ‘reporter’… As an additional safeguard, this definition enshrined in legislation would ensure that rogues — who do not uphold the journalists’ code of ethics — are not able to hide their shonky reporting behind shield laws. In terms of the modern day, it is easy to see people like [veteran political journalist] Laurie Oakes and the others who sit up in the journalists gallery as journalists, but there is then quite a continuum down to the perhaps aggrieved blogger who puts out something every week…

I would suggest to the Senate that the definition of journalist include some additional words. If we go to the 126G definition where journalist is defined, I would suggest that it also include ‘a person who ascribes to the journalist code of ethics as published and codified by Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance’. This would be a narrower definition that would still cover the intent of the member for Denison’s legislation.

Perrett isn’t necessarily suggesting every blogger become a member of the MEAA. But I make two observations for now.

1. The MEAA’s codification of journalistic ethics is not necessarily the only view of how things should work. I’ve nothing against the MEAA. Far from it! But I wouldn’t like to see them enshrined in legislation as the only view of how the media should operate.
2. There are plenty of MEAA members who fail to live up to this high ethical standard. Witness any episode of ABC TV’s Media Watch. This test for ethical behaviour fails in practice.

When the recent changes were made to Australia’s Freedom of Information laws, it was proposed to grant journalists the first five hours of decision-making time free of charge. But as the new Information Commissioner, Professor John McMillan told iTnews.com.au:

There was a debate about whether someone was a journalist or not for the purposes of the Act. They resolved that by giving everybody FOI free for the first 5 hours.

The can of worms was not opened on that occasion. But it looks like it’s going to be this time. This will be an interesting can of worms to open. Good luck, Senators.

I’m one of the panellists on Viocorp’s Future Forum The Future of News Reporting next Friday 9 July at midday Sydney time.

The other panellists are: Angelos Frangepoulos, CEO, Sky News Channel; Eric Beecher, publisher of Crikey; Mark Hollands, Chief Executive of PANPA; and Sam North, Media Director at Ogilvy Public Relations. The moderator is the redoubtable Mark Jones.

Now I’m a little worried about the topics listed, because some of them seem like we’re revisiting that tired old “bloggers are not journalists” (non-)debate. I thought we’d moved on from there. And “citizen journalism”? Haven’t we killed that term yet? Truly, I’ll end up stabbing someone. So I intend to derail proceedings at the earliest opportunity. Oh. Don’t read that bit, Mark.

In case you’re late to the party, some of my thoughts on this can be found in my presentation to Media140 Sydney and my Journalism in a hyperconnected world from late 2008. Maybe I need to do an update piece.

It’s a webcast thingy, so do please watch. And tell your friends. Unless they’re bloggers. Or journalists.

Newspapers are folding in the United States at an astonishing rate. According to Paper Cuts, a website tracking the newspaper industry, more than 120 have folded since January, 2008. While Australian broadsheets have not succumbed just yet, there is a real possibility that they may not survive in the long-term. But is that such a bad thing? Tom Connell reports.

Mark Scott’s recent comments about the Australian newspaper industry would have sent chills through journalists and editors across the country.

“It does strike me that much of the bold and creative thinking about the future of print seems to be happening outside the major publishers — probably because the talented people within are too busy simply attending to the fire in the building,” Scott said, in and article in The Age on 9 April.

This was hardly the first doomsday article on newspapers, but what set this apart is that Scott, current head of the ABC, was until 2006 a newspaper executive at Fairfax Media –- the second largest newspaper owner in Australia.

Scott’s startling admission is a perspective from the inside, and speaks volumes for how dire the predictions have become for the broadsheet –- even more so given such articles are appearing regularly in the very newspapers they are talking about.

The fire Scott was talking about has been raging for some time; faced with the competition of the internet, broadsheet newspapers are struggling to come up with a way to keep making money.

Yet it’s not so long ago that newspapers were making so much money that the names of some of our most successful businessmen are synonymous with them. Titans such as Murdoch, Fairfax and Packer commanded institutions that had been making money for nearly two centuries, with no end in sight.

The origins of this money-making can be traced back to 1825. Until this time the government owned entirely what was known as the convict press. When two British lawyers, William Wentworth and Robert Wardell, began printing an independent newspaper, nobody stopped them, and by default the free printing press in Australia was born. The byproduct, of course, was that papers now had to be run on commercial imperatives.

There has been, in theory at least, a balance between popular entertainment, in order to sell advertising and fulfil the commercial imperative, and exposing the truth, in order to adhere to the notion of “protecting the public sphere”: to defend the defenceless and criticise those in power.

While newspapers were made viable with standard display advertising, they became big business on the back of one major advent: classified advertising.

Deputy editor of The Age, Andrew Rule, started working as a broadsheet journalist at a time when the newspaper was still king — when the classifieds, known colloquially as “rivers of gold”, were of such importance to Melburnians that leaking an ad before publication was a lucrative business, and in turn a sack-able offence.

“I can recall walking out of The Age on a Friday night in the late evening and seeing a queue of cars three deep, spread for four blocks, with police there trying to keep order, because people were so desperate to get Saturday’s copy of the paper, all because of the classifieds,” Rule said.

“Within a decade, that scene was gone. The classifieds lost their superiority and ad revenue started to go to other sources.”

The scene Rule described is so far out of date it’s unimaginable to later generations — the concept of having to physically queue for information because it can’t be accessed online.

The result, Rule explained, is that for the first time The Age, and similar papers, is trying to make a profit without the cushion of the classifieds, which may necessitate radical change for the newspaper industry.

“I suspect, if we have a future, that it is as a smaller circulation paper, with better material in it, at a higher cover price.”

If Rule sounds guarded about the broadsheet’s survival, it’s understandable given the steady decline in circulation in recent years.

According to the Australian Press Council, from December 2007 to December 2008, The Age‘s Monday to Friday circulation was down nearly 8 per cent.

The Sydney Morning Herald (15.1 per cent) and The Australian (10.1 per cent) also decreased in circulation during this time, and these figures only continue a long established trend of negative growth for Australia’s broadsheets.

But there is some hope in the statistics of the weekend editions.

The Age and The Australian recorded small rises in weekend circulation during this time, and the Sydney Morning Herald a much smaller drop than their weekday edition suffered. What, then, is the ongoing appeal of the weekend paper?

The answer could lie in ritual, according to Stilgherrian (a mononym he adopted in his 20s, Stil for short). Stil is a new-media figure whose output includes radio, magazines, blogging and podcasts.

“There is still an aesthetic thing about the big weekend broadsheet in particular — I can see that people will be willing to pay for it, if for no other reason than spreading the news out on the table on a Saturday morning over a cup of coffee,” he said.

Having started out working for ABC and community radio in Adelaide, Stil is now a regular online contributor for Crikey, with several of his articles focusing on the plight of newspapers in Australia.

He thinks that newspapers are “probably doomed”, but said this may not necessarily be a bad thing, depending upon what replaces them.

“It just so happens that the way history unfolded, newspapers filled the role of spreading information, but increasingly there are other ways of reaching people, other ways of distributing journalism. The problem is that newspapers, and experienced journalists are guilty of this, are thinking only within the box of what they’ve got to work with, and I think that’s really holding them back.”

This echoes the words of Rupert Murdoch, who in giving one of the Boyer Lectures in 2008 said “some journalists are misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity of the internet.”

Murdoch, Stilgherrian and Rule seem to be roughly on the same page — the future revolves, somehow, around the internet. Perhaps not astonishing news, but stark revelations by two of the men, considering their vested interest in the printing press.

An online future represents a two-fold problem for the broadsheets.

First, online advertising is not capable of generating the amount of income to which newspapers are accustomed. According to the Newspaper Association of America, since 2005 in the United States the annual print advertising revenue dropped by $A17.65 billion, while over the same time online advertising revenue was up just $A1.53 billion.

Second, newspapers have not utilised the internet as best they could, and have lost ground to a proliferation of news websites both national and international.

According to the latest AC Nielsen figures, NineMSN gets nearly half a million hits per day, well ahead of both the leading sites of Fairfax Media (smh.com.au at 390,456 hits) and News Limited (news.com.au at 264,257 hits).

Sites such as NineMSN, though, could not be said to be in the business of in-depth news; their role is breaking the bare facts of news, with an obvious emphasis on entertainment.

Independent sites such as Crikey are proving popular for users who want more than just news. Crikey‘s motto is “telling you what they won’t”, with their focus on the story behind what they call the so-called facts.

The main criticism of Crikey, and similar sites such as New Matilda, is levelled at the people writing the content.

Freelance journalists contribute to these sites, but their type is nothing new. The new media figure is the blogger, or so-called citizen journalist.

This is, essentially, an individual who reports from the ground up; an ordinary person’s experiences of or opinions on the news. It is a much-derided form of journalism, though some believe it has real merit in today’s world.

One such person is John Pilger, who said that if journalism is the fourth estate, these individuals might just be the fifth — truly independent reporters at a time when public relations is said to have infiltrated news rooms.

“Corporatism and consumerism are laying to waste the breeding grounds of free, inquiring journalism when it has never been needed more,” he said.

“In these days of corporate ‘multimedia’ in thrall to profit, many journalists have become absorbed into a propaganda apparatus without consciously realising their true role.”

For Pilger, citizen reporters, or non-journalists, not only represent the future of good quality journalism, but they can also produce a superior product to that of the existing custodians; unaccountable to media organisations, citizen journalists report with neither fear nor favour.

But herein lies the problem — the lack of accountability of these so-called “citizen reporters” brings into question their credibility.

Stilgherrian believes this assertion is misguided, and that a shift from cultural acceptance of newspapers as the trustworthiest source is inevitable.

“We trust the story on page three of The Australian, not because we trust the journalist — in many cases they don’t even have a by-line — but because of the big masthead on the front of the newspaper which says ‘The Australian‘,” Stil said.

“The journalist is dressed up in the authority of the masthead. New trustworthy sources will emerge online, and have already.”

This seems a valid point. Stil’s own employer, Crikey, has over 10,000 paying subscribers, which might pale in comparison to current newspaper circulations, but the trend is in favour of sites such as Crikey and New Matilda.

While these sites are an excellent source of news comment and news opinion, and sites such as NineMSN are more up to date on events than newspapers could ever hope to be, there is one aspect conspicuous by its absence — investigative journalism. Which begs the question; will investigative journalism be lost with the last broadsheet?

As newspapers are killed off in the United States, the country from which Australia catches its colds, a new solution has emerged: not-for-profit organisations.

The Huffington Post has launched what is now one of several public funds for investigative journalism, the idea being that the fund is overseen by an editor who decides which stories need to be told, and freelance reporters are paid out of the fund to write the stories.

This seems a viable solution in the US, with a population of over 300 million and a philanthropic culture. But it’s hard to imagine enough funding for regular investigative journalism being forthcoming from our comparatively small nation.

Individual benefactors, suggested Stil, could be the solution.

“Bill and Melinda Gates are putting billions of dollars into African health, but I can see that there will be people that will want to put their money into things we call journalism now.”

But this would seem to throw up a major problem: having investigative journalism funded by billionaire businesspeople will inherently create conflicts of interest too large to overcome.

An investigative report into Crown Casino funded by James Packer, anyone?

Perhaps, then, it’s too early to call the demise of the newspaper — maybe it does still have a role to play, albeit in a far different form.

There may be hope for The Age, for Rule is far from the old hack, rigid in his ways, which Murdoch alluded to. He is willing to concede the reality that broadsheets cannot survive as they are.

“You can’t afford to carry all the forms of journalism that those classifieds paid for. We now have cost-cutting, and central to that everybody has to pay their way.

“In the past, there were people who weren’t the best at what they did — they were second- or third-raters — but they were cushioned by those classified ads.”

Time for some tough decisions, then. The Age is moving to new offices in September of this year, offices that are smaller and that occupy cheaper land in the CBD. The prestige of newspapers, one feels, has taken a whack with this withdrawal — perhaps a necessary one.

But newspapers, and in particular broadsheets, should tread very carefully when trying to reduce their bottom lines, lest they defeat their purpose for survival.

An article in the online edition of The Economist in August of last year pointed out that newspapers were like many industries, in that “it is those in the middle — neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist, that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.”

There would two seem to be two ways for a newspaper to survive, then.

The Herald Sun has so far done a remarkable job of being entertainingly populist; the highest-selling paper in Australia continues to increase its readership with uniformly tabloid content and format. Just don’t expect investigative journalism.

In contrast, Rule concedes that at the forefront of every decision made by broadsheets must be the need to maintain quality and depth of journalism. In doing so, they can hope to appeal to what to what he said will be a smaller but more discerning share of the market.

“You can’t really maintain quality when you are using cheap or amateurish material. Photographs and words are still as difficult to do well as they ever were. And I think, going forward, we’re going to have to compete to pay for the best talent.

“Ultimately there will be high price attached to the best talent. Because whether you’re running a newspaper, or a radio station, or a boxing gym, you need the best talent there to attract people.”

So is Rule saying that cost-cutting can only go so far, that the quality of the broadsheet must be maintained if it is to stand any chance?

“In my view that’s true. The only chance we have for survival is to go for quality and hope that people will want to pay for it.”

And herein lies the crux of the issue that is the broadsheet’s future in Australia — paying for it.

The online monster that threatens to consume newspapers has many advantages, not least of all that, generally speaking, it’s free. Calls for newspapers to go online ignore the fact that papers would simply become another online news site — and in doing so lose their inherent value.

While admitting the internet might be the future for newspapers, Rule is sceptical about it as a source of news, describing it as a “trash and treasure market”, full of misinformation.

“When it comes to something deeper, what we need in this cacophony of noise is to sit down and pay for expert people, the best of their generation, to analyse what’s going on around them and to write about it.”

There have been threats to newspapers before: television has saved a few trees in its time, as has radio.

But while these two media have in many ways complemented newspapers, the internet threatens to supersede them.

How is a broadsheet supposed to compete with words (without space limitations), pictures and videos?

The best chance seems to be with good quality, accountable investigate journalism. Online news sites are perfectly suited for what they are, but ill-equipped to cover stories beyond the reporting of facts and opinions; to “protect the public sphere”.

The masthead of credibility needs to be clung onto ferociously, whatever the cost, if newspapers are to survive and serve their purpose.

Without the rivers of gold, resources need to be used more efficiently. That may mean less focus on news telling, no more weekday papers and a raft of other cost-cutting.

Rule, for his part, is no optimist regarding the plight of the broadsheet.

“It took a while for surf boards and blonde hair to get to Australia and possibly, it’s just taking a little bit of lag time before we too start executing newspapers, putting them down like old Labrador dogs.”

Let’s hope Rule, and his broadsheet cohorts, are up for the fight.

For perhaps not all of us would miss getting up on a Saturday morning and spreading the world over our tables over a cup of coffee.

But if the old Labrador dogs of this country do get the green dream, investigative journalism will be the poorer.

Increasingly, I’m getting annoyed with otherwise-intelligent people who simply don’t “get” what is happening as our world becomes hyperconnected and rail against it. The man in the photo is Henry Porter. He doesn’t get it. But a pseudonymous commenter at The Poll Bludger this morning does. And he explains it better than I ever have.

Ah, the contrast!

In a piece for The Observer, Porter’s headline warns that Google is just an amoral menace. The ever-growing empire produces nothing but seems determined to control everything, we’re told.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the Internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs — worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past…

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

It’s worth reading the full rant — because it completely misses the point: I only found Porter’s piece because Google had told me about it.

Google didn’t “steal” his content. It produced a new audience member. And that’s what all media outlets produce: an audience for their advertisers — or, in the case of the ABC and SBS, an audience sufficiently large to justify their existence.

Ever though I think this one piece by Porter is full of shit, I clicked through, read about him, and discovered much better pieces about his concerns for our declining civil liberties and how the decline of one-way TV sets the scene for increased public debate. Porter now has a new reader because of Google.

However that commenter over at The Poll Bludger, yes, he got it right…

Responding to another commenter’s suggestion that Google should set up its own news operations, dolphin-avatar’d The Finnigans said:

Google doesn’t need to. News service is also an old hat. Citizen journalism via blogs, video posting à la YouTube, social networking sites and the latest Twitter-type news sharing. News service will also heading the oblivion path that is the print and classified media are heading.

As someone who was there from the beginning, Mosiac Browser V0.1, Web Server v0,1 and HTML V0.1 on Windows NT for the main streamers. Yes, I know the Unix guys have been hacking away for years, but it did take Mosaic browser to take it to the masses on Windows.

We knew from the beginning that aggregation will be the king. We actually built the first web crawler in Australia that aggregate contents across websites. But we didn’t have the resources to build a proper search engine. So good on Google for making billions because they do build the best search engine there is.

We also knew the Web/Internet will smash the monopoly and democratise the content creation, publishing and distribution. Especially distribution, the print media was supreme because it controls its own distribution channel via the newsagency channel. Any business that has control and monopoly over the distribution network, it’s a very good and profitable business, just ask Telstra.

But now, the distribution networks or channels are commodity, especially with the arrival of the wireless. The mobiles will be king in the next few years. In Japan, Korea, USA and some European countries, 50% of the internet traffic now are coming through the mobiles. It’s still early days for the mobiles, that is why I suggested to William that he should talk to his master at Crikey about putting together a mobile version of PB.

Rupert said people should pay for the contents. I am not prepare to pay for data, information, knowledge any more, they are commodity, they are available everywhere. I will pay for wisdom. Sorry Rupert, your publications do not have any wisdom and you have missed the bus many times and still missing. Adios Amigo.

BTW: I notice Microsoft has stopped selling its encyclopedia Encarta, obviously it has been killed by Wiki, just as it killed Britannica.

Pre-fucking-cisely! I explained this in my piece Journalism in a hyperconnected world, when I discovered I could track the Bangkok riots of 7 October 2008 through Twitter far better than through any “mainstream” news outlet.

Campbell Reid, the Group Managing Director at News Limited, got it right when he told the ABC’s “Quality Journalism” forum that “me-too journalism” is the cancer because it wastes resources.

Why do news editors send someone to cover a media conference which is already being streamed live?

Take a look at the photos of this week’s G20 demonstrations in London. Why is there a pack of photographers at every little violent incident, producing hundreds if not thousands of almost-identical images?

Some news sites have already given up.

Fairfax, for instance, produced Heatwave gets them all aTwitter simply by copying and pasting tweets — spelling mistakes and all — with the journalist doing nothing more than adding some weather data cribbed from AAP and elsewhere.

As Newsphobia points out, Twitter is not a Lazy Journalist’s Replacement for Vox Pop.

Fairfax gets away with this because Twitter users are still a minority. For now. But for those who do use Twitter, who do see the trending topics display and, since the Internet is so handy, to the Bureau of Meteorology‘s weather observations, Fairfax added nothing of value.

Who were these people? Where were they? What were they doing?

Where was the engagement with the community which demonstrated that the Fairfax was producing, as The Finnigans puts it, Wisdom?

No. This is just me pondering five stories about journalism this week. Grab yourself a cuppa and follow the links before tackling my discussion, because this’ll be a long, meandering essay — one in which I’m exploring my thoughts rather than reaching any conclusions. Yet.

1. Veteran columnist Frank Devine used the pages of The Australian to attack Crikey publisher Eric Beecher in Keep Beecher from the hack lagoon (yes, every newspaper headline must be a pun, or the sub-editors are whipped), and Beecher responded in Beecher v Devine: The threat to public trust journalism.
2. Another veteran journalist Mark Day (interestingly, also in The Australian) regurgitated a variation of the standard journalism versus blogging debate in Blogs can’t match probing reports. Stephen Collins’ excellent response is The Hamster Wheel.
3. I was taken to task for my “unbalanced” commentary on Senator Stephen Conroy’s keynote speech at the Digital Economy Forum. Read the comments.
4. The Rocky Mountain News was taken to task for (mis-)using Twitter to report a child’s funeral.
5. The MEAA held The Future of Journalism conference in Brisbane yesterday, and from first reports the usual journalists vs bloggers “debate” emerged.

OK, back? Cool. Here we go…

I’ll dispose of the dinosaurs first, 1 and 2.

The media students amongst you might care to run through Mark Day and Frank Devine’s pieces and catalog the logical fallacies and cheap rhetorical tricks. Here’s what I found after just five minutes on Frank Devine’s piece:

1. “Thomas Jefferson would be horrified by Beecher’s proposition,” an appeal to a long-dead authority in a claim which can’t possibly be substantiated;
2. “Beecher is a serious individual, gleaming with the dark radiance of gravitas. However, this does not impose on the rest of us any obligation to take him seriously,” i.e. a claim that we shouldn’t listen to Beecher. Similarly, we’re under no obligation to take Devine seriously just because of who he is or where he writes;
3. “The notion of further involving government in Australian media is preposterous,” which simply asserts the point he’s trying to prove;
4. “Newspapers do not set the agenda, [News Corporation CEO John] Hartigan said. People think for themselves,” which ignores the fact that almost every talk radio production office and every TV newsroom does rely on the agenda set by the newspapers to frame their day’s media output. It also ignores his own proprietor Rupert Murdoch’s obvious use of agenda-setting newspapers to gain influence — otherwise why sink money into such barely-profitable mastheads as The Australian, the London Times or the New York Post?
5. “Agenda journalism is a dangerous pursuit. It makes newspapers tediously predictable at best and, at worst, cumulatively untrustworthy.” I agree 100%. During Australia’s 2007 federal elections The Australian‘s own Dennis Shanahan consistently mis-reported polling figures, giving them a pro-Howard spin when a more reasoned analysis by the likes of Possum Comitatus showed the opposite. Shanahan’s response, of course, was to attack the messenger. This is precisely why I don’t trust The Australian‘s political analysis.

That’s enough Frank Devine for now. Eric Beecher’s rebuttal covers the remaining key threads.

Now Mark Day’s piece poses relevant questions, but I think he draws the wrong conclusions.

The most valuable role of journalism in a democracy is to peek behind closed doors, to keep a watchful eye on the workings of politics and power.

Agreed.

By definition this is a job for private enterprise because governments cannot reliably scrutinise themselves. Journalism that reveals information that some people do not want you to know is time-consuming and costly to sustain. Therefore it can be supported only by a profitable business.

“By definition”? Investigative journalism is expensive, yes, and the money has to come from somewhere. But in addition to a “profitable business” it could come from, say, a public trust like the UK newspaper The Guardian. A properly-funded, independent ABC could also continue its fine tradition of holding governments accountable.

(My gut feeling is that Day’s article is part of a Murdoch campaign to argue against the ABC getting additional government funding. I’m sure Mr Murdoch prefers to minimise his competition in the provision of “quality news”, and with the Fairfax broadsheets in decline and Channel Nine’s bean-counter owners having dumped journalism in favour of cheap game shows, the ABC and perhaps Crikey are now seen as Murdoch’s main threats. But I digress.)

Day continues…

There is only one model I know, or can see, that can do this, and that is the traditional advertiser-supported model that has sustained newspapers for more than a century.

Ah, the argument from personal ignorance! A classic logical fallacy. While Mark Day is undoubtedly intelligent, the fact that he, personally, doesn’t know of any other business models doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

The challenge… is to transfer the workings of newspapers to a web-based delivery system while maintaining the journalistic standards and characteristics that made them profitable businesses.

No. The challenge is not to transfer “the workings of newspapers” to the hyperconnected online world, but to transfer the trust and authority of “real journalism”, the art and craft of finding The Truth.

I suspect that a successful business or other institution which delivers investigative journalism online will look nothing like an industrial-age newspaper.

Unfortunately Day then descends into a predictable anti-blogging waffle, to which I responded:

Here we go again! Sigh. Blogging is all poor quality drivel. Journalism is all deeply-investigated, cross-checked insight. There’s a patronising “blogging has its place”, but with a sneeringly implied “but of course we journalists know better”.

We. Have. All. Seen. This. Before. So. Goddam. Many. Times.

Like most of these repetitive false-dichotomy blogging versus journalism waffles, this one provides no new insights. The headline sets up a tautology: “Blogs can’t match probing reports.” No. Of course not. Folk tales can’t “match” Hollywood blockbusters. Cheese on toast can’t “match” an 11-course degustation menu. And no, an individual writing with nothing more than their own resources (which is how legacy journalists usually frame the evil bloggers) can’t match the output of a trained investigative journalist who’s backed by the resources of the largest media empire on the planet.

Sorry, Mark, arguing that “A does not equal B” doesn’t cut it. You can do better.

You’re right when you say that news is “created”. But “news” has never been the only thing in “newspapers”. Legacy journalists, it seems, get stuck thinking that the specific way they crafted specific media products in their “traditional” media factories is the only way of doing things. It’s not, but it seems to be the only way they know how — and that’s why so many of them (including yourself, Mark?) find the changing world of the digital age so, so threatening.

Picking a soft target like “bloggers” and blaming them for this is an understandable psychological reaction, but all it really shows is traditional journalists’ failure to adapt.

Yes, this is all very tedious. After July’s Future of Media Forum, Hugh Martin, GM of APN Online, wrote from his perspective as one of the panellists in Blogging Future of Media 2008.

Here was a bunch of passionate and intelligent new media consultants and proselytisers who believe deeply in the inevitability of the digital media future, who appear not to have the first clue about the way MSM actually works, and who cling violently to a set of pre-ordained notions about said MSM. So the minute any capital “J” journalist makes a disparaging remark about bloggers or blogging they leap on it and shout “told you so!”

I reckon Hugh’s first paragraph could have been turned around and been just as accurate:

Here was a bunch of passionate and intelligent journalists who believe deeply in the sanctity and nobility of their craft, who appear not to have the first clue about the way blogging actually works, and who cling violently to a set of pre-ordained notions about said blogging.

Hugh is right to say this continuing argument isn’t constructive. Anger at the sheer repetitiveness here is what inspired my polemic Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu! Yes, the time really has come to move past all this crap.

There was a wonderful discussion between Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism and Jay Rosen who teaches Journalism at New York University at Jarvis’ blog in a piece called A cure for curmudgeons.

Jarvis writes:

I was on a panel with Terry Heaton at the Public Radio News Directors’ annual confab in Washington. Topic: blogging. Terry and I were almost through with opening tap dances when a hotheaded curmudgeon in the third row interrupted — which is fine; we like conversation — to go on the attack and save the world from these horrible blog people. He spat out all the usual lines, including how terribly busy he is being a news director (his italics) and how this is such a nonsense and a bother. My favorite sputtering: “I have a job. Do you have jobs?”

To which the proper response should have been, “Go fug yourself.” But I didn’t say that… I’m tough. I can take it. This is hardly the first time I’ve heard everything he had to say (but he seemed so proud, as if he’d just thought it up himself; the only thing he didn’t say was that he didn’t want a citizen surgeon, either).

Jarvis’ policy is to fight curmudgeonliness with curmudgeonliness.

I told this fool that if he didn’t want to see the opportunities to do things in new ways, fine…

[T]he hour is far too late and the state of the industry far, far too desperate to waste time with these sideshows. They had their time and the objections needed to be addressed in that time. But I haven’t heard fresh objections in a few years. What I want to hear instead is fresh ideas; we must have more of those.

Jay Rosen declared this war over in 2005 but he tweeted: “I’ve since realized that they are each other’s ideal ‘other.’

The rest of their exchange is well worth a read, as are the comments. I particularly like Corky’s reply:

One of my favourite replies to that sort of curmudgeonly blather is “Lead, follow, or get out of the way”.

Frank Devine and Mark Day, you can probably get out of the way now, because you certainly aren’t offering any leadership.

My third and fourth little yarns both illustrate the changing media landscape…

Despite being “on the web”, Crikey is really an old-fashioned print newsletter delivered via email. When I wrote about Senator Conroy’s speech and speculated about the rest of the day to come, it made sense in a lunchtime email. But at 10.30pm or whenever, George Fong complained that I didn’t cover the rest of the day. He quite rightly expected the story to have changed as the Forum unfolded.

Crikey is an established brand. But like every other brand it needs to keep evolving rapidly to preserve its ecological advantage in the rapidly-evolving mediascape.

The new Crikey Blogs, to be formally launched next week, are a great step. Bringing established political bloggers The Poll Bludger, Possum Comitatus and former senator Andrew Bartlett under the Crikey umbrella is an inspired move. I look forward to further moves into Web 2.0.

Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountain News did try to keep a story going by using Twitter from a child’s funeral. Mediamum summarises the controversy. The Colorado Independent was scathing:

Whatever their rationale, it’s unconceivable. Utterly, and unforgivingly, inconceivable.

I disagree. This was a legitimate news story. A community was shocked by the death, and recording its grief is appropriate — if done with tact and respect. If I were a newspaper editor I’d certainly have assigned a journalist and a photographer. What makes the Twitter coverage inexcusable is not the supposed “intrusion” — I doubt whether anyone even noticed at the time — but its sheer banality.

RMN_Berny: people gathering at graveside
RMN_Berny: coffin lowered into ground
RMN_Berny: rabbi zucker praying
RMN_Berny: rabbi recites the main hebrew prayer of death
RMN_Berny: earth being placed on coffin.
RMN_Berny: rabbi chanting final prayer in hebrew
RMN_Berny: rabbi calls end to ceremony
RMN_Berny: family members shovel earth into grave

This, Berny Morson, is boring as batshit! A community’s grief at the death of a child is being portrayed with less emotion than the call of a horse race. Wrong.

The editor’s response to the criticisms is worth quoting at length:

Ultimately, to me, it’s all about execution. Poorly done, such journalism might very well feel inappropriate. Done well, I don’t think so.

Some criticism of the short blasts our reporter sent may be justified. They can seem cold, even crass. But I am responsible for that failing. It is my job to make sure our staff is trained properly…

But to claim there is something inherently wrong with the idea is to make too sweeping a judgement. Everything from services for major public figures like presidents and popes to ceremonies for victims of tragedies like the one at Columbine High School have long been covered by TV and radio…

We must learn to use the new tools at our disposal. Yes, there are going to be times we make mistakes, just as we do in our newspaper.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try something. It means we need to learn to do it well.

I’d actually like to congratulate the Rocky Mountain News for trying something new. OK, you fucked up. But editor John Temple has taken responsibility and we’ve all learned something.

And that leads nicely into my last piece, yesterday’s Future of Journalism conference. While I wasn’t in Brisbane and could only see a few tweets and blog posts, it does sound like it was — once bloody again! — the old versus new, journalism versus blogging conversation.

The Podcast Network‘s Cameron Reilly had this to say:

[M]y comments were not well received. As usual, I tried my best to explain that the economics of media have fundamentally changed and that means all bets are off. But, as usual, nobody listened and I was accused of being a “shock jock” espousing “revolutionary rhetoric”. Jean Burgess from QUT used the old line about “we’ve had technological shifts before and it didn’t cause the end of the industry”, completely missing the point that this is NOT about a technology shift — it’s about an economic shift…

Fifteen years ago, if I wanted to publish something to a wide audience, the financial barriers were extreme. The cost of owning a newspaper or magazine were (and still are) very high. So very few people were able to own one. It was a limited playing field. Consequently, the people who em own a newspaper had the market to themselves. There was limited competition for people’s attention. As a result, they could carve their local market up between themselves and fund their business through advertising.

However, today, anyone can publish something online. The economic barriers have been removed. Consequently, there are 75 million active blogs that I can read, not 4 newspapers. And so audience attention is fragmenting and the traditional news companies can’t control it. As they lose audience, their ability to generate advertising revenue diminishes. As revenue declines, they can’t afford to maintain their old cost structures, so they start downsizing. Sound familiar? It’s a negative spiral. And there is NO. WAY. OUT.

As I said in the essay I posted this morning, I don’t think the most dynamic new media factories will emerge from the old. And I don’t think the existing media factories will bother trying to re-train their old curmudgeons into new jobs. They’ll just hire the people who are already doing things “the new way”.

Or, as @earleyedition put it, and I paraphrase here, “If journalists wait for their current employer to organise their job for them, they will, it just won’t won’t be with the current incumbent.”

I repeat my challenge from this morning’s essay. If you really are so good at storytelling, start creating these new forms. Off you go. Now.

Australia’s Fairfax media empire is sacking 550 staff, including 120-odd editorial staff, and the journalists went on strike. Well, off you go, petals. You can stamp your feet and turn blue in the face too, for all I care — because a strike is just plain wrong.

The MEAA‘s Chris Warren reckoned the anger behind the strike was driven by not just the jobs cuts, “but the clear view that there’s no strategy behind the job cuts.” Agreed. As Crikey reported, Fairfax’s message to staff didn’t articulate any kind of vision, and didn’t even mention journalism.

But journalists haven’t exactly provided vision either.

Humans are inquisitive, social critters. We’re hard-wired to seek out an understanding of the world around us, to find out what others are up to and slot it into a coherent narrative. Society has always provided mechanisms to meet that demand.

At one end of the spectrum there’s the folk craft we call “gossip”. Granny bubbles over the dinner table about little Sally’s wonderful performance at the kindergarten concert, sharing the joy of her delight and reinforcing the narrative that we’re a good family and Sally’s doing well. There’s Brian at the pub, seventh beer in hand, asking if we’ve heard the news, “Davo’s banging that new bird Sharon in accounts”, reinforcing the narratives that David is a bit of a larrikin and that I use outmoded sexist stereotypes.

Up the other end we’ve got big institutions like the Church, Science and the Fourth Estate of The Media constructing narratives which they call, respectively, Belief, Knowledge and News. All of them, when feeling threatened, start referring to their narratives as “The Truth”.

Between them, the folk practitioners and the professionals (and everyone in between) manufacture enough news to fill our recommended daily intake. Yes, manufacture. A TV newsroom, for example, makes 15 minutes of news each evening to fill the gap between fanfare and sports desk, choosing from the myriad of events those which best support the narrative they wish to construct.

Back in the Industrial Age, only the big end of town was visible, with its cathedrals and newsagents. Everything else happened in small groups, and was ephemeral. Once Brian had made his drunken announcement, we laughed and smirked and, later, exchanged knowing winks, but it wasn’t written down anywhere.

But now, Quelle horreur!, the means of (media) production are literally in the hands of the peasants. Even Brian’s shaky mobile phone video of Sally’s Gimme more is on YouTube for Granny to show us — not just over dinner but also to relatives across the globe. And to complete strangers, too, who wear either a happy smile at the innocence of a playful child, or a creepy leer because they reckon they can just see Sally’s knickers when she bows at the end.

(Brian’s phone also came in handy re Davo and Sharon, but I digress…)

Journalists’ union thug Jonathan Este is right. He responded to my polemic against “old media” journos by reminding us that “whingeing, old son, is the past, the present and the future of journalism… It’s what we do. Journalists love whingeing and we’re pretty damn good at it.”

Yes, you are. But what else can you do?

By an odd coincidence, as well as the Fairfax sackings, Tuesday also brought Sydney’s first Media in the Pub night. Subject: The new shape of media careers. I bought Jonathan that beer I owed him and we both watched as the usual complaints about “citizen journalists” soon emerged — that “anyone with a computer” could now “just write stuff”.

Yes, that’s precisely the point, and why I reckon going on strike is precisely the wrong thing to do.

A strike reveals that you only see your craft as doing a particular kind of cog-in-the-machine job in a particular kind of media factory, manufacturing a particular style of media widget which your colleagues in the factory reproduce, distribute and sell. Well, those factories are in decline as people explore the wider range of narratives on offer, including those constructed by their family, friends and random strangers.

Journalism is, above all, storytelling. Journalists even call each other’s best efforts “good yarns”. The human passion for hearing good yarns isn’t going away, it’s just that factory-based employee-journalists are facing increased competition for everyone’s limited attention. New kinds of media factory are emerging too, requiring different skill sets.

Journalists should be fearful for their jobs. But as I told Media in the Pub, I don’t think your current employer will show you how to become gainfully employed in the new media factories.

I also suspect the most dynamic media factories won’t emerge from the old. After all, you can’t turn a steamship into an Airbus A380, you have to start from scratch. Maybe the 5% of Fairfax’s professional journalists facing the sack should see this as an opportunity, not a threat. Maybe the other 95% could join them and create something new and wonderful.

But no. What happened is a strike. A fight for the ever-shrinking supply of deckchairs on a sinking ship. 1500 people joined a Facebook group to “save journalism”. Once more the craft is confused with the factory where it was practised.

The euphemism for “going on strike” is “taking industrial action”. Dear Journalists, how about taking some post-industrial action? Or are you saying you’re not up for it?

But I haven’t though of anything better. Neither has anyone else yet, so we’re stuck with it. We might as well agree on what it means.

As usual, Wikipedia provides some good background. But Jay Rosen recently repeated his Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism:

It’s mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the “so-called” from in front?

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

There are other definitions, but they will have to be discussed in the comments.

I used quote-marks in my headline and first paragraph because I believe that’s how you denote the item of language you’re discussing. But from now on, I’ll use the term “citizen journalism” without quotes — except just then, because I was denoting again.

Does this definition work for you? Got a better name for it?