Australian airline Jetstar and the managers of rock band Powderfinger seem to think that waving the magic word “social media” means free labour. Exploitative cunts.

As mUmBRELLA reported:

Jetstar is continuing its drive into social media, funding an official blogger on Powderfinger’s farewell tour which is sponsored by the budget airline.

According to Jetstar: “Over 50 days, Jetstar’s official tour blogger will ‘Follow the Finger’ and produce daily blogs, video diaries, fan photos and Twitter updates. They will interview the band and support acts, interact with fans and locals and become a member of the tour support team.”

As well as covering travel and accommodation, the blogger will receive an allowance of $100 a day.

Right.

So in other words, for more than a month and a half, the “winner” of the “competition” will work as a writer covering the tour — call it journalism or blogging or whatever you like, it’s all the same thing. They’ll work as a producer, curating fan photos. They work as a PR assistant and “interact with fans and locals and become a member of the tour support team”. That’s a whole bunch of different media skills, a pretty special person indeed.

In return they get paid less than the legislated minimum wage.

The federal minimum wage is currently $15.00 per hour or $569.90 per 38 hour week (before tax).

Casual employees covered by the national minimum wage also get at least a 21 per cent casual loading.

I reckon “become a member of the tour support team” sounds like an offer of employment, yeah?

“Jetstar has been making a growing investment in social media,” says mUmBRELLA, but clearly not enough to pay a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

Maybe Jetstar should try telling the roadies they’ll also get $100 a day “allowance” in return for the privilege of seeing all 34 concerts. To their faces. And I’ll sit back and watch…

Please insert a final angry sentence that includes the words “exploitation”, “unethical” and “pond slime”. And on Monday I’ll be phoning Fair Work Australia for an opinion.

Rock on.

Unless, of course, Jetstar get in touch before then to tell me they’ve decided to pay the winner the proper MEAA rate for freelance writers [PDF].

“Do journos do it better?” Do journos do what better? I think this is actually the more interesting question: What is it that journalists actually do in our society?

Or, to stick with the question, what do they do in “social media communities” — although as I’ll explain, all communities are “social media communities”?

Now if I were presenting an Oscar I’d start by quoting the dictionary. “The Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘journalist’ as ‘someone engaged in journalism’.”

Very helpful.

However “journalism” in turn is glossed as “the occupation of writing for, editing, and producing newspapers and other periodicals, and television and radio shows”.

So the question as stated is meaningless. Of course journalists are better at “It” — journalism — because they’re the ones doing it. If you’re not a journalist you’re not doing journalism, therefore you’re not merely bad at it, you’re not even doing it at all!

This is why I think the whole bloggers versus journalists debate was and still is so incredibly stupid. Both sets of people are doing much the same thing — creating words and pictures, probably about current events, maybe for money, maybe for the love of it or for professional status. Maybe they’re doing it well, maybe they’re doing it badly.

But during the Industrial Age, journalism with a capital “J” ended up meaning, specifically, the employees of industrial mass-media factories — especially newspapers. Employees whose jobs were to create the specific widgets of news needed by a production line — a five-paragraph story, a 30-second radio news item or whatever.

Or, with respect to my friends at the MEAA, “journalist” meant membership of a certain trade union.

Now, coming back to that word “social” in “social media”…

Humans are social critters. We’re inquisitive. We’re hard-wired to look for ways of understanding the world, to find out what others are up to, and slot it all into a coherent narrative. Society provides mechanisms to meet that demand.

At one end of the spectrum there’s a folk craft called “gossip” — and as anthropologist Robin Dunbar has pointed out, gossip is central to keeping societies running smoothly.

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

Between them, folk practitioners and professionals and everyone in between manufacture enough news to fill our recommended daily intake. All choose from thousands of events those that support the narrative they want to construct — for whatever ultimate goal.

In the Industrial Age, only the big end of town was visible, with its cathedrals and newsagents. Everything else happened in small groups — socially! — and was ephemeral. We heard some juicy gossip, we laughed and smirked and, later, we exchanged knowing winks, but it wasn’t written down anywhere.

That’s changed. In the digital age, all that folk media — which I say again, has always been there — is now visible. Public. Permanent. Searchable. And pretty much everyone has, or soon will have, the tools for creating those permanent forms of media.

Eric S Raymond is one of the giants of open source software development. In 1997 he presented a paper called The Cathedral and the Bazaar which contrasted the traditional closed-shop process of developing software — the cathedral, where each release was packaged up with a big red ribbon before the public saw it — to the seemingly chaotic process of open source development, where everything happens in public, warts and all.

Until now, journalism — the making of news — has worked on that cathedral model. Journalists beaver away in their media factories and The Story is bestowed upon the grateful citizenry. You were told what the narrative was.

Now, though, the citizens are using new, cheap tools to figure out the narrative for themselves. In the eyes of an old-fashioned journalist it looks messy, “unprofessional”. The term “citizen journalist” grates. This is not journalism, they think — because it isn’t. It isn’t how they, as employees of media factories, do things.

An example to illustrate my point: the dust storm of 23 September. What was the journalists’ role in developing that narrative?

Well for a start, the dust storm actually started the day before in places like Broken Hill. But because industrial-scale news travels east to west in this country, it wasn’t officially a story until it hit the Sydney-based media factories.

On that morning, everyone woke up to an orange sky and started talking about it. Through their own conversations they soon worked out the extent of the storm, and through their own photos they created a shared cultural experience.

Like ants mapping out food trails, people did this by passing signals to each other — interesting photos and factoids and emotional responses — without central control. And because they knew the people they passed them to, these messages had plenty of personal resonance.

When the industrial media factories creaked into action, maybe only minutes or an hour later, what were they adding to that process? Were they just packaging that collective narrative for the folks who aren’t yet connected to the live global hive mind?

When everyone is connected, what does the capital-J journalist do that’s worth charging money for?

I really must think of a better way of doing this…

• The World As Seen From Chang’an Street | Strange Maps: A nice piece of work from The Economist, in the style of Saul Steinberg’s ironic as well as iconic The World As Seen From New York’s 9th Avenue.
• A battle rages for control of the internet in China | PM: ABC Radio’s current affairs program PM covered the Grass Mud Horse phenomenon on Thursday.
• Conroy’s Blacklist Responses | TinyPic: A satirical take on who Senator Stephen Conroy planned for his appearance on Q&A.
• “conroy fail” T-Shirt Design by disgruntled [2807035-3] – RedBubble: Available in 15 colours, and only AUS$30.
• Song of the Grass Mud Horse (Cao Ni Ma) | YouTube: One version of the song, with handy subtitles showing both the respectable words and the anti-censorship subtext.
• Blocking the Net | SBS Insight: Senator Stephen Conroy has a chance to make up for his stumbling performance on Q&A with a guest spot on SBS TV’s Insight this coming Tuesday 31 March at 7.30pm (plus repeats).
• Podcast of The Tangled Web: Beyond an Internet Filter | Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ: The audio recording of New Matilda‘s public forum on Internet censorship, with Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, Irene Graham of Libertus.net fame, and Nic Suzor from Electronic Frontiers Australia. The panel was chaired by the infamous QUT law lecturer, Peter Black.
• Right To Know Free Speech Conference | Alliance Online: The record of a liveblog of Tuesday’s “Right To Know” Free Speech Conference, run by the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance.
• 60-foot penis painted on roof | BBC News: An 18-year-old has secretly painted a 60ft drawing of a phallus on the roof of his parents’ £1million mansion in Berkshire. It was there for a year before his parents found out. They say he’ll have to scrub it off when he gets back from travelling.
• How do you get others onboard with using 37signals tools? | 37signals: I love 37signals’ tool Basecamp for managing communications on client projects. One perennial problem, though, is getting people to actually use it, rather than just replying to random emails.The comment stream for this blog post has some useful thoughts.
• DBCDE wouldn’t agree to blind filter trial: iiNet | iTnews Australia: iiNet’s chief regulatory officer, Steve Dalby, said the ISP had told the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) that if customers knew they were being filtered, they were more likely to attribute any problems to the filters. This would likely skew the results of the trials. Several customers calling into iiNet’s call centre already to complain the filters were slowing their connection speeds, even though the ISP isn’t part of the trials.
• David Weinberger: 4.5 lessons from Twitter| The Huffington Post: Amongst the flood of articles about Twitter, here’s one which offers some genuinely new observations, well expressed.
• The Tangled Web | newmatilda.com: On Tuesday night, newmatilda.com hosted the first in a series of public forums about internet regulation in Australia. If you’ve managed to miss the raging “clean feed” debate, here’s Rachel Maher’s overview to get the conversation started. Obviously nowhere near as good as mine.
• iiNet quits Conroy’s filter trial | ZDNet Australia: “It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the government simply describes as ‘unwanted material’ without an explanation of what that includes,” [iiNet CEO Michael] Malone said in a statement.
• Google submission hammers section 92A | New Zealand PC World Magazine: In its submission regarding the controversial new s92 of New Zealand’s copyright law, Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.
• Stilgherrian on Lateline | TwitPic: I look rather scary when appearing later than life on someone’s 42-inch TV.
• Mandatory internet filtering. It’s not a debate. | Wazzapedia: In summary: The pro-filter lobby are offering a solution to the “problem”. It’s not enough for the anti-censorship campaign to demolish their argument — if we don’t start offering an alternative workable solution as part of our strategy, we will ultimately fail.
• Govts website black list leaked on internet | Lateline: I appeared on last Thursday night’s ABC TV program Lateline as part of a report on the leaking of a secret blacklist of naughty websites.
• Blog, Podcast, Vodcast and Wiki Copyright Guide for Australia | CCI: I think the title explains it all. A handy reference for everyone, it’d seem!
• Social Collider: Whatever this visualisation is visualising about my Twitterstrean, it’s pretty. I’ll come back to this later.
• World War II: If Maps Could Fight | Strange Maps: A cartoon and cartographic interpretation of World War II by artist Angus McLeod.
• Metropolitan Skin | Out to Space: Some of ’Pong’s photos are in this this exhibition on the video displays at Sydney’s World Square (George Street) through to 25 March. Also featured are images by Robert McGrath and Vitek Skonieczny .

• Conroy responds to Ludlum. Finally. | Public Polity: A blog post quoting Senator Stephen Conroy’s eventual response to Greens Senator Scott Ludlam’s questions about Internet censorship plans. I haven’t had time to analyse it or link back to the original Hansard.
• Future of Journalism summit | Corporate Engagement: Trevor Cook’s live blog of the MEAA’s The Future of Journalism summit, held in Melbourne on Wednesday. Yes, there’s still some value in reading the commentary.
• History of US Govt Bailouts | ProPublica: A nice chart comparing the size of financial bailouts of commercial operations by the US government since 1970.
• Statistics Laundering: false and fantastic figures | Libertus.net: “This research paper contains information about various alarming and sensational, but out-of-date, false and/or misleading ‘statistics&’ concerning the prevalence of ‘child pornography’ material on Internet websites, etc., which appeared in Australian media reports and articles in 2008. While sometimes statistical exaggerations are not important, those referred to herein are being used to directly exaggerate the prevalence and hence risk level of certain threats, and to indirectly weaken the position of those attempting to critically assess the nature of the threats, and whether proposed public policy solutions are effective and proportionate.”
• Save the Net | GetUp! Campaign Actions: “The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Under the plan, the Government can add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist. Testing has already begun on systems that will slow our internet by up to 87%, make it more expensive, miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and accidentally block up to 1 in 12 legitimate sites. Our children deserve better protection – and that won’t be achieved by wasting millions on this deeply flawed system.”
• Are web filters just a waste of everyone’s time and money? | The Guardian: The interesting thing about this article isn’t so much its clear explanation of the pointlessness of trying to automate an Internet “bad things” filter but the fact that it was written in August 2007. Nothing has changed since.
• AFACT v iiNet: the case that could shut down the Internet | APC: A legal analysis of the law suit being brought by the movie industry body AFACT against ISP iiNet. This will be an important test of the “safe harbour” provisions of Australian copyright law.
• Labor's arbitrary internet filter plan misguided and deeply unpopular | Liberal Party of Australia: The Liberal Party’s media release, which includes the full text of Senator Nick Minchin’s statement about Internet censorship.
• Minchin slams Labor’s NBN backflip | ZDNet Australia: Opposition Senator Nick Minchin has ripped into the Australian government’s Internet censorship plans, calling them “misguided and deeply unpopular”. Without Liberal support, and without the support of The Greens, no new legislation can be passed. (The article’s headline related to the other story covered in this report, the question of whether the tendering process for the National Broadband Network is sufficiently transparent.)

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.