Club Troppo

Right now Ray Finkelstein and Matthew Ricketson, the two members of the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry, are trying to finish off their report to the government. It’s due by 28 February.

Writing these reports is frequently difficult, but Finkelstein and Ricketson have a particularly intriguing task. It’s more difficult because they clearly want to rein in a few of traditional media’s worst excesses – and they want to do it just at a time when that traditional media is shrinking in importance in the face of an Internet-driven explosion of information availability:

1. Finkelstein and Ricketson have to examine what the terms of reference call “the effectiveness of the current media codes of practice in Australia”. That’s tough enough on its own, because it’s hard to think of a more effective system which isn’t also more restrictive of freedom of speech. The head of Curtin University’s journalism department, Dr Joseph Fernandez, has made this point well – see the transcript of his evidence here. Fernandez perhaps understands these issues clearly because he spent 14 years editing newspapers in Malaysia, a country where editors face real experience of freedom-of-expression issues.
2. They must examine the codes of practice “in light of technological change that is leading to the migration of print media to digital and online platforms”. Their problem here is that technological change is leading to an explosion of content that undermines the case for even existing restrictions on publishers. This is a point that Ian Rogers and I have tried to make at length in WorkDay Media’s submission to the inquiry. Traditional media had a level of oligopoly power over information distribution. These days anyone can publish. There is no longer any such thing as “the media” – rather, there is a huge and messy range of information forms, sources and channels with different levels of reach, frequency, engagement, audience trust and motivation. This is great for citizens: the “marketplace of ideas” has never been closer to being fully realised. But it’s bad for traditional publishers – and for aspiring regulators.
3. They must assess “the impact of this technological change on the business model that has supported the investment by traditional media organisations in quality journalism and the production of news”.  For anyone who pulls the economics of media apart, the answer is pretty obvious: printed newspapers mostly won’t survive. They are losing advertisers and readers to a fundamentally more attractive and efficient Internet. The media analyst Roger Colman calculates that “all metropolitan newspapers in print editions will be unprofitable, definitely, by 2020″. But a surprising number of people don’t want to say this. And if Finkelstein and Ricketson do say it, they will instantly raise the question: “so why are we bothering about extra regulation of print media now?”.
4. They must figure out how investment in quality journalism ”can be supported, and diversity enhanced, in the changed media environment”. This is an interesting question. But as Ian Rogers and I have argued, the answer is less obvious than many people think. The media and those who analyse it are constantly in danger of over-estimating traditional print media journalism’s contribution to the world, and underestimating the benefits of the information availability explosion which the Internet is bringing us.
5. They must look at “ways of substantially strengthening the independence and effectiveness of the Australian Press Council, including in relation to online publications”. The ABC’s Jonathan Holmes has predicted that the inquiry will push from a stronger Press Council with more powers and a much broader remit. And that will bring us back to the inquiry’s fundamental problem: it seems to want a more activist government media body just at the time when technology is making traditional media of all sorts less dominant and undermining the case for media regulation.
6. They will feel pressure to come up with a solution that fits in with the interim report of the Convergence Review, which has decided the inconsistency of Australia media regulations should be addressed by a system of regulating equally all members of a vaguely-defined group called “content services enterprises”. These firms’ content would be subjected to a public-interest test. The firms covered would include television, radio, newspapers and online outlets – which means print and online journalism would face new restrictions. Finkelstein and Ricketson are at least awake to the freedom-of-expression minefield that such a law would sow. As Jonathan Holmes again points out,  the convergence review’s authors seem largely, weirdly, oblivious to the whole issue.

The Independent Media Inquiry could sensibly suggest that a voluntary body provide reputation indicators for online and offline media. That’s the solution recommended by Monash University’s Dr Johan Lidberg. (The Council could also make it easier for small online media organisations to join.)

But if the inquiry recommends the Press Council or a new media super-regulator starts regulating a much wider group of reporters and commenters, and government follows that recommendation, three things will happen. The council  will be quickly overwhelmed, it will be forced to make impossible judgments, and it will eventually become a joke.

[Update: An hour after first posting, I gave in to the impulse to properly honour Lewis Carroll by adding a sixth point, on the Convergence Review.]

When New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane asked whether Times reporters should challenge the ‘facts’ asserted by the newsmakers they write about a large majority of readers responded: "yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth." That’s pretty much how John Quiggin responded too. But it’s actually a more difficult question than it seems.

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With the Media Inquiry in full swing and the Greens’ Bob Brown complaining loudly about News’s lack of fairness and accuracy, now might be a good time to travel back in time 20 years. Let’s visit another era when a powerful paper was unashamedly boosting one side of politics – the left.

In 1992, Joan Kirner’s government was in its dying days: state government debt had ballooned, and many ministers seemed frequently to be denying reality. One newspaper, however, resisted the consensus that change was needed. The Age stuck by Kirner, took its initiatives seriously, derided the government’s critics and Opposition Leader Jeff Kennett in particular. Some of its best journalists, on beats like national politics and business, looked on in despair. But the state reporters and commentators would not be swayed. Balance consisted of criticising the Kirner government from the left as much as from the right.

The Age had many fine journalists in that era, but working on state issues there sometimes had an air of unreality. When Kennett won the 1992 election in a landslide, some of the paper’s reporters seemed not quite to believe it had happened. Only one of the paper’s Melbourne-based political journalists – the cheerfully professional Sue Neales – appeared to have cultivated contacts within the Coalition. ALP reformers like John Brumby thought the Cain/Kirner government had stuffed up; quite a few at The Age did not. On my third day working for the paper in Melbourne in 1993, I turned down a request from a news editor to write an opinion piece explaining that the new government’s budgetary tightening was unnecessary and dangerous. When Kennett’s initiatives succeeded – he ran one of the most successful privatisation processes ever – many at The Age seemed determined to ignore them. Steve Bracks and John Brumby knew better; on assuming government, they kept the best of the Kennett government reforms firmly in place.

Alan Kohler, appointed editor in 1992 to bring the paper back to a more centrist line, struggled against the power of the paper’s welded-on sympathy for the left. Kohler’s successor, Bruce Guthrie, an aggressive newsman, made Kennett the target of much of his aggression.

The point is not that The Australian’s frenzied campaigning against the current federal government is warranted. (I don’t think it is, and neither do many journalists at The Australian.) It’s not even that The Age’s approach in the early 1990s damaged democracy (the News-owned Herald-Sun was pro-Kennett, and frequently manically so, throughout this period). The point is simply that newspapers have campaigned against governments at regular intervals in Australian history, and campaigned at least as hard as The Australian is campaigning against the federal government now. If a newspaper or an owner has a duty to be even-handed, no-one noticed in the early 1990s. Certainly not Bob Brown.

[Cross-posted to Online Opinion]

I spend my working life running an online media firm – WorkDay Media, publisher of Banking Day – with its owner and editor-in-chief, Ian Rogers. Last month, Ian and I wrote a submission to the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry. You can see the whole thing at the WorkDay Media site.

We’re trying to focus the inquiry a little more on what we might gain from the Internet’s transformation of communication, and a little less on what we might lose as newspapers inevitably dwindle.

It’s fairly obvious that Australians are relying less and less on information from “the mainstream media” – that is, existing newspapers, TV and radio stations. Instead they are getting and exchanging information from a far richer variety of Internet-based sources, from email newsletters to expert blogs to government and company records – plus, of course, Club Troppo.

This seems like good news. So why are we holding a media inquiry focused on mainstream media, and particularly on the newspaper industry?

The obvious answer is that the future for Australian newspapers looks pretty ugly. Once newspapers were the gatekeepers; now they are not. They are losing advertisers and readers to a fundamentally more attractive and efficient Internet. The media analyst Roger Colman calculates that “all metropolitan newspapers in print editions will be unprofitable, definitely, by 2020″.

Many of those who fear for the future of “the mainstream media” in Australia – like academic David McKnight, or publisher Eric Beecher – are concerned about how we will reproduce the activities of big newspaper newsrooms as newspapers gradually go out of business. They believe this is a very important question.

But this focus on the media past signals a failure of imagination. Big newspaper newsrooms will not be recreated in online form. Facts, news, analysis are all going to have to come out in different ways than they have in the past.

And they will. They already are. You have to be enormously enthusiastic about the old media environment not to believe this: the new media environment, for all its faults, is far better than what it is replacing.

Media thinkers worry that online sources would never have uncovered a Watergate scandal. They’re probably wrong, in every way. Now more than ever, the truth will out. Richard Nixon’s corruption was mostly uncovered by official investigators; Woodward and Bernstein, great journalists that they were, were merely conduits. In the age of the Internet, Watergate might have evolved over weeks, not years. Just in the past year we have seen yet another new information innovation – Wikileaks – whose model suggests secrets will be harder than ever to keep in the decades ahead.

There will probably be times in the future when Australia will look back at some event, some scandal, some development in the society, and say that newspapers might have done a better job than the new information sources. But we suspect those cases will be few and far between.

New online players would already be even more numerous in traditional media areas such as politics, public policy and business if not for the presence of mainstream media, particularly newspapers, whose large online presences are hugely subsidised by their traditional businesses. This is certainly the biggest bar to the expansion of many online information ventures, including WorkDay Media.

Australia has entered an age when media can be created, transformed and transmitted far more easily than ever before. Australians who believe in the importance of an informed society should treat the 2010s as an era of huge optimism and opportunity. For there is every reason to believe that the Australian society of the next 20 years will be better informed than ever before.

Facing such a future, it makes little sense to try to impose a more restrictive regime on the dwindling existing “mainstream media”, or to subsidise its continued existence. We can improve the Press Council. We can have governments make more information available to citizens. But there is no need to choose this moment to impose either a new regulatory regime or a new protection scheme.

This is a moment to embrace the information future, not to embalm the media past.

I usually disagree with recently reborn RWDB blogger Professor Bunyip, and his potshots at this week’s principal witnesses in the Finkelstein Press Inquiry aren’t exceptional in that regard.  But I have to confess (not for the first time) to taking a certain guilty pleasure at the Bunyip’s elegant line in toxic splenetic bias. Yesterday’s attack on Martin Hirst was a reasonable example of the genre but today’s spray at Stephen Mayne, Robert Manne, Eric Beecher and law academic Adrienne Stone is a true classic of the genre:

So they are the main voices likely to dominate the witness box – an old Trot, a short wanker, a tall wanker, a rent-seeker and an academic who supports freedom of speech except she doesn’t.

Interestingly it seems cartoonist Peter Nicholson shares a not dissimilar view, although I can’t work out whether the Fourth Horseman is meant to be Hirst or Stone.  More likely the hourglass suggests it’s neither, but rather the spectre of print media  doomed by time and technology irrespective of the efforts of Manne, Mayne et al.  I’m not convinced he’s correct but it’s a great cartoon. I especially love the portrayal of Ray Finkelstein, who I briefed years ago in a commercial dispute and who at the time was a dead ringer for Woody Allen in both appearance and manner. Nicholson seems to think he’s acquired a rather more ecclesiastical gravitas in the meantime.

I assume that the serious point Professor Bunyip is trying to make (apart from gratuitously paying out on people he doesn’t like) is that regulation of print media is dangerous and not to be countenanced under any circumstances or to any extent.  This is a view not only held by those on the hard right.  The ABC’s Jonathan Holmes, for example, has a similar opinion.  Personally, I acknowledge the democratic dangers but I don’t think it’s beyond our wit or wisdom to devise an appropriate solution.
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Back in 2006 UK rumour-monger Guido Fawkes boasted that the news is no longer defined by big media. Laurie Oakes is afraid he’s right.

In his 2011 Andrew Olle Media Lecture, Oakes predicts that bloggers will soon be determining what is news. He says that political commentators like Fawkes "who happily runs stories without the kind of investigation and verification mainstream journalists are supposed to require", will break stories and scoop the mainstream media. Eventually the trend will spread to Australia and the result will be a race to the bottom.

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New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online.  An extract:

Moreover, yesterday’s behaviour by Murdoch’s Brisbane Courier-Mail of publishing edited extracts of a Liberal-National “dirt” file on Queensland Labor MPs rather suggests that it is high time for media behaviour to be placed under the microscope of public scrutiny.  The “Fourth Estate” has been defecating in its own nest for too long and is unlikely to receive much sympathy from the general community if government seeks to bring it to account. …

However, [Jonathan] Holmes implicitly assumes that formal government regulation and heavy-handed bureaucratic oversight are the only available alternatives to the current system of self-regulation of the print media by the Press Council, which Holmes himself (and just about everyone else) concedes is “slow and toothless”.   In fact there a range of possible options for achieving more effective oversight of media behaviour without undermining democratic freedoms.

PS I was tempted to use this image in the post at the official CDU site/blog but I resisted. I’m not quite ready for compulsory retirement.

Two diametrically opposed takes on the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ newly released 2009-10 Household Expenditure Survey:

Spending survey busts struggling families myth (ABC news item):

Claims that many Australians are doing it tough and households are being weighed down by the soaring cost of living no longer match up with the facts.

A comprehensive analysis of household spending by the Bureau of Statistics shows that in real terms we are richer than we were six years ago, and while we’re spending more on essentials like housing and transport, we are also spending more on recreation.

Incomes have risen 50 per cent and that suggests that although we may be paying more for goods and services, we are consuming more as well.

Snapshot of a nation under stress (The Australian):

ONE in four households relies on welfare benefits while one in seven is spending more than it earns, as increasing cost-of-living pressures bear down on families. …

Of the nation’s poorest households, one in 10 went without meals and 7.3 per cent could not afford to heat their homes in winter during 2009-10, according to a six-yearly snapshot of spending by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australians are having to spend more than half their income on the basics – housing, food and transport – as the soaring cost of living bites into spending on life’s luxuries. One in eight households could not pay their bills on time.

The ABS household expenditure survey reveals that households are under as much financial stress now as in the lead-up to the 1998 east Asian economic crash.

The “financial stress” afflicted some of the nation’s wealthiest people, with almost one in seven high-earning households failing to pay bills on time and 8.8 per cent seeking financial help from friends and family.

Try this quick quiz.  Which story gives a more accurate picture of the ABS survey? Hint – It isn’t Rupert’s “journal of record”.  How unusual.

"Enormous Penis Located on Google Maps". Last time I checked, Gawker’s illustrated story about the huge penises drawn on school lawns in New Zealand had racked up over 46,000 views. A more recently posted story tells of how "A man in Russia broke into a hair salon and the owner of the salon beat him up, tied him to a radiator and kept him as a sex slave for three days" (it turns out the story is 2 years old and probably apocryphal).

In an article for the Atlantic, James Fallows visits Gawker and discovers a media outfit dedicated to giving readers what they want (rather than what journalists think they should have):

The first thing you see on entering Gawker’s loft-size open work area is a huge screen that looks like a nicer, higher-def version of what you might see in a brokerage house. The top part of the screen shows live views of the home pages of the main Gawker properties—Gizmodo, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Gawker itself, and others (excluding Gawker’s sex-oriented site, Fleshbot, which accounts for about 5 percent of the company’s total traffic). Together, according to [publisher Nick] Denton, the sites bring in some 32 million unique visitors worldwide a month, about the same as The New York Times and twice as many as The Washington Post. Meters display the second-by-second traffic to each site. As users log on to a site, and leave, the needles on the meters go up and down to register its popularity. The bottom part of the screen lists specific stories from each of the Gawker Media sites and across the company as a whole, ranked by how many people are viewing them at each moment—and those numbers are listed. As you watch, the stories switch places on the screen, each with a green arrow if it’s trending up or a red arrow if it’s heading down.

And it’s not just editors and writers who can view the stats. Gawker publishes them at the top of each story for everyone to see. There’s even a public page showing how much traffic each writer attracts to the site. When Gawker publisher Nick Denton announced a new bonus system based on "US monthly uniques" rather than page views Gawker published his memo to staff on the public website .

No doubt this kind of thing terrifies journalists. In an interview with Fallows, Denton explains that advertisers aren’t going to pay good money so that journalists can write about worthy topics. "Nobody wants to eat the boring vegetables" he said, "Nor does anyone want to pay [via advertising] to encourage people to eat their vegetables." At Gawker everything from the headline down is designed to attract clicks, tweets and links.

So if "worthy" journalism doesn’t fit into an online business model that depends on advertising, is there a way to pay for it? Denton suggests local volunteers or philanthropy. That should reassure nervous journos.

"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" philosopher Richard Rorty once said. Earlier this week journalist Johann Hari discovered he’d made a mistake about what was true and what wasn’t.

Guy Beres at Larvatus Prodeo writes: "When I read an interview, I should have the right to assume that what it has been reported that the subject contemporaneously said is what they actually said". And with Johann Hari interviews that’s not always the case. As Hari explains:

When you interview a writer – especially but not only when English isn’t their first language – they will sometimes make a point that sounds clear when you hear it, but turns out to be incomprehensible or confusing on the page. In those instances, I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me, so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible.

Hari now admits this is wrong: "Why? Because an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee."

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