Category Archives: Journalism

Laurie Oakes is missing the point

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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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Media regulation – the mailed fist in velvet glove option

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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.

Post-modernism and the media

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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.

Gawker – The future of news?

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"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.

The truth and Johann Hari

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"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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Breaking news: Mr Denmore and I agree

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Mr Denmore is unhappy about my recent post ‘The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur‘ where I suggest that blogging isn’t about to replace professional journalism. Mr Denmore agrees but thinks I’m attacking a straw man:

… just who is saying that blogging is intended to replace professional investigative journalism? And who says it is ‘either/or’? Can’t we have both? One would have thought we had got past this tired "pro" versus "am" debate and got to discussing what makes good journalism irrespective of how the writer is employed.

My post was born out of frustration. While I was skimming through a piece at the The Drum I read this comment by Flubber: "the task of serious investigative political journalism is being undertaken by a dedicated cohort of political bloggers, such as Grogs Gamut, Larvatus Prodeo, The Political Sword, and others." The claim was ridiculous but nobody on the thread questioned it.

Back in 2006, Andrew Norton offered a more realistic view of what popular political blogs might aspire to:

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Bloggers or journalists: whose opinion writing is better?

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Are bloggers writing better commentary and opinion than journalists? According to Troppo commenter Alex White the best blog commentary is more valuable than the best commentary in the mainstream media. In a response to my post on the blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur, he writes:

Most mainstream commentary about politics … is tedious, biased echochamber nonsense from pundits with no other life experience than mooching around the Canberra Press Gallery.

Alex argues that the commentary and opinion appearing in newspapers like the Age and the Australian: "is not of any higher quality than the average tertiary educated blogger."

I don’t expect we’ll ever be able to settle this question to everyone’s satisfaction, but maybe we can make a start. Here’s what we’ll do:

  1. Go and find your favourite examples of opinion and commentary from an Australian newspaper or blog
  2. Post the title and a link in the comments thread. If you like you can also explain why you think it’s a good piece of work.

For this exercise, let’s not get into a discussion about what’s wrong with mainstream media or start criticising particular bloggers or journalists. Let’s concentrate on trying to find the best examples of good writing.

When we’ve got a decent number of examples I’ll create a new post and comments thread so we can compare notes.

The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur

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Remember when bloggers uncovered evidence that Reserve Bank of Australia subsidiary Securency was using money-laundering techniques to channel suspected bribe money to a company in the Seychelles? Me neither. Journalists at the Age and the ABC broke that story. Investigative journalism takes time, persistence and hard work so it’s no surprise almost all of it is done by professional journalists. Yet I’m constantly reading comments like this:

If you didn’t know already, the task of serious investigative political journalism is being undertaken by a dedicated cohort of political bloggers, such as Grogs Gamut, Larvatus Prodeo, The Political Sword, and others. They are not paid and do it for the love of it, hence they are also not subject to the whims of a proprietor. You’ll get more analysis of policies here than in a month of Sundays in the local rags or TV stations.

There’s some great stuff on Australian blogs, but it’s hardly a replacement for the work of professional journalists. Writing in your pajamas after work might keep you out of reach of the truth-throttling tentacles of teh evil Rupert Murdoch, but it doesn’t leave much time to phone your sources, search public records or crunch numbers.

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