Category Archives: Media

Wonkworld vs the Mediaverse

Posted on by
19

Facts are no match for a compelling narrative, says Jonathan Green. Despite the efforts of left leaning bloggers, conservatives are winning arguments and elections because they have better stories.

Voters see themselves as struggling with an ever rising cost of living, the federal government mired in debt and the parliament paralysed by the lack of governing majority. According to Green, none of these things is true. But against a "conservative political machine happy to deal with well-calculated and skillfully deployed impressions", truth is no defence:

The blogosphere is filled with number crunchers, graph bloggers and fact checkers. The picture they provide is lucid, accurate, and challenging to many of the familiar political tropes.

But it is the tropes that leave the lasting public impression. The frustration for the left is the lingering impression that facts ought, in the best of all possible worlds, to get in the way of the story. Trouble is, the story is increasingly the story.

What works politically is in fact a compelling, ahem, narrative – whether it be manufactured from fact or fiction is not really to the point.

So here we are in chapter one of a gripping tale with heroic wonk bloggers battling against conservative spin merchants and the mainstream media they understand so well. Will our heroes be defeated? Will they embrace the tactics of their opponents and be lured over to the dark side? Or will they turn to the light side of the Force and use the power of narrative for good?

Continue reading →

Print media: It’s not management’s fault

Posted on by
1

Here’s a short note to everyone I know in the print media industry; Please, when you bemoan the state of media today, do not tell me that it’s “management” that has got the industry where it is.

I hear this all the time, particularly from Fairfax staffers and ex-staffers. If only Hywood or one of his predecessors had taken the opportunity to do X, everything would have been better. Hilmer should have bought Seek. David Kirk should have committed to quality journalism. Brian McCarthy should have fixed afr.com. News Limited people frequently have the opposite problem: when Fairfax cuts are in the news, they tend to suggest that News knows much more about digital product. But when News Limited cuts make it to the outside world, they too mutter darkly about the “wasted money” spent on digital media ventures like The Daily, which News closed this week.

The print media industry is in transition everywhere in the developed world. That transition results from changes in the economics of media. Journalists, who are paid to understand their society, should have noticed this by now. If you think print media’s problem is that it has somehow selected all the very worst managers in the world, and that this is why the industry is struggling, then please, ask yourself: how likely is that, really?

I like print a great deal – I’m currently editing a print magazine – and it has a future as an effective media form. But it’s a smaller future, and it’s less about the mass market than about  niches: the big rises in Australian magazine circulation last year came from Donna Hay, Frankie, Game Informer and Men’s Fitness. You could bring in the lovechild of Albert Einstein and Tina Brown to run a mass-market newspaper or a magazine and it wouldn’t make that much difference to falling circulation.

Printed-word media needs to experiment with new economic models – which is just what News did with The Daily. But most of those experiments will fail.

The economics of media has changed fundamentally in the past 20 years. Technology has made information ubiquitous and cheap and has left general newspaper and magazine advertising struggling to compete. The era of the Few Media has ended and the era of the Many Media has begun. No management genius can change any of that.

The danger in Pell’s dubious anti-media script

Posted on by
11

To my astonishment, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell spent part of a press conference today claiming that the news media are exaggerating the scandal of Catholic Church child abuse in Australia. There was “a persistent press campaign against the Catholic Church’s adequacies and inadequacies in this area”, he said.

In fact, the opposite is true. The media has underplayed the issue to a remarkable extent.

A major Australian institution appears* to have harbored hundreds of child abusers abusing thousands of children over a period of several decades around Australia. The same institution has apparently committed the same offences across the globe. According to one senior NSW police officer, this institution covers up for paedophile priests, hinders police investigations and destroys evidence to prevent prosecutions.

The obvious reaction would be that this institution needs an investigation to run through it like a dose of salts.

Yet too few people have rushed to say this about the Catholic Church in Australia. Quite the contrary. On 3AW last Friday two national political leaders – Bill Shorten and Joe Hockey – talked with Neil Mitchell about how people close to them had been affected by Catholic Church paedophilia. Then they both tied themselves in knots trying to avoid saying that the Catholic Church should be the subject of a major official inquiry. Continue reading →

Tim Dunlop’s forgotten people

Posted on by
8

Too many political commentators think about social media users as voters who don’t matter when they should be thinking about them as an audience that does

When Julia Gillard ripped into opposition leader Tony Abbott accusing him of sexism and misogyny, the YouTube video of the speech went viral. Viewers took to social media platforms like Twitter to say how excited they were about her performance.

But elation turned to despair as opinion columnists in major newspapers marked the PM’s speech a fail. According to blogger Tim Dunlop "the reaction of ordinary people on social media shows in a glaring, almost cruel way just how out of touch political reporters have allowed themselves to become."

Continue reading →

The newspaper crisis (and Finkelstein, again)

Posted on by
Reply

The graphic below comes from the University of Michigan’s Professor Mark Perry, who runs a libertarian and market-oriented blog called Carpe Diem.

Graph: US newspaper advertising revenue

It shows, essentially, the collapse of the advertising revenue stream in US newspapers. Adjusted for inflation, US newspapers will earn as much from advertising this year as they did in 1950. Note that advertising has historically made up more than half of US newspaper revenues and more than two-thirds of Australian newspaper revenues.

The Australian newspaper industry is not in the same state as the US industry yet, but you wouldn’t want to bet the eventual outcome will be all that diffferent.

I’ve noted this before, but the contraction of the newspaper industry is a huge problem for supporters of the Finkelstein Review’s recommendations for new Australian media regulation. In order to justify its claim that the marketplace of ideas was irrelevant to the Australian media landscape, Finkelstein argued that the press would be a dominant media form for many years to come. From page 101 of the Review:

“The Australian press is in no immediate danger of collapsing. The main media companies appear to be reasonably capable of dealing with the pressures facing them at least over the medium term.”

The Review is not yet a year old, but its intellectual underpinnings are crumbling. Let’s hope the government has noticed.