When Too Much Analysis Is Barely Enough
Amongst the standard-issue ammunition in the journalism industry’s defensive skirmishes against those pesky citizen journalists and news bloggers is the deceptively simple claim that there’s a clear difference between reporting the news, i.e. breaking stories (which is what professional journalists do) and commenting on the news, i.e. “endless talk” (which is what everyone else does).
It’s a line repeated in the latest missive from Christian Kerr in The Australian - a rabid, self-serving rant against all those online commentators from Possum’s Pollytics to Larvatus Prodeo whom he doesn’t like, curiously claiming in its title that “our blogs [are] too analytical”, as if intelligent analysis is somehow a bad thing. Still, if nothing else, it’s got one thing going for it: if ‘real’ journalists are the ones that break stories, then Kerr himself isn’t a journalist.
One problem with that neat definition, though, is that breaking stories isn’t a particularly common trait of mainstream newsroom practice these days: much of the content of our daily newspapers and broadcast bulletins comes from a diminishing number of global wire services, and is simply processed by journalists to fit the local context. Similar to citizen journalists’ common practice of gatewatching - following the news passing through the gates of mainstream news publications, and then commenting on it - this is a kind of industrial gatewatching, where agency feeds are constantly monitored for new items to be inserted into the locally-produced publication. So, news bloggers and citizen journalists don’t tend to break stories - but neither, for the most part, do professional journalists.
In that context, Rupert Murdoch’s latest hobby-horse is even more puzzling. He’s publicly floated the idea that one solution to the current newspaper crisis, which has seen even renowned newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times hit the wall, is to go back to hiding online news content behind a paywall. It’s an idea which cannot possibly work for news stories: not least because so many stories originate from news agencies and are republished by online news sites the world over, it’s become impossible to rein in such news content - if readers can no longer freely access a story from the site of The Australian or The New York Times, they’ll be able to find pretty much the same content somewhere else on the Web. For better or worse, news stories are now no different from music or TV series: if you can’t find them in one place, you’ll be able to access them in another, for free.
In this environment, what does set one newspaper, one news site, apart from the other is precisely the quality of the content which Kerr so seems to despise (perhaps because he’s so bad at it himself) - informed, intelligent, topical commentary and analysis. The recent launch of News Ltd.’s The Punch and Fairfax’s response through the yet-to-be-(re)launched National Times are no accidents, and neither is Crikey ’s continued extension of its stable of bloggers and commenters - here’s a way to distinguish yourself from your competitors, and perhaps even to publish some unique content that readers might even be prepared to pay for.
As an aside: as I heard at the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation conference in Hamburg the other week, one of the major success stories in newspaper publishing in Germany over the past years has been the strong performance of Die Zeit , a voluminous weekly newspaper packed chock-full of news analysis and commentary. Not only has the Zeit been able to survive these troubled financial times unscathed: it’s been positively flourishing, despite its hefty sales price of €3.60 (around A$6.25). A weekly dead-tree newspaper, which doesn’t break stories, doing well intellectually as well as commercially - imagine that.
Mind you - the quality of commentary in Die Zeit is light-years ahead of what passes for analysis in The Australian and most other domestic newspapers; its stable of regular commentators includes such luminaries as former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt (who is also a co-publisher of the paper), for example. Last week’s print issue had a cover story on Jürgen Habermas (to celebrate the philosopher’s birthday), for crying out loud. Janet Albrechtsen and her ilk aren’t even on the same planet.
Cases such as this fatally undermine Kerr’s argument: there’s no such thing as being “too analytical”. If readers are increasingly bypassing the self-declared “Heart of the Nation”, then perhaps The Australian would do well to seek blame at home rather than find fault with Australian blogs which “obsess about the mainstream media and their reporting”. From that perspective, the success or otherwise of The Punch, The National Times, and similar experiments in establishing commentary sites backed by mainstream news organisations will be interesting to observe.
Meanwhile, memo to Christian Kerr: infantile name-calling does’t qualify as informed analysis.
Elsewhere: Possums Pollytics , Larvatus Prodeo .
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