DBCDE Case Study on Youdecide2007, and Further Thoughts
Long-term followers of Gatewatching.org may remember that we started the blog in part as a vehicle for discussing our Youdecide2007 citizen journalism project for the 2007 Australian federal election. I’m happy to report that this project has now been featured as a case study in the Australian federal Department for Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy’s newly-released report “Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions“. For the Youdecide2007 case study, which is described a little misleadingly as an interview with project leader Terry Flew on the DBCDE Website, I drafted a concluding section with a few ideas on likely future developments in professional and citizen journalism, but because of the overall word limit we could only use a few bits from it - so I thought I’d republish the whole piece here:
The Future of Journalism and Citizen Journalism
The journalism industry is currently facing a number of substantial challenges, further exacerbated by the global financial crisis which is severely affecting the commercial media organisations operating newspapers and broadcasters. Newspaper readership, especially among younger age groups, is continuing to decline in most developed nations, and income from advertising is diminishing. Meanwhile, an increasing number of users are getting their news from a variety of online sources - but here, brand loyalty is often substantially less developed than it was for print and broadcast news. Further, new news aggregators - for example, Google News - track and collate reports from news sources around the world, leading to a more random access model for news. This may be beneficial for smaller news operators (whose news reports are now placed alongside reports on the same topic from major newspapers), but further reduces the special position of leading news brands such as The New York Times or The Australian.
Recent reports suggest that a number of major news organisations - especially in the US - are now facing bankruptcy or severe cutbacks; already, the publishers of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times have both filed for bankruptcy in recent months, for example. Against this background, Rupert Murdoch has publicly attacked Google News and entertained the possibility of making his newspapers’ contents available online on a for-pay model only.
However, such models are unlikely to be effective for mainstream news sites, and may even accelerate the demise of incumbent news organisations. For-pay models are effective only in an environment where the information sought cannot be accessed by other means; news organisations which have been able to operate such schemes are those focussing on specialist (e.g. financial) news, such as the Australian Financial Review, or those seen as covering the news from specific perspectives or in exceptional depth - both The New York Times and Crikey have been able to operate for-pay models, therefore, though the former abandoned this model in 2007 and the latter has added an increasing amount of freely accessible materials to its site and has been rumoured to be considering a switch to a fully open access model. In the Australian and international context, at any rate, it now appears inconceivable that a substantial number of users would opt to pay to access content on the Websites of The Courier-Mail, The Australian, or comparable international newspapers while comprehensive news coverage remains available for free through other online newspaper sites or the news Websites of major public broadcasters such as the ABC and BBC.
If no easy commercial solutions are available to support the ailing commercial news organisations and prevent the collapse of a number of major newspapers, then this places an increased emphasis on indirectly or directly government-supported news operations, and especially on the public broadcasters (and their online operations). As staff numbers in commercial news operations are reduced, and as local and regional papers are closed or amalgamated, public broadcasting organisations become ever more central as providers of news, especially in those areas poorly served by mainstream commercial news. In Australia, this is especially true also for more resource-intensive forms of journalism, such as investigative journalism - not only since the closure of The Bulletin in January 2008, this crucial form of journalism now has few homes in Australia outside the public broadcasters.
As the role of public broadcasters becomes ever more central as a result of such tendencies, it must also be noted that their online operations are of particular importance now: with the - possibly permanent - decline of newspapers, online becomes the other key medium for news access, next to the broadcast media. In our submission to the Government’s review of ABC and SBS in late 2008, we have therefore argued in favour of a reconceptualisation of these organisations as public media organisations rather than simply as ‘public broadcasters’. Online must be considered to be of equal importance to broadcast in these organisations, and the two must be tightly integrated.
Online news sites operated by trusted public media organisations such as the ABC and SBS, and under the governance of clear and progressive guidelines for public media and their role in modern society, also provide the best opportunity for citizen involvement in news, opinion, and public affairs. Youdecide2007 provides a clear example for how citizen voices from areas outside of the immediate media focus may be highlighted and harnessed to generate public discussion; similar opportunities exist in many other areas as well. While some citizen journalism sites draw energy from positioning themselves as immediately opposed to the ’spin’ they perceive in commercial news organisations, citizen journalists have the potential to work hand-in-hand with professional journalists and thereby increase the depth and breadth of news coverage and public debate. Clearly, this requires good will on both sides, and Australia’s generally respected public media organisations are therefore best able to position themselves as a neutral common ground and to combine the best of citizen journalism with the best of professional media work. Such approaches need not be central to these organisations’ operation immediately, but - like Youdecide2007 in cooperation with SBS, or like the ABC’s Pool.org.au project for user-generated content - can be explored through one-off projects which may then be able to be incorporated into ongoing processes.
While far from positive, the current financial crisis, and the severe disruptions to the established media industries which it is likely to cause, can also be seen as a source of opportunities in this context - it brings about a period of ‘creative destruction’ which shakes up old models and provides the space and impetus to explore new ideas and initiatives. Notably, one of the new organisations to emerge from the 1999/2000 dot.com crisis was Google, now a leading media organisation in its own right - and there is every chance that some of the media companies being founded on the rubble of the current crisis will similarly become leading institutions in a few years’ time. Targetted exploration of innovative new models by Australia’s public media organisations today, and Government support for new media start-ups, may pay substantial dividends at that point.
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