Major Contributions to the Online News Debate in Australia
There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks about the continuing struggle between NewsCorp chairman Rupert Murdoch’s defensive and protectionist approach to online news, and ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s ambitious ABC Open strategy to increase dissemination of its news content and incorporate user-generated content more strongly. Some of that discussion has been insightful, some, not unexpectedly, much less so.
I’m already on record as saying that I think that - outside niche markets - Murdoch’s paywall plans are doomed to fail, and fail miserably; most news users simply don’t care enough about NewsCorp’s specific flavour of news to prefer it so much that they’d be willing to pay money for it, if much the same material is also available for free elsewhere. (If this report from Forrester is right, Murdoch should certainly think twice about what he’s proposing to do.) I’ve also been less than convinced by those commentators who say that the ABC’s plans for a stronger embrace of user-generated content, and the gradual or not-so-gradual decline of commercial news organisations, are ‘bad for journalism’, for two reasons:
a) because in most commercial news publications, a majority of content is already sourced from a small handful of newswires - actual journalism has long ceased to take place where this is the case, and if we are concerned about the lack of diversity in our news, we should have been so well before the arrival of Web news as a new form of competition; and
b) because in all the widely publicised statements and speeches from Scott and others at the ABC, there’s nothing to suggest that as it engages more thoroughly with user-generated content, the ABC will simultaneously wind back the operations of its own newsroom - indeed, the ABC remains today in a very exclusive club of Australian news organisations which still have a strong network of professional journalists right across the country, and around the world.
(There’s also an undercurrent of grumblings about the future of investigative journalism - as if Australian commercial news organisations had a particularly proud history in that field or were somehow uniquely qualified for it. Let’s get real here: investigative journalism can be incredibly important, but the few genuine success stories in recent years - say, reporting on the Australian Wheat Board scandal by Caroline Overington, before the trainwreck - are vastly outnumbered by partisan smear campaigns and exposés or ACA-style dumpster-diving. In the current debate, at any rate, the ideal of ‘investigative journalism’ is invoked all too often by superannuated ex-journos who hark back to a better time that never was, and have forgotten the harsh realities of commercial journalism as it is.)
But anyway - my purpose here isn’t so much to add yet another voice to an already unwieldy debate, but to pull together and document some of the key statements to date. Make up your own minds. So:
- ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s much-publicised AN Smith Lecture at the University of Melbourne on 14 August 2009, “Media after Empire”, outlines his critique of the remaining mainstream media empires’ response to the shifting environment in general, and of Rupert Murdoch’s paywall plans in particular. (Sadly, the University of Melbourne seems closer in attitude to Rupert than to Mark, and doesn’t offer the video of Scott’s speech in an embeddable, shareable version, so here’s the link only… And here’s a transcript of the speech.)
- Rupert Murdoch’s interview with Sky News Australia’s David Speers on 6 November 2009, responding in part to the criticism by Mark Scott (while habitually throwing in a couple of ad hominems against Scott):
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Mark Scott again, this time at the Media 140 conference in Sydney on 5/6 Nov. 2009, outlining the ABC’s social media strategy and introducing the ABC Open initiative (Scott’s introduction starts at around 18.15 minutes into the video - skip forward, but be patient with UStream’s less than responsive video player); here are Scott’s slides, too.
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Finally, there’s also a radio interview with ABC News Director Kate Torney on Inside Story from around the same time, as Margaret Simons has pointed out. Worth checking out to get more sense of the specifics of how newsrooms are changing.
It’s also worth remembering that investigative journalism and participation (aka UGC) are not mutually exclusive.
Indeed, as the world that media organisations seek to investigate becomes more complex it is less likely that the people working for those media organisations will have *all* the skills needed to uncover and understand the facts in a story. I’m thinking about forensic accounting and data mining, but there are doubtless other areas. Don’t mistake that for suggesting that media organisation will not need to spend money on programs of work to investigate a story. What I am suggesting is that well-paid professionals who work for media organisations could play a role in organising people who aren’t in the employ of the media organisation, and verifying the work that they do.
This is only partially new - investigative programs and units have employed specialist analysts in the past - but the internet enables more connections, and perhaps network effects.
- Some people have speculated that huge amounts of documents tabled in a court case might be filtered by a well organised crowd, with potentially significant sections referred to professionals.
- Another application might be asking large numbers of people to record rainfall, or other observed phenomena, to be centrally collated, analysed and, if warranted, investigated.
At the moment this isn’t happening on any big scale that I know of, but there are opportunities for imaginative applications of investigative participation.
Disclosure: I work for the ABC, partially on ABC Open, but these are my views, not the ABC’s.
Thanks Fergus, and yes, absolutely - there seems to be a strange assumed automatism in some of the commentary I’ve seen about Mark Scott’s statements, by which more user participation unavoidably means less involvement by professional journalists. In reality, the two of them are complementary - unless the embrace of UGC is used as an excuse to shed staff at the same time, as has been the case in some underperforming commercial news organisations.
There’s nothing in Mark Scott’s statements that suggests that this will be the case at the ABC - indeed, the opposite appears to be true, since it seems that initiatives like ABC Open will create jobs rather than kill them off. Commentators in commercial news organisations who suspect the opposite tell us more about the climate in their own companies than they provide insights about what’s happening at the ABC, I think.
Well done on following the ABC’s new social media engagement guidelines with your disclosure statement, by the way.
Would love to hear more from you about ABC Open as it evolves…
Any idea on how traditional news organisations would go about filtering and moderating UGC?
Sure - Jason’s work on the ‘preditor’ is a good start in answering that question.
I remember this!!!