The Knight Foundation, for example, has provided funding for journalism schools as part of its Innovation Incubator Project (this 2011 paper examines some of the opportunities and challenges involved for educators and students, and you can see some of the projects supported by the Foundation here).

The post below wraps two Australian perspectives on such developments:

• Journalist Lesley Parker suggests that business incubators, whether funded by government or philanthropy, could help the emerging digital media sector. Her piece was written in the wake of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation’s recent Meet Up in Sydney.

•  But Australian governments have “comprehensively ignored” suggestions for how they might encourage innovation in public interest journalism, according to Associate Professor Margaret Simons, Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne and a founding member of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation.

****

The incubator model: could this help emerging digital media?

Lesley Parker writes:

It’s a dirty subject but someone has to talk about it: money – how Emerging Media can make it, and refugee journalists from Big Media can earn it, so the future of digital journalism is a sustainable one.

Journalists coming out of Big Media are used to the (ostensibly) clear separation of editorial and commercial functions. As ‘proprietors’ of start-up digital media (e-newspapers and magazines, websites and blogs), that will have to change as they become both editor and CEO.

The question is – for big and small media – where will the ‘seed capital’ and ongoing working capital come from: paywalls/subscriptions or advertising, philanthropists, crowdsourcing or the ‘sweat equity’ of people willing to work for free until an enterprise is on its feet and able to pay?

A mixture of funding sources will be needed, and public interest journalism may have to be subsidised by other, more commercial projects on the side (George Clooney played Batman so he could produce films such as Good Night, and Good Luck, addressing the theme of media responsibility; award-winning photo-artist Belinda Mason works in commercial and fashion photography to be able to produce her work focusing on Aboriginal communities.)

Then there’s government support. Journalists may be initially wary, but many IT start-ups (and artists) use government grants and loans to get projects on their feet. They access government-sponsored training and support programs to acquire business skills in areas such as project management, legal, sales and marketing and finance.

Specifically, is there a place for a government- (or philanthropist-) sponsored ‘business incubator’ or ‘accelerator’ program for emerging digital media?

Incubators were/are used as a way of supporting the growth of small business and in particular the IT industry in Australia; is there an argument that there’s a public interest in supporting the development of New Media?

Such an incubator could provide journalists with access to expertise and advice in such areas as fundraising and marketing. It could also be a place where they come together to collaborate – sharing their ideas, specific experiences and useful contacts.

In IT, an incubator is often a physical space where several start-ups work alongside each other, sharing core business services and spreading business costs. An Emerging Media incubator may or may not require a physical space but people should still convene regularly for discussion groups and information sharing and to access advice and training.

Such incubator funding tends to be available at a state level. Emerging media could try applying for existing grants and services (for instance, through NSW Trade & Investment) but the question is whether their proposals would fit into the available categories, which tend to be IT focused.

The Public Interest Journalism Foundation itself could provide informal incubator services of a sort, bringing people together to ‘workshop’ specific topics such as fundraising and convening with people such as Terry Cutler (a director of The Conversation, chairman of the advisory board for the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and author of a landmark 2008 report on innovation policy).

***

Support for emerging media entrepreneurs is lacking

Margaret Simons writes:

Several people who made submissions to the Convergence Review and the Finkelstein inquiries argued for government action to encourage and assist the emerging news media sector.

In my own submission to Finkelstein, I supported calls by others for not-for-profit public-interest journalism initiatives to be granted tax-deductible status for donations and gifts.

In the USA, philanthropically funded sites such as ProPublica have helped to keep investigative journalism alive, as newspapers have closed and newsrooms shrunk. Such action here might help philanthropically funded entrepreneurs, such as the alternative site New Matilda, which has crowd-sourced funding from its audience.

I also suggested that measures explored by governments in other fields be adapted and applied to encourage diversity in journalism and media.

For example, the Cutler Report on the National Innovation System included recommendations for a Knowledge Connections program to work with industry, academic institutions and innovators to ‘inculcate a culture of innovation … from the bottom up’. (Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education. 2008. Venturous Australia: Report on the Review of the National Innovation System.)

A similar approach was foreshadowed in Victoria. The Brumby government identified digital media content, including journalistic media content, as a potential area of industry strength for the state, and instituted a range of measures to encourage its growth.

These included direct grants to new-media start-ups, and also anticipated the establishment of government funded ‘clusters of excellence’, involving universities, other research bodies and industry innovators. (Declaration: Under this policy, the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, of which I am the founding Chair, was successful in receiving two grants from the Victorian Government, the first to establish YouCommNews, and the second to support the New News 2010 conference, held in partnership with the Melbourne Writers Festival.)

Other measures for government action anticipated by the policy included helping start-up enterprises to access finance in the early stages of development, and brokering collaborations with international organisations, big companies and research and education sectors. (Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development, 2010, Victorian ICT Action Plan – an ICT Plan for Victoria’s Future.)

The policy did not survive a change of government in 2010.

I suggested to Finkelstein that the federal government explore similar measures for new-media entrepreneurs. Such action would not only be worthwhile in its own right, but would also compliment the development of the National Broadband Network.

Sadly, amid the many overlooked opportunities in the Convergence Review process, the suggestions for support for emerging media made by myself and others were comprehensively ignored.

Which leaves us with our often struggling, courageous entrepreneurs, and the emerging sector that is barely a sector.

****

It seems appropriate to end this post with a quote from the Knight Foundation’s mission statement:

He contrasted some of his writing, while working at The Age and The Sunday Age, with harrowing accounts from his father, Branko Birnbauer, of life under successive regimes in the Balkans in the 1940s and 50s.

The Birnbauer family were from the Baranya region, which at different times was part of Hungary and Yugoslavia (now Croatia).

Bill, who was three years old, when he moved to Australia in 1958 with his parents, Mariola and Branko, read from 28 letters that his father wrote to him, after many years of not speaking much about the traumas of his youth.

The letters “were written about a time when certain words meant certain death,” Bill said.

His father, who worked as a printer and linotype operator, described Australia as “paradise”, compared to the “hell” and “purgatory” he had endured in war-torn Europe under the Nazis and then the Tito regime.

Bill ended his talk with a quote from his father urging him not to take “the condition we are enjoying for granted”, and to “try to contribute to further improvement of your homeland”.

You can watch the full talk here.

It also includes reflections and commentary from some of those who attended. Their comments are run at considerable length so readers can see both the diversity and overlap of themes.

The Public Interest Journalism Foundation would also like to acknowledge the Old Fitzroy Hotel for allowing us free use of a function room.

Summary of presentations

Adele Horin
Formerly a social affairs writer and columnist at the SMH, now blogging at Coming of Age

Adele described her relatively recent transformation from “the classic example of the much pilloried old media journalist” to someone who is enjoying blogging “enormously”.

While at the Herald, she wanted only to write, and not get involved in the other elements of producing and promoting a newspaper.

But when she left the paper last September, together with about 80 colleagues, she realised that to continue writing, “I had to get online”.

She explored the blogosphere, discovered The Failed Estate and rang Jim Parker for advice.

“This is where my ignorance came in handy because if I’d known he was such a celebrity on Twitter I would have been too frightened to ring him,” she said. “I asked, ‘can a technophobe run a blog?’. He said, ‘sure’.

“But the best thing he did was put me in touch with his wife.”

Weekly training sessions with Lesley Parker were critical to her transformation. “I was a dinosaur three or four months ago and I’ve had to come a long way.”

Adele acknowledges that she is in the fortunate position, thanks to a redundancy package, of not having to make an income from her blog. “If I had to make money I wouldn’t be blogging to do it,” she said.

Many colleagues who took redundancy packages had to keep making a living, and left journalism to work for ministers, universities and interest groups, which she described as “a tragic loss” of journalistic expertise.

Adele did not feel confident to predict where the future of journalism lies, but worries that it may rely too much upon students, retirees and people who can be supported by their partners. The kind of investigative journalism done by colleagues like Kate McClymont needs big money and lawyers behind it, she added.

Adele has some reservations about commercialising her blog, and does not want to let commercial considerations or Internet analytics influence her choice of topics.

Feedback from the audience and panel suggested others are more confident than Adele about the financial future of her blog.

***

Anne Summers
Journalist and author who has recently launched an online magazine, Anne Summers Reports

Anne stressed that her new digital publication, which launched last November, is a magazine – not a blog or a website.

She described starting the magazine “pretty much on a whim” after being unable to get a proper run in the mainstream media for a profile that she had done of David Gonski.

“Kids all round Australia were wearing badges saying, ‘I give a Gonski’,” she said.

“It seemed to me that if you didn’t read the business pages you had no idea who Gonski was. And even if you did read the business pages, you had no idea about how this merchant banker from Vaucluse came up with this report, which recommended the most radical overhaul of Australian education in 40 years. So I thought I would publish it myself.”

Anne’s aim is to provide strong reporting, “gorgeous, original art work” and stories that range from the serious to lighter material “to reflect the people we are”.

“We are a reporting, not an opining magazine,” she said. “We’re not campaigning, not like The Australian.

“I’m trying to report on things that I think are incredibly important, interesting and relevant to the country that you don’t find elsewhere in the media.

“It is quite astonishing how much stuff is happening out there that doesn’t get reported; because the mainstream media has been obsessed with the leadership story in Canberra, that’s all we ever read about.

“And so the government gets away with murder and the opposition gets away with murder, and there’s all sorts of interesting things happening in the bureaucracy that we never hear about.”

Anne is working with an art director, a copy editor, an editorial assistant and a digital producer who have been willing to invest “sweat equity”.

“I was incredibly lucky that everybody was willing to work for nothing for the first issue to demonstrate that you can come together to produce something new and exciting that we were proud of,” she said.  “I know this isn’t a sustainable model and I felt particularly bad about the fact I wasn’t paying people for their work.

“As a journalist I won’t write for nothing and why should anybody else? But we saw this as a new venture and were investing sweat equity in it.”

While the magazine still has some production issues to resolve, Anne’s major challenge is to develop a funding model. She needs to raise $300,000 per annum to produce ten editions and to pay all contributors.

The options, she says, include donations, crowdsourcing funds (though she is unsure about whether to use this for the magazine as a whole or individual stories), and niche custom advertising.

With the third issue nearing launch, we are about to hear plenty more about this magazine.

***

Jim Parker
Blogs as Mr Denmore at The Failed Estate

Jim spoke passionately about the role of journalists and engaged citizens in asking the tough questions that are vital for healthy democracy.

To survive, he said journalists should focus on providing value – by working with integrity, developing communities that trust them as sources, and being fearless.

“They’re supposed to be asking questions, getting up peoples’ noses and being a bloody troublemaker,” he said.

“But we’re all worrying about whether we can make money out of writing for a lifestyle supplement. Well, to hell with it; get out there and ask questions.”

Jim said many journalists were not asking the questions that needed asking, and were also failing to give their audiences the information they needed to understand and evaluate policy.

He said: “News Ltd which controls 70 percent of print media is now a partisan organisation, actively campaigning for a change of government.”

He also suggested that journalists needed to move beyond notions of false objectivity.

“If you’re on Twitter, it’s not Switzerland,” he said. “Journalists have got to get over this idea that they’re somehow the voice of God who is above everything.”

The future of journalism lay with the public following individual journalists who they trusted, rather than media organisations perhaps via micropayments.

***

Lesley Parker
Freelancing since the mid 1990s, and does some digital training for the Walkley Foundation

Lesley said many journalists, whether freelancers or working in the mainstream, had struggled to develop digital skills.

She suggested that freelancers needed to get together to share ideas about upskilling and developing business models, and noted that the Walkley Foundation is open to hearing suggestions for training programs.

Bloggers also needed help in developing skills and negotiating ethical issues, she said.

Lesley’s vision for the future is that projects like the Anne Summers Reports will work because they will be trusted. “People are really thirsty for information they can trust,” she said.

While optimistic about the long-term future for journalism, she expected the next five years would be a very difficult transitional phase.

“My gut feeling is that … in five years time we will start to see models that are working,” she said. “We will start to see people advertising on Adele’s blog and that Anne has crowd sourced funding for her magazine.”

 *****

Feedback and commentary from participants

Robert Milliken, Sydney-based journalist and author

As traditional newspaper and other old media outlets shrink in their size, scope and role, the meeting provided a valuable forum for the essential ingredient of journalism: a meeting place of ideas.

In newspapers’ heydays, journalists fraternised in newsrooms, restaurants and bars to swap ideas for stories and to discuss editorial strategies. With newspapers shedding journalists, much of that has gone.

The scene is now dispersed, journalists are feeling isolated and no one is sure where it is all heading.

Yet the meeting showed journalists are no less passionate about the need for strong reporting and investigation, even if working out how to reach our audiences remains in a state of flux.

I couldn’t help reflecting that a meeting like this would never have happened just a few years ago, in an era when journalists were buoyed by rich and powerful news organisations.

So in some ways, bringing people together from different backgrounds, now united by the search for new ways to keep journalism strong, opens up exciting possibilities.

Perhaps we could take it one step further and nominate a pub like the Old Fitzroy or a place in the city where journalists, bloggers and other public interest journalism supporters could meet once a month to keep the discussion alive.

I have written for Anne Summers Reports, Anne’s new online magazine devoted to reporting, a job many traditional newspapers have dropped. I think it’s a great initiative, and one important answer to many questions raised at the meeting.

***

Amanda Wilson, former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald

Journalism is evolving. It is no longer a monologue by professional sceptics, dirt-diggers and storytellers working for mainstream media. Nor is it a conversation between these outlets and their audiences and readers. Today’s journalism is a collaboration.

As the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists showed recently with its global, multi-layered investigation into tax haven fraud, these collaborations can be between professionals around the world working on various parts to create a spectacular whole.

As Twitter shows on a daily, hourly basis, news and information now moves between users, enhanced by some, degraded by others – but the story does build in real time, pointing everyone from working journalists and bloggers to the interested public to direct sources of information. This, too, is collaboration.

And this week we have seen the launch of The Citizen by Melbourne University’s Centre for Advancing Journalism. It’s a collaboration between seasoned reporters and editors, and students and what they are calling “citizen participants”. It’s a terrific idea.

It’s a roller-coaster time for those who believe we need public interest journalism more than ever. Decisions about what’s interesting or newsworthy are not just taken by a couple of editors sitting in a newsroom.  New platforms for publishing information are emerging every week.  Yet can we trust the quality of the information?

With the tectonic shifts in the way people consume information, respond to information and act as citizen journalists or publishers, those who are or have been paid professionals must open their eyes to the possibilities of collaborating beyond their old networks to seek, distil and publish quality information.

Most journalists would still like to think they can make a living in a craft that, at its best, delivers a reliable, trustworthy narrative about the times we live in.  Yet, making a living from it these days will require entrepreneurial thinking.

Last week’s Sydney Meet Up devoted too much time to melancholic raking over the coals of mainstream media job losses. This is not a new crisis. Anyone who has been following the difficulties of news organisations in the US and UK will have known redundancies on this scale were only a matter of time in Australia.  And clearly there will be more as the two planks of news funding (advertising and circulation) continue to fail, and available revenue from online advertising is hoovered up by Google.

Quality journalism is still being done in these newsrooms, but for how much longer?

My concern is for what happens when media falls further short of its public interest duty through constant newsroom budget cuts. Can we rely on hard-pressed news editors in 24/7 newsrooms to keep pushing for the hard-won hard news, the time-consuming investigations, the dissection of policy? Can we rely on them to resist pressure to keep those clicks coming with pervy expose videos, tales of murder and mayhem, celebrity wardrobe malfunctions, and risqué first-person features?

Much serious thinking is being done around the world to find new ways to monetise journalism. Yet journalists themselves have always liked to leave the business of making money to others. Now is the time for journalists to think and act more like entrepreneurs, to look at all the ideas and models being developed by newcomers, to find new ways to collaborate.

We are deluged by information, but many players are working to sift and filter that torrent to serve the public interest; to use that information responsibly and ethically. Many journalists used to be scathing of efforts by those outside the inner circle of their profession to produce quality information. The smart ones now are looking beyond professional snobbery for some of the answers to what ails them. Initiatives such as The Citizen will hopefully be the first of many.

I’m looking forward to participating in further PIJ discussions, and hope to hear more from some of the innovators. These are very important discussions.

***
Kathy Bail
Former editor, now chief executive of UNSW Press

Great to catch up with a few colleagues at the PIJF event in Sydney.

I applaud the efforts of Anne Summers, Adele Horin, Jim and Lesley Parker – and several others there – to connect directly with their readers through various digital formats.

They are beginning to build communities with a genuine interest in their journalistic work.
At New South Publishing we’re on the lookout for distinctive writers who have this kind of targeted readership.

A book, which is released in various digital and print formats these days, can complement and extend journalistic endeavours.

***

Lesley Parker

It was clear from the large group that gathered at the Sydney MeetUp that the pain of the recent round of redundancies at Fairfax is still very fresh, with many journalists present asking how can they continue to be journalists and pay the bills.

That was the challenge thrown out to the panel – to say how blogs and e-magazines and twitter might one day be a sustainable form of journalism (and without veering into populism in the hunt for ‘hits’).

Is that a mundane question – how to pay the bills – when you’re considering the future of public interest journalism? In some ways it’s a key question. We can’t have great journalism if great journalists are pulled away from the profession by the need to earn an income somehow.

Jim, Adele and Anne have ‘live’ projects but each concedes that they (to differing degrees) have the luxury of being able to do this because they are sustained by income from elsewhere (a full-time job, a redundancy payout) or by people willing to work for free, for a short while a least (‘sweat equity’), to give a worthwhile idea a chance to get on its feet, hopefully to one day become a paying concern.

So the questions facing us are not just what journalism do we want to see and how will it be delivered, but also how can we make this financially viable? We won’t get the chance to answer the first two questions if we don’t also address the third.

One of PIJ’s roles will be to act as a meeting place (real or virtual) or ‘hub’ to discuss specific ideas and experiences around fundraising, advertising, marketing and promotion. The discussion was wide-ranging; perhaps sub-groups could come together to share specific information.

Should there be some sort of government-funded ‘business incubator’ service for emerging media … providing assistance with marketing, funding and commercialisation, with finding partners/investors/angels/mentors/advisers, and providing access to business/management/legal training … ?

It’s an exciting time, at the ‘macro’ level, because of the potential for a greater diversity of voices to emerge via new channels. But change is difficult and this transition period will be challenging for many people.

***

Suzanne Ingram
PhD Candidate with the Centre for Public Awareness of Science, whose interest is the return of Aboriginal people’s evidence-based health research to those who need it

I was quite heartened by the discussion at the Sydney PIJ forum. It was clear from the panellists – Adele Horin, Anne Summers, Jim Parker and Lesley Parker – that content and accuracy are still important.

The change that is happening across media production thanks to the Internet is one that we are all coming to terms with. Jim made the point about ‘trust’, a commodity that takes time and its own set of values.

I work in health research where people are big on data gathering, yet very slow on disseminating. Large publishing companies hold the market on evidence-based papers.

In these days when everyone can be a journalist but few are, it will be the space to watch, where evidence – not jingoism – can be respectfully regarded and public awareness grows.

**

Kellie Bisset
A former journalist who now works as a communications professional

The latest PIJF meet-up in Sydney was an inspiring turn-out. I felt energised by the fact that such a varied and interesting group was propelled by its collective concern for the Fourth Estate to get together in a Sydney pub and look to the future.

Journalists, bloggers, academics, communications professionals and others chewed over the future of journalism – a subject some might say is well masticated already. But among the inevitable doomsday scenarios there was some cautious optimism and the very sensible proposition that evolution and innovation will be critical to journalism’s survival.

The stellar panel line-up of Anne Summers, Adele Horin, Jim Parker and Lesley Parker offered some worthy insights.

It was acknowledged that the next five years would probably be the hardest. But we were reminded that the journalistic skills of building communities and building trust would be as important as ever in the new media landscape, whatever that might look like.

You could actually taste the shifting balance of power away from old media power structures, and the desire from traditionally under-served groups to get out there and tell their own stories in their own words. There was definitely a sense from some parts of the audience that journalism has contributed to its own decline.

Unsurprisingly, no magic bullet was uncovered and the inevitable question of ‘who pays’ for quality journalism hung over us all evening.

But maybe that’s the point. Looking to one model, as we have in the past, isn’t going to give us the answers. There might be as many answers out there as there are individuals creative enough to seek them.

***

Leigh  Dayton
Science writer & broadcaster, PhD Candidate, Macquarie University

It was great fun to catch-up with old friends and meet new ones at the recent confab. I was struck by the gulf between the senior journalists, formerly working with mainstream media, and the bloggers and up-and-comers as we dissected the impact of the asteroid impact on Planet News.

As an old-hand I worry that the decline of general daily news coverage is increasing the level of ignorance of the electorate.  That’s so as existing radio and television outlets pick-up their coverage from the newspapers. As well, emerging online entities are generally poorly funded, fragmented and narrowly focused. Far too many new projects rely on love, sweat and tears.

I was pleased to hear of efforts to build new business models such as Melissa Sweet’s conference reporting project and Anne Summers’ online magazine.

Over time more models may emerge based on, for instance, tax-exemptions for public interest journalism, serious crowd-source funding or support by philanthropic organizations. After every mass extinction new “species’’ arise, diversify, fail or flourish. The next five years will be fascinating but terribly stressful. To borrow from the old Chinese curse: we live in interesting times.

***

Wendy Bacon
Journalist, researcher for the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and contributing editor to New Matilda

I thought it was a great evening, led by people who have all ventured out into the online world from the world of older style journalism. It was great to hear their stories and various approaches. What came home strongly to me is that each is adapting their strengths in new ways.

Anne has a long history in magazines and is now producing a new downloadable magazine. She has also shown that a single online essay can hit the mark with an audience and continues to produce columns for the mainstream Fairfax newspapers.

Jim is a journalist with very strong core reporting values, which he is using to critique the media while he earns his living in a palatable but non-journalistic way. He has now become a not-for-profit journalist.

Lesley has been able to mix a mainstream career with ‘coaching/ people in how to adapt to new world. I think there is a strong need for that – in fact, quite a market I would say.

Adele has an extremely strong record in merging the personal with the political and she has now launched her own blog with weekly posts. She is aiming for specific audience and also has to launch herself as a ‘brand’, which would seem odd after being in such a big organisation for so many years.

The panellists all either still publish in the mainstream or could if they wanted to – I think that’s worth noting. However none work full time in the mainstream media. None will again.

There were different interest groups present. This was one of the strongest features of the evening for me. I felt there were at least four or five distinct groups and it would be good in future meetings to think about how they intersect but may have different needs.  I am not suggesting here that they be separated – in fact I think they have much to offer each other.)

A few of us are old enough and privileged enough to have the luxury of experimentation without worrying about the mortgage. This is not to say that we don’t recognise the importance of paid work. Anne said for instance that she wanted to pay her team decently and was considering how to raise what she considered a fairly modest amount.

Then there is a group of people who still need to earn a regular wage but do not necessarily have the skills wanted in the mainstream today. This is tough. Most of these people will move into peripheral areas or move into different careers. This is very disappointing but they could decide like Jim, they will separate work from worthwhile journalism work.

Support networks for those who want to shift more into a more online and independent environments would be worth building – Lesley might have ideas there. Updating skills through uni courses can also be a good idea.

We have a very experienced ABC journalist doing postgraduate courses at UTS.

Then there are people who were previously non journalists who are becoming a new sort of independent journalist – this includes some academics, public intellectuals, and others with a strong desire to communicate information around specific issues. There are probably other groups that I haven’t mentioned.

It’s hard to believe that only a few years ago, there were people who argued that a journalist could only be someone who was paid to work producing news and current affairs.

As so-called business models go down, there is a resurgence of non-profit journalism.  The importance of journalism transcends the occupation of journalism. That might seem very pompous. What I am saying is that so long as there are people wanting to get information out, people will be trying to do journalism.

People sometimes idealise the past. The media was narrow and conservative when I was young. It was broken open by alternative and independent media that was non-profit.

I made some comments about journalism graduates and what they do. All graduates now need to be able to work across radio, TV and online/ print. They need to be totally on top of social media. The best will have done subjects in investigative journalism and have some skills in data analysis and visualisation. This is what employers are looking for and expect.

The best still do get jobs, but more jobs are coming up in non-mainstream than before but Fairfax Metro has pretty much dried up at the moment. News metropolitan jobs are a tiny trickle. Some young journalists are editing two or three community newspapers. Crikey, Mumbrella, and New Matilda have all hired one or more young graduates. The ABC, SBS, AAP, rural newspapers and community newspapers are still hiring.

My point is that you need to be careful not to project what is happening to older workers onto all. At least three of the young online/video journalists at Fairfax are under 30. My main worry is that they won’t reach their potential as journalists because of the values driving editorial at Fairfax.

Adele and others asked: who is going to produce the journalism that brought about the ICAC inquiry. I completely agree that this sort of journalism needs resources, time and on going salaries.

My feeling is that there is already quite a bit of good investigations in Global Mail, New Matilda and Crikey – not to mention Uni publications such as Inside Story, The Citizen, Mojo and Reportage – but admittedly not at the same level.

One difficulty is that the mainstream often applies a policy of ignoring these stories – which makes it hard to get traction. I believe that non-mainstream journalists should help push each other’s work. The story is what counts in the end.

As I’ve been writing this, a 23-year-old UTS Journalism/Law student Paul Farrell along with two other recent media grads have just published a very strong story based on FOI on Global Mail in conjunction with DetentionLogs.

Only last week DetentionLogs pressured DIAC to release information on trends in population in detention centres. DIAC was not releasing this information buy was instead hiding the info from the previous month as each new date for release came up. (I should declare an interest here as one of this team is my son – his work is completely separate from mine and he didn’t do a journalism course.) Paul has already done other strong stories for New Matilda, Crikey and Reportage at UTS.

I feel optimistic about our journalists or all ages – compared to the nineties when we saw independent media close, or when I grew up when we had no alternative media and almost no investigative journalism.

I think these are better times. But its very tough if you caught in the middle, though. I also worry like others about broad daily reporting, gaps in the agenda and the power of News Corp to peddle ignorance. If you interested in last point, see the figures on News Ltd in my ACIJ report on reporting Climate Change.

***

Kate Southam
Employment blogger

I was at the event in Sydney on April 24 – Mr Denmore, you are so much younger looking in person – and the voices, sometimes heated with frustration, articulated the difficulties so many well-trained and highly experienced journalists face.

Like the saying, “I feel like a sail boat wondering where the wind went” – journalists, who were told for decades to separate themselves totally from the commercial, now need to be immersed in it or perish.

Being offered “opportunities” to write for nothing are also too often the norm. I went to work at ninemsn in 1997 and then spent more than a decade covering employment from the safety of a website owned by News Ltd. Thank goodness. It certainly taught me about the need to navigate change but in my view conventional media here did only a little to help many of those who had contributed so much to their main game of journalism transition to a new world.

Good quality journalism exists in Australia and I only hope it continues. I worry that the ones paying the bills now will tire of it at some stage.

The other voice I would like to hear on all this is that of the public. Just my weekly visit to my local farmer’s market on a Saturday tells me how concerned people are by a degraded democracy in Australia. The stallholders are good for a chat and hungry for better quality news but they don’t know about the media available. I carry a little note pad so I can write down and tear off a list of media for stall holders or fellow bus travellers or party guests – whoever needs it – from Croakey to The Hoopla, The Global Mail to The Conversation and The Guardian Australia.

I see people’s eyes light up as they sigh with relief. I know how they feel.

Last thing: I’m a paid subscriber of Crikey and have no qualms about paying to keep good people doing what they do.

*****

Professor Lesley Barclay
University Centre for Rural Health

I joined the Meet Up as a community member. I was invited by a colleague and friend from whom I am learning much. Melissa Sweet is a public health oriented journalist who I met a decade or so ago when the journalist’s world was very different.

She is helping me learn about the social media as I try to make my academic learning and experience more accessible and influential by writing for Croakey, a public health blog that she moderates.

The get together helped me learn a little more from her colleagues about digital media. I had not been aware of the distress that rapid change is producing for many journalists. This is not only economic, because of redundancies and shrinking job opportunities, but also professionally because of monopolistic ownership and constraints now imposed on writing for conventional media.

It also began to explain to me why much of the journalism I admire is no longer in broadsheets, but online.

The lesson for me from this evening is one that I was already learning from Melissa: that is there are different ways of employing the craft of journalism and getting well crafted, analytic or investigative messages to people.

The importance of writing concisely and clearly for Croakey is a lesson she is teaching me. However, it is she who developed the blog, solicits articles and makes these accessible and valued – not me!

The other realisation – which probably reflects my slowness or previous lack of informed commentary – was realising the day of the broadsheet as carrying much of the communication we want to read is over.

Another example of where journalism has moved that mightily impressed me is also very recent. The National Rural Health Alliance (a Council of 33 member bodies ranging from consumers though rural professional groups), which I chair, attracted over 1000 attendees to their recent conference.

Our impact through the conference service was far wider because of journalists employed by the Croakey Conference Reporting Service.

Those who could not go to the Adelaide conference and those who went but could not attend all concurrent sessions had a daily report and synthesis of key papers.  This was a fine example of the journalist’s craft.

Our organisation and our constituency has benefited significantly from what for me at least was highly innovative.  I am profiting from this innovation personally.

But at the Meet Up, I also saw that these advances can be painful for some, as well as stimulating and risky for the innovators. Perhaps this is the way of innovation and it does appear the way of the future.

***

Keren Lavelle
Freelance journalist and editor

Attending a meeting on Public Interest Journalism, I didn’t really know what to expect, but was interested in the topic and the calibre of the speakers.

The event started late, I was tired, and some familiar irritations with mainstream journalists surfaced in my mind. I am a freelance journalist and freelance editor, I’m an all-rounder not a specialist, and I have had 30+ years’ experience with lots of facets of non-mainstream publishing.

I first started grappling with the challenges posed by online publishing 20 years ago when I was on the management team at Choice, and a member of a committee of independent Australian publishers benefitting from training courtesy of Keating’s Creative Nation policy.

I’m a little bit jaded with the exclusive clubby attitude that MSM journos frequently display. The decline of relevance of our print media and the decline of important investigative journalism in both broadcast and print media is deplorable, but to equate the new or ongoing employment of seasoned journalists (this seemed to be an underlying theme) with these two problems is simplistic, nor can we equate the survival or growth of the Fairfax Press as a resolution of this.

I’m an admirer of Adele Horin and her writing, and perhaps it is unfair of me to say that I was irritated by her “I just want to write” – I’m paraphrasing here – ‘I don’t want to do all the other things involved with publishing because I’ve been sheltered from them in the past’ attitude.

The following speaker, Anne Summers, has ventured into a form of magazine publishing underwritten so far by free labour and limited in its form online to PDF format, possibly because an old mate entrusted with production only knows one way to produce.

Jim Parker, who I know from my tweet stream as @MrDenmore, gave a rousing leftie call to arms, and Lesley Parker regretted that despite her best efforts at social media communication, she feels she is not getting to the target audience she would like to reach with her personal finance and consumer affairs information.

Melissa Sweet spoke last, not long enough and too softly for me to really understand what she is doing with Croakey blog, health forum reporting and the other things she does.

The issue of how to pay for journalism was very much alive in the room with one audience member repeating that working for nothing would not pay the mortgage.

I was mindful of the fact that the discussion should be larger than that (and it did briefly touch on citizen journalism and social media). I’m pretty dogmatic about getting paid for my work too, but at one point I got snippy with the mortgagee, who was harping on about specialist expertise as well as the necessity for payment.

I couldn’t also help but think of Tina Perrinotto, who voluntarily left her round on the Financial Review to found her environmental property publication The Fifth Estate four years ago by mortgaging her house to help kickstart what to my mind is public interest journalism.

Afterwards, I approached the mortgagee complainant to apologise for my snip, and found she has in fact given up on journalism, is engaged in PhD studies and has found other ways of earning a living. Her gorgeous Georgian cottage is so far safe from repossession.

I know there’s a lot of nitpicking about the various new forms and brands of Australian online journalism springing up. After the panel session ended, one audience member expressed to me her criticism of the choices already made by the Australian Guardian online newspaper to focus on politics and to hire “old voices” when there are so many other areas of interest neglected. She voiced the fear that if The Guardian moved on eventually, out of Australia, after having destroyed the Age and the SMH, the end result would leave our media further diminished.

Which reminds me: the argument that serious journalism requires serious media with deep pockets to hire lawyers had also surfaced in the discussion.

Well, the MEAA union has come up with a new form of freelance membership – a surcharge on top of their usual membership – on freelance journalists where they pay extra to receive professional indemnity (including libel) insurance, if they undertake authorised (by the MEAA) media law training as well. That might address some fears, but we perhaps will have to see it in action as well before we can all feel safe. (Insurers are probably better at reading and writing the fine print than unions are, IMHO.)

However, the next profession to face internet disambiguation and disintermediation is likely to be the legal profession, which already has a culture of working for free – pro publico bono – in the public interest.

Here’s a suggestion: It is not impossible to imagine that somewhat under-employed lawyers may one day be organised to provide their services at low or no cost to defend otherwise unprotected freelance journalists/shoestring media organisations who/which are carrying out public interest journalism.

Links with independent media organisations in our region whose members are already networking and sharing stories, especially with those members who publish in English (for examples, the Jakarta Post, and Tempo), is another avenue to explore.

The fact that social media, especially tweeting, can create forms of ‘citizen’ journalism that aren’t solely concerned with so-called breaking news is obviously a topic for a later PIJ discussion, perhaps the one to be led by @LukeLPearson, the instigator of @IndigenousX – have a look on Twitter if you don’t know this handle. I’m hoping to be there then.

***

Dr Becky Freeman
Lecturer Sydney School of Public Health | Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney

I don’t really feel qualified to comment on the future of journalism, but I will say that I think it is a bit of a myth that the public has no idea how to sort online content or wade through the Internet to find the quality of information they seek.

My friends, family, networks, colleagues, bulletins, social networks etc – all do this for me (and me for them) on a constant basis. High quality writing does stand out sharply when there is an overwhelming tide of average content out there.

Maybe just like Web 2.0 transformed the Internet so that online consumers become the primary source of content, perhaps this is where journalism is going…more contributors, journalism no longer an expert driven model.

There will always be experts of course, the best of which will do very well, but much more room for many “amateur” contributors – this doesn’t mean that the amateurs aren’t valuable or contributing meaningful content – just doing it in a different way.

Not sure exactly where I am going with this – but it may mean that your ‘average’ journo gets a bit lost in the mix between expert and amateur? Which I suppose you could define as paid and unpaid? Not sure – but clearly journalism is not dead or even dying – it is thriving as far as I can tell from the many incredible and inspiring pieces I read all the time.

I would describe myself an “enthusiast consumer of online content with quite varied tastes” – health research/fashion/parenthood/science/exercise/gossip/photography/social media/marketing/feminism/cooking but I probably source about 90% of what I read from less than 10 different sites.

I should add, I only get my news from free/advertiser paid (no paywall) digital sources – I don’t watch TV news that much at all maybe once a fortnight, only listen to the radio for about an hour in the morning, and only buy a paper on Saturday mornings if the café I am at doesn’t have one freely available. I might buy a magazine at the airport a few times a year. I don’t think I’m at all unusual in my news consumption pattern.

***

Dr Mark Ragg
Sometime journalist

Meeting old friends in an old pub and discussing journalism can never be a bad thing. The meeting of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation added to that by forcing me to remember one of the ingredients of journalism that sometimes gets shoved aside – passion.

But passion not just for ‘a good story’, whatever that story is, but for things like righting wrongs, exposing corruption, seeking redress and improving the lot of people who are in less fortunate situations than most.

It was a great night and I look forward to more.

***

Marita Hefler
Health researcher and writer

The discussion around how people are changing the way they engage with news sources and what that might look like in the future was very thought provoking, and raised some challenging issues for the future of not only journalism, but democracy and citizen engagement more generally.

While social media is opening up opportunities for interactive debate, the suggestion that trusted journalists might become part of an individual portfolio of news and information sources – trusted brands in their own right – could also come at the opportunity cost to encounter views and interests that are radically different to one’s own.

I found the issue of ‘agenda setting’ fascinating – while the range and quality of news sources are increasing, the issues that are given most prominence in national debate continue to be set by the large media conglomerates.

How can this be challenged? It seems to go to the heart of the question raised of ‘how do we know we are reaching those we’re aiming for?’

Maybe the answer to that lies in how accurately or inaccurately political pundits are able to predict the outcomes of key events like elections.

The US election showed that many of the dominant voices were wrong about the outcome – the ground had shifted because people were being reached in new ways.

***

Chris Rau
Freelance print journalist

A gong to Melissa Sweet for organising the gathering at the Old Fitzroy Hotel at Woolloomooloo (that suburb’s hard to spell) ….where assorted thoughtful reptiles chinned the wag about recent technological and sociological upheavals in our industry.

Most were print or former print people, but many others were also represented, including book editors, academics, broadcast people, and, thankfully, bloggers, who have paved the way for a lot of us reluctant dinosauric beasts.

First of all: the venue – it was terrific. A spacious setting with an informal feel, and – yegawds – an open terrace area for the three smokers amongst us. Much better than some anonymous, neon-lit, enclosed  space. Food and drink was in evidence.

The issues: maybe the word “uncertainty” best encapsulates the consensus.

We’ve been saying this for the past decade or so, but it’s still too hard to tell what the future holds for anyone who wants to train as a serious journalist and still find paid work.

Adele Horin, Anne Summers, Melissa Sweet and Jim and Lesley Parker were the speakers, with Leigh Dayton getting the occasional word in. All, including the audience, were thoughtful and – to some degree bewildered – participants, given the roar of the presses has lost ground to the click of the blogomouse.

I was a bit surprised not to see anyone representing the MEAA there, but it was mid-week, and everyone’s busy.

The overriding and worrying themes, to me, seemed to be two things.

Will there be any value left in a journalist’s “nose” and experience?

And will there be any reliable money in it?

Jim, Adele and Anne all touched on the new phenomenon of the “hobbying journalist”. This is where no matter how good you may be at your craft, you won’t sustain any sort of reliable income via freelance or independent work, no matter what your experience or tradecraft, unless you’re lucky enough to be a “name” or have a column – usually both!  (Don’t even get me started on pollies having columns…or ABC shows about ethics(!))

Anne, one of the most celebrated academics, bureaucrats, feminists and journalists of our generation, has started a new magazine without being able to pay anyone for two months.  She got a groundbreaking interview with Qantas’ CEO Alan Joyce, but it was never decently picked up in the mainstream press.

As Brian Toohey’s “The Eye” and Max Suich’s “Independent” have shown us in the past, print magazines are fickle creatures. People like the idea, but they won’t buy them. Morrie Schwartz is only able to keep The Monthly going because he’s, essentially, also a hobbying journalist, dabbling in Melbourne property on the side.

Anne is doing her magazine as an online initiative – with cover page, print layout and all – but she and her team are still grappling with the technology about how to make this a printable, advertising-friendly, and popular outlet. Popular as opposed to populist.

Many on the night were dismissive about traditional media, criticising everything from news sense to strength of vision. To some degree, I agree, but it’s the real world and it’s disingenuous to think “old” media, whatever its flaws, is going to disappear any day. If anyone’s undermining “old” media, it’s those who think their audience doesn’t conflate “compact” with tabloid, and those who talk their own industry down.

I’m told that if you have any skills at social media and IT these days, you can get ahead in print journalism whether or not you’d recognize a news story if it were a bus and ran over you. Go figure…self-fulfilling prophecies.

All that aside, traditional media still sets the agenda, given that the fragmented web audiences have to congregate somewhere – and it’s usually around the fire of mainstream commercial TV, newspapers or, dare we say it (those left-wing ratbags) the ABC.

We may throw our hands up in despair about the selective or poor news judgment of the mainstream media (depending on which freelance idea was rejected on the day; grumble, mutter), but they still get the majority of bums on seats and they still have the resources to pay a skeleton staff and emaciated research.

Certainly we all have to adapt and change, which is now an old theme. A symbol of how this is recognized was how, on the 24th, people were enthusiastic about the role of ‘citizen journalism’ and Twitter in getting immediate information and visuals across to the mainstream.

Certainly, it’s all starting to merge, and perhaps a happy marriage can be better than an acrimonious rivalry? Harold Evans has been an enthusiast for this mixed-marriage in the recent past (see Lateline archives).

The current head of online consumer rights and social advocacy group, GetUp, Sam McLean, told a round-table group of us four years ago that he never read newspapers. This was with some pride! Our more dinosauric panel, including the ABC’s Jonathan Holmes, were scratching our variously balding and collective heads about analysing media change. I don’t think, among so many gasbaggers, that there’d ever been such a long and collective conversational pause of sheer shock!  But the stats bear witness to Sam’s selective use of news coverage. He was a ripe old 21 at the time.

Interestingly, GetUp got its start from online subscribers, but has only ever been really successful when they used mainstream print outlets for advertising, or when their petitions went so viral they attracted mainstream broadcast exposure.

My kids, from 13 to 18, only read newspapers if I cut out something that I know will interest them. They only watch TV news if they happen to be in the room when I’m already watching it. They reckon it’s usually too depressing.  But they will watch quirky fluffy-dog stories.

A general disengagement? My three – an inbuilt focus-group – are active, intelligent, and engaged in their own ways, but they don’t even go to news websites. Maybe they just don’t give a flying hoot or they somehow absorb news via string theory and osmosis? Certainly it’s a parallel universe.

The only solution re “old” media and freelancing, in practical terms, is to think of ten ideas instead of three, in the hope of getting at least one in. And not to take anything too personally.

Some professional lapses have become annoying. When I first started at the National Times, I thought it was rude when my colleagues didn’t answer their phones. Not only rude, but counterintuitive: what if that phone call was from the one person who had a terrific story?

Now, if you send an email with a freelance idea, you feel pathetically grateful if you get any response at all, even if it’s a no. (Ironically, I had a terrific idea for a think-piece on rejection, and how it influences mass-shootings and the like, only to be rejected…sob – but still think it’s a goer).

I have one story in particular I can’t pursue because I can’t finance corporate affairs searches, land titles searches, FOI, potential legal fees and travel. Not to mention the luxury of working for a good two months on an investigation if you’re not on a salary.

So don’t knock the mainstream outlets too soon, and don’t knock those still there who are struggling hard to carry everyone else’s expectations about journalism on their slender shoulders. Not to mention the young people aspiring to the ever-more unachievable ATAR scores to get into the media courses proliferating everywhere. It is a terrible time for them to try and gain entrance when so many doors are closing, even for experienced hacks.

As Wendy Bacon, who has only just hung up her hat as a UTS Professor, told the group, only the very best of the very best of media students have a hope of getting in anywhere.  But, on a more encouraging note, those of her UTS students who did get in were in decent and rewarding jobs, in outlets ranging across broadcast and print.

While canvassing a lot of these ideas for a book (blatant plug here: Dealing With the Media, UNSW Press, 2010), and talking to people across the spectrum, it seemed to me that there’s a vested interest in people who are advocates of new technology in dismissing the benefits of the “old”. (I always find it curious too, that no one talks about the end of broadcast anytime soon – it’s always print).

I would have thought, given the public’s voracious appetite for stories, there’s plenty of room for both? Why the antagonism?

Jim Parker was particularly passionate about how you can’t substitute a trained journalist’s skill and expertise. “Asking the right questions,” was his theme.

And he’s right. It takes a fair bit of experience to ask someone who you suspect of lying, wrongdoing, or out-and-out fraud about firstly, whether they’ve done it; then, how they did it, and thirdly, what did they get out of it? (And, was it fun at the time?)

It needs many years of experience to build up that sort of interviewing chutzpah, and before then, you have to be able to judge whether something is newsworthy in the first place. To have the idea, enthuse the editor about it, and take it from there.

I’ll never forget how surprised I was when David Marr told me in 2005 he’d much rather wade through a 45-page document than ring up someone he hadn’t interviewed before. So if a seasoned old salt like David still gets nervous, having to don the fake impervious reptilian hide, imagine what it must be like to be a student stuttering through their first interview?

It’s no wonder we have such a plethora of PRs and such a dearth of investigative journalists!

Which gets us back to money. Of our speakers on the 24th, Adele and Anne were blogging/magging for free, Jim was blogging for free, seeing he’s stalking the financial corridors in his working time, and I can’t remember whether Lesley said she was being paid a living wage or not.

For many of us, it’s a labour of love. Unlike Adele, I have no redundancy or superannuation funds to draw on, and if it weren’t for my husband’s day job in community newspapers, we’d be stuffed: and we don’t even have a mortgage anymore.

I’ve just finished a deadline for a medical publication which took three weeks of work, research, contacts and thought, and will be lucky to clear $1,000 from that. And that is a good gig. The SMH pays you $500 per 1,000 words, unless you’re already a “name” on squillions and don’t need the money anyway.

The News Limited papers are eclectic with their payments, some paying nothing at all – the privilege of being published is purportedly enough – and some paying less than MEAA rates, as Fairfax does.

New Matilda sometimes pays, but they’re on a really tight budget and it’s an exception when they do. Not-for-profit groups like the St James Ethics Centre have magazines like “Living Ethics”, but they can’t afford to pay their writers; instead relying on people’s good will and expertise to garner any content.

The Australian online version of The Guardian is a bit of a dark horse. It’s been much-touted, but very little practical detail of how it works has been revealed. Crikey and the Drum are out there, but for the thousands of journos looking for paid work, it’s a tight squeeze.

It is exceptionally expensive and difficult to juggle the finances and the readership/audience base for any publication, no matter what format it’s in. And I don’t care what you say about the logistical beauty of online publications, the tangible nature of print will always attract “customers”. The roar of the presses and the smell of the crowds, as someone once said…

In the past, you had rich families like the Fairfaxes being able to finance loss-makers like the National Times out of a form of philanthropy. As well, it gave the family an intangible “feel-good” factor. Then, you could afford to run some news outlets for the public good, as long as others were making money, without casting an anxious eye on advertising volume. Now, you don’t get a John Singleton without a Tom Waterhouse.

These days, it seems you don’t even bother with any sort of journalism unless the ads are already in place! As our speakers said on the night, journalism’s become a hobby for people of independent income. How depressing. Maybe we should ask Hugh McKay’s Ipsos team to run a poll of teenagers re their ambitions re journalism and their interest in news? Maybe the MEAA could fund it.

Surely there can be some way we can turn this current malaise, where misjudgements are made, audiences are underestimated, and content is sacrificed for ephemera, around? A few “sugar-Clives” would be nice (not expecting the Ginas anytime soon), but surely we could take a leaf from Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox and begin “Doing it for Ourselves”?

That is where sessions like the one Melissa organised this April can help.

We can support each other with ideas and contacts. I know a lot of it is hot air, but that is sometimes helpful too. Sometimes, a chance to vent and just ask the questions, rather than expecting instant answers, is good enough in itself.

***

Adele Horin
Journalist and blogger

The meeting left me more hopeful about the possibilities of a more collaborative approach between citizens, academics and journalists in filling an information gap about issues of public interest.

I can see some news ways of working that I didn’t see before. I can also see the very best journalists will survive through using their skills in many forums, including working for overseas publications.

Personally I was encouraged by the response from audience members to my new blog Coming of Age  – that people thought a blog about the issues facing baby boomers as they age is a good idea, and potentially a commercial one.

I still think good journalists have special skills gained through their training and from mentors that are essential to democratic society: fact-finding, fairness, asking tough questions, investigative skills, and story-telling. Some things journalists do need the backing of defamation lawyers. The skills are worth probably as much as a teacher’s salary.

I’m still left wondering after the meeting how the online environment will pay for journalism (rather than opinion) and I hope Anne Summers’ venture finds a way through generous donors to show it’s possible.

***

Jim Parker also reported on the event at his blog, and blogger Andrew Elder also wrote about it here.

And a final word from the compiler of this rather long post, Melissa Sweet
(in fact some of the words I used to introduce the evening…)

In many ways we face a paradox when it comes to public interest journalism. Just as we’re losing reliable sources of revenue for our work – a recent US jobs survey concluded that newspaper reporter is the worst career for 2013, so are we gaining the opportunity to work in new ways and to better serve the public and our audiences.

There were some useful insights in a recent US report called “Post Industrial Journalism: adapting to the present”.

Just for the record, Post industrial journalism is a term first coined in 2001, to mean “journalism no longer organized around the norms of proximity to the machinery of production.”

As this particular report states, post industrial journalism starts with the assumption that news organisations are no longer in control of the news, as it has traditionally been understood, and that the heightened degree of public agency by citizens, governments, businesses and even loosely affiliated networks is a permanent change, to which news organisations must adapt.

A recurring theme through this report and many others that you can read about the changing nature of journalism is that journalists need to become much better at collaborating and working with community.

As this report puts it:

“We are living through a shock of inclusion, where the former audience is becoming increasingly intertwined with all aspects of news, as sources who can go public on their own, as groups that can both create and comb through data in ways the professionals can’t, as disseminators and syndicators and users of the news.

This shock of inclusion is coming from the outside in, driven not by the professionals formerly in charge, but by the former audience. It is also being driven by new news entrepreneurs, the men and women who want to build new kinds  of sites and services that assume, rather than ignore, the free time and talents of the public.”

This report also suggests that we need to recognise that that “we are in a revolution, in its sense of a change so large that the existing structure of society can’t contain it without being altered by it.”

Often discussions focus on the changing roles of journalists and journalism, but in my view it is at least as important to focus on the changing role of citizens and civil society in this digital age.

In my field, public health reporting, there’s a saying that health is everyone’s business. We need – as citizens and society – to start understanding the implications of journalism now being everyone’s business, as well.

One of the things that struck me out of the Meet Up is that post industrial journalism = PIJ = public interest journalism. If this equation is going to stick, it’s going to require some effort from wider society.

It is significant that Terry Moran, a former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, recently urged public servants to engage with the blogosphere, saying that the decline of the traditional media and the rise of smaller specialised media outlets provided more scope and reason for senior public servants to get out and discuss their work.

In my field, I am regularly seeing researchers, health professionals, patients and members of the public taking on some of the roles that used to be the preserve of journalists – reporting and analysing news and developments, via blogs, Twitter and so forth.

In retrospect it would have been useful to have at least one citizen representative on the panel.

I was particularly pleased to see Luke Pearson participating in the Meet Up. He founded the ground-breaking @IndigenousX Twitter account, which is doing a huge public service by sharing the diverse voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

I don’t know if Luke considers himself a journalist, but I for one think that he performs many of the public interest roles of journalism, including digging into issues that deserve wider attention, and enabling a vibrant and open debate.

I am delighted that Luke will be our guest presenter at the next PIJ Meet Up later in the year.

***
Addition to post (added 9 May, 2013)

Deborah Singerman
Journalist, editor, managing editor running her own business

I was heartened by the mix of well-known and less well-known journalists at Re-inventing journalism and I do not believe this would have happened if things were not so dire, challenging or whatever you want to call it.

We are all in this together, whether recently redundant or continuing to find new ways to make a living, telling stories, news, projects, research, case studies, and trying to get behind the spin, even if not to the extent of investigative journalists.

We have to re-invent ourselves, expand our core interviewing and research and writing skills, collaborate with each other, communities of specific interests and the wider citizenry. We have to read as widely as possible from digital and print.

There was a genuine camaraderie and opening up about worries and hopes for the profession and the future of journalism. I hope we can build on this during what we all agreed was going to be a tough transition but we’ll be able to face this better if we have more of these great, honest nights, being our own community.

In the post below, Peter Browne, Editor of Inside Story, looks at how countries like Norway, Sweden, Austria and Finland have used public subsidies for newspapers.

He argues that innovative approaches to sustaining the news media need to be explored in view of the media’s importance for healthy democracy, and examines options such as:

• Legislation to allow news organisation to operate under charities legislation. This would free newspapers from sharemarket pressures and provides taxation and other benefits.
• This would also enable the development of innovative structures such as that which arose in response to the collapse of the childcare operator ABC Learning. A number of charities combined with Social Ventures Australia to develop a loan based financial structure that delivered returns, via interest on bonds, to the charities concerned as well as to other classes of ‘investors’ including philanthropic trusts and venture capitalists.
• Indirect government assistance – greater postal concessions, voucher schemes and so on – to assist large and small, and new and old, news providers.

The article below is an edited extract from “New ways of funding and supporting journalism”, Peter Browne’s chapter in Australian Journalism Today, a book edited by Matthew Ricketson. (It is edited from his author’s final draft).

***

Assisting the industry

Peter Browne writes:

The question of how governments can assist newspapers to survive and multiply, whether or not they appear in print, is a contentious one.

Newspapers with an international, or at least a national, reputation are best placed to follow the lead of the NYT – assuming its strategy proves successful – and avoid closure or punishment at the hands of their shareholder owners.

But a diverse news media, vital to any functioning democracy, also needs metropolitan and special-interest newspapers.

Philanthropic funding is often seen as part of the solution to falling profits in the industry. Internationally, several metropolitan English language newspapers are under what is effectively philanthropic ownership (or at least ownership founded on a philanthropic act): the Guardian, owned by a trust set up by its one-time owner and editor, C.P Scott; the Florida-based St Petersburg Times, which is owned by the Poynter Institute, a journalism school created by the newspaper’s former owner, Nelson Poynter (Barnes 1999); and the Irish Times, which was transformed into a trust by its major shareholder in 1974.

Each has, in its own way, been a notable success: the Guardian, as we’ve seen, has achieved a remarkable online circulation (fuelled partly by its investigative reporting – notably its dogged pursuit of the News of the World scandal, and its role in publishing the WikiLeaks cables); the St Petersburg Times has largely bucked the trend of sharply declining print circulations in the United States (Edmonds 2011) and, according to the Director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, ‘has been recognised for decades for its quality and commitment to news’ (Jones 2009, p. 215).

Not surprisingly, the Irish Times, considered Ireland’s newspaper of record, has been buffeted by that country’s very serious economic problems (Flanagan 2011).

But wholly owned philanthropy-based newspapers are unlikely to emerge as a significant part of the metropolitan media.

It’s possible, especially in the United States (which has the strongest tradition of philanthropic investment in media projects), that newspaper companies and new entrants can find ways of drawing on philanthropic funds to support their work, but those funds will be for specific projects.

As McChesney and Nichols write:

Our sense is that foundations can and should fund innovative projects, which may play a role in defining where journalism goes… But as a viable replacement for the broad network of commercial support of newspapers in the United States, the foundation ‘solution’ seems to be another dead-end street.

For starters, many foundations provide only limited-term support, often for periods of three years or less, to new enterprises. Foundation boards and directors like to spawn new projects, not bankroll them in perpetuity. (McChesney and Nichols 2010, p. 87)

Or, as the Director of the Shorenstein Center puts it, foundations ‘can change their minds, lose their money, get mad, get bored, or simply want to do something else’ (Jones 2009, p. 215).

These observations lead inevitably to the question of the role of government. Because the media industries in English-speaking countries have generally been highly resistant to government intervention on either free-speech on commercial grounds, the most dramatic forms of intervention to promote press diversity or compensate for market problems have been elsewhere. Reflecting different attitudes to government intervention in the economy and social life, the best-known of these are in Scandinavia.

Since 1969 and 1972 respectively, Norway and Sweden have run schemes which assist ‘second position newspapers’ which are ‘losing out in the commercial contest for advertising’ to survive and compete with the dominant newspaper in a particular market (Murschetz 1998, p. 294). In each case, subsidies to individual newspapers are calculated according to circulation and revenue.

As Victor Pickard, Josh Stearns and Craig Aaron observe in relation to Sweden:

Based on the assumption that a plurality of voices is essential for a healthy democracy, such government intervention initially caused some controversy for making papers dependent on the state, but this relationship is now largely accepted in Sweden. The subsidies have been most successful in preventing one newspaper towns by helping smaller provincial newspapers, although they account for only about 3 per cent of papers’ total revenue. (Pickard et al 2009, p. 235)

In 2006, about US$65.4 million was given to Swedish newspapers whose circulations were no more than 30 per cent of their market. Publishers also receive government support through reduced taxes and distribution subsidies (ibid). Despite an across-the-board fall in newspaper sales during the 1980s and 90s, Sweden has remained a strong and relatively decentralised newspaper market.

The combined circulation of ‘printed paid-for dailies published at least four days a week’ at about 3.3 million, equivalent to roughly 460 copies per 1000 population; the figures for Britain, the United States and Australia, by comparison, are 308, 213 and 166 respectively (Tiffen and Gittins 2009, p. 180). In the period 2000–06, writes Rodney Benson, per-1000 circulation fell by 9 per cent and 18 per cent respectively in the United States and Britain but rose by 0.4 per cent in Sweden (Benson,p. 189). According to the European Journalism Centre, however, Sweden’s subsidies now play only ‘a minor role’ in the newspaper landscape (Weibull, Jönsson and Wadbring 2011).

Norway has a similar system of subsidies; in 2005, they amounted to 300 million Norwegian kroner (approximately A$50 million at 2008 exchange rates) and accounted for approximately 3 per cent of newspapers’ total revenue. The subsidies are directed at ‘national ideological and political newspapers, the “No. 2” newspapers in areas with local competition and the smallest local newspapers’. Separate subsidies for newspapers using the Sami language and directed at the Sami population. (Østbye 2010)

Although President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to give every eighteen-year old a one-year subscription to one of the country’s major newspapers attracted wide publicity, France already provided large direct and indirect subsidies to newspaper publishers (Pasquier and Lamizet 2010; Nielsen and Linnebank 2011). Direct assistance includes subsidies for distribution; targeted subsidies for newspapers with low advertising bases, for modernisation of plant and technology, etc; and government support for the news agency Agence France Presse.

Indirect subsidies include tax relief for registered newspapers and for several groups of newspaper employees, and concessional postage rates (ibid). France spent a total of €1239 million (approximately A$2032 million) on these subsidies in 2008. Unlike Norway and Sweden, however, overall sales of newspapers per 1000 population in France languish at around 150.

Less well-known are the subsidies available to publishers in Finland (which shares characteristics with France’s system) and Austria. Austria’s government began making annual payments to all daily newspapers in 1974. Under changes to the scheme in 2003, subsidies are provided for distribution, to foster regional diversity and to improve journalists’ skills:

In 2008, about €12.8 million were allocated to the press according to this subsidy scheme; €4.5 million for the distribution scheme, €6.6 million for a diversity scheme and €1.7 million for journalism schools and special projects. When it comes to subsidies, it is irrelevant to the government whether a newspaper is profitable or not. All receive their share of the subsidy as long as they make a request. There is no auditing or reporting obligation. (Trappel 2010)

Subsidies like these might struggle to attract political support in the main English-speaking countries, however. In the United States, even public funding for broadcasting has been highly contentious; in Britain, Canada and Australia it is difficult to imagine a political consensus emerging to support direct subsidies to media proprietors, old or new.

McChesney and Nichols argue that political hostility to supporting the media in the United States rests on the false assumption that the media long thrived without support of any kind. They point in particular to large postal subsidies at key points in the historical development of the press (‘Between 1792 and 1845’ – according to one researcher they quote – ‘the minimum charge for a letter ranged from six to twenty-five cents… but the maximum postage for a newspaper for any distance was one and one-half cents.’) and argue that new forms of indirect subsidy are need to deal with the current crisis (McChesney and Nichols 2010, pp. 145–25).

Their proposals include new postal subsidies to encourage smaller publications whose advertising content is no more than 25 per cent; tax credits for newspapers up to a maximum of $45,000 for each journalist they employ; an annual $200 ‘Citizenship News Voucher’ which adults can use to subscribe to non-profit news publications (on and offline) of their choice; and a new government agency to assist newspaper companies to design and implement ‘post-corporate’ ownership structures. They also propose a number of sources for revenue for these schemes.

The post-corporate ownership structures discussed by McChesney and Nichols, among others, include not only philanthropic and other forms of non-profit ownership, but also a relatively new hybrid model, the low-profit limited liability company, or L3C. Although L3C companies, which are already allowed in a number of US states, are primarily charitable they can distribute a modest overall level of profits to investors. In the US context, the advantage of L3Cs is that they can also attract investment funds (as well as grants) from philanthropic foundations. Foundations can make ‘program related investments’ (PRIs) as well as their usual grant-making programs; the L3C could allow these foundations to invest in social ventures (McChesney andNichols 2010, p. 183).

As lawyer Brian Howe writes:

The flexibility of the limited liability structure allows ventures to structure differing levels (tranches) of investment opportunities. For instance, a L3C may offer three different tranches of capital with the first tranch to foundations (PRIs with lower rate of return, greater risk, high emphasis on social purpose), the second to socially conscious investors (medium rate of returns, lowered risk, emphasis on social return), and the third to regular investors (market rate of return, less emphasis on social purpose). (Howe 2011)

McChesney and Nichols argue that newspapers and current affairs– related magazines should be recognised in legislation as meeting the requirements for L3C status; the question of what qualifies as a ‘program related investment’ was a continuing subject of debate during 2011 (Howe 2011).

Although circumstances – the structure of the industry, legal arrangements, the priorities of philanthropic foundations – are different in Australia, some of the approaches and proposals advanced overseas could be modified or combined to suit local conditions.

Australia doesn’t have a large and internationally recognised newspaper controlled by a family or a trust committed to public service journalism (like the NYT or the Guardian), so existing and emerging players in the Australian market – like their smaller counterparts overseas – will have less capacity and owner/shareholder backing to experiment.

Complicating the situation in Australia is the dominant role of News Limited, whose ownership structure has features in common with that of the NYT but whose future, especially since the 2011 phone-hacking scandal, is unclear. If the Murdoch family loses control of the parent company, News Corporation, then the possible outcomes include the sale or closure of News Ltd titles.

Given this uncertainty, it seems all the more important that the Australian government creates the conditions in which existing newspapers are most likely to survive without major reductions in their journalistic resources, and new entrants are able to overcome barriers to entry.

As the international newspaper sales figures show, competitive news markets mean higher overall readerships (Simons 2008); the same is likely to hold true online.

Underpinning any program of assistance should be an acknowledgement that the news media play a vital role in Australia’s democratic system.

Once newspapers (and potentially broadcasters as well) are formally recognised as performing a vital social role, the options for new legal structures and other forms of assistance can be broader than has been the case so far in the debate about the growing crisis in the industry.

This could be done in a number of ways. Governments could legislate to allow news organisation to operate under charities legislation. Although Australian philanthropic foundations have not traditionally funded media projects, it may be possible to assemble funds from charitable and other sources to back an existing title (if the Australian or the Age, for example, were to become available as stand-alone businesses). Charitable status would free newspapers from sharemarket pressures and provides taxation and other benefits. At a time of declining circulation and advertising income, this approach would require a strong level of local or interest group support for the media outlet concerned.

Other innovative structures could also be encouraged. When the childcare operator ABC Learning collapsed in late 2008, a number of charities combined with Social Ventures Australia to develop a loan based financial structure that delivered returns, via interest on bonds, to the charities concerned as well as to other classes of ‘investors’ including philanthropic trusts and venture capitalists. Conceived in response to what many saw as a crisis in Australian childcare, the tailor-made structure might well hold lessons for media groups, potential buyers or new entrants. For news projects to take advantage of models like this, charitable status would need to be made available through legislation.

A specifically Australian version of the L3C structure, incorporating some or all of the advantage of non-profit or even charitable status, would also be worth exploring. The Productivity Commission (pp. 193–94) briefly mentioned the possibility in its report on charities, but no detailed work had been done on whether newspapers might fall within its scope.

Governments can also consider indirect assistance – greater postal concessions, voucher schemes and so on – to assist large and small, and new and old, news providers.

Given the size of the Australian market, these and other forms of support will undoubtedly be needed if media organisations are to have time to adapt to the emerging conditions and to preserve and enhance journalistic resources and talent.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Michael Liffman and David Ward for a very useful discussion of options for philanthropic and government involvement, and to Tim Lovitt of Experian Hitwise for web traffic data.

• To read the full article: Australian Journalism Today, edited by Matthew Ricketson.

• A related, previous post: Federal Government urged to act on crisis facing journalism

It will be an opportunity to share ideas and experiences around innovation in journalism. Come and chat informally with journalists who have been reinventing their craft online, including:

Anne Summers, who has recently launched an online magazine, Anne Summers Reports.

Adele Horin, who has recently launched a blog exploring the challenges of growing older, Coming of Age.

Lesley Parker, freelance journalist and online journalism trainer.

Jim Parker, treasurer of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation, and award-winning blogger at The Failed Estate.

Melissa Sweet, president of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation, and founder of Croakey, a public health blog hosted by Crikey.

***

Who is invited? Citizens, bloggers and journalists who are interested in sharing ideas about the reinvention of journalism in the digital age.

Venue: Upstairs at the Old Fitzroy Hotel, 129 Dowling Street  (Cnr Cathedral Street) Woolloomooloo NSW 2011. You will be able to buy dinner and drinks.

From: 7pm on Wednesday, 24^th April

RSVP: By signing up to Meet Up or email Melissa Sweet via here.

Science journalism is contracting globally, despite its important role in helping us to grapple with many of the challenges facing the world, says experienced science journalist and broadcaster Leigh Dayton.

Leigh Dayton writes:

I used to have the perfect job. As The Australian’s Science Writer and later also Editor of the paper’s professionally oriented health section, I was paid to talk to interesting and important people about interesting and important ideas.

From gene patenting, embryonic stem cell research, polar exploration and climate science to environmental toxins, human evolution, cosmic evolution and the now not so elusive Higgs Boson, it was all my bailiwick.

I wrote across the paper and loved every minute of it, that is until an editorial change – inspired by the Global Financial Crisis and the Newspaper Financial Crisis – put me and my round at the bottom of the newsroom food chain. Little wonder I was restructured out the door last September.

So my perfect job doesn’t exist. And not just at The Australian. The shake-up of the media has led to a shake-out of science reporters worldwide. My perfect job doesn’t exist anywhere.

As Christopher Zara wrote earlier this year in the International Business Times, science journalists are tumbling out of jobs in the US. He cites telling statistics. In 1989, there were 95 newspapers with weekly science sections. Today there are 19.

The UK is experiencing a similar decline, as science writers get pushed from their perch in the daily papers to make way for cheap general reporters and teams of online staff. The Guardian is the exception, keeping its science coverage intact.

In Australia we were reasonably, if not generously, served until recently.

The Sydney Morning Herald had not only long-time Science Editor Deborah Smith – who took redundancy the week I left — but also Nicky Phillips, now sole science bod. Bridie Smith remains at The Age as Science & Technology Reporter and Claire Peddie covers Science and Environment for The Advertiser in Adelaide. Then it gets thin on the ground. Aside from the ABC, the electronic media is a science wasteland.

This worries me greatly. It’s not just because I’m pushed into a career change, but because science, technology, environment and medical research are at the heart of many important current events, issues and dust-ups of today.

Experienced science reporters cover the bases from astrophysics and zoology. They know the players, the issues and the nuts-&-bolts of the scientific method. They can tell a genuine break through from a beat-up or even a stuff-up. Remember the ill-fated faster-than-light neutrino discovery? Lots of breathless headlines worldwide; few considered stories; plenty of red faces.

Most of all, science journos see how science impacts current events. Their round isn’t just funky fillers and creature features gleaned from journal and university press releases. Their slowly vanishing specialty brings intellectual depth and breadth to news.

But this isn’t how editors and producers view the round. It’s an extra. It isn’t sexy. Real journalists do politics, business and economics. Doubt it?  How many men are science reporters? Exactly.

So who’s replacing science specialists in the mainstream media? For the so-called discovery stories general reporters do their best with press releases and wire copy does the rest.

When a story takes off, though, political journalists generally muscle in. That’s fine. They’re an intelligent and capable bunch. But the result can be superficial. It’s the equivalent of sending me to cover internal Cabinet disputes or Coalition policy shifts. I’d get the obvious points but miss the context and complexity. Important issues and implications would go unreported.

Consider the recent extreme weather events. Where was the in-depth discussion of Australia’s preparedness for coping with more of same, courtesy of climate change? The submissions to the recent Senate Inquiry Recent Trends in and Preparedness for Extreme Weather Events barely got a mention.

What about the surprise Federal Court decision upholding the validity of patents on the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2?

The decision was covered extensively. There was mention that women might have to pay for breast cancer diagnostic tests and that Cancer Council CEOIan Olver called for a change to patent laws.

But there was little discussion of what those laws are, how they’re applied to human genes, recent legislative reviews or implications for fundamental research and innovation, let alone alternative approaches to managing emerging knowledge.

Same with Julia Gillard’s announcement that the government will commit A$504.5 million to establish up to 10 Industry Innovation Precincts to boost the nation’s output of globally competitive innovation and industry. The papers covered big business’s loss of the R&D tax break and a few details of where the precincts would be located.

So why is successful innovation even an issue? How and why have successive governments struggled to boost it? Not a peep.

It sounds naive but how can we have a functioning democracy with a poorly informed electorate? You get my drift.

• On Twitter: @leighDayton

• This article was first published at the public health blog Croakey, and has also been republished by the World Federation of Science Journalists.

Professor Robert Picard and his blog, The Media Business

The emerging crisis in the Australian media industry is likely to galvanise the community sector and philanthropists to engage with the reinvention of journalism.

So says Professor Robert Picard, a leading authority on media economics and management and government communications policies, and the Director of Research at the Reuters Institute, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.

Professor Picard recently delivered lectures at the National Press Club and the University of Canberra, where he also consulted on development of a research agenda for the News and Media Research Centre.

In a Q and A published in full below, he says that journalists need to become more open to developing partnerships with the community sector, although this will require a significant cultural shift.

“One thing I’ve always said about journalists, and as an ex journalist, is that a lot of journalists don’t like the public – ‘please don’t call me about my article’,” he said.

“In the training and the mythology of journalism, we are the school-master of the people. It’s the great unwashed out there, we’re supposed to educate them and direct them…that’s a terrible view of the public. And in fact one needs to be partnering with them.

“It is a cultural shift but it has to happen because the way we interact in a digital world requires interactions, transparency and trust – that haven’t necessarily been evident between media companies, journalists and the audience, which we didn’t really trust.”

In an era where many people and organisations are taking on some of the traditional roles of journalism, Professor Picard says it is imperative that journalists focus on how we can value add in servicing communities’ information needs.

To survive and prosper, journalists must focus more on providing analysis and contextual coverage, to help the community make sense of their information overload, rather than simply providing an account of who said or did what.

“Journalism isn’t an end to itself; journalism is a function that helps society,” said Professor Picard. “I agree that innovation will come as solutions to community problems.”

While Australian philanthropists and foundations have not been anywhere near as proactive in supporting public interest journalism as in the US, Professor Picard expects this will change as the industry crisis grows.

“In Australia the situation has been deteriorating, and it’s getting close to the point whether community and other foundations are going to say, ‘we’ve got a problem now’, whereas two years ago it may not have been perceived as that’,” he said.

Organisations like the Public Interest Journalism Foundation have an important role in educating the wider community about the value of sustaining the worthwhile roles of journalism, he added.

As to the skills that journalists need for the future, Professor Picard says the core attribute of successful journalism remains unchanged: curiosity. He advises journalism students to do double majors, and to develop an area of expertise to enable more authoritative reporting.

He also suggests there may be start-up opportunities in servicing the needs of expat and immigrant communities, pointing to a successful venture that is doing this in Sweden (as profiled here).

While he predicts that print has a limited lifespan and says we are now in a transition period where “people need to try a lot of things”, Professor Picard is optimistic for the future and the reinvention of journalism.

“It’s a great time for journalism,” he said. “I think it’s one of the most exciting times, there are more opportunities for young journalists to do things in the future.”

****

Edited transcript of Q and A with Melissa Sweet on 12 February, 2013

Q: If introducing yourself to a room of people interested in public interest journalism, how would you do so?

RP: I’ve spent 30 years trying to understand the economics of media and how they operate, how they fund, and what the implications of the kind of information and content that they provide. Today, as we’re looking at the problems facing journalism, having that background helps me understand what the possibilities are, why the industry is in trouble, and how it relates to the way that news has been funded in the past.

I’m interested in those underlying business and economic factors… because of the performance issues of how do we in society have news and information and content that helps us in our lives.

In the 1970s I was working in the news business and there was a lot of consolidation going on in the news industry and I was trying to understand why do newspapers die, and that’s what led me into some of those questions. Over time I found that I enjoyed studying it better than doing it, and it was a better opportunity for me to contribute by doing that.

Q: What is the critical agenda for research in journalism?

RP: The real question is what information needs are there in communities and how are we going to solve those. Newspapers and television have actually done a terrible job of providing community information. They’ve done a fairly good job at providing information about institutions, but they’re not very good at tracking peoples’ lives very well.

For most people their lives revolve around community centres, around schools, around churches, around their daily activities of life. In many ways those are harder to cover because there are not organised institutions that are always there supporting those so you can go talk to them. Secondly, there is a problem in journalism in that there really isn’t a broad structure to cover those. You don’t get affirmation from your peers for covering what goes on in a church parish hall.

Q: How does that tie into a research agenda?

RP: One of the things they (the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra) are trying to look at is to look at communities and try to say, well, what do people want?

There are different types of people in a community; even in a city there are rural areas around. You have different ethnic groups, which may or may not get the information they want from the traditional media. In a town you have media but there are other kinds, some digital, community newspapers. So the first thing is to identify what information do people need and then to start looking at where do you get that info and how do you pass that on in a community and what gaps are there – which really becomes the important part. How can we use current and developing technologies to improve delivery of certain kinds of information?

Q: How can journalism best serve the public interest in a digitally connected world?

RP: Some of that is about local community information, why we have media in the first place. Even in small communities today you don’t need much media. If you’ve got 1000 people living in the community, everyone is going to know what’s going on, because they show up in the local public tavern, there’s the parish hall and so they communicate on a regular basis. If you’re upset with what’s happening with the mayor, the next time you see him in the pub, you’re going to accost him.

As scale grows, those places where we communicated as individuals are separated from us and so we have to find out how we can provide and facilitate that kind of connectivity. It differs in different communities and different parts of the country. You have to look at a particular community to see what needs are being filled and not filled.

As human beings, the more we interact, the more we trust each other, the more we understand each other, the more we look out for each other’s interests. We want people to be engaged in the communities, we want people to be engaged in the decision-making in communities. But people can’t do that if they don’t have proper information. So how do you get that information is really what journalism is all about.

Then there’s the second part of journalism, which is as people become separated from the mechanisms of government, how do we promote accountability in that system? So different media will serve those different functions.

Q: You’ve written that public interest journalism is only a small part of what the media does although it’s the part we love to emphasise. Where does public interest journalism fit within the changing media landscape? What are the opportunities and the perils?

RP: Some of it’s changing simply because the institutions that are involved are changing. If you take health centres for instance, a lot of health providers are now providing a great deal of online health information and advice that journalists used to write in their newspapers. Analysing whether they’re doing well is something that probably requires a journalist to do it.

It is important in life that young people are out playing sports; but in many communities you never see those people in the media. Only the professional teams are (appearing in the media), yet that’s an important part of community development and life. It’s good for the health of the community. It’s an important part of pride and developing self-respect.

We have many functions in the community. If they are not being done by the traditional media, we now have the opportunity that others can step in and do that using digital media. Some of this is being done by journalists, some is being done by educated members of the community who have the ability to write and convey information well. It is a very exciting time because these provide a lot of social benefits along the way.

Q: In an era where anyone with a website or internet access is potentially a citizen journalist or media publisher, how can journalists differentiate themselves and value add?

RP: The difference is between the functions of traditional media. One function is just information, what’s happening, what’s out there. That doesn’t require a great deal of training, it requires the ability to gather information and convey it in a reasonable way. Journalists have done that historically for about 200 years because nobody else was doing it.

But then there’s the news function which is really looking at society and saying here’s the range of information, here’s some issues and things we need to focus our attention on and here’s some things to think about – and that requires training. So what I think will happen in the years to come is that journalists will start moving out of the general information function and move more directly into this function that requires a group of practices of how to ensure you’re actually conveying very good information.

Q: But journalists aren’t the only ones with those skills – there are plenty of academics and so on who are doing this?

RP: We’re getting what I call “expert journalism”. One of the functions of journalists has traditionally been, that if we have to do a report about the economy, journalists go out and interview economists. Well, there are many economists now running their own news sites about the economy and they’re aimed not at other economists but the general public. It’s a very good thing but it does bypass journalists, but you have to be wanting to hear what an economist says to go to them. So there’s still a point where journalists need to be able to say to the general public, there’s something going on here that’s interesting.

We’re seeing that with scientists, with doctors, with sports people with a whole range of expert journalists. These really are experts but they were traditionally our sources of information before.

Q: So our sources are becoming our competitors or our collaborators?

RP: Absolutely, because today our monopoly over the platform, which is what really made journalism powerful in the 20th century, is breaking down, because of the internet.

Q: There has been a lot of criticism about the media’s coverage of politics. In particular, how can we value add when it comes to covering the long federal election campaign?

RP: I think that really becomes the issue. Journalists have traditionally done the horse race campaign – who’s ahead in the polls, who’s doing what. In many cases if you look at election campaigning and the way it’s portrayed in media, you don’t always get a sense of what the candidates’ positions are. Part of that is a space issue and a time issue in broadcasting.

Now that we’re breaking that with the internet, the value adding that the journalist really needs to be doing is comparing candidates and looking at the issues in depth so that if people want to see, what is their position on health care, on a particular agricultural policy, what does it mean and how does it compare to other options? It’s (helping the community to get) that background of understanding, because there’s enough ways for that basic information to get to the public.

Q: Yet you’ve written that: “Unfortunately, many journalists do not evidence the skills, critical analytical capacity, or inclination to carry out value-added journalism. News organizations have to start asking themselves whether it is because are hiring the wrong journalists or whether their company practices are inhibiting journalists’ abilities to do so.” What are the core skills/attributes for journalists of the future?

RP: What makes a good journalist to begin with and what is going to be needed in the future is curiosity. One has to be out there saying, what is this about, what’s behind it, why are they telling me that and not telling me something else, what are they not telling me? And to really understand what it’s all about, to put that together with information from others and to provide critical analysis.

A journalist’s role in this information age is to sort through it, to make some sense of it; and that means you have to be curious, you have to analyse and you have to be thinking, you have to have some background skills or understanding on what you’re reporting on.

Q: And is your advice for media organisations of the future?

RP: It doesn’t help when news organisations are suddenly saying to a journalist, you’ve got to produce five stories today. All you can do is get the basic information and after a while that information is not very valuable because it’s not in a coherent picture that helps people understand what’s going on.  So journalist organisations have to really start thinking about, how do we stop doing these little bits of flow, and start focusing on the other? There are enough places on the internet where you’re getting that (information) flow, and now what we need is understanding and comprehension.

Q: What role is there for non media organisations in contributing to public interest journalism? Any worthwhile examples?

RP: There are some very interesting examples. A lot of it is coming from NFPs and NGOs, for example, in covering foreign aid issues. NGOs will now have sites about where aid needs to be directed. They are quite journalistic in their approach and many of the people they use to do it are journalists.

So we’re seeing a whole group of specific information provision on specific issues. There are some very interesting sites now about the conflict in Syria. Some of it is quite independent neutral and some of it is from people who have chosen sides. The problem for the public is that they have to learn what ones are credible and which ones aren’t. And there is a role for journalists there in directing the public to useful sites.

Q: Who should or could journalism be collaborating with?

RP: Journalists have to collaborate more with community organisations; that’s absolutely fundamental. First of all they have to be very open to the kind of information that is there. They have to be open to the fact that they really want to help people.

One thing I’ve always said about journalists, and as an ex journalist, is that a lot of journalists don’t like the public – ‘please don’t call me about my article’. In the training and the mythology of journalism, we are the schoolmaster of the people. It’s the great unwashed out there we’re supposed to educate them and direct them…that’s a terrible view of the public. And in fact one needs to be partnering with them.

Q: It’s quite a cultural shift though?

RP: It is a cultural shift but it has to happen because the way we interact in a digital world requires interactions, transparency and trust – that haven’t necessarily been evident between media companies, journalists and the audience, which we didn’t really trust.

Q: How can journalists and media organisations develop that?

RP: It is a cultural shift and it takes time to do. One of the great advantages of journalism training is that we do train journalists to be suspicious – why are they giving me this information?, what are they not giving me?, why are they making me look over here because they’re hiding something over there?

It is important to be a little critical and wary along the way, but there are organisations and community-based groups that are not exercising power in the same way. And those are the ones where once you start working with them, you start seeing, it’s fine, we can work with them.

Q So should we be looking in our partnerships to the less powerful?

RP: I think so. They’re less worrisome to us. In terms of journalism you’re trying to hold power to account. But at the same time those who aren’t powerful are the ones we’re trying to help as well.

Sometimes those groups that aren’t exercising power are bringing forward social problems we really need to be dealing with and when we deal with them as equals and as partners in the community, we keep things calmer in the community and it actually facilitates solving problems.

Q: What other sectors can we learn from, that are succeeding with innovation in a digital world?

RP: What you see more than anything else today is the idea of connecting people and getting people to contribute in different ways. We have to believe that people out there know something.

In journalism we’ve always said the only thing people know is what they observe so we will go interview them and talk to two or three witnesses and try to put together what’s out there. Very rarely do we invite people to come to us with information.

For example, if you’re covering why there are so many problems with potholes in the street, you can ask the audience whether there is an expert in materials or who lays road – the guys who do road construction and design. We can ask because they’re reading us, they’re part of our community both online and offline. There are people out there with great expertise on everything in society, far more than journalists ever had. But we don’t know who they are. The networking effect of the digital world allows us to reach them in a way that we couldn’t reach them in the offline world.

Q: What is the most interesting piece of journalism research that you’ve seen recently, and why?

RP: Some of the more interesting things that are happening today have to do with different levels of trust that people have for media. A general pattern is starting to emerge, that people find more credibility in media that are closer to them. The farther away, the less trust. If you have a local community newspaper that may be a terrible newspaper in journalistic terms, but people often really like it because it’s theirs and it reflects them. One hundred miles away might be a larger, more important paper but we don’t quite trust them because they are not our neighbours, we don’t meet with them, we don’t know who they are.

A lot of the research, both in national and international journalism, is showing the same problem. It’s very interesting because we have to say that the local is every bit as important to people in their lives.

Q: How does that fit in a digitally connected world?

RP: Trust develops by human interaction. So with the digital connection, the longer you are in them and you build up a trust, you know whether to trust them or not. So you have this community effect still online. It’s not necessarily geographic.

Q: So if you want to do digital innovation in journalism, trust is all important?

RP: Absolutely. We all have multiple identities, we are not all the same people. I have an identity as a professor but I also have an identity as a father, as a sailor. We are all that way; we are not one person. The world today facilitates that easier than it did in the past.

Q: What is the most useful report on the future of journalism that you’ve seen recently, and why?

RP: A lot of them aren’t very useful. A lot of them are just whining, saying it’s awful, it’s terrible, it’s not the same as they used to be. I like those trying to identify solutions rather than just the problems. The problem is nobody really knows that the solutions are.

We are in an age where people need to try a lot of things. We are in a transition period. There is no one answer, there are different answers for different media. It is really distressing when a local radio tries to use the same strategy as a national radio strategy.

Q: Looking around the world, what are the best models of innovation in public interest journalism?

RP: Some of the most interesting ones right now are digital start-ups. Some are well known like Propublica. But there’s also San Francisco Public Press, saying we want to cover the community and community activities in a different way. We want to cover those activities that are not being covered.

The world is different today than it was 50 years ago and we have much more mobility. People are moving around. When you move away from your country, you still want to keep in touch with your home and culture.

There are lot of things happening to do that. For example, in Sweden there’s this wonderful (initiative), it started out as a free paper, Gringo (profiled in this recent article), it now has radio and TV shows. It was started by Latin Americans who had moved to Sweden; what they wanted to do was convey that we are different but we are being treated differently and to convey their problems in this very egalitarian society.

Because they were groundbreaking, they become a voice for all immigrants. Now you have other groups starting their own, partly because they want to keep in touch. Their audience is in Sweden. It (Gringo) was started by community members but now has journalists.

You’re seeing that happen everywhere, you’re seeing a new type of ethnic media than in the past.

You may have Kurds that have come to Australia from Iraq. That helps them explain to each other, how do you understand Australia, how do you relate to the country and integrate into the country and it helps preserve some of their values.

Journalism isn’t an end to itself; journalism is a function that helps society. I agree that innovation will come as solutions to community problems.

Q: In a 2009 paper provocatively titled “Why journalists deserve low pay” (available here) you argued that the professionalism of journalism and journalism education have turned most journalists into “relatively interchangeable information factory workers” and that “if journalism as an economic activity and the news business are to survive, we must find ways to alter practice and the skills to create new economic value.” Do you think journalists need to rethink their income expectations and rethink creating value out of what we do?

RP: The income expectations don’t need rethinking – they’re just going to change.

You have to be prepared to work in different ways; you have to think about your retirement incomes and your whole financing of life in a different way. The old way of working for an organization for 30 years isn’t going to continue. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that you have to be prepared for that.

Historically journalists had certain things that gave them a lot of economic value. If journalists wanted to speak to people in power, they had access. It was that unusual access that was very important. If there was a speech by the mayor or by the PM, they could go there and be there. Well, we can all be there by cable TV today or by Internet and watch it live.

So just merely saying, ‘well they said this’ isn’t enough any more. That’s where the rethinking has to happen. Many of the advantages that journalists traditionally had, of being able to go into the parliament are now changed.

So one has to think through, what were the advantages that journalists had, a lot of it had to do with sources and access other such things, which they no longer have a monopoly on.

If you don’t have a monopoly and people are already watching the event, if you just say ‘this event took place, you watched it’, that doesn’t matter to the public, but if you say ‘you watched this event, what does it mean, what does it tell us about what’s going to happen next?’

Now we have people able to do so much as citizen journalists and computer programs and all this ability to watch the world from afar. You have this deskilling, plus this value added problem, how can we have better skills than the public?

Q: Do governments or civil society have a role in sustaining public interest journalism?

RP: I think they should. The question is at what level should they do so and how should they be involved? All institutions of society, whether government, foundations or educational institutions (have a role) in helping and finding ways to have better flows of information to society.

Governments spend a great deal of money or give up a great deal of money supporting media – not only for public broadcasting but through tax advantages to commercial media. May be we should reallocate those to the news rather than entertainment operations, or to quality rather than tabloid.

Having good information flow and having citizens connected to their communities and participating in the decisions of their communities are important too.

Q: Foundations in other countries have done a lot but we haven’t had much of that in Australia…

RP: (It will come) in time, as the crisis grows. In Australia the situation has been deteriorating and it’s getting close to the point whether community and other foundations are going to say, we’ve got a problem now, whereas two years ago it may not have been perceived as that.

Q: What advice do you have for the Public Interest Journalism Foundation?

RP: I think there’s an educational function, about how this (space) is changing, and about the important functions of journalism. We have foundations that are designed to help give the public better information about health. We need to show them that there’s now a disconnect, and that the ability to reach the public with that information has to be part of your remit.

Q: What advice for do you have for journalism students?

RP: It’s a great time for journalism. I think it’s one of the most exciting times, there are more opportunities for young journalists to do things in the future.

One of the problems of traditional journalism in the past is that you came in and it was years before you got to do anything interesting, simply because there were so many more seasoned people above you.

But in this environment, you have an ability after a year or two to start your own activities to focus on a particular problem. So when you come in, you have more opportunity to do a greater variety of things than in the past.

(Also, I’d say) understand the technology and the issues. I always say to journalism students, get a second major, get a major in economics, psychology, healthcare because then you’re able to bring some knowledge or understanding to the issue so that when you’re writing or broadcasting about an issue, you’re not just parroting others, but you can bring some understanding to an issue.

Q: What are your predictions for the future of media in Australia and globally?

RP: Entertainment media is in great shape, but for news media it’s a different kind of setting, it is very, very difficult.

One of the things about journalism is if you go back 50 years ago, people in journalism could make a comfortable living. Nobody got rich. It was only in the bigger cities that you had people getting rich. Then in the 80s you had this period where people got used to getting rich.

We’re changing but I don’t view it as completely negative. Print is very good at providing information to large numbers of people. But if you’re not providing to large number of people it’s not very cost effective.

In a newspaper, about 12 to 15 percent of the costs are the news and the rest is everything else. That’s a terrible business to be in, and 85 percent or more of your costs are for things that are not to do with core business.

I do think that daily journalism will move away from newspapers because it’s just not cost effective. We will see some of the big city and national newspapers go. Smaller and rural papers are more likely to last longer but in the end, over the next 25 to 50 years, we will get rid of paper. It’s expensive.

Four out of five parts of the newspaper are entertainment, lifestyle. Journalists like to pretend what they’re doing is accountability journalism, but most of them never touch that. Why are we doing food news? We have to rethink the newspaper to say, what parts are we going to do without?

Q: What would you get rid of?

RP: It differs by community. A lot of those feature sections in newspapers, eg food and lifestyle. Now if you want food or automotive information, there are so many other choices, so how important is it to spend a lot of your resources doing that? So each paper is going to have to analyse what they’re spending and how much they’re getting back and to decide which ones are right to keep.

Journalists will need to be more accountable. More and more, you are going to have to justify your actions to funders, whether it be to foundations, the news company or to educational institutions wanting to work together on a project.

Q: How to retain independence?

RP: There is no complete independence and never has been. The question is where do you draw the line, and at what things to worry. Those are going to have to be negotiated each time, but journalists have been doing that for 200 years, trying to negotiate where the boundaries are.

***

For more from Professor Picard, see this interview with Eleanor Hall on ABC’s The World Today, in which he says journalists are going to have to become much more entrepreneurial:

“Essentially, the idea that you go to work for an organisation and stay there for 30 years is just dead and journalists are going to have to become much more entrepreneurial on their own, and much less dependent on the organisations for their income.”

Update: And the link to the National Press Club speech.

• Declaration: Melissa Sweet is a PhD candidate at the University of Canberra.

For those with a concern for the future of journalism, there is no shortage of reading.

You can start with 2012 Andrew Olle Media Lecture (or listen here), in which ABC presenter Mark Colvin outlines what he calls the crises of consensus, authority, credibility and finance facing journalism.

He concludes with this call to action: “All I can give you is my profound conviction that good journalism – journalism of integrity – is a social good and an essential part of democracy, and we have to do everything we can to try to preserve it.”

Meanwhile, journalists are working on four new books about the challenges facing the newspaper industry, according to Susan Wyndham’s Undercover column in the Sydney Morning Herald (27-28 October, 2012). These are:

• The former editor of The Australian Financial Review, Colleen Ryan, is due to publish with Melbourne University Press next year.

• Pamela Williams, the editor-at-large of the AFR, has recently signed a deal with HarperCollins, with a manuscript due within a year.

• Ben Hills, a former investigative journalist with Fairfax, is due to deliver his manuscript to ABC Books late next year.

• Former age editor Michael Gawenda has a late 2014 deadline with Allen & Unwin.

And Scribe recently announced that Tim Dunlop is due to publish a book on media and democracy, News At The End Of The World, next year. (Scribe is also publisher of the recent release from Greg Jericho, aka Grog’s Gaumut: The Rise of the Fifth Estate: social media and blogging in Australian politics). An excerpt is here.

And in the article below, former financial journalist Jim Parker – also known as the media analyst and blogger, Mr Denmore – reviews a new book from Dr Margaret Simons, Journalism at the Crossroads, also published by Scribe. Simons, the director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne, is a founding member of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation.

****

Investigating the role of journalism in democracies at a time of enormous change

Jim Parker writes:

Hundreds of young people in Australia enter communication degrees each year in anticipation of securing jobs in journalism that no longer exist. How must that make a journalism educator like Margaret Simons feel?

Well, not as depressed as you might think. In fact, as the title of her new book attests (Journalism at the Crossroads: Crisis and Opportunity for the Press), Simons – the director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne -  paints a tentatively hopeful picture of the future of the craft which has been her living for most of her life.

Of course, whether individual readers see it as ‘hopefully’ as the author will depend on their own circumstances and expectations. For to be sure, the vision of journalism in this book is not one of a return to the large newsrooms of the industrial age in media.

“It is becoming clear that, no matter what business model is adopted, the future for today’s mainstream news media organisations is a smaller and less profitable one,” Simons writes in her opening chapter.

That is the ‘crisis’ part of her analysis and it is a familiar one. The business model that supported 20th century mainstream media journalism – one in which the journalism was subsidised by large-scale advertising – is well and truly busted.  Indeed, the fulcrum of Simon’s book is the fortnight in the winter of 2012 in which our two major newspaper companies – Fairfax Media and News Ltd – announced major restructurings that resulted in the loss of hundreds of jobs.

For many, these were shocking events, unimaginable only a few short years ago. For others though, including this blogger, they were sadly inevitable. In fact, having watched Fairfax Media’s stumbling and bumbling adaptation to the digital age – both as an employee and now as an outside observer – it is a wonder it took so long.

Large-scale, mass-market journalism is no longer commercially tenable outside of public broadcasting. And even there, given the high probability of the formation of a Coalition government at the next election, one does not fancy its chances of survival in its present form.

With musings about the malaise of the news business (in reality “the advertising business”) well raked over, the more interesting arguments in this book relate to the author’s view that journalism should really be redefined as an “act of engaged citizenship”.

“Journalism in the future will be as much a practice as a profession, and many citizens may from time to time commit acts of journalism,”Simons says. “Yet the professionals, if they can only rethink from first principles what it is they do, will continue to be important – perhaps more important than ever before.”

So we hear of the use of Twitter by journalists to report on the Arab Spring and the growth of citizen journalism – most notably the ‘digital first’ experiments of the revitalised US newspaper group the Journal Register Company. The readership in that case was given a central role in the production of the papers – from story ideas to research and was further engaged through the use of the company’s substantial archives.

Of course, these sort of democratic ideas tend to send traditional journalists running from the room in horror, but the crisis in the profession has reached the point that formerly radical-sounding proposals like crowd-sourcing now seem positively mainstream.

As someone who quit mainstream media journalism six years ago to work in corporate communications, the idea in Simons’ book that resonated most with me is the concept that you don’t stop thinking like a journalist and doing journalistic things when you leave the media industry.

More and more companies – in telecommunications, banking, sport, healthcare, education and funds management – are doing things that formerly would have been seen as journalistic. I’m talking about writing articles, filming and editing interviews, producing e-newsletters and website communications and running social media campaigns.

Naturally, much of this would be written off by mainstream media journalists as public relations or marketing. Yet, I would challenge anyone to differentiate one of News Ltd tabloids ‘people power’ campaigns from outright marketing or PR.  Not everything – in fact a decreasing amount – of coverage in the MSM – is public-spirited. Much of it, in fact, is purely about corralling audiences around faked up ‘news’ and popular prejudices to sell onto advertisers.

My professional role, for instance, revolves around helping academic economists to communicate complex ideas to lay audiences. Yes, there are commercial imperatives here. But commercial imperatives increasingly influence mainstream journalism and in a less open way than what I do. The loss of distinct masthead editors at Fairfax and the move to a centralised multi-platform processing approach where journalists respond directly to commercial management imperatives is potentially such an example.

Simons touches on this debate by arguing that we need to stop defining good journalism by its degree of ‘independence’ (a hazy concept at best) and consider more the notion of ‘integrity’, a concept that she defines as “the freedom for journalists to follow the evidence and relay the result of inquiries and investigations to the audience in a way that is not determined by commercial, political and personal interests.

“Journalistic method is a product of the Enlightenment”,”she writes. It means searching for truth, heeding evidence and disseminating the results. If journalists are not able to do those things, the product is not journalism, but something else.

‘Journalism at the Crossroads’ is a vital addition to a growing body of scholarship in Australia and elsewhere about the role of journalism in a democratic society at a time of enormous change.

In many ways, we can ALL now be journalists and we can all contribute to the noble art of finding things out and telling people about them. That has to be cause for hope.

***

More recommended reading…

…a blast from the past

In his Andrew Olle lecture, Mark Colvin mentioned that in his early days as a journalist, his favourite book about journalists and journalism was the 1967 Point of Departure, by the British writer James Cameron. Colvin also referred to this interview with Cameron on YouTube.

…and looking forward

A smorgasbord of articles examining new media trends and developments comes in this new release from Wiley, A Companion to New Media Dynamics, edited by John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns.

Contributions include:

• The Economics of New Media, by John Quiggin
• National Web Studies: The Case of Iran Online, by Richard Rogers, Esther Weltevrede, Sabine Niederer and Erik Borra
• Long Live Wikipedia? Sustainable Volunteerism and the Future of Crowdsourced Knowledge, by Andrew Lih
• Improvers, Entertainers, Shockers and Makers by Charles Leadbeater
• The Dynamics of Digital Multisided Media Markets: How Media Organisations Learn from the IT Industries How to Engage with an Active Audience, by Patrik Wikström
• The Internet and the Opening Up of Political Space, by Stephen Coleman
• The Internet as a Platform for Civil Disobedience, by Cherian George
• The New Media Toolkit, by Mark Pesce
• Beyond Generations and New Media, by Kate Crawford and Penelope Robinson.

How can we sustain the work of public interest journalism into the future?

This question, which lies at the heart of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation’s mission, is one that all sectors of society should be pondering at a time of unprecedented loss of talent and experience from the industry.

How many of the journalists departing Fairfax and News Ltd will remain in the industry? And what might help them to develop new career paths or media start-ups?

Some practical help – free office space – is on offer from Andrew Jaspan, editor of The Conversation, based at Carlton in inner Melbourne.

The offer is for a desk, wifi and access to advice from The Conversation’s tech, editorial and back office team.

Independent journalists interested in taking up Andrew’s offer should contact him via The Conversation’s website (or andrew.jaspanATtheconversation.edu.au).

Meanwhile, it seems that there is an extremely timely research project to be had – tracking what happens to this cohort of journalists over the next five years or so.

It would be useful to have this documented, as well as to track their reflections of the industry and how these might change over time.

- Melissa Sweet

One of the many pleasures of the recent New News conference was the opportunity it provided for interaction with journalism students, both online via Twitter and during the sessions.

The students were tweeting reports and commentary, and also filed stories from each session to the New News Reporting Hub - a joint project of the Melbourne Press Club, Monash University and the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advanced Journalism.

Have a read of their stories to get a flavour of the conference’s stimulating and forward looking discussions about the future of news.

Some snippets from just a few of the students’ reports:

• Fleeting tweets, journo beats
The NPR’s Andy Carvin does not like the term citizen journalist as he thinks it suggests the reporting will be bad, and that there is a wall between journalists and other people who practise journalism. In his fascinating keynote address, Carvin described his forensic use of Twitter as a research tool when reporting on the Arab Spring.

• New media tastes sweet
As new media enterprises shared their experiences, Michael Gawenda suggested a body like the Australia Council could be set up to fund journalists and media venues.“The fact is that good journalism enriches the culture in which we live,” he said. “In Australia we need support.”

• What do we think of the Fink?
According to Professor Matthew Ricketson, if the public got all their knowledge on the Finkelstein Review from the mainstream media, they would be hard pressed to understand its recommendations. He said of the 29 opinion pieces that appeared in The Australian newspaper following the release of the review, one was neutral, two supported it, and 26 opposed it with “varying degrees of vehemence and sharpness and vitriol”.

Meanwhile, this post at the Croakey health blog describes the “incubator session”, which aimed to brainstorm ideas for a new online publication about climate change and health.  Fiona Armstrong, a journalist and editor who helped establish the Climate and Health Alliance, has begun an email list for those interested in carrying the publication forward. Contact her via infoATcaha.org.au.

Another highlight of the conference was the launch of The Citizens’ Agenda, an action research project which will use the federal election to test the capacity of social media to increase civic engagement in the political process and enhance political journalism.

The project will be driven by Melbourne University’s Centre for Advanced Journalism, in partnership with Fairfax Media and the social media group OurSay and also involves researchers from Melbourne University’s Centre for Public Policy and the Media and Communications Program. (More details here).

The New News conference aims to brings together journalists and media industry leaders, academics and students, citizen journalists and bloggers, and members of the community. It is about engaging the people who will have most to do with determining the future of journalism – the audience.

It is held by the Centre for Advanced Journalism, in partnership with the Melbourne Writers Festival and the Public Interest Journalism Foundation, and supported by the Melbourne Press Club and Copyright Agency Limited.

Margaret Simons, the director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism and a founding member of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation, says that recent developments in mainstream media organisations amount “to a potential civic emergency — a big decline in Australia’s professional journalistic capacity”.

“Yet for the most part,” she says, “the fundamental changes in news media and journalism are discussed, not with the people who matter most, but within the industry and, to a lesser extent, within academia. Even academics and industry figures rarely meet, for which both sides are the poorer.”

That is one of the reasons behind the New News conference, which is part of a rolling program of New News events throughout the year (more details here).

• The New News program is here.