THE MEDIA HAS CHANGED; THE HABITS HAVEN’T
As a cadet journalist, I rode a train to work. In those days a commuter without a newspaper was like a modern teen minus a smartphone.
I watched travellers for a reaction when they encountered my splendid stories. That rarely happened. Instead, most readers followed a routine.
They'd glance at the headlines, maybe linger lightly if the story affected their suburb, and then turn to the sports news. There they'd stay for much of the 30-minute ride to the city.
The other draw was the comic strips, film reviews and the editorial page cartoon with readers' letters. Maybe they'd browse the serious stuff later when they got to the office, though I wasn't that confident because of another regular observation.
The paper had separate weekend sections selling cars and houses and advertising jobs. Next day’s paper could be bought at the gate where bundles of the early edition were trucked to the airport or country towns.
After the pubs closed on Friday nights the boozer-buyers at the loading dock pulled out the ad sections and tossed the news and feature pages into waste bins kept just for the discards.
And there laid the deathless prose of Duncan Graham and his few hundred colleagues who thought their words were wanted. For many it seemed they weren’t.
In the old system journos got employed by a publisher that sold space for ads. The income was used to run the show and pay the workers.
The ‘rivers of gold’ funding model that irrigated the newsroom has run dry because advertisers prefer social media to reach consumers with more precision.
Had the bosses of the past been more ruthless they’d have kicked out the journos decades ago and just published broadsheets of ads.
That didn’t happen till much later because a few company board members tended to be part of the establishment, starting their days with a dab of do-gooder after the shower.
They also saw themselves as influencers, nudging society in the direction that suited their interests.
This is not a paean to capitalism though some devotees could be altruistic: The 19th century Australian press barons were sometimes linked to universities and philanthropic projects.
Though numbers were few, enough believed that as long as their investments returned big profits they earned merit points by keeping the community informed - or at least telling of the happenings that they thought the unwashed should know about.
Ponder this: Although the Internet, smartphones and social media have destroyed the world just described, needs haven’t changed - only the means of assembly and discovery.
Online stores outrank news sites. So are the alleged funnies, no longer monochrome comic strips but full-colour videos. Sport and entertainment pull the clicks.
The difference between now and then is the delivery system - an intimate screen as opposed to a spread of newsprint.
Although serious journalism rode a machine powered by profit, the driver won prestige for helping reveal some lower-level wrongdoers and so maintain the status quo.
That puffed-up notion has largely vanished along with hot type. However a few columns of writers remain who think that the public has a right to know and we have a duty to tell.
We’re addicted - and poor. Idealists have the skills but not the money so rely on supporters to pay the small independents’ bills - which usually don't include wages for the writers.
The solution is to use the income from the ads, just as before the Internet. Google, Meta, X and other platform / publishers may not have vision beyond the Nasdaq Composite but moralists reckon they have responsibilities that come with trading in a democracy.
That means using their ad incomes to fund an independent agency with the job of supporting professional journalists determined to keep the ideals of a free and open society alive.
Possible? Of course, easy peasy, it’s been done before. The ABC started in 1932.
The problem is that the new media moguls are big fellas strutting past state borders. So it needs the power of politicians to make them do the right thing.
The state funds three of democracy’s pillars, the Legislature, Executive and Judiciary. The fourth is the Media; the government can and must ensure it stays upright.
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The author blogs at: https://indonesianow.blogspot.com/
First published in Independent Australia, 8 August 2024: https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/news-media-has-changed-but-our-needs-stay-the-same,18853
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