SMALL, SMART AND STRUGGLING
Where’s the torrent of
cash expected to flow from Google, Meta and other overseas behemoths plundering
Ozzie journalism? Here’s the latest
handwringing.
Three years ago more
than 80 per cent of readers said they hadn’t used print media to get a news fix. Hadn’t or couldn’t?
The Melbourne-based NGO Public
Interest Journalism Initiative reckons it knows of “166 news outlet
closures” across the past five years.
The scorched mediascape is
being colonised by Quixotes, aka altruists, motivated by the frustration
felt from living in a society where mass communication concentration levels are
"amongst the highest in the world."
The battlers are listed by
compendium True North as Australia’s Independent New Media Publishers.
The catalogue of 65
titles is incomplete and needs scrutiny. Absent are the uni newsletters
employing editors; Indonesia at Melbourne and New Mandala (ANU)
are free and cover serious affairs.
A few shows are vanity
outlets for their flopabout founders. The personal pronoun gets sweaty
from excess workouts. Most have a drum to beat; likewise, Murdoch. He plays on the right.
Outfits such as The
Koori Mail are specialist; others are satirical like The Shovel. Editors no longer sit in glass cubes
overlooking newsrooms big as aircraft hangars.
The top desk is now more likely to be a coffee-stained kitchen table
with a laptop, smartphone and an indifferent pussycat.
The skills needed for
startups can be gleaned online by companies offering templates and links. Substack
takes ten per cent of readers’ subs but writers can create free-use websites.
Costs are still an impost
if design professionals are used. A few like Michael West Media hire a video
whizz to polish presentations; others rely on the standalone skills of
wordsmiths.
These tend to be printaholics
- like Jack Waterford, former editor of The Canberra Times and still a
contributor, also a Pearls and Irritations regular pricking the capital bubble.
Not all are straining to
stop the presses that are closing anyway.
Veteran foreign correspondent Hugh Lunn’s folksy recollections in Over
the Top are delights to sample, not challenges to arouse.
All sites have one thing
in common – begging, though they call it appealing.
The rivers of gold that
irrigated the legacy media are running dry.
Some newbies use aridity as a positive – 'see, no ads', reasoning that screaming
retailers repel serious readers.
There are few philanthropists
in the paddock: Three years ago, miner
Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation promised
to help 18 small publishers secure licensing deals with Google and Facebook.
What’s happened? Best check the tailings dump as the
foundation hasn’t responded to an update request.
Backing small publishers
is risky as any journalist might reveal a discomforting morsel and turn a donor
from generosity to petulance. Gina Rinehart’s
$14 million support for Netball Australia was
bounced out of court when some players thought her company’s
logo linked them to her late father Lang Hancock’s alleged racism.
It’s not just the miffed that
close off with a can-rattle; The
Guardian which pays
its UK editor-in-chief Katharine Viner almost a million dollars a year, pleads
daily for benefactors, reminding readers there’s currently no paywall or ads.
At the mid-level is The
Conversation which offers salaried academics an unpaid forum without waiting
months for a journal peer-review.
Erudition doesn’t equal
clarity. Having a PhDs is no qualification
for writing a pithy line plebs can understand at first reading. The Conversation says it employs
150 full-time scribes (2020 figures) to make the abstruse palatable - their
efforts apparently reaching 38 million online users.
Impressive, but about half
the claimed viewership
for Murdoch’s Fox News where bottom feeders graze on their prejudices –
no thinking required.
The Conversation uses
the Creative Commons allowing authors’ work to be republished free if
acknowledged. Some research has helped set the national agenda, usually through
ABC follow-ups.
The website’s owner is a
registered charity and last year said it spent $7.87
million. Every taxation time it bombards
readers for more and more money. It was launched in Oz in 2011 and has become
an intellectual export, online in the US, UK, Brazil, Canada, France, NZ, Spain and Indonesia.
In the archipelago The
Conversation wants to be the “leading media platform that empowers
Indonesian researchers, academics and experts to collaborate, spread knowledge,
communicate information and educate the younger generation.”
Here some quality control
is needed when a professor from the prestigious Universitas Indonesia
can get a run alongside a teacher at an obscure private uni. There are
almost 3,000 in this category against 184 listed as public.
Last year The
Conversation published
more than 1,000 articles in Indonesia reaching an estimated six million. That’s
wholesome in a nation where only one in a thousand is
reported to be an “avid reader”.
Australian are attached
to the freebies. Sites like Crikey
bait readers by offering an opening par or two as an entrée, then demand a
credit card number for the full meal that may be on the ABC’s menu.
Press Reader
offers free newspaper access
to members of community libraries, a digital continuation of last century’s
public reading room. Only The
Australian and The Guardian remain – the rest have pulled out,
indifferent to the needs of the curious poor.
To shift society the
independents need to offer substance, reads like this unforgettable obituary
by Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges of American HR advocate Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi slain by a sniper in the
West Bank.
Unlike The Weekend
Australian’s polemic it doesn’t simplify
the conflict as “a fight between good and evil” but a complex, compound,
wretched, political and personal tragedy.
The US alternative media is
way ahead with subscribers and unapologetic advocacy. The 1440 digest
site claims
3.9 million “intellectually curious readers”.
The Constitution’s First
Amendment helps shield writers from litigious lawyers and their
big paymasters– a species much feared by small Australian publishers with outworn
credit cards.
The US website on politics
and war Drop Site spells
out the issue: “Investigative journalism is expensive … digital ad revenue
alone can’t sustain the slow boring of investigative work. It can only be
supported by people who insist that it exist.”
That’s not Google and Meta.
DisclosurFirst published in Pearls & Irritations, 17 October 2024:
No comments:
Post a Comment