The Present of Journalism

So, last Saturday I went to the Future of Journalism event in Brisbane (and spoke on one of the panels). Contrary to my usual practice, I didn't live-blog the event - panel-based events are notoriously difficult to blog. Here, then, are some reflections on what I saw - adding to comments already posted by Mark Bahnisch, Marian Edmunds, Cameron Reilly, and Bronwen Clune, among others.

The event began well, with Margaret Simons setting the theme with her usual insightful comments. Her observations about the troubled economic future for the journalism industry (and here, especially newspapers) are perhaps nothing new to most of us (though still not necessarily fully appreciated by many journalists themselves), and the bleak future that this malaise points to especially for in-depth, costly, quality investigative journalism has been discussed in some detail already (including by Jason, Barry and me in the Club Bloggery series), but it was a useful framing for the panels to follow.

Two key points Margaret made bear repeating, however. On the one hand, that the link between the business of media and the practice of journalism is gradually being severed - it is increasingly possible for some forms of journalism to take place outside of the business environment (indeed, the best future for investigative journalism may now lie in funding by taxpayers, NGOs, or philanthropists, while quality political commentary in Australia is now found in citizen journalism sites more so than newspapers), while there is also a chance for journalists to extract themselves from employment by mainstream media organisations and set up shop on their own (something Margaret herself is currently attempting to do, of course).

On the other hand, then, this also requires journalists (and especially journalism students), to develop skills well beyond the standard journalistic craft. Margaret stressed quite strongly that journalism students would be well advised to learn about business plans, and to seek a possible professional future in alternative ventures rather than relying on the availability of employment in the mainstream industry.

Such views contrasted in interesting (and sometimes frustrating) ways with the panels of Griffith University journalism students and mainstream newspaper editors which followed. One of the students represented has already objected to the characterisation of their statements on the panel which I made at the conference, but I'll say it again - I didn't see a great deal of thinking outside of the box, that is, outside of the conventions of mainstream journalism, from the students' panel.

Perhaps it's unfair to expect too much here - the students had clearly been briefed by conference organisers to spend some time discussing their personal news usage, which wasn't all that interesting -, but the perspectives they represented struck me as rather insular, and I didn't get the sense that they were particularly well prepared for the significant industry upheaval which has been foreshadowed (and, in the case of Fairfax, may already been underway). I don't mean to overly criticise the students themselves in this context - rather, I'd suggest that for the most part, journalism courses in Australia and many other countries tend to prepare their graduates for the present rather than the future of journalism. Learning from the wise old heads (at university, and later during cadetships in news organisations) is fine as far as it goes, but their perspectives, honed in years and decades of newsroom socialisation, are limited.

Just how limited, in fact, became apparent in the following panel with editors of the Courier-Mail and Sunday Mail. Titled 'adapt or die', and recast as 'innovate or die' by moderator Hugh Martin from APN, based on what the editors of these commercial newspapers had to say the odds seem stacked in favour of the latter possibility. Courier-Mail editor David Fagan's response to the structural challenges before him was mainly to point to the paper's use of more engaging graphics; he also noted its continuing expansion into Brisbane's outer suburbs, addressing especially recent new Queenslanders moving up here from the southern states, and the simultaneous switch to the tabloid format more favoured by former readers of, say, the Daily Telegraph. (Fagan himself studiously avoided the T-word, of course, referring to the new format as a 'compact' instead.)

Not a great deal of innovation or even adaptation in the face of new challenges especially from online news sites was evident here - just the intention to keep fighting for every reader by aggressively marketing the established brand and product. And yes, that's a strategy which is likely to work for the Courier-Mail for some time to come, as any loss of existing readers may be counterbalanced by the significant influx in new arrivals to the state - but that doesn't make it sustainable in the long run.

Real innovation in journalism in Australia is probably going to happen around the edges rather than at the core of the journalism industry, then - in Crikey, if we're lucky, and in the wilderness beyond, more likely. The highly concentrated media ownership structures of the Australian media industry are partly responsible for this, of course - in an environment where most Australian cities are journalistic one horse towns at best, there has historically been little incentive to engage in content and format innovation.

I would have liked to spend more of the time allotted to my own panel - with Mark Bahnisch and Marian Edmunds, and moderated by Cristen Tilley - on a discussion of such innovation where it has already begun, but I think we did get stuck a little too much on the 'amateurs vs. professionals' debate which I had hoped to avoid. I'll take some of the blame for this - I think I got the point across that this debate is stupidly reductive, and that the haughty petulance towards citizen journalism expressed in a number of recent editorials is laughably ill-informed, but not so much the point that there are better opportunities for exploring the future of journalism if we're prepared to examine projects that do already engage in Pro-Am journalistic processes. Ah well.

Overall, though, what also struck me during the event was the very blinkered vision of many in the mainstream industry. I got the sense that there's something not unlike Stockholm syndrome at work here - the longer you work in the industry, the harder is it to imagine any other way of working than by following the routines established long ago. (A recent post by Bronwen Clune about the troubles at Fairfax seems to echo that sentiment.) This, I'm sorry to say, seems doubly so not for journalists, but for many journalism educators, who continue to churn out industry-ready cadets for an industry that's increasingly less ready to take them on. I can't think of many journalism courses which have already responded to Margaret Simons's challenge to incorporate the entrepreneurial skills required for journalism graduates to set up their own operations rather than rely on employment in the mainstream industry.

Many if not most other information and knowledge industries have already moved to put much more emphasis on such independent entrepreneurship, in order to weather the challenges of portfolio employment and precarious labour environments which Mark Deuze has outlined so clearly in his recent book Media Work. (Other than journalism, off the top of my head I can think of only one clear example which similarly has yet to come to terms with its emerging new environment: academia. Here, too, we all too often take for granted a future of employment and prosperity, even in spite of some very clear challenges on the horizon, and real innovation remains limited to a few leading lights in the sector.)

So, overall, some interesting insights into the present state of journalism in Australia. The future of journalism, however, remains very much unclear.

Technorati : Courier-Mail, Future of Journalism, Margaret Simons, citizen journalism, journalism, journalism industry
Del.icio.us : Courier-Mail, Future of Journalism, Margaret Simons, citizen journalism, journalism, journalism industry