Journalistic Models in Australian News

The second speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Lucy Morieson, whose focus is also on Australian online news – in particular, on the Websites of The Age, Crikey, and The Conversation. This also plays out against the changing business and professional environments for Australian journalism, of course.

Journalism in Australia is currently in crisis, as audiences and advertisers are dissipating, and this also has an effect on Australian political and democratic processes. At the same time, this is also an opportunity, enabling the emergence of new players in the journalistic sphere. Between the dichotomous rhetorics of crisis and opportunity, however, lies a much more messy reality.

The relationship between journalism and democracy is not a straightforward one – simply providing information to the public does not result in democracy, and the specific democratic contribution of journalism is generally limited. In the recent shift towards a greater communicative abundance access to diverse media forms has infiltrated everyday life, enabling what Keane has called a monitory democracy in which much more information is created and distributed; this is also accompanied by a greater information overload, cynicism, and disinterest, however.

The three sites which Lucy has studied have negotiated this environment in different ways. The Age site is the online version of a broadsheet newspaper, building on a perception of quality but also subject to increasingly significant financial pressures; this has required it to take an uncomfortable role of professionalism, attune to the changing financial pressures, shift away from its traditional fourth estate role, move towards a new form of audience engagement which is based on financial rather than political imperatives.

There is still a substantial divide between print and online at The Age. This is also reflected in the professional relations between the journalists working for either section, in the structural setup of the two newsrooms, and in the news agendas of either – as a result, the online version is much more strongly focussed on salacious material which will draw in casual readers than the print edition, which attempts to serve a particular class of reader. The organisation has shown a new form of responsiveness to its readers, at least from a business perspective – controversial columnist Catherine Deveny was sacked in response to strongly negative reader responses to one of her stories, for example.

Crikey was founded as an online, amateur newsletter focussed on commentary and opinion, building on a niche business model and a form of contradictory professionalism that sees itself as both stalwart and new guard, critic and champion of the fourth estate. It takes an audited approach to audiences which is dictated by traditional notions of journalistic professionalism, while criticising the professionalism of more traditional news organisations. This means it positions itself as at once alternative and professional, as involving professional staff and drawing on the work of its readers as contributors, as operating in a context of both crisis and opportunity.

The Conversation is the youngest of these three sites, and draws entirely on academics as authors, mediated by a team of journalistic editors; it's aim is to make the work of academics translatable and newsworthy, but in reality its articles often respond to the existing mainstream news agenda rather than setting its own. Its funding model bypasses traditional questions about the business model of contemporary journalism by drawing on philanthropic support from Australian universities, government and other sources, but it remains committed to professional journalistic standards. There is a question about whether this constitutes journalism as such, and the site has come in for criticism from mainstream journalists, but it has also opened the door to a greater role for domain experts in the news conversation. Generally, too, this opens up possibilities for the greater participation of diverse groups in public life.