Club Bloggery 13: Once Were Barons

Last week we published another instalment in our ABC Online series Club Bloggery - this time dealing with the demise of iconic Australian news magazine The Bulletin. As always, the article is also cross-posted over at Gatewatching:

Club Bloggery: Once Were Barons

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

Though we often give the print media a hard time here at Club Bloggery, we're not so sanguine about the end of the iconic magazine, The Bulletin, last month.

Despite its virulently racist origins, and its tendency under Kerry Packer to be used now and then as the mogul's mouthpiece, its end is an alarming symptom of something wider and more serious. The worrying structural problem it reveals is the difficulty of sustaining any venues for the specialised task of investigative journalism in Australian and international media.

Investigative journalism is a notoriously protracted, expensive and difficult business. Complicated stories, stories that must get past deliberate obfuscation by powerful interests, or stories that take a long time to unfold, all require major investment.

'Proper' investigative journalists may spend weeks or even months doing little more than following the paper trail and unravelling fact and fiction, and there's no guarantee of a usable story at the end of their work - but if it comes, the payoff is the kind of reporting that brings down governments, blows open corporate scandals, and brings public figures to account. The Bulletin, at least while Kerry Packer was prepared to subsidise it, was hailed as one of the last refuges for investigative journalists within an otherwise increasingly indifferent commercial media environment.

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