Futures for Journalism?

Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker in this very enjoyable session on day two of the CCi conference is Margaret Simons, asking the question "What are journalists for?" She begins by noting the role of the Australian Press Council, long perceived as a publishers' poodle, and recounts how she has recently been contacted by a researcher at the APC inquiring about the development of journalistic staff numbers in Australian publishers - publishers themselves were not interested to share these numbers, presumably because there is a strong decline in numbers in the current, distressed context of the journalism industry.

What information is available about such staff figures, then? Margaret would go about this by utilising her personal networks, contacting journalists and middle managers to get at such data, most likely jeopardising their and her own careers in the process. Journalists, at any rate, are under threat, and journalism can be very dirty work, as this anecdote illustrates. What is worth preserving about journalism and journalists, then - especially in a world where anyone inside or outside the industry can publish journalistic content?

Journalism's history traces back to London's coffeehouses, and early journalists frequented them to scare up news and scandal; today, however, journalists are often strongly embraced by political actors, largely in order to enable them to feed intended tidbits of information to such journalists who now perhaps lack a more critical edge. As all of this moves further towards an online, niche environment, what happens to this - will we enter a more highly fragmented age?

Key elements of journalism remain investigation, storytelling, and conversation, and each of these need to be preserved - as does basic reporting (focussing oin everyday aspects). Conversation has received a major boost in the online environment, even if major media organisations still are very reluctant to engage in such conversation. Blogs and citizen journalists do conversation well, but not necessarily investigation and storytelling (and usually acknowledge this, too). Conversation can be a powerful tool of journalism, but by itself is not sufficient; journalism done well is hard and dirty work for which news bloggers and citizen journalists may not have the time, resources, skills, or contacts.

News bloggers focus on opinion and commentary, and gatewatching is a useful addition to journalism, but cannot replace it altogether (that's not to say that mainstream journalism necessarily does much better - a significant percentage of industrial journalism also simply repurposes government information and commercial press releases). Interesting experiments combine professional and citizen journalism approaches, Margaret suggests, and she names Youdecide2007 and Assignment Zero as examples here.

Interaction with the audience and the blurring of the line between audience and content maker will continue, as does the shift in writing style from impartial reporting to a more opinionated writing style (as Crikey does it, for example). Audiences are increasingly interested in narrative voice rather than robotic objectivity. Journalists are once again turning to correspondents in the full sense of the word. At the same time, factual accuracy must remain, and disinterested reporting must survive. Journalists will be challenged in their definition of 'objectivity' - a term which retains a pre-modern positivist definition in journalism that is rather underproblematised.

What outlooks and business models will support such journalism in the future? Journalists may increasingly start their own sites (as they did, in fact, when newspapers first emerged); nearly all of these remain niche publication, however, and will never be mass media (attempting to transform itself that way it would likely lose its character). But if everyone has their own relationship with their niche publication, how is democracy maintained in the face of this fragmentation? Margaret suggests that the new metaphor for journalism is mapping - journalists provide a map of our world at various levels, and in doing so make choices of what it is necessary to include; in the future, audiences (users) will increasingly be co-creators of this map by contributing their local knowledge.

Margaret plans to launch a hyperlocal news site for her own suburb of Flemington in Victoria; in The Flemington Map, she plans to report on all matters of local relevance, and thereby show the connections of local issues to matters of national importance. This project may fail, but Margaret suggests that we need many of such new projects to work out what is possible and feasible here, and in the process we will learn what elements of journalism are worth preserving and what new elements drawn from other sources will need to be introduced.

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