Media Responses to Convergence Culture

Brisbane.
The next plenary session at the CCi conference responds to Mark Deuze's talk - John-Paul Marin from SBS and Tony Walker (blogger at ABC Digital Futures and the ABC's Manager of Digital Radio) will share their own experiences of operating in the new, user-led, media environment that Mark has sketched out.

John-Paul makes a start, and begins by noting the importance of audience engagement for SBS. The last 12-18 months has been a coming-of-age process for SBS's online services, and there has been an associated cultural change at SBS as part of this process. Online is much more embedded in the production processes at SBS than has previously been the case, and online producers can be much more involved in production processes right from the stage of their conception. More people may already, or soon, be watching SBS TV online than they do through their TV sets.

John-Paul also notes that forms of audience engagement remain somewhat lo-fi, though - fora, discussion boards, blogs, and other simple tools are used especially to engage with communities which do already exist (harnessing existing champions for such engagement within these communities). The approach is to engage with amateur journalists and content creators through this process, and online producers become facilitators in response to audience needs much more than programme makers.

Tony says that there may be little point in talking about the future of media institutions if Mark's view is correct that the foundation of permanence on which they rest is beginning to slide. Media organisations now struggle with the shift from audiences as product receivers (expected to remain permanent) to audiences as active users and participants. In the past, emerging audiences were expected to 'grow into' the products being offered by media organisations; this is now no longer true as such audiences can find plenty of alternative offerings, and it is the media organisations which must change to deal with this. This is also complicated by generational changes within organisations, and there is also a significant deal of frustration within many media organisations across this generational divide - and in the context of impermanence, younger staff whose interests are impossible to be addressed within the institutional framework may now move out of the institution much earlier and set up their own alternative operations.

It is dangerous to see this merely as a generational issue, however - it is a matter of diverging mindsets, and there are high-level managers in some media organisations who do understand this shift, though they may be few and far between. Overall, however, it seems that managers who make the strategic decisions are of a certain age, and do not necessarily understand the full potential of the technological tools and possible directions now at their disposal; this is a significant shift from earlier times where managers had risen through the ranks from ground-level involvement with standard technologies and could bring this inherent understanding to bear on strategy formation. There is in a sense a need for a kind of reverse mentoring process, where top-level managers are taught by younger staff about digital production.

Panel chair Anne Dunn now notes the current structuring of media organisations around the divisions between media forms - a structure which tends to stifle cross-platform content offerings. Often, there remains a sense that radio, television, or print remains the 'core business'. Terry Flew notes that during the first rise of computer technology, it was visible everywhere except in productivity statistics; there was a lag between technological change and institutional response - is this the case today with the rise of new media technologies, too?

John-Paul responds that the lag is driven by managerial responses to some extent, and especially relates to a reluctance to take risks. SBS has recently worked through a planning process which did take some risks, and broke down some barriers between divisions in the institution. Tony adds that the lag may play out differently in different cases - there are responses on the production side of the equation which can happen sometimes quite quickly, but on the audience side of the equation (responding to audience needs) there is a profound lag indeed, driven in part by generational issues. Mark adds an example from archaeology, which had a very strong focus on Romanisation at some point, and therefore the data was perceived strongly through a Roman lens. The same is true in media organisations, which have their own limited perspectives.

My question is this: so what would the ideal media organisation look like in this new environment which Mark has sketched out? Tony points to OhmyNews as a reconceptualisation of journalism from the ground up - it does away with the closed environments of traditional journalistic models, and has made the site a very potent presence in the South Korean mediasphere. Margaret Simons yesterday also pointed to the possibility of models built around small, strong teams of media practitioners tied into strong user communities. John Paul points to the continuing importance of a strong institutional voice; a reconfigured SBS, for example, would be very strongly community-driven platform for engagement which would nonetheless include some high-quality, well-produced content to maintain that voice.

Sal Humphreys also points to the problem of current IP regulations, and Peter Black adds to this by noting that part of any lag in responses may also be caused by institutional lawyers holding back innovative approaches. John Paul also says that at least SBS lawyers have been very supportive of new ideas, and help develop appropriate and sound bases for new developments. For the ABC, Tony also points to the role of the ABC Charter as a further influence on what can and cannot be developed in this context; he highlights Paul Chadwick as director of editorial policy in the ABC as a very key supporter of new ideas in the organisation.

Stuart Cunningham comes back to the question of organisational models: big revolutions have occurred in public service media organisations in the past, he notes, and these organisations have coped with internal and external change. SBS and ABC to some extent have managed to build their reputation for being porous to societal influences and trends - professional ethics here are about porosity. Lelia Green mentions her own experiences with user-driven Websites in which there were significiant internal struggles between groups of participants; John Paul says that similar tendencies are present in many of SBS's Websites (such as The World Game with its many partisan groups of football fans), and that they need to be managed well - but this cannot be used as an excuse to shut down fora or other forms of user participation.

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