ideas: on media

Google should search for fix, too

I am loath to support anything Rupert Murdoch says or does. His contribution to journalism as it stands – residing over mostly tabloid rags with mostly declining readerships, to not even mention the genuinely dangerous Fox News – is hardly impressive. Nor do I often disagree with Mark Bahnisch from the excellent Larvatus Prodeo, a man I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and who remains a master to my blogging apprenticeship.

But he’s simply wrong on Google and its legally-questionable, commercially-shortsighted rip-and-read model of news delivery. Not that he’s alone – the blogosphere, at least as precious and certainly as feral as any pack of journalists, have turned on Murdoch and his campaign against Google News.

Murdoch says Google is stealing from publishers, a legal question that is far from resolved. Recently he dispatched one of his key lieutenants, Australian-born Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson, to throw some hand grenades while on holiday at home. He told Murdoch’s The Australian:

“There is a collective consciousness among content creators that they are bearing the costs and that others are reaping some of the revenues – inevitably that profound contradiction will be a catalyst for action and the moment is nigh. There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet.”

It’s hyperbole that only inflames the debate and, predictably, steers it off course. It allows bloggers to launch into the tired routine about journalists losing public trust, about how traditional media dismisses the role of blogging and social/citizen contributions (worried, the argument goes, about being done out of a job by the new-media geeks), about how the mainstream media is just as guilty of recycling content, etc. Suddenly the debate is framed that Google can do all it likes because Murdoch is greedy and journalists are responsible for Today Tonight.

Frankly, I’m sick of legitimate debates about the future of media being derailed and dismissed by non-journalists deluded into thinking the world can do without some of these traditional reporting models.

Yes, the contribution of non-journalists to reporting is increasingly important and really exciting. Yes, Murdoch is greedy and fairly evil. Yes, there are a lot of really rotten stories masquerading as journalism (a phenomenon that, remarkable as it may seem to some, is actually not new, nor exclusive of the many rotten, irresponsible and just plain waste-of-kilobits trivial blogs crowding cyberspace). Yes, the press also feeds off itself to produce derivative content. Yes, Today Tonight really does produce a lot of stories about miracle back pain cures and gravity-defying wonder bras.

You’ve got us there. Now can we move on?

Bahnisch writes:

“So those who are trying to protect the salaried model of journalism, and those who think this model protects the public interest, might pause and consider whether this sort of approach is really the way to go – even if a supposedly successful and brilliant mogul suggests it is. If Murdoch’s proved anything with this spray, it’s that he gets neither the internet nor, arguably, the media business.”

Murdoch doesn’t really ‘get it’, and I made a lot of noise about this recently. I have also written in the past about the fight not to save newspapers or traditional content delivery models, but to set up new models to save journalism – in whatever form that may take. As I wrote, blogging and so-called citizen journalism alone is not the answer in itself.

When both sides of this debate accept the fact neither can do without the other – bloggers need traditional reporting networks at least as much if not more than journalists need web-savvy citizens – then maybe we can get to the heart of the matter.

Google is the largest, most influential media brand in the world. Its contribution to expanding and harnessing the power of the internet, to exposing more people to more of the world, is immense. But its contribution to journalism is almost zilch.

Does it have a commercial, even moral, obligation to support traditional media models (particularly when print-based media companies only really have themselves to blame for the mess they find themselves in)? Absolutely not. But perhaps it should ask itself just what news content it will aggregate as these companies shed journalists, cut back on original reporting, or simply fold altogether? Blogs, I hear geeks everywhere scream. Sorry, but get back to me when blogs start reporting the news, when they start exposing corruption and mismanagement and human rights violations and holding powerful institutions to account – not once or twice a year, but every single day. When they do more than comment on the skilled journalistic legwork of others.

I liked the analysis of The Guardian commentator Henry Porter. Calling Google an “amoral menace”, he wrote on Sunday:

“Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model – the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits. Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time. On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn.

“One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.”

In fact, the relationship can and often is mutually beneficial. Google, I believe, coexists with content creators. But the point on Google’s market power is well made. One critical production group for the future, news reporters, are desperately searching for a new model to survive as Google continues to profit from its (decreasing) output.

For Google not to take a seat at the table debating the future of journalism is, at the very least, commercially short-sighted. At worst it will be held at least partly responsible for any degradation in the scrutiny provided by the fourth estate – a tragedy that some bloggers, like Murdoch perhaps, simply don’t ‘get’.

Going viral, and who’s really brave

I hasten to add, as always, these views are my own as a journalist engaged in the debate on the future of the profession, not as an authority of any sort. But I am aware a few more are listening after I recently went ‘viral’. Which, rather than requiring isolation and bed rest, apparently means I’ve become some sort of 15-minute minor celebrity in some circles on the internet. Who would have thought?

My recent post on the future of media and the leaders taking us there was rebroadcast online more times than The Simpsons appear on the Ten schedule each week. The response was genuinely shocking and entirely overwhelming, in ways both positive and negative. The full story of that cannot be told now, nor do I intend to clarify, add to, defend or step back from what I wrote. It exists in the public domain for as long as Google keeps finding it.

I do want to point to those who have commented, both on this site and the others that carried it, on my thoughts. Your ideas were terrific, and your criticism mostly constructive. The debate should continue: you can read some of it here.

Finally, I’ve been called “brave” and “courageous” for my public views. The description is embarrassing. Stupid, perhaps, but certainly not brave.

Brave is slain Sri Lankan newspaper editor Lasantha Wickrematunge, who knew his paper’s coverage of the civil war would eventually see him killed so he wrote an extraordinary from-the-grave editorial espousing the importance of a free press. Or American television reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee, currently being detained in North Korea for alleged “illegal entry” into and “hostile acts” against the repressive regime. Or 28-year-old Iranian blogger Omidreza Mir Sayafi, who was sentenced to 30 months in prison and died before his release for insulting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneiand and revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Or the Afghan journalist Jawed Ahmad, just 22, imprisoned without charge by the United States military for 11 months and eventually killed in a drive-by shooting in Kandahar soon after his release. Brave is the Australian ABC crew who smuggled their way into Zimbabwe risking detention or worse to produce extraordinary reports on a cholera epidemic the Government refuses to even acknowledge. Courageous is the investigative reporting team at The Age who recently broke the Defence Department spying scandal despite, as Margaret Simons rightly points out, working for a rudderless media company with dwindling resources and outright contempt for journalists. Every journalist, really, of any description from any medium, that manages to produce important work in the current depressed and depressing climate is somewhat a hero.

The sort of people Google and others should be supporting. Yes, Mark, their salaries should be protected.

© 2009 importance of ideas….