ideas: on media

Cyberstumped: Big Media offline

Regularly taking the razor to their organisations won’t help Big Media prosper. The need a new vision, not new bean counters…

Video never did kill the radio star, and nor will the internet and digital news kill newspapers. Similarly, despite what the sales department and bean counters will tell you, the recession we almost had is not responsible for the precarious balance sheets at many traditional media organisations.

News companies are slicing costs and dicing journalists almost entirely for one reason: vision – or a Blind Pew-like absence of it.

The commercial timidity in newspaper-dominated Big Media, the sheer dearth of imagination in delivering profitable media on new and predominant platforms, is breathtaking. Those running these lumbering news factories are at least guilty of short-sighted negligence, if not full-blown incompetence.

This state of media flux throws up uncomfortable and complex questions. Nobody thinks this is easy; nobody has a fully-formed answer, and it’s always much easier to throw stones. But the decision-making of late is worthy of critique. If shareholders won’t do it, employees and journalists must.

At some media companies, it’s hard to believe boards even have their eye on the ball at all. The Fairfax brainstrust was recently locked in an ugly and protracted war not with enemy competitors or rival platforms, but with each other.

Few believed ousted chairman Ron Walker had the vision to set a new course for the beloved media dinosaur. But the distracting and damaging scrap to dump him – installing former Woolworths boss Roger Corbett, who hardly brings any more media management experience to the table – was all the more remarkable given the daunting business agenda before them. Former Fairfax editor turned new media proprietor Eric Beacher described it in Crikey as “almost surreal”:

“It is like watching a brawl between the captain and senior personnel on the bridge of the Titanic while the ship sinks and the passengers and crew jump for their lives.”

There is tragi-comedy, too, in the contrast presented by an enterprise desperately positioning itself in an interconnected age while pulling the plug on its own journalists. As the boardroom brawl hit the company’s own business pages, a leaked editorial ethics policy revealed Australian Financial Review journalists were being instructed to only engage on social media like Twitter in a “strictly personal capacity”. (News Limited Editorial Director Campbell Reid, too, has publicly said he’s “very uncomfortable” with his journos using Twitter professionally.)

The smart people in media recognise the importance of plugging into social networks to drive news coverage. Twitter, particularly, is widely-acknowledged as a powerful new weapon in a journalist’s arsenal – a virtually unrivalled means of crowd-sourcing information and uncovering talent, a window on worlds journalists fear to tread (the Iranian election is just one example), and as a way to engage with readers that can inform and enrich follow-up reporting.

Indeed, it’s amazing what Twitter shows up. My own commentating (@thetowncrier) on Fairfax drew the following response from a recently redundant employee (who, naturally enough, pleaded for anonymity). It’s a view hardly unique both inside and outside the company:

“Fairfax are great at cutting cost but have forgotten how to make money and are completely bereft of any ideas beyond getting the razor out at what seems like regular intervals.”

Veteran journalist, academic and new media champion Margaret Simons leaked the Financial Review’s draconian memo on her blog The Content Makers. As she wrote in October:

“If you are a journalist and not already on Twitter, for heaven’s sake get with it. This thing is a tool, not a toy.”

Fairfax seems to struggle to ‘get with it’ more than most. Its digital division is an entirely profitable enterprise responsible for some of the most trafficked news brands in Australia online. But the fact online news is siloed at all seems remarkable at a company that puts itself forward as a 21st century media organisation.

At Fairfax – and this is really standard-practice across the print-based media – a handful of mostly young (read: cheap) journalists repurpose print and wire copy for online publication. They answer to digital bosses, secluded from masthead editors, breeding a bipolar disorder in its brands: the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age broadsheets position themselves rather earnestly at the ‘serious’ end of the media spectrum while their online beachheads chase hits with more titillating fare.

Online integration?

For all the theory behind ‘integrated newsrooms’, for all the talk from editors about tearing down walls between print and online, it actually hasn’t happened. Generally, the bean counters have isolated and taken hostage the attractively profitable online operations while print editors jealously guard their exclusives.

There’s a prevailing attitude in newsrooms that newspapers have to be ‘saved’. As long-time Fairfax writer Geoffrey Barker extolled in his recent Griffith Review essay ‘The Crumbling Estate’:

“…despite their vigour, newspapers are increasingly at risk from their misguided attempts to save themselves…the strategic decisions made by newspapers to defend themselves against technological change and economic difficulties have only worsened their situation.”

Certainly, the investments companies like Fairfax and News Limited have made in the online space may prop up balance sheets but give little insight into how the companies will make money while supporting journalism in the longer term.

Fairfax set up web-only news products in Brisbane and Perth as a way of expanding its display and, particularly, classified advertising reach. But neither trouble competitors in terms of news coverage, as more mostly young journalists largely perform old-style rip-and-read coverage feeding their websites with news from wire service reporters.

Rupert Murdoch added social networking site My Space to his News empire, and as its hold on that market falls away nobody seems quite sure what to do with it. In Australia, the company launched The Punch earlier this year – a website that proclaimed to “celebrate journalism” without actually doing much of it (and, as some reports would suggest, barely contributing to the bottom line).

It publishes op-ed on the day’s developments, from a small team of journalists and a roster of unpaid contributors, while performing the same sort of news aggregation that Murdoch has ruthlessly rallied against companies like Google doing. Fairfax followed suit, relaunching the National Times masthead online that recycles its print opinion writers and justifies no real comparison with the crusading but long-forgotten newspaper of the same name.

Murdoch is now determined to charge his readers for accessing content online. Speaking to Sky News recently, the new CEO of West Australian Newspapers (publishers of The West Australian) Chris Wharton said of the pay goal:

“If they come up with a model that works, I’ll pinch it.”

He won’t be alone. Mainstream media companies the world over, in desperate need of innovation, are instead stuck in a holding pattern on ‘Murdoch Watch’.

The debate over ‘pay walls’ has raged exhaustingly astray. People will, indeed do, pay for news. Specialist publishers reap significant subscription revenue online in niche areas. The Wall Street Journal has a healthy e-revenue stream locking off its expert business reporting (after Murdoch smartly reversed his initial plan to tear down the subscription wall after taking charge of the venerable news brand). They will pay for news they genuinely need and want – a halcyon supply-and-demand concept that could, in fact, bring out the best in journalism.

But it will not work alone. The pay debate has already exposed the stubbornly narrow terms of reference within which media proprietors are framing their strategies, desperate for a quick-fix. It deals not with the fragmentation of news sources and mediums and the dissemination of public information; the audience demand for greater engagement and interaction and the role of so-called citizen journalists and inter-personal media; the very different, indeed exciting, reporting tools and techniques a professional journalist needs as the game shifts.

Media companies who want a future must do what is hard – the more radical and inescapably inevitable transformation in how newsrooms, how journalism, operates.

In October in his grandiose speech at the University of Melbourne evocatively titled ‘The Fall of Rome’, Fairfax refugee turned digital deity and ABC boss Mark Scott painted a picture of proprietors frantically clinging to old models and old ways of thinking. Asking audiences to pay for content, the publisher of government-subsidised news rather churlishly said, is “wistful and perhaps wishful”. But more tellingly, more truthfully, Scott criticised media tyrants for using “legacy thinking” to develop new solutions.

“Survivors will be those who face up to how the world is, not as they might want it to be. And who are determined to secure a future in that new media world, not just squeeze out a few more years’ profits, not just milk the business until the CEO’s retirement and the board moves on.”

Because that, surely, is the only hope left for major news organisations – true leadership, true vision beyond their contractual terms.

The structure of large-scale reporting enterprise, unlike some platforms and revenue models, is not actually broken. Indeed, it is vital. The industry desperately needs prophets to quit fixing the latter and craft a brand-new sculpt for the former.

This is an uncut version of an essay first published in the December/January edition of The Walkley Magazine.

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