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November 7, 2008
Tim Dunlop has closed his Road to Surfdom weblog down, a few weeks or so after finishing his Blogocracy gig at News Ltd in order to write a book. These were high profile and successful weblogs and it is sad to see them become another archive. Still, blogging is a tough gig, and people move on to do different things.
In his final post Dunlop comments on the state of the mainstream media in Australia, and his diagnosis of its unhealthy condition is spot on. He says:
The fact is, Australia’s mainstream media is moribund. Although there are great journalists and other contributors out there, the institution itself is stuck in a hopeless, self-serving, tenured cul-de-sac and is failing in its job to properly inform, discuss, debate and entertain. Not to mention, reinvent itself. The form is dominated by a handful of insiders who have grown so content with their own lot that they are immune to sensible criticism and lack the self-awareness to reassess what it is they are doing. They are supported in this self-satisfied loop by a political class that is happy to exploit the status quo, feeding them leaks and other tidbits to keep the whole charade ticking over in such a way that nothing really changes.
I concur. It's not the liberal bias that the conservatives complain about that is the problem. It is that the media do not do their job as the watchdog of democracy. They have mostly dumped that tradition and shifted to the insider drip feed, infotainment and partisan opinion, whilst the old journalist ethos that underpinned informing discussing, debating has been buried.
Dunlop continues with his diagnosis:
The narratives, the memes, the discussions of our political and social life are set in concrete and endlessly recycled. We have learned to accept the daily, largely manufactured, controversies of political and social discussion in lieu of genuine examination. The same voices — and there are only about 20 of them — continue to define what is important or useful or worthy of discussion and the few organs of the mainstream media keep churning them out. Their lack [of] seriousness is only matched by their lack of courage.
Spot on.There is little by way of analysis and general examination of policy issues and problems in the mainstream media. We are subjected to manufactured moral outrage, crude ideology by entrenched economic interests and the outpourings of the political noise machines. Many journalists recycle media releases, and they have no knowledge of, or interest in, policy issues. Nor do they see this as a cause of concern. The media's political focus is primarily on leadership conflict within the political parties and between them.
This dumbing down or decline of the mainstream media creates a space in a digital Australia for an "independent media" to pick up the watchdog for democracy role. What then is the condition of the "independent media"? Dunlop says that:
there are some new voices out there trying to make a difference. Some of them are thinktanks, some of them of grassroots organisations, some of them are blogs or other forms of online media. None of them has really “broken through” in the way that is necessary to make a real difference, but they are a start.
This space is quite healthy and vigorous in a grassroots way, as the new and independent media slowly replace the little magazines of the pre-internet era. However, their public presence and influence is low apart from Crikey, and there is little of the cross fertilisation of ideas between journalists, bloggers and thinktanks as there is in the US. Most of us in the new media still live in our silos.
So where to now? What do we need to do? Dunlop adds that at this moment we need to foster an independent media and enable it to move into a new and more vibrant phase. This means that people need:
to think about what needs to be done and what we can do. Citizenship matters and it is too important than to leave in the hands of the cynical gatekeepers who currently decide what is important in this democracy of ours.
True. What is the next step? A professional independent media says Dunlop. What do we need to do to produce the professional product that Dunlop says is necessary? Dunlop says it's hard cash--financial support. Mark Bahnisch, in picking up Dunlop's post at Larvatus Prodeo, concurs. Dunlop's call for a genuinely professional product, he says, requires the shift from amateur bloggers to professional writers, and that this step requires some way to earn a living from the writing so the writers can write full time:
not to put too fine a point on it - if we really wanted to try to provide the sort of independent media we think we deserve in this country, we’d need several people working full time on such an effort. There is just no other way.The frustrating thing is that I know we’ve collectively got the expertise to do it, but we can’t, because we don’t have the seed money to even get started. (And I very much include the LP community in that “we”.)
That is probably true as well--the expertise is there, the cash is not. Bahnisch appears to be reinventing the professional journalist in the mainstream media for the digital age. As a collective blog LP may evolve into some kind of online magazine with some blogs.
However, not everyone wants to be a full time citizen journalist in the independent media--an example of what is meant by citizen journalism? Many do want to do do other things than practice citizen journalism---as they are academics, policy wonks, artists, writers of books etc. If the internet's technology has opened up many ways for us to become produsers, then diverse opportunities beckon, especially for those with an entrepreneurial bent, or an eye to innovation.
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Tim started around 9/11 and figures Obama is a good time to quit. A lot of his commenters agree.
Ages ago someone at Gatewatching suggested that the blogosphere evolved and continued as a response to right wing nastiness and they were shouted down for it, but I thought at the time, and still do, that it's pretty much right. Ken commented on his own retirement from RTS thread that he wasn't enjoying blogging anymore. It sounded as if he was just sick of being angry.
Blogs come into their own when people feel strongly enough about something that they're motivated to participate. The sorts of things that generated that level of motivation don't come along every day and are likely to be even less frequent in this new global environment.
As someone more interested in comments than bloggers, Mark's piece conceptualises bloggers in pretty much the same way as the MSM locates the commentariat. I don't see how that model can survive long when we're seeing a shift away from trust in centralised authority.
It will be interesting to watch what happens from here on in.