|
August 24, 2009
The Future of Journalism movement is having a forum in Adelaide tonight at the ABC Studios, just after it had rolled through Perth. The forum is entitled Blueprint for Progress, and it looks to be an interesting forum with lots of space for discussion.
I don't know how the Perth discussion went but my gut feeling is that newsrooms of the traditional media are unhappy places. This Moir cartoon can be interpreted as applying to journalism, given all the downsizing currently taking place.
I mentioned the forum on an earlier media post What I didn't say then was that yours truly will be a member of panel 2, The changing landscape. My talk notes are here on philosophy.com.
The two panels are structured in the following way. Panel I, entitled The changing workplace, is primarily concerned to get some idea of how journalists’ lives and work environment are changing. To what extent is convergence rewriting the skills manual – what new skills should journalists be learning and what should be provided on-site? Are journalists working longer hours? Covering more stories in any one day?
Has the traditional face-to-face interview largely been replaced by the telephone and email? What of quality: how important are the old skills of accuracy and concise writing? Are time pressures having an adverse affect in these area?
The key question for Panel 2, The changing landscape, is about charging for content – will it work, and what sort of content will people pay for? What sorts of niches are there out there ripe for exploiting by people with journalists’ skills who understand new technology? What sorts of funding models might work in the changing news landscape?
How can journalists add value to what they have traditionally done? Will “citizen journalism” play a major part in keeping the public informed and, if so, will this displace the traditional news media? How important are social networking tools to the news media: crowdsourcing, marketing, etc?
The Media Alliance's weblog Wired Scribe, which was run by Jonathan Este and attached to the Future of Journalism site, appears to have been replaced by the The Debate on the Future of Journalism site. They have added a No journo No News site. They are doing their bit to foster debate and discussion amongst their members. This post sums up the current state of debate on the charging for content issue.
Trouble is there is not much of a debate happening within journalism, judging by the lack of comments from journalists on The Debate weblog.
Update
The national context of the forum was Fairfax's $380 million loss for 2008-09, weighed down by operating earnings fell 27 per cent to $605 million, with the metropolitan newspapers the hardest hit. Fairfax have little idea about top-line growth in a digital world as they are still locked into seeing their staff as a cost centre to be constantly trimmed, rather than as the engine room for their next brilliant idea.
Understandably, the atmosphere of the forum was rather depressing if one read the body language of the industry people on the first panel, and there seemed to be a reluctance amongst journalists to step into a digital world and develop their own blogs. Journalism as writing and image making (video) was assumed to be information rather than the interpretation of information and events; the insider/outsider distinction between journalism and bloggers was assumed; and the fall in advertising revenues was attributed to the global financial crisis on advertising revenues, not the shift of advertising online. Digital advertising is still in its early stages according to the advertising people especially with local targeting, tailored to specific readers.
The journalists are in shock rather than being recovering journalists. Nothing like GrowthSpur was mentioned to facilitate the shift to web based journalism. It was bootstrap stuff----each media organization finding their own way into web journalism constrained by their resources.
In the satellite feed from London, Stephen Brook from Media Guardian, ruled out a pay wall saying that the Guardian News and Media group is exploring other ways to create new revenue streams, such as membership, and looking at a variety of potential partners and vendors (eg., festivals such as Glastonbury.)
There was no mention at the forum about news photography or photojournalism --- visually covering daily news events-- being finished.
|
Comprehensive talk notes Gary.
I couldn't help comparing your underlying assumptions with Este's. You're assuming we're all going to have to adapt to change that is clearly underway, Este is assuming journalists can be sheltered from change.
It should be an interesting night.