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August 18, 2009
Bill Wyman at Hitsville has begun a series of articles on the reasons why Why Newspapers are Failing at Splice Today. He has five reasons for this and so far he has uploaded two: the collapse of newspaper's business model as advertisers desert newspapers for the internet, and the culture of the newspapers.
As the former is well known I will concentrate on the latter. Their culture is that of a monopolists and their history of being their reader’s de facto window to the world was just a quirk of their monopolies that made them that. Google desktop enable readers to develop their own home pages. Secondly, the newspapers did understood the web, grasped its service power, or recognized that an enormous sea change was taking place.
Wyman's argument is that journalists aren’t too clear-eyed and often aren’t too intellectually honest) when it comes to analyzing the collapse of their own profession. He says there were a number of things newspapers plainly needed to do in relation to the seachange:
Most of all they needed to stake their place in the new informational channel that was going to change our world. They had to shift their coverage to a new, tech-savvy generation. They needed new equipment to share in the experience of that generation, undergoing the biggest sociological shift since the 1960s. They needed to learn the new era’s tools, experiment with and test a new medium, take advantage of its speed and immediacy to take their place in society even deeper into peoples’ lives. They needed to take a look at their work rules and union agreements to make sure they didn’t the hamper the evolution of their industry at a time when it could be facing mortal danger.
The truth is, newsroom staffs are permeated with fear of change and a discomfort with new technology. At bigger urban papers, parsimonious bosses, unions and work rules made the transition even more difficult.
This reason for newspapers failing applies to the regional newspapers in Australia as they have a very limited presence on the web, and their strategy has been one of cost cutting and containment. In other words there was no strategy to adapt newspapers to the enormous sea change. Cost containment and reducing debt is still the "strategy" of Fairfax under Brian McCarthy. So we have their lost cost Independent Weekly as competition to The Advertiser; so low cost that it has a minimal internet presence.
Wyman says that the criticism of Google News from publishers is flawed because the top 20 daily newspaper companies in the country could have built a similar site with a paltry investment 15 years ago. They didn’t, of course, for three reasons:
• No one understood the technology or its implications, and if they did lacked the skills to situate their companies competitively;
• They didn’t think they had to;
• And, most importantly, after decades of monopoly control, they had forgotten to care about the convenience of readers in the first place.
Those three bulleted points amount to a polite way of saying they were out of their depth, lazy, and arrogant.
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That's more or less my thesis.
The only big name journo I can think of who properly grasped the function, meaning and nature of the internet and had the finesse to handleit right was Margo Kingston from the SMH.
She was so resulting successful that the her brainchild, Web Diary, overwhelmed her, along with interference from an uncomprehending management.
In contrast, Murdochs and thelater Fairfax have held the readership in contempt.
The pressure from the reading public to ease commodification and instead apply broadsheet principles, following the old notion of earning a keep thru providing a service, only created an unreflexive, reactive retreat into yet more hectoring and ideology, reflecting the victimhood entitlement culture described in the lead in to this thread.
Oddly, it is media and the ABC who provide the most spectacular example of the "controlling" mentality and its consequences, as related per "Media Watch", last night.
The specific example involved a notorious Shier-era executive (Bass) insisting on a pronounced and prolonged "slant" involving the "othering" of Timor L'Easte leader Xanana Gusmao. This was a media equivalent of Malcolm Turnbull and "Ute gate", characterised by a determined refusal of evidence, against some sort of overwhelming urge or requirement to control content and perception. The Hansonist undertones of the mediation ought to be cause for concern for those seeking a site still relatively untainted by ideology for reliable news.