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Future Of Journalism
rhysweatherley writes: "This year's Andrew Olle Lecture was presented by Eric Beecher of Text Media, and deals with the current and future state of "real" journalism, including the impact of the online world on traditional journalism (not all of it good). It is a good insight from one of the media's insiders in Australia. More information on the Andrew Olle Lecture series can be found here." I thought this was interesting. A little different than the usual Slashdot fare, but good reading nonetheless.
There is also an 'other' state-owned TV channel in Britain, Channel Four. It carries advertisements and apart from a vague commitment to 'minority' programming, looks like a commercial TV station. I think this is the analogue of Canada's CBC, rather than the BBC - although rather than being subsidised, Channel Four makes a profit.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
We have seen this only a couple times so far, and generally only with regard to video coverage: the Rodney King video is the prime example, of course.
/. (that is, it would work a LOT better if they had some real editors) and will get better. The nature of the gatekeepers is changing and we seem to do a lot better at exploring and explaining the various sides of most technical issues. It's messy as all hell but still in it's infancy as a media genre. I definitely think this is the way to go though...just get some real editors (or learn how to act like them).
"Distributed Reporting" seems to work pretty well with
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+&x
Yep, it certainly is different from the usual /. fare.
(Go ahead, mod me down. See if I care.)
Free Hans!
The CBC model of parital public/private funding sounds pretty cool. Of course, in a sense, the American PBS is a bit like that already, since almost every program is preceeded by a "this is made possible by ". How does the CBC look when you're watching it? Do they have pledge drives? Are there commercials? Does it seem just like a regular TV channel?
Free Hans!
I think ABC along with SBS, provide an excellent counter weight to the commercial free to air TV and radio stations.
Both the news segments on ABC TV and radio and SBS are excellent. ABC's news provides a commercially and politically (mostly) unbiased review of events around Australia and the world, while SBS provides a broader, not anglosised or americanised, review of world events.
Although the commercial news segments are not to bad, they suffer badly from the CNN cut and paste disease, and that mindless fluffy filler crap. Why produce interesting indepth news stories of particular interest to Australians when they can just copy something from the US or the UK?
It is current affairs that really show the differences between the ABC and the commercial stations. Apart from, as talked about in the speech nine's Sunday program, the commercial current affairs programs rarely deal intelligently with topically issues of the day, instead simply go into tabloid sensationalism.
The hilarious show "Frontline", a satire based around the production of a fictional commercial nightly current affairs program. This show worked so well because the real current affairs programs were already nearly a farce.
The ABC current affairs shows, from the nightly indepth review of current events of "the 7:30 report" and "lateline", to the documentary style indepth look at one issue by "Four Corners" the current affairs shows are just incompareable to the commercial crap like "a current affair" which I find unbearable to watch.
As another an aside. I live in a country town in Australia. The ABC youth radio station triple J is an excellent service, providing both interesting non mainstream music from Australia and overseas. It is a godsend when compared to the crap the commercial radio stations play, as well as doing a lot to push Australian music.
Anyway I think The ABC provides an excellent service for the tax dollars spent on it. But can it maintain their standards with anymore budget cuts? I hope so.
Niches exist, but they're far more prevalent in markets where the audience has a lot of money. ("Why The Free Market is Not a Democracy," point 1.) Look at the tremendous number of phonebook-sized New Economy magazines -- Business 2.0, Wired, Industry Standard, etc., etc. Then look at the flimsy page count and non-glossy paper of a little lefty magazine like The Nation -- that's not just a circulation question. It's also a question of who the readership is and how much disposable income they have. DeBeers isn't knocking down The Nation's doors to buy ads for diamonds in the next issue.
There's a lot of valuable content that has nothing to do with mindlessly buying shit. Which is the fundamental flaw with ad-supported journalism.
Do domain names matter?
The Sydney Morning Herald's take on the article.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
If the author of this lecture were employed as a journalist by the ABC (which I assume is Australian equivalent of BBC), he can have little hope of keeping his job once the new head of the ABC reads it! Within this piece, he accuses the new head of ABC of being entirely unqualified to make any decisions about its journalism, yet making sweeping changes regarding journalism in that organization. It certainly can't be an attempt at propaganda, assuming his goal is either to keep his job, or influence the new director (of the ABC)) regarding his programme (note the British spelling! (-8 ) for journalism by his organisation.
One point the speaker failed to make, btw, is that the Internet (esp. the Web) allows all connected persons, throughout the planet, essentially to become reporters. My own hope is that text-based Internet media (such as this forum) will benefit from an enormous growth in ubiquitous reporting -- once educational institutions (or more likely, teachers) realize youngsters need to learn to report accurately much as their grandparents needed to learn to write decent business letters... We have seen this only a couple times so far, and generally only with regard to video coverage: the Rodney King video is the prime example, of course.
As someone who works for a large metropolitan newspaper, I can tell you that this is true to a certain extent, but not because the papers are owned by large corporations. Those columns are usually syndicated, by the same companies that syndicate the comics (Universal Feature Syndicate, Tribune Media, etc.).
Our editorial page is strictly done in-house (although it's not very good anyway IMHO). But it has to share a page with the Letters to the Editor. The op-ed (opposite the editorials) page is a combination of in-house columns, freelance opinion pieces, and syndicated columns (Molly Ivins and George Will, among others).
I also wouldn't blame the journalists for the poor state of newspapers. The assigning editors make all of the decisions about what gets run.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
The emergence of the Independent Media Centers is really re-defining not only what we mean by journalism, but also more specifically online journalism. A Slashdot format is one where a small group of people hype themselves and their website and eventually sell it to a larger corporate interest which (arguably) influences the stories reported. The Independent Media Center model builds on traditions in anarchist self-organization, and so far has been the most democratic journalism that USA has seen in recent decades.
Working class and community-centered journalism is almost totally extinct. In a country where there were thousands of union-sponsored and community-organized newspapers, all that is left are a few fledgling papers in a few cities. Corporatization and illegal union smashing took care of the working class movement to provide working class news and discussion.
The model for IMC is: 1) a website which allows anonymous, self-publishing of audio, video, images, hyperlinks or text, 2) a counterpart, organized in some kind of collective method (there are a million different methods from organic to consensus, etc), that meets face-to-face and plans editorial changes (i.e. what stories are on the homepage), organizes print versions, organizes co-operation with pirate radio and other independent media sources.
Our hits are through the roof, and the goal is that within a year or so, many people will be looking to democratic news sources instead of corporate news sources. At least a distinction should be made. The idea of objective journalism outside of scientific publications seems to be a quaint throwback or corporate PR. The idea is that other voices and other biases can be heard through the onslaught of corporate BS.
Your Vote Doesn't Count If They Don't Count It
bjord.org
news from the revolution
IMC uses nearly all GPL'ed software (although there is a debate between FreeBSD vs. Linux on our production servers). Anyway, after posting the above message on the IMC's, I figured this is Slashdot, so I would post a general plea to wealthy free software-oriented companies:
IMC's are desperately in need of webservers! We have a few servers that are taking all of the load of dozens of cities around the world. When the Prague protests occurred, we were all in IRC trying to patch things up, keep Postgres alive, etc. If we could get a few more boxes to distribute the workload, or even BANDWIDTH!, it would make life a lot easier and help the project along greatly.
If you can help out, please drop Ryan an email at techp@techpiracy.org
Thanks!
bjord.org
news from the revolution
Some shows are preceded with "the following program is sponsored in part by...", but not all of them. There are no pledge drives. The majority of the programming is Canadian content, natch. CBC stole the show from NBC during the Olympics in some places because CBC was actually carrying live coverage. That, and CBC generally has a reputation of having sports broadcasters who really know what they're talking about. I watch extremely little TV myself, but when I do it's almost always CBC (Hockey Night in Canada or the Royal Canadian Air Farce).
In the UK, the BBC does not carry commercials, but recently had a large public advertising campaign (delivered via themselves, so it was free), which was essentially an enourmous lobbying effort for an increased licence fee. This struck me as unethical to say the least. An irresponsible use of their undeniable influence on members of the public.
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It has a national youth radio station (http://abc.net.au/triplej) which not only broadcasts on the net, it plays a wider selection of music than anything you're likely to find on commercial radio anywhere. While the drama department has suffered with the funding cuts, most of the best drama Australia has produced has initially been shown on the ABC. Its coverage of rural issues, particularly on radio, is far more comprehensive than the largely Sydney-based commercial broadcasters.
One criticism that it consistently receives is that of political bias, particularly from the conservative parties, and they are using it as an excuse to cut funding. Like all such accusations, it has some basis in truth, but not nearly as much as the bleating would imply. While it gives both sides of politics a hard time when in office, its the issues that it pushes and the attitudes that it presents are usually that of the inner-city tertiary-educated elite who, particularly on social issues, are far more liberal than the government and the outer-suburban and rural voters it works very hard to attract.
However, I think the ABC does a very good job for the money and I'm quite happy that my taxes are spent on it. In fact, I'd like it to receive *more* funding so it can resume producing more drama and resume a real shortwave service to the world.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It carries ads, so it's state-subsidised rather than state-funded. And it's expected to break even.
This is a good mix: they still have commercial sensibilities, but when faced with: "we will lose money on this {program|series|segment}, but it's exceptionally {insightful|informative|funny}", they can make the right decision. Giant publicly-held conglomerates cannot.
cheers,
mike
This predicted future predicts that news publishers, both online and print, will no longer research their own stories but instead refer to stories published on other news sites and papers. This is the model made famous by popular online news site Slashdot where articles almost invariably contain links to Wired, ZDNet, CNN and others. (Jon Katz articles notwithstanding.)
Naturally this brings up the age old problem of the chicken and the egg, and has indeed attracted much attention from cosmologists who deem the puzzle "Central to the essence of every bootstrap theory of the universe."
:wq
The really scary part is that the big media companies, like NBC and ABC (in the US) are owned by even bigger companies. When was the last time you saw any negitive (or any other) story about GE on NBC? You didn't. In fact, the only time I've ever seen any aknowledgement of GE's ownership of NBC was years ago on Letterman, when he tried to visit GE's home office.
Another bad thing about consentration of ownership is that there is little insentive to have localized content made available. In the US, if you watch your local newscast with a stopwatch, you will find that only about 5 minutes of the newscast is actually devoted to local news (this is not counting sports and weather, which aren't really hard journalism, and are mostly there to get ratings. After all, everyone is effected by the weather). Same thing is true in the newspaper (the web versions of most newspapers make this very clear). Even most of the editorial pages are just national columns. This is known in the corporate takeover world as synergy, and is a very distrubing trend.
Now, everyone knows that owning a TV license is a license to print money, so stations are bought and sold all the time, mostly on VC. Except that now we have media saturation in Cable and independent stations (and Blockbuster), and now we see that there's been a clear decline in viewship over the past 10 years.
How are you going to get your message out in this world? Two ways make sense: Attempt to be like Wal-Mart or McDonalds, that is, not the best, but not offensive either. Bland, predictable, expected. The other method is to be so over the top that you get a major reaction (if it bleeds it leads). This was the first method - the Action News theory - that worked well in the early 80's and led to a real decline in the inner city (white folks wouldn't go there since there' so much crime, gangs got attention and even praise (gangsta rap!) from "The Media" and the money went away). However, you can only shock people for so long before they get used to it. Jerry Springer is a good example of this. The first time you see it, you think "my god, this is like when Rome fell." Then you get into it. Later, you start to pity the people who actually think this show is good, and finally, you are ready for the next shocker, but the media can't seem to keep up.
The thing that is much harder is to be bland without appearing to be marketing. It is getting better all the time, and I think one of the defining moments in marketing is this year's Presidential "election." I'm still trying to figure out if there's any difference at all between these two. It is like the parties decided to hold a bunch of focus groups to define the party platform. No mention of hot buttons, such as killin' or stealin' (or smokin' and drinkin'), since that won't play well with the folks back home. If there was any real journalism in this election, it never made it out of the newsroom (and Matt Drudge is not real journalism, BTW).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that:
1) yes, this guy is right. Journalism is in very poor shape right now.
2)the fix is not going to happen with the current group of journalists, who are part of the problem.
3) The Internet will make it possible to make journalism a hobby, much like open source software has made it (in theory) a hobby to write software in your spare time.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
As a voting citizen of the state of Florida, I can personally testify that the vast information networks we often pride ourselves on can be of harm to journalistic integrity. Too many journalists exposed to incomplete/inaccurate information has caused a fiasco, which would not have occurred 30 years ago. Without modern communication technology piping instant "feedback" to ratings-hungry journalists, perhaps a more conservative approach to covering the election would have eliminated the sensationalism and better presented the facts. Technology should be used to enhance our knowledge of truth, not to make a story.
I would accuse him of being too easily distracted. True, the media business is enourmous and pumps out a lot of sterile crap. However, just because lots of people are willing to pay for commoditised snippets of information, and lots of companies will provide that information, the market for quality journalism is no smaller. You just have to know where to look.
The authour is worried that it is hard to turn a profit from modern serious journalism because everybody expects information to be free. Well, printed media has relied on advertising and tie-in promotions (rather than cover price) for a while now anyway.
Ultimately, though, the authour is trying to protect his job. ABC is funded by the ozzie government. ABC's budget is currently being reviewed. This article is a piece of propoganda trying to protect ABC's budget. Much as I hate the idea of state funded broadcasting, the BBC is so damned good that I happily pay my licence fee. What do ozzies think of their state media?
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