Slashdot Mirror
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.
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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