On 22 February 2012, Kevin Rudd announced his resignation as foreign minister. The news, along with his challenge of Julia Gillard in an attempt to wrest his old job back, has dominated the media conversation of the past fortnight.
But there was another significant news story that day.
Legendary conflict reporter Marie Colvin and French photojournalist Remi Ochlik were killed when a ‘makeshift media centre’ was hit by Syrian rocket fire. Three other journalists were injured. This came just a week after Anthony Shahid, another internationally renowned conflict reporter, was also killed in Syria.
Marie Colvin, who died by Syrian rocket fire last week: ‘Total objectivity is a myth.’
On Twitter, Natasha Mitchell, host of ABC Radio National’s Life Matters, was just one of a small but persistent trickle of Australians to note the deaths. Amid all the speculation and gossip on K. Rudd and ‘faceless men’, Mitchell tweeted the news as ‘a sobering perspective’. She wrote, ‘What a sad confusion and juxtaposition a Twitter stream can be when a genuine international warzone tragedy melds with a domestic political saga’.
Colvin was well known for her bravery and persistence, as well as her humour and compassion. She has often been compared to her friend, pioneering female war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, whose stories focused on the impact of war on individual lives, families and communities.
‘Total objectivity is a myth,’ Colvin has said. ‘I am always moved by the people I encounter in horrific situations. But that is what war is all about. The mothers, the kids, the soldiers.’
The day before she died, she spoke to the BBC, appealing for the public to notice what was happening in Syria. ‘I watched a little baby die today,’ she said. ‘Absolutely horrific, a two-year old child had been hit. They stripped it and found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said ‘I can’t do anything.’ His little tummy just kept heaving until he died.’
She said, ‘These are twenty-eight thousand civilians, men, women and children, hiding, being shelled, defenseless. That little baby is one of two children who died today, one of the children being injured every day. That baby probably will move more people to think, “What is going on, and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?“’
Colvin began reporting for the Middle East for the UK’s Sunday Times when she was 30 years old; she was 56 when she died. Her eyewitness accounts were often broadcast on CNN or the BBC, because she was often the last journalist on the scene.
In East Timor in 1999, she famously refused to leave a UN compound in Dili where 1500 people had taken shelter – as Indonesian troops closed in and the UN called for the journalists to pull out. After her foreign editor heard all the men had left (leaving just Colvin and two other female journalists), he berated her. She replied, ‘I guess they don’t make men like they used to.’
Her trademark eye-patch was a result of a shrapnel injury in Sri Lanka, in 1996. ‘Not many people know that she had post-traumatic stress disorder so badly after that she had to be hospitalised,’ said BBC Middle East correspondent Jim Muir. ‘So she was a person who knew what war was about. It’s not about glamour. It’s about people being killed. And that’s what happened to her.’
Yet Colvin was hesitant to claim such bravery for herself, recognising her privilege in being able to make choices about when she came and left the world’s trouble spots. She said she was ‘more awed than ever by the bravery of civilians who endure far more than I ever will. They must stay where they are. I can come home to London.’
In a prescient 2010 speech, she said, ‘It has never been more dangerous to be a war correspondent because the journalist in the combat zone has become a prime target.’ It has been suggested, but not proven, that the attack that killed her was a deliberate targeting of the media.
‘Imagine a real-life Katherine Hepburn heroine, but braver and funnier,’ said the BBC’s Paul Dannaher. ‘Marie Colvin was everywhere I was in Libya, only she always got there first.’
Another of the many things Colvin was known for was her access to Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, who she interviewed many times over 25 years. He was so taken with her that he is reported to have asked after her during interviews with other journalists. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that ‘a peculiar effect of her beguiling character and her journalistic talent was that tyrants were charmed by her and sought her out, even as she eviscerated them in print’.
There have been (deservedly) many tributes and retrospectives written about Colvin over the past week or so. Two of the best are the obituary published by her editor at The Sunday Times, which gives a wonderful overview of her life and work (sadly, now behind a paywall); and a conversation with two of her fellow conflict reporters about Marie’s legacy and ‘the inherent risks of bearing witness in dangerous places, and the particular challenges and advantages for women in war zones’, for New York magazine.
One of those reporters, Eliza Griswold (Atlantic, New Yorker, Harpers, New York Times) said, ‘Marie was ‘the best – not one of the best – woman in the field today. I first met her in a minefield in northern Iraq, eye patch and all. Stories about Marie’s courage, almost insane courage, precede her. She had her eye shot out when reporting on the Tamil Tigers, she married the same man twice – which is very brave – she wedged herself into Gaza’s tunnels.’
‘But she was in no way a gonzo crazy person – one of those, I hate to say it, mostly American war reporters (not women usually) who is all about themselves. She was about the people living and dying in the field, and it is in no way surprising to me that she died doing what she felt called to do. She was tough as hell, but not the empty bravado, bearing-witness-in-leather-pants type of reporter. For an entire generation of women, she was the best there was, and that there could be.’
Eliza Griswold will be speaking at The Wheeler Centre next Thursday 8 March at 6.15pm, about her journeys through some of the world’s most fascinating – and divided – societies and her book The Tenth Parallel.
A Columbia Journalism Review feature called ‘Confidence Game’ has taken up the case for newspapers. Dean Starkman argues that a group of intellectuals he calls the ‘Future of News’ group, or “FON consensus”, is championing a new kind of journalism based on peer-production at the expense of the traditional news media. Starkman argues that this new kind of journalism can’t ever hope to produce the public interest journalism of the traditional news media – the kind of institution-centred journalism typified by Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who broke the News of the World scandal. Starkman calls his preferred model of journalism the Neo-Institutional Hub-and-Spoke model. He advocates “[r]ebuilding and shoring up institutions” that can give professional reporters the time they require to produce journalism in the public interest. The reporting is published by the institution and disseminated and commented upon by social media.
At a Wheeler Centre event earlier this year, ‘Taking Liberties With the Press’, media commentator Margaret Simons spoke in defence of ‘public interest reporting’ but admitted that the notion was a difficult one to define. “Journalism relies on the unauthorised disclosure. That’s what most journalism that isn’t public relations is … The question is where do you draw the [ethical] line and why, and the answer of course is the public interest. But what I would say is that journalists in general and certainly journalists in this country don’t give enough thought to what we mean by that.”
(Click to watch video.)
As part of the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival, a two-day conference called ‘New News’ was held at the Wheeler Centre last weekend. The keynote speaker was Jay Rosen, who chairs the journalism faculty at New York University. Jay has published his address on his blog, Press Think. Here’s an excerpt.
Imagine the entirety of the political reporting and commentary produced by the New York Times or the political staff of the ABC and plot it on a grid. On the left side of the page: appearances. On the right side: realities. On the top of the page: arguments. On the bottom: facts. Appearances, realities, arguments and facts. All political news should be divided into these categories, and journalists should organize their daily report into my four quadrants.
Under appearances we find everything that is just that: the attempt to make things appear a certain way. All media stunts. Everything that fits under the management of impressions. Or politics as entertainment. The photo ops. The press releases issued in lieu of doing something. […]
My suggestion is to report appearances as just that: mere appearances. Which would be a way of jeering at them, labeling them as not quite real. So the appearances section would be heavy on satire and simple quotation. In the US, Jon Stewart has become a huge star by satirizing the world of appearances. This would be a way to get in on some of that action. Appearances, then, means downgrading or penalizing politicians who deal in the fake, the trivial, the merely sensational. In other words: “watch out or you’ll wind up in the appearances column.”
Under realities we find everything that is actually about real problems, real solutions, real proposals, consequential plans and of course events that have an integrity beyond their fitness as media provocations. This is the political news proper, cured of what Tanner calls the sideshow.
But then there’s my other axis. Arguments and facts. Both are important, both are a valid part of politics.
A new paradigm for journalism, courtesy of Jay Rosen’s blog, PressThink
So imagine my four quadrants.
Bottom left: Appearances rendered as fact. Example: the media stunt.
Top left: Phony arguments. Manufactured controversies. Sideshows.
Bottom right: Today’s new realities: get the facts. The actual news of politics.
Top right. Real arguments: Debates, legitimate controversies, important speeches.
Now imagine all of today’s political news and commentary sorted into these four quadrants. This becomes the new portal to political news. Appearances and realities, arguments and facts. To render the political world that way, journalists would have to exercise their judgment about what is real and what is not. And this is exactly what would bring them into proper alignment with our needs as citizens.
You can read the entire post here, and you can watch or listen to the video/podcast of a Wheeler Centre event of earlier this year, ‘Dumbing Down Democracy’, featuring George Megalogenis in conversation with Lindsay Tanner following the publication of Tanner’s book, Sideshow.
When News International announced that the disgraced News of the World would be printing its final edition last Sunday, they sent in two senior editors. Their brief was simple: scour every last line in the newspaper to make sure that nothing derogatory, slanderous, libellous, abusive or offensive was written by disgruntled staff about their parent company and its senior executives. And so it was: with a front page that read ‘Thank You & Goodbye’, the final edition sold up to two million extra copies.
But there was one thing the heavies from head office forgot to check: the crossword on page 47. Clues to the Quickie puzzle included “deplored”, “desist”, “disaster”, “menace”, “racket”, “stench” and “tart.” Disgruntled staff have claimed the last laugh.
In an act of editorial audacity that has come to typify the newspaper, Sunday’s edition featured quotes from George Orwell on the back page. But that’s not the end of the audacity. It’s been reported a consortium is considering reviving the newspaper – employing existing staff – as a serious investigative newspaper, if Rupert Murdoch decides to sell the brand (which is unlikely).
Hidden messages have a long and storied history in journalism – car journalist James May was fired for his hidden message in an automotive annual.
The twitosphere is abuzz about the sale of the Huffington Post news website to America Online, or AOL. AOL was of course one of the world’s biggest companies when it bought Time Warner at inflated prices just before the dotcom bust about a decade ago. Lately it’s been selling dial-up internet to a couple of million subscribers who seem unaware of or indifferent to the fact they could get much better internet access elsewhere.
Now AOL has bought Huffington Post (see analysis here and here) for over $300 million. HuffPost, as it’s often referred to, is a news and analysis website founded less than 6 years ago that makes US$50 million a year (last year), receives 25 million unique visitors a month and is already bigger than the Washington Post website. Its success is based on its mix of insider Washington gossip, unashamedly progressive opinion (with a sprinkling of populism), loads of images and video, and healthy dollops of comedy and celebrity tattle. It’s a unique and attractive mix of broadsheet and tabloid journalism (often linking to third-party sites, just as we do here at the Dailies), and it’s entirely free.
“No paper, no presses, no trucks.” With those words, Rupert Murdoch has personally launched The Daily, an iPad application designed to be a virtual daily newspaper only available on the iPad. It’s available for free to Australian users for two weeks, after which subscription costs $47.99 per year, or $1.19 per day.
Here’s an interesting review comparing The Daily to Flipboard. Flipboard is another iPad application that compiles a magazine for you from what’s already available on the web, based on your preferences and what your friends are reading – Flipboard calls it social journalism. It is in fact a battle between two different kinds of online journalism business models: one is based on old-fashioned content production, the other on curation. It will be fascinating to see how they fare.
If you’ve been looking at the newspaper and thinking you could do a better job then Schmedlines could prove to be the perfect distraction.
The idea is simple: get a real news story with a weak headline and then invite users to submit their alternatives. Today there’s a story about a Montana jury who have decided they won’t convict for the possession of a small amount of marijuana, so headlines include: MONTANA JURORS UNWILLING TO CAST THE FIRST STONER (from mitt umlaut) MONTANA JURY: DON’T FEAR THE REEFER (from Lddougherty)
And if you don’t like them you’re encouraged to write your own with users voting for their favourite headlines. There’s also a ranking system from cub reporter to managing editor that makes it like Facebook for news junkies.
Coming from his final 7:30 Report, Kerry O'Brien has been honoured at last night’s Walkley Awards. O'Brien was awarded the Walkley for journalistic leadership as well as the prize for best interview for confrontations with Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.
The ABC reported O'Brien appeared to lose his characteristic cool during his acceptance speech: “I’m stunned. I did not expect this. Tonight was my last show for 7:30, as you know, and I was determined to play a straight bat and I managed to, and now you’ve got me, you bastards,” O'Brien said.
Also honoured was Channel 9’s Laurie Oakes, who used his acceptance speech for the Gold Walkley to nudge Julia Gillard for her stance on Wikileaks. The Sydney Morning Herald quotes Oakes on Julia Gillard’s response to Wikileaks as “ridiculous”. Oakes went on to tell the crowd of media professionals, “To brand what the WikiLeaks site has done as illegal when there’s no evidence of any breach of the law, I think is demeaning… I think as journalists we should make that our view.”
Yesterday ABC Managing Director Mark Scott gave a keynote address extolling the virtues of Twitter as journalism tool and arguing against paywalls.
“Lock yourself away – out of the conversation, out of the discussion, untweeted, unlinked, unreferenced – and you might find yourself unloved,” Scott told the 2010 Journalism Education Association Conference. He said that journalism would have to be financed, but that most experiments with paywalls have only reduced readers and limited their influence.
He went on to defend the ABC’s use of Twitter on programs like Q and A, because “the ABC should be a town hall, a commons, a place for connecting not just with content but connecting with each other”. He believes the public broadcaster should continue to be accessible to all and not become “a town hall which is not – as Tony Abbott’s first TV public forum at Rooty Hill was – locked behind the pay TV wall”.
US-based magazine Cooks Source has reproduced an article by Monica Gaudio without her permission, according to the blog How Publishing Really Works.
Gaudio was informed by a friend that her 2005 article “A Tale of Two Tarts” had been re-published by Cooks Source. When Gaudio contacted the publication’s editor Judith Griggs, she was reportedly told, “Well, it was on the Internet. Didn’t you want it published?”
Gaudio explained that the article belonged to her and that reproducing it in a magazine didn’t represent fair use. According to Gaudio’s Live Journal she asked for an apology on Facebook, a printed apology in the magazine itself and a donation of US$130 to Columbia School of Journalism in lieu of payment.
She received a reply from the editor that showed a disturbing lack of understanding of copyright:
“But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!…I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally… We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me!"
It doesn’t seem to be an isolated incident at Cook Source, as further examples of the magazine’s plagiarism have since appeared on Facebook.
Click to see the full video
“As an online journalist, pressing the publish button is just the start,” Sophie Black told us on the Lunchbox/Soapbox as she championed web journalism. Sure, the web has its fair share of Twitter hoaxes and sensationalism, but there’s also the chance to create great stories. The public nature of the internet makes journalist more accountable and more reactive, but also offers new tools. As Black says, “good online journalism must take risks.”
Crikey editor Sophie Black
Dwarf’s penis gets stuck to vacuum cleaner
That was the headline that made me hate the internet.
Were you one of thousands of readers that clicked on that link three years ago? After all, it was asking for it. Just blinking on the Top 5 Most Read stories list on the Age website. Can’t remember?
Here’s the lead:
A dwarf performer at the Edinburgh fringe festival had to be rushed to hospital after his penis got stuck to a vacuum cleaner during an act that went horribly wrong.
Come on, you can admit it.
You weren’t the only one to go there. It was one of the most popular stories of that week, that month even. You clicked, you read, some of you even rated it out of five.
But admit it, you felt cheap and dirty afterwards. It’s headlines like that that got online news our reputation. It cheapened us, it robbed us of our credibility, it chipped away at our self esteem.
We were the cheap date, the fling on the side, the guilty secret. Newspapers were still the one you woke up next to, and the evening news was always waiting faithfully for you at home every night.
And every time you clicked on a cheap link like that, a wire story that was only there to keep the ad sales team happy so they could brag about page impressions, a journalist died a little bit inside.
That was a real photo gallery doing the rounds on The Daily Telegraph website around the same time as the embarrassed dwarf.
Stay with me here – it’s a complex concept – it consisted of 22 slides of the heads of various Hollywood celebrities photoshopped to look like pieces of fruit, vegetables and nuts.
Johnny Cash-ew. Tom-ato Cruise. Aspara-Gus Van Sant. The fruit heads, was more clicked on than the story that covered the latest Baghdad death toll that week. That and a Chihuahua named Chelsea wearing sunglasses. Was this really the future of online news?
I was lucky enough to be spat out of journalism school in the early 2000s, teetering on the edge of a very inconvenient tipping point. I was ready for the romance of print, which in my mind consisted of a vague amalgamation of All the President’s Men, Citizen Kane, My Year of Living Dangerously… and Superman.
The internet had other ideas.
Of course, newspapers didn’t know that yet, and neither did I but given I found myself in the middle of a technological revolution that would fundamentally change the way we communicate across the globe in ways we couldn’t begin to imagine… really, there was no time for nostalgia.
Instead, I was staring down the barrel of a new news culture that told writers that web traffic was more important than quality content, that could get the editor of Gawker bumped for not sufficiently sexing up his stories, that fired an Australian tech journalist for not generating enough hits.
The New York Times’ columnist and now compulsive blogger David Carr wrote in 2007:
Here at the Times, the Most E-Mailed list on our Web site has gone from being an in-house curiosity to a measure of salience, as much as getting an article on the front page. The list can be wonderfully idiosyncratic — last Friday, a story about using animal training on husbands (“What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage”) appeared alongside Thomas Friedman’s meditation on the president’s plan to send more troops to Iraq.
Admit it, you like the sound of Shamu.
In the reassuringly prehistoric world of the newspaper you picked the New York Post, the Sun UK or the Daily Mirror for a page three girl and all your celebrity news.
For the naturally superior there was The Grey Lady, the Washington Post, The Times, the Age, the Telegraph, the Australian or the Guardian with only the Wall Street Journal’s stipple pics to whip you into an overstimulated frenzy. Your choice of masthead defined you. You bought into the kudos, or you liked the crap.
But then the column lines began to blur online as editors appealed to readers’ penchant for sex and gore to generate traffic. And where does the next generation factor in all this?
We who grew up with newspapers may know better, but what about the generation whose soft, pink finger tips have never been sullied by ink and have no time for the evening news? Soon, with their attention spans shorter than Bratz' skirts, they’ll have mobiles grafted to their ear lobes and will demand that all news content be delivered on them.
And what kind of content will they demand? That’s the question. If they haven’t grown up with well resourced, in depth, fearless investigative journalism, how will they know to ask for it?
These were just some of the concerns I had about the state of online news during what I now refer to as the Year of the Dwarf Penis.
But while I was lamenting the loss of a journalistic world I’d never known, based on a set of assumptions that were already overblown, the internet just got on with it.
This week a research firm released the results of what they billed the “biggest ever study of global online habits.”
They revealed a marked global shift away from traditional media, with 61% of online users using the internet daily against 54% for television, 36% for radio and 32% for newspapers.
According to Internet World Stats, there were more than 750 million internet users in Asia in 2009, representing more than 40 per cent of global users. This compared to Europe with about 23 per cent and North America with only 14 per cent. China was said to already have 384 million internet users, the largest number of internet users in the world.
The internet, turns out, is bigger than Rupert Murdoch’s ambitions and/or ego. It’s bigger than the Fairfax board’s internal spats, or the Australian Financial Review’s lawsuits over outlets copying their headlines, and it’s definitely bigger than the narrow Western world vision of what media means.
Here are the headlines that changed my mind about online news:
Headline: Iranian Woman killed in protests in Tehran, 20 Jun 2009, YouTube.
The footage of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan drew international attention after she was shot dead during the Iranian election protests. Her death was captured on video by bystanders and broadcast over the Internet. It was described as “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history”.
Headline: Investigate your MP’s expenses, the Guardian June 2009
Following the disclosure of British MP expense claims and the scandal that ensued, the Guardian asked readers to join them in digging through the documents of MPs' expenses.
They posted 458,832 pages of documents. So far 27,198 readers have reviewed 221,729 of them. Only 237,103 to go…
Headline: Collateral Murder, WikiLeaks, 5 April 2010
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from an incident in which Iraqi civilians were alleged to have been killed by U.S. forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.
Headline: Election 2010: Day 14 (or waste and mismanagement – the media), Friday July 30 2010, Grog’s Gamut blog.
Grogs Gamut, public servant by day, blogger by night, posted an entry suggesting to all the news directors around the country that began: bring home your journalists following Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard, because they are not doing anything of any worth except having a round-the-country twitter and booze tour.
Each of those stories in their own way represents a major shift in the way media works online. Through the crowd sourcing of the Guardian MPs' expenses project, to the unfiltered dissemination of information from WikiLeaks, to the self examination that a hobby blogger like Grog’s Gamut could provoke among the Australian press gallery.
Right now, across the media landscape, from the little bloggers to the big media moguls, there’s one thing that all of these competing outlets have in common: No one knows what they’re doing.
Good online media outlets and good online journalists accept this vital fact, and for many it informs the way they write and present information. They must write intelligently, logically, transparently, embedded with links to back their story. Then they tweet it. I know I’ve come along way when I can use that term with a straight face.
But there’s nothing cheap about twitter. Social media and the way news is shared on it is one of the most disruptive and exciting developments that online news has seen so far.
As an online journalist, pressing the publish button is just the start. The story doesn’t live and die in a day, it’s hashed over, reread, and commented on as it gets digested across the web, from websites, to Facebook, to Twitter, to Reddit, to Digg.
If you’ve got something wrong, expect to hear about it almost immediately. And publicly. This is one of the most rewarding, and terrifying, aspects of online media.
It’s also addictive.
And it’s the prospect of the front page talking back that’s luring the big guns away from tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper. Just last week Howard Kurtz, the veteran Washington Post journalist, announced the end of his 29 year tenure at the paper in favour of a move to the two-year-old the Daily Beast. One writer described the reaction to Kurtz’s move as “reminiscent of when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.”
Why’d he do it?
@howardkurtz harder to innovate online at big company. Time to take a leap. #kurtzbeast
Online journalism can cut through the fat. Dispense with the niceties. Mock the ego.
That doesn’t mean that journalists should not be held accountable, or be responsible. In fact, it means the opposite. They’re exposed more than ever before, they must be transparent, and reactive.
A good online masthead can’t afford to be arrogant. There’s no room for hubris. It’s too easy to be made fun of. Take the twitter storm in a teacup, in which News Ltd’s Andrew Bolt blogged about a Fake Andrew Bolt twitter account that he’d discovered.
Bolt suggested it was a case of identity fraud and threatened to take action against the unidentified person behind the account.
In the wake of Bolt’s post,over 40 fake Andrew Bolt accounts bloomed on twitter. I’m Andrew Bolt, one said. No, I’m Andrew Bolt, another insisted. By the time they were finished, no one could tell who the original fake Andrew Bolt was.
Poking fun is one of the hallmarks of the culture around online media. Partly because of the very uncertainty that new media is built on.
All of which is good news for you readers.
Newser’s Michael Wolff, wrote recently in Wired magazine:
Reading, it turns out, is not a passive, solitary enterprise; it is deeply tied to social activities. Thanks to the web, readers are no longer just consumers – they are participants and creators in their own right, and they are empowered.
So go on, get in there, get up to your elbows in it, shout back.
Of course, taking the leap like to online like journalist Howard Kurtz is not all clear sailing. There remains that small matter of how to fund the good stuff. Publications like The Daily Beast are by no means money makers. And great journalism is expensive, not to mention time consuming.
But as people like Steve Jobs, father of iTunes, corrals content into iPad sized packages that people seem to be willing to pay for, as fences go up again and control is reasserted on the world wide web, now more than ever there is a role for the editor to make sure the good stuff floats to the top, to ensure that their publication cuts through the noise.
That’s one of the major new learning curves on this great big tipping point that we’re jumping off together: restraint is key.
In the wake of a mind numbing 24/7 election campaign we’re witnessing the media pulling back and reassessing. Vowing to slow things down, to recognise that readers still demand quality, that just because you can fill 24 hours with new developments, doesn’t mean you need to.
That doesn’t mean you don’t experiment. The papers may continue to keep themselves nice, but good online journalism must take risks. To consider all the sources of information to be tapped, and the best way to do it.
Whether that be crowdsourcing, or collaborating on investigations with universities, or other outlets for that matter, to get the story up.
Of course, for every WikiLeaks scoop there’s a video of a cat in a t-shirt playing an electronic keyboard that takes Facebook by storm.
With the magic of Google Analytics, I have the power to see what has made Crikey’s most popular stories over the last five years or so. And there, sitting alongside our big stories on the federal election campaign, the US primaries, the night Kevin Rudd was knifed, and the huge traffic day we had when the independents finally named the new government, there’s a headline that still hovers in the top 5, from January of this year: Has Australia really banned small breasts?
Ah well, who says you can’t have your little bit on the side?
Sophie Black is the editor of Crikey. This is a transcript of her Lunchbox/Soapbox: In Defence of Online News.
Blogger Fatima Malik
Mark Latham reporting for 60 minutes is an attempt to bring American-style shock jock journalism to Australia which is more obsessed with personality than facts.
It was meant to shock us and excite us. It was meant to make us want more. Instead what Australians saw when Mark Latham questioned Julia Gillard on the campaign trail, was what it actually was; an interview lacking respect, carried out by someone desperate to inject himself back into the national spotlight.
Channel Nine was quick to apologise to Prime Minister Gillard, saying the interview lacked proper respect. However what did they expect when they hired Latham? Do they not remember this handshake? Or have they never read his weekly column for the Financial Review, always full of scathing attacks.
What Channel Nine was actually trying to do was duplicate Fox News style reporting. Fox News which consistently tops the ratings in the United States is famous for getting into fights with the White House and being home to Bill O’Reilly, who constantly berates and shouts at guests on his program. The Fox News model favours personality, invective and spectacle over facts. Perhaps that is why they hired Sarah Palin. Even I must admit it makes for gripping television just waiting for something else nonsensical to come out of her mouth. Is this what we are headed for?
Maybe Channel Nine was hoping Mark Latham could be their Sarah Palin, their own firebrand supplying an endless stream of gaffes and YouTube moments. In some ways Channel Nine has succeeded. All people have been talking about all week is Channel Nine, Mark Latham and now Laurie Oakes. However the public reaction to the Latham stunt shows that the Australian public isn’t buying it, at least not yet. They see it for what it really is: a distraction.
Some have said that the saga, in particular Laurie Oakes and Mark Latham feud which has emanated from it, is a win for old media in an election that has been dominated by Twitter. However it also represents the demise of old media.
60 minutes is one of the oldest institutions in Australian current affairs. However it has been on a downward spiral long before Latham. Long gone are George Negus, Jana Wendt and live reports from war zones. They have been replaced with interviews with celebrities and fillers sourced from American 60 minutes.
The response to Mark Latham’s report is therefore a win for new media. There are now enough alternatives to mainstream media that people feel comfortable criticising it and utilising other sources to get their news. Sunday night on Nine is no longer the only window into politics and world affairs.
Channel Nine seems to be persisting with the Latham experiment. Perhaps they are hoping this type of journalism will catch on. I for one sincerely hope it doesn’t.
This cross-post is from Express Media’s Electioneering blog, a regular look at what young people are thinking about the election campaign.
Paul Keating never left anyone wondering about the real Prime Minister and he shared his opinions on privacy laws at a Melbourne University last night.
Lateline reported that Keating’s serve on the media’s invasion of privacy. The former PM lambasted the media saying “Whole industries now revolve around so-called celebrity, fame, rumour and gossip, often more correctly straight fiction, which is published these days often by media organisations. These organisations proclaim the importance of free speech in the dissemination of news, but clearly are more at home in the entertainment business.”
Keating called it “naive in the extreme” to allow the media to self-regulate the extent to which journalists can report on the private lives of public figures based what they “determine… public interest is”. Keating wanted stronger laws enforcing privacy laws and better training for journalists.
But former Age editor Michael Gawenda thinks his proposal is unworkable. He told Lateline “Judges and lawyers and politicians don’t necessarily have the same interests in terms of the public’s right to know things that we journalists have traditionally thought was a right, and that’s my major concern.”
New Matilda announced today it will stop publishing after 25th of June. The online magazine has been creating content since 2004 and has built the careers of writers including satirist Ben Pobje and national affairs correspondent, Ben Eltham, but failed to turn a profit.
Editor Marni Cordell attributes the decision to ongoing financial problems. “It probably won’t surprise you to learn that newmatilda.com has never operated on a profit. However, we had projected that the site would break even by 2010.”
Despite securing big advertisers including banks and Apple, New Matilda is one of a number of online publications struggling to make a business case for online journalism. When founder Stephen Mayne sold Crikey in 2005, ABC Online called the website “financially unstable”.
At the time Mayne commented “Despite the impressive growth of Crikey, financially it has always been a struggle and to this day we still have Crikey-related liabilities of almost $50,000.” In the five years since, online journalism remains anything but a get rich quick scheme.
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