In his Andrew Olle Media lecture on Friday, Mark Colvin discussed the digital Tsunami that has hit media.
He identified four areas of crisis for media, especially newspapers: Consensus, authority, credibility and finance. Here are some opf his thoughts.
The digitisation tsunami has finally hit, and that means that mainstream media in Australia and around the world face not one, but several crises at the same time.
There’s a crisis of consensus, where journalists find it increasingly difficult to find a common ground from which to write.
There’s a crisis of authority, in which institutions that have tended to hand down pronouncements like stone tablets from the mountaintop now often find themselves subject to disagreement, abuse or even ridicule.
And there’s a crisis of credibility, as, Wizard of Oz- like, the curtain is pulled away from so-called authorities like News Corp and the BBC to reveal the sometimes despicable reality.
Looming over all, though, is the fourth crisis, the biggest of all – the crisis of finance. How, in the age of creative destruction brought on by digitisation, can we make journalism pay?
Crisis of consensus
I’m talking about the way people can create their own reality stream now…
You no longer need Fox News or radio shock jocks to feed your prejudices and screen out the facts.
You just create a world where you get all your news from the twitter and Facebook and blog sources you’ve chosen. And that world’s already upon us…
The best you can do as members of the reality based community is – like Voltaire’s Candide – to cultivate your own garden.
Oh, and go hell for leather to ensure that your radio or print or TV content is available and palatable for a social media audience. Even in the most hermetically sealed worlds, it’s still possible for facts to get through.
Yes, the fall of the consensus empowers fanatics… We have to hope, we of the reality based community, that we can still penetrate some prejudices with facts.
Lessons learnt about Twitter
These are some lessons I’ve learned, in nearly four years on Twitter.
Crowd-source. That can mean anything from checking a date to asking people, as the Guardian regularly does now, to help scour through big government document dumps and Commission reports.
It’s amazing how much more information you can find with thousands of willing helpers… Ask your readers, listeners and viewers to contribute…
Be a presence on social media, giving as much as you. Don’t just plug your own stuff: encourage conversation and join in others’ discussions.
Use Twitter as a rolling news wire, but subject it to the verification tools developed by journalists over decades.
Take the Japanese tsunami – Twitter put us way ahead when that happened. And I don’t just mean ahead of the TV coverage – ahead of all the mainstream media.
Admit you can be wrong, but correct yourself as soon as possible.
Be aware that people will come to you as an act of free choice, and not because you’re the only game in town.
You’re not and you never will be again. You have to work for your place, 365 days a year.
Crisis of credibility
Credibility is not just about what you put in the paper, or out on the airwaves, it’s about how you get that information, what you do with it, and more broadly, how you conduct yourself as a corporation.
It’s not nearly enough in my view for BBC top brass to say they didn’t know about Jimmy Savile – and it’s not nearly enough for Rupert Murdoch to have closed down the News of the World as expiation for hacking Milly Dowler’s phone.
The British tabloid press – and by no means only the Murdoch press – in my view needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to clean the stables… One thing that certainly would make a difference is simply to enforce the existing laws…
We do have to face the fact that the hacking scandal and many other incidents have coloured the credibility of the mainstream media here and around the world.
It couldn’t – for all kinds of reasons I’ve alluded to tonight – have happened at a worse time.
I do not, however, argue for less freedom of the press…
Economic crisis
Even in the most liberal freedom of information climate, the best stories are often hard, long and expensive to dig up.
A well funded media with a broad readership is essential to fund and support that.
Increasingly that looks like wishful thinking.
Where is the money to employ journalists going to come from?
It’s not all bleak…
One recent ray of light: The London Evening Standard, for example, actually claims to have made a profit for the first time since it dropped its cover price to zero.
It did so mainly by radically slashing its distribution costs…
For most papers and magazines the switch from newsprint to digital looks unavoidable – if not in the next five years, probably in the next ten…
News itself is going from a scarce product to a superabundant one…
You can see a pattern: the journalism sites that make money are the ones that CAN make money for readers, like the Economist, the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times – or the ones that add value through investigation, expertise, political insider information and analysis, great writing, humour, and consistent quality…
This is the world we all have to travel through.
I wish I could give you a roadmap and some certainty. I can’t, and anyone who says they can is a charlatan.
All I can give you is my profound conviction that good journalism – journalism of integrity – is a social good and an essential part of democracy, and we have to do everything we can to try to preserve it.
For the full text of Colvin’s lecture, click here, and for the Catchup TV replay, check our Hot off the Net section.