This week another battlefront opened in the conflict between old media and new voices over competing visions: old media struggling to sustain its monopoly voices into the 21st century; new media demanding recognition of (and support for) a more vibrant and diverse ecosystem.
It’s happening at an “existential moment” for media, as Nobel peace prize laureate Maria Ressa reminded us on Monday. The business model is broken, she said, in a call for more support for media. She urged developed countries to dedicate 0.03% of aid funding to global media development. (On current figures, this would be just $1.2 million for Australia.)
In Australia, Ressa’s call has echoed a more tawdry fight over money — specifically over philanthropic support from the $100 million Judith Neilson Institute: should it be to fill the holes left in old media by the cascading collapse in ad dollars? Or should it be targeted at all media to make an ecosystem-wide transition to a more diverse future?
According to news reports, JNI’s eponymous founder reckons that old media companies have had enough hole-filling money from her institute, particularly now they’re picking up a lazy $100 million a year between them thanks to the Frydenberg-brokered pay-off from Google and Facebook.
Problem is, as Crikey’s been reporting over the past couple of weeks, the big media pivot to a subscriber-supported future is hitting a wall. They’re discovering you can build news media with reader support but you can’t build the sort of 20th-century commercial mass media monopolies that turned families like the Murdochs and the Packers into billionaires.
Worse, when philanthropic support shifts from hole-filling to digital start-up and transition support, big media’s monopoly ambitions take a second hit. It delivers the last thing they want: a whole lot more competition for fragmenting audiences.
Australia’s transition to a modern media ecosystem has been hamstrung by our local big media’s rent seeking — with the active collaboration of the lost decade of the Abbott to Morrison years.
Even a positive 2017 reform of grants to help Australian-owned small and independent regional media through the digital transition was, in 2020, transformed into more open slather public interest news-gathering grants. Pre-empting Ressa’s call this week to develop independent media, the Morrison government in 2019 announced a three-year $17 million grant to Australian commercial broadcasters to on-sell programming to the Pacific.
The ABC, too, has been more problem than solution. Although internally it’s doing plenty of exciting innovation in its programming and journalism, it’s been too ready to play safe by tolerating the ambitions of the commercial monopolies — rewarding News Corp, say, with regular appearances on Insiders, while ignoring new media (like *cough* Crikey).
Under pressure from the Liberals, it cut the news feed to the government’s most hated new media voice, industry super-owned New Daily. Across the Tasman, by comparison, Radio New Zealand has been a key supporter of media innovation (for old and new media) with a free news feed and collaboration over podcast creation.
In this context, when JNI first launched, the old media monopolies weren’t sure how to take it: threat or opportunity? The foundation responded with “every kid wins a prize” assurances, making sure all the big media got money out of their initial grants rounds. (Crikey received “emergency” funding from JNI to help keep employing casual subeditors.)
But the institute eschewed the more controversial — and more necessary — targeted support for the digital media transition.
Smart politics. Maybe, in the Australian media culture, even necessary politics. But not so helpful in building the media ecosystem we need for the future.
Some of its grants have provided real value: it funded Guardian Australia’s program to build a Pacific network. It supported a proposal to link Indigenous journalists and media in the region.
But there are better models. The Omidyar Foundation’s India arm, for example, has invested in digital news start-ups like Scroll and News Laundry. The George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation spun off the media development investment fund in the 1990s to provide low-cost financing for new media in emerging democracies. It’s been critical in supporting Indonesia’s diverse media.
In the US, Matter VC used the US west coast venture capital fund-raising boom to provide seed funding through a media-focused accelerator program. The Walkley Foundation raised funding (from Google, among others) for a four-year Media Incubator and Innovation Fund from 2013, which supported more than 25 media ventures and experiments. (Disclosure: I was a trustee when the fund was launched.)
Journalism-supporting institutions work better when they work with others, rather than duplicating (do we really need another journalism award?) or attempting to rival or supplant the work of, say, the various university journalism schools and research centres.
There’s a big need for something like the JNI in Australia, particularly if it helps speed up the change we need.
Thanks Christopher explaining this kerfuffle at the JNI. And I support your suggestion to support transition, diversity, penetration and accessibility. That will be my future test for whether media is better or worse.
Such a good, nuanced analysis of the truly disruptive information transition in play. At the heart of it all is the possibly-unanswerable question: who exactly gets to decide what ‘information’ is, or ought to become…’the news’?
Journalists have always understood the dynamic, fundamentally arbitrary nature of news ‘editing’: the ever-present decisions to make about which stories to pursue, and which not; what prominence and resources to allocate them, where and how; what kind of coverage to produce, what audiences to aim it at. Sometimes it’s obvious; often it’s line ball. These are, in a very profound sense, unavoidably and deeply ‘subjective’ decisions. Once upon a time, banal technical imperatives made it somewhat easier for ‘the professional media’ to curate these trickier elements of ‘the news’. The news cycle itself, the societal dominance/prominence of ‘institutions’ like parliament, public service, church, establishment businesses, professions; simple media space and logistic limitations; journalism’s access and trade/vocational expertise ‘exclusivity’…it all added professional heft, legitimacy and momentum (or ‘elitist credentialism’, ‘info-gatekeeping’ and ‘status quo inertia’) to the challenging business of being a guardian-profession ‘of the public record’.
But now…man. When every one of us can be our own 24-7 TV station and mass circulation newspaper – most of us cr*p, but some exceptionally ‘good’, as ‘good’ at ‘journalism’ as any legacy pro – how do we decide what stories get to become – should get to become – ‘The News’? Who makes the call on ‘the public interest’? Who gets to anoint their ‘journalism’ a legit ‘source of sceptical truth-to-power-telling’?
And who gets to make all those daily editorial calls? And – no less important – the daily editorial calls to spike some stories as…NOT ‘The News’? Some strange new ‘Fifth Estate’ daily editorial meeting, compromising a couple of billion social media click-likers? An Elon Musk e-cult leader, channeling a Jack Dorsey crowd-newsroom based on Twitter swarm numbers, all funded by harvesting Tesla pump-and-dump daily stock plays? Daily Tik-Tok viral democracy? Bring back God to referee it all? Or work like buggery to finally nail down AI, and just hand the whole now-in fathomably complicated matter of information triage over to the machines?
The obvious solution would of course be to simply appoint me as Global Infallible News Objectivity Editor-in-Chief – I would do it for MEAA scale (and the same holiday break entitlements as the ABC) – but as faultlessly ‘fair and balanced’ as I would shorely prove to be, I suspect there’d be a bit of pushback from a few of the older pro hacks, anyway. The bolshie whingers.
It’s tricky. Big philosophical questions in play. No idea how journalists might work through it, TBH, or where we all fetch up. Great piece, CW. Gets right to the super-tough nub of where your vital vocation is at.
Was always a bit curious of the JNI’s claims on its role in or support for journalism and media. If our media laws, like the UK, Hungary, Turkey, Russia etc,. had not been diluted with much intimidation of those speaking truth to power, we would not be in this situation?