Where’s the torrent of cash expected to flow from Google, Meta and other overseas behemoths plundering Ozzie journalism? Here’s the latest handwringing.
Three years ago more than 80 per cent of readers said they hadn’t used print media to get a news fix. Hadn’t or couldn’t?
The Melbourne-based NGO Public Interest Journalism Initiative reckons it knows of “166 news outlet closures” across the past five years.
The scorched mediascape is being colonised by Quixotes, aka altruists, motivated by the frustration felt from living in a society where mass communication concentration levels are “amongst the highest in the world.”
The battlers are listed by compendium True North as Australia’s Independent New Media Publishers.
The catalogue of 65 titles is incomplete and needs scrutiny. Absent are the uni newsletters employing editors; Indonesia at Melbourne and New Mandala (ANU) are free and cover serious affairs.
A few shows are vanity outlets for their flopabout founders. The personal pronoun gets sweaty from excess workouts. Most have a drum to beat; likewise, Murdoch. He plays on the right.
Outfits such as The Koori Mail are specialist; others are satirical like The Shovel. Editors no longer sit in glass cubes overlooking newsrooms big as aircraft hangars. The top desk is now more likely to be a coffee-stained kitchen table with a laptop, smartphone and an indifferent pussycat.
The skills needed for startups can be gleaned online by companies offering templates and links. Substack takes ten per cent of readers’ subs but writers can create free-use websites.
Costs are still an impost if design professionals are used. A few like Michael West Media hire a video whizz to polish presentations; others rely on the standalone skills of wordsmiths.
These tend to be printaholics – like Jack Waterford, former editor of The Canberra Times and still a contributor, also a Pearls and Irritations regular pricking the capital bubble.
Not all are straining to stop the presses that are closing anyway. Veteran foreign correspondent Hugh Lunn’s folksy recollections in Over the Top are delights to sample, not challenges to arouse.
All sites have one thing in common – begging, though they call it appealing.
The rivers of gold that irrigated the legacy media are running dry. Some newbies use aridity as a positive – ‘see, no ads’, reasoning that screaming retailers repel serious readers.
There are few philanthropists in the paddock: Three years ago, miner Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation promised to help 18 small publishers secure licensing deals with Google and Facebook.
What’s happened? Best check the tailings dump as the foundation hasn’t responded to an update request.
Backing small publishers is risky as any journalist might reveal a discomforting morsel and turn a donor from generosity to petulance. Gina Rinehart’s $14 million support for Netball Australia was bounced out of court when some players thought her company’s logo linked them to her late father Lang Hancock’s alleged racism.
It’s not just the miffed that close off with a can-rattle; The Guardian which pays its UK editor-in-chief Katharine Viner almost a million dollars a year, pleads daily for benefactors, reminding readers there’s currently no paywall or ads.
At the mid-level is The Conversation which offers salaried academics an unpaid forum without waiting months for a journal peer-review.
Erudition doesn’t equal clarity. Having a PhD is no qualification for writing a pithy line plebs can understand at first reading. The Conversation says it employs 150 full-time scribes (2020 figures) to make the abstruse palatable – their efforts apparently reaching 38 million online users.
Impressive, but about half the claimed viewership for Murdoch’s Fox News where bottom feeders graze on their prejudices – no thinking required.
The Conversation uses the Creative Commons allowing authors’ work to be republished free if acknowledged. Some research has helped set the national agenda, usually through ABC follow-ups.
The website’s owner is a registered charity and last year said it spent $7.87 million. Every taxation time it bombards readers for more and more money. It was launched in Oz in 2011 and has become an intellectual export, online in the US, UK, Brazil, Canada, France, NZ, Spain and Indonesia.
In the archipelago The Conversation wants to be the “leading media platform that empowers Indonesian researchers, academics and experts to collaborate, spread knowledge, communicate information and educate the younger generation.”
Here some quality control is needed when a professor from the prestigious Universitas Indonesia can get a run alongside a teacher at an obscure private uni. There are almost 3,000 in this category against 184 listed as public.
Last year The Conversation published more than 1,000 articles in Indonesia reaching an estimated six million. That’s wholesome in a nation where only one in a thousand is reported to be an “avid reader”.
Australians are attached to the freebies. Sites like Crikey bait readers by offering an opening par or two as an entrée, then demand a credit card number for the full meal that may be on the ABC’s menu.
Press Reader offers free newspaper access to members of community libraries, a digital continuation of last century’s public reading room. Only The Australian and The Guardian remain – the rest have pulled out, indifferent to the needs of the curious poor.
To shift society the independents need to offer substance, reads like this unforgettable obituary by Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges of American HR advocate Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi slain by a sniper in the West Bank.
Unlike The Weekend Australian’s polemic it doesn’t simplify the conflict as “a fight between good and evil” but a complex, compound, wretched, political and personal tragedy.
The US alternative media is way ahead with subscribers and unapologetic advocacy. The 1440 digest site claims 3.9 million “intellectually curious readers”.
The Constitution’s First Amendment helps shield writers from litigious lawyers and their big paymasters– a species much feared by small Australian publishers with outworn credit cards.
The US website on politics and war Drop Site spells out the issue: “Investigative journalism is expensive … digital ad revenue alone can’t sustain the slow boring of investigative work. It can only be supported by people who insist that it exist.” That’s not Google and Meta.
Disclosure: The author has written for some of the publications listed. A few have paid.