Another year passes and the great (yawn) debate about social media goes on. Are bloggers journalists? Can they ever be? So 2005 darlings.
Mark Scott makes speeches and recruits Australia's best-loved twitterers. Despite the rhetoric, and the recruitment, the ABC continues to draw a sharp distinction between professional (inside the citadel) and amateur (amusing chaps who as Scott points out will mostly never get paid for their work).
The Drum, where the ABC's well-paid employees publish, is billed as 'analysis'; further down the page, much further down the page, is Unleashed, the place where the outsiders scribble in what is condescendingly referred to as 'robust community debate' - which sounds as serious and alluring as an evening at a local church hall to protest the lack of pedestrian crossings.
Despite Mark Scott's earnest pleadings to the contrary, the ABC's strategy is not to share but to dominate the emerging media space, which he sees as traditional media plus social media. That is, not a transformation but the old stuff with a bit extra on the side. Still, the ABC is being more creative than News or Fairfax - so that's something.
In the early days (think, say, 2004), social media was seen as a way to re-invent the Internet. It would be an Internet that everyone could use to read and write just as the early visionaries hoped. And the amateurs would come to rival the professionals. Never happened. If you can't make a living out of it, you can't compete.
Money is money and like water it finds its course. Just like in some grief cycle, big media first ignored, then scoffed, later attacked and then took over social media. Social media is no longer a challenge to big business, it is now part of big business. Social media is cheap content. But is a blog, really a blog in the same sense as the early adopters envisioned if it is hosted at News Ltd or the ABC? Or is it just another product offering? When social media got taken over, big media hyped it. Hence the Mark Scott speeches. It is all wonderful now that it is indoors and toilet-trained.
Of course, there are still bloggers who do it for the love of it, but they are not the main game, and there overall impact on the media world is as close to zilch as you can get. I love the amateurs but I'm in a small, small niche. Most bloggers want the profile that hanging off a big media site can deliver. Most Internet users lack the confidence in their own judgement required to move away from aunty ABC and the corporate equivalents.
The big issue, outside taxpayer-funded media, is not how to incorporate social media types, that's a slam dunk now, but how to fund journalism. No amount of amateurs tapping out their views on the ABC site or elsewhere is going to solve this problem. As John Lanchester writes in the current issue of the London Review of Books:
The man who is trying harder than anyone else to solve this conundrum is Rupert Murdoch. It is hilarious that Murdoch, who has in many respects been a pantomime villain for progressives, should now be riding to the rescue of the print media – but it shows that the Dirty Digger, for all his flaws, does genuinely love the newspaper business. (It also shows that he owns many hugely valuable franchises in print journalism, but there’s no law saying you aren’t allowed to have overlapping motives.) His dislike of giving his expensively developed content away for free is well known. He owns the Wall Street Journal, which successfully charges for access. His solution: to erect a paywall around the Times and Sunday Times and begin charging for content.
I don’t think I can be alone in having had very mixed feelings about this experiment. On the one hand, I think Murdoch has been a strongly negative force in British life and I don’t wish his enterprises well. On the other, if it did turn out that people were willing to switch from reading stuff for free to paying for it – were willing to hop over the paywall as if they barely noticed it was there – then that would, right in that moment, be the saving of the entire newspaper industry in its current form. If the Times paywall worked, we could all exhale and slap each other on the back and say ‘that was a close one’ and forget that the business had once seemed doomed. But I should say that I don’t know a single internet-minded person who thought that the paywall experiment had any chance of succeeding.
The reality is that good journalism costs money and lots of it. And that's why the ABC's social media experiments have been disappointing so far - they haven't paid for more quality journalism. Lots more commentary to be sure, but that only takes you so far - as talkback radio has demonstrated in the past. Just about everything you can say about the wonders of social media, Alan Jones has been saying about his radio program for 25 years. Democracy of the airwaves, ordinary people having their say, our audience are our best researchers and so on. As radio talkback grew, the commitment to spending on journalism on commercial radio declined. Lots of reasons, of course. But talkback, like social media, is a lot cheaper than journalism.
If Murdoch's challenge is to find a way to pay for journalism on the internet, Scott's challenge is to find a way to turn all that social media scribbling into journalism. Yeah, I know context and analysis are important parts of journalism, but what we need is more research-driven content. More real insight backed by argument and substantiated by fact.
But in the meantime, in the big world where people get paid, does social media have any political impact of any real consequence?
Australian researcher Sally Young estimates that the political audience in Australia is very small, as she told Mark Colvin last month:
SALLY YOUNG: I've got some figures in the book where I try to map this quite specifically because I don't think it's been done in Australia before, that we talk about who are these people? Who is the political news audience? And I've got quite a few chapters devoted to this and in one of them I chart it and I say, basically the people who are really political news tragics - people who watch Parliament Question Time or subscribe to Crikey, for example, or watch Sky News press conferences and so on live - that's about 0.5 per cent of the Australian population. So they're your real political tragics and it's a very small percentage.
MARK COLVIN: And so politicians have a real dilemma there. I mean, they're speaking on two levels and if they engage too much with the Twitterarti etc, then they're in danger of ignoring the vast majority of the population.
SALLY YOUNG: Mm, that's right and I mean, even just broadening it out. When I looked at the percentage of people who buy a broadsheet in Australia, it's about 2 per cent of the adult population. So, you know, it broadens out to things like, if you count people who watch ABC or SBS news and current affairs that's about 10 per cent, or 12 per cent might listen to ABC Local Radio. So it's somewhere between 0.5 to 12 per cent. That's the core audience you think are interested in detailed information about politics, that sort of public affairs.
MARK COLVIN: So you're left with 80 to 90 per cent who get everything they know about politics from the first couple of minutes of one of the commercial channels' news bulletins.
Twitter, Facebook etc are only going to be important when they break stories. Sure they are entertaining, but they are not journalism. I don't mean in the sense of the first person to tweet about the outcome of a caucus ballot, I mean in the sense of telling us something that we wouldn't have known otherwise. The Walkleys brings us examples every year of great journalism of the latter sort, but it costs money and it takes time. And it is getting rarer as the cost pressures mount.
So wikileaks. It's great, but it's whistleblowing not journalism. If it hadn't been for the work of journalists on major media outlets around the world would we know what was important in all those cables (most of them are of little significance)?
To paraphase Colvin, I think we will be left with 80 to 90 per cent of the population getting their political news from the first two minutes of the evening bulletin unless Mark Scott, or some other saviour, can turn some of that social media into (research-driven) journalism, rather than turning journalism into social media.
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