EIDOS Brisbane conference: Social media in times of crisis

(Kym Charlton of QPS speaks at Eidos. photo: Fiona Muirhead)

One of the predicted outcomes of climate change is more frequent and intense severe weather events (today’s report in The Australian predicting exactly the opposite should be treated with caution due to the paper’s well documented ideological biases.) Given the likelihood of such events increasing, a conference called “Social media in times of crisis” held yesterday in Brisbane was timely. Organised by the Eidos Institute, the conference brought together a number of speakers from academia, media, public relations and public affairs to discuss the use of tools such as Twitter and Facebook in crises, particularly in the 2010-2011 Queensland flood event.

First speaker Kym Charlton was ideally placed to talk to the topic. Head of Queensland Police Service media unit, she was responsible for the delivery of a service that set the gold standard in crisis response. Charlton told the audience she set up the QPS Facebook Page in May 2010 without asking the powers that be for permission.

She admits it was a risky move in a notoriously risk-averse organisation. Without telling anyone about it, the page grew slowly through word of mouth. Charlton eventually realised she needed high level signoff for the page and approached her boss Deputy Commissioner Ian Stewart (who would later play a critical leading role in the flood response). The tech savvy Stewart agreed to trial the page for six months and by December 2010 the page had 6,000 likes. Early experiments such as live-streaming the funeral of an officer who died on duty failed, but the experience gained was crucial.

Then on 15 December as Charlton laconically put it, “it began to rain”. Many people, myself included, signed up to the QPS Facebook feed in the days that followed as it sent out reams of useful and relevant information covering the flood events across a huge area of the state. Then on 11 January, a torrent of water rushed through Toowoomba and into the Lockyer Valley below. Journalist Amanda Gearing would later take the conference through a harrowing blow by blow of events in the region from her eye-witness perspective.

There was a desperate need for credible and quick information about missing family and friends. USQ’s Kelly McWilliam told the afternoon session how one person’s page Toowoomba and Darling Downs Flood Photos and Info was set up within an hour of the flood (well ahead of scanty official responses from the Toowoomba Regional Council) as a repository of photos and information about the missing. It remains the most popular site with 37,000 fans.

QUT’s Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess measured Twitter use of the #qldfloods hashtag. They noted a huge spike in tweets on the day marked “Lockyer” (there would be an even greater number marked “Brisbane” in the days that followed.) The ABC’s Monique Potts told the conference how the national broadcaster used tools such as Ushahidi to map crowdsourced incidents in the flood (and later cyclone) region.

On the day of the Toowoomba/Lockyer Valley flood, the QPS Facebook page was a crucial resource. Suddenly as Kim Charlton said, their facebook page feed was on the pointy end of social media. 16,000 fans of the page became 160,000 in just 24 hours as people across Queensland, Australia and the world desperately sought to get information about those in the disaster zone. There were 39 million views of the page in that day, over 450 views every second. “Thank heavens it wasn’t our website,” Charlton said. “January 11 blew us out of the water.” The pressure remained intense to get timely and accurate news out all week as the wall of water headed towards Brisbane. Just as valuable as the information sharing were the QPS “mythbuster” posts and tweets which punctured the many rumours that were rife at the time. Then “after a week off” as Charlton put it, tropical cyclones Antony and Yasi struck the north coast pushing the QPS team into overdrive again.

It was an astonishing effort for a team with just one acknowledged social media expert in an organisation with no official social media policy. Emergency 2.0 Wiki Project Leader Eileen Culleton (herself a survivor of Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy in 1974 when it took days to let the world know what happened) would later tell the conference that setting a social media policy was a must for all organisations with a public presence. Culleton noted how the Brisbane City Council galvanised the "mud army" to help with the clean-up with their use of social media.

But for Charlton the QPS social media updates were simpler still; it was something they had to do to save lives. The conference's final speaker UQ’s Mark Bahnisch put these usages in a social sciences context of “social resilience”. Disasters, said Bahnisch, expose our social structures more sharply than any other important event. They unsettle us by taking us out of our normal rituals. But panic is rare, Bahnisch argues and there is a social good of new communities created out of the common bond of crisis. Social media go a long way to help creating those communities, not to mention as the QPS found out, saving lives.

Is Media140 abandoning Twitter?

The inaugural Media140 conference in Australia is on in November in Sydney. As a totally Twitterised wannabe journalist, I’m looking forward to attending. There will be lots of great speakers and good discussions there, I'm sure. Interestingly, the event’s flyer barely mentions Twitter, the technology that inspired the 140 idea. That’s a pity in some respect because sometimes a little technological determinism doesn’t hurt. No matter what it is called, Twitter is a reforming technology.

Its name may be for the birds, but Twitter is usually imagined as a stream. Right now, it is a raging current rushing towards some eventual ocean of communication. The channel is known but it might be more difficult to work out who is saying what to whom and for what effect.

At first glance Twitter seems anchored and orderly with a precise naming system. There are hashtags denoting issues and an honest sounding at-sign denoting voices - My voice is @DerekBarry. But the information in the sign may not be reliable as it seems it is at.

Fakes about on Twitter. The real fakes acquire a fixity over time channelling other personalities. Tiny Buddha spreads 140 character wisdom, Marcel Marceau spreads a similar amount of silence. Nietzsche may have killed God but he cannot stop him/her from tweeting.

If there is genuine in the fake, there is also as much fakery in the genuine. Last week, “Media-more-than-140” gleefully published research that headlined 40 percent of Tweets are pointless babble. They were wrong to call it Twitter twaddle; the figure grossly underestimates the need for phatic conversation as a part of social bridge-building. But whatever the true ratio of signal to noise, the question has validity. It implies there is a discrete judgement about each individual communication.

Discrete communication Twitter may be, but discreet it ain’t. Yes, there are backchannels where you can sometimes privately engage in conversation via the deep and meaningful DM. But most of Twitter’s output is in the public sphere where followers can see directly and a network of others can indirectly. Twitter is a 21st century agora and a marketplace of ideas. It exists in mostly equal fashion across the Internet though there is manipulation. China and other countries can switch it off from time to time and the US can keep it on the air in an attempt to update Mohammad Mossadegh's Iranian fail whale story.

As the State Department found out, Twitter is useful. It is a vibrant source of news, stories, information, jokes, links, music, arguments, gossip and goofs. There are leads, information, signposts, arguments, diary entries, story, contact, and laughing. There are many expressions of boredom. It is how taste is transferred; a sort of Bourdieu on Big Brother.

Much of this milieu is familiar to other modes of communication. But there is also joy in the technology itself. Like Google, it is simple. Unlike Google there is a restriction. The 140 character limit concentrates the mind. Twitter's most ingenuous factor is the creative motif of denial. The need for brevity is paramount. Every letter of every word must be scrutinised to ensure it is working for the cause. Driven by the limit, Twitter is a 21st century telegraph on steroids. But what goes on in this digital Vegas doesn’t necessarily stay there.

Digital data is easily replicable and there is also a wonderfully organic search engine. Twitter search has its faults as it doesn’t keep a great history, but it is right up to date with the present. Anything new, interesting, informative or important will cascade quickly through its networks in the form of an accelerating power law. It can go from 0 to 140 in under ten seconds. Google might be able to tell you what something is, but Twitter can tell you what it is right now.

Citizen Byte conference part 3: Political blogging in Australia

This is the third and final post about Friday’s “New Media and the Informed Citizen” symposium held at Brisbane’s South Bank. See links to parts one and two.

In his perceptive book Blogwars (2008), American academic David Perlmutter says that too many news and information blogs read like reporters’ notes prior to going to press. He quotes the famous dictum of Washington Post publisher Philip Graham who said that journalism is the first draft of history. Blogs, said Perlmutter, could now be considered the first draft of journalism. But where exactly blogging and journalism intersect has always been a thorny subject in the Australian political and media landscape and this was one of topics Graham Young touched on in his speech to the Citizen Byte forum.

Young is well qualified to speak to this theme having vast experience across blogging, the media, and politics. He blogs at Ambit Gambit, conducts online polling at What the People Want and is also the chief editor of one of Australia’s most important Internet journals, On Line Opinion. In the 1990s he was the vice-president and campaign chairman of the Queensland Liberal Party. He was successful too – the Liberals last election victory in 1995 occurred on his watch. But Young was always too iconoclastic to be a Liberal hero and is now outside the fold.

He began by discussing how the Internet was affecting Australian politics. He quoted the 2007 Nielsen Internet Technology Report which found the technology was pervasive and that 72 percent of all Internet users use it for news, sport and weather updates. However when he looked at the data, he found that despite the existence of thousands of political blogs, online users were consistently turning to existing media organisations for their news. In order of frequency the most accessed were (with Alexa ranking in brackets) Nine MSN (9), News.com (11), SMH (14), ABC (21) and The Age (26). The exclusively online organisations were well down the ladder with the biggest Crikey at 40,977 and Young’s own On Line Opinion further down at 142,137.

The message from this data, said Young, was that “tyrants rule” in Australia. Existing brands count, he said, as do the number of resources at their disposal, their national presence, and the fact that Australia is such a small and competitive marketplace. The few exclusively online operations that have been successful serve niche markets. Young also found that geographical proximity counted on the Internet and 30 percent of On Line Opinion’s users were from Queensland (which has 20 percent of total population).

This accentuation of the local was repeated in the Youdecide2007 citizen journalism project which Young was also involved with. This 2007 federal election site was an initiative of the Creative Industries faculty at QUT, funded by the Australian Research Council, and supported by project partners On Line Opinion, SBS and Cisco. The intention was to provide hyperlocal news and information on a seat-by-seat basis. However, audiences and stories from Queensland predominated (including the site’s one ‘gotcha’ story crategate) and this can be attributed to the fact the project was run out of Brisbane.

Young also noted how what he called Australian “para-parties” use the Internet. In the last election, 200,000 people joined the union-based Your Rights At Work campaign to fight the then-Governments Workchoices legislation. Activist group Getup! has an even bigger membership with 325,000 people registered on their books. Young disputes whether these are "members" in a traditional sense. He see Getup! as a harvester of e-mail addresses to which it then targets fundraising and single-political issue campaigns. According to AEC returns Getup! raised $1.2m in the election year of 2007 and it campaigned heavily (with mixed success) in the seats of Bennelong and Wentworth against Liberal heavyweights John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull respectively.

The mainstream political parties haven’t embraced the Internet as much as the “para-parties”. Young says there is a good reason for this – the old fashioned methods still work. TV ads and direct mail remain the most successful media campaign techniques. According to Young, Liberals used the Internet the most (with 44 percent of candidates having websites) with Labor second on 30 percent. Surprisingly, the minor parties such as the Greens and the Democrats were well behind, preferring to use their scarce funds on more traditional advertising. Despite their apparent net-friendly credentials, these parties were only too aware where the real priority was when it came to spending money. (This is not a unique Australian problem; Perlmutter notes in his book that despite being a very adept blogger, Iowa Democrat governor Tom Vilsack was forced to drop out of the 2008 presidential race because didn’t have the money to buy television time).

Young then turned his attention to what he called the problem of “the failure of the blogosphere". He gave his version of an a-list of blogs he called “the domain” which included Larvatus Prodeo, Jennifer Marohasy, Homepagedaily, John Quiggin, Club Troppo and Henry Thornton. Young said that with the possible exception of Thornton who writes a fortnightly column in The Australian, none have successfully made a breakthrough similar to US blogs. Possible reasons for this include their point-of-view, a competitive market, the unwillingness of the MSM to interact, and the lack of a sustainable financial model. Young conceded some polling blogs have succeeded in impacting the agenda but he said this was hardly a mainstream interest. He also suggested that the highly educated people that ran most of his “domain” blogs may not be talking about the issues relevant to everyday Australians.

Because, he said, in the mainstream “brands count”. Media companies rely on severe audience inertia acting against change. Commercial television stations know that the 5.30pm slot is the most important because if they can lock in viewers prior to the high cost ads of the 6pm news, the likelihood they won’t change the channel – remote or no remote. Other issues affecting the ability of blogs to impact on politics here include the central control of party funding and candidate selection and the fact that Australia, generally speaking, is well run. What that means is that people generally don’t need to think about politics in daily life – they have more exciting things to do. The reason almost 100 percent of people voted in Iran’s recent election, said Young, was because there was a burning desire to fix a problem. The same desires don't exist here. The blogs have their community but have not crashed through to a greater public. According to Young, "the days of the Interknight errant never arrived”.

Citizens bite: Part 2

“Everyone, from journalists to the people we cover to our sources and the former audience, must change their ways. The alternative is just more of the same” – Dan Gillmor (We the Media).

And speaking of changing ways, I must begin with a correction. I gave the impression that Brisbane media did not attend the Citizen Byte new media symposium in Brisbane yesterday. That simply wasn't true. Graham Young (OnLine Opinion, Ambit Gambit, What the People Want) was an invited speaker and there was also Wotnews.com.au and Woolly Days. I have since found out that other journalists and academics would have attended with more notice. In any case, the proceedings were filmed and I hope will be available in the public domain soon enough.

Citizen Byte is a community research project whose stated purpose is to “examine what the implications of the new media environment are on politics and the political sphere both in Australia and in Malaysia.” One of those implications was that new media was having a bigger impact in Malaysia than it was in Australia. Last night I discussed the role of keynote speaker Steven Gan. The editor of Malaysiakini is the “new media” go-to person for the White House and the New York Times and he has transformed a small online venture into Malaysia’s most popular news site. But tonight I want to discuss some of the other Malaysian wisdom on offer at the symposium. Tomorrow I will conclude with some great observations by the conference’s only Australian speaker, Graham Young.

Not the least wisdom came from a member of Malaysia’s media elite: Datuk Azman Ujang. Datuk Azman is chair of the Malaysian Press Institute and the Editorial Adviser at both national news agency Bernama and its broadcasting arm Bernama TV. He took up the latter two jobs having retired as overall GM of Bernama. Datuk Azman is an experienced powerful insider who can get away with calling a spade a spade in the corridors of power. He told his Brisbane audience how the government admonishes him for being “too honest” but it does not dare censure him further. Yet even he was disturbed by the last election result which he said was a wake-up call for the media as well the government. Datuk Azman said that entrenched government support within the media has resulted in biased news for 50 years. The arrival of new media suddenly made their credibility a marketplace issue for urban voters. Malaysiakini took up the challenge and inspired other news portals. Meanwhile opposition politicians took to blogging in numbers to enhance their appeal with younger audiences and crash through their lack of coverage in the MSM. They also used the world’s highest mobile penetration to good effect to spread viral political messages.

But most of the villages don’t have the Internet or mobile phones and the government won the election overall 60:40. The poorer states, particularly East Malaysia voted for BN. There is entrenched corruption in Sabah and Sarawak that has survived for half a century which KL turns a blind eye to. And the government uses regulation of the broadcast spectrum and annual licensing of newspapers to keep the media in check. Datuk Azman said there were “unwritten laws” which depended on the circumstances and mood and attitude of the government at a particular time.

Mohd. Zulkifli was the next to speak. Zulkifli is a content manager at Media Prima Berhad. Media Prima Berhad is Malaysia’s largest media company with a diversified portfolio of assets including four free-to-air TV channels. Zulkifli is bringing the power of new media to bear on many of those assets. He said audiences had to register to his websites but the content was free. 838,000 Malaysians have signed up.

Zulkifli says their biggest differentiator is video content but they are also providing Tweetdecks, SMS alerts (with video alerts starting next month), streaming content on mobiles, as well as interacting with television shows in innovative ways that would please fan theorists like Henry Jenkins.

Their websites are full of blogs and online discussions with network stars and there are discussion rooms where audiences can go to have their say and possibly affect the plots of soap operas. There is also an “Indie showcase” channel that deliberately attempts to “push the boundaries of censorship”. In 2007 Berhad released Malaysia’s first made-for-web drama. “Kerana Karina” or KK tells the story of overnight pop star Karina in 20 four-minute episodes. Though he didn’t mention in the speech, Zulkifli took time out from his day job to write the lyrics to the KK theme song.

What he did mention was that Berhad’s investment in new media (including 60 staff) is starting to pay off. The most popular site TV3.com gets 41 million hits each month. His job is to keep the revenue high otherwise, he said, he “wouldn’t be here next year”. Zulkifli says that social media is the big challenge of the next couple of years. Somehow, I don’t expect him to fail this challenge - Mohd. Zulkifli is definitely not “more of the same”.

Malaysiakini editor speaks in Brisbane

When Barack Obama’s campaign team and the New York Times online editor were scouring Asia-Pacific for innovative ways to harness the power of new media, they avoided Australia. There was little going on here they did not already know. Where they did go to was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which is home to some of the most cutting-edge use of media in the world. The person both organisations sought out was journalist and editor Steven Gan. Gan is the editor of Malaysiakini (MK) an online citizen news service that has become the most trusted media organisation in the peninsula. MK publishes in Malay, Chinese, English and Tamil and has also expanded into video.

Today, Brisbane was fortunate enough to host Gan and several other key Malaysian new media players at an all-day symposium called “New Media and the Informed Citizen” at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane’s South Bank. The conference outlined the vibrancy of the industry in Malaysia in front of audience of about thirty people and it was a shame more people in Brisbane didn’t get the chance to listen to how the media is being shaped in new directions in our part of the world.

“Malaysiakini” means Malaysia Now and celebrates its tenth anniversary in November. Up to around 1998 the Malaysian Barisan National (BN) government (which has ruled since independence in 1957) had a monopoly on news in cyberspace. But after visiting Silicon Valley, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad introduced the Multimedia Super Corridor (now MSC Malaysia) to kickstart the local IT industry. One of things Bill Gates and others told Mahathir was that he should not censor the Internet. While Mahathir had misgivings (particularly over pornography) he saw the business benefit and agreed. Malaysiakini rose to exploit the loophole, starting up with just four journalists.

But despite the liberal censorship rules (by Malaysian standards) the new publication still attracted the unwelcome attention of authorities. In January 2003, police raided the offices of MK looking for details of an anonymous letter writer who satirically compared a politician to the Ku Klux Klan. The politician was not amused and sent police in to find out the identity of the letter writer. Gan, as any good journalist would do, refused to divulge his source. Police seized four servers and 15 central processing units from its office and interrogated Gan and senior staff. The move provoked an outcry with spontaneous protests outside the office and led to a coalition of groups condemning the raid. Police never formally raised charges and returned the now obsolete boxes two years later.

MK continued to grow as its attacks on government corruption attracted a new readership unhappy with the servile nature of Malaysia’s mainstream press. In 2006 they broke the Petronas story over lies the oil company boss told about its activities in Sabah. The following year they took on Abdul Taib Mahmud the long-term corrupt leader of Sarawak over logging kickbacks to Japanese shipping firms. And last year MK played a pivotal rule in the general election (where the MSM all supported the government) and BN had its worst result in 50 years, losing control of five states.

MK now employs 30 journalists and has moved into video at www. malaysiakini.tv. They have also trained up a team of citizen journalists and provided them with video cameras to report on local news across East and West Malaysia. MK grew steadily with a subscription only model ("go subscription" was the advice he gave the NYT) and a large bed of content.

As the election got closer in 2008, Gan made an important decision. He opened up the site for free for the entire period of the election. By the time of the vote on 8 March it had overtaken The Star newspaper as Malaysia’s most popular political site. Gan called the election a tsunami that almost completely overturned Malaysia’s political system (a later speaker said it wasn’t a new chapter in Malaysian politics – it was a new book).

Thanks to a corrupt government and the biased MSM, Malaysiakini has now established itself as the most trusted media brand. It brought in thousands of new subscribers after the election. The badly shaken BN government admitted they lost the Internet war and have now started to negotiate with MK and the other online outlets.

MK is now a thriving media organisation that has made a profit in each of the last four years. Gan says they were lucky they started their subscription model early. And after the election he says that big advertisers have started to take notice. He described one of his proudest moments as a video they released of a “nude ear-squat” form of prisoner punishment the government claimed had not been used in decades. The video scandal caused a Royal Commission to be set up to investigate the affair. “A half minute video changed practices that were going on for years," he said.

Israel flexes its muscles: The West’s shameful boycott of the Durban Review Conference

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said she is “shocked and disappointed” by the US decision not to attend the anti-racism Durban Review Conference which starts today in Geneva, Switzerland. The US joins Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, Netherlands, Germany and Italy in boycotting the conference. Speaking yesterday High Commissioner Navi Pillay said these countries have allowed a couple of issues to dominate, outweighing the needs of numerous groups who suffer worldwide on a daily basis. “These are truly global issues,” she said “And it is essential that they are discussed at a global level, however sensitive and difficult they may be."

Navi Pillay is right. It is shameful that these Western nations have allowed their Israeli interests to trump discussion of a wide range of important human rights issues. According to the Financial Times, the boycotters say they want to avoid a rerun of the original 2001 Durban meeting at which Israel was attacked over its racist policies towards Palestinians. Although this year’s draft communiqué was reworded to address concerns, the US was still unhappy at the final product.

The Obama administration announced its decision on Saturday. State Department spokesman Robert Wood said that although the US was “profoundly committed to ending racism and racial discrimination”, it could not sign up because the language in Friday’s communiqué text reaffirmed the 2001 Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA). “The DDPA singles out one particular conflict and prejudges key issues that can only be resolved in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians,” said Wood. “ The [US] also has serious concerns with relatively new additions to the text regarding ‘incitement,’ that run counter to the US commitment to unfettered free speech.”

Australia used similar arguments in announcing their boycott. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said he’d taken the decision with regret “as Australians are a people committed to eliminating racism and racial discrimination.” He claimed Australia was committed to advancing human rights and had put in place policies to close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people (one of the main items for discussion at the conference). However, he said he could not support a document which reaffirmed the DDPA in its entirety. “We cannot be confident that the Review Conference will not again be used as a platform to air offensive views, including anti-Semitic views,” said Smith. “Of additional concern are the suggestions of some delegations in the Durban process to limit the universal right to free speech.

US and Australian concerns seems over dramatised when looking at the actual text of the original 2001 DDPA (pdf). Just one out of 122 issues related to the treatment of the Palestinians. This is issue 63 which reads: “We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion.”

Hardly over controversial, and sentiments shared by many across the world. The decision looks even more suspicious having looked at the agenda of the 2001 conference. It dealt with five major human rights themes: trafficking in women and children, migration and discrimination, gender and racial discrimination, racism against indigenous peoples, and protection of minority rights. In none of the press releases related to these five areas, is Israel mentioned by name.

The call for laws against incitement is more problematic, but some boycotting nations already have similar laws (eg Volksverhetzung in Germany) on their books. The relevant passage in the DDPA (Action 145) urges “States to implement legal sanctions, in accordance with relevant international human rights law, in respect of incitement to racial hatred [through the Internet]”. In any case, the action is stated as an “urge” and does not imply outright agreement. And even if the states disagree with the provision, this is surely not reason enough to boycott the entire conference? This means the only logical reason countries are pulling out is because they do not want any public discussion of Israeli policy in the Palestinian territory.

Admittedly early draft versions of the Durban 2 declaration were rabidly anti-Israel. The 3 March version found by Ha’aretz found that Israel's policy in the Palestinian territories constituted a “violation of international human rights, a crime against humanity and a contemporary form of apartheid”. However the final version I read this evening (Rev 2) contained no explicit mention of Israel at all. The commitment to avoid a just settlement in Palestine has trumped “the commitment to prevent, combat and eradicate racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” The US and Australian position on human rights commitments has been shown up as a pious platitude and the boycott is shameful politicking.

Future of Journalism Queensland 5: Techniques and technology

This is the fifth and final post in a series about the Future of Journalism Queensland summit held last Saturday at Brisbane’s QUT campus. See links to parts one, two, three, and four. The final session was entitled “Tools or toys: techniques and technology for the digital age. The session was moderated by the ABC Landline’s executive producer Peter Lewis. The panellists were The Courier-Mail’s online chief sub-editor John O’Brien, citizen journalist and CEO of Perth Norgmedia, Bronwen Clune and the editor of news.com.au, David Higgins.

The numbers of people at the conference had dwindled significantly by the time of the final session and moderator Lewis jokingly threatened to lock the doors to keep the rest of the audience in. He also claimed organisers had “saved the best till last” and he may have been right. Lewis began describing himself as a Luddite and asked his panellists how do old technologies fit in. Higgins talked about his audience profile and how they accessed news.com.au differed depending on the time of day. He said that between 7am and 9am, it was peak time for mobile phone access with 150,000 people accessing the site via mobiles. Then as people arrived at their work they logged on to the website from their offices. Higgins said the industry needed more tools to further granulate their audience tastes. “We need to figure out what stories fit where”.

John O’Brien from the Courier-Mail’s online team said they needed to be selective about what stories are carried across each platform. He said the important part was getting a good headline to “lock in” customers to their site. Bronwen Clune spoke next. The head of citizen journalism site Perth Norg said that for time-poor people, online was the best way of consuming news. But she said that print still has “a long life” ahead. Clune said that a different writing style was needed for online content, a style that was less formal, more personal and opinionated and not bound by the traditional “inverted pyramid” format of hard newspaper articles.

Clune then talked about Amy Gahran’s article about journalism culture in which she described the "Priesthood Syndrome". This syndrome describes the assumption that traditional journalists are the sole source of news that can and should be trusted. This supposedly gives them a privileged and sacred role that society is ethically obligated to support. Clune said citizen journalism was dispensing with the priesthood syndrome. She said mainstream journalists were allowing comments in their “blogs” but were not engaging with their audiences.

Higgins also said his online organisation was dispensing with traditional journalistic practices such as the “inverted pyramid” (the practice where print journalists write their article paragraphs in descending order of importance so that subeditors can cut from the bottom up if newspaper space is at a premium). Article length varied from print to online but there was no hard and fast rule as which format might provide more information. News.com.au are also experimented with “chat boxes” where audiences can engage with the journalist in the side bar of the screen. The speedier delivery of online news also means that journalists use tools such as Twitter in the field. They then can, and do, go back later to add more information as it arises and in Higgins’ words “craft a more traditional story”. The “day after” newspaper story is no longer straight reportage but has more detail and analysis.

Lewis asked the panel who was “minding the gates” in this new dynamic environment. Higgins admitted that journalists were now doubling as their own subeditors. “You’re constructing the story in front of the audience”, he said. Clune said citizen journalists relied on their audience to pick up errors. She noted the fact that her provocative blog post entitled “A letter to love-stricken Fairfax journalists” (written during their industrial action last week) had incorrectly spelt the title word as “love-striken” until a Courier-Mail journalist pointed out the error to her. Clune’s response was “Thanks for pointing it out. All fixed now…That’s essentially subbing isn’t it?” (For what its worth, I believe “striken” was a totally appropriate word to describe the Fairfax journos!)

John O’Brien said his motto was “your readers know more than you do”. Nevertheless, he said that his comment thread moderators needed to be well trained to deal with flame wars and potential defamation threats. He noted that as a result of Fairfax’s mass sackings, the company got rid of their in-house specialist lawyers which could have an unintended (or possibly intended) “chilling effect” if controversial stories can not be vetted before publication. Lewis said “the law has not caught with (digital) reality”. O’Brien agreed and talked about the importance of cleaning up errors as soon as possible after the fact, however, he said, “mistakes live on in Google cache or if someone has taken a grab”. Higgins said he would advise against the “open moderation” model of the ABC, because “you will get sued and there is nothing you can do about it.”

The panel then took a set of diverse questions from the audience. Clune said bloggers offer a diverse voice, “which we don’t have in the Australian media”. When asked about tools of the trade, Higgins said that the best camera for a journalist was “the one they happen to be carrying at the time”. He did add that PDA devices could be useful for reporting from the field but “what you have in your hand is most important”. Clune said she was a fan of the Iphone which “allowed for participation as well as consumption”. Clune also promoted the micro-blogging concept of Twitter where “disorganised news very quickly organises itself”.

Higgins talked about the importance of Search Engine Optimisation and getting journalists trained in how to attract a high Google rating with their headlines. He said making a story more effective was ‘less about brand, and more about mobilising the story and putting it out there in places such as Facebook”. Lewis asked him whether there were concerns over what effect this would have on the journalist and whether the Internet deliberately attracts dumbed down content. O’Brien said the effect was not all bad. He said celebrity stuff drives other hard news traffic. Higgins also disagreed. “Websites are the way journalists set them up,” he said. “Its not a management decision. He said his team edits the site “in real time with incredible amounts of information”. However, like any other media product, he said, “you place them where you think they will get the most traffic”.

Unfortunately I had to leave as the panel wrapped up and did not catch Chris Warren’s closing remarks to the conference. Nonetheless, I believe it was an extremely valuable day. While the immediate future of the more traditional and hierarchical forms of journalism remains grim, there are a number of exciting avenues and new models available that make me believe a new Gutenberg revolution is at hand. Despite a continued dwindling of resources, there will continue to be, I believe, a home for quality journalism in the big “media of record.” But they will be supported and challenged by a plethora of small independent online media as well as norgs, blogs, micro-blogs, citizen journalism, magazines, non-fiction books, wikis and social media projects that will keep print-democracy flourishing in the years to come. The challenge will be connecting all the dots that lead to the people formerly known as the audience.

Future of Journalism Queensland 4: Bloggers

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the Future of Journalism Queensland summit held last Saturday at the QUT campus in central Brisbane. See links to parts one, two, and three. This one was about bloggers and was subtitled “amateur netizens or professionals of the future?” The session was moderated by the ABC’s Christen Tilley, a senior producer and opinion editor at ABC News Online. The panellists were freelance journalist Marian Edmunds, sociologist and blogger Mark Bahnisch and Dr Axel Bruns, a senior lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT.

Tilley began the discussion by quoting at length from Mark Day’s article in the Australian last week. Day said the only model that could support investigative journalism was “the traditional advertiser-supported model that has sustained newspapers for more than a century” and said blogging won’t work as an alternative. He said citizen journalism “hasn’t happened and is not likely to.” In Day’s view, effort should not be wasted on blogs and instead editors should focus on creating news. For Day that meant: “revealing information about the communities in which they work, setting agendas for discussion, reporting events figuratively over the back fence, and using this to add value to the essentially free flow of breaking news and information accessible virtually anywhere.”

Marian Edmunds spoke first in response. Edmunds is a very experienced journalist who has worked in Australia, London and Hong Kong on such publications as the Financial Times (fulltime) and the Australian Financial Review, and the Weekend Australian as a freelancer. She now blogs at “Will write for money”. She began by describing why she had turned to blogging. “For me,” she said, “it being in touch with people who are not normally sources or contacts…voices we don’t normally hear that provide local colour”. Edmunds advised those starting out to look at the business models and create your own space. But the fundamentals of journalism still applied: "Learn the craft," she advised.

Mark Bahnisch, custodian of perhaps Australia’s most influential blog Larvatus Prodeo, attacked the issue of Mark Day more directly. He firstly pointed out the absurdity of Day attacking blogs in a space entitled “Mark Day blogs”. Bahnisch said the debate between journalism and blogging was poorly presented. There were many aspects to the debate, but…“It has little to do with blogging and more to do with changes in journalist profile,” he said. “(Their) identity was at risk from online competition and changes in the industrial environment”.

Bahnisch pointed out that bloggers represent an “incredibly diverse” range of opinions. He blasted the newspaper stereotype of “bloggers in pyjamas” and said journalists were blaming bloggers for their own problems. The debate had little to do with bloggers and more to do with changes in the profile of journalism. “The underlying angst of what is a journalist is projected onto the nefarious figure of bloggers (who will) steal their spot,” he said. Bahnisch could not see why the narrative was one of competition and said that journalists were using “imaginary demons” to “keep the opposition alive”.

Axel Bruns took up the narrative at this point. He also disputed Day’s view and said there were hundreds of different forms of blogging. He pleaded for the debate to move on from the “us and them” and said the line between professional and amateurs had changed with the Crikified blogs of Possums Pollytics and The Poll Bludger. Possum’s free analysis gave the mainstream media a run for its money and set off the “who owns the polls” debate in The Australian. Bruns noted that this was a peculiarly Australian problem and harked on the notorious 2007 The Australian (newspaper) editorial which claimed that “unlike Crikey, we understand Newspoll because we own it.” Bruns said it was Rupert Murdoch who owned Newspoll not The Australian.

Bahnisch said blogs were a “distinct space for micro communicators and micro publishers on line”. Blogs create a community that do not rely on “arm’s length sources”. He pointed out how different they were to George Megalogenis’s so-called blog which appealed for civility claiming a “significant minority” of bloggers begin their posts with an assumption that everyone who disagrees with them is a “moron”. Bahnisch quoted Trevor Cook’s response which called out a wonderful comment response to Megalogenis that laid the blame squarely at The Australian for earning the civility (or lack thereof) it gets.

Axel Bruns said this antagonism towards blogs occurred only in Australia. He said projects elsewhere united blogs and professional journalism in much more productive ways. Bruns said the local situation was a product of “a severe lack of diversity” in the media. Because of this, he said, there was no need to drive exploration of new models. Bahnisch agreed and said that blogging was a risk-taking, conversational form. From the audience, Antony Funnell took passionate exception to this sense of antagonism that Bahnisch believed existed between journalists and bloggers. Funnell said that the anti-blogging opinions of Day and Christian Kerr were “not representative”. He said most journalists understand new media and use bloggers as part of their daily media diet.

To my mind, Funnell’s point is valid. With more than a hint of a sympathetic working journalist’s anger when provoked, he showed up some glaring open wounds between the two disciplines of “journalism” and “blogging”. For all their talk of false dichotomies, none of the panel were able to bridge the gap between the two. The scholar Bruns clearly understands how the models operate but showed no sympathy for those in his audience who are about to be impaled on the pointy end of the media stick. Bahnisch, meanwhile, is the archetypal blogger-netizen who uses his sharp intellect and wit to slam the justifiable flaws of mainstream media without stopping to worry if he is casting the first stone. Somehow of the three, it seems to me that it is Edmunds who comes closest to the honest norm of a working journalist who happens to use the medium of blogging to “write for money”.

Future of Journalism Queensland 3: Paying for journalism

This is the third in a series of posts about last Saturday’s Future of Journalism Queensland summit at QUT, Brisbane. See links to part one and two. The next session was about business models and was entitled “Who is going to pay for journalism?” The session was moderated by Antony Funnell, the host of ABC Radio National’s Media Report, an excellent weekly program that is compulsory listening for anyone with an interest in journalism in Australia and the world beyond.

Funnell moderated a three person panel. They included Dr Jean Burgess, a postdoctorate research fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation where she works on cultural participation and user-led innovation in new media. Also on the panel was Phil McDonald, Queensland managing director of marketing and communication firm George Patterson Y&R. He is also a board director of the company nationally. Completing the panel was Cameron Reilly, founder and CEO of new media company The Podcast Network.

Cameron Reilly began the discussion by describing big media as an anomaly of the 20th century. In the middle of the 19th century there were hundreds of newspapers in the big cities of the world. Then the economics changed when newspapers began subsidising the selling price with advertising. But the era it ushered in has been now been undermined by the Internet. Reilly said the Internet has taken us back to the type of communication that dominated the previous 40,000 years: that of telling stories to each other. The fundamentals of the economy has changed, he said and “there was no putting the genie back in the bottle”. He said there were now 75 million blogs and 100 million videos (a day) on Youtube. Reilly said these diverse platforms were undermining “the controlled oligopoly” of big media.

Funnell asked the panel if the future meant there would be many small-sized business in place of a few large ones. Reilly noted the fact that Crikey had bought up several important political blogs in the previous day or so but would ever only employ a handful of journalists. Given that traditionally news in print form was paid for by classified ads, he asked rhetorically: “Is Seek going to be the new investigative journalism site?”

Phil McDonald took up the conversational cudgels from the adman’s perspective. He said consumers were consuming more news than ever. But how to target them in the new environment is the frustration for advertisers. He said what clients wanted was a return on investment and were prepared to take risks to follow the news online. However the charging of advertising has not kept up with the provision of news. He said producers need to create more, to make money for his clients. But habits have also changed and people now consume news when and where they want it. “A credible source of news is where people start and what advertisers want,” he said.

Jean Burgess spoke next. She said the mass media need to be seen in the context across the creative industries. She said news was only one of the creative industries obsessed with “delivering to the consumer”. Burgess said its “here is the news – you can now comment” is “not respectful” and not how the blogosphere works or how audiences engage with media. She asked whether media organisations were interested in engaging with social media, an area where there was “lots of experimentation”.

Burgess saw the Viacom law suit against Google’s YouTube as a clash of business models. A better way, she thought, than "Viacom's belligerent charge to the courts" might be to get some component of the revenue generated, rather than asking for the content to be taken down. She said the agenda was now being driven by the demands of an engaged audience and people could make a living out of the new media. “Maybe not a river of gold,” she said, “but a trickle of silver.”.

Reilly said his company “breaks even” using a mixture of subscription, advertising and consultancy work. He was unsure where the revenue might be in five years. Advertising was the “easiest guess” but lots of work was required to make it happen. And he warned that it would be a serious problem if he was hit by a major lawsuit. He said he had respect for journalists but it wasn’t what he did. “99 percent of bloggers and podcasters don’t want to make money (and) don’t consider themselves journalists,” he said. “If anyone said I was a journalist, I’d be horrified.”

The panel then took several diverse questions from the floor. Reilly said he got 90 percent of his news from Twitter and believed the 20th century economic model where we “supported fat rich white guys in Mercs and Jags is gone.” But he was very pessimistic about the future for journalists saying there was a “tough decade ahead”. But the writing was on the wall for a long time before the recent Fairfax bloodletting and his question to journalists was “why did you fiddle while Rome burned for 20 years.” Burgess suggested that if the Courier-Mail disappeared “then maybe the ABC would blossom”. McDonald concluded that brands like the Courier-Mail won’t die, “but (they) need to realise impact in different forms”.

Future of Journalism Queensland 2: Students and Editors

Yesterday I wrote about the first session in Saturday’s Future of Journalism Queensland conference at QUT in Brisbane. Today’s post will cover off the next two sessions: “The future as we see it” and “adapt or die: the news managers on their survival strategy”. These two sessions took on the views of those diametrically opposite in the local mediascape. The “we” in the title of the first of these two sessions were three third year Griffith University journalism students whereas the news managers of the second session (Hugh Martin, David Fagan, Stuart Watt and Liz Deegan) are the among the most important media players in Australia.

The university student session was chaired by John Taylor who is the presenter of the Queensland version of ABC TV’s Stateline. The three students were from diverse backgrounds. Amy Bradney-George is from Bellingen, in northern NSW. Tran Nguyen was born in Malaysia and moved to Australia with her family when she was one year old. She is fluent in Indonesian and Vietnamese. Denis Semchenko emigrated from Russia when he was 17 and now edits the Griffith student newspaper The Source.

Taylor began by giving all three the floor to discuss their background, their aspirations and concerns, their media habits and their reasons for studying journalism. Amy Bradney-George began by talking about her home town of Bellingen where there was a “strong sense of social conscience”. But, she said, people were cynical about journalism and this was something she wanted to change. Her media diet was rich and varied, listening to ABC Radio National, watching the various TV news and current affairs shows, reading newspapers and online sites. She was a fan of social network sites as “word of mouth” tools to quickly spread information. Bradney-George liked the “personal trust” aspect of radio, the “visual context” of television and the enjoyment of reading of a newspaper with a cup of coffee. However, she said, the Internet had the potential to combine all three media. She concluded by expressing a concern about the concentration of media ownership, “which is why I get news from different places” she said.

Tran Nguyen began her speech by saying she rarely reads a newspaper or watches television. The Internet was her dominant source of news which she liked for its ease of access and the ability to get news when you needed it. “Generation Y loves instant gratification,” she said, “the Internet gives me news now”. Time was the most important thing for her as a busy university student. “TV news times doesn’t suit us,” she said. However, she acknowledged that when she compared news articles in their online form against the same article in the newspaper, they were often shortened. She also said that online doesn't place as much news value on stories as print, but the Internet was convenient, accessible and up-to-date. Nguyen enjoys working with refugee groups and said because she was also studying International Relations she might not necessarily end up in journalism. “I’d like to work as a communications officer for a regional aid program,” she said.

Denis Semshenko said he too got most of his news information online which he supplements with some newspapers. He was a fan of local bloggers such as John Birmingham. Semshenko is a keen musician and a guitarist in a Brisbane band Dream Sequence, and reads a lot of music street press such as Rave and Time Off. He said he goes online “four or five times a day” to check for news and also subscribes to social networks such as Myspace and Facebook. Semshenko said that community newspapers were important in the way that they introduced stories that often made it into metropolitan and national media.

The students’ views and media habits may not have been music to the ears for the next panel which brought in some of the heavy hitters of the Brisbane media scene. Talking about the survival strategies involved in “adapt or die” were moderator Hugh Martin manager of APN online (“the largest media organisation no-one has heard of in Australia” according to Martin), David Fagan, editor of the Courier-Mail, Liz Deegan, editor of the Mail’s weekend stablemate, The Sunday Mail and Stuart Watt, the web development manager at ABC Online News.

Liz Deegan began the discussion. Deegan edits the Brisbane Sunday Mail which attracts a weekly readership of three quarters of a million people. She defined adaptation not as a threat but a challenge and an opportunity. She wanted to see journalists who were creative, and what was needed was “journalists with passion, integrity and hunger for news stories.” Deegan said we now operate in a competitive media landscape. “20 years ago there was nowhere near the same competition in news delivery,” she said. Deegan believes that newspapers needed to “have innovative product, (be) relevant to audiences and offer the best product they can.”

David Fagan spoke next. The Courier-Mail editor is a little-known but extraordinarily influential figure whose paper reaches one in three Queenslanders and he is the person politicians most fear in a one newspaper town. He agreed that adaptability was one of the biggest issues facing journalism. He said there needed to be a continual push for change and journalists should not be content with “ten pars in the paper” but also look to re-purpose the material online or as magazine pieces. “We need to adapt to audience needs,” he said. “the (key) thing is the story”. Fagan used the example of what he called “a terrific story” in today’s paper Qweekend magazine insert. The story “the six lives of Andre Fromm” about Dieter Fromm whose son Andre died. Dieter now regards the six people who inherited his son’s organs as family. This was a story Fagan heard on the radio. He sent a reporter and a video operator to capture for print and the Internet “the power of this guy with a strong story to tell”. That was the approach we need to take, he said.

Morgan asked Fagan about the difference between the Mail’s print and Internet editions and how much of that was explained by editorial influence. Fagan said ten percent of newspaper content ends up online. He said younger people prefer to read the online edition. It was a matter of experimenting he said, trying and failing new things. While many have complained about the dumbed down content online compared to print (an issue shared by Fairfax Media), Fagan said he was “not uncomfortable” with the difference between the newspaper and the website. “There is a lot of depth in there,” he said. “Don’t judge it on the home page”.

Stuart Watt spoke next. Watt was one of the innovators of the ABC News online website in 1996 and has risen through the ranks to manage the news development team. He said the fundamentals of journalism were the same as they always were. “A good story is a good story (and that has) not changed in a hundred years,” he said. He believed it was an exciting time to be involved in media but it was a case of “innovate or die”. However he was grateful that the “resource rich” 75 year old ABC did not have the commercial imperative of his rivals and it allowed them to experiment with new methods and “try and fail” until they find something that works. “If go down enough rabbit holes,” he said, “you eventually come to a parallel universe”.

Morgan concluded by asking the panel what skill sets new journalists needed in the parallel universe. Watt said it was important they were aware of what was going on in the world. There were too many people who had no idea what was going on. “I’ve had people tell me Brazil is a country in Europe”, he said. Spelling was also important. Watt said those who combine news values with web expertise would also have a future. He wanted to see “digital citizens interested in how it all hangs together and exploring different ways of telling a story.” Liz Deegan said she wanted graduates who have “tested themselves” in work experience, have video skills and are very well read.

All of the panel believed their institutions would successfully adapt to the changing times. And if the impressive quality of the young journalism students at the conference is anything to go by, industrial journalism's confidence in the future may be justified. A bullish Fagan concluded “death is something that is going to happen to someone else”.

Future of Journalism Queensland 1: The state of the global news media

The QUT Gardens Theatre was the venue yesterday for an all day summit devoted to a discussion of the Future of Journalism sponsored by the journalist union MEAA and the Walkley Foundation. It follows on from the successful Sydney summit in May and about a hundred journalists, managers, bloggers, educators and students came along to listen to the words of wisdom of many of Brisbane’s key media players. The day was broken up into six sessions that covered the state of global media, media students’ vision of the future, news managers’ survival strategies, future business models, blogging, and techniques and technologies. I will cover off my notes on these sessions in a series of articles and this first post is about the opening session entitled “the state of the global news media”.

The session was a discussion between MEAA federal secretary Chris Warren and media academic, journalist and author Margaret Simons. Warren began by hailing Simons’ 2007 book The Content Makers as “the text that summarises where we at” with the Australian media (an assessment I fully agree with). He then asked her where she thought the local industry was headed. Simons said that the industry had gotten industry into dire straights in the last twenty years and “it would get worse before it got better”. She said new media technologies (Internet, mobile, digital broadband) had put a bomb under the establishment and we had reached the “end of Empire” stage of the two major powers in Australian media: Murdoch and Packer.

But Simons did not necessarily want to put the boot in; she said it was almost a situation of “what did the Roman Empire ever do for us?” Both Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch supported unprofitable outlets but both The Bulletin and the Sunday program were killed off after Packer died and the same may happen to the loss-making The Australian when the “old man” Rupert Murdoch dies. Nevertheless there remains an “embarrassment of riches” available in terms of media content which is being repurposed in different places and different times. The problem is that the business of selling has changed as the classified ads migrate to new digital homes. “It is possible now," said Simons, “to buy a house or a car without buying Michelle Grattan.

Simons said the audience is fragmenting but that represents an opportunity as well as a threat. She believes we need to rethink what quality means and said that interaction with the audience is necessary. Some journalists are struggling with this concept. Mark Day wrote off bloggers this week in The Australian while George Megalogenis told the Byron Bay writers festival he would only allow “expert” opinion in his blog comments. But while some Australian journalists were dismissing the hoi polloi, over in the US Jay Rosen was an “exciting pioneer” with his pro am experiment Assignment Zero and its wisdom of the crowds approach.

Simons also noted how that approach influences newer media where there is “instant redaction” when there is an error. Simons said journalists need to acknowledge when they get something wrong. “It is a very human, but extremely destructive, impulse to back away from error.” But fixing it was “something we are bad at doing at the moment”. Simons also stressed the need for journalistic independence. By this she didn’t necessarily mean an independent voice but the ability to stand up to their editors when asked to provide objectionable reporting. She said those who criticise bloggers for their partisan positions should realise that this is also how the newspaper industry started. It wasn’t until the 19th century and an increasing reliance on advertising revenue that the notion of objectivity took hold.

Warren then moved on to ask Simons for some scenarios of the future for mass media. She said mass media would survive with “bite size” chunks of interactive news. However Simons was doubtful whether there would be enough of a mass to support national news journalism in Australia. She said high quality journalism will migrate to other platforms but won’t appear in the mass media. But she said other avenues were opening up for quality journalists to make a living. Simons said the non-fiction market has thrived in recent years and books such as “Dark Victory” by David Marr and Marion Wilkinson have achieved commercial success. Simons noted also that this type of journalism follows a true “user pays” approach where people who want a product pay full price for it.

Simons went on to discuss the importance of the national broadcaster. She said that if Jay Rosen was Australian, he would probably be working for the ABC. They have 3,000 content makers who are paid by what Rosen called “The People formerly known as the audience” (a slogan that several speakers would return to, as the day progressed). Simons said it would only be a slight step to make that process more direct and she believed ABC is moving towards the model. She said ABC boss Mark Scott is aware of the issues. While not totally in agreement with the way he is running the corporation, she said she was “glad ABC was aware of citizen journalism and what the challenges are.”

Warren asked about her views on how journalists should adapt to the changing landscape. Simons said that an increasing number of journalists were starting their own business. Stephen Mayne was a pioneer with Crikey and since he sold it, it is now making a small profit. Mayne is now involved a new video journalism experiment The Mayne Report. Meanwhile Alan Kohler and Stephen Bartholomeusz quit Fairfax to start their own subscriber-based “Eureka Report”. She said it was important to note that journalism and media were not the same thing and advised those at the start of their career to put together a business plan not necessarily to make huge profit but at least to pay a salary. She said small niches were the way to attract dedicated readership “but the challenge is connecting the niches”. Simons wondered how democracy would function if people only read their own niche.

Warren then expanded the democracy question to ask what role journalism had in the post-nation state era. Simons stated that the invention of the printing press caused democratic forms to change. She said there was 200 hundred years between Gutenberg’s press and the rise of the newspaper. “But only 30 years has passed since the invention of the Internet and we don’t know where it is taking us,” she said. “And democracy is not in great shape now”. But, she said, the growth of literacy and the communication of news in the 16th and 17th century had everything to do with the growth of democracy. What is needed is a return to the “high public purpose of journalism”.

Simons then moved on to the gift economy. She said this was a concept borrowed from anthropology where services are given for intangible rewards. Similar to potlatch rituals, people freely give away their services in return for kudos, pleasure and power. She said most blogs are not written for profit and the best of them, such as Larvatus Prodeo and the (now rebadged) Pollytics have given newspapers such as The Australian a run for its money.

Simons concluded the session by answering questions from the floor. One Courier-Mail journalist asked whether traditional journalism “craft skills” would still be relevant in the future. Simons agreed that the skills of writing things in newsworthy fashion, and extracting information in interviews were difficult to attain. She said that these craft skills were the key difference between journalists and bloggers. But her advice back to the journalist was to find out what your audience needs in terms of journalism and provide it for them.

On other questions Simons said the code of ethics needed to be constantly reviewed and updated, the staged political interview (such as those conducted by Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 report) were a “tired cat-and-mouse game” and there were also hopeful signs for the industry in the Pay TV and documentary sectors. She said we needed to work out where the mass audience will be in the diversified market when analog TV finally switches off. Simons concluded on a positive note. “There was no evidence of declining appetite for journalism,” she said. “It is the business model that is at risk”.