Brian Leveson - media personality 2012

The 2012 Woolly Days media person of the year is Brian Leveson. Leveson is a jurist not a journalist but his impact on journalism and the world of media this year has been profound. 

The year 2012 will not go down as a great year for the world’s media. While the world’s business-as-usual pattern of production and consumption sees it barrelling down a path towards a 4 degree increase in temperature by 2100, the focus of most media attention is ever increasingly the deeply superficial.  

Commercial media have always fulfilled two purposes: to make money and to inform but it is the profit imperative which is winning clearly at the moment. The large multi-national conglomerates that own media stock look no further than the bottom line when it comes to meeting deadlines. Issues like news values and ethics are a poor second if there is no payback. Meanwhile shareholder disquiet of falling ratings or circulations can be managed quarter to quarter by cost cutting and doing more with less.  There is as a result according to Michael Mandel, a “shift in journalistic employment to non-traditional industries, an increased in the self-employed, a delayering of journalism, and perhaps lower pay.”

Brian Leveson admitted as much on his recent visit to Melbourne. The closure of a large number of newspapers has reduced the extent to which local government, health, education and the courts can be held to account. “Society will be less well served as a result”, he said. Yet Leveson was aware that even if journalism jobs are becoming diffused and of less value, the media they serve remain powerful players as editorialists, chroniclers, sensemakers, muckrakers and watchdogs. 

Their contract with the public to perform these roles is based on trust. The one-to-many broadcast model of television and the major papers ensured they always had the microphone to drown dissent. The internet and web2.0 changed all that and disapproval can amplify virally if compelling enough. The web further undermined the media’s privileged modus operandi by allowing a multiplicity of blog voices harvesting free online content often with more sagacity and insight than the journalists. Social media has forced big media to become more humble in their dealings with the public they profess to “serve”.

There remains pockets of strong resistance, with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp leading the counter-assault. This old fashioned news and entertainment empire (one of the few not owned by a non-news company) remains convinced it does not need to answer its critics. China is a rare failure but In the US, Fox News is highly successful while his 2011 plan to buy the 60.9 percent of British cable company BSkyB it did not own was just a whisker away from being successful when undone by fine journalism. 

Revelations by the Guardian journalist Nick Davies and his editor Alan Rusbridger brought the sordid hacking affair to light. The shadowy practices not only showed the need for profit greatly exceeded all other motives but described the contempt News had for its own audience. With the weight of evidence growing Prime Minister David Cameron appointed Justice Leveson in June 2011 to investigate the culture, practices and ethics of the British press as well as the dealings between the press, politicians and the police.

As testimony followed testimony, it was clear much was rotten in Murdoch’s hamlet.  It wasn’t just the attitude that privacy was for paedo’s as former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan espoused, it was the scene of serious crime. As November 2012, there had been 90 arrests on charges of interception of mobile phone messages, payment to public officials, data intrusion. The Inquiry would expose potentially corrupt dealings between senior members of the media, political parties and the police.

In nearly nine months of oral hearings, almost all available to transcript or watch online, involving 337 witnesses and 300 statements, the Inquiry became “the most public and most concentrated look at the press” Britain had ever seen. It enormous resonance not only in Britain but wherever British legal, ethical and press traditions operate, such as Australia. The numerous celebrities who portrayed themselves as “fair game” to an uncaring media, added to the notoriety of the charges. Australian media were quick to distance themselves from the phone hacking but there but for the grace of god go they at any lengths for a story. 

With such a wide ranging brief, Leveson’s Inquiry had important things to say about plurality of ownership, privacy laws, and regulation of the press, all of which got the media companies quivering in their boots. Leveson was at pains to stress his inquiry was not an attack on press freedom. However, he said, with rights came responsibilities and all too often the press has simply ignored them. Neither the press or the press council ever launched investigations into allegations of serious misdoings such as breaches of data protection or trade in private and confidential information. Indeed when the phone hacking issue was raised, police executing a warrant were driven off the News of the World premises while the Press Complaints Commission criticised the Guardian for publishing the results of their investigations into the cover-up. 

In November 2012 Leveson released his findings in a 2000 page report and 48-page executive summary.   Leveson proposed an independent replacement for the Press Complaints Commission which he said had no regulatory powers. It would have a dual role of promoting high standards of journalism while protecting the role of the individual. The new body would not include serving editors or politicians and it could impose fines and direct the appearance of corrections. 

Leveson said participation needed to be universal for the body to be properly funded and succeed in its purpose. Those that declined to be involved would forfeit the right to the in-built arbitration process and therefore could not claim costs of any civil action even if they won because they had refused the cheaper route to justice. Leveson said such a body would not regulate the press.  He did not advocate prior restraint (a point of honour with the British press since Milton’s Areopagitica in 1644). He acknowledged how the important role media plays in society “as a critical witness of events” and accepted that media and journalists have several necessary privileges under the law as “one of the true safeguards of our democracy”. Leveson said his legislation would in fact enshrine “for the first time, a legal duty on the Government to protect the freedom of the press”.

However, the media did not see it that way.  Every newspaper in Britain except the Guardian rushed to denounce Leveson’s key recommendation. Biggest selling paper The Sun said it was “deeply alarmed” by the prospect of “State control of newspapers.” “Such a law could allow State officials to walk into papers like The Sun and censor stories,” it said. The Express also worried about political aprons: “To put politicians in ultimate regulatory control of newspapers and then expect them never to seek to use that power to constrain criticism or scrutiny is to place in them a degree of trust they frankly do not deserve.” 

Prime Minister David Cameron – himself implicated by the evidence of the over-close relationship between press and politics – plumped for the press over Leveson. He expressed his reservations over the legislation for the independent process to recognise the new self-regulatory body.  “For the first time we would have crossed the Rubicon of writing elements of press regulation into the law of the land,” Cameron said. “We should I believe be wary of any legislation that has the potential to infringe free speech and a free press.”

High profile hacking victims such as JK Rowling expressed dismay at Cameron’s speech. “"Having taken David Cameron's assurances in good faith at the outset of the inquiry he set up, I am merely one among many who feel duped and angry in its wake," she said. The Hacked Off coalition gained 100,000 signatures calling on the government to comply with Leveson’s findings. Cameron’s coalition partners the Lib Dems are among them, so the matter rolls on, awaiting further political arbitration in the new year.

If Cameron didn’t reckon for the public outcry, then Leveson certainly did. He predicted the victims and the public would not accept the outcome “if the industry did not grasp the opportunity”. Following seven inquiries into the British press in 70 years, it “did not make sense to contemplate an eighth.” Whether short-term interest will prevail is a moot point, as is the longevity of the media’s powers of influence. What is not in doubt is that Brian Leveson has done us all a favour by pointing a strong light on its problems. Maybe then, the media can return to the problems that affect the rest of us. 

Previous Woolly Days media personalities of the year

2009 Mark Scott

2010 Julian Assange

2011 Nick Davies and Alan Rusbridger

New Western Star blog

Cross-posted at the Western Starblog

This is the first attempt to do a blog for the Queensland newspaper, the Western Star. Established in 1875, the Star has published every Tuesday and Friday continuously for 136 years from the town of Roma, 490kms west of Brisbane. It roughly covers the Maranoa council region serving towns such as Mitchell, Injune, Surat and Wallumbilla, in a rough 140km radius of Roma. (photo of Hodgson grain mill at dusk - Derek Barry)

That makes the area we cover larger than the European country of Croatia. But while Croatia has 4.2 mllion people in its 57,000 sq km, the Maranoa has just 13,000 souls spread across its 58,000 sq km.

Up to about a year ago, the Western Star was a print only publication. We took our first tentative steps onto the Internet when we created the Western Star Facebook page. We also created a Twitter page and linked the Facebook feed to also display in Twitter. We used the Facebook account to promote the newspaper and to publish community information that could not wait until the next print publication.

It wasn’t until January 2012, the Western Star finally started putting its content online starting with a back to school story. In early February, there were serious floods in the region that impacted Roma and Mitchell which gave us a chance to put important and timely content. Both towns broke river and creek height records. Thousands were cut off, hundreds of homes were inundated in both towns and one person lost her life in Roma.

A disaster management group was set up to deal with events in both towns. This author was invited to sit in on the group. This proved invaluable at getting reliable information out quickly via Facebook and the web site. The flooding happened on a Friday so previously we would have had to wait until Tuesday before publishing any information. Not this time. We were usually publishing as quickly as radio and in far more detail and authority. The feedback we got was that we were providing an essential service with timely and reliable information and we also posted a huge gallery of photos of the flood impact in both towns. Our Facebook likes soared from around 200 people to over a thousand in a couple of days.

The reliability of that information was directly related to my ability to sit in on the decisions as they were taken. The fact we were trusted by the audience was because I was trusted at the disaster group meetings to do the right thing. Occasionally in these meetings, dirty laundry got aired and I respected all requests by those doing the airing, not to publish this material. I told them if they could not debate these life and death matters freely, then there was no point in my being there. I would only publish material I felt to be in the public interest.

As soon as possible after the meeting, I would get back to my desk and write up a report on the latest flood news to go on the web and on Facebook. There were updates from the firies, ambos, police, SES, Ergon Energy, Main Roads, Council and other agencies. If something was particularly urgent, I would send an update directly from the meeting to our Facebook page. Things were happening so quickly, we occasionally got things wrong. When this happened we were quick to put out a correction and an explanation why we got something wrong. Trust was critical to our mission, so it was something we valued immensely.

The positive audience reaction shows what can be done when a news outlet is trusted. Today, our Facebook has stabilised just under 1300 “likes” which while small is still a substantial subset of our readership. Our print circulation of around 3000, and there is at least a thousand people that read us on Facebook that don’t read the paper. These are people who don’t buy or read newspapers or are part of the Roma Diaspora interested in the region but who live somewhere where they cannot easily buy the paper.

I am unsure what audience this blog will attract. That is in part because I am unsure what content will be provided here that isn’t provided elsewhere. Blogging is actually an older technology than Facebook. Blogging took off in 2002 after Google Blogger provided an easy to use interface to a population traumatised by 9/11 that wanted a public platform to write about it. Now people write blogs about everything under the sun. Blogging is a brilliant democratic tool that opened the freedom of the press to everyone.

Writing a blog is relatively easy but finding an audience remains difficult. The word “blogging” has negative overtones, its bad reputation often spread by newspapers. Yet newspaper websites are now chock-a-block with “blogs” because it seems to offer a way of publishing something in a simple and easy to use format. There is no general agreement on what a blog is other than it is a log of writing presented under a banner in reverse chronological order with the ability for readers to add comments. In many respects Facebook does this but not everyone is on Facebook. That why a blog is still useful and why there are now hundreds of millions of them on the Internet.

I am hoping the Western Starblog will evolve to fill some niche in our writing I’ve yet to fully understand. I welcome comments and suggestions on where to take it next.

Derek Barry,
Editor, the Western Star

Newsstand up and running for a media inquiry

I got an email tonight from grass roots campaigners Getup advertising the existence of a new organisation called NewsStand. It is little surprise Getup would promote NewsStand; the newbie is moulded in Getup’s image (and uses former Getup staff) but with a narrower focus in the media. The main purpose of NewsStand is to demand a parliamentary inquiry into Australian media and they want people to sign an e-petition. “We believe Australia needs a full parliamentary inquiry to publicly scrutinise the media landscape as a whole: what’s working, what’s not and what we can do to change things for the better,” NewsStand said.

The site’s about page said it was inspired by the Murdoch UK hacking scandal. NewsStand was born out of the revelations of unethical and illegal practices which showed the “extent of the power and influence that individuals and companies can have over the news industry”. It quoted a Lenore Taylor article in the Sydney Morning Herald which mentioned NewsStand’s first market research which showed 60 percent support for a media inquiry.

NewsStand’s board consists of five members. They are journalism professor and investigative journalist Wendy Bacon, Ben Brandzel who has done fundraising for Barack Obama and worked at Moveon.org, Australia Institute executive director, economist and Greens strategy adviser Richard Denniss, Centre for Policy Development executive director Miriam Lyons and communications consultant Nick Moriatis. They provide direction to a staff of two led by US political strategist Kate Walsh and supported by former Getup campaign director Ed Coper.

Like Getup, it hopes to have a blog up and running but it has not yet been launched. The idea is to encourage conversations, assess the validity of sensationalist news, conduct interviews with experts and shed light on the inner workings of the media industry. This is all laudable but it should have been up and running with the launch of the website. A blog desperately needs content to survive, not just promises. Like Getup, NewsStand is shilling for donations and is also attempting to harness social media. The @Newsstandau twitter feed has quickly built up 400 followers but disappointingly is following none of them back.

There is little doubt the Australia media is in poor shape. The flabby Murdoch empire will say or do anything to keep its power. Just today, artist Robert Crumb wrote an open letter to the Sydney Morning Herald saying why he was not coming to a Sydney festival. The fault belongs to the other Sydney rag, the Murdoch Daily Telegraph which published a shocker of an article bylined by Jesse Phillips which described Crumb primarily as a “self confessed sex pervert whose explicit drawings cannot be shown in Australia”. The article cited rent-a-quote moral crusader Hetty Johnson who gave the predictably juicy line about the “depraved thought processes of this very warped human being".

No effort was made to talk to Crumb or anyone who might have had a different view. The article was pure trollumnism. Crumb pulled the pin on the trip after the article and made some pertinent observations in his SMH letter. “One can see in this example how skilled media professionals with low standards of integrity are able to mould and manipulate public opinion, popular beliefs and, ultimately, the direction of politics," Crumb wrote. “The majority of the population in most places is not alert to this kind of deceptive manipulation. They are more or less defenceless against such clever 'perception management’”.

A reminder why NewsStand wants a media inquiry is pertinent: “The inquiry must examine how to promote higher standards, protect people’s privacy while guaranteeing the freedom of the press, stimulate a more diverse media marketplace, and ensure that problems and complaints can be handled simply, fairly and effectively.” Watching the Telegraph at work, it’s no wonder the Murdoch publications don’t want a bar of it.

US State of the Media 2009 report paints grim picture

The latest American State of the News Media report shows a continuing and catastrophic decline in advertising revenue in online, newspapers, magazines, radio and network television. Cable television was the only sector not to decline and the overall picture leaves analysts wondering how much farther the industry has yet to fall. Amid the gloom, the Pew Project report says 2009 was the breakthrough year for Twitter and other social media which emerged as powerful tools for disseminating information and mobilising citizens.

But the uncontrolled nature of social media is not much consolation for major news media organisations. Their most immediate concern is how much revenue they will regain as the US economy pulls out of recession. Market research and investment banking firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson predicts that by 2013 newspapers, radio and magazines will take in almost half as much in ad revenues as they did in 2006.

The collapse so far has been extraordinary. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall by a quarter during the year bringing the total loss over the last three years to 43 percent. Local television ad revenue fell 22 percent in 2009; triple the previous year’s decline. Magazine ad revenue dropped 17 percent, network TV is down by 8 percent, while online ad revenue fell by 5 percent. Revenue to network TV news and online news sites weren’t broken out of the overall totals but most likely fared much worse.

Newspapers are in the worst trouble. The researchers estimated the US newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000 - roughly 30 percent. They predict further cuts in what remains a $4.4b industry in 2010. This is a major concern because newspapers still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism. The report uses the metaphor of sand in an hourglass. “The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry’s funds, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online,” it said. “The industry must find a new model before that money runs out.”

But it is not just newspapers feeling the heat. Network news divisions are on a long slow curve of decline since their 1980s peak period and have since halved in size. Local television has not been hit as hard but is also feeling the pain. One estimate puts the losses in the last two years at over 1,600 jobs roughly 6 percent. Flagship magazines such as Time and Newsweek have also shed almost half their staff since 1983.

Life on the Internet paints a more complex picture. Almost three in five Internet users now use some kind of social media, including Twitter, blogging and networking sites. Citizen journalism is on the rise at local levels and rapidly filling niches vacated by undernourished news organisations. But the report says that despite the invention and energy of new media efforts, their scale is dwarfed by what has been lost. The J-Lab project estimates $140 million of non-profit money has been pumped into new media in four years but that represents less than a tenth of newspaper losses alone. According to NYU’s Clay Shirky “the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

But this is not necessarily a bad thing. The motivation of news corporations over the last 20 years has been to cut expenses for the sake of profit eroding its sense of public good in favour of efficiency and profit. The researchers say the collapse of these ownership structures may mean a partial rebirth of community connection and public motive in news. But it warns unless someone can develop a system of financing the production of content, reportorial journalism will continue to shrink despite the new technologies.

The vexed question of a viable Internet revenue model is core to this problem. The researchers found that four out of every five online news consumers say they rarely click on online ads. Rupert Murdoch and News Ltd are moving to paywalls to address this problem but studies also show most people are “grazers” and only about one in five people say they would be willing to pay for online content - this number is likely to decrease with less voracious news consumers not included in the survey.

The upshot is a growing tendency towards niche operations. Most news organisations are becoming narrower in ambition and more specific in focus, brand and appeal. The researchers see the critical questions now as being: What collaborative models might work and under what ethical basis? Will there be more sharing of content and resources and what does that mean for fairness and accuracy? “The year ahead will not settle any of these,” they conclude. “But the urgency of these questions will become more pronounced.”

Read all about it: Over half of all Australian news content is PR

A major new study of Australian newspapers has shown over half of all editorial content is driven by some form of public relations. The study by Crikey and the University of Technology Sydney found that 55 percent of all hard news stories in Australia’s top ten papers were the result of a media release, a public relations professional or some other form of promotion. The study backs up similar international and Australian research that says PR is the backbone of modern journalism.

The study was carried out by UTS investigative journalism students and Australian Centre for Independent Journalism student interns in the spring semester of 2009. The students chose a five day period from Monday, 7 September to Friday, 11 September from the print editions of the ten newspapers and analysed news articles from 11 rounds for a total of 2203 articles.

The ten papers in the study were spread across three owners News Ltd (The Australian, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Melbourne’s Herald-Sun, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, Adelaide’s The Advertiser and Hobart’s The Mercury), Fairfax (Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age) and WAN (The West Australian). The 11 rounds chosen were: politics, business/finance, education, technology/innovation, police, rural, health/science/medicine, arts & entertainment, environment/energy and motoring.

Students investigated the origin of news and feature articles in these newspapers by using Google search engine and the Factiva news database to pick out earlier uses of direct quotes and phrases in media releases. Source material was also found as students combed exclusive interviews, publicity events, specialist email alert services, stories directly tied to and produced to support advertising, and public relations stories targeted and prepared for particular journalists.

The study found the News Ltd capital dailies were the worst offenders for using PR generated stories. Fully seven in ten stories in The Daily Telegraph were sourced from PR while the Hobart Mercury was not far behind with 67 percent. By contrast the Fairfax metro dailies did a lot better for original work with the Sydney Morning Herald just 42 percent spin and the Melbourne Age 47 percent. Worryingly (or brazenly, if you prefer), a quarter of all articles featured a journalist’s by-line with little or no appreciable effort in the article beyond the original PR.

Results also differed widely from round to round. Researchers found that over three quarters (77 percent) of all innovation/technology articles were sourced from PR while police was also high at 71 percent. Perhaps surprisingly given the number of governmental communications officers around, politics was lowest at 37 percent. But this is not necessarily cause for joy. The researchers cautioned this lower figure may be because “more public relations activity happens behind the scenes through journalists’ relationships with politicians and their advisers and for that reason is harder to identify.”

The results would have been worse if PR-heavy rounds such as property, travel and lifestyle were included or if the weekend papers had been included with their mass of supplements packed with promotional material. The problematic sports round was also excluded because contact between sports celebrities and journalists are heavily controlled by Sports PR. Crikey and UTS decided because of the nature of the media and PR industries relationship with sport, it was “too difficult to reliably code the sports reports”.

The findings should be no surprise to anyone working in journalism, PR or in research. Not only does public relations generally pay better than journalism, there are far more people in the PR industry than are currently listed as journalists. And with most companies now exercising strict policies when dealing with the media, it is getting increasingly harder for journalists to get anything other than the controlled message from an organisation.

Allied to this are time pressures and multiple stories which often do not give journalists enough time to get additional sources of information prior to deadline. The lowest-common denominator of Internet click-throughs and corporate penny-pinching also add to the problem. The bottom line is that investigative journalism is on the wane as we move towards the triumph of celebrity culture. On the whole, the quality of what we read, hear and see (the broadcast media are no better) on the news is ordinary. However the fault is ours. As news consumers, we are only getting what we pay for.

Guardian Media Group looking to close The Observer

(photo by Florian)

The world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, the London-based Observer, is on the verge of closure as its Guardian Media Group (GMG) owners look to save costs. The Scott Trust foundation which owns the GMG is drawing up plans to turn the 218-year-old title into a mid-week news magazine. Foundation members opposed drafts of the proposal last month and executives have gone back to the drawing board to determine the best way forward. There is a possibility the paper may survive as a heavily down version.

The decision was forced on the GMG after it announced an annual loss of $180m last week with its flagship newspapers The Guardian and The Observer losing $74m. The group immediately began work on a three year strategic plan to come up with radical measures to staunch the losses. But while the charter of the Scott Trust (“to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity”) means that The Guardian will be protected despite the losses, there is no similar protection for the Sunday broadsheet the Trust bought in 1993. GMG’s chief executive Carolyn McCall said that while the paper could withstand the losses this year (and last year) it could not do so three years running.

Donald Trelford, the paper’s editor between 1975 and 1993, told the BBC’s Newsnight last night that the problem is caused by a combination of factors. He blamed the overly large Saturday newspapers which take all weekend and beyond to read, competition from free content on the Internet, and the Scott Trust protection of The Guardian from the open market. Trelford said that without The Observer “we’d be left with the Sunday Times [...] and the Sunday Torygraph [sic] and I can’t believe that would be a healthy thing for British democracy”.

Mark Hanson of The Independent (which has a similarly troubled Sunday edition) is paying the price for bad strategic decisions taken by Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. In May Rusbridger announced that a single merged team would operate across the three platforms (the two newspapers and the website www.guardian.co.uk) that would keep the “distinct voice” of each platform separate. Hanson claims that Rusbridger sunk $120m into bespoke printing presses that no other newspaper is able to share because of the papers’ unique Berliner format.

This is not the first time The Observer’s future has been threatened. GMG tried to shut the paper down five years ago. They commissioned consultants who suggested the Trust look at replacing the newspaper with a magazine. But the proposal was fought off by members of the trust and the then-editor of the paper, Roger Alton. Despite the decline of the British newspaper industry since 2004, the paper still has a healthy readership. The paper has a circulation of 420,000 (17 percent of the Sunday market) and a readership of 1.37 million.

If it does disappear it will be a sad moment in British history. W. S. Bourne founded the paper on 4 December 1791 with a commitment to the free communication of truth. Initially subsidised by the government in return for favourable reviews, it gradually found its own voice. Under David Astor in the 1940s it became a liberal, trust-owned publication, with no political affiliations. The paper became a pawn in Tiny Rowlands’ war with Mohammed Al Fayed in the 1980s before finally being taken over by the GMG after a House of Commons motion opposed its closure. It is difficult to believe that today’s parliament will feel a similar sense of outrage.

Dear John: A letter to Pollyanna Hartigan

Dear John, On a long driving journey on Friday I was listening to a Radio National discussion about the efficacy of feedback. There was much feedback on feedback within the hour. What struck me most was what people thought the ratio of positive to negative feedback needed to be. One expert said that for every piece of criticism, you have to give 11 items of praise to compensate for the damage caused. Though others say three is sufficient, you strike me as feeling a bit vulnerable. So before I criticise your recent hand grenade speech to the Press Club I’ll go with 11 compliments.

Here are eleven reasons why I like your speech.

1. You are the head of the largest non-government media organisation in Australia. As such you have a powerful voice and one that deserves an honest hearing when used.

2. I still pay to read your newspapers so I'm interested in your philosophy.

3. For all its faults and shrieking opinion, I find The Australian’s news content usually authoritative.

4. While I’m not a huge fan of your online content I like how you don’t break stories into separate pages to inflate page impressions like "Firefox" Fairfax

5. I love your vigorous work leading the Right to Know Coalition. Censorship, almost without exception, is insidious and evil. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

6. I like the fact you still spend money on large newsrooms. Long may that continue.

7. I like your national approach to stories. The commercial television stations are locked in parochial city rivalries. The Australian is one of the few organs that consistently takes a broader stance.

8 I agree with three of the elements in how you defined good journalism: "something that was original, highly relevant and genuinely useful to your audience". I didn’t like the fourth one: exclusivity. Nor was I totally happy you chose a diet as the best example of news that met all four of your criteria, but I’m dealing with that.

9 I also agree your berating journalists for being negative is timely. There is a future and it needs to be carved out not thrown out. News Limited has a talented pool of people that can help show the world that journalism is a valuable part of our society. A bit of optimism doesn't hurt.

10 I am also pleased to hear that newspaper ad revenues are growing in Australia. Long may it remain a profitable business. I’d hate to have to do the Sodoku online with my cuppa.

11 so I thank you for opening this up for discussion.

Call me Pollyanna, you said. Are you sure? Pollyannaism describes the tendency “for people to agree with positive statements describing themselves”. Not sure how well they deal with the negative.

But sure, be Pollyanna as you desire. Like the character in the Eleanor Porter novel you want your optimism to be infectious. You like to see the best in things. Can you accept, therefore, that some things could be better?

Let me start with the extraordinary sight of Fox News asking their (and your) boss about his opinion on the News of the World wire-tap story. Murdoch hid behind the likelihood that it could become a legal matter and refused to comment. Though the interviewer somewhat ruined the effect by becoming sycophantic when Murdoch wouldn’t answer, it was a surprisingly ballsy question for a usually undemanding and compliant network.

Because if the charges against the News of the World are true, then this is a significant ethical failure on behalf of News Ltd. None of these phonetapping targets passed any “public interest test” in destroying the privacy of their conversation. The effect of this behaviour will be twofold: Firstly it will further increase public cynicism and disillusionment and hardens the view that journalism is an amoral and a despised occupation. Secondly, it loses political trust as it shows how media companies will take increasingly desperate measures to generate sensational and salacious content.

But John, I'm sure you know these risks already. Some of the stuff you put out under such brands as the Daily Telegraph (Sydney) and news.com.au are as desperate as they come and a disservice to the craft. Your way is to “manage” tastelessness and turn it into just another aggressive marketing strategy. And anyway, let’s face it: NOTW is not your problem.

What is your problem is the need to keep Australian eyeballs and influence at News Ltd in sufficient numbers to counteract the inevitable migration to digital content. Overall sales are flat, you concede, and as you say yourself the online reader generates about 10 percent of the revenue you can make from a newspaper reader. So you’ll have to find eleven times as many people online to make a buck. Well, go find them - I just gave you eleven compliments with which to start.

The eyeballs are certainly out there and with them, the influence. Appetite for news is not on the wane. Google thought it was being attacked in the half hour after Michael Jackson died. You said yourself you had bumper editions after the bushfires. International audiences now available to you increase your potential reach from 20 million to several billion. Advertisers will eventually pay big dollars if they think they can get access to this level of influence.

But of course, you decide that three billion is not worth aiming for with free content. You think it might be time to make people pay up front. With this approach, those numbers are back around the 20 million reach again (probably even a lot less than that) but that might be enough scraps to survive on. So you throw a fence around your “premium content”.

Let me remind you of the decision by Encyclopaedia Britannica to turn down Bill Gates' offer to build a CD of their product because they thought it might interfere with their book sales. Instead Gates teamed up with Encarta and blew Britannica away with a $49 CD. Wikipedia then went a step further and put it all on the Net for free. The premium of the data was no longer in the price but in the use. The sooner News Ltd understands this, the less it will be like Encyclopaedia Britannica unable to understand why their fence fell down.

And then there's the journalism. I mentioned earlier I did not like exclusivity among your four goals. While the scoop has some merit as a competitive tool, its effect in the commercial world is to hide information from competitors (and sometimes readers) in an attempt to reveal earliest. It is this inherent rottenness that can infect the “chase of the story” at the expense of the overall truth. In the speedy world of internet connectedness, the fact that you come out a minute or two before the opposition is irrelevant.

Because information is not like a service. A service is exhausted on consumption. Information, like the recipes in the diet you so gladly defined as news, is reusable. The blogs reuse your news because they can. Taking that ability away won’t make News Ltd any better. One of the blogs you mentioned at the shorter end of the long tail was Crikey which does has a subscriber model. I subscribe to it more because of its packaging (a useful daily email wrap) than its decision to put content behind a paywall.

And then there's the bloggers. As the world moves away from being a market economy to being a networked economy, you should be looking for allies. Treating bloggers with contempt is not a wise move and tarring them all with the one dismissive brush is a bit silly. You are setting yourself up as a judge of intellectual value, which itself could be construed as being barely discernable from massive ignorance.

Instead of attacking them, why aren’t you asking for their assistance? Look at the sorts of things bloggers do well such as conversation, debate, and creating social networks as well as the things they don’t do so well (rounds, international news and straight reportage). Make sure your skilled journalists can out-blog the bloggers. You say citizen journalists don’t have the resources to bring us reliable news yet you ask for people to send in their photos and videos all the time. News Ltd needs to understand that the roles of producers and consumers is becoming increasingly complicated and interconnected in the digital economy.

Yes, amateur journalism is capable of trivialising and even corrupting serious debate but so is professional journalism. I’d even argue corruption is more of an issue in the professional field. Phone-tapping is much more capable of causing democracy to degenerate into mob rule than the opinions of bloggers, however hyperventilated some of them might be.

I do like your “future world view [where] good journalists will be very well paid, valued by their readers, and the envy of their colleagues.” But even here, I somehow think the manager in you will always begrudge those pay increases.

Anyway Mr Pollyanna, never mind the bloggers and the low paid journos. News Ltd has more to worry about from Google - and more to learn too. “Do what you do best, and link to the rest” is a philosophy News should cherish not criticise. What is needed is imagination to design new ways of connecting ideas and news in a distributed environment. Otherwise, you’ll eventually be left behind. And no-one will miss you.

By the way, if you want an example of a story that meets all of your criteria, try this one at EngageMedia about the Indonesian Government banning Al Jazeera from showing a Melbourne film makers documentary about West Papua. Its even got a local angle.

State of Play: Will the Internet kill the newspaper movie?

I went to Stafford cinema last night to watch Russell Crowe’s journalist caper movie State of Play. It is always constructive to understand why a film gets its name and in this case it is not entirely obvious from the political thriller plot. As far as I can see, the State of Play is that of the newspaper industry itself hovering on the brink of total collapse as is its 20th century revenue model. The film is no less than an elegy for newspaper values and the movies written about them.

State of Play's Scottish filmmaker Kevin McDonald is a former journalist. He brings an attention to detail to the piece which transports a 2003 BBC miniseries across the pond and condenses six hours to two. In many ways a standard Hollywood thriller that tries too hard to please, McDonald’s movie still says something important about the parlous state of industrial journalism in the world. Set in a fictional large newsroom in Washington DC, the film has a lot to say about the challenges newsprint is facing to survive; both from the disappearing advertising imperative and the impact of the new practices of digital media.

The central character is Crowe’s Cal McAffrey, a scruffy “old-style” journalist who uses his wide-ranging connections to get to the salient facts of any case. McAffrey is sartorial challenged but is adept at working his sources and knowing what news angles to use in any given situation. His employers, the fictional Washington Globe, serves as a cipher for the Washington Post and the film’s attempt to uncover dirty political tricks is redolent of the Woodward/Bernstein story in All the Presidents’ Men. But while owners such as Katherine Graham (now dead) and Warren Buffett have respected the venerable nature of the Post, the fictional paper has been taken over by the money men who want to see quick returns on their investment. The new owners are more interested in profits than Pulitzers.

The paper’s editor is played in Graham-style by Helen Mirren. She has to juggle the demands of her new corporate bosses while still encouraging her reporters to get the story. Mirren is keen to support the paper’s online presence. In the film this is portrayed by Rachel McAdam’s character Della Frye – a silly name but a plausible nod to journalistic films of yesteryear such as The Front Page or His Girl Friday. But while Rosalind Russell happily called herself a reporter in the Billy Wilder classic, Frye calls herself a blogger. Defending her new recruit, the editor tells McAffrey why Frye is employed: "she's hungry, she's cheap, and she churns out copy every hour."

While the blogger is initially stereotyped as someone who does not do any fact checking, it quickly turns out that Ms Della Frye is a darn fine reporter who gets under McAffrey’s crusty skin. The old journo lays down the law. "This is a real story, not gossip” he warns her. However this idea that some stories are too deep for blogs is horseshit. As was this line from Frye when Crowe’s character asks her if she is going to blog about it. Her response: "When people read this story, they should have newsprint on their hands." Ah but why, Frye? Such sentimentality is touching except for the fact most people want to read the news for free and not have to wait around for the morning delivery.

But what happens when there is no more morning delivery? Roger Ebert wonders if this will be last newspaper movie with its “eerie valedictory feeling”. Perhaps optimistically Ebert answers his own question in the negative. It will survive, he says, because no matter what happens to newspapers, the newspaper movie is a durable genre. According to Ebert, shouting "stop the presses!" is ever so much more exciting than shouting "stop the upload!"

Yet it is likely the presses will stop regardless of what Hollywood wants. In some ways McDonald realises this with his elegiac closing credits showing the production process of a newspaper. Having filed the story, the credits take the viewers through set plates, whirring presses, collated broadsheets and stacks of newsprint ready for the public’s morning read. As A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times, “the images are stirring and familiar, though in a few years’ time they may look as quaint as engravings of stagecoaches and steam engines.”

The film left unanswered the question of whether either McAffrey or Frye would survive the disappearance of print. To me, it seemed that the young blogger could easily pick up McAffrey’s skills but he would have difficulty picking up hers. No longer could they say of her as the LA Times could say about the archetypal blogger Matt Drudge: “He’s a menace to honest, responsible journalism.” But what Drudge did was challenge the rules of journalism. He bypassed the hierarchies of editor and publisher. Given that these hierarchies are about to disappear, the world will belong to those that master whatever is left behind. That is the true state of play.

Working in Warwick: tales from the frontline

Just got back from a couple of days trying out for the Warwick Daily News. This was unpaid work, but valuable experience in a real newsroom. Warwick is a small town of 12,000 people on the Darling Downs about 160km west of Brisbane. It is amazing a town that size can support a daily newspaper, and even the editor admits it is tough to survive – especially when there are two other newspapers (both free) in town competing for scarce advertising revenue.

But survive it somehow does as the smallest newspaper in the APN stable, Australia’s third largest newspaper chain. The Warwick Daily News is an old and venerable newspaper starting initially as the Warwick Argus in the 1860s and changing its name to the Daily News after amalgamation with the Examiner and the Times in 1919. Today’s paper still has the smell of an oily rag feel to it. There is a small editorial staff with the deputy editor running a team of four full-time journalists and a couple more part-timers. The staffers are young and enthusiastic and are all excellent reporters. In a small paper like Warwick’s, the reporters do the lot. That means all the rounds, checking the newswires, taking photographs, copy tasting, sub-editing and more.

On my first day there I was sent out to do a follow up on a truck accident. A day earlier a truck had overturned on a dangerous turn of the New England Highway in the centre of Warwick. The original story was already in the paper the morning I arrived. The deputy editor told me that the junction was the subject of a bunfight between the Queensland Department of Main Roads (DMR) and Hungry Jack’s who were building a restaurant on the corner. DMR wanted Hungry Jack’s to include an additional turning lane on the corner but were not prepared to pay to resume the land to make it happen.

As well as talking to the two organisations, my job was also to go down to the corner and find someone who would talk about what they thought the problem was. So having left messages with DMR and Hungry Jack’s I set off to the corner where the truck rolled. There were no pedestrians about and no one answered the door at the first few houses I knocked at. There was a curtain shop at the corner but the two ladies inside didn’t want to be interviewed and they gave me the mobile number of the store owner whom they said “would have plenty to say on the matter”. I rang him up but contrary to expectations, he didn’t want to go on the record. In despair that I would fail on my first job, I finally found someone sitting on his porch a few doors down from the junction who was prepared to talk. While his story didn’t fit in with the DMR/Hungry Jack’s stoush, I did get a photo and a few colourful quotes - he blamed the accidents there on cars cutting in on trucks “like a bat out of hell”.

While I waited on my other contacts to get back to me, I started on my second story. The editor had gotten a media release from the Queensland government who were promoting international travellers using the state’s visitor information centres. I had to walk across the road from the newspaper office to where the Warwick tourist bureau resided. There I spoke to the manager who admitted he wasn’t yet aware of the minister’s campaign but told me 10 percent of Warwick’s visitors were from overseas. Most were what he called “free independent travellers” looking for directions, accommodation, things to do and road conditions north and south - “not many go west”, he said. The rest were backpackers looking for work and these ones he packed off to Stanthorpe where the fruit-picking was.

After another photo op outside the bureau, I dodged the traffic back across the road to write up the second story. In the meantime Hungry Jack’s rang me back to say they had finally acquiesced to DMR’s demands so my angle was now that the corner would be fixed. I then got a terse typically carefully worded statement from the minister’s office confirming they were re-looking at the burger chain’s solution. I finally wrote up the story and managed to keep the photo of the resident and his contribution (the photo alas did not make the abbreviated online version) Happy that I got my first two stories ready for publication, I spent the last few hours helping out by filling “news in brief” columns from wire copy and local sports reports. There was one final bout of proof-reading the news pages before I emerged into the very cool night air of Warwick.

I was finding it a lot colder this side of the Great Dividing Range two hours west of Brisbane. I stayed the night at the Criterion Hotel in town where my book on Warwick told me that the road from the big smoke is named for Allan Cunningham, a former assistant manager at Kew’s Royal Botanical Gardens. In 1827 Cunningham led an expedition from Segenhoe in NSW north into Queensland and found a beautiful area he named the Darling Downs in honour of the then-NSW governor. I then read about the Leslie family who were the first white people to colonise the area 13 years later, before the early start (I left Brisbane at 5am) and the rigours of reporting took it out of me and I fell asleep.

This morning I woke refreshed and ready for a second day of Warwick journalism. I came away from the 9am news conference with two tasks. Firstly I was to take a photo of two Warwick High School teachers in their respective Blue and Maroon shirts for a backpage spread on the State of Origin. Secondly I had to find out why a local business was changing hands after 23 years. The teachers were in class so I left messages for them to ring me. The business owner was available. He told me he was retiring and selling his steel business at the end of the month to a big company called OneSteel. I arranged to go out there and take a photo of him outside the office. In my zeal, I made several mistakes including taking videos instead of photos, and forgetting to ask him to spell his name. But perhaps with retirement on his mind, he good naturedly responded to all my return requests.

Back at the office, the teachers were still not responding. I got a third story, a bit of federal “he said, she said” tit-for-tat silliness between federal Labor infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese and local National member Bruce Scott. Albanese accused Scott of not supporting road fixing schemes which Scott angrily denied. I went off to Hansard (actually used the more user-friendly Open Australia.org) which had the relevant parliamentary debate and with the help of the two sides press releases and an interview with Scott’s media minder, it was easy enough to write up the article.

But at 3pm, disaster struck on my State of Origin story. Neither teacher had yet responded and I found out that one of them had gone home sick. “Was that alright?” said the person apologetically who took my tenth call to the school. Well no, it wasn’t alright as now we had no back page photo. I rushed out into the streets of Warwick looking for blue and maroon clad supporters I could line up for the “mate v mate” pose. For the best part of an hour I cruised the streets armed with camera and notebook desperate to buttonhole anyone that might look like a fan. But no-one was wearing the colours. I finally holed up an 11 year old boy in the sports shop whose school colours were an approximation of Queensland’s and the shop attendants helped out by putting a maroon jester’s hat on his head for the photo. I asked them would they pose in blue to complete the photo but they both politely declined.

Delighted with my improvisation, I went back to the office only to be told it didn’t fit in with the theme – what was needed was a blue-clad body standing back-to-back to a purple-clad body (similar to the photo shown). Disappointed but not despondent I went back onto the streets and found a second sports shop. Here the owner told me that he had no blue shirts because NSW had changed manufacturer from Canterbury to Classic this year. With daylight fading and no supporters on the streets I had to admit defeat. The paper would have to go without a local photo angle. I still managed to get a couple of late quotes from local footy identities to at least add a bit of Warwick colour, even if I couldn't get the team colours.

After put these stories to bed (or least to copy edit), it was time to say goodbye to Warwick and the lovely people at the Daily News. In two unpaid days there I had worked harder than at any job in recent memory and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I found it a very different experience from blogging. I got an inkling of the daily tyranny of filling up a newspaper and all it entails. There was the joy of talking to diverse sources, the authority that comes with representing a media organisation, the frustration of waiting on people to return calls, the disappointment of not being able to capture a story, and the thrill of meeting a deadline. I think I will be back for more, some time.

Australian Press Council losing friends and not influencing people

Australian broadcasters have reacted coolly to the Australian Press Council’s proposal to expand its remit to regulate broadcast and digital media. Margaret Warner, the head of peak body Commercial Radio Australia said her industry already has a government regulator and does not need any assistance from the press watchdog. Meanwhile, ABC boss Mark Scott has also rejected a role for APC in monitoring the public broadcaster, claiming the council was deficient in its complaints procedures. "The council's workings are opaque and its judgments given precious little display," Scott said last month. "It has no power to order corrections."

The rejections complete a bad week for the publisher-funded body. Last Monday The Australian announced the APC was facing the loss of one third of its budget and the biggest structural shake-up in its history. The publishers which finance the council (including News Limited, Fairfax Media and APN News & Media) issued a joint submission which propose major changes to its membership and functions to cope with the proposed cuts. The publishers will slash industry contributions to the council from $880,000 this financial year to less than $600,000 in 2009-2010. The cuts are required, say the publishers, because of a mix of the global financial crisis and so-called “structural problems” (presumably, collapsing revenue) in the industry itself.

In response, Press Council member Alan Kennedy made a counter-proposal to expand the organisation's remit in an article published on the journalists’ union site Alliance Online last Thursday. Kennedy called for an expansion to give the council unfettered right to police online news sites, television and radio news. The downside is that the new members would have to fund the council pro rata, but in return would gain credibility for the quality of their products. He said that slashing funds would seriously hamper the APC’s “vital work” in handling ethics complaints and lobbying Government on press freedom issues. However, he acknowledged the model under which publishers funded a percentage based on circulation is flawed and needs to change.

Kennedy said the council’s main selling point was turnaround time. He described the procedures of Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which regulates the broadcasting industry, as “prescribed and clunky” While ACMA can take six months to make a complaints decision, the APC usually gets a judgement out in six weeks or under. This is because complainants must waive their legal rights when they engage the APC and therefore lawyers are not involved. An win at the Australian Press Council entitles the complaint only to a public apology.

The APC was established in 1976 with two main aims. These were to help maintain the traditional freedom of the press and ensure the press acts responsibly and ethically. At the time, the press barons were worried the government might try to licence newspapers if there was no self-regulation. The APC has grown into the role. It has made over 1,400 adjudications and now sees itself as a bastion of a free press. Their annual State of the News Print Media publication is an important document that looks at key trends and issues that affect newsprint in Australia.

The council has 22 members comprising of ten public members, ten members from the publishers, and two independent journalists. This panel currently deal with 400 to 500 complaints annually. About 90 percent of these complaints are successfully dealt with by mediation using sub-panels and the other ten percent go to the full committee. About 47.5 percent of complaints were upheld last year. As I heard Press council member Adrian McGregor say today, the APC's ability to deal with such a large number will be severely compromised by the massive drop in budget.

It is a shame then that other media will not subscribe to the service. The “get-your-tanks-off-our-lawn” message (as Mumbrella neatly put it) from Commercial Radio Australia and the ABC is unhelpful. Given that many media complainants simply want an apology, explanation or an acknowledgement, the APC's version of the ombudsman provides a useful means of getting a cheap, quick and fair result.

The future looks grim for The Independent

The crisis that is devastating the US newspaper industry is now spreading to the UK. The future of the London titles "The Independent" and "The Independent on Sunday" is looking extremely doubtful with closure likely if a buyer cannot be found in the next few weeks. Irish parent company Independent News and Media (INM) announced in late April it had failed to reach an agreement with lenders over a $270m (US) bond that it must repay by 18 May. This is part of a larger company debt which has now blown out to $1.75 billion.

INM, which announced losses of $216m in 2008, is under increasing pressure from bond holders to dispose of the flagship Independent titles which are understood to lose at least $15m a year. The problem will now become Gavin O’Reilly’s to solve as he takes over as chief executive of INM from his 73 year old father Tony O’Reilly. O’Reilly (junior) also announced this week that the Australian arm APN (which INM owns 39.2 percent) is also likely to face cutbacks as the parent company struggles with its debts.

But it is the British mastheads that are his biggest worry. In 2004, the two Independent titles were valued at $226m but are now worth a fraction of that price. Yet there is no rush of buyers for the loss-making paper. Potential owners are put off by the size of the pension fund deficit, falling circulation, declining advertising revenues and the cost of laying off more staff. O'Reilly is now hoping a cost-saving office-sharing arrangement with the Daily Mail will buy time for the newspapers until the economy improves. The Independent is moving from Docklands to the Kensington headquarters of Associated Newspapers, which owns the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. Journalists at the paper however are unhappy with the move to co-locate with titles that pursue a very different form of journalism to The Independent. And morale is already low among staff. The Independent has suffered two rounds of redundancies in the last two years. The 430 staff that remain have been told they need to work 25 percent longer hours to cope.

Even these sacrifices may not be enough to save the papers. Irish mobile phones billionaire Denis O’Brien has muscled his way into power at INM with 26 per cent of the shares and a seat on the board. He is believed to be supportive of shutting down the Independent titles to help bring the business back into the black. There is also the issue that he may still be nursing a grievance about the paper’s coverage of allegations that he once bribed a minister. In April, he gave a strong signal on his position saying "management needs to remain focused on eliminating loss-making businesses and all stakeholders need to work together to ensure that value is protected.”

The holding company Newspaper Publishing launched The Independent on 7 October 1986 as a broadsheet under the editorship of former Telegraph staffer Andreas Whittam Smith. Within three years it had a circulation of 400,000 and a reputation that lived up to the name of the masthead. Within another year owners launched The Independent on Sunday. The papers then joined the Murdoch-inspired migration to Canary Wharf in 1994. A year later O’Reilly’s INM and Mirror Group Newspapers become controlling shareholders and after another four years O’Reilly bought out the Mirror’s shares. However by then the circulation had dropped to half its 1989 level. It went into so-called “compact” format in 2003 but it did little to lift profits.

Today, its circulation remains the lowest of the London quality dailies and hasn't really moved in a decade selling just over 205,000 copies each day. That compares to 340,000 for The Guardian, 590,000 for The Times and 820,000 for the Telegraph).

One mooted option has been a merger with Alexander Lebedev’s Evening Standard. However Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade suggests another way out of The Independent’s crisis. He says it could be time for the paper known for its innovations of the compact shape and "the viewspaper" (pictured) to experiment again “by becoming the first serious daily paper to be distributed free of charge in major cities (and paid-for elsewhere).” Greenslade said such a model would prove to be proper competition for giveaways such as Metro and Murdoch’s London Paper. However Greenslade concedes making the Independent free Indy would cause an initial massive hit to revenue “so the risk may be too great for a hard-pressed INM.” But, he concludes, “another owner may well feel differently.”

Buffett consigns newspapers to the waste bin

Speaking in front of 35,000 investors at the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting, billionaire Warren Buffett joined the growing litany of voices charting the decline of the newspaper industry. The 78 year old cult investor known as “The Sage of Omaha” is an avid lifelong newspaper. However he said newspapers had lost their relevance to the Internet and were no longer an attractive investment option. He told his Omaha audience on the weekend he would not buy newspapers “at any price” because of the possibility of “going to just unending losses”. Buffett’s comments come as The Boston Globe looks like becoming the latest high profile American newspaper to go under.

Despite his grim tidings, Buffett said he would not sell out his existing newspaper interests. Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway is the largest shareholder in The Washington Post Company (Buffett is a board member) and also owns the Buffalo News. The Washington Post Company posted a $18.7 million quarterly loss last week as its flagship paper reported a 33 per cent slump in print advertising sales. Buffett continued to show faith as he said the Post had an attractive business model with its cable interests. But he added it "does not have answers to the problems of the newspaper business."

Berkshire Hathaway is not immune from the global crisis with operating profit down about 12 percent from a year earlier to $1.7 billion. Company stock has fallen 39 percent since December 2007. Buffett was asked at the shareholders’ meeting whether there was a good price to invest in today’s newspaper business. His full answer was instructive:

The current environment is accentuating problem in newspapers -but it’s not the basic cause. Charlie [Munger] and I read 5 a day. We’ll never give them up. We would not buy them at any price. They have the possibility of going to unending losses. They were essential to the public 20 years ago. Their pricing power was essential with customer. They lost the essential nature. The erosion has accelerated dramatically. They were only essential to advertiser as long as essential to reader. No one liked buying ads in the paper - it’s just that they worked. I don’t see anything on the horizon that causes that erosion to end.”

Writing in Slate, Jack Shafer said Buffett predicted the death of newspapers as far back as 1992. He quotes a letter Buffett sent to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders that year that said newspaper, television, and magazines were losing their status as mass profit-making franchises. Their previous success was based on product need, the lack of a substitute, and the lack of price regulation. Newspapers had survived despite often being an inferior product because of what Buffett called their “bulletin board” value. But with the rise of cable and satellite broadcasting and Internet, newspapers no longer sold "as if they were indestructible slot machines".

Jeff Jarvis agrees and says the prognosis “keeps getting clearer and clearer”. He says it is making less sense to try to preserve and protect the failing newspaper model. “Every day that papers keep printing is a day that they haven’t reinvented themselves for a new reality,” he said. Jarvis says he is not being a doomsayer, but merely observing inexorable events in the economy. “The insane response to this change is to resist it and mourn it,” he said. “The sane response is to find the opportunity in it.”

Locally, this is also the view of the Australian Newsagency Blog. It believes the crisis has been delayed here by the large home delivery industry because “small business newsagents carry the more of the high cost of distribution than delivery contractors in the US.” However, the writer "Mark" is not naïve enough to believe that that can stave off disaster. “[Newsagents] cannot rely on newspaper generated traffic to our businesses forever, not even for five years,” said the blog. “We need to build new traffic urgently.”

The crisis that now envelops journalism is also starting to impact book publishing. Ian Jack in The Guardian says royalties are tumbling, staff are being cut, and publishers are taken fewer risks. Jack explains that the reasons are similar to newspapers’ demise: “generations are now growing up with the idea that words should be read electronically for free - a new human right - which has grave consequences for the people paid to compose and edit them.”

While no one seems sure how this “new human right” will be paid for, only one country has gone down the path of government bailout. In January French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced a €600m ($800m) emergency aid package for his country's troubled newspaper industry. The French press is among Europe’s least profitable with a rapidly declining readership. The most high profile of Sarkozy’s rescue plans was the announcement that every French 18-year-old would get a year's free subscription to the paper of their choice to boost reading habits. He also relaxed foreign ownership rules, extended tax breaks for investors in online journalism and doubled the state’s advertising in print and online papers.

However there is a legitimate question about whether the package compromises press freedom. The concern is that French journalists will not be capable of biting the hand that now feeds them. But it is also arguable this problem is no different than the one that exists currently in the purely commercial sphere. In the book “Last Rights”, a group of academics from the University of Illinois claim freedom of the press used to be defined as a political matter. However the communication system in capitalistic societies is primarily economic. To have a truly free press, say the authors, there would not only be no state intervention, there would also be a lack of market forces, ownership ties and other material bonds. Clearly no such beast exists in any profitable or influential form. Some form of economic intervention is almost always required to make it work. Sarkozy’s plan may not save newspapers, but might yet provide a reasonable transition path for journalism to cross from print into the digital realm without permanently damaging the public service it provides.

Christian Science Monitor moves online

The Christian Science Monitor (CSM) has joined the growing litany of newspapers that is stopping its daily print run. On Friday it published its last edition. The 100 year old paper’s editor John Yemma announced the move saying, “as of today, we are shedding print on a daily basis.” The editor said it was necessary to keep the paper relevant and to move toward financial sustainability. The paper is currently posting net losses of $18.9 million a year on $12.5 million in revenue. The CSM, in common with almost every other newspaper on the planet has been suffering decreasing readership and reduced advertising revenues.

Yemma said that in to order to survive in today’s business environment, newspapers everywhere were “taking radical steps”. Some were decreasing print frequency, some were web only. Others still have shut down or gone into to receivership. Common to all of them is the collapse in classified advertising which is moving towards free web platforms. Yemma’s own hand was forced as circulation dipped below 50,000 (from a high water mark of 223,000 in 1970). “Saying goodbye to daily print closes an era,” he said. “But the Monitor itself…is becoming more daily than ever.”

The paper is not totally shutting down the presses - there will still be a weekly print edition which will commence operation on 12 April. Unlike most newspapers the CSM mainly relies on mail subscribers. The 44-page weekly edition (the daily edition ran 20 pages) will cost $89 a year to subscribe (down from $219 currently) and this move will reduce costs by $10 million. The editorial team has reduced from 97 to 80 in the last year and there may be other layoffs. But Yemma says the paper’s core value won’t change. “We are putting on new clothes for a new era, but we are the same Monitor, committed to the same objective we have adhered to since we were launched a century ago: `to injure no man but to bless all mankind,'” he said.

The CSM is a Boston-based non-profit publication. It wants to lessen its reliance on subsidies, which totalled about $20 million last year. Of that figure, $13.3 million came from its owner, the First Church of Christ, Scientist and another $6.8 million came from an endowment fund. The paper was started by the Church's founder Mary Baker Eddy in 1908. Despite its name and ownership, the Christian Science Monitor is not overtly religious. However its church ownership, allied a public-service mission, and commitment to covering the world has given the paper a strong independent voice in journalism. As Business Week says, its strong suit is sober analysis, not breaking news.

Consumer advocate and serial presidential candidate Ralph Nader is a former reporter for the CSM. He said received the news of the paper’s print closure with “special sadness”. The paper launched his freelance writing career after he graduated from Harvard Law School. He wrote for the business, travel and foreign affairs pages and was paid $75 an article. “I'll always remember the Monitor as a liberator, a polite agitator, an open-minded newspaper that gave voice to many writers in many places around the world,” he said. “It is only a small stretch to describe this newspaper as an early successful experiment in "open-source" journalism.”

The new move to digital follows a similar move by the high profile Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently. But as Jeff Bercovici warns, going digital is no guarantee to salvation. The business model is unproven and the advertising revenue is not yet there to make general interest journalism pay for itself. No one is exactly sure how to turn the online advertising audience into revenue. Other newspapers such as The Ann Arbor News and the Rocky Mountain News could not take that risk and shut down completely. Yemma himself admits the strategy is risky: "I feel like this is a high-wire act that we're all doing."

The scale of that high wire act is acknowledged in The State of the News Media 2009 released earlier this month. The sixth such report, it is also the bleakest and says some of its numbers are “chilling”. Newspaper ad revenues are down by a quarter in the last two years. Some papers have gone bankrupt while others have lost three-quarters of their value. Nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst yet. It says the combination of the Global Financial Crisis and the migration of the audience to the web is proving fatal. “The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem,” it says. “It is a revenue problem—the decoupling…of advertising from news.”

Murdoch names insider as new Wall Street Journal editor

Robert Thomson has named as the new managing editor of the News Corp owned Wall Street Journal. Melbourne-born Thomson was the editor of The Times (London) and in his new role will hold the joint roles of editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, its flagship publication. The move is seen as a change to the Journal's institutional culture with Thomson a proven candidate as someone who will execute Rupert Murdoch’s plans faithfully.

The move had been telegraphed since December when Thomson was appointed publisher of the Journal after playing a key role in Murdoch's acquisition of the newspaper. According to News Corp, the new appointment was approved unanimously by the Wall Street Journal’s “special committee”. The committee was created to protect the Journal's editorial independence after News Corporation bought Dow Jones.

Murdoch first made his takeover move of the journal in May 2007 but was initially opposed by the Bancroft family who had controlling stake in the Dow Jones Company. But by August the company confirmed the signing of “a definitive agreement” with News Corp for a cool $5.6 billion. Murdoch expressed his gratitude at the deal: "I want to offer the Bancrofts my thanks, and an assurance that our company and my family will be equally strong custodians.”

Many articles have pointed out similarities between Thomson and his boss. The pair are close friends, share a birthday (11 March; Thomson is 30 years Murdoch’s junior) are married to Chinese women and both made their way up from the bottom in papers owned by Murdoch’s father Keith. But these similarities are superficial. This relationship is purely business. Thomson has an impeccable editorial record in three continents and is a newspaper man through and through.

47 year old Thomson started his career as a copy boy on Melbourne’s now defunct afternoon newspaper The Herald in 1979. After working as that newspaper’s Sydney correspondent, he was hired by the Sydney Morning Herald where he gained a reputation for his judicial reports. He graduated with a BA in journalism from RMIT in 1990. Thomson moved to London where he worked for the Financial Times. In 1998 where he was appointed editor of the American edition of the FT. Having narrowly failed to become overall FT editor, Thomson got the plum job of The Times editor in 2002. Under his direction The Times made the decision to go tabloid. Thomson left the Times in December 2007 to join Dow Jones.

Thomson’s appointment as managing editor became more likely after Marcus Brauchli resigned in April after just 11 months in the job. Because Brauchli resigned rather than being fired, the Journal editorial committee were unable to complain about proprietorial interference. However there seems little doubt that Brauchli was pushed to make way for a Murdoch man. Thomson has already wrought changes. The paper has increased its political coverage and broadened its opinion pages. Writing in Thomson’s former paper, the FT, John Gapper foresaw some problems for the new editor. “Journal staff are uncomfortable about Mr Murdoch’s enthusiasm for taking on the New York Times by broadening the political coverage,” he said. “Even if it does the job well, it will inevitably lose some focus.”

This point was also made by Stephen Mayne writing in Crikey in August last year as the Murdoch deal crystallised. Mayne saw Murdoch’s biggest risk as a revolt by the 2,000 Wall Street Journal journalists. According to Mayne “it would be easy for a group of them to set up a direct rival to The Journal ’s website offering and, with some capital backing from, say, a cashed-up Bancroft family, a rival paper version in the US would not be out of the question.” Thomson’s appointment as editor will be the acid test for the Journal’s reputation.