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”.

insiders and outsiders: a comparison of Brisbane media practices

Journalism is a cultural practice and it is instructive to understand how that culture operates in different settings. This post will compare journalistic practices in mainstream and alternative media outlets. The mainstream media example chosen for the comparison is the News Ltd owned Brisbane Courier-Mail. The alternative media example is the two publications The Bug and The Independent both run by Brisbane independent journalist Don Gordon-Brown. For the purposes of this comparison, I conducted in-depth interviews with Melanie Christiansen, a journalist at the Courier-Mail, Pat Johnson, a tour guide at the Courier-Mail production facility in Murarrie, and Don Gordon-Brown, the editor of the two alternative publications. The study will show that each form of journalism have their advantages and disadvantages. There are also strong points of similarity between the two forms. Both mainstream and alternative forms have relevance, and both shape new experience to established forms.

The Brisbane Courier-Mail is one of Australia’s oldest newspapers. Its forerunner, the Moreton Bay Courier, printed its first issue in 1846. The Courier-Mail was established in 1933 as a merger between the Daily Mail and the Courier. The publisher was Queensland Press whose major shareholder was the Keith Murdoch-managed Herald and Weekly Times (HWT). HWT shareholders kept Keith’s son Rupert at arm’s length from the company after his father’s death in 1952. In the wake of the Hawke-Keating government’s new cross-media laws in 1986, Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd successfully bid for HWT’s extensive newspaper interests. Murdoch bought all of Queensland Press’s shares and became effective owner of its prize possession, the Courier-Mail. Murdoch then closed down his own Brisbane newspaper the Sun leaving the Courier-Mail as the only daily newspaper published in Brisbane. At end 2006, its weekday circulation was 224,690 at end 2006 which makes it the third highest selling daily in Australia.

Don Gordon-Brown is a former Courier-Mail journalist. With ex-Queensland Labor press secretary Lindsay Marshall, he founded the political satirical sheet The Bug in 1989. The free title has since been produced on an irregular basis with a circulation of roughly 5,000. The ABC has described it as a “subversive little journal” that has ridiculed the vanities of state and federal politics for almost twenty years. Gordon-Brown and Marshall then founded The Independent in 2001 initially as a monthly and now as a fortnightly title. The Independent is a free local newspaper with a circulation of 15,000 copies bulk-dropped in the Brisbane CBD and surrounding suburbs.

The first obvious difference between the compared publications is the scale of their operations. The Courier-Mail is a Rupert Murdoch newspaper; one of over 130 titles globally belonging to one of the largest media groups in the world. The newspaper employs 750 staff in the editorial offices at Mayne and another 250 people in the production facility at Murarrie. There is over $400 million worth of state-of-the-art publishing equipment at Murarrie and the facility operates 24 hours a day in three shifts. By contrast, The Bug and The Independent are a small one-room operation in a building at Fortitude Valley. Yet the quality of the end product is high with contributions from well known journalists such as Mungo MacCallum and printing done by the Beaudesert Times. While The Bug and The Independent make some money from advertising, Gordon-Brown’s publications are typical of the alternative press in that at bottom they are more interested in the free flow of ideas than in profit.

Gordon-Brown said his operation was a “labour of love” and rarely turns a profit. He was critical of the way state government departments automatically give their advertising to the larger media players. Gordon-Brown’s position corroborates Chomsky who says major corporations rely heavily on state intervention and subsidies. Gordon-Brown described such practices as “lazy” and they stripped government agencies of their bargaining power. Despite the shoe-string budget, it was important to him that Brisbane had a newspaper “not owned by Rupert Murdoch”. He was proud of its independence and the fact it was locally owned. The aim of The Independent is typical of alternative media: to provide ‘ordinary people’ access to the media on their own terms.

By contrast, the Courier-Mail is part of a vast transnational empire; one of the mega-corporations that Chomsky calls “tyrannical, totalitarian institutions” whose primary function is to sell audiences to advertisers. There is no doubt that the Courier-Mail is big business calibrated to very fine commercial levels. It has a 60:40 ratio between advertising and editorial space, and the price of advertising is increased for display on the popular sports pages or in the well-thumbed bottom-right hand corner of each odd page. Moguls such as Murdoch have faced criticism for their alliances with politically conservative forces leading to the production of “soft” media content. For journalists, the pressure is often to produce something of a tangible sales impact then for the greater good of society.

There is also substantial difference in the journalistic autonomy between the two publications. Don Gordon-Brown is at total liberty to choose his own stories. He is a firm believer in wearing out “shoe leather” to get his stories and views The Independent as a “parish pump” newspaper. He says he gets his best stories from listening to people. He cites the example of his exposé of the problems with the Brunswick St railway station upgrade which he found out simply by conversing with nearby station workers. Gordon-Brown shows the characteristics of ethnographical journalism which Valerie Alia describes as humility, a willingness to learn new information, and an awareness of one’s limitations.

Christiansen has more limited autonomy to choose her own stories. She keeps a news diary of upcoming events as well as relying on contacts for leads. But because she is a general reporter, she is at the behest of the Courier-Mail’s two chiefs of staff who can also assign stories to her. Though she can argue her case for the merits of her own stories, management choices usually take precedence. Also because Christiansen can be working on up to three stories simultaneously, she is often tied to the office and relies more on the telephone and email than on-the-spot reporting to get the stories out. Such desk-bound reporting decreases “out and about” journalism. It also inevitably increases the reliance on easy-to-access accredited sources for information and makes it difficult for minority groups and ordinary people to enter public debate through the mainstream media. This has been borne out in a study of the Courier-Mail which revealed it uses Indigenous sources sparingly – even in stories about Indigenous affairs.

Like many alternative publications, The Bug and The Independent are essentially run by the editor with freelance writers and volunteers providing copy. Also typical of the alternative press is the fact that the editor is multi-skilled and responsible for a range of tasks within the organisation such as reporting, photography, editing, layout and distribution. Job delineation is far clearer at the Courier-Mail. Once Melanie Christiansen files her story, the night editor will determine if it makes the cut and where it should go in the newspaper. Then a sub-editor will “tidy it up” for publication with the journalist unlikely to be consulted again unless the sub-editor has a specific query). Critics have described this as a “battery hen approach to news gathering” but these are important processes. With a need to form newspaper pages and whole sections, gatekeepers such as sub-editors encode entirely new messages which are related to, but independent of, the messages that Christiansen has encoded. Yet while Christiansen is at the mercy of more gatekeepers than Gordon-Brown, she has the advantage of getting her by-line out to a significantly larger audience, however much her message has been further encoded.

Defamation remains a hazard for all publications, mainstream and alternative, despite recently streamlining of the law in Australia. Defined as “the wrong of another’s reputation without good reason or justification”, defamation law is something that all Australian journalists need to have a working understanding of. Both Christiansen and Gordon-Brown were conversant with defamation law but perhaps surprisingly, neither have had recourse to the law in their respective careers. Gordon-Brown said the closest he had come to the courts was a letter from the solicitors of Queensland University Press after The Bug made a satirical comment about a Sally-Anne Atkinson incident. Gordon-Brown ignored the letter and nothing further came of it. But while a poverty-stricken organisation like his is probably not worth taking to court, News Ltd certainly is. Yet Melanie Christiansen also says she not had any brush with the defamation laws. She said that any particularly controversial story is run past the legal department before publication. While this common lack of legal problems may be attributable to luck or co-incidence, it may also point to a strong ethical quality in the journalism of both reporters.

The use of Internet technologies is markedly different in the media organisations under scrutiny. Although Gordon-Brown holds the rights to the potentially economically valuable domain name www.theindependent.com.au, he says the web site is out of date and they have not uploaded any print issues since June 2006. He understands that the web is the way forward but does not have the time or technological wherewithal to keep the web site current. By contrast Rupert Murdoch is on the public record many times saying that the Internet is crucial to News Corporation’s ongoing success. Earlier this month he told a shareholders’ meeting his company needs to “educate” advertisers about the Internet’s virtues. Dr Stephen Quinn agrees and says student journalists should learn to become information workers before they become print reporters. At the Courier-Mail journalists like Christiansen are expected to file their stories regularly to the web site. However, Christiansen says that “scoops” are deliberately held over to the print editions.

Apart from Internet usage, Christiansen represents a generational shift from Gordon-Brown in one other key respect. While Christiansen has been a reporter for almost 20 years, her reliance on the telephone and email resembles the younger journalists’ techniques in Josie Vine’s study on the differences between journalism cultures in 1974 and 2003. Gordon-Brown’s repertoire of face-to-face interviews, tip-offs and foot-slogging are more typical of journalists who began their cadetship in the 1970s and 80s. The spirit of larrikinism, with its connotations of defiance, egalitarianism, and support for the underdog pervades The Bug and The Independent and is markedly absent from most journalism in the Courier-Mail.

Yet Gordon-Brown and Christiansen also have much in common. They are both committed journalists and dedicated to their craft. Both have a strong ethical commitment to their writing and enjoy being ‘on the beat’. Although a long-term study found that the Courier-Mail was significantly anti-Labor in the 1970s, Christiansen says there are no pressures to introduce bias in her reporting today. She also said that the “blokey culture” does not exist in news rooms anymore with over half of the Courier-Mail staff and one of the Chiefs of Staff female. Both Gordon-Brown and Christiansen adhere to the good working definition of journalism that it contains four essential elements: reporting, judging, a public voice, and a sense of the here and now. Both enjoy working in an industry that enjoys a privileged position in our culture’s hierarchy of values. They also enjoy being part of the basic premise of mass communication: the passing of knowledge to many more people than those from whom it originated.

This article has found major points of difference and some similarity in the cultural settings between the two journalists. There is significant difference in the scale of operations, the economic factors, the amount of journalistic autonomy, job delineation, and use of the Internet. But there are strong points of similarity too. While Don-Gordon Brown and Melanie Christiansen serve different masters and different markets, they both have an ethical commitment and enthusiasm for the job of journalism. There remains a place for both the journalism of the Courier-Mail and The Independent in Brisbane’s media landscape.