I’m preparing to fly out to Hobart tomorrow morning to get ready for the Future of Journalism roadshow at the Dechaineux Theatre there tomorrow night and then it's on to Alice Spings and Darwin. Details of which can be found here and here.
Part of getting ready for an events such as these is briefing the various speakers we have lined up, particularly those people who have the happy task of moderating panels. We keep a sort of daily “reading list” of the latest news and opinion on the way the industry is changing and I generally send out one or two top pieces of analysis to people as a guide to the latest thinking.
We pretty much have to prepare a new list for each event as the landscape shifts and changes almost daily. The latest brief I am giving people includes the speech Rupert Murdoch gave in China at the weekend during which he referred to the internet as the province of “plagiarists” and “content kleptomaniacs”.
I’m preparing to fly out to Hobart tomorrow morning to get ready for the Future of Journalism roadshow at the Dechaineux Theatre there tomorrow night.
Part of getting ready for an event such as this is briefing the various speakers we have lined up, particularly those people who have the happy task of moderating panels. We keep a sort of daily “reading list” of the latest news and opinion on the way the industry is changing and I generally send out one or two top pieces of analysis to people as a guide to the latest thinking.
We pretty much have to prepare a new list for each event as the landscape shifts and changes almost daily. The latest brief I am giving people includes the speech Rupert Murdoch gave in China at the weekend during which he referred to the internet as the province of “plagiarists” and “content kleptomaniacs”.
Here’s Jeff Jarvis on the subject. He reacts, as you’d expect from an internet evangelist who is making at least some of his living as a man who owns stock in, and wrote a best-selling book about, Google: What Would Google Do?
But he’s not alone in taking exception to the attitude of the News Corp boss – and that of AP boss, Tom Curley, who he says are missing the point of the internet entirely.
Jeff is a bit blue-sky for me, a lot of the time, but his basic attitude is sound: that it is down to the industry to figure a new way of existing in the new information ecology and that journalists do not necessarily have a sacred right to exist. At lest journalists doing the sort of journalism made possible by the happy accident of business that married advertising and editorial into a beautiful format called the daily newspaper.
We’re taking the roadshow on to and Darwin next week and I’m looking forward to hearing what the likes of Erwin Chandla, of the Alice Springs News has to say about the way in which digital technology is affecting the ability of his organisation to reach its audiences.
I’m hoping it’s a positive message. We’re also hoping to hear from Chris Graham, of the National Indigenous Times who will try and find time to pop in to talk about his experience in covering and talking to a community that is under-represented in the mainstream media.
At the moment though the excitement about the possibilities of new media are tempered, at least among journalists, by the uncertainties we are all feeling about the future security of our jobs.
The prevailing orthodoxy is that people will pay for their news and I hope they will. But I’ve yet to see any coverage of the media sector – which is my professional beat – that I would pay for. In fact, for all the scoffing by mainstream media bosses, this is a sector that is overwhelmingly better covered in the blogosphere.
As I blogged yesterday, the Guardian in the UK is trying out an experiment by recruiting “beatbloggers” in regional centres. We don’t know how that will work – what are the terms of their employment, for example. But it aims to fill a gap increasingly left by the big media companies.
We’ll hear from Stephen Brook, the MediaGuardian’s deputy editor, tomorrow night. He’ll give us his overview of where the industry is going in the UK and elsewhere in the world. And this is important, because despite what others may say to the contrary, you can bet that what is happening over there will affect us to – by this I mean the structural change to the industry rather than the cyclical economic pressures that will ebb and flow.
But the main thing is the discussion. Everywhere we have been in Australia, journalists have said they welcome the chance to debate what is happening to the industry they love. We may not solve many problems over the nexct fortnight, but if the roadshow at least stimulates debate then it is doing Australian journalism a service.
I’ll leave the last words to Margaret Simons, who will be speaking tomorrow night in Hobart:
“The union deserves browny points for running these gigs, rather than doing the what conservative unions faced with technological change tend to do – standing on the beach trying to hold back the tide.”
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