Meg Simons correctly put her finger on the important bits of Mark Scott’s Fall of Rome speech. Sure, the stuff about the decline and fall of big media empires was a lot of fun and will inevitably be the talking point du jour for some time to come – but his point that the organisations that succeed will be the ones that learn to engage with their audiences, even cede a little power to them.
One of the first things Chris Warren told me when I started working at the Alliance was that people love you more when they are doing something for you than when you are doing something for them. It’s all about a sense of common purpose, rather than a sense of obligation.
I think this applies just as much in how newspapers should be viewing their audiences. Those news organisations who understand enough to invite comment and opinion in from outside – to become a hub around which informed and engaged debate can flourish, rather than maintaining the rigid top-down lecture model on which papers have traditionally based themselves, are the ones that will be able to turn themselves into clubs with members.
Dare I say it, paying members?
Thus far, most of our major mastheads allow/encourage comments from readers on their sites – but how far do the writers go in answering, engaging with the people who are commenting?Most just walk away, having said their piece. You rarely see any of them come back.
You still hear a distressing number of journalists dismissing their audiences as “the great unwashed” (to quote someone with whom I worked for many years) and moaning about the level of discourse online as if it should be beneath any thinking person.
The other fallacy, as Stilgherrian points out in his comment to this Meg Simons post, that is all too common out there is to compare the worst of what is going on in blogs with the best of what is going on in mainstream news organisations as a way of discounting the blogosphere.
Typically it is the bloggers who have long since moved on from that topic of conversation (Jay Rosen had moved on by 2005), yet a lot of journos still seem hung up on somehow being superior to bloggers. They’ll be dumbstruck to read the Technorati piece linked to by Simons which sets the mean income for self-employed journalists at US$122,000. There’s an interview with Melbourne’s Duncan Riley attached which has some intriguing insights on how he got started and how he makes his money.
In the great Venn diagram of the news media, the people formerly known as bloggers (content producers) are growing and making more money and the number of people employed full-time by big commercial news companies (content producers) are falling and making less money.
As for social media, which again is largely viewed with a certain degree of distaste and fear by the big mainstream media organisations, the savvy operators are immersing themselves in setting up social networks. As Laurel Papworth wrote yesterday, if you are going to pay someone to write about something, these days you would always have to prefer someone who can bring with them a large, dynamic and engaged network.
Meanwhile the commercial news houses are coming up with restrictive codes of practise governing the way their staff use social media,
Next week’s Media140 conference at the ABC in Sydney will bring together a whole counter-culture of people who have moved beyond the fear of social media tools. It’ll be a must-attend for anyone interested in the future of our trade.
One thing you’ll hear a lot of, I predict, will be The Guardian’s recent success in having an injunction against reporting parliamentary questions withdrawn after editor Alan Rusbridger wrote a tweet about it and sent the Twitterverse into meltdown.
Reflecting on it, he said the Trafigura incident will be taught in future as a case study at business school. He should have added journalism school as well!
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