Branded Journalism

Australians don’t know who reports the news they consume and don’t care. At least that’s the conclusion of new research from Essential Media Communications, which found that outside the household names of Laurie Oakes, Michelle Grattan and Andrew Bolt,readers and viewers struggle to nominate a single journalist.

To anyone raised in journalism over the last few decades, this is not really a surprise. The cult of the byline is really only a recent phenomenon. In days gone by – and not that long ago – journos got their names on their stories only in special instances. A byline was a reward for a particularly large effort on a story, usually involving a lot of independent reporting, or it was the reserve of columnists – people who had built up such a level of expertise in their “rounds” that their observations were sufficiently authoritative to cast off their anonymity as mere reporters. Not even war correspondents were guaranteed the recognition of a byline.

These days, bylines are ritually attached to four paragraph stories cut and paste from wire services that in turn are cut and paste from PR handouts. Public relations professionals stand around in bars swapping stories of how the copy they wrote has appeared under half a dozen different bylines around the country. Occasionally, individual journos will attempt to add some value to the raw copy – like getting a ritual “no comment” from an opposing source or providing a local angle. But generally, the presence of bylines no longer has any relation to the effort put into the copy.

Indeed, as Peter Lewis of Essential Media suggests, there is almost an inverse correlation between the commodification of news and the efforts of media companies to “brand’ themselves through celebrity journalists. Instead of the journalists earning our trust through the gradual acquisition of their craft, we are asked to trust them on some kind of likeability and visibility principle. We buy them as personalities firstly, which makes their craft almost incidental. Hence, the trend of  TV anchors who spend most of their lives in a studio and then get airlifted into the fringes of natural disasters to do stand-ups in flak jackets.

This should not be read as a denial that there are journalists out there who have earned their bylines through years of grafting as reporters (Laura Tingle of the AFR springs to mind), but there was a day when certain publications had such credibility that their journalists were never bylined. The Economist still does it to this day, although in that case there is such a house style that every story appears to be written by the same person. Even the columnists – Buttonwood for instance – use pseudonyms.

This raises questions about media companies’ strategy of trying to build their business strategy around celebrity journalists. From this perspective, they are coming at it from the wrong way around. It all starts with the quality of the journalism and the establishment and maintenance of trust between the organisations and their readership. Perhaps we are living with the consequences of marketing departments these past 20 years having too much sway in the business of journalism.

Whatever it is, something has been lost.