If you could pay directly for the work of a journalist. says Annabel Crabb in a widely applauded University of Melbourne speech on the sorry plight of her trade, you would be buying the individual journalist’s time, research and writing.
“You are taking out a time share on all the stuff that the journo remembers, an infinitesimal slice of the mistakes they’ve made, and what they learned,” she says. “You are buying a tiny shred of the moment when Laurie Oakes got leaked the whole Budget, or a millionth of a sesame seed on the bread roll of the lunch that Laurie deserted on the day of the Whitlam dismissal, to sprint back to Old Parliament House.”
In a rousing address that already seems to have her under-appreciated, under-paid and over-worked press gallery colleagues hooting and air punching and settling down to watch All the President’s Men for the 100th time, Annabel tells us that people have to realise that information that’s for free is rarely much chop. You have to pay for the the good stuff. And to back her case that it’s worth paying for, she paints a gritty picture of the life of a journalist, doorstopping reluctant politicians, staking out meetings and digging into dry reports – all for the sake of unthankful readers who only see the glamorous side of the industry.
And to News Corp’s dizzy delight, she sings the praises of media paywalls, seemingly unaware that marketing and advertising groups in Europe are already asking some fairly tough questions about about the success of this strategy with The Times and Sunday Times.
Journalism in Australia is in crisis not because the media’s classified advertising business model has been blown apart. It is in crisis because the product is simply not very good. And suggesting now that people pay for the product directly does not advance the arguments of recent months in the blogosphere one iota. It is something like musicians, no longer able to sell CDs because everyone’s downloading music for free over the internet, complaining about who will pay for their guitar strings.
That she has to hail back 35 years to the sepia-toned memories of The Dismissal (sorry, I don’t think Laurie Oakes getting leaked the budget a day ahead of release is particularly noteworthy in public interest terms, much as it excites journos) to come up with example of journalism that might inspire the public to pay for it directly speaks volumes for the quality of the current product.
“Why is my intellectual property suddenly worthless, while the guy who invents hilarious ring-tones is still entitled to the customary presumption that his day’s work warrants some kind of commensurate recompense?” Ms Crabbe ponders. “The answer is that journalists have already ceded the field. We’ve already given our stuff away.”
Or perhaps the answer is that your product is deemed not worth paying for? Put another way, are you, Ms Crabb, seriously suggesting that the Australian public would fork out its hard earned to pay for the sort of “coverage” we saw in this past election – where the press gallery was either shadowing every move of a former Opposition Leader moonlighting for a tabloid current affairs show, opining on the size of the prime minister’s ear lobes or doing half-arsed “analysis” of opinion polls generated by their own mastheads, who create these polls as a marketing peg?
Let me answer Ms Crabb’s question of what people would and would not pay for if they did have to pay for journalism directly. They would not pay for time spent at doorstops. They would not pay for the boredom of stakeouts and lock-ups and estimates hearings. They would not pay for the ink in the journos’ printer cartridges or their USB sticks and cabcharges. They would pay for a product they could trust. They would pay for RELIABLE information in historical context that might impact on their roles as citizens and consumers and taxpayers and shareholders and all the other things they do in the public sphere.
They would not pay for News Ltd’s ideological barrow pushing and distortion or the ABC’s futile attempts at bogus balance or for the commercial “cross-platform” ambitions of Channel Ten or anyone else. This confuses what the seller thinks it can “price” and what the buyer “values”. Ultimately, what drives the quality of the relationship between a journalist and his or her readers and viewers is TRUST. That is what good journalism is worth. If journalists stopped feeling so sorry for themselves, got back to their knitting and focused on that – restoring trust – the money men could take over from there and fiddle with the business model. That’s the discussion that Ms Crabb’s speech, as amusing and feel-good and rousing as it was to nostalgic-at-the-pub journos, did not tackle. And it is one we badly need.
20 Comments
Anonymous · October 27, 2010 at 1:22 PM
You are right, Mr Denmore, you are right.
Anonymous · October 27, 2010 at 9:34 PM
Bullseye! Well said sir.
polyquats · October 27, 2010 at 9:51 PM
Agreed. If journalists have even a smidgen of historical knowledge and spend any time at all reading the press releases crafted for them (let alone any dry reports), then I haven't seen any evidence of it in a long, long time. Certainly not from Ms Crabbe.
The classic example – the political reporter who spent the run up to the election watching West Wing. American fiction trumps Australian history as required knowledge for political commentators. Just brilliant.
Anonymous · October 27, 2010 at 11:39 PM
Mr Denmore,
The following is something I've not heard of before. Would you mind putting some flesh on this bone?
Quote:
“… the ABC's attempts to provide “value for its stakeholders” “
PS: Another great piece, by the way. Appreciate your clear writing voice.
Mr Denmore · October 28, 2010 at 12:02 AM
Anonymous, in that quote about the ABC, I'm referring to its creeping commercialisation. So it becomes a sort of quasi-Nine Network. It's a whole other issue, but public broadcasting needs to provide an ALTERNATIVE editorial voice to the he said-she said journalism of commercial media. Instead, we are seeing stopwatch journalism and a sort of bland, beige neutrality that says nothing. So the organisation becomes innately conservative (not in a political way, but a cultural way).
Anonymous · October 28, 2010 at 2:48 AM
Thanks for the explanation. I wasn't aware Scott used that phrase in relation the ABC.
Obviously the only “stakeholders” the ABC has are taxpayers, for we own the corporation and fund its running. As far as I've been able to tell lately it's not been fulfilling its obligations to its owners to deliver quality, independence and a worthwhile alternative to the commercial media well enough.
It's since Howard interfered politically with the ABC that the decline has been most precipitous. Being as the majority of current Board members were appointed by a conservative government devoted to instilling free market / private enterprise influence, I wonder how deep is their commitment to the principles of public broadcasting. I think it would accurate to observe that the aims of the free marketeer and the public enterprise proponent would in some ideological conflict. Did Howard put some Draculas in charge of the Blood Bank? Is that why its news and current affairs coverage are hemorrhaging quality and impartiality?
Mr Denmore · October 28, 2010 at 3:30 AM
Anonymous, you might want to refamiliarise yourself with this ABC insider's view of a couple of years back:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2008/04/02/mark-scotts-abc-vision-will-be-a-nightmare/
Anonymous · October 28, 2010 at 6:15 AM
I wouln't pay to read any of the on-line “newspapers” – not a one. The only thing I'd pay to read is some of the marvellous blogs, like yours Mr Denmore.
skink · October 28, 2010 at 8:14 AM
I liked it that she insisted that quality product by gifted professional journalists deserved to be paid for, and then admitted to crowdsourcing her content and jokes via Twitter
Richard Green · October 28, 2010 at 8:35 AM
I have always been astounded by the pedestal on which the Oakes budget leak is placed by Australian journalists. It's such a strong symbol of how far removed the press gallery's aspirations are and what their customers actually want from them.
Afterall, all the leak did was put into the public domain something that was going to be put into the public domain, and in fact was designed to be put into the public domain, a marginal time period before it was intended to be. It didn't put anything into public knowledge that was intended to remain secret, or something that would have been overlooked, neglected. It didn't make limited knowledge (either because it was local or specialised) accessible to more people. It did nothing to help people understand that knowledge.
Yet decades later, it is considered an epochal moment. There is nothing more noble in the journalistic world than to be like those internet trolls that race to post “First!” as the first comment on a popular blog.
I really don't understand how these internal values of what is desirable can be so absolutely resilient to market pressures (i.e consumers choosing not to pay for “first!” journalism and related rubbish). Imagine if the whole food industry had internal values that valued getting food on the table as soon as possible, no matter how undercooked. Customers complain and refuse to pay for bad food and thus the chefs gather around the complain about how the armchair critics don't know how hard they work building up the ability to pull meat out of the pan with their bare hand, withstanding the heat because utensils are so slow and reminscing about the old days when one of their number once tore a leg off a living cow and had it on the table in 15 seconds. And all the customers want is tasty food.
Seriously Denmore, do you have thoughts about how this culture is so utterly resilient?
Mr Denmore · October 28, 2010 at 9:30 AM
Thanks for your observation Richard. I agree entirely about the mythology over the Oakes budget leak. It never impressed me much, and I was an economic journalist!
I have written a post about speed fetish in journalism. See Speed Quills:
http://thefailedestate.blogspot.com/2010/09/speed-quills.html
It's always been there, but it has got more intense in recent years as the ability to publish in real-time with little production paraphernalia in between has increased.
As a general rule, though, Journalists generally do not seek to impress readers. They seek to impress each other. And their aim in life is to get a “good yarn” and get it before anyone else.
They do this because it is easy to measure. And they wear as a badge of pride beating everyone else by a nano second with a story that was going to break anyway. And 99 percent of “news” comes out of manufactured events in which the journalists are passive witnesses and relayers of things the public can see anyway via live pictures or original source material on the web.
Even worse for the media, now, the role of expert analysis has been taken away from them – with many bloggers (Possum for instance) more expert than they are in analysing data – and better able to generate REAL news out of it.
So like Tim Dunlop today on The Drum, I read Annabel Crabbe's piece as an instance of playing to her gallery (literally), who in this whole public debate are the only people who remain in denial.
joni · October 28, 2010 at 11:51 PM
Very good article Mr Denmore (came here via Cafe Whispers).
Stop Murdoch · October 29, 2010 at 2:47 AM
The problem is akin to that of “The Goat F*cker”.
“I built a school, but do they call me 'John the school builder?' No.
“I built a hospital, but do they call me 'John the hospital builder?' No.
“I built a church, but do they call me 'John the church builder?' No.
“But I f*ck ONE goat…”
The trust and credibility you write about is lost because just about every single one of them (and certainly every one of their publications) has too many goat moments against their names.
weaver · October 31, 2010 at 4:22 AM
Someone needs to explain to Annabel that she is a content provider for a business that sells readers to advertisers (actually, I think you mentioned in an earlier post that when Fred Hilmer pointed this out to Fairfax journos they got all shirty). As such, readers are under no obligation to pay for her content as we are the product not the customer in this particular transaction, and, in any case, pay for her content every time we buy a product or service made more expensive by advertising costs, whether we read her or not. So, really, what she needs is some understanding of economics and of the business model of the corporation she works for.
As for ABC journos – they simply need to be reminded (constantly, apparently) that the job they're hired to do as journalists and the job advertiser-funded content-providers do are not the same job.
Sorry for the late comment – I was collecting my thought. 😉
david · October 31, 2010 at 10:06 AM
I'm not sure what the point of your article actually is. You use a few comments on journalism by a journalist you don't admire to spark a critique of the trade. If the starting point for your argument is a failure of journalists, where are you headed?
The coverage of political affairs in Australia is from a wide range of sources. You lay blame of the crap coverage in general terms at the doorstop of the ABC & Annabel Crabb.This is a flaw in your reasoning that damages your discussion.
I appreciate you'd like to see improved standards in journalism. Holding the ABC and Ms Crabb responsible for the faults in Australian news media is pointless at best, and possibly biased.
Mr Denmore · October 31, 2010 at 10:28 AM
David, you completely misread me if you took me as saying I hold Ms Crabb and the ABC responsible for all the faults in the Australian news media. Perhaps you could point out where I said that?
I was simply offering my opinion that her claim that people were not paying for news because it is being given away in the first place rather missed the point. they are not paying for news because he local media is not offering anything WORTH putting a price on.
And I am not talking about the ABC in particular. I am talking about Australian political journalism generally.
I am not sure what circles you move in, but I don't know of anyone who was remotely impressed with the coverage of the recent federal election. And the general feeling is post-election, they are back to their old tricks, reporting politics as a horse race.
As for the ABC, it is my opinion that it has bent over so far backwards trying to appease a paranoid faction in the Liberal Party about “balance”, it has turned into a bland recycler of press releases and pre-fabricated spin.
Nicholas Gruen · November 6, 2010 at 2:50 AM
Thanks for another great piece Mr D. I too am bemused by the rapidity of Ms Crabbe's climb to greatness. Personable enough as you observe. Bright enough.
Sadly I'm much more pessimistic that the public would pay for better quality. Broadly speaking that's why they get the shite they do.
Magnet · November 11, 2010 at 2:59 PM
The Estate hasn't failed, Mr Denmore, it's just kind of caught in a rip and needs a lifesaver, lifejacket or perhaps at a push, even just a pair of floaties would help.
I've read some good stories from Annabel Crabbe.
She's preaching to the choir though – why?
In WA, four of the journos we hold up as pillars of the Fourth Estate(Blackburn, Lovell, Egan and Christian) worked outside of hours to achieve those results.
I think therein lies the problem, journalism is just 'work' to staffers now, too few staff, too much spin, whatever…when they clock off they are not journos. They're more interested in the pay packet than chasing Fourth Estate ideals for no money. When stories get stifled about human rights or custodial deaths there are no rooftop protests held by journos anymore, against their bosses.
So asking the public to pay for “good journalism” is putting the cart before the horse, it's the editorial teams, boards and media moguls who need to begin forking out for decent journalism – suggesting the public doesn't already pay is a bit of a big business sleight of hand.
Mr Denmore · November 11, 2010 at 10:47 PM
Magnet, I knew I was going to cop flak for singling out the speech by Annabel Crabb. She is a good, observant writer and does what she does well.
My intention was more to point out the tendency of journalists to romanticise their craft and to misunderstand what their readers value.
The most precious value is the truth. Being objective doesn't mean saying “on the one hand, on the other hand”. It means not having any skin in the game and not carrying a torch for one side or the other.
Over-rated in journo-land are “scoops” and “yarns” and “on the spot” reporting and premature cynicism – over-rated because that's what journalists like. Under-rated are facts and history and context and explanation and the asking of straight-forward questions (why? how?) that don't assume anything and aren't intended to show how much the journalist knows about his or her subject.
It's pretty basic really. Call it old school if you like. But good journalism is really about standing in for the reader/viewer and shining the light of truth on the world. That won't happen if everyone is focused on speed and colour and entertainment.
The Worst of Perth · January 24, 2011 at 2:36 PM
I think the problem is that people aren't going to pay for it even if it is worth paying for.