JOURNALISM IN A TIME OF CHANGE

Margaret SimonsDirector, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of MelbourneASTW Convention Keynote 5 September 2015

When everything

is changing, it’s worth

considering the

things that stay the

same

Human beings make stories

When everything

is changing, it’s worth

considering the

things that stay the

same

Whenever they come together, human beings

share news

So What is a

Journalist?

Journalists Describe Society to Itself.

They Convey Information, Ideas and Opinions

They search, disclose, record, question, entertain, suggest and remember.

They inform citizens and animate democracy.

They give a practical form to freedom of expression.

(MEAA Code o f Ethics)

Two Key Ideas

The job of professionally gathering and spreading news and information arises when communities become too big and complex to know themselves by word of mouth alone.

And the business of professionally gathering and spreading news and information has always been heavily influenced by technology.

We are not determined by technology.

We create it.

We are shaped by it,

and we shape it

The printing

press (1400s)

Made “mass media” possible.

Led to notions of the “public” as a body of people remote from each other, but sharing interests.Led to the religious reformation.To modern ideas of democracy.To modern ideas of freedom of speech.To newspapers – and journalists.

Revolution!

In the 1600s, the breakdown of power under King Charles during the puritan revolution meant that the newspapers had previously unfelt freedom. The fall of the king, and even his execution, were freely reported.

 

“Who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, but he who destroys a good Booke kills reason it selfe. Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolioz’d.”

John Milton 1644

More Revolution

!

Newspapers helped incite rebellion!

The notion of the Fourth Estate originated during the French Revolution. (The other three estates being the clergy, the nobility and the commoners.)

The notion that the Press is the fourth estate rests on the idea that the media's function is to act as a guardian of the public interest and as a watchdog on the activities of government.

Depending on one's view of the media, this is either self-serving rationalisation, or an important component of the checks and balances that form part of a modern democracy.

- AustralianPolitics.com

http://www.australianpolitics.com/media/fourth-estate.shtml

More Revolution

!

"No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all avenues of the truth".

Thomas Jefferson

Principal Author, US Declaration of Independence. 3rd President of the United States.

And Commerce

…

The first newspapers were often founded as private news sheets by merchants who wanted information about markets.

The first professional “foreign correspondents” were hired by them to provide information about markets and supplies.

Publishing information about business and prices made modern capitalism possible.

The Telegraph

(1794)Led to the need for brevity

For putting the most important facts first

To more immediacy

To faster news

Radio (early 20th

Century)

• Telling stories with sound

• Interviews

• “Actuality”

• More speed

• More immediacy

• The need for access

Television (mid 20th Century) Pictures

Access to news

More immediacy

More speed

The need for television skills

The World Wide Web (late 20th Century) Lowered barriers to entry

– anyone can publish

Other media converge – pictures, sound and text all delivered to web pages

More immediacy

More speed

The hyperlink – stories become portals

And Now???

Communities of interest the members of which post and point each other to news

Niche media rather than mass media?

Distribution becomes more important than platform

“The medium is

the message” - Marshall

McLuhan

Technological Determinism

• Journalism is “called in to being” by technology

• The journalistic method is formed and determined by technology

• The technology of our own time may end journalism OR

• The technology of our own time will make us all into journalists

Determinism

• Takes a narrow single track view – only one possible way

• Lets society “off the hook”

• Makes us passive

• Misses complexity

…another view

“A knife can be used to cook, kill or cure.”

- Paul Hodkinson, Chapter Two, Media

Culture and Society, an introduction (Sage, 2011).

Technology can both be “read” – telling us things about the society that created it.

It also “writes” by influencing what it is possible for the society to do.

A Fifth Estate?

• Does the “network of networks” create a new “estate” that can help keep the fourth estate accountable? (Bruns 2013, Dutton 2014)

• Or does it merely reproduce existing power networks?

• Or will it lead to a new dark ages, in which we don’t know what is true…

A moment in recent history…

• Gillard’s “mysogony speech” 11 October 2012.

• Within 24 hours – 300,000 views on ABC News and YouTube

• “Gillard” one of the world’s top trending words on Twitter

• Headlines around the world

…while in Australia

journalists were

dismissive

• “Gillard's judgment was flawed. All she achieved was a serious loss of credibility”

-Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald

• “It sounded more desperate than convincing”

- Michelle Grattan, The Age

Crisis? • It is important to keep in mind where the crisis IS, and where it is NOT.

• There is no evidence of declining appetite for news and information. Quite the reverse.

• The crisis is in the business models that have supported journalism, not in the public’s appetite for journalism.

Storytelling

(including journalism

) as communit

y work

“The key to building community among residents of urban areas is residents’ storytelling about their community. A complete “storytelling neighbourhood” network consists of residents, community organizations, and local media that together are generating and sharing stories about the community. The most effective thing that media and community organizations can do to strengthen community is foster storytelling about and within that community.”

- Metamorphosis: Transforming the Ties that Bind

Coming soon?

• Google Glass: Interacting and reporting at the same time – so that the boundaries between the two blur

• Collapsing boundaries between social media platforms

• Implanted media devices – stories to your head

• Story and meaning-making by sharing

• Creativity resides in the collective, as much or more as in the individual

Journalists of the

future…

• Generous of spirit

• Innovative

• Sharers and community workers

• Quick to make meaning

• Happy to converse

• Able to bind together the threads of story from many contributions

• Highly valued, and highly sought after

End of Empire….

“The only media organisations that will survive will be those who know and accept that all the rules have changed. That the media business has gone from one of the most simple to one of the most complex. Only those who can see now what many generals only see after devastating loss – that the tactics that won them the last battle might just be the ones that deliver them defeat in the next.”

-ABC Managing Director Mark Scott. AN Smith Lecture, October 2009.

Seized by Hope

“Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response – harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media. If ever there was a route to building audience, trust and relevance, it is by embracing all the capabilities of this new world, not walling yourself away from them.”

 Alan Rusbridger, Editor The Guardian

Hugh Cudlip Lecture, 25 January 2010.

Who owns the

stories?

Who makes the

stories?

We do