The Content Makers

Margaret Simons on Media

More Speechifying – Kim Dalton Calls for MORE Regulation.

November 19, 2009 – 10:10 pm, by Margaret Simons

Today was a day for speechifying by television big wigs. Even as Foxtel’s Kim Williams was calling for deregulation of the television industry, as reported in my previous post, the ABC’s Director of Television, Kim Dalton, was suggesting that regulation be extended to cover new platforms, including mobile telephones and television content delivered by the internet.

In a speech to the Screen Producers’ Association of Australia, Dalton expanded on arguments he made in New Zealand a few weeks ago. He said that the arrival of the National Broadband Network would mean that many, many providers of television content would soon be in the market.

In may cases, telecommunications companies would offer cheap or free content as part of a bundled package of services, with the main revenue earners being telecommunications, not content. This would mean these providers would buy cheap content wherever they could find it, particularly from overseas.

In an argument likely to make Kim Williams turn beetroot, Dalton asserts that the threats to Australian culture justified considering extending regulation to the new platforms. Dalton also argued for the money raised from selling spectrum made available by the switch to digital television to be used  for a cultural fund to support the making of Australian content. On this, Williams and Dalton agree.Williams made a similar suggestion in his speech.

Dalton said that the Government was focussing on communications infrastructure, but that attention was also needed for cultural infrastructure.

Dalton also gives an interesting report card on how Government funding has been used by the ABC.

Read the whole speech here.

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Foxtel’s Kim Williams Takes the Fight Up to “Old Television”, Government and the ABC

November 19, 2009 – 5:13 pm, by Margaret Simons

The CEO of Foxtel, Kim Williams, has made a major speech today calling for a rapid and fundamental alteration to the way in which the television industry is regulated.

Speaking at the Network Insights Conference in Sydney, Williams took the fight up to commercial free to air television and to the ABC, suggesting that regulations and government practices that favour them are the last bastions of the pre-1980s protected Australian economy. Read the speech here.

He called for government funding for Australian content to be made contestable, rather than being given only to the public broadcasters, and argued that the new era of multiple channels means there is less justification for taxpayer funded broadcasting. The ABC should be limited only to things the market cannot provide, he said.

Over the last year, the ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has emerged as one of the thought leaders of the Australian media industry. Kim Williams is the only other media executive who can truly claim that title. (News Limited CEO John Hartigan is a distant third.) Williams is smart, dynamic and forward thinking and, as he said in his speech today, can genuinely claim to have been a leader of innovation.

Today’s speech is another blow in what I have previously described as one of the most important battles of the new media century –  between those who want to make us pay for content (think News Limited and Foxtel) and public broadcasters.

But Williams also has government and commercial free to air broadcasters in his sites. Television, he says, is the last industry not to be deregulated in the interests of a dynamic economy.

Television sits today like a protected island in an ocean of economic freedom – much like one of those side-stepped Pacific Islands 25 years after the end of World War Two, where the ragged, grey-bearded Japanese soldier still stands guard with his rusty bayonet, waiting for the Americans to land, because no one’s told him his side has already lost the war.

He drew an analogy with the industrial revolution and the invention of the steam locomotive.

Now imagine an alternative scenario for the birth of railways. Having constructed a new network, the protectionists came along and said: “Look,what about the companies that run the horse-drawn train industry? They’v been around for centuries. They may not be as profitable as they used to be,but they have employee jobs and shareholders to protect; they know how the old system works; and they are slower, quieter and less dangerous. We should give them preferential use of the network and keep the steam locomotives on a few branch lines only, preferably somewhere like northern Wales. It’s the best outcome for the majority. The result would have been predictable: there would have been no industrial revolution.

Williams argued against prohibitions on a fourth television network, and attacked limitiations such as the anti-siphoning regime, that tied up key sporting events for free to air television. He said:

You can’t change the delivery system and not change the regulatory framework; you can’t adopt a medium that is all about consumer power but keep the consumer powerless; you’re ether in the analogue world or the digital world, the past or the present – you can’t be in both.

There are interesting echoes, here, of Mark Scott’s recent speech in which he described the shift of power from media emperors to the audience. But Williams paints Foxtel, unfettered market competition and the coming of the National Broadband Network as the liberators of the audience, with little role for public broadcasting.

Without Foxtel Australians would only have five stations to watch, because te old channels participants rather than leaders in the digital economy – would never have expanded their offering.

Williams argued today that the ABC content is no longer unique. Foxtel provides high quality public interest content, including the A-PAC public affairs channel.

The content mightn’t have huge ratings but its very existence guarantees freedom of speech.

Just like the ABC, he said, Foxtel will introduce an advertising free children’s channel, and its Ovation channel already offers  ”more operas, plays, ballets and orchestras than you can poke a conductor’s baton at.”

If there is public money available for new worthwhile Australian content, then Foxtel is happy to commission it on a contestable basis with the ABC and others:

And let us remember that while the ABC is a much loved institution and at its best a good broadcaster, Aunty is not Athena, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom. The ABC does not have a monopoly on wisdom or commitment to Australian content.

Williams suggested that more creative ways are needed to protect Australian content, including using some of the digital dividend money made available through the sale of spectrum once the analogue signal is switched off. Once again, there are echoes here of the ABC approach. Auntie’s Director of Television, Kim Dalton, made a similar case just a few weeks ago, focusing on the content production industry. There is no doubt about it. Both Foxtel and the ABC grasp the challenges of the age. But they have different solutions. Dalton wanted increased regulation over mobile devices and other new services. Williams wants the money, but without the regulation.

Williams believes the ABC has a very limited place in the deregulated industry he would like to see. He says he is not against public funding of broadcasting, but that in the digital age the ABC should not merely replicate what the private sector is doing, or “crowd out market driven creativity and innovation.”

The ABC’s programming was once both unique and special – today it remains
special but it is no longer unique.

Williams concluded by calling for a government review of broadcasting regulation to be brought forward, and for the new regime to be technology and provider neutral. Spectrum, he said, should be auctioned off before analogue switch off, and the prohibition on a fourth television network removed.

Two weeks ago, when I wrote about Mark Scott’s plans to make the ABC a dominant regional and international presence, I predicted that we would soon see return fire from the pay television sector. This is it.

But it is more than that. In this speech and other recent public pronouncements, Williams is claiming for Foxtel the mantle that Scott would like to drape over the ABC – as chief innovator, provider of quality niche content, and industry leader.

Both sides of this debate naturally fail to acknowledge their weaknesses. Foxtel has yet to penetrate the majority of Australian homes, and the National Broadband Network is about to bring much more choice to Australian consumers. Commercial free to air is not the only television sector facing fundamental challenges to its business model.

And, despite being willing to provide channels such as A-PAC for free as part of its public relations campaign, the majority of Foxtel’s quality niche content has to be paid for, which raises obvious issues of equity.

As well, the particular nature of public broadcasting means that there are innovations that come naturally to the ABC – such as the recently announced ABC Open, in which professional content makers help the audience to tell their own stories – that are more difficult for a commercial organisation.

On the other hand, there is no denying that taxpayer funded broadcasting, which was once justified by the scarcity of quality content, must today find new justifications. Scott has pitched Auntie’s continued claim on the public purse as being about innovation and audience power without the need to worry about commercial returns, safeguards for the existence of quality journalism and Australian content in an era of market failure, and a trustworthy safe guarder of Australia’s enlightened self interest.

Williams is taking him on.

Expect more soon.

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Humans First, Journalists Second. The Journalism of Black Saturday

November 19, 2009 – 12:14 am, by Margaret Simons

This morning the Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne will release its first major research report. It is an extraordinary document, giving a close-grained view of how journalists reported on Australia’s worst peacetime disaster – the Black Saturday bushfires earlier this year.

In a story in the Crikey email later today, I detail some of the ethical and management issues the report raises. But here, I want to give a sample of some of the very moving case studies collected by the report’s principal author, Dr Denis Muller and the Director of the Centre, Michael Gawenda, who conducted 28 extended and anonymous interviews with journalists and media workers.

The report will be published later today  and should be available here. It is well worth reading for anyone interested in how journalists actually think and work. It should be compulsory reading for journalism educators, editors and chiefs of staff.

Here are the case studies:

Case study: When humanity trumps journalism

At about 10 o’clock that morning one of our reporters came over and said there was an opportunity to go into Flowerdale.

The police at the roadblock told us to get out of the way and let the residents go ahead. And as we waited, a guy came out of the Flowerdale hotel and jumped into the back seat. He was a resident of Flowerdale. He’d been in the pub. He wasn’t drunk but you could tell he’d had alcohol. And he said, “Can you take me to my house?”

Straightaway we said we can but you should know we’re the media. We told him we were going to be filing reports and taking photos and if that didn’t sit well with him, he’d have to find another way.

He’s like, “No, no, that’s okay.”

He was clearly distressed and bewildered and it looked like he hadn’t slept since Saturday, to be honest. We kept asking him if he was okay.

I was thinking, how do you go about interviewing this person or getting their story, without being offensive? Let’s face it: the guy is going to see if his house is still there.

[Reporter] simply passed back his little recorder and microphone and put it on the seat and he said, “I’ve turned that on. If you want to, you’re welcome to pick it up and say whatever you like as we’re driving in. We’ll turn it off if you like.” But [the resident] said, “No, leave it on.”

I felt comfortable with that approach. If he wanted to tell his story, it might be cathartic for him. It sat well with me on a moral level and on a media level because I thought, well, he probably will pick up the microphone – which he did — and he basically started saying, “That used to be the store there” and pointing out landmarks and saying things like, “That’s Robbo’s house. Shit, I hope he’s alive” and stuff like that.

I started to well up, and I was filming as well. I was filming not [the resident] but what we were looking at.

He was saying how the fire was upon him and he’d given up hope.

Everyone was gone, and he went into his house and poured himself a bourbon and was going to see it out on his couch, knowing full well he was going to burn to death. I started thinking about this and it started affecting what I was doing as a media person.

I was becoming quite emotional about itHe decided to take us through the most highly populated part of Flowerdale.

All the houses were absolutely levelled and you could see the police tape on them, which we assumed meant it was a crime scene as well because someone had probably passed away there.

He was overcome with emotion. He obviously must have known some of the people.

It wasn’t an interview any more. It was just streams of consciousness – what he was thinking.

Then he said, “If you turn right here, that’s my street.” His house was about the sixth along. And we pulled up and he started wailing. It’s hard to describe how he was wailing and crying.

On the video we published you can hear me, because I started crying. I couldn’t help it. I was overcome with what I was seeing. Everything hit me at once.

We got out of the car and I put my arm around him and I turned the camera off and I said, “I know it doesn’t mean shit, but I’m really sorry.”

So there was another moral question: what do I do now? So I said to him, “I want to turn the camera back on but I certainly won’t if you think that in any way that either now or down the track you won’t want this to be recorded.”

It’s a tough question I guess, because how can he know how he’s going to feel down the track? But he said, “No, no. It’s okay.”

So I felt like I did the right thing.

He started rummaging through stuff and he said, “That’s the couch where I was sitting with my scotch.”

His girlfriend had taken the kids and dogs somewhere safe and then barged through the police roadblocks to get him.

We hadn’t planned any of this. We hadn’t planned to take someone to see their home.

So it was all ad hoc. And [the resident] then said, “I’d like to go to Kinglake to see my father’s house and see if some of my mates are there.”

Quite frankly, in my head it was a no-brainer. I didn’t give a shit about work any more.

I was, like, we’re taking this bloke wherever he wants to go. And I answered on behalf of both of us and said, “Yes, of course.”

The last thing I would want to feel we did was use this person. I knew we had an amazing story, but I also wanted to make this guy’s life better that day. That’s why it was a no-brainer.

We arrived in Kinglake and that was a whole new level of madness. It was full of fire trucks and police and people. On the way we saw burnt out cars where clearly people hadn’t made it. So your mind is racing.

At this stage I’d stopped working, I guess. I dropped [reporter] to find the media centre and took the car and took [resident] to his father’s house, which was a sawmill. The house was intact but the sawmill was destroyed, so he was pretty emotional again.

He asked a neighbour about his father. I had stopped filming at this point. Apparently his father had been hurt but he was alive and fine and in a hospital somewhere.

I then walked him into the relief centre and said, “Get some lunch and I’ll be back”I was worried about [resident] and my worries were justified when I went back to the relief centre and couldn’t find him. I asked people, described him. No one had seen him. So I became quite flustered and thought, how’s this bloke going to get back to Yea. I was a bit cut up that I’d allowed myself to leave him for so long. So I’m literally running around Kinglake looking for him.

Eventually after about 25 minutes he sort of just pops up almost out of nowhere in the middle of the road with a can of Jack Daniels. I said, “Don’t fuckin’ do that! Don’t just leave!” And he’s, “Oh I was just catching up with a few mates.” I was really losing a plot a little bit. I’d stopped thinking about work altogether.

[They did a live cross, and it started with the audio of the resident wailing when he saw his home destroyed.]

Q: Did he mind that being used?

No. That was put to him. He didn’t mind. He made it clear many times during the day that whatever we wanted to do, that was fine. We kept checking in, but he did make that very clear.

[Resident] thanked us on air. He said that what we had done had given him great peace of mind to see the people in Kinglake he thought were dead. I took a lot of pride in that. I thought there’s no right or wrong, or rhyme or reason, in what’s going on, but this guy’s not pissed off, and that’s a start.

Back at Yea I made sure he was okay and actually gave him a hug and gave him mynumber said if I can help, give us a call.

Case study: Real and confected spontaneity

On the Monday we went to Whittlesea. That was particularly gruelling. Every media outlet in the world, virtually, had managed to get to Whittlesea.

There was one woman who came out with a phone to her ear and our broadcast point was right at the door, and she came out and she just yelled, “They’re alive! They’re alive!” And because we were right on the door, one of my producers said, “Come and talk to [respondent].”

And she came and I said, “What’s happened?” And she said, “My husband’s just rung and he’s been going out the back on his tractor and he’s found our neighbours and my son’s with them and he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive!” And she virtually hugged me, and it was wonderful. And I think I said on air, it’s so good to get some good news. And

I’d been crying all morning.

And she turned around to walk off and [another radio station] grabbed her and said, “Can you do that again?” And then a TV channel grabbed her and said, “Can you do it for us?” And then another TV channel.

And I’m thinking, “I can’t believe it.” But that’s how it happens. Don’t kid yourself that it doesn’t.

By and large, though, I think it would be quite unfair to characterise the media response according to those few atrocities. By and large people were fantastic.

Case study: When push comes to shove

At this point nobody knew how many people had died, and in those early days that was what a lot of it was about – it was about deaths and property damage.

And so for me, the emerging story, by Tuesday, was how many people had died in Marysville. All sorts of figures were being bandied around, and this became a significant challengeI was [speaking] to my editors. They wanted a figure, and there was no figure at thatpoint, but there was a lot of pressure to quantify this disaster.

So I found myself in a situation by the Tuesday night when all day I’d had very senior people in emergencyservices saying to me that they believed there were 100 to 200 people dead in Marysville. No one had reported that at all, but those numbers were being repeatedly talked about.

I was very anxious because I knew that if that were the case, that was a very very big story that hadn’t been told, but it was also impossible to verify. So I just kept talking to people: I put it to the police, I put it to the Premier, I put it to the Prime Minister’s office, and no-one would deny this. They had all, off the record, been advised that this could well be the case.

At the same time the Red Cross had set up a missing person’s bureau and hundreds and hundreds of people’s names had been registered with them.

It came to a bit of a head on the Tuesday because the story that hadn’t been written, that I was trying to get up, was to say that there are fears that up to 100 people may have died in Marysville alone. And that was very much the story that the paper wanted, because no one had run with that yet.

Other journalists were obviously hearing similar things but no one had run with it. So Tuesday, for Wednesday’s paper , we decided to run with the story that said that there were grave fears held that up to 100 people may have died in Marysville alone – 10% of the population.

I worried a lot about this story. I did not sleep that night – I worried myself sick about it because nobody else had said this yet publicly, and it was impossible to verify, but overwhelmingly I was being told it by people who were in the best position to know the magnitude of it.

So we went with the story, and I wrote it as conservatively as you can write a story saying 100 people might have died in Marysville alone. And everybody ran with it – it became the figure. Now we know now that 100 people didn’t die in Marysville. The death toll ended up being about 38. And that has been something that I have worried incredibly about ever since.

Look, I don’t know – I’ve thought about this a lot, and it’s been a source of conversation in my office. For a while I really beat myself up about that and thought, I just should have kept my mouth shut. But now I’ve changed my mind about it again because that was the story – people did genuinely fear that that was going to be the death toll. But I certainly put myself through the wringer over my decision to tell [my editor] because once you tell an editor something like that they’re going to get excited.

It really worried me for a long time that it looked like a huge beat up. It wasn’t meant to be a beat up. It was genuinely what I was hearing.

Case study: Withdrawing and withholding

By about 2 o’clock [Sunday 8 February] it was obvious that the emergency services had locked up the area. So we ended up at Arthurs Creek, north of Hurstbridge, right next to Strathewen, south of Kinglake. And we saw this extraordinary group of people, anxious and waiting, oddly almost high-spirited: senses heightened by the event.

Sometimes you get that feeling at funerals, I find: a slight euphoria because there has been this tense build-up and then a release and it comes out almost inappropriately.

And this great group of people, who had every reason to be on their knees wailing and weeping, were almost chatty and mildly hysterical. No one wanted to acknowledge the truth or the likely realism.

They were mostly residents who had evacuated, and people from Melbourne who knew their families and loved ones hadn’t been in contact. Some of those people we approached and they told their story: why they were there. [It] was vague and not very useful, and I might have sent in three or four pars to be mulched in somewhere with other stuff.

We started to get these stories early in the afternoon, but as time went on and the wait continued, it all clamped down, and the whole mood started to shift, because the reality was dawning on them. That euphoria or strange feeling was subsiding, and there was this quite glum mood by about 5 o’clock.

We were speaking to the fire captain. My intention was to get in there [to Strathewen].

We wanted to see what the devastation was, but there was no way they were going to let us in.

A little while later, the fire captain said, “The people here – just be careful. It’s getting more and more raw as the day goes on”. And we understood that. I rang the newsdesk and said, “I don’t think I’m going to get a story today. I think if we sit here long enough, we will get one, but we might not have something for tonight.”

The feeling in Melbourne was, do what you think you have to do. If we don’t get anything today, there’s lots of stuff coming in anyway.

The fire captain tipped us off about 6 o’clock, and said, “You might just want to step back a bit. The police are about to arrive to tell them that there are no survivors in

Strathewen. So if they know people were in there when the fire hit, they must know now they’re dead.

So we decided to stand back from that.

When the police arrived and started to tell them what happened, people started to crumble. A woman collapsed, and a young man ran to the middle of the oval and we could hear him wailing because he discovered his parents had both perished.

We didn’t take photographs of that. We observed it from 50 metres away. He just slumped and sat in the middle of the oval for about an hour, and finally someone walked over and took him away.

We felt we had no right to intrude at that point and listen to those people being told that their loved ones were likely gone.

About 9 o’clock, the fire captain said, “I really appreciate the way you stood back and just waited. Come out here first thing tomorrow and I’ll personally take you in on a tour”.

So we came back at 8 the next morning and he took us on a tour and the devastation was absolute. It was a hamlet that had been wiped out. So we got a very story with the fire captain. He was quite clearly traumatised himself, having dealt with the fires and then the aftermath.

As we went through Strathewen, he had graphic stories of what had happened to various people. It was a narrative of the scene through his eyes: what he’d seen and what he’d heard. Acts of bravery, acts of extraordinary luck, what fire fighters had done. There was police tape across driveways, which meant that the forensic team still had to come through. There was no way of verifying any of this, so we took it on his word and wrote a piece through his eyes.

As we went through, the fire chief himself was clearly on the brink. He was also teeing off at just about everybody. He had a red-hot go at the police, he had a red-hot go at

CFA command. So when I came to write this piece, I deliberately censored a lot of those more extravagant claims out because I just felt it would have been totally unfair to him 24 hours after that event to have just published every word that fell out of his mouth, because he was quite clearly beside himself: a very high state of agitation, angry, traumatised, grief-stricken because he knew a lot of the people who’d been killed.

I thought if he wants to, in a month’s time, sit down and make those same allegations and support them with evidence, I’ll come back and ask him. But I didn’t get a chance to do that, and I was interested when, five months later, he stood up at the royal commission and said exactly the same stuff again.

So I perhaps could have used some of that material without compromising his integrity, but I didn’t know that at the time, so I didn’t use it.

I guess we apply a different standard when it’s a public official who is in the public eye constantly and dealing with media. But I reckon you intuitively know what’s right and wrong about that stuff. I don’t know if the intuitiveness grows out of your journalism or just out of your humanity. You knew very quickly that this guy was on the edge.

Case study: Managing a “rolling” broadcast

We took the news at one, and then we “rolled” [broadcast fire information continuously] from then on. A whole lot of factors play into that: the conditions on the day; the fact that there were three separate “going” fires, one with an “urgent threat” message; a recognition that the community needed that comprehensive coverage.

Perhaps it’s the companionship as well: that we’re not leaving them.

The threat messages aren’t telling the whole story. There is a whole lot of other information. By rolling coverage, we can take talkback callers, we can talk to the incident controllers, do one-on-one interviews, we can talk to the weather bureau and find out what the local conditions are like.

I was just amazed at how quickly it took off: from half-past twelve, when there was an “alert” message, to suddenly an “urgent threat” message. And then we had three “urgent threat” messages, and then we had six and then we had fifteen.

I was trying to keep a mental log, a list of each major fire so I could tick off in my mind regular updates with the incident controllers.

I had a Word document open on my computer. As each new “threat” message came in, I was adding it to my list, but about 4 o’clock – although it might have been earlier -I felt quite panicked, and I turned to the producer beside me and said, “I can’t keep up with this. I haven’t got my head around it.” It was just too many to keep track of: location, and the towns each one was threatening. So many fires started simultaneously.

I don’t generally lose my head. I am quite a calm person, but I just found it so hard to understand what was happening.

We just tried to cope as best we could. We had a big laminated map of Victoria in the studio. Every time a new fire sprang up, I tried to put a dot on the place so at least I could look at it and say, okay, here and here and here.

I just had to hope that in our “threat” messages, we would get out what was necessary.

[We needed] better mapping. An electronic map, or access to the maps that they must have at the incident control centres. We didn’t have a lot of mapping on that day.

A producer’s friend – a fire-behaviour expert – to work with us in the studio to help give us that perspective [would help], because it was all happening so quickly. Someone to say, “Hey, look: I tell you now, this Kilmore East fire, with that wind behind it, it’s going to be threatening Kinglake. Forget that it’s in Kilmore or Wandong. Over here is what we need to worry about.”

The same with the Murrindindi Mill fire: “This bit here is State Forest; here’s a big hill.”

We’ve got a map but it’s not a topographic map with valleys and hills and ridges.

Someone who can make sense of it, both on air and in the studio.

Q: So it’s mid to late afternoon and all these fires are happening and you’re getting a stream of information from the CFA. Are you getting other information?

Yes. Mostly from the public. Phone calls. On a regular day, we get around 800 talkback calls. We had 8000 on that Saturday. We answered as many as we could: perhaps 800 or 1000.

Initially people rang to tell us what they were experiencing. As the day went on, they were ringing for very specific information. They wanted to know, would they be okay?

It was really hard. Our set position is to tell them that we can’t provide personalised information because we don’t know enough, and we risk giving people information that they’re basing their life-and-death decisions on.

So we say, “Keep listening. We’re going to have another update on that fire soon.”

Q: Were there occasions when the information you were getting from people like that was different from the information you were getting from the authorities?

Yes. I took about half a dozen calls from Kinglake saying the fire was in Kinglake or approaching Kinglake, and there were no [official] messages for Kinglake. So I rang the CFA media and said, “What’s going on in Kinglake?” And they said, “There’s nothing listed for Kinglake.” And I said, “Well, I’ve had half a dozen calls from Kinglake, so you’d better go and check”, because there was clearly something happening in Kinglake.

Q: What did you do by way of broadcast?

We were putting callers to air who were eye-witnesses; people who weren’t panicking.

Q: How did you assess a caller’s credibilityIdeally people who could speak directly about what they had seen. So they weren’t reporting hearsay. In some cases it was people who had spoken with friends or relatives in the fire area, but first-hand account where possible.

Some people rang up quite panicked, and we were cautious about putting that sort of tone to air.

Q: So if they were factual, sounded stable, preferably reporting first-hand?

Yes. They were the main ones.

In some cases the producers knew they were the last people who spoke to these callers before they died in the fire. And God, you just wouldn’t want to hear that on air.

It’s horrific.

It might have made great radio from a really morbid perspective. But we want to be accurate, timely and useful in what we put to air, and I’m not sure it fits with our role to create public panic in an emergency.

I’ve heard people speak about coverage that other broadcasters provided in other fire situations where they did put callers to air who were panicking, and you run the risk of adding to it, whipping up fear and frenzy rather than broadcasting calm and clear information.

We were trying to keep a radio program going, but we were human beings first and radio producers second.

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Curse you Mumbrella. I wish I’d written this.

November 18, 2009 – 11:19 am, by Margaret Simons

…but every journalist should read it. It’s about how to stay up with reporting tips on YouTube.

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The ABC’s Op Ed Plans, and Mumbrella Scoops Me

November 18, 2009 – 10:40 am, by Margaret Simons

I was talking to some ABC people yesterday about the new project that Crikey editor Jonathan Green will edit. The way it was put to me is that in this new multi-media universe, there is one area that your ABC has not done particularly well – text. This is what you would expect from an organisation that still has “broadcasting” in its title and charter.

The new project is meant to change that, bringing a new seriousness of purpose and considered editorial strategy to the online text offerings. It is worth reflecting on the fairly frequent pleas from some quarters that the ABC consider launching a newspaper. This has long featured among the desires of some of those now in senior management positions in the ABC.

Clearly, a dead-tree newspaper is not something that anyone is likely to launch soon. But the modern iteration is online text. How often, after all, do you hear old newspaper types lament that you can’t find long and beautifully written reads online?

Now, the ABC project can’t address all of that, but as well as being a competitor to The Punch, National Times and Crikey, it is also clearly a move into the text space, and a challenge to newspaper op ed and analytical features, with the capacity for audience interaction built in to the medium.

Meanwhile, Tim Burrowes at Mumbrella has managed to do what I have not yet done: interview the ABC’s online boss Bruce Belsham about what is planned. Read the result here.

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How Rupert will Charge

November 18, 2009 – 9:12 am, by Margaret Simons

James Harding, the editor of the Times newspaper in England talks about the plans to charge for content. He pledges that News International will “re-write the economics of newspapers”.

I think it is beginning to become clear that there are in fact a number of models being developed inside News Corp for the pay wall. There is the method outlined in this article – probably best suited to the strongest content and the most respected mastheads.

Then there is the idea of new online products sold to tightly targetted niche audiences for a subscription, bundled with freebies and specials, as outlined by Mark Day a while ago, with the latter probably linked to  the “cool new toy” anticipated by others.

These are not mutually exclusive plans, of course. They could all come together.

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@Bronwen for the ABC or SBS Boards?

November 18, 2009 – 8:50 am, by Margaret Simons

Here’s an interesting thing. Bronwen Clune, the woman who coined the term “control media” to describe that which is printed on dead trees and broadcast one-to-many, is going to nominate for the ABC and SBS Boards. She told me so yesterday evening.

Expect this to cause a flurry on Twitter, where @Bronwen has more than 3000 followers for her regular posts, and is one of the main Australian purveyors of news and views about social media developments locally and overseas. She is a challenging and conceptual thinker. I have myself used (with acknowledgement) her observations about Twitter and how quickly it has come to organise itself, and her “control media” terminology.

Declarations up front: Clune is on the Board of the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, of which I am the Chair. It seems to be a side effect of being on our board that one shortly applies for other such posts. Regular readers will know that other  board members include Gerard Noonan and Steve Harris, who recently tilted for the Fairfax Board. One of the things that makes chairing the Foundation so utterly fascinating is the amalgam of traditional media, new media and community activists. (read more here about our projects).

Clune is a traditionally trained journalist who did her cadetship on the West Australian, but for some years now she has been experimenting with new media start-ups. She has become known as one of the more articulate new media enthusiasts. At the recent Media 140 conference, it was Clune who closed the first day’s events with the challenging line “Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media”.

Here are some other excerpts from that speech:

I’m not anti-journalist, I’m not pro-blogger, I’m pro-journalism and it’s core function to inform. ..Who performs that function is less relevant to me.

And:

Participatory media doesn’t mean you letting your audience participate in the creation of news, it about acknowledging that you participate in news creation along with your audience.

Most famously Clune founded the  Norg Media citizen journalism sites, which she describes as “an Australian people-powered news network that has been recognised for its innovation in news.” More recently she has been a contributor to The Punch, an online strategist in the film industry and an adviser and project manager for new media start-ups.

The Perth-based Clune would be a novel presence on the ABC Board. She would be one of only two women (the other being Julianne Schultz who is, ahem, also on the Board of the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism). At 34 years old, she would also be the youngest member for a long time, if not ever. She lacks the long list of serious corporate engagement that characterizes your typical 50-plus Board candidate.

Why does she want the gig? While she realises she is an unconventional candidate, she says she has looked at the selection criteria and reckoned she could tick some boxes.

“I believe I can provide a different perspective at a time when the ABC is trying to integrate things online across the organisation. I would like to have a chance to bring fresh perspectives to that.”

Meanwhile it is worth refreshing our memories about who actually makes the decision on the ABC and SBS board vacancies – particularly since in the last 24 hours I have encountered various people trying to send up smoke signals to the people concerned. That’s  the bugger about arm’s length processes. You can’t just tell the selectors who to choose!

The Rudd Government, remember, set up a process meant to cure forever the propensity of governments to make political appointments. Under the new rules,  a panel conducts a merit based selection process, then presents a shortlist to the Minister.

So once applications close at the end of this month, all eyes will be on the panel that selects the shortlist. Who are they again? This is how their appointments  were announced just over a year ago:

Mr Ric Smith AO PSM has been appointed to chair the Nomination Panel for a period of three years.  Mr Smith was Secretary of the Department of Defence from 2002 to 2006 and had previously served as Australia’s Ambassador to Indonesia and to the People’s Republic of China.

Professor Allan Fels AO has been appointed as a member for a period of three years. Professor Fels is currently Dean of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government.  He was Chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission from 1995 until 30 June 2003.

Ms Leneen Forde AC has been appointed as a member for a period of two years.  Ms Forde has been Chancellor of Griffith University since 2000 and was Governor of Queensland from 1992 to 1997.

Mr David Gonski AC has been appointed as a member for a period of two years.  Mr Gonski has been Chancellor of the University of New South Wales since 2005 and is chairman and director of a number of major companies.  He was Chairman of the Australia Council from 2002 to 2005.

There will be lots and lots of nominations, of course. The two boards are seriously sought after gigs.  Clune is a long shot. But an interesting one.

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Google Wave, and Why What We Are Living Through Really is Different

November 17, 2009 – 11:55 pm, by Margaret Simons

It could be argued that until very recently, there wasn’t really anything fundamentally new about the internet. Email was just a faster and more efficient version of the post and telegrams. Web pages were similar to publishing and broadcasting – a one to many model, albeit with the barriers to entry dropped to near zero.

But I think it is no longer possible to argue that we are not living through a fundamental change in how human beings will live together and think. Social networking tools – Facebook, Myspace, and most recently and especially Twitter – are new things, giving us capabilities that have never been seen before in human history.

At the heart is the ability for many geographically dispersed people to collaborate in real time. It will change most things, including how we absorb and create media content.

I was reflecting on this when I received the following report from David Wright, a friend of mine who was invited to try out Google Wave. Read what he says, imagine what it will be like when this thing or others like it gets a grip, and then see if you can still mount an argument that nothing much is changing, and we can keep thinking in the old ways about how people will be informed.

Google Wave

What is a Wave?

That is the question I was asking myself around 5 months ago when I caught wind of another of Google’s many projects. This one was shown during Google I/O this year. They were doing an hour long demonstration on a project they had called Google Wave. While watching I was intrigued but was not blown away.

Fast forward four months and one of my friends dropped me an invitation to the closed Wave beta. A beta is an initial release of software for testing purposes. Wave is in closed beta which means you need to be invited to take part in it.

Firing up Chrome and logging in I was presented with a very Google-like interface. Clean, crisp, uncluttered layout.  Down the left was the familiar navigation panel: Inbox, Spam, Trash, etc. Continuing down was my contacts list. The rest of the screen was split into two equal windows, the left for all my Waves and the right panel to show the selected Wave.

So again I was left asking what is a Wave? Seven of my friends also got into the beta, so straight away we just started playing around with it, trying to found out what it did, how to manipulate it, what were the shortcuts.

A Wave is what you get when you take email, instant messaging (IM) roll them together and sprinkle some collaboration tools on top. An incredibly powerful system.

You can open a new Wave and invite who you want to participate in it. If you only invite one other person it is more email, IM than anything else. You can send each other messages (wavelets) within the Wave, whole chunks of text, drag and drop pictures, drop in links etc. With more people it gets more interesting, the other tools come more into play. Private responses where you select who can view it, post polls up for everyone to take part in. Each message can be directly responded to so you can have many nested conversations that are easy to jump in and out of.

Say me and three other people are working on a large project. We have a Wave going. We have been using it for a while so there are nested conversations within conversations. Pictures and updates everywhere. Now we add someone new. How can they understand what’s going on? Simple, the replay tool. Click “replay” on a Wave and it runs the Wave for that person from the beginning, showing each change in chronological order.

Even with that, it can get very confusing. You can see what everyone is typing while they are typing. You can jump in and edit anyone’s comments ( no stealth comments). You can be typing and adding to a comment while someone is doing the same thing. It is all real time. So there is a real question of etiquette. As we haven’t quite yet figured out email etiquette getting used to Wave will be interesting.

It is still definitely in beta though, so there is a lot of time to fix and learn. Of course once my friends and I had been using it for an hour it was natural for one of us to open a new Wave entitled “So how do we break this thing?” Apparently posting a million character word breaks the Wave making it unusable for everyone.

Will Wave supplant email or Instant Messaging? The short answer is no. If you just want to fire off a quick question or message, email is still easier. Holding long conversations is still easier via IM (or the phone of course).

What it will do is collaboration. Anything that requires more than two people’s input and it really shines. The ability for everyone to have their say, to follow easily what is going on, to track through the conversation, to be able to jump in after an absence and get up to speed straight away.For these things, it is perfect.

Collaboration is the heart of Google Wave. So what could it mean for news? Let’s imagine The Age decided to set itself up with a Wave account and all its stories were posted as Waves. They would be editable by the staff to allow real time updating. The audience could become involved in the Wave. A story could break as a Wave and all the staff could edit, add, drop in pictures, add maps to the Wave. Late to the story and need to be brought up to speed? Replay the Wave.

Media outlets could post all their stories as Waves. This would engage the audience by not only allowing comments butals nested conversations.As Wave is still in beta we are still discovering how it can be used and what can be achieved with it. It could provide citizen journalists with incredibly powerful collaboration tools for free, while allowing the audience to easily follow the stories.

The moment people have imprinted a piece of themselves onto something, as simple as having a debate instead of just throw away comments over a news story, they make a deeper connection to it.

As with all emerging technology it will be fun to go along for the ride.

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Engagement, Conversation and News: ABC News Director Kate Torney Speaks

November 17, 2009 – 3:06 pm, by Margaret Simons

We have some hints as to how the new ABC op ed site, to be edited by Crikey editor Jonathan Green, will fit within Auntie’s emerging new media vision.

Two weeks ago, the ABC’s Director of News, Kate Torney, was interviewed by Peter Clarke for the Inside Story podcast. Listen here.

It’s a long interview, and of course was conducted before the announcement of the new site. However, with hindsight it is possible to see how the new ABC presence has been conceived. Torney talks about the way social media can be used by news journalists. She talks about the new imperative of engagement between reporters and audience, and the way in which in the future, the truth might emerge through the conversation with the ABC’s audience as well as through professional news reporting. She also talks about the need to maintain the quality and reliability of the news reporting.  “It’s horses for courses,” she says.

She talks about the ways in which ABC people such as Leigh Sales and Mark Colvin have used their Twitter presences to build a persona and a new relationship with audiences, and about the importance of experimentation and trying new formats “just to see if there is an appetite for a new way of digesting news”.

There are also reflections on the challenge of getting the tone right for online – rather than merely replicating what is available through broadcast and print.

For those wondering why the ABC doesn’t seem to break big stories any more, she says she thinks ABC newsrooms should be well placed to ignore what is on the front page of newspapers, and approach a different kind of news making. She asserts that around the nation the organisation does break news on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily make the national agenda. Online will allow the organisation to be more confident and assertive in making this point.

She responds to criticisms of the ABC’s international plans and Managing Director Mark Scott’s “soft diplomacy” pitch for more government funding.

She also has some advice for those who are designing journalism courses.  (Declaration: my project in designing a new journalism course at Swinburne University gets a mention by Clarke.)

At the end, she is asked for her Twitter name, and refuses to give it. She is on Twitter, but  “I am anonymous. I am an observer.”

As Ray Martin might say, hmmm.

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UPDATE on the ABC’s new Op Ed site

November 17, 2009 – 1:53 pm, by Margaret Simons

I have the word from the ABC. Contributors to the ABC’s new opinion and analysis site will be paid at the same rate as for articles on ABC Unleashed – which, for those not in the know, is $200 for pieces of around 800 words.

The ABC also says:

ABC staff who write for the new site will have some adjustments to their work priorities to accommodate the new tasks, and details of these adjustments are currently being discussed.

To all those of you peppering my Twitter DM and inbox with queries, I will try to have more on the what and the why of this new ABC enterprise, and how it fits within the ABC charter, before too long.

I will also let you know what I am able about Crikey as and when I find stuff out.

Patience, friends!

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