Nothing drives site traffic like gossip, as the figures for my blog yesterday – when I posted the deliciously painful correspondence between Eric Ellis and The Monthly - attest.

Meanwhile I’ve been waiting for a quiet day on the media patch to give a more serious matter a going over. Thanks to Malcolm Turnbull hogging the headlines, the quiet day has arrived.

And I would point out that I can tackle this topic, at length, only because I am serving a niche audience of media workers and those interseted in media workers. My costs are low. . If this post attracts only 100 readers, nothing much has been lost. The measure of my success is about intensity of engagement with my audience, rather than only the size of the audience. This is one tiny example of niche media, and how it works. And niche media is one of the ways of the future. 

Having pointed that out, I’d like to turn to the perpetual debate, stoked most recently by Foxtel boss Kim Williams, about the place and future of taxpayer funded “broadcasters” in an age of media plenty. In his speech last week, Williams suggested that the ABC  should be funded only to do those things that the market cannot do – and that government funding for Australian content should be made available on a contestable basis, rather than simply given to the ABC and SBS. Williams’ model would see the ABC reduced, I think, to little more than Radio National and perhaps Four Corners. It would be a much tinier institution, and we all know that tiny institutions are easy to wipe out.

All this, as I suggested in this post at the time, is part of a broader battle between media that asks users to pay at the point of use, (and can therefore afford to provide high quality content to comparitively small audiences)  and free to air media, both advertising funded and taxpayer funded. Given that the advertising funded free to air mass model is basically broken by audience fragmentation, the main free to air warrior is taxpayer funded “broadcasters”.

I’ve put the word “broadcaster” in inverted commas for obvious reasons. The ABC and SBS are much more than broadcasters these days. They are multi-media organisations. While ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has ruled out ever publishing a dead-tree newspaper, the ABC is now turning its attention to the one aspect of multi-media that, to date, it has not done well – text. This is the thinking, I am told, behind the new “op ed” venture to be edited by departing Crikey editor Jonathan Green. The ABC is taking it up to the newspapers.

Should Auntie be allowed to do it? Why should the ABC be able to compete against already stressed businesses? It has to be acknowledged that William’s arguments are powerful, and I agree that the case for taxpayer funded media needs constant examination and reassessment. But I also think that the justification for tthe ABC’s draw o the taxpayer purse is stronger than it has been at any time since it was founded in the 1930s.

I would put the argument for the defence under three headings: equity, innovation and addressing areas of market failure.

 Equity

Quality media that is free at the point of use is important for information equity, and information equity is important for tolerable and democratic socieities. The commercial free-to-the-user business model is broken, as Rupert Murdoch knows (hence the pay wall debate) and as our debt-ridden commercial television stations know only too well. If quality content is only available to those who can afford to pay, then we create an information underclass. Taxpayer funded media is a safeguard against that dangerous scenario.

Innovation

At a time of enormous change, public broadcasters can afford to experiment at a depth and with a daring impossible for media companies bound to decaying business models and the bottom line. Public broadcasters can embrace audience fragmentation, without having to worry about the impact on advertising dollars.  It can explore new ways of serving many different, small but intensely engaged audiences. Innovation is key to the justification for the ABC’s existance. If the ABC did NOT innovate, it would be harder to argue for its claim on the taxpayer purse. But experimentation implies that it must be allowed to sometimes fail.

Addressing Market Failure

Returning to those decaying business models, over the next few years we are likely to see increasing areas of market failure in fields including Australian content, investigative journalism and rural and regional reportage. Having public “broadcasters” is an insurance policy against the impactof these failures  on our democracy. A public asset such as the ABC means our media and civic future looks brighter than that of the USA and much of Europe.

Lest anyone think I am a slavish defender of publically funded media, I’ll make the point that this set of justifications won’t last forever. Cast forward twenty years, when new business models have emerged, when innovations have been adopted and settled in, then it is easy to see that the justifications for taxpayer funded media might be different, or even absent. The ABC is currently having a renaissance and a golden age. It won’t last, at least not in this way.

In fact, it might be the last golden age before something else – something less of an institution and more of a process – takes its place. What the ABC might be doing right now, in its experimentation, its opening up to the audience, is ushering in its own replacement, in which content makers will be in a direct relationship with the audience.

The immediate spur for these reflections is this speech by the BBC Director General, Mark Thompson. We know that ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has read it and liked it, because he recommended it to his followers on Twitter. The speech is a vigorous defence of public “broadcasting” using the concept of public space.

Thompson takes on James Murdoch, who recently argued against the BBC being able to use its taxpayer subsidised position to compete against commercial enterprises. Thompson points out that in the United Kingdom and comparable societies, there have always been two models for  delivering media and culture: the untrammelled market, and public space.

Not just the BBC and the other PSBs, but universities, our museums and galleries, many of our orchestras, the RSC, the National Theatre, our great national parks, more broadly our educational and health systems: in fact so much of our collective cultural and social life exists not in James’s bi-polar universe of market and state, but in a third space.  Public space.

Public space is not-for-profit space, not by accident but by design.  It exists not to make money but to serve the public and it is accountable to them, not just as customers in James Murdoch’s formulation, but as citizens.

Wherever it can be – and certainly in the case of the BBC – public space is free at the point of use.  And the more people who use it the better.

That’s the argument in a nutshell. Media as space, with the difference between  public and commercial “broadcasters” being analagous to the difference between a town squares, and shopping malls. The difference between addressing the audience as citizens, and as consumers.

Thompson attempts – not entirely successfully in my view – to argue that public “broadcasters” should continue to have a wide remit – not only those things that the market cannot provide, but also popular culture similar to that provided by the commercial operators. The logic isn’t instantly apparent at this point.  But he acknowledges that in the era of media plenty the emphasis in public space has to be on quality:

I expect to see on the BBC a further shift in emphasis in favour of investment in high quality, original British content in those areas which are least likely to be provided by the market: the best journalism in the world, we hope, available to the public here and around the world free at the point of use; a long-term commitment to outstanding content for children; a bolder strategy for programmes which build knowledge about the arts and sciences; a determination to open up the BBC’s archive and make it as widely available as possible.

He has some interesting things to say about what the boundaries of public space should be, and how one balances the different things that should be done within those boundaries. And he concludes:

I want to end by saying that I believe that the fundamental contract between the British public and the BBC remains strong.The case for a major public intervention in broadcasting and the web is probably stronger today than at any point in our history.  Although there are those who dispute that and the whole idea that there is any third way, any path between the market and the state, they are in the minority.  And the opportunity for the BBC and for others not just to defend the concept of public space, but to transform it and to use the new technologies and new media to populate it with amazing new ideas – the opportunity to forge a new relationship with the public within that space – that opportunity is greater now that it has ever been before.

I agree. But will these things still be the case in ten, twenty and thirty years time? I suspect that in the next few decades, the ability of the public to directly enter the media making business might require a very different contract, and a very different use of taxpayer media money.