You can read the lecture here.

Mark Scott gives a good speech – well written and for the most part, well judged.  It will be interesting to see what the mainstream media make of it, if anything, because despite its undoubted significance there is no easy news point or grab. The obvious route would be to pick up on his criticism of Rupert Murdoch’s plans to make people pay for content. Scott depicts this as the last frantic efforts of a media emperor to:

deny a revolution that’s already taken place by attempting to use a power that no longer exists, by trying to impose on the world a law that is impossible to enforce.

No media company has solutions to the collapse of business models and the new threats, says Scott.

For newspapers, the last great hope now seems to be something called Waiting for Rupert…

..now, the man who just four years ago said he wanted to “make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands of the digital native” says he’s not going to respond to the demands of these digital natives.  Instead, they – who have never in their lives paid for news online – will be asked to respond instead to his demands and start paying..

The mission to make people pay for content will not work and cannot work, except for a few highly specialised high quality brands, says Scott. I think this is one area of the speech where Scott’s bark is bigger than his bite. Read carefully, and he says a pay model will work for some things. Yet his language is more condemnatory than that message would suggest.

The reason for this slight slippage in rhetoric is in the speech itself. Scott knows that the commercial media organisations are “after” public broadcasters, attacking their right to exist in the new world of media plenty. He is joining the battle.

But more significant  is Scott’s central message that power has shifted to the audiences, and that this cannot be resisted, but must be embraced.

News gatherers cannot compete with the audience, who are everywhere and now able to publish to the world with elan and efficiency. We no longer live in a world in which ownership of a printing press or a broadcasting licence brings unique  power. They very strategies and thinking that built the media empires may now be the things that bring them undone.

Scott depicts the ABC as living in a constant state of fear that it is not moving “fast enough or bold enough to meet the challenge of the times”. Personally, I think that’s a healthy kind of fear. I’d rather be frightened of not changing than frightened of change.

Scott  is thinking in terms of “ten thousand channels, not five delivered to your living room”  and constant reinvention.The ABC is asking:

What is television? What is radio? In doing so, we are questioning nothing less than the very foundations upon which the ABC has been built over the course of 77 years.  You have to be ready to be truly bold.

He reprises the idea of a public “broadcasters” role as being a town square in which citizens can meet and discuss their affairs.

Scott’ speech begins with the feel of an elegy. He quotes an Auden poem on the fall of the Roman Empire, and continues with better turns of phrase than those who used to sub his copy on the Sydney Morning Herald would have expected to find.

He continues through a nice framing of the challenges and the struggles of the declining empires, and ends with some “hestitant suggestions” about the way forward. He says that the only media organisations that will survive are those that accept that all the rules have changed.

The future lies, not in owning everything but in being part of something. This means that the audience “long treated with an oligipolist’s disdain” must be treated with real respect and their contribution valued.

Scott’s central message is about a shift in power relationships from owners to audiences and participants. This is a hard message for any commercial media company to swallow.

It is no accident, of course, that the public broadcaster takes the debate forward. Only public broadcasters can embrace audience fragmentation and is unphased by collapsing business models.  And there is a natural fit between content makers already directly in the pay of the public and the new imperative to embrace audience power.

It is hard, if not impossible, for a stock market owned media company focussed on quarterly results to innovate and experiment with the depth and speed that is necessary to even hope to keep up.

That is why the ABC is more important now than since its creation. Its new justification for existance includes innovation and experimentation at a time of collapsing business models and paradigm change in media. And that is why we can expect it to come under increasingly fierce attack from all of those who want to make audiences pay for content.

I think the battle between public broadcasters on the one hand, and those who want to make us pay for content will be the key media fight in the early part of this century.  It will be of more lasting importance than the ructions in the Fairfax Board, to name just one set of agonies.

It might be described as the battle between “control” media and “participatory” media. (Thanks to Bronwen Clune for those terms).

Scott’s speech should be seen in that context.

Nevertheless, those of you who tolerate my musings on media futures might find this podcast on the Inside Story site of interest. I was interviewed by Peter Clarke, and we talked about the Seattle P-I, Pauline Hanson, the ABC and many other things.

Declaration: Inside Story is published by the Institute of Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology, where I am employed part-time.

Is it possible to run an online-only local news site that serves a city’s readers well while turning a profit? Is a digital news product a viable solution for cities whose papers can no longer afford to operate? We think so.

We’re going to break a lot of rules that newspaper Web sites stick to, and we are looking everywhere for efficiencies. We don’t feel like we have to cover everything ourselves. We’ll partner for some content; we won’t duplicate what the wire is reporting unless we have something unique to offer; we’ll continue to showcase the great content from our 150 or so reader bloggers and we’ll link offsite to content partners and competitors to create the best mix of news on our front page.

We don’t have reporters, editors or producers—everyone will do and be everything. Everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and curate the home page. That’ll be a training challenge for everyone, but we’re all up for the challenge and totally ready to pick up all these skills.

This will be one to watch – for all of us.

On the other hand there are some chilling figures. Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23 per cent in the last two years, and it is estimated that one out of every five journalists employed by newspapers in the USA in 2001 has since lost their job, with 2009 expected to be the worst year yet.

Audiences are migrating to the internet at an increasing rate, but:

It is now all but settled that advertising revenue—the model that financed journalism for the last century—will be inadequate to do so in this one. Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining.

This echoes remarks made by Rupert Murdoch in Australia recently, in which he indicated he was focussing on subscrption businesses as the engine of the future.

The report concludes that reinvention of the industry is needed – and now. Some of the comments echo the situation in Australia.

“There are growing doubts within the business, indeed, about whether the generation in charge has the vision and the boldness to reinvent the industry. It is unclear, say some, who the innovative leaders are, and a good many well-known figures have left the business. Reinvention does not usually come from managers prudently charting course. It tends to come from risk takers trying the unreasonable, seeing what others cannot, imagining what is not there and creating it. We did not see much of it when times were better. Times are harder now.

I have thought for some time that the depth of innovation and experiment needed is unlikely to be possible for stockmarket based media companies. It is hard to sell risk taking to institutional investors with legal obligations to worry only about short term returns on investment.

The report says that alternative news sites have grown, including some produced by journalists who have left mainstream newsrooms, but their scale remains small. Few are profitable.

Nevertheless the report identifies as a major trend the shift in power away from media institutions, and towards individual journalists.

” Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites. …It would be a mistake to overstate the movement at this point. But for a few journalists at least, there are signs of a new prospect: individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places.

The report canvasses the various methods tried to get people to pay for content online, and suggests some ideas that should be tried.

“1. Adopt the cable model, in which a fee to news producers is built into monthly Internet access fees consumers already pay. News industry executives have not seriously tested this enough to know if it could work, but these fees provide half the revenue in cable. 2. Build major online retail malls within news sites. This could both create a local search network for small businesses and link them directly with consumers to complete transactions, not just offer advertising—with the news operation getting a point-of-purchase fee. 3. Develop subscription-based niche products for elite professional audiences. These are more than subject-specific micro-sites. They are deep, detailed, up-to-the-minute online resources aimed at professional interests, and they are a proven and highly profitable growth area in journalism. There are other ideas as well, including news companies collaborating to seriously challenge aggregators, especially Google, to start sharing more revenue. Several new revenue streams most likely are needed. The closest thing to a consensus right now is that no one source is a likely magic bullet.

Lots more meat here, and most of it relevant to Australia, in my opinion, despite the trend for newspaper executives to protest that the USA is not a relevant model for what is likely to happen here. While the report describes itself as “the bleakest yet” I think it also contains the seeds of hope.

First, the continued appetite for news. Second, the capacity for individual journalists to seize the initiative. We are living at a time of paradigm shift for our profession, which means great pain and confusion in the short term.

But the medium term future may be bright.

First The Guardian reports on Pew Research Centre findings that suggest niche publications – particularly the little trade magazines that were once not taken seriously by mainstream journalists – are becoming the new sites of serious political reportage. There are implications for equity:

Press coverage is being remoulded to serve an elite that will pay a premium price to keep tabs on how politicians and civil servants are affecting elite interests. News of how democratic institutions work is being segmented and privatised. And this process began 20 years ago, long before the recession and even before the growth of the internet.

But for a more positive take on the potential of niche journalis, look at this article from Editor and Publisher, which reports on the New York Times experiment with highly local citizen journalism.

The New Media Index monitors and analyses the content on more than 100 million blogs and other social media web pages concerned with national news and public affairs, then compares the results to the stories in mainstream media.

The results vary from week to week, but seem to suggest that social media covers a wider range of topics, focusses less on “winner-loser” coverage. Sometimes topics of interest only to niche audiences nevertheless build up a head of steam because of the intensity of interest within that group.

The idea of journalism as a public good is what has led the French Government to support that country’s newspapers. It is also why all those universities and charitable trusts in the USA are backing experiments in making good journalism sustainable.

Locally, the idea of journalism as a public good is what drives our media organisations in their founding and support for the Right to Know campaign, although I won’t be the first to point out that there is self interest involved as well.

It’s not hard to persist in the assumption that journalists are good things, even if it does involve overlookin or forgiving gross abuses of media power. In recent months I have taken pleasure in observing how The Age, despite all the troubles at Fairfax, is still dishing up some gutsy investigative yarns. All credit to those involved, and those who support them.

But sometimes you need a reality check. And there are good reasons why most people think the newspaper emperor is a tad underclothed.

Have a look at this post on the US based Xark blog . It scores a number of direct hits. Although it concerns the American scene, these are questions we will have to confront in Australia if we want to convince people that journalism actually matters.

Here are some edited highlights:

Watchdogging government is hardly the primary purpose of modern newspapers (it doesn’t even make the Top Three in most outfits), and if Watchdogging ever interferes with Job No. 1 (generating double-digit profit margins for shareholders), Watchdogging is right out;

And an uncomfortable one for both News Limited and Fairfax:

Newspaper companies and media corporations are run not by civic-minded saints, but by business people. And while they love looking into other people’s business, they don’t like anybody looking into theirs. If you run for public office, you’re expected to reveal your financial interests, but buy a newspaper and you can shape public opinion for years without ever having to reveal much of anything.

But what about the “newsroom firewall,” that oft-touted invisible fortress that protects the news judgment of top editors from the economic interests of the company? Might as well call it a Maginot Line. Does anybody seriously believe that editors who refuse to adopt the personality and concerns of top management are likely to reach and remain in top newsroom jobs? Even the best top editors exist in a hellish realm of compromise between their public-minded mission and the “bottom-line realities” of for-profit newspapering. Color me snobbish, but I like my watchdogs to live by the same rules they apply to others. Call it a quirk.

And one for every editor I have ever known, and every news conference I have ever sat in on:

Your local city council is required to let the public witness all its decisions. What about your local newspaper? Are interest groups allowed to sit in on afternoon budget meetings? Are news decision-makers required to release their notes and e-mails that relate to why they promoted one angle but spiked another?

Editors understand that they take heat sometimes for the stories they publish. The last thing they want is heat for the stories they didn’t publish, or a pubic accounting of the decisions that lead up to framing stories in a particular way.

The conclusion:

Today’s mediascape is a remnant of a collapsing 20th century system in which most of the journalistic infrastructure belonged to newspapers. Their current argument for their social value oozes irony because it reverses the way newspapers have valued themselves for a generation — not for their civic-mindedness, but for their bottom line. And if that bottom line is less than 20 percent profit, you can bet they’re laying off reporters, not offering stockholders smaller dividend payments.

Somebody should investigate that.

All of which adds up, surely, to a realisation that if we want to continue to believe that journalism is important, and particularly if we want other people to care about its future, then the way we do it is going to have to change quite radically.

So how should it change? New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen outlines the problem well, then suggests some new ways of thinking, in this post on his Pressthink blog.

Rosen outlines several possible new ways (and some of them are in fact old ways, dating from before modern media) in which the collection and dissemination of news might be supported, including:

• The private collection of news, in which individuals directly commission correspondents;

• new economies of news, including:

1. wealthy individuals supporting investigative work (and not celebrity gossip, entertainment etc) because it is a public good;
2. Niche publications serving highly specialised audiences with content of intense interest to them

Rosen also has stuff to say about advertising, and how it, too, is going to have to change, which is why it can’t be relied upon to fund journalism as it has in the past.

Says Rosen:: “We need to try all routes: for-profit and non-profit; amateur, pro and pro-am; market-driven, subsidized.”

Those who heard Rosen address the Future of Journalism conference organised by the MEAA in Sydney last year will remember his beautiful migration metaphor.

We are all going to have to leave the old country, and seek our future in the new. Not all of the boats we push out will make it across the ocean, so we must make sure that we launch a lot of them. When we get to the new country we will find that others are there before us. We will no longer have exclusive claim to the territory. Like all migrants, we will have to work out how many of our old traditions and habits are still relevant and useful, and how many we will need to abandon.

Says Wilson:

“In the moments when they’re deciding whether or not to publish a piece of news or gossip that’s not generally known or available, I suggest that the best strategy is for bloggers to think of themselves as journalists. My answer to the question in this post’s title is: you’re a journalist when you’re publishing news. In that situation I think it’s a good strategy  for bloggers to behave as journalists ideally would, and ask themselves the same questions that journalists do. That means trying to confirm information, and not just because truth is a defence against defamation in every Australian jurisdiction. If you can get confirmation from a reliable source – preferably the person, people or organisation that the news is about – legally, you’re in the clear. You can also have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re telling the truth.  There are many ways to make sure of information, but I still think that it may mean occasionally picking up the phone. Notwithstanding John Quiggin’s point about journalists having a kind of professional licence that excuses such intrusions, if bloggers want to avoid trouble they may occasionally need to steel themselves and ring the subject of their rumour.

I agree almost entirely with Wilson, but would add a few observations. The Quiggin post that Wilson references makes the point that journalists operate with an extraordinary licence, that allows them to ring up the great and powerful and fire questions. It’s not so easy for a blogger to get an interview (not that it is always easy for journalists, either).

As a journalism educator I know that the biggest psychological hurdle wannabe journos have to vault is the act of picking up the telephone or collaring someone in person in order to ask annoying or intrusive questions.

Students will Google for hours, do public record searches, bury themselves in the clippings files – anything to forestall the need for actual human confrontation.

Yet this is the main way in which journalists find things out, and finding things out is the core trade skill of a journalist, and our main claim to usefulness. It is also the reason why journalism is, at its heart, dirty work, particularly when it is done well. We should worry when the business of journalism becomes too neat and tidy, too clean. Interviewing well involves overcoming a psychological barrier to do with being “nice”. Journalists leap the barrier to ask questions face to face or voice to voice in a way that often makes everyone uncomfortable. Academics and bloggers generally do not do these things.

Finding things out involves trying hard to talk to people you don’t know and who have no reason for wanting to talk to you. Often it involves making people angry, or hurting them.

It involves opening yourself up to rejection and anger. It involves building relationships of trust with sources – and not only and not chiefly political professionals or spin doctors. Sometimes one must get close to the loud, the objectionable. The smoother the source, the less likely they will tell you anything that is both important and new

So the reluctance to pick up the phone or collar someone is very understandable,  and the social licence given by the title “journalist” certainly helps – although most professional journalists still find it difficult.

And the fact that journalism done well is often dirty work is the reason why the search for new business models to support journalism is so important. It is not because professional journalists are the only ones who can do journalism. As Wilson shows and we all should know by now, lots of people can do it. And many people who call themselves journalists don’t do it well or often enough.

But the fact is that if you want journalism done constantly, consistently and well, with disinterest and with experience, then it will be necessary at some stage to pay for it, including after the industrial superstructure of Big Media has declined.

UPDATE: An interesting perspective on this bloggers and journos thing from The Guardian

Following on from all this, an idea occurs to me. Why doesn’t a big media organisation – and the ABC might be best placed to do it – spend some real time and resources asking the public what sort of things they want from journalists over the months and years ahead, during which bushfires will continue to be a big story.

We need new ideas on how to do the job of reporting. Something that goes beyond the cliches in which everyone is either a hero or a victim.

As I say in the Crikey e-mail, I have never known a story that so intimately involves us all. Everyone in Victoria, it seems, is either directly affected or knows someone who has lost their home or their life.

If we believe what we say – that journalism is important and a force for good – then we should have the courage to ask what, in this situation, journalists can be for.

This is a crucial question for the future of journalism. As I’ve been saying for a while now, we need to remember that journalism is not the same as media. Journalism is the practice of gathering and diseminating  news and information. Media is the business of gathering audiences and selling them to advertisers. The two have been enmeshed ever since the printing press became mainstream technology. Journalism was used to gather audiences. Media businesses sold those audiences to advertisers, and paid the journalists. It worked well for about four centuries, though not without shortcomings.

Now we are living through a technological change at least the equivalent of the invention of the printing press, and it is disrupting this old business model. The size of the audience for any one media outlet is going to shrink, as more options become available. Some kinds of advertising – such as classified ads – are no longer bound to journalism by appearing in the same physical product. And as Rupert Murdoch predicted a short while ago the amount of money media can charge for display advertising online is already much lower than for print ads, and will decline further.

So while the traditional media-journalism enmeshment will continue, it is on the way out as a means of paying the salaries of large numbers of experienced journalists.

So how will those journalists be paid, once the industrial superstructure of media has declined?

Or in other words, will people pay for journalism, and how much will they pay?

Various models are being discussed overseas, including the idea of micropayments – tiny bits of money that you will hardly miss directly debited when you access content online.

In the last edition of the American Editor and Publisher, Steve Outing poo-pooed that idea, and instead touted for a Silicon Valley start-up called Kachingle, which provides the means by which readers of content online can voluntarily click a button to financially support their favourite content.

Says Outing:

Think of it this way and you’ll understand the core concept behind Kachingle: Just as online users currently pay an Internet provider $30 or more a month for their computers to access the Internet, and perhaps a monthly fee for all the music they want from a service like Rhapsody, they’ll also pay a monthly fee for all the news and blog content on the Web. Only the last fee is voluntary, and it will be up to publishers to educate the public on the importance of paying for content online. (National Public Radio has been doing this for itself for decades. Now commercial news publishers and bloggers need to do it to benefit all of them, not just one entity.)

The next important point to grasp about the Kachingle model is that it allows individuals to financially support the online content providers that they like best. So if a newspaper wants to get paid for its content when a Web site visitor clicks through to one of its articles, it should ask that the visitor support the site via Kachingle.

This is a variation on what I called the Community Broadcasting business model in my book The Content Makers. The business model (if it can be called that) rests on the faith that the community will support content they like.

It assumes (and I think this is often missed in the debates) that people will feel an intensity of connection with the content. In the book, I suggest that the community broadcasting model might have legs in the interactive new media world, in which the lines between audience and content makers are blurred.

I anticipate that in the future intensity of connection with audience will become more important than size of audience for many journalism outlets and their business models.

Anyway, the latest entry to this overseas debate is here. Self-described veteran media executive Alan Mutter has crunched the figures on the likely “take” from a Kachingle-style honour payment system for newspapers, and concludes that it just won’t work.

To calculate the potential of the tip-jar system, I obtained the number of page views for several newspapers in 2008 from Nielsen Online. I assumed that site visitors would click the Kachingle button on 2% of the pages, which is a reasonably high response rate for most sorts of voluntary activities on the web. I further assumed that the newspaper would get an average of 2.5 cents per click, net of the commission Kachingle charged to participate in its network.

As you can see in the table below, the tip system might generate revenues of nearly $3.7 million a year for the New York Times, the busiest of all newspaper sites with 7.4 billion page views in 2008. The $3.7 million would pay 24.5 journalists making an average of $150,000 per year. Although that sounds pretty good, bear in mind that the paper has a newsroom staff of about 1,300 individuals. So, Kachingle would cover the cost of only 2% of the staff.

I would point out that Mutter assumes that the Big Media companies he investigates will pretty much carry on as before, dishing out content that they think readers should value, rather than entering in to collaborative relationships with audiences.

If the Community Broadcasting/Kachingle model has any legs at all, I think it will be for smaller, intensely networked groups of content makers and audiences. I wouldn’t expect it to support the present staff of the New York Times, or indeed any mass media model. In other words, it is not THE ANSWER to the problems of the press – but it might be one of an array of answers.

The intensely networked collaborative model raises another possibility – why let Big Media call the shots? If intensity of connection is the way of the future, why not use the possibilities created by the web to allow groups of citizens to directly commission the journalism they want?  Isn’t it more likely that people will pay to get a service they have directly requested? And we do have to think of journalism as a service, I think.

Some readers will know that I have a more than academic interest in these questions. Things are developing. More news soon.

UPDATE: Roy Greenslade has a post on this topic, with some other links that are worth a look.