Readers of the Crikey email and of this blog might well wonder what is going on at the organisation that pays my retainer.

Over the last week I have had to write two stories about events within Crikey. Last week I wrote about a $50,000 cut in the contributor budget, and today I had to announce the departure of the editor, Jonathan Green, for a new position with the ABC.

It is ticklish writing about one’s own media organisaton. So far as possible I’ve tried to research and write the stories in the same way as I would any other, but there are always nice lines to be drawn between what one knows as a friend and colleague, what one suspects, what one has on the record and what the gossip network says.

Crikey is changing, there is no doubt – but I believe the intention of the proprietors is to change the business side without adversely affecting the editorial.

While it is not vastly profitable, Crikey is now a significant media presence and some of the changes of the last few weeks seem to be about trying to make it part of a more serious and hard-nosed business, with room for expansion.

Hence the amalgamation, now under way, between Smartcompany and Private Media Partners, which owns Crikey. The two companies have until now shared office space and shareholders, but have had a very different “vibe”.

Smartcompany is about entrepreneurs - all smart and glossy and making money. Crikey is, or has been, a ratty, irreverent pissing-into-the-tent kind of publication.

How will the two go together? Particularly since Amanda Gome, the founder of Smartcompany, is now CEO of Crikey? It remains to be be seen.

It seems to me that whatever the appearances, the amalgamation is not intended to effect the Crikey ‘vibe’ or editorial direction. Publisher and co-owner of the two companies, Eric Beecher, says he does not intend to make big changes in the editorial content. Green’s departure was at a time of his own choosing, and not initiated by Beecher.

Green’s departure is natural enough. He has done the job for three years, which is probably enough for anyone. Putting out Crikey is relentless – a daily lunchtime deadline, a small staff,  lots of controversy and shit. During Green’s time in the job the website has also been completely redeveloped, leading to the discovery of a separate, younger and more web-savvy audience than the subscribers to the email. But the subscription email still pays most of the bills. Crikey is therefore a hybrid model between paid content and free content. It is both an experiment, and at the same time a working media organisation with all the pressures that entails.

A great deal of attention will naturally focus on who the next editor of Crikey will be. Green’s deputy, Sophie Black, has often filled in for him with when he has been away or on holiday. She would be the natural internal candidate, and her appointment would be a clear tick of approval for  current directions.

On the other hand, with other media organisations in a sorry state, there will be no lack of impressive applicants should the position be advertised externally. I was telephoned by three people today inquiring about the job, and I’m not the right person to talk to.

Meanwhile Green’s new job is interesting in itself, signalling that the ABC is taking on publications like  The Punch and the National Times and, for that matter, Crikey itself.

This afternoon the ABC put out a news release announcing that Green would be the editor of a new online opinion and analysis site, launching next month.

Jonathan will lead a team of ABC writers, including Annabel Crabb, who joins the ABC in December, as well as commissioning expert opinion and analysis from contributors outside the ABC.

I wish Green well. He has been a good editor for Crikey and working for him has been both stimulating and fun.  I’ll miss him.

As for what happens next – watch this space.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am the Chair of the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism at Swinburne University, which is exploring a number of new models and initiatives for taking journalism forward in the new media age.

These include a community driven commissioning mechanism, similar in some ways to the San Francisco based www.spot.us.

So I was pleased to see this week that The New York Times has just published the result of its first collaboration with Spot.Us – a multi-media story  on the Pacific Ocean garbage patch. As reported here, Spot.Us raised more than US$6000 from around 100 people, which paid for the reporter’s travel expenses. Without the money, the journalism would not have been done.

Expect more announcements about our Australian community driven commissioning initiative soon.

I listened in to the Fairfax Board Meeting via webcast on Tuesday for the purposes of filing for the Crikey email. The last couple of days have been very busy for me. I have been meeting a major deadline for a Griffith Review article (to be published in February) as well as doing some work for the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism. So apologies for the late nature of these reflections, but while I have been dashing around some thoughts have drifted to the surface.

In the latter stages of the questions section of the meeting, many ordinary shareholders were asking about issues of editorial judgement and quality, particularly at the Sydney Morning Herald, and getting quite specific about particular issues and stories. The Board clearly struggled to deal withthis until, quite suddenly, Corbett seemed to remember editorial independence – that is, the notion that editors make these decisions and the board does not interfere. After that, it was easy to dodge the questions.

During this discussion, Corbett attempted to defend the role of the media. He referred to how essential it was to democracy to have a “cynical and independent” media.

Now, his use of the word cynical struck me at the time as rather unfortunate at the time.

Thinking about it since, I think he must have made a mistake.

Surely what Corbett meant was a sceptical media.

Personally, I regard scepticism as vital for journalists. But cynicism is moral failure.

The other interesting slip was in CEO Brian McCarthy’s report to the meeting, in which he was talking about the number of unique browsers of the company’s sites. He said, instead “internet bruisers” and quickly corrected himself. A slip anyone could make, of course, but one wonders if it was Freudian, given what the web is doing to revenue.

There was little at the meeting about how Fairfax plans to prepare for the National Broadband Network, other than an assertion that they are doing it. I guess that is fair enough. They don’t want to give their plans away to their competitors. Nevertheless, it seemed a bit limp to say, as McCarthy did, that they planned to have a website for all their 400 plus mastheads. If they haven’t already done that, then it is staggering. Compare and contrast with what the ABC’s Mark Scott (a former Fairfax executive) has been doing and saying. Of course, Scott has the luxury of not having to worry so much about commercial competition. Nevertheless, the vision-gap is rather visible.

But surely the most gobsmacking thing is that the Fairfax Board admitted that it allowed a breach of the law for two years while David Evans was a Director of both Fairfax and Village Roadshow. How can it be that nobody noticed?

The Broadcasting Services Act, which prohibits people from being a director of two companies that control radio stations in the same market, is hardly a secret. Does Fairfax’s (and Village Roadshow’s) failure to realise they had a problem signal contempt for the law, or merely profound ignorance? Either way it does not inspire confidence.

And what on earth was the industry regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, doing all this time?

Finally, Gerard Noonan says that Corbett promised all three of the candidates for the Board will be considered for appointment during the “renewal process” now underway.

I understand the Board is looking for at least one person with solid new media experience, plus at least one person with a track record in journalism and media. My money would be on Steve Harris being picked up. He has run a quiet campaign, eschewing public criticisms of the Board. This will mean there are fewer bridges to be built and faces to be lost than there would be if Noonan or Mayne were chosen.

Declaration: Both Steve Harris and Gerard Noonan are on the Board of the recently established Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, of which I am the Chair.

I have a story in the Crikey email today about the cuts in the Crikey contributor budget. The post before this one talks about the ticklish nature of writing about one’s employer.

But much more important is some of the content which may be lost. For the last two years, freelance journalist Melissa Sweet has supervised the Crikey Health and Medical Panel (CHAMP), and for the last twelve months written almost a piece a day for the Croakey health blog.

Sweet  is a journalist with a speciality in health, and a particular concern for all the public health and policy issues that rarely get discussed in the mainstream media. To get the declarations out of the way right at the start, Sweet is both a mate of mine and co-founder, with me, of the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism. We both sit on the board.

But I think any fair minded survey of the content she has been providing and organising would result in the conclusion that it is valuable. If it can’t be done at Crikey, it deserves a new home. Sweet and her collaborators began the Croakey and CHAMP project with the aim of encouraging a more open, transparent and informed public debate around health, and boosting  coverage of under-reported and disadvantaged areas, such as indigenous health, rural health and mental health.This article in the Medical Journal of Australia describes the background to Sweet’s Crikey work.

Outcomes have  included the Crikey Register of Influence documenting links between experts and marketing campaigns, and the Croakey Register of Unreleased Documents, which records the details of evaluations, plans, reviews and so forth that should be released  in the interests of  better informed policy, practice and debate.

There are now 181 members of CHAMP, including leading figures in public health and health policy. Together they have written hundreds of stories for the Crikey email over the last two years on issues otherwise neglected by the mainstream media. CHAMP is an innovative project that has had a significant impact upon debate, and there is increasing interest in the health sector in engaging with CHAMP and Croakey.

Professor Simon Chapman, Professor of Public Health, University of Sydney, has said of his experience writing for CHAMP:

“I was particularly interested in the responses that came in
on the Howard Indigenous health ‘blitz’ in the [Northern Territory]. It
seemed that Crikey was the main voice putting alternative views on
the wisdom of what was happening. As a result of contributing Crikey
articles, I have been threatened with a writ; done numerous media

interviews; received many emails; and received both positive and negative feedback the next day via Crikey.

Professor Guy Maddern, Professor of Surgery at the University of Adelaide had this to say:

“The one article I contributed to Crikey . . . had . . . considerable
feedback from a range of sources, including the state Minister for
Health, colleagues I have not heard from in decades, and my local
butcher! Indeed, the article led to a number of radio interviews and, I
believe, gained useful and productive exposure to the issues that were
highlighted in it .

Other contributors to CHAMP have included the nutritionist Rosemary Stanton,  who sparked off a debate when she called for food to be included in carbon trading schemes.

Sweet has done  all this – moderating Croakey, writing for it most days, and coordinating CHAMP – for the modest retainer of $1000 a month. Croakey is not a high traffic blog, but in the last mongh has achieved over 19,000 page views and just over 17,000 unique visitors: not enormous, but as those in independent media know, not be be sneezed at either, particularly when they are such a tightly targetted group of professionals.

Now Sweet’s retainer has been cut. For the moment, she is still doing the work for nothing, but this cannot continue indefinitely. She hopes to find alternative means of funding the project.

Her email address is on her web page if anyone wishes to get in touch, and she Twitters as @croakeyblog.

How amusing. Amanda Meade’s Diary column in The Australian this morning retells part of the exchange between The Oz’s Caroline Overington and the Sydney Morning Herald’s Annabel Crabb about their publications’ various problems and prospects. But Meade has either self-censored, or been cut off at the pass by the sub-editors.

Overington had claimed The Australian was protected from the collapsing business models of print newspapers by the fact that it had a “benevolent proprietor”. (aka Rupert).

Meade accurately reports that after Overington pronounced a death sentence on the Sydney Morning Herald, Crabb hit back , saying “at least we are still profitable.”

But as readers of this blog will know, the best lines came just after that.  Crabb went on to say:

We are not in as much trouble as you will be once your great leader drops off the twig.

And later Crabb added:

I think it is wonderful that your survival strategy depends on the robust genes of a 78 year old.

You’d think that if the Oz couldn’t report the whole exchange, they would not have reported it at all. Poor Meade.