Here’s The Australian’s editorial today.
Old media, by Crikey
Newspapers will prosper long after e-scandal sheets are gone.
AS News Limited’s John Hartigan delivered a speech in Canberra on Wednesday, online news site Crikey’s Canberra correspondent, Bernard Keane, responded on Twitter. There was no faulting Keane for caustic commentary or brevity, given Twitter can only accommodate messages of 140 characters. But as a news report of what Mr Hartigan had to say, or even as considered opinion, it was electronic ephemera. It was light on for facts and awash with anger that Mr Hartigan, CEO of the company that publishes The Australian, dared to predict a positive future for the print media. It was a case of all the news that is fit to fabricate and it explained why newspapers will survive while parasitical publications like Crikey will come and go. Crikey’s editor, former Age journalist Jonathan Green, may not like this situation, but he obviously understands how much he needs newspapers. In common with the generality of online news outlets, Crikey would not exist without the papers its writers affect to despise. Every morning it includes many links to the websites of real newspapers. The only original content Crikey’s writers often offer are rants about what they read in The Australian.
Crikey, and its many peers in the US and Britain, are not newspapers. Rather, they are the work of small groups of passionate people with big barrows to push. In contrast, great newspapers, and their websites, are professional products staffed by men and women who combine deep knowledge of specific subjects with a talent for finding and reporting facts. Their work, rather than ink on paper, is the lifeblood of their publications. Their writing is the reason The Australian’s circulation is increasing and why News Limited mastheads are making money, despite declines in advertising income. Certainly, newspapers in the US are in trouble. But this is because of bad business models and editorial approaches. The Chicago Tribune is burdened by debt and The New York Times is deadly dull. Even in the US, newspapers that invest in quality can make money, demonstrated by the success of The Australian’s sister publication, The Wall Street Journal. Certainly, the internet has reshaped the news media but the losers took their audiences for granted. There are more free-to-air TV channels in trouble than well-run newspapers. And even online, nobody has worked out how to turn a profit from products many people adore, but will not pay for – including MySpace, also owned by The Australian’s parent company, or even Crikey.
Crikey sells itself as the future of serious journalism, but it isn’t. It does not break big stories. It does not send reporters around the world. It does not analyse policy in detail. And too often it escapes the laws on defamation and the scrutiny of the Press Council. Crikey is what newspapers were in the 18th century, a small-circulation propaganda sheet, read by people less interested in news and debate than having their prejudices confirmed.
Discuss.
27 Comments
Who is Jonathan Green and why do they keep writing about him?
All print media not just newspapers are in trouble all over the world. Mad magazine is now a quarterly publication. PC Magazine no longer has a print edition. It is only available digitally.
The internet and ‘new media’ has changed how media and news is delivered. San Francisco is a classic example of what is happening. All newspapers are in trouble there. Many because San Francisco the most tech savvy part of the US. It’s the younger tech savvy generation that are the nail in the coffin of print media. This is only going to become more pronounced with each new generation.
The Australian can make all the arguments they like. The fact is at times the paper is so thin that it’s not worth its $1.50 price tag. Ten years ago its tuesday tech edition was as thick as the Weekend Australian. Now it’s just a waste of space and not much space at that.
I would be interested in seeing The Australians demographic sales breakdown.
That is funny. You will note that when describing what the Oz actually does there is not one mention of ‘Journalism’.
So I expect ‘the punch’ to be closed down?
“a small-circulation propaganda sheet, read by people less interested in news and debate than having their prejudices confirmed.”
Hmmm… Quite a good description of The Australian I would have thought.
What was it that Gandhi might have said? First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. I think we are definitely seeing the “fight” stage between old and new media.
Former Age journalist. Never heard of him, I only read Andrew Bolt.
Oh, the irony:
Hartigan, Mitchell and Penbo all attacking Crikey in the same week, and yet it’s Crikey who are obsessed.
they can’t stop mentioning John Hartigan’s speech, as if it was something insightful and unique. navel-gazy bullshit indeed.
I love that they attack Crikey for the limited analysis it offers purely based on Bernard Keane’s tweet, and entirely ignore the several much more detailed articles Crikey has published on the subject of Hartigan’s little rant.
Now that there’s an online component to the Walkleys, one can only assume that The Oz will gleefully report on the success of The Punch.
Hartigan’s speech was the sort of oratorical onanism that would make a politician blush. The sort of speech that The Oz would crucify KRudd for…
“Every morning it includes many links to the websites of -real- newspapers.”
Oh no, we’re subscribing to something that doesn’t exist!? I didn’t realise, this whole time… =(
The Oz calling the New York Times “deadly dull”? They have no sense of self at all, do they?
As for the rest of this list of histrionic, pompous nonsense….they sure don’t like criticism, do they?
Daryl Mason makes a bloody good point about Hartigan’s claims that bloggers are “stealing” content from News Ltd. when they quote articles
http://theorstrahyun.blogspot.com/2009/07/when-murdoch-newspapers-do-it-its.html
Brilliant piece!
I only discovered Crikey this year. I knew about it of course but hadn’t checked it out. Black Saturday was the reason I looked at online media. Mainstream media covered the fires in two ways: saturation colour pieces and commentariat. In other words dramatic minutiae plus (generally) bombastic opinion. This lasted barely a month, followed by four months of silence broken only by daily summary reports of Royal Commission hearings.
The commentariat knew nothing of wildfire. Most simply used the fires to push those very ideological barrows that John Hartigan refers to as Crikey’s raison d’etre. News Ltd. was the worst offender. Their commentariat blamed environmentalists and plumped for simplistic solutions such as “controlled burning”. As for journalism, The Australian did best. It’s fortunate to have Gary Hughes (who directly experienced the fires). The Australian also published the only trenchant account of how the battle was lost on the day, shortly after the event. But it didn’t last. 5000 pages of royal commission transcripts, bulging with startling evidence, have been ignored by the media, apart from the aforesaid daily servings of reportage.
John Hartigan’s claim that newspapers have the inestimable advantage of journalists with “deep knowledge of specific subjects” while the Crikeys of this world are just ranting propagandists is disingenuous. The Australian has a busload of right-wing propagandists, covered by the world’s largest figleaf, the pinko Phillip Adams. As for journalists, some do have deep knowledge of specific subjects but most don’t. Newspapers are very light on for sophisticated analysis in some areas. Land management and the environment is one such. Wildfire is a subsection of that. For S.E. Australia, wildfire is a big deal. Thousands could die in the next “unprecedented” firestorm, so rigorous scrutiny is required. But we’re not getting it from newspapers. Where is the forensic questioning of Premier Brumby for hailing the fire bureaucracy’s inept performance on Black Saturday as “outstanding”. That’s why we need the media, but after a promising start the mainstream media has failed. Lost interest. Lack of knowledge by editors and journalists is one reason: they don’t see the many ramifications of Black Saturday which extend to environmental policy generally.
If investigative journalism and in-house commentary have failed to assess the fires, what of op-ed? Op-ed is one way to tap into specialised expertise and divergent views. Once again, mainstream media flopped. Hundreds of op-ed spots came and went after March without a skerrick of Black Saturday analysis. If newspapers didn’t receive any, they should have sought them out.
Crikey, on the other hand, published a wide range of Black Saturday pieces from seven or eight writers. So I say this to John Hartigan: newspapers and Crikeys will both survive. People want quality content and couldn’t give a toss about spats between media outlets. With such vast resources, I expect far more of The Australian and The Age. Lift your game. Cut the hypocritical complaint about Crikey’s frothing ideology (as far as I can see Crikey prints all sorts of opinion). To the Oz I say get some balance into your commentariat. The Age should lighten up the stodge and sanctimony (on anthropogenic global warming for instance- I think Age journos have to swear on a lightbulb that they will never question global warming orthodoxy). If the print media don’t shape up, people will desert them.
spot the bigger dog @ 2 wrote:
Add comparative … for the last 20, even 10 years and the figures would be far more interesting.
I was an Oz reader from Day1 year 1, until I bought a new fast youbeaut computer that downloads global newspapers fast enough for me to be bothered. A planner and analyst who’d studied, applied, consulted in and published on demographics and market research I knew I’d spent decades being the epitome of TheOz chosen demographic; three of its weekday supplements I read avidly; I depended on it for much of my OS news; its cryptic Xword was part of life (waiting for the old computer to download). But, not a Liberal voter even before Howard’s more disgraceful efforts, I was increasingly furious at its choice of topics & slant, its glaring bias, decreasing attempts to hold the Howard government to account and the deteriorating quality of its journalism. On the day I bought the new computer, I still had a long-term subscription which ran out at the end of Dec07.
So much changed with access to on-line papers, and a growing number and improving quality of blogs, message boards etc; especially those which did aggregate news – inc international news. By that time, I’d taken part in several “how to improve TheOz” surveys & have done so since; constantly commenting on the alienating effects on its chosen demographc of bias and declining standards of journalism, especially its OpEd. Once I’d changed computers, I added comparative comments on the roles (in news & views aggregators, blogs and message boards) of argumentative comment writers who backed their statements by supplying URLs of national & international sources. These specifically helped the reader pick up on blatant lack of in-print, on-line back-& cross-checking (ie shoddy journalism).
Once I was on-line, my daily Oz seemed even more biased, lacking in references to substantiate statements made in columns and articles (especially important as the nature of on-line political and news commentary means that any errors and omissions are rapidly identified & referenced) selective about what it printed & what it didn’t and out of date, regurgitating in the morning ed what had been thoroughly canvassed on-line during the previous day, and out of touch with its chosen demographic. I was careful to explain on the surveys I completed that, given its chosen demographic, TheOz staff had to be aware that most readers in that demographic used on-line computers to read national & international on-line papers, aggregate sites and blogs. I forget how many I’ve answered/ filled out in the last few years – far more that 2 or 3 – but I might as well have saved my time.
Then Kevin Rudd’s ALP won in 2007; and there was a more than even chance that a very substantial part of The Oz’s demographic, especially GenY & Boomer, had voted for that outcome. OK Oz, I figured on 24/11/07, you have 5+ weeks to convince me to renew my subscription. It didn’t and I didn’t – which I elaborated to the person I was asked to contact and explain why. I took to checking friends etc I knew were Oz readers, and found that most had dropped the paper for on-line news, but decreasingly from TheOz. Why read it for international, esp business, climate change, GFC etc news when one could read it in the countries of origins’ far higher quality on-line papers?
But TheOz did more than completely fail to accept Australian voters Election 07 choice; it declared war on Rudd, adding taboid-style beat-ups on Rudd’s first trip to Europe (Shanahan not only got two successive articles completely wrong, his moderators even published my corrections – complete with OS on-line papers’ URLs supporting them- I was certainly not the only one to point them out) and to a host of later issues, from early 08’s pensioner beat-ups to the current “StimulusWatch” (despite what banks, schools, the voting public etc thinks – how to alienate even more of one’s key demographic!) Did journalistic standards improve? No, TheOz’s content, accuracy, “gravitas” and journalistic quality kept dropping.
(Note that I’m not saying TheOz shouldn’t hold government & Opposition to account. Far from it. But to be taken seriously, it has to have at least some semblance of objectivity. After the AWB scandal went nowhere in terms of holding Howard’s government to account, it seemed to give up holding Liberals to account in favour of what Ms Overington, one of its own journalists, called its “Kingmaker” self-image.)
Kevin Rudd is a king not of TheOz’s making. He’d taken out the former King (Howard). The person at the centre of Ms Overington’s Oct 07 comments & actions was Malcolm Turnbull. In the week+ starting 18th June 09, NewsLtd gave its King enough rope to hang himself, and he’s still swinging. Current Opinion polls serve to show that, after 19-20 months of the Rudd government, there is now – thanks in a considerable part to NewsLtd’s own efforts – little chance that Rudd will lose the next election.
What chance that Hartigan’s rant, especially against the Blogsphere, Intertubes & Twitter will win back TheOz’s chosen demographic; the cutting-edge, technologically competent commercial, professional, academic and artistic current and future movers-and-shakers its Media, IT, Higher Ed, Property, Arts supplements & business/commercial coverage once targeted and lured to its advertising space?
Or did Hartigan merely prove what former buyers have learned through the last few years: The Oz has completely lost touch with reality and its target demographic.
PS Apologies: there should be a after “demographic” in para 2 seconf lot of bold starting I knew I’d spent decades …
In comparison to this morning’s stand-up comedy script from Imre Straight Out of the NSW Far Right’s Fundament, Halfwit Hartigan is a model of objectivity and integrity.
For once, I entirely agree with The Australian’s editorial writers, and that has never happened before. Crikey couldn’t exist without newspapers. It has obviously responded to criticism that it doesn’t break news by running some gumph about Computershare yesterday and today, but no one cares.
I’ve subscribed to Crikey for three years, but won’t renew my sub. Why bother, when I can get all the good stuff for free? Har har de har har.
BTW, Jonathan Green is the person who made Crikey dull. Good job, mate.
Crikey’s problem – and I expect this is Beecher’s influence – is it insists on clinging to that long-defunct concept of an “afternoon newspaper”.
In this age of instant news, who’s really interested in a rehash of Thursday’s news when they finally get around to publishing it at 1pm on Friday?
As The Oz editorial said, Crikey’s readership is merely those who need to check in and find out what their own opinion should be. Yesterday.
The Australian editorial: a bloo bloo bloo
Actually, the fact that The Australian and other older newspapers are mentioning Crikey (in name too, not just referenced as ‘a gossip website’) is evidence of Crikey’s growing importance.
This editorial (and the Media Watch anniversary special broadcast recently on the ABC) is just more evidence that journalists are pathetic children who can’t handle criticism. Even if Crikey was ‘just’ a site for critique of the media, so what? As for the ‘breaking of big stories’, well…..I wonder how difficult it must’ve been to break the Pauline Hanson nude photos story, or the faked email story. Clearly The Australian is just chock a block full of budding Woodward’s and Bernsteins!
@ Ozpol tragic: the Australian lost me years ago, and I know I’m not the only one in my demographic mystified at their blatant bias. these days I only read the online version to see what the wingnuts are getting their knickers into a knot over.
Not sure what News.ltd’s problem is. If they had poll bludger and Possum, I’d be over there with them. When Tim Dunlop was on news.com.au, I was there. If Bernard Keane had Kerr’s job, I’d be reading him over there.
Crikey offers what I want, so I’m here.
That the best they could come up with is the lame “The Punch” (and what a name – who did they workshop that with, NRL players?) shouldn’t mean they need to hate Crikey. Crikey isn’t likely to run articles written by Bronwyn Bishop criticising Julia Gillard (because God knows that filled a “need”) so what are they worried about – the audiences are obviously different?
I guess they think it’s a zero-sum game.
Poor fools.
The establishment should be able to rustle up a few old agressive alcoholic journos to stand under the flag and shake their fist at the sky, cursing the changing world. Those upstart on-line things, how dare they make old newspapers and their journos look irrelevant.
Newspapers depend on generic stream of news feeds for their content, it is not as though any of them do anything investigative now days. If news papers didn’t exist places like Crikey would still exists and in fact grow and thrive.
The only reason the OO and others papers get such comment in the on-line world is for their blatant and persistent bias. It is why they places like Crikey are hated as well, their old secret little world is no longer secret, the blatant bias, laziness, incompetence and games and lying revealed.
The Australian murdoch media is in a state of decay, they are too concerned with pushing a partisan line, too busy fighting wars in their own mind and living in denial that their prestige is dead and gone and that they better catch up quick or PO.
And maybe that is their major problem. To qualify as a global News Corp journo you have to be able to wave the Conservative flag in what you write. And everyone knows neo-con journos are crap writers.
But what amazes me is the willingness of News Ltd to give free advertising to Crikey and the on-line world by complaining about them all the time. People at Crikey must be over joyed at all this attention.
All you want is a left-wing opinion on everything, then, Grog. For a teacher, this is not healthy.