I don’t usually subscribe to all the ‘heritage media, death of newspapers’ stuff but when I saw the Sydney Morning Herald this morning I almost choked on my home-made, organic, wholemeal sourdough toast. Here’s the copy from the ad that caught my attention:
As the race to the White House comes down to the wire, don’t miss the Herald’s unmatched coverage of this critical US Election. You can rely on the Herald’s expert team on the ground, Annabel Crabb, Anne Davis, Peter Hartcher and Ian Munro, as well as exclusive access to the news and analysis from the The New York Times, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Only in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Are they kidding about ‘exclusive access’? This is an ad that belongs in the era before the Internet existed. First, you can read all this ‘exclusive’ stuff online, and from many more newspapers, well before it hits the streets in Sydney. And, second, there are many online sources for election news and analysis these days that are as good, often better, than what you’ll find in the NYT, LAT and WAPO.
What’s more the ad seems to think that we should be excited that Annabel (cute and funny) Crabb and Peter (humble) Hartcher have been despatched to the USA to help ‘cover’ the election. Why is anyone going to read them in preference to the hundreds of journalists and bloggers online that are way more knowledgeable then the ‘fly in, fly out’ aussie crew. People who have been analysing, reporting and commenting on the US election continuously for the past two years. Well, I guess, lots of people must love reading their stuff or the SMH wouldn’t bother. Crabb, in particular, can be just as cute and funny about American politics as she can be about the Canberra variety. So if that’s your go.
But really, at a time when Fairfax is crying poor and sacking journalists, you just wonder at the wisdom of spending a truckload on covering something that will get saturation, and better, coverage on the Internet anyway. It’s not just the Fairfax newspapers, other ‘cash-strapped’ outfits like the ABC and SBS have been also sending people to America to ‘cover’ the election. A lot of these seem to be wondering around the countryside doing vox pops and colour pieces. Just horrible. This effort wins the prize for the biggest wank so far.
But the key point is that the SMH ad, and the news gathering and reporting underpinning it, is almost like a surrender flag. It blares out to you – ‘we have no idea what to do in response to the Internet tsunami so we’ll just pretend it’s not happening’. It is a recognition that they have not been able to develop a plausible, and credible, post-Internet content strategy.
If this is the best they can do, then perhaps newspapers are stuffed after all.
5 Comments
Spot on Trevor.
Like you i dont think print is going away anytime soon but this illustration of their ignorance is disappointing.
To try and highlight the relevance of this format as the race ‘comes down to the wire’ accentuates the point, come Wednesday morning virtually everything the Herald carries in the print edition will be irrelevant. As the polls close radio, TV and the web will dominate election coverage.
Congrats to Crabb and Hartcher on what should be an A Grade junkett, enjoy, it will likely be the last in this mode of operation.
“Things published daily on paper” survived radio and TV, so they’ll survive the internet too. There’ll just be different media forms optimised to each medium’s strengths and the audiences’ needs. “Newspapers” may be so radically transformed that they’re unrecognisable. Look at newspapers from 200 years ago and they’re very different beasts! so they may not be made in the same way by the same people or even by the same companies.
I reckon the newspaper guys aren’t so worried about the death of the newspaper as such, but the death of their own jobs, personally, because they’ve failed to adapt.
The problem with the SMH’s me-too US election plan is that it doesn’t provide anything different, as you’ve rightfully pointed out, Trevor. There’s a real herd mentality, and a really deep rut of established news-value norms which says “this is a big story, therefore we must cover it”. It’s the same dull conformity which means three channels of TV news have the same stories, in the same order, with the same angles — and often with the same pictures! — every goddam night.
When your local newspaper(s) were the only source of all news, and because a newspaper is an all-or-nothing thing, this made sense. But now we can choose our news from an immense palette of specialist sources. Apiece here, a piece there.
I’d no sooner turn to SMH for US election news that I’d turn to Pig Breeders Gazette for an analysis of the war in Afghanistan.
I wonder whether a “local” paper like the SMH, aiming at its Bondi-to-Leichhardt, Mosman to Surry Hills demographic, could actually be bold enough to drop international news entirely and re-deploy all those resources to serious journalism about our city?
Stig – I reckon those journos would consider it beneath their dignity to just do local news but we sure as hell need a newspaper, if we need one at all, that does serious stuff about the place we live