Abstract
Journalism in the midst of a profound structural adjustment. In the last decade digital technology has disrupted print journalism, requiring journalists to rethink how they deliver content to audiences. But disruption has not altered the central mission of the profession. This article considers key trends, including the rise of the reader, the rolling news cycle, the impact of rolling news on the quality of journalism being produced, and the consequences of these changes for political discussion. The article ends with some observations intended for journalists just entering the profession.
Keywords
Talking about ‘then and now’ is always a trap, and a fiendish one in these challenging days when Australian journalism is buffeted by profound structural change. Nostalgia dictates that things were always so much better in the olden days when we had certainty.
It is all right—you can relax. I have no intention of boring you senseless with syrupy sentiment in this article. I am confident I missed journalism’s golden age—if there was in fact a golden age. But I do want to start with a personal counterpoint, because it helps me sift through how things have changed in the almost 20 years I have been hacking away in the parliamentary press gallery in Canberra.
In January 1996, I showed up at the Senate entrance of parliament house, waiting to be signed in by my new colleagues at the Australian Financial Review (AFR). I was then in my mid-twenties. I had had an accidental first career thrust upon me by the recession in the early 1990s—I had been a public servant since my exit from university because I had been lucky enough to get a graduate cadetship at a time when it was very hard to get a job.
Between 1992 and 1996 (with a year off wandering the world), I worked in three government departments: industrial relations, the environment, and communications and the arts. As a consequence, I knew about policy—how proposals tracked up through departments and over to parliament house and back again. I had been a very junior sausage maker, attached to some very experienced and connected bosses. And as a consequence of the sort of work I did, I knew ministerial staff, a number of bureaucrats and some press gallery folk. That was my value to the AFR: knowing something of the working of government from the inside.
These days, when young reporters wait, full of anticipation, at the Senate entrance for their colleagues to sign them in for their first day on the Canberra beat, they have been selected for different reasons. Knowing something of the territory still matters, it is still desirable self-evidently—but proven capacity in the rigours of the 24/7 news cycle, and digital fluency probably, matters more, at least in the mainstream press.
The AFR might still hire the odd person like me, but I suspect I would struggle to get in the door anywhere else. I was a lateral hire, a risk. I knew what I knew, but I needed to be taught on the job how to be a journalist. Canberra political reporting is one of the most competitive and relentless environments in Australian journalism. The cycle never sleeps. These days we are too busy for risks, or for intense on-the-job incubation.
When I walked in to the parliamentary press gallery in January 1996, I walked into a corridor populated by big newspaper bureaus and big television and radio bureaus.
There was bustle, but it was an orderly sort of business. We worked hard, or we thought we did. Down the newspaper end of the corridor, we filed several stories a day in a great rush in the evening. Our job was not to record the moment, it was to throw forward. We were concerned with tomorrow’s news, not today’s. We were print, and proudly so, writers.
There was no rolling news cycle, apart from the wire services and the hard-working radio journalists, who filed every hour. We were not podcasters, bloggers, photographers, television talking heads, live radio talent, tweeters, Facebookers, Instagramers or Periscopers.
At least we were not until the great disruption, and by the great disruption, I mean, of course, the arrival of the Internet. Digital, when it arrived, smashed all the old, long-cherished demarcations. The era of specialization was behind us.
Nobody asked us whether or not we wanted this to happen, it just happened, and we had to adjust. Some of us did not get the chance to adjust—successive redundancy rounds loomed grimly alongside our brave new world.
So, I had 10 years of being just one thing.
My next 10 years in political journalism was a decade of constant transition, which has completely revolutionized the way I do things. While the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of what I do is a world away from the comparative calm of 1996, the journalistic mission has remained constant, and the values underpinning my practice have become more important than ever.
In this article, I would like to share some of the changes of this period, and consider their impact on my journalism.
Active Readers and Established Beats
The most significant change over my decade in transition has been the rise of the reader. At the start of my career, I was a print journalist. I wrote for a newspaper. Readers were important but distant. They were on the letters page. There was my dentist, who took great delight in informing his receptionist that this woman who was about to be liberated from her wisdom teeth ‘worked at the Financial Review’. There was the odd person at a party. There were the regular letter writers, often elderly, sometimes abusive.
I am no longer a print journalist. Technology has pushed me into another professional form—a digital form. That same technology has brought readers much closer.
They talk to me, and each other, at length in the comments thread under the live blog I write when federal parliament sits. They are in my inbox 24/7, with tips, bouquets and brickbats. They want to follow me in Instagram and Facebook, and they talk to me on Twitter. They give me instant feedback when I am on Insiders on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), or on the radio, or Sky News. The reader is now right beside me, because technology connects us all, and makes everyone a micro-publisher.
The American journalism academic Rosen (2006) calls modern news consumers ‘the people formerly known as the audience’. He likens them to passengers on a ship who have decamped in order to build a boat of their own.
The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about. Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak—to the world, as it were. (Rosen, 2006)
Katharine Viner, launch editor of Guardian Australia, and now the editor-in-chief of our global operation, explains the change thus:
Digital is not about putting up your story on the web. It’s about a fundamental redrawing of journalists’ relationship with our audience, how we think about our readers, our perception of our role in society, our status. We are no longer the all-seeing all-knowing journalists, delivering words from on high for readers to take in, passively, save perhaps an occasional letter to the editor. Digital has wrecked those hierarchies almost overnight, creating a more levelled world, where responses can be instant, where some readers will almost certainly know more about a particular subject than the journalist. (Viner, 2013)
To people outside contemporary journalism, noting this change might seem a simple cultural curiosity. But as Viner and Rosen correctly assert, operationally, this is a major structural shift.
Once journalists could get away with ‘voice of God’ journalism—preaching to an audience with confected certainties. It was a fiction so absurd it could only be sustained in an era when the readers did not actually talk back. Once readers gained equality with the folks paid to put down the first draft of history, once they gained the option to micro-publish and share their interventions, the jig was well and truly up. Our tone had to shift. Journalists, readers and viewers will be delighted to know, have had humility thrust upon us. Not all of us, mind you. But some of us, certainly.
From my own perspective, the rise of the reader is a welcome development. At its best, the new environment is more democratic, more vibrant, more interesting, more stimulating and more honest, both for the journalist and for the reader.
I have pushed the engagement philosophy in my own practice. I make it a priority to speak to readers ‘below the line’—in the comments threads under my live politics blog or my Dispatches column. I also engage with readers on social media.
I think all contemporary journalists should approach readers as equal participants in the national discourse.
Not just say that. Mean it.
But the equality philosophy presents the working journalists with an interesting conundrum. If we are no longer asserting our privileged status, can we still assert the value of our specialist knowledge?
I believe we can.
And the reason we can is because Canberra remains an important bedrock of ‘beat’ journalism. In my view, the journalistic beat is the heart of who we are, and what we do. Technology may have transformed print and broadcast specialists into vaguely harried multitaskers, but technology has not changed the mission. The journalistic mission remains at its simplest: know your patch, and use your knowledge to try and tell readers what is actually going on.
As former The Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon—creator of TV shows like The Wire and Treme—says on the subject of beat journalism:
The reason I am able to tell you this story is not because I am now an amateur or because I have a blog. It is, above all, because a news organization paid me for years on end to cover the same approximate beat on a full-time basis. I did it for 50 or 60 hours a week because The Baltimore Sun had a sufficient revenue stream to pay me a living wage and benefits so that I could take a mortgage and raise a family and show up to do the work on a daily basis. (Simon, 2012)
As the industry contracts, it is beat journalism that finds itself most under threat. It is hard to maintain a rounds structure or a beat structure when the newsroom is shrinking, and there are more platforms to service in any given 24 hours. As a devotee of the beat, I have a rakish pride in Canberra’s capacity to roll on relentlessly in flagrant opposition to an industry trend, which, on my analysis, is our most troubling form of iterative extinction.
By rolling on, I mean this: we show up. We get to know the protagonists. We watch the cycles of politics, long enough to see them repeat. We outlast the various ministerial staff and often the ministers who periodically vow to extract terrible career-ending revenge because something undesirable has been written. As one of the press gallery’s leading lights, Laura Tingle, noted to the social services minister Scott Morrison at a National Press Club event in February 2015: ‘I plan to be here long after I’ve seen you off.’ Morrison’s response to that light-hearted provocation? ‘Wonderful.’ Tingle’s response to that: ‘I thought you’d be pleased’ (Tingle, 2015).
We do acquire expert knowledge. But in order to continue to say that, we need to be worthy of trust.
Trust requires honesty. It requires some collective self-knowledge. Here is my personal contribution to that collective requirement. We political journalists do not always get things right. We sometimes produce race call commentary and gotcha rubbish that is not worth the reader’s time. We can lapse into herd instincts. Some of us are capable of abuses of power. We can also be captured by the protagonists, which might work for them, but does not work for the reader.
Remaining independent for a political journalist is a conscious choice. You have to want to be independent, even if it means you are off the Christmas card list, or the prime minister’s office ‘accidentally on purpose’ forgets to brief you when they have briefed 10 other colleagues. You can miss stories when you refuse to act as someone’s drop box. Missing stories is generally frowned upon by the bosses in our line of work, so politicians and their operatives use the baseline anxiety to try and herd cats, or they use information in calculated ways—briefing a person they want to advance, blocking a person they do not approve of. It is quite funny at one level, the pettiness of it. Sometimes the kindergarten tactics work, sometimes they do not. Asserting independence requires a certain clarity of mission: ‘I write for readers, I don’t write to amplify your agenda, or to impress someone.’
As a journalist who goes looking for audience feedback, I hear rather a lot of it. I hear how deficient I am, or how deficient the parliamentary press gallery is. I hear how the gallery makes things up, how various journalists are undeclared cyphers for various politicians. I get told I am an idiot for writing that Tony Abbott is intelligent, or that I have a corrosive bias against Bill Shorten.
The feedback about my own work and my profession is incredibly willing.
Practising political journalism in 2015, if you are pushing out to readers rather than standing back convinced you know better, is a bit like being a surgeon performing a delicate operation while a small crowd gathers to tell you how you should be cutting, or stitching, or clamping.
As I have already noted, some of the criticism about gallery reporting is entirely justified. But I do periodically consume criticism of the press gallery that is about as shallow and uninformed as the worst of our work.
The gallery is regularly said to be monolithic. We are not. My corridor in 2015 is populated by a diverse group of journalists working at different levels with different personal aspirations. Some of us work for good bosses who prize the integrity of the work above all else. Some of us do not.
Some of the shallow critiques readily traverse the what, but never pause to ask why. Fact is we are working in challenging conditions: the most challenging conditions that I have yet experienced. The rolling news cycle creates conditions where small things can gain disproportionate coverage (more of this shortly). This is a very broad generalization, but it think it holds—we have gone from the placid news cycle I started in, which served to amplify the messages of politicians in largely orderly and linear fashion—to a cycle of constant cross-current, contention and disruption. It can be hard to keep your feet, your nerve and your clarity in such conditions. (More of that shortly too, a phenomenon which also affects politics, not just journalists).
To summarize the arguments: Canberra is a journalistic beat, and mastery of the beat remains the essence of daily journalism. But to continue to assert that right, we need to be accurate, we need to be trustworthy and we need to listen to voices and perspectives other than our own. Listen. Yes, really.
Capturing the reader’s trust is central to our mission. In my view, it is the most important thing we now do, and the way we do it is by reaching out, explaining and building community.
There are no shortcuts.
The Importance of the Audience and the Lure of the ‘New’
The rise of the Internet and the proximity of the audience have increased the intensity of everything in our professional world. We have entered a fully connected life, which both enriches and punishes its inhabitants.
Audiences want their news now. They do not want to wait for us to think for several more hours before bringing them up to speed; they want it in real time.
Our analytical audience measurement tools tell us with brutal precision what audiences are reading, how long they read it for and how much they have shared it.
Keeping audiences engaged has become an existential challenge for daily commercial media journalism. With readers, we can generate revenue, and live. If they desert us, we die.
I have already indicated that the digital news cycle requires a completely different approach than print. Our working day begins much earlier, and often wraps up late. We do not just write anymore, we talk on video, we podcast, we blog, we live stream and we meme.
We have had to will our minds to work faster, to not only chase new facts but to provide clarity and context in the moment, because that is the expectation of the audience.
The rolling news cycle is a hungry beast, and its fuel is the ‘new’.
The print cycle of two decades ago imposed a simple discipline. ‘New’ was not enough to make the cut. The development had to be both new and important.
If it was new and important, it would appear on page one or page three or page five—still important 24 hours after it happened. The important made it to the top of the list, and the intra-day static fell away to three paragraphs at the bottom of the story, or to the cutting room floor.
I am not meaning to imply the old print cycle saved readers from inaccuracies or defamations or distortions or poor judgements—it did not, of course. But scarcity did impose a discipline that is fast becoming an anachronism. It is not uncommon to see a story running prominently on a news website that would not have made the paper 20 years ago—simply because it is new, not because we really need to know. Good news organizations still apply the old judgement matrix, a story must be both new and important to be displayed prominently. But these values are not always applied universally.
From my perspective, the consequential professional response to the rise of the reader should be to deliver better, richer, more informed and more collaborative journalism, because there are ample opportunities to do just that. Our collective ambition should not be to dish up breaking fluff with an over-egged headline in the desperate hope that audiences will fail to grasp the difference.
But this sort of integrity can be hard to assert. It requires editorial leaders to keep their heads and their feet in a maelstrom. It requires reporters to say no when they are asked to produce or chase material devoid of value, and offer up smarter ways of coming at the content.
In short, prioritizing quality over disposability requires experience, guts and a steady hand, and it requires the professional will to make the web serve rather than allowing the thready impulses of the web or the bandwagon culture of social media to enslave the journalism. It is very easy for breaking canapés, or breaking gossip, or breaking half facts to shoot to the top of Google news alerts, or start trending on social media, which generates entirely rational pressure for news websites to jump on board and chase those clicks.
The Impact of Our Structural Transition on Politics
Politicians and journalists are adversaries, but there is a symbiosis between the tribes as well. We both operate in a world where public validation powers our mandate.
To put this more starkly, we both rise and fall at the whim of our audiences. When journalism sped up—when the rolling networks entered the fray, when newspapers became 24-hour digital operations—politics accelerated also. Politicians and political journalists have moved in lockstep from brisk walk to sprint.
As quickly as the media creates new platforms or modes of communication, politicians stretch to fill them, and stretching to fill them has consequences for the quality and efficacy of their communications.
Politics can tame the echo chamber. It is possible to climb on a Jet Ski and ride the choppiness in advantageous ways. But the cycle does make governing increasingly difficult.
Politics in most liberal democracies is increasingly at war with an accelerating and fragmenting news cycle that in short order renders everything more disposable and forgettable and obsolescent, whether it is profound or whether it is trivial. The current fragmentation and the rolling bandwagon culture of the online world and social media also works against the interests of activist governments with any reform ambition.
Former New York mayor and media owner Michael Bloomberg spoke about the culture of the instant referendum in an interview with The New Yorker in 2013. ‘Modern technology is making it very difficult to govern,’ Bloomberg said. He added:
This is going to be one of the big problems down the road. Traditionally, we’ve elected somebody to a term and they have that term to do things and then explain why it’s the right thing to do, and to prove it’s the right thing to do before they have to face the voters again. We’re going into a world where there’s an instant referendum on everything before it even starts. And I think that’s going to change how decisions are made in government for the worse. (Auleta, 2013)
I do not have any particular answers on this question, and ultimately, it is up to politics to make its own transition—but the phenomenon is something we need to note in any snapshot of political journalism in the here and now.
Our structural adjustment is not only professionally interesting but also consequential for the national affairs discourse. Disruption has been visited on us, and, as a consequence, politics is feeling the northerlies too.
Some Thoughts for Young Journalists
I want to end this article by looping back to the beginning. I entered political journalism in my mid-twenties as a lateral hire. As I noted in the opening, I am entirely confident I would not get a job now.
In 1996, I walked into a fully staffed Canberra bureau where senior correspondents had time to mentor my transition from public servant to journalist. I owe my career to a handful of people who worked very intensively with me to make sure I made that transition successfully. Now senior correspondents in Canberra, and news editors, have less time. There is no less will, no less professional generosity, but there is less time. Bureaus are smaller than they were a decade ago, and the demands on their denizens are exponentially greater.
Now there is a tendency to bring in new recruits with a proven track record in metropolitan newsrooms, and there is an expectation that everyone will do a bit of everything, not specialize in a particular journalistic skill set. Part of what employers are looking for is energy and acumen: surviving the rigours of Canberra’s highly competitive breaking news culture requires a significant capacity for hard work, and it requires having the skills and networks to promote your own work.
Getting the work out there is now a collective exercise, not a contribution made externally by newsagents and other distributors. Dealing your work into the digital conversation is an important requirement of contemporary journalism.
Young reporters seeking to come to Canberra for a long time or for a short time are walking into a more chaotic and demanding and uncertain and contested professional world than the one I entered. But it is a richer ecosystem in almost every respect.
It is a more diverse world. The digital revolution has opened the field for new players. The young reporters formerly known as print journalists do not now just have to wonder whether they will work for News Corporation or for Fairfax Media. They can now also contemplate working for Guardian Australia, or Crikey, or BuzzFeed, or Junkee, or for the Huffington Post, or for the online sites of the ABC and Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). The offering is more vibrant than it was a decade ago—and that is before we get to the blogs and specialist publications—but of course, it is no utopia. Well-paid secure jobs are very hard to find, and the future of commercial media remains uncertain.
News organizations have distinct editorial voices, and presentational styles, meaning there is no one size fits all. The nascent diversity means young reporters need to have digital skills, social media fluency and a flexible attitude—and I think reporters who understand and embrace a reader-centred philosophy will put themselves philosophically where they need to be in order to prosper in their chosen vocation.
While young reporters need new skills, the advice I got from my mentors 20 years ago remains constant. Get your facts straight, and if you do not have your facts straight, do not rush to publish them.
The digital world can sanction the corrosive ‘never wrong for long’ philosophy, but while the technology allows rapid resetting in the event of error, adopt a blasé attitude at your peril. If contemporary journalism demands that the reporter cultivate their personal brand, and enter a contract with an active reader where trust is central to the sharing and the conversation, then accuracy is actually more important now than it has ever been.
I do a great deal of live work at Guardian Australia, which exposes me to the constant risk of error, overstatement and cock-up. I am periodically guilty of all of these sins. But I am also clear in my approach, having presided over a live blog for several years—I would rather be running just behind the action with reliable content than just ahead of the action with speculative or unreliable content.
Older reporters always have a tendency to say this to younger reporters, but it is right in the main. The second piece of advice, apart from get it right, is watch and learn before you give the readers the benefit of your wisdom.
The cycle is hungry for content, and for opinion, the more outrageous the better. The best thing that ever happened to me as a reporter was being encouraged by my mentors to listen and watch and learn and serve a careful apprenticeship before I wandered into analytical territory. The views I would have been delighted to express to anyone who would listen during my first 10 years on the job would really not have been worth listening to, so I am very glad I did not have the opportunity to share them.
Political reporting in 2015 requires tenacity, at times it requires courage, it requires nuance—a vastly underrated attribute in our ‘shouty’ world—it requires the capacity to keep your feet, both with the new material that thrusts itself to you 24/7, and with the political class who are always intent on cajoling, hectoring or, otherwise, persuading you to accept the rightness and inherent virtue of their various propositions.
It requires a deep scepticism, which should never be confused with a deep cynicism. As Oscar Wilde once observed, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
My vocation requires you to play a long game, even if you only inhabit the hot house for a short time.
But what it requires now, 20 years ago, 20 years from now, is truth seekers.
It does not matter what platform we produce on, whether the demands are many or few, whether there is certainty, the illusion of certainty, or no certainty at all—the vocation is constant.
It requires a deep-seated desire to serve the public by speaking truth to power.