Whither goest thou, media?

Margaret Simons

With all the problems facing traditional news media as we know it — the proliferation of media outlets, the decentralisation of power from the traditional strongholds of Packer-esque families, the advent of online content and the increase in citizen journalism — Finding Meaning in the Media might well have been considered a self-help session. Instead, Margaret Simons and vigorous chair Jeff Sparrow held forth on these issues in a most adroit fashion.

Change is natural in any context. But in relation to journalistic media, one of the most important changes has been what people want from it. No longer do people wait for the newspaper to be published; they can simply hop online and find out through Twitter or news websites. So does this mean that there is less demand for news content? Simons thinks not. In fact, ‘there is no evidence for a declining appetite for news.’ The figures for print are declining, but throw online content into the mix, and you get a better picture of the increased demand for news.

Newspapers, then, are declining in their ‘social purpose’. News media consumers should be wary of this breakdown, as this means that there will be fewer professional brokers of information, whether it’s simple reporting or more involved investigative journalism, In that case, where will we get our news from? The internet is the obvious place to look, with dissemination models ranging from single-person blogs to niche providers such as Crikey’s incredibly successful Eureka Report. Not only does this media revolution affect our news paradigms, says Simons, but also how we organise our societies.

What path then for young people just getting their journalistic shoes on? Simons, a tongue-in-cheek shill, suggested the new course she has put together at Swinburne University, which includes traditional elements such as writing skills and good old fashioned story-seeking research; but also elements that embrace the specificities of new media spaces, including how to facilitate community and using social networking platforms. The most interesting thing to come out of Simons’s involvement with Swinburne is, to my mind, the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, which investigates new models of journalism. One such model is a direct journalist-audience relationship, where a journalist can list their areas of interest or loose pitches and audiences can fund articles of interest, similar to Etsy’s successful Alchemy marketplace or the Kickstarter artist funding program.

Margaret’s book The Content Makers is due out in September through Penguin: probably a must-read for anyone who read more than the first line of this post.

Estelle Tang, 3000 BOOKS
Festival Blogger