Katharine Murphy On Disruption

Greetings from the Australian National University, where Michelle Grattan is asking Katharine Murphy about her new book "On Disruption".

This is a short 121 page, A6 size pocket book, which is very readable. This is a bit Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, being in part a personal reflection on becoming a journalist and part on the nature of political discourse in the age of the Internet. It starts "It was the fag end of summer and I was decked out in a new linen threepiece suit from Sportscraft."

Michelle Grattan asked about the story of the week with Senator Leyonhjelm's comments about Sarah Hanson-Young. Katharine Murphy commented that women have decided not to accept such comments any more.

One question from the audience is where does the money come from. Katharine Murphy replied that The Guardian has a membership scheme, rather than a pay-wall. This is curious as in effect, the for-profit company takes donations like the pay-what you can Lentil as Anything
restaurant in Sydney.

The thesis of the book is that the Internet has "disrupted" journalism, in the same way Uber disrupted taxis. The problem is not knowing where all the information "washing around" the Internet came from "... perhaps someone in a basement in Moldavia".

What I find surprising is that journalists did not realize the Internet was going to disrupt  their business until it happened. Hopefully the academics in the audience are listening, as the Internet is coming to disrupt them.

Last month the "Father of the Internet", Vint Cerf, talked at the Australian National University in Canberra. Australia has had Internet access for thirty years, about ten years after the US development.

John McDuling IT Journalist of the Year

John McDuling from AFR Weekend was just announced as winner of the ACS Excellence in IT Journalism Award at the National Press Club in Canberra. 

Future of Journalism

Last night I attended "Has journalism a future" with presentations by

Caroline Fisher (University of Canberra), Stephen Matchett, (Campus Morning Mail), Matthew Ricketson (University of Canberra) and Lenore Taylor (Guardian Australia). This was at the new

Centre for China in the World, at the Australian National University in Canberra. The entertaining evening was chaired by Colin Steel, ANU Emeritus Fellow.

 

The new Centre for China in the World is so new, that the WiFi has not yet been installed, which is why I am posting this the next day. It also has a "new car" smell. ;-)

The first speaker said the good news was that the cost of production for news had reduced. However, there is a tendency for the new media to concentrate on that most ancient and popular form of news: gossip. The market for news is shrinking and the print media made the mistake of giving away their content free online while trying to survive on advertising. A few premium paid news services may survive, but most will not.

Many policy journalists now write for free for "The Conversation", with journalism becoming philanthropy, part funded by the state. But without real journalists chasing hard facts there will be less oversight of government.

The second speaker took exception with the fist speaker having a problem with taxpayers funded journalism, pointing to the work of the ABC.

It occurs to me that all the journalists speaking seemed to have the idea that journalism was a noble search for the truth, whereas in a business sense it is the job of the journalist just to fill up the spaces between the paid advertisements (which are the important parts of the publication). Perhaps James Marcus' book "Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut" should be required reading at journalism school. In this one of Amazon.com's early employees relates how they were hired to Amazon to write and edit book reviews. They saw their job as writing Amazon to write and edit independent and interesting book reviews, whereas Amazon saw them as helping sell books. Amazon worked out that a crowd-sourcing system which passed on recommendations from customers to other customers was more popular and more effective at selling books than professional reviews, at which point the journalist was out of a job. The same is likely to happen to almost all journalism jobs.



The result may well be a reduction in serious investigative journalism, if that turns out to be something readers do not value. As an example of this future, yesterday I was contacted by a TV news service asking about hacking of WiFi baby monitors over the Internet. When I checked I found recent stories about this, but also almost identical stories a year ago. I explained to the journalist that I did not think this was a real story, it was recycled from a year ago. The journalist explained their boss wanted a story and so there would be a story: they did not seem to be concerned as to if it was true or not. I declined to take part in a story which was pandering to parent's fears, with little  basis in fact.