MORE than 18 months on from the Media Alliance’s Future of Journalism summit at the ABC’s Eugene Goossens Hall in Sydney, the tribes gathered once again yesterday for the Media140 conference to discuss journalism in the digital age.
Actually, there were probably more of the tribes there yesterday, this being aimed squarely at the Twitterati and bloggers and, at times, journalists seemed like something of a curiosity – put up on the stage for the amusement and at times ridicule of the people in the auditorium.
And from the reactions many of the people on the stage, about 50 per cent of them journalists, 50 per cent “new” media and, sadly, not enough straddling the two categories on our Venn diagram, the disconnect and lack of understanding between the two groups is as great as ever.
To be fair, many of the journalists are trying – for most, their core discipline isn’t technology. They’ve been schooled, and become experienced, in the key journalistic skills needed to find things out and express those things – in print or broadcast.
I’d be wrong to say the protocols of new media publishing were developed wholly outside journalism, because that’s simply not true, but to a large extent it is a new world being invented by people who have never been, or wanted to be, part of the tribe of journalists – with its mores, enthusiasms and taboos.
So to a lot of journalists the enormity of the changes happening are not really apparent and the profundity of what the other tribe is doing is only beginning to seep through slowly. Although it must be said, with the likes of Mark Scott, who is obviously open to experimenting with his tenure as ABC boss, to adapt to these new realities, the message is still getting through.
But there is, in “legacy” media, still this faintly patronising sense of curiosity about new media. Yesterday was all about Twitter, really, which is bringing with it a lot of changes but is still a platform – a tool – rather than a thing in itself.
On the part of the “new” media types there’s a fairly widespread misunderstanding of what journalism actually sets out to do and the skills and tasks involved in doing it properly.
I was most curious – and a little disappointed – after Chris Warren talked of the core journalistic ethics: respect for accuracy, respect for the Public’s Right to Know and respect for the rights of others, to hear the rest of the panel pooh-pooh this, talking of “contextualising” journalistic ethics and “the ethics of listening” which are empty words and really rather irrelevant.
Of course, Warren is my boss (disclosure) but his basic point, which is that certain base elements and requirements of the journalistic craft are “platform agnostic” is surely nothing more than good sense.
I was mesmerised by Laurel Papworth and her exhortation to journalists to “hand in your press cards” and join the rest of the world as it “co-authors the future of the human narrative” or some such – I don’t have a transcript handy. She made the point that, unlike in the past – history won’t be written by the winners, which is very true (I hope) but her words seemed to imply that she doesn’t really understand how much from the world and craft of journalism should be taken across into the new landscape of news to ensure that the “human narrative” is written well, accurately and elegantly.
On accuracy, there’s a smug assumption on the part of many new media people that journalists sit around in newsrooms making things up, writing obviously slanted stories, suppressing information and generally being corporate beasts dancing to the drum of the likes of Rupert Murdoch (and Caroline Overington didn’t do much to dispel this frankly).
Having spent more than 15 years in newsrooms here and in the UK I can honestly say that the people I saw busted a gut to get as many sources as they could to back their stories and were scrupulous about trying for balance (sometimes too scrupulous as certain stories don’t repay the “even-handed” approach – try balancing the climate change science argument, for example).
The “legacy media” hasn’t always covered itself in glory (see weapons of mass destruction, Pauline Hanson pics, Godwin Grech email, etc), but on the whole journalists jealously guard their professionalism.
Let’s not pooh-pooh this and let’s not be too quick to try and jettison these vital aspects of the journalistic craft as we race towards a new news landscape.
So that’s the quick reaction. A more considered piece with links, etc, follows after today’s proceedings.
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