NEWSPAPERS in Australia are at the
most important crossroads in their 209-year history. This year they are
attempting to convince the public that their best journalism is worth
paying for in new ways. If they fail this challenge, there will be
newspaper deaths and our democracy will be weakened.
The internet is drying up the traditional newspaper income streams
of printed classified advertising and cover sales. Now the newspapers
are asking their customers to pay a price through website paywalls or
tablet subscriptions. But the public has become accustomed to getting
news free on the net, either through their newspaper websites or other
sites which cherry-pick news from local and other sources.
Most
newspapers have tried to make their websites more box-office by
highlighting entertainment, celebrity, fashion, sex, sport and other
subjects more likely to get the tech-savvy younger generations clicking.
When
newspapers faced their last big challenge - the introduction of
television - the response from the better papers was to reinvent and
reinvigorate themselves with better quality, more explanatory
journalism, more background and more commentary, more opinion and more
campaigning. These were the things that television could not provide.
The result was that 15 years after the introduction of television, the
circulation of the major metropolitan newspaper in Melbourne, for
instance, was at record levels with 1.5 million papers sold on average
each day Monday to Saturday, a penetration of one paper per two
citizens. Today the penetration is one paper per seven citizens.
The response by newspapers to the challenge from the internet seems
at the polar opposite. Newspapers are scaling back their editorial
resources and seem to be trying to imitate the internet rather than
playing to their own strengths.
Are they damaging their brands
and missing the key point of difference between newspapers and the rest
of the media? In marketing terms, are they ignoring their unique selling
proposition (USP)? The answer to this question may well decide the
future of newspapers.
The USP of our big newspapers is the 200 or
300 sets of eyes and ears trained on our communities, our institutions,
politicians, public servants, business people and crooks. No other
media outlets come close to having this number of journalists keeping
watch on behalf of the public. A big city television newsroom might have
only a dozen or so reporters, a top-rating radio station maybe six.
Only the ABC comes close to having the same number of reporters as a
major newspaper and the national broadcaster must spread them very
thinly over a big continent, so in a capital city it has nothing like
the resources of a major newspaper.
Radio talkback presenters
admit they rely heavily on newspaper stories to generate their content.
Television news directors admit their starting point for planning their
day's news gathering is the morning papers. Most news sites on the web
"borrow" their material from newspapers.
Only the newspapers can
simultaneously have people watching our parliaments, councils, police,
courts, schools, universities, hospitals, transport systems, churches,
planning systems, defence forces and diplomats. Not to mention the dark
corners and underbellies where corruption and injustices cultivate.
Television,
radio and the internet can produce some terrific scoops, but only
newspapers have the resources to consistently expose things that are
rotten in all parts of our society. Exposing rotten things leads to
changes which improve society. The role of a newspaper may be to make
money, but the mission of great journalism is to improve society by
exposing corruption, injustice, lies, failures and hypocrisy. And
there's nothing wrong with a few jokes, puzzles and pictures to lighten
the load.
When a newspaper disappears, so does a sentry on our
democracy. When newspapers disappear they are gone forever; they never
come back. We are facing the depressing prospect that the public will
not realise the value of newspapers until they are gone; and then it
will be too late.
Newspapers must quickly convince the public
that they are providing something of great value, something worth
supporting in a philanthropic sense as well as in a news consumer sense.
In this way, it is a marketing challenge.
Newspapers need to
explain over and over how good journalism improves society. In the news
industry, there is nothing less interesting than yesterday's news. But
good marketing depends on constant repetition and reinforcement of the
message. The industry's responses to criticism of media standards and
accountability is defensive and pathetic. It is time for newspapers to
get on the front foot and explain themselves, the same thing they demand
from others in the public eye. And explaining themselves includes
making sure the public knows the good that comes from great journalism.
For
raw material, they could do worse than start with the work showcased in
Melbourne last Friday night at the presentation of the Melbourne Press
Club Quill Awards for Excellence and the Graham Perkin Australian
Journalist of the Year Award.
Here are a few examples of the
community benefit derived from some of the entries that received
winners' cheques or were highly commended.
Without the
persistence of The Australian's consumer editor Natasha Bita,
Australians may never have heard how the Fluvax vaccine could be doing
more harm than good for children, and more babies would have died.
Cameron Stewart of The Australian penetrated walls of secrecy to expose
life-threatening ineptitude and lies in Australia's navy shipbuilding
programs, exposures that triggered official investigations. And the
public debate about suicide, which kills more people than road deaths,
is now more open and honest after Kate Legge's reporting in The Weekend
Australian Magazine, stories which led the Australian Press Council to
establish new guidelines on the reporting of suicide.
The
Victorian government and Victoria Police would still be fudging crime
statistics to make them rosier had it not been for young Herald Sun
reporter Amelia Harris outing them. The Herald Sun also forced the
closing of a loophole that was allowing 50,000 drivers to dodge demerit
points on their licences each year. And Geoff Wilkinson in the same
paper forced the state government to review the parole system after
revealing that 11 people had been murdered by parole violators because
of flaws in the way Victorian parolees were monitored. And Victoria may
never have heard the 40-year-old secret of how hundreds of people were
exposed to dangerous chemicals at a Country Fire Authority training
ground if the Herald Sun's Ruth Lamperd had not had the institutional
support of a big newspaper to pursue the story for months.
Had it
not been for the very expensive investigative unit at The Age,
Victorians would never have known the seriousness of the vicious dispute
at the top of the Victoria Police or that a deputy commissioner was
having his phone tapped in a secret process initiated by his boss. Nor
would the Victorian government be clamping down on the crime and
immigration rackets in the prostitution industry. And nor would
executives at two companies affiliated with the Reserve Bank been
charged with offering bribes to get contracts in foreign countries or
that there was a cover-up of the allegations at top levels of the
Reserve. The Age also broke the story that forced the state government
to abandon plans to introduce mandatory minimum sentences of two years'
jail for 16 and 17-year-olds.
There were smaller but no less
important victories for the citizens affected. The Herald Sun
embarrassed the federal government into finding the $5 million needed by
the Australian War Memorial and abolishing the Gold Pass perk for
future MPs.
A campaign of more than 500 articles in the
Australian Financial Review has helped shareholders force more
accountability and change in the way public companies remunerate their
executives.
Local newspapers can also make a difference. A
campaign by Leader Community Newspapers forced the federal government to
reverse a decision to axe the carer's allowance for children suffering
Type 1 diabetes after they turned 10. Another Leader campaign led to a
shake-up and more government support for the animal rescue service
Wildlife Victoria.
And in the bush, The Weekly Times has raised
awareness and forced manufacturing changes and tougher workplace safety
rules by campaigning on the risks of all-terrain vehicles.
These
are just a few examples in one state. No doubt, the newspapers by now
have reported their own triumphs from the awards night, emphasising
their victories and giving scant acknowledgment to their opposition and
the industry in general. It will be another wasted opportunity to
explain to their readers why great journalism matters and why it is
worth paying for.
Michael Smith is a former
editor of The Age, and a committee member of the Melbourne Press Club,
which administers the Quills and the Graham Perkin awards
