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.
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, From: The Australian,March 26, 2012
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