It was announced yesterday that the Australian Associated Press (AAP) will close its doors on June 30th, as CEO Bruce Davidson conceded that people weren't willing to pay for that kind of quality journalism any more. Now some of this is because the internet has in fact stolen traditional print media's lunch but a great deal of the blame must surely be levelled at the AAP's three owners of Seven West Media, Nine Entertainment Co. and especially News Corp Australia, who have white anted and stripped the company.
I can not feel sorry for the business case of the AAP when the people who run it, are knaves and when one of those owners has been running an 88 year campaign to destroy public broadcasting and even went so far as to set up a political party to do it.
I do of course feel incredibly sorry for the employees who joined the organisation because they genuinely wanted to join the field of news wrangling and telling stories. For those people I say 'Vale!'; to management I merely tut.
This does however fit in with the general story of the news gathering and reportage business, which along with every business in the world, has changed very noticeably in my lifetime and especially in the last two decades.
I also feel anxious for the future of democracy in this country as yet another window of clarity, closes. Of course Seven West Media, Nine Entertainment Co. and News Corp have openly stated with this decision that they aren't prepared to keep that window open; which is actually almost self serving. Commercial news services were the vehicle upon which the public would buy media and which advertisers would buy the attention of the public. Commercial newspapers, radio and television was always paid for by advertising and really the general public only subsidised the physical production of the news.
One of the great promises that the internet held out for us beyond Eternal September was the ability to look up any piece of information at any time. In the 1950s and 1960s when everyone was madly imagining the future while it was still bright, this also included visions of super smart children learning at their own pace and everyone becoming scholars and scientists.
What actually happened was that even with the entire world of knowledge at our fingertips, the thing that people wanted the most information about was themselves and virtually nothing about how the world works. The showmen and the marketers took over the realms of information, politics, the news, and even the scholars and scientists have had to join in.
It seems that the only people who correctly imagined the future were Huxley and Orwell, except that we ended up in a world without the drugs and with Big Brother having the semi-ambivalent eye of capitalism that only cares if you have the ability to pay.
In the process of all of this, the task of going out and collecting the news, which was once subsidised by advertising, has withered and become anaemic. Once proud news organisations have now had to bow at the altar of the showmen and the news organisations which are owned by the public for the public good, are being burned and sacrificed upon that same altar along with every other public institution in some mass act of worship for the mighty dollar. All Hail!
What we didn't end up with was viable commerical news organisations and it seems that even the act of collecting the news, which is why they existed in the first place, is itself seemingly scorned by the showmen in charge. The promise of looking up information is impossible if nobody is out there to fossick for it.
Regional media organisations like Prime, WIN Television, NBN Television, Capital etc. now run several nightly news bulletins out of central offices. While they might collect sensational footage from the regions, they have very few boots on the ground.
The newspaper organisations like Fairfax, News, Consolidated Media Holdings, Seven West Media etc. also do not have boots on the ground. While they might have people who write for them on a freelance basis, they like the television stations, tend not to engage in on the ground journalism.
It is a little bit different in the world of radio, where you have very small staff who might be in a small town but even then, they don't have the resources to do on the ground journalism either.
To wit, I wouldn't exactly call Mosman rural or regional however¹, The Mosman Daily which used have a dedicated office on top of the newsagents' shop on Spit Junction, now operates out of Holt St in Surry Hills like the rest of News' local media. The Mosman Daily which once upon a time would send someone to sit in on council meetings, has not done so in more than a decade according to my friend who works for the council. Anything that is reported on that front, is either cadged from the minutes from the meeting or is fed to the newspaper by interested and biased parties. If not even doing journalism in Mosman is sustainable, then what hope is there for a region where it might take several hours to get anywhere.
The suggestion that because we now live in a world of constant media, that we also live in a world of increased journalism, is functionally a nonsense. While there is in fact a role for citizen journalism, the actual ability of regular citizens to go out and do journalism is virtually non existent.
It takes time and effort to sit through boring council meetings, court cases, read through transcripts, or even visit places where news is breaking. Just because everyone has smart phones and cameras everywhere does not mean that they have the time to be able to record, contextualise, and report on the world around them. I for instance am not a journalist but a blogger/diarist and while I might write reasonably long opinion pieces, they aren't exactly reportage of the news². It is only on exceptional circumstances that I engage in actual journalism and only because I happened to be witness to a thing either by being there or because some genuine media outlet had boots on the ground.
The truth is that it takes both time and effort to sit through news as it is happening, then more time and effort to wrangle the words/images/audio/video to be able to report it. It takes time to hack out a thousand words; it takes time to spell check and subedit them; it takes time and effort to reread them to make sure that they make sense. It takes still more time and effort to make sure that the things which have been said are true and verifiable. I have no idea how this is even possible if news desks have been obliterated and they run on a tiny fraction of the staff that they used to. Far too often, the function of fact checking what you intend to publish has been thrown aside.
As a result, I know that although I have a broad knowledge of a lot of stuff, I also know that I know little more than diddly-squat about practically everything. I know that I know practically nothing about how the world works and more importantly practically nothing about how politics actually works because I am simply not being told. I suspect that those who see the price of everything and the value of nothing, rather like it that way. It makes sense to keep the general population as dumb as a post because that way, they are compliant and will believe anything. It doesn't take a great con-man to con stupid people.
¹North Sydney is a rural area as evidenced by the grants for North Sydney Pool.
²They are of better quality than the opinion pieces in both the Daily Telegraph and the Australian, if the Keirnsey-Mech reading... is any indication.
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