Having absorbed your comments on the state of journalism, I’m turning the tables. What are YOU prepared to do to maintain quality, independent journalism?

I’ve included at the end of this entry two fascinating news stories of today on the topic – a story by the Herald‘s online editor Tom Burton about the Australian Financial Review’s attempt to charge for its online service and a searing broadside against 60 Minutes by its longest serving (now sacked) reporter Jeff McMullen.

The central question facing print journalism (remember print journalism through its journalistic resources still sets the news agenda for a parasitic TV news) is how to merge its hard copy and online elements of the paper. Web content is free, more immediate and because of the lack of space constraints, much more in-depth, allowing readers to pick and choose how far they want to explore a story. It is also more interactive, giving readers power in determining coverage.

But the online site of The Sydney Morning Herald and other papers is almost wholly reliant on the resources and profits of the hard-copy product. Surely people will gradually move to the online product, killing the profits which allow it to exist. I have some ideas on how to cross pollinate the hard copy and online versions but will save those for another day. The question is: are you, the engaged reader, prepared to pay for the quality news and analysis you expect?

I first started thinking about this when speculation began that the new ABC management would dismember Radio National. RN provides product available nowhere else on Australian TV, radio and increasingly, broadsheet newspapers. It is a minority taste and, while cheap (largely because radio journos are so committed they work for a song), does require intensive resources.

So would the listeners, if their service disintegrated, be prepared to pay for a subscriber-based alternative? It would involve buying an AM spot on the dial and, perhaps, leasing capability from the ABC online to create an online archive and internet radio. Say the current budget of RN is $5 million plus $5 million worth of general ABC resources used for free. So you’d need 100,000 subscribers to pay $100 a year each to need no advertising. As, in effect, “the owners” of a privatised RN, subscribers would have power to shape content, through feedback, criticisms, content provision and so on.

Would any of you be in it? In other words, do you value the ideals of quality journalism to such an extent that you’d put your money in your pocket for it?

Take smh.com online. Subscribers to the paper are, in effect, subsiding Australians round the country and the world who use the website for free. Would any of you in that position pay to see the Herald online? We have credibility, reputation, and journalistic resources to sell. Would you buy? Or if the basics remained free and specialised pages within it required subscription, would you do so? For example, how much would you pay, if anything, to access this web page? It’s cost is basically my salary plus the technical and back-up resources of the paper. Say no advertising was allowed on my page. The annual budget would be, say $450,000, allowing for a reasonable return on capital. Say about 5,000 people visited this site, about the same number as bought my book,. Would you be willing to pay $90 a year to subscribe? A big advantage, again, is that subscribers would “own” the site in a very direct way, and thus have enormous power to help shape its content. Subscribers would have confidence that the space is independent, because it would not be in the papers interests to compromise the site. I could even envisage a “contract” with subscribers, including guaranteed access to critique the site, and a transparent accountability system.

My guess is that the answer to these questions would be no. So what value does the public place on independent quality journalism?

This goes to Jeff McMullen’s outburst. He complains bitterly that 60 Minutes is a corrupted, substandard current affairs product. He admits that his attempt to work on improving quality from the inside has failed.

When it began, 60 Minutes had a strong investigative element, which resulted in the program, through reporters like Ray Martin, breaking important stories like Chelmsford. Investigative reporting is costly, and dangerous, because powerful interests can sue and otherwise pressure management. Now 60 Minutes is unashamedly based on interviews with celebrities hawking product and lightweight, cheque-book journalism which disobey basics on disclosure to its viewers.

As Media Watch pointed out recently, 60 Minutes defied public statements by its news and current affairs head honcho Peter Meakin, that Nine would not pay alleged criminals for interviews, by paying the former South African cricket captain Cronje for an exclusive interview. He is an alleged criminal. When money changes hands, it is often accompanied by unstated agreement on the interviewers approach? We know nothing of any of this, except that the interview was soft.

60 Minutes has compromised its edge, substituting strong, original, ethical work with celebrity reporters who earn celebrity pay for derivative, safe, cheap work.

I know nothing of McMullen except his work, first on ABC and then on 60 Minutes. His work strikes me as hard-nosed and professional. Like the outcry over Jana Wendt when she took a stand for good journalism, it is easy to say McMullen sold his soul for 16 years for big money and should not now complain. I strongly disagree. To me, Jana’s stand (I disclose I am a friend of Ms Wendt) showed exceptional courage for the very reason that commercial TV had made her a rich star. She had more to lose and she duly lost it. I see McMullen’s outburst as yet another indicator that senior journalists believe their profession is crumbling, and are prepared to take a public position on that sad state of affairs. His comments tally nicely with those of Eric Beecher in the Andrew Olle lecture (see yesterday’s Web posting to this page).

I do know the 60 Minutes executive producer John Westacott who sacked McMullen, having worked for him a decade ago when he was executive producer at A Current Affair (I was Jana’s political researcher for just under a year). As a result, I never found Frontline funny. It was just reality TV.

What struck me most about A Current Affair was its similarity with politics at its most base. Pollies want votes, TV wants viewers and ethics are to burn, if they are considered, let alone comprehended. Like some politicians, Westacott and co had a contemptuous attitude to viewers, seeing them objects whose red buttons needed to be pushed as often as possible.

The worst thing I saw was a story about a bloke who said he was forced to eat petfood because of a federal government decision to increase the price of prescription drugs (no matter that the policy had not yet come into effect). When I saw the raw tape I commented that such a poor bloke seemed to have a lot of clothes in his cupboard (this was cut). The camera, as you can imagine, drooled at the sight of this bloke eating LUV dog food. When the promotions for the story began appearing, a colleague on the show received a call form a doctor friend, who advised that this man was not poor but a little disturbed. My colleague immediately informed Westacott, who closed down and pressed on.

When the story appeared, our phones were blocked with outraged viewers. Didn’t we know that LUV was an expensive dogfood and that cans of backed beans were often cheaper? The audience blew Westacott’s cover. His response: to run the next night a story on how to cook nutritious food on the cheap.

The example that concerned me directly was an interview with then Industry Minister, John Button, which a producer cut in such a way that he appeared to answer a question Jana asked when in fact he was answering a different question. I was mortified and apologised profusely to Button’s adviser. The most depressing thing was that she wasn’t surprised or even that upset. The politicians expected no more.

So why do A Current Affair and 60 Minutes rate so well? Westie is right, not me, if you accept that people power reigns. Do people want good journalism or is it, as Eric Beecher says, now a charity case? If we journalists cleaned up our act, would our audience improve?

 

AFR GETS SERIOUS – IT’S GOING TO CHARGE

SMH 14/11/2000

By TOM BURTON

All eyes will be on Fairfax when next month it seeks to buck the industry trend and begins to charge for access to its Australian Financial Review Web site.

The move to charge for the bulk of the site will be keenly watched to see if the AFR site can make a success of what few have been able to do on the Web, build a business by charging for content.

Jupiter Research claims that in the US only six of the top 100 trafficked sites charge for content, “with several major sites abandoning the model, largely due to consumer reluctance, the prohibitive expense of customer acquisition and the viability of alternative business models”.

High profile sites such as online magazine Slate, The New York Times, Money Central and, more recently, the finance site The Street, have been forced to open up their sites as they struggled to make their content-subscription business work.

It galls many traditional publishers that the Web would seem to place no value on their content. But what these sites have had to learn the hard way is that with so much of the Internet free and consumers already paying for their ISP access there is fierce user resistance to paying for content. The US data suggests that, at best, one in four Web users will ever pay for content – mostly adult site users.

The lesson has been that this forces up the cost of acquiring customers by a factor of four to 10 times that of a free media site and makes the value proposition (ie, profitability) difficult to sustain.

The Wall Street Journal’s site is probably the best known of the subscription sites but, while it now has over 340,000 paying subscribers, it has left the field open to other sites, most notably London’s Financial Times.

The FT site has about six times the customer base of The Wall Street Journal and is undoubtedly the leading world financial portal, a position it owes much to the fact that the WSJ has steadfastly stuck to its subscription model.

In Australia the media companies have already lost out to the banks and the online brokers in the lucrative online finance sector. But to the extent the US experience is replicated, afr.com.au will fight to keep its current traffic levels, thereby further opening the market for other players.

Part of the assessment of how big an impact the change will have will depend on how much of the site remains free and how much is locked away as so-called premium content.

The difficulty is that much of the premium content which is to be offered is already available free on other finance sites.

Many finance sites have bought in services such as stock prices, charting, portfolio management and real time indices as lures to complement their transactional activities.

The new media finance sites also carry relatively comprehensive and updating news services, most often serviced by UK-based Reuters, which has aggressively moved into the space the local traditional media companies have been reluctant to compete in.

The local online subscription price has not been set yet but for offshore users it’s a healthy $140 for three months. This is high compared with the WSJ, which charges $US59 (about $113) for a year’s access.

Print subscribers get access to the afr.com.au premium areas for free, which suggests the motivation for the subscription policy is only in part a Web business objectives and something of an attempt to protect the print franchise.

Defending a print monopoly might make sense if there were evidence the Web was siphoning circulation away but as yet there is little evidence of print circulation being cannibalised by the Web. It is certainly true the traditional media outlets are having to adjust to yet another player on the block but the research suggests there is actually relatively small cross-over between the Web audience and the print audience.

The risk for Fairfax (publisher of this product) is that it gives the lucrative financial services online market away while defending a market position, which is not actually under threat, with a business model which so far has struggled to be viable.

It also has wider implications for Fairfax’s ambitions to expand into the financial services market place. Fairfax’s online arm, f2, has announced a financial services joint venture with Macquarie Bank. While the obvious strategy would be to drive strong traffic from afr.com.au site through to the financial services joint venture site, this becomes problematic if the AFR’s site traffic follows the US pattern and falls significantly.

One thing is for sure: if Fairfax can succeed where others have not and make its subscription strategy work then there will be many other media companies coming to Australia to find out how they did it.

Tom Burton is editor of smh.com.au and holds options and shares in Fairfax.

McMULLEN TAKES PARTING SHOT AT ‘CHEQUE-BOOK TABLOIDISM’

SMH 14/11/2000

By CYNTHIA BANHAM

The longest-serving reporter on 60 Minutes, Jeff McMullen, yesterday blamed his continual complaints about the show’s cheque-book journalism and tabloidism for the decision to sack him after 16 years.

McMullen, 52, blasted the program’s executives, saying the program had lost its way and surrendered “to sensationalism and overblown hype”.

He denied the announcement had come as a shock, saying it had followed “five or six” years of intense internal criticism of the program’s management style.

“I came in the glory years … and for the first decade had unquestionable respect and support of the public,” he said.

“My belief is that the drift of 60 Minutes is self-inflicted damage, my belief was to change quietly and vigorously and not to cut and run, so I’ve stayed and fought and never given in to things I’ve believed are unethical.”

McMullen said he had seen George Negus, Jana Wendt and Jennifer Byrne leave the program for more serious projects.

“At the time of their decisions I’d reason [with them] and argue ‘what makes you think you can create serious journalism elsewhere, you should stay and fight,'” he said.

He said the Nine Network and 60 Minutes was “generally becoming so addicted to seeing ratings – seeing ratings as the only measure of success or quality – and lost sight that it is credibility, truth and honour of the program that drive viewers to it in the beginning”.

McMullen’s departure follows that of 32-year-old Ellen Fanning, who quit 60 Minutes last month, 18 months after joining.

The program’s executive producer, Mr John Westacott, said the decision not to renew McMullen’s contract was his alone, and had nothing to do with ratings. He said the resignation of Fanning, which he “regretted”, had given him “food for thought”.

“It did make me think about the line-up,” he said, adding he thought it was “time to freshen up the look of the program”.

“When 60 Minutes first started our reporters were in their 30s, and they’ve grown with us but [we’ve] also collected new ones along the way.”

He described McMullen as a “consumate all-rounder”..

McMullen scoffed at suggestions he had got the chop because of his age.

“John Westacott, the executive producer, is in his 50s, and seems to be terrified of his advancing age … [this has] nothing to do with the age and lustre of the line-up. It’s more to deal with the rancour and mean-spiritedness of other people to which I objected.

“They do not want to accept the program is adrift, they’ve lost touch with the fundamentals of television journalism and they don’t want anyone to question it.

” I’ve questioned the cheque-book journalism, the tabloidism and quite frankly they’re tired of my objections.”

McMullen also accused the management of treating its staff with malice, referring to the sackings of cameraman Phil Donoghue and a sound editor, describing them as “absolutely shameful decisions”.