Here’s a strange little story I picked up in Byron Bay on the weekend which makes me wonder whether there are is any lines between public service and private profit any more.
There’s a big new nightclub in the town called CMOOG, and it’s distributed a glossy magazine which announces that on New Year’s Eve “Triple J presents CMOOG’s genrebust. Welcome in the New Year with a musical mystery tour through all the genres of dance, featuring ….”
The Byron community will go troppo for its own reasons: It’s overwhelmed with tourists for New Year’s eve every year, doesn’t know how to cope, wants as little publicity as possible, and has had a community committee working on safety on the night for several years since a notorious NYE riot some years ago. Today the mayor and a councillor cried foul, foreshadowing a motion to council to ask Triple J to pull out because the promotion breaches its gazetted NYE ‘crime prevention plan’.
I’m more interested in the Triple J’s commercial role in all this. When the story broke this morning, the club’s financier, one Simon Page, immediately threatened legal action. He’s threatening to sue the council for $150,000 in damages if Triple J pulled out, being the lost value of advertising and promotion which the club would have extracted had it done the gig. His grounds: Triple J surveys showed a majority of young people list Byron Bay as their ultimate destination and the Triple J cache would mean they’d come to the club when they came to Byron.
That means that a nightclub run for private profit will get a significant economic benefit via the reputation and crowd-pulling capacity of the Triple J brand.
The ABC Charter bans it advertising private product/services, but what about the private sector profiting from the ABC brand? My first thought was – what does Triple J get out of it? And since the nightclub is effectively claiming the endorsement of Triple J for its club – and using it as it’s big NYE attraction – what steps has Triple J taken to ensure the club is an OK place to go to?
I spoke to Triple J program manager Linda Bracken late today. She said the club hadn’t even signed a contract with Triple J yet. She said that despite what I’d read as the clear message of the magazine that Triple J would be there on NYE with bells on, what was planned was something much lower key. A techie person would attend to feed the music through, and that’s all, which is why Triple J thought increased crowds wouldn’t be a problem.
She also said Triple J had not given permission for its logo to be used by the club, and that if permission was given in the future, it would be on the basis that the artwork was vetted by Triple J before publication to ensure it wasn’t connected with commercial sponsorships. Which raises the question: Does Triple J insist on any quality control over the uses to which its (ie the taxpayer’s) brand is put? And if the use of its logo is unauthorised, and the advertising pitch misleads Triple J’s fans, what will Triple J to do about it? Does it give a damn anyway?
Ms Bracken didn’t say whether Triple J would get monetary gain from the arrangement – if it went ahead – but did say Triple J’s motivation was to showcase Byron Bay and Sydney DJ talent on NYE. “If we’re not welcome there, we won’t go,” she said.
Why should a for-profit company profit from its association with an ABC radio station? On the other hand, why on earth would Triple J do this unless it got a fee for selling its brand for advertising and promotion? Surely the ABC wouldn’t allow its brand to be used for private profit with nothing but potential downside for the brand if the product it’s advertising isn’t up to the mark?
I’ll try to speak to ABC corporate affairs and its legal department tomorrow. I’ve tried to contact Simon Page, but had to make do with an email which I’ll chase up tomorrow. On the face of it, there’s something weirdly blurred about all this. A nightclub sueing a local council for lost profit because it convinced a public broadcaster not to do something in the public interest is pretty darn strange.
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Last week the ABC’s Radio National program Night Club asked me on after a piece in The Age included me in a discussion on weblogs despite the fact that I’m not a weblogger. (The reporter did not contact me.) The weblog thing has been going a while in Australia but I know little of it except for a few political/war weblogs. I offended some weblog pioneers with a remark that Tim Blair got the scene going here. He didn’t. So today,Graham Freeman and Anthony Hicks set the record straight, as it should be – too many times the trailblazers of the next big thing get forgotten when others popularise it. By the way, the first weblog I noticed was that of pioneer Neale Talbot. His excellent weblog is at wrongwaygoback.
Graham Freeman
I was particularly intrigued to hear your version of the history of how weblogging in Australia: “The person who started the weblog scene in Australia is a right-wing warblogger called Tim Blair, and he sort of helped other people who wanted to get into it, left and right.”
Wrong.
Tim Blair happened to get in amongst the post-9/11 rush to rant about turning the Middle East into glass. He had his journalistic skills and some contacts (a big help), and consequently he happened to be in a position where he could plug it somewhere in a respectable print publication. He had something to say, he said it well, if perhaps a little disingenuous about it, and he was savvy about it. Fair enough.
However, to give him the credit for starting weblogging around here? Ha-ha! No. I don’t bloody think so.
It was I, along with Anthony Hicks, who started his a year before me in 1998, and a few others who ceased blogging even before the diminutive “blog” was coined. It wasn’t all hardboiled political opinionating, but we called them weblogs, and we knew what the term meant. Weblogging in Australia, as elsewhere, took off during 2000 as more and more people discovered the damned things, and a fair number of those, including mine, certainly had political content amongst the writing, even if they weren’t as one-note as some of the current favourites.
The truth is, I started thumping out near-daily instalments of uninformed opinionated dreck (and stuff about music) a good two years before Tim Blair discovered Blogspot. I don’t know why he’s still hanging around Blogspot rather than getting his own domain and the technical jiggery-pokery behind it into gear, as everyone else seems to be rapidly doing, as they realise that having “blogspot” in their address is tantamount to wearing a big sign around their torso saying “I Am A Crank!”.
Regarding your remark about the lack of gender balance in the blogging world in general, before mindless aggression became the flavour of the month again, weblogs were one of the most gender-balanced aspects of the internet, and still are. It’s just that a small but noisy segment that finds the format ideal for promulgating their simple and wrong ideas have gotten most of the attention in the past twelve months, and that of course is extraordinarily blokey.
Fortunately, as you’ve well realised, there’s also been a corresponding increase in the number of weblogs maintained by people who actually some idea of what they’re talking about.
Am I bitter? You bet. Having been somewhat of a pioneer with the bloody things, at least in the local scene, it’s been galling to have media drone after media drone send an email saying “can you talk?” and when I finally get around to responding, they’ve already filed the report, in the same samey samey fashion – usually along one of three things:
“Weblogs are radically changing the face of the media.”
“Weblogs aren’t radically changing the face of the media.”
“Weblogs are passe.”
So it goes. Even though I have a mild distaste for self-promotion, as I regard hyping up something as marginal as a weblog as a bit crass, my ego doesn’t agree and has demanded that I join the empty-headed “look at me!” brigade.
My main point is Australian weblogging certainly did not start with Tim Blair, he just happened to catch the wave that grew from the ripple that I helped to start.
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Anthony Hicks
I just wanted to set the record straight on the origins of weblogging in Australia. Actually Tim Blair came into the scene quite late (2001 according to his archives). When I started the Aussie Blogs webring in early 2000 I found around 70 Australian weblogs, many dating back to 1999. I started my blog back in March 1998, and the online diary/links/commentary form has been experimented in Australia since the beginning of the web, they just weren’t called weblogs.
I’ve seen this claim that Blair kicked off Australian weblogging a few times now, but only by journalists. I think it comes down to the fact that for journalists Blair’s blog is the first widely read Australian weblog they see, and therefore conclude his must be the first or most influential. Certainly for his topic area he is popular, but most certainly cannot be said to have “kicked weblogging off in Australia”.
Humbly, if anything, I have donated hundreds of hours of my time to hundreds of Australian webloggers since 1999 to help create a community and to help them get online and find other weblogs through the Aussie Blogs web ring (currently listing 320 sites – with more than 600 sites over its history), and I certainly do not claim to have kicked off blogging in Australia.