Boxing Day for Journalism

In his annual plea to persuade more Australians to subscribe to his online news service, Stephen Mayne evokes a by

gone era when journalism wielded power and made money. This role, he says in his Christmas message to anyone who has ever looked at Crikey and inadvertently left their email address, “has been usurped by social media, clickbait, fake news, spin and the mindless pursuit of mass audiences.” So be it. Journalism is probably dead and the question that’s staring us in the face is what will replace it? But haven’t we always had clickbait, fake news and spin, swirling around the media like dirty laundry in a twin tub washing machine?

Television is entertainment, newspapers are walking dead and Stephen Mayne and his merry band of journos, who may well be making a last stand for independent trustworthy news making, can’t make a buck. They pitch to us like the Salvos. ‘Help these old deros get some clean pants.’ It’s sad, and unfortunately true in a post-truth kind of way.

Where will we go from here? Let’s think about it. Will we keep watching the suck-hole press gallery churning out PR for the major parties? Will we campaign to save Four Corners from the clueless ABC boss in the hope of getting more expose’s on juvenile justice? Will we urge our friends to support the Saturday Paper and the Monthly in the hope that they will one day become interesting enough to capture a real audience? The mass market has been blown up by the internet anyway, so now there isn’t a way to capture a full sized audience anymore unless you are a cooking show or a home renovation series. As our information economy evolves everyone will live in their own impenetrable bubble absorbing all the personally curated information they need to support their preferred lifestyle choices.

In the future, journalists will work for companies, organisations and politicians delivering their stories directly to their publics. It’s not the journalists who are a threatened but the media companies they presently work for. So in the future, more so then now, we’ll just have to take everything we read with a grain of salt.