Greg Jericho Lecture
Greg Jericho (who before being outed by The Australian blogged under the pseudonym Grog's Gamut) is a blogger who came to prominence during the 2010 federal election campaign for his critique of the Australian press gallery and their coverage of the election campaign. The head of the ABC, Mark Scott, mentioned in a speech that Jericho's criticisms of the election coverage had been mentioned in an ABC executive meeting. This lead to The Australian outing Jericho because it was in "the public interest"; which ultimately lead to him leaving the public service. Jericho is uniquely qualified to comment on the antagonistic relationship between bloggers and journalists, as well as offering a sharp critique of the many problems that plague political journalism is Australia.
This is an edited extract from a lecture he gave at the University of Canberra on the 10th of May 2012 entitled "Is The Internet Making Political Journalism Obsolete?"
I think the world of blogging is more akin to sort of academic work and actually literary critisism. When you're analysing a novel, or writing a review of a novel you don't ever feel the need to actually get in touch with the author and say "well what did you mean in this paragraph?" or "was this character really meant to be so limp?" You would just write that the character is limp and you would quote some passages from the novel to basically make your case. And that's a lot like what happens in political blogging. You will take a statement said by a politician, or some data and you will say that "this demonstrates x and y". Whereas with journalists there's this need where they feel that "we better ring them up and find out 'did you really mean to piss of the north shore when you said that the north shore weren't real people'" or something. And I think that is infuriates journalists who are really, perhaps, stuck in this construct that said "no, when we write something we have both sides of the coin and we present a final document", so to speak, where bloggers don't. They [bloggers] have this real sense that it is part of a discussion; part of a dialogue.
Where this dialogue aspect becomes important is on a thing like Twitter, which is all about discussion; it's all about dialigue. Every statement on Twitter is made with the view of there being a response; you know you're not just making it to nobody, you're making it to your followers. Journalists struggle with this because there isn't that final sense that they have when they post something on the web or on their news site or get published in the newspaper where it's fixed and unchangeable. Suddenly they come on to Twitter and they are confronted constantly with responses to something that they have said. And too often political journalists (I shouldn't say it's all political journalists but I think it's a majority), think that Twitter is filled with annoying people but it's something that I have to go through because there might be breaking news on there and so they need to be on Twitter to see this breaking news but they'll only follow politicians and other journalists. And if you look at who journalists follow on Twitter, 90% are other journalists and politicians and a few celebrities and news sites. And when you think about this in terms of how Twitter is used; you only view the tweets of people that you follow or people who are mentioning you in a tweet. Now if the only view of the regular people (non journalists) are if they are mentioning you in a tweet, generally you are only going to view them in a sort of adversarial way of criticising you. So too often with political journalists on Twitter there is this sense that "people are only really on Twitter to criticise me as a journalist" whereas they're not really. These people that happen to mention that "oh, I thought you're piece was biased", that's not what they're tweeting about all the time. It's just that they happen to have you read that, seen that you're on Twitter and are tweeting to you. But because that's the only tweet you see of them that's what you thing they are. And so you see this response is a constant stream of articles "people are nasty on Twitter", "people are abusive on Twitter", "Twitter's mean", "everyone on Twitter picks on us" from journalists.
Another response I see in response to the dialogue nature of Twitter and the social media from journalists is that they use Twitter for a couple of things. One is to improve their own brand and perhaps even their own news organisations brand but I think the personal brand becomes more important. And the other is to demonstrate that the journalists holds the neutral and thus correct and centred view of the debate. I note this especially from journalists who have come late to Twitter. They have come with a bit of a pre-conceived view that Twitter is full of cranks and they almost go on Twitter trying to find proof of this. A bit of a self fulfilling prophesy. A good example is Peter van Onselen who earlier this year in February, posted his column on Twitter saying "Disaster prone Julia Gillard living on borrowed time". A couple of hours he came back and Tweeted "The one eyed ALP supporters on Twitter are right silly me. The PM is doing a bang up job well done #oopsiadvocatedavotefortheALPin2010 #wakeup". This was written a couple of hours later in response to 16 tweets from 11 people. 5 of the tweets were actually just general musings that now the Australian has a paywall they no longer actually ready anything that Peter van Onselen wrote. So really there were basically only 10 tweets that were saying "you don't know what you're talking about" and they weren't abusive at all. It was hardly the biggest attack ever witnessed on Twitter. But it was enough for van Onselen to come out and say "you've got it wrong, I'm not biased I'm telling the truth because I once advocated for the ALP so no when I say something against the ALP you can't accuse me of bias because I'm in this middle". You've probably heard the phrase "High Broderism", which comes from the American journalist David Broder, which occurs when a journalists aim seems less concerned about being accurate or about reflecting what they actually think is happening and more about being seen to be neutral. This sense that I'm not going to praise something done by Julia Gillard because that might seem that I'm more on the left. If I do praise Julia Gillard the next article I'll praise Tony Abbott or I'll criticise Julia Gillard so when someone criticises me I can say "you didn't see what I wrote last week" It comes from 2006 when Broder wrote this opinion piece where he wrote: "Now, however, you can see the independence party forming -- on both sides of the aisle. They are mobilising to resist not only Bush but also the extremist elements in American society -- the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left and the doctrinaire religious extremists on the right who would convert their faith into a whipping post for their opponents. The center is beginning to fight back." And what he is really talking about is not actually the centre pushing out; it's trying to bring everything into that centre. And I see this a lot on Twitter by journalists, even journalists who I really admire. Laura Tingle tweeting in February in response to critasism of her column "apparently I have been body snatched by both the left and right of politics today. Which just leaves my hair on the insiders on Sunday", making a bit of a joke about it all. George Megalogenis recently has come to Twitter after resisting it for a very long time and unfortunately he then, after a good couple of months, decided to add to this unending number of articles on the lack of civil debate on Twitter and on the blogs when he wrote of "cyber bullies" on the left and the right and he cited Rupert Murdoch's wonderful tweet, quite approvingly where Rupert said "Tweeters who don't like particular newspapers don't have to buy them. Thousands of crappy blogs available". A sense that they're crappy, if you don't like what we're doing, go and do something that is "illegitimate" essentially. Megalogenis followed this up by writing "Twitter allows us to see how many followers you've got, so it is easy to ignore the no it all." Now I have no idea how your number of followers has got anything to do with whether your point is valid or not and I dislike this kind of view because it does seem to suggest that if you've got a lot of followers then obviously your point is valid, if you're only followed by 200 people then obviously you're just some crank. "Rupert is right about the blogs, those that don't like what we write should set up their own and see how they go". Thankfully George commented in his blog, and he is a very good journalist in that he does engage in his blog on The Australian's website where he clarifies "I wasn't talking down other blogs" which I kind of think he was, he says "that has never been my thing, I was just making the point that there is a certain online contributor who is not acting in the interests of my various employees and giving them free reign on our sites risks becoming a form of professional suicide.". Now I do agree with him to an extent, but again it's this view that if you're going to engage in discussion online whether its on Twitter or on blogs can you please operate by our centred "letters the the editor" type view where you have to supply your name and address or a phone number. Confirm to this centre view, don't stratify things and don't allow different voices to become heard unless they are operating through our centred construct.
I think for many journalists this lack of control and the destruction, I guess, of the old conditions and this stratification of the language and the discourse becomes too great for some. They are unable to cope with this, what I think is a widening gyre of social media, in which journalists words are taken and spun away from their hands. John Bergin the director of social media and digital news at Sky News, noted to me when I was chatting to him for my book, "journalists need to realise that when they put a story onto social media, or indeed if someone else does it form them, then it is immediately de-centred. They are not the final authoritative author and there is not one fixed meaning or one way to distill meaning from their work and it is going to be held up to scrutiny." He also suggested that social media and the dialogue nature of social media that "it's absolutely part and parcel to the future of journalism. The name Twitter or the name Facebook, as hard as it is to believe, once upon a time didn't exist and one day those web services will be defunct at well. But the underlying ethos that makes sense to use those sorts of technologies won't. This dialogue between the formally passive readers and the active journalist is never going to go away. It's going to be there whether we are still using Twitter or not." And he says "this is going to need a different set of skills from journalists" and this is where, I think, we get into whether or not political journalists are going to be obsolete because one of the things about social media is that not only does it connect readers with journalists it connects voters with politicians, the people about whom the journalists are writing. And the big thing that political journalists have now, that they hold up as their one thing, is access. They can pick up the phone and talk to a politician and get a quote and find out a story. But as social media grows we're going to have politicians who are going to get more comfortable with bypassing that and using social media as a primary means of getting the message out.
In future journalists are going to lose this power that they have with access, they will still have it as long as they've got the readership, but it's going to become less and less. And I think this is where, if we're going to talk about the future of journalism, is where it's going. It's going to be this case where reporting will take more or a dialectic nature. Where the story won't be finished when it's published; it will be altered, adjusted, explained, discussed. The author of the piece will still be crucial; just as on a blog the actual person who writes the blog is important. You go to a blog site where someone you know writes good things and there's a good discussion that flows from that. But I think in some ways it will be a bit like private computer designers who take a computer game and create a mod of it. In the computer game world that is nothing unusual, where as journalists are like "how dare you take my words and make something else with it, you should have just kept that on our media site", in the future I think that is going to be a bit more fluid; it's going to be a case where it is just this dialouge. And I think that journalists, and this is I guess my final point, journalists who triumph is this age (and we're in such a minute part of it, journalists only started using Twitter in 2009, that's 3 years ago. It's like looking at the news on the TV in 1959 and saying they could foresee a 24 hour news channel and all the news organisations we have now, they didn't even have 4 Corners at that stage, that was a dream. We are such a short way into where we are going to be, all I can see is that if you're going to try from whatever form it's going to be, you're going to have to be able to triumph in the dialouge. And it won't just be being a columnist that provokes outrage, it will be someone who provokes discussion. It will be someone who is comfortable and able and willing to engage in this discussion and realise its just part of the whole process of what being a political journalist is about.
This is an edited extract from a lecture he gave at the University of Canberra on the 10th of May 2012 entitled "Is The Internet Making Political Journalism Obsolete?"
I think the world of blogging is more akin to sort of academic work and actually literary critisism. When you're analysing a novel, or writing a review of a novel you don't ever feel the need to actually get in touch with the author and say "well what did you mean in this paragraph?" or "was this character really meant to be so limp?" You would just write that the character is limp and you would quote some passages from the novel to basically make your case. And that's a lot like what happens in political blogging. You will take a statement said by a politician, or some data and you will say that "this demonstrates x and y". Whereas with journalists there's this need where they feel that "we better ring them up and find out 'did you really mean to piss of the north shore when you said that the north shore weren't real people'" or something. And I think that is infuriates journalists who are really, perhaps, stuck in this construct that said "no, when we write something we have both sides of the coin and we present a final document", so to speak, where bloggers don't. They [bloggers] have this real sense that it is part of a discussion; part of a dialogue.
Where this dialogue aspect becomes important is on a thing like Twitter, which is all about discussion; it's all about dialigue. Every statement on Twitter is made with the view of there being a response; you know you're not just making it to nobody, you're making it to your followers. Journalists struggle with this because there isn't that final sense that they have when they post something on the web or on their news site or get published in the newspaper where it's fixed and unchangeable. Suddenly they come on to Twitter and they are confronted constantly with responses to something that they have said. And too often political journalists (I shouldn't say it's all political journalists but I think it's a majority), think that Twitter is filled with annoying people but it's something that I have to go through because there might be breaking news on there and so they need to be on Twitter to see this breaking news but they'll only follow politicians and other journalists. And if you look at who journalists follow on Twitter, 90% are other journalists and politicians and a few celebrities and news sites. And when you think about this in terms of how Twitter is used; you only view the tweets of people that you follow or people who are mentioning you in a tweet. Now if the only view of the regular people (non journalists) are if they are mentioning you in a tweet, generally you are only going to view them in a sort of adversarial way of criticising you. So too often with political journalists on Twitter there is this sense that "people are only really on Twitter to criticise me as a journalist" whereas they're not really. These people that happen to mention that "oh, I thought you're piece was biased", that's not what they're tweeting about all the time. It's just that they happen to have you read that, seen that you're on Twitter and are tweeting to you. But because that's the only tweet you see of them that's what you thing they are. And so you see this response is a constant stream of articles "people are nasty on Twitter", "people are abusive on Twitter", "Twitter's mean", "everyone on Twitter picks on us" from journalists.
Another response I see in response to the dialogue nature of Twitter and the social media from journalists is that they use Twitter for a couple of things. One is to improve their own brand and perhaps even their own news organisations brand but I think the personal brand becomes more important. And the other is to demonstrate that the journalists holds the neutral and thus correct and centred view of the debate. I note this especially from journalists who have come late to Twitter. They have come with a bit of a pre-conceived view that Twitter is full of cranks and they almost go on Twitter trying to find proof of this. A bit of a self fulfilling prophesy. A good example is Peter van Onselen who earlier this year in February, posted his column on Twitter saying "Disaster prone Julia Gillard living on borrowed time". A couple of hours he came back and Tweeted "The one eyed ALP supporters on Twitter are right silly me. The PM is doing a bang up job well done #oopsiadvocatedavotefortheALPin2010 #wakeup". This was written a couple of hours later in response to 16 tweets from 11 people. 5 of the tweets were actually just general musings that now the Australian has a paywall they no longer actually ready anything that Peter van Onselen wrote. So really there were basically only 10 tweets that were saying "you don't know what you're talking about" and they weren't abusive at all. It was hardly the biggest attack ever witnessed on Twitter. But it was enough for van Onselen to come out and say "you've got it wrong, I'm not biased I'm telling the truth because I once advocated for the ALP so no when I say something against the ALP you can't accuse me of bias because I'm in this middle". You've probably heard the phrase "High Broderism", which comes from the American journalist David Broder, which occurs when a journalists aim seems less concerned about being accurate or about reflecting what they actually think is happening and more about being seen to be neutral. This sense that I'm not going to praise something done by Julia Gillard because that might seem that I'm more on the left. If I do praise Julia Gillard the next article I'll praise Tony Abbott or I'll criticise Julia Gillard so when someone criticises me I can say "you didn't see what I wrote last week" It comes from 2006 when Broder wrote this opinion piece where he wrote: "Now, however, you can see the independence party forming -- on both sides of the aisle. They are mobilising to resist not only Bush but also the extremist elements in American society -- the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left and the doctrinaire religious extremists on the right who would convert their faith into a whipping post for their opponents. The center is beginning to fight back." And what he is really talking about is not actually the centre pushing out; it's trying to bring everything into that centre. And I see this a lot on Twitter by journalists, even journalists who I really admire. Laura Tingle tweeting in February in response to critasism of her column "apparently I have been body snatched by both the left and right of politics today. Which just leaves my hair on the insiders on Sunday", making a bit of a joke about it all. George Megalogenis recently has come to Twitter after resisting it for a very long time and unfortunately he then, after a good couple of months, decided to add to this unending number of articles on the lack of civil debate on Twitter and on the blogs when he wrote of "cyber bullies" on the left and the right and he cited Rupert Murdoch's wonderful tweet, quite approvingly where Rupert said "Tweeters who don't like particular newspapers don't have to buy them. Thousands of crappy blogs available". A sense that they're crappy, if you don't like what we're doing, go and do something that is "illegitimate" essentially. Megalogenis followed this up by writing "Twitter allows us to see how many followers you've got, so it is easy to ignore the no it all." Now I have no idea how your number of followers has got anything to do with whether your point is valid or not and I dislike this kind of view because it does seem to suggest that if you've got a lot of followers then obviously your point is valid, if you're only followed by 200 people then obviously you're just some crank. "Rupert is right about the blogs, those that don't like what we write should set up their own and see how they go". Thankfully George commented in his blog, and he is a very good journalist in that he does engage in his blog on The Australian's website where he clarifies "I wasn't talking down other blogs" which I kind of think he was, he says "that has never been my thing, I was just making the point that there is a certain online contributor who is not acting in the interests of my various employees and giving them free reign on our sites risks becoming a form of professional suicide.". Now I do agree with him to an extent, but again it's this view that if you're going to engage in discussion online whether its on Twitter or on blogs can you please operate by our centred "letters the the editor" type view where you have to supply your name and address or a phone number. Confirm to this centre view, don't stratify things and don't allow different voices to become heard unless they are operating through our centred construct.
I think for many journalists this lack of control and the destruction, I guess, of the old conditions and this stratification of the language and the discourse becomes too great for some. They are unable to cope with this, what I think is a widening gyre of social media, in which journalists words are taken and spun away from their hands. John Bergin the director of social media and digital news at Sky News, noted to me when I was chatting to him for my book, "journalists need to realise that when they put a story onto social media, or indeed if someone else does it form them, then it is immediately de-centred. They are not the final authoritative author and there is not one fixed meaning or one way to distill meaning from their work and it is going to be held up to scrutiny." He also suggested that social media and the dialogue nature of social media that "it's absolutely part and parcel to the future of journalism. The name Twitter or the name Facebook, as hard as it is to believe, once upon a time didn't exist and one day those web services will be defunct at well. But the underlying ethos that makes sense to use those sorts of technologies won't. This dialogue between the formally passive readers and the active journalist is never going to go away. It's going to be there whether we are still using Twitter or not." And he says "this is going to need a different set of skills from journalists" and this is where, I think, we get into whether or not political journalists are going to be obsolete because one of the things about social media is that not only does it connect readers with journalists it connects voters with politicians, the people about whom the journalists are writing. And the big thing that political journalists have now, that they hold up as their one thing, is access. They can pick up the phone and talk to a politician and get a quote and find out a story. But as social media grows we're going to have politicians who are going to get more comfortable with bypassing that and using social media as a primary means of getting the message out.
In future journalists are going to lose this power that they have with access, they will still have it as long as they've got the readership, but it's going to become less and less. And I think this is where, if we're going to talk about the future of journalism, is where it's going. It's going to be this case where reporting will take more or a dialectic nature. Where the story won't be finished when it's published; it will be altered, adjusted, explained, discussed. The author of the piece will still be crucial; just as on a blog the actual person who writes the blog is important. You go to a blog site where someone you know writes good things and there's a good discussion that flows from that. But I think in some ways it will be a bit like private computer designers who take a computer game and create a mod of it. In the computer game world that is nothing unusual, where as journalists are like "how dare you take my words and make something else with it, you should have just kept that on our media site", in the future I think that is going to be a bit more fluid; it's going to be a case where it is just this dialouge. And I think that journalists, and this is I guess my final point, journalists who triumph is this age (and we're in such a minute part of it, journalists only started using Twitter in 2009, that's 3 years ago. It's like looking at the news on the TV in 1959 and saying they could foresee a 24 hour news channel and all the news organisations we have now, they didn't even have 4 Corners at that stage, that was a dream. We are such a short way into where we are going to be, all I can see is that if you're going to try from whatever form it's going to be, you're going to have to be able to triumph in the dialouge. And it won't just be being a columnist that provokes outrage, it will be someone who provokes discussion. It will be someone who is comfortable and able and willing to engage in this discussion and realise its just part of the whole process of what being a political journalist is about.