The Future Of

Journalism

Episode Summary

Join us for our first birthday! We explore how COVID-19 has impacted the journalism industry, whether tech giants should pay for news and the role of journalism during a time of social and political upheaval.

Episode Notes

It’s been one year since we first launched The Future Of podcast at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. We’re so thrilled to be able to journey into the future with you and explore how research is helping to change the world. This podcast is only possible through the efforts of the Curtin community, so we’d like to give a special thanks to our hosts, creative and marketing teams, production coordinators and the Curtin researchers who make it all happen. 

Journalism has survived the advent of radio and television, the demise of print, but now has new threats to address, namely social media and an outdated business model.

COVID-19 has particularly exposed how vulnerable the industry is to a loss of advertising – falls in revenue have resulted in the closure of newsrooms across the world, and staff cuts to both community and mass media organisations. 

In this episode, host Tom Robinson is joined by Glynn Greensmith and Dr Kathryn Shine – journalists and academics in Curtin University’s journalism program. Shine and Greensmith explore the current state of the industry, and the changes that must be made to ensure journalists can continue to deliver news that keeps the public informed and engaged in their communities. 

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Got any questions, or suggestions for future topics?

Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au.

Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of the university.

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You can read the full transcript for the episode here: https://thefutureof.simplecast.com/episodes/journalism/transcript.

Episode Transcription

Speaker 1: 00:00 This is The Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.

Tom Robinson: 00:09 Hello, I'm Tom Robinson. Welcome to a new episode of The Future Of. Before we get started, I'm excited to say that today is our very first birthday. It's been one year since we launched The Future Of from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. So far, we've produced a total of 42 episodes with 57 experts, exploring what the future might hold in areas from social media to living cement, space exploration and pandemics.

Tom Robinson: 00:35 Today, we're discussing the future of journalism. I'm actually a journalism student here at Curtin Uni, so I'm very keen to explore this topic. Journalism is an industry that's adapted to radio and television, survived the demise of print, but now faces new challenges, including fake news, falling revenues and growing public distrust. To discuss these issues, with me today are Dr Kathryn Shine and Glynn Greensmith.

Tom Robinson: 01:00 Kathryn is a journalist and the course coordinator of the journalism program at Curtin Uni, and Glynn is also a journalist and Curtin researcher. They're both my teachers as well, so the pressure is on to make this a pretty good episode! It's great to have you both on the show.

Kathryn Shine: 01:14 Thanks, Tom.

Glynn Greensmith: 01:15 Thanks for having us, and happy birthday podcast!

Tom Robinson: 01:17 Yes. We wanted to bring the party poppers in, but we didn't get there. Kathryn, hundreds of jobs have been lost in the journalism industry recently. Why is the industry in such trouble?

Kathryn Shine: 01:31 Well, the pandemic has really shown how vulnerable the media industry is to loss of advertising. So ironically, people have been turning to news more so than before and actually, trusting news more so than before during this period because they have need of this vital information about coronavirus.

Kathryn Shine: 01: 56 But because most media organisations still rely on the advertising model, and most businesses are not in a position to advertise at this time, it's caused a lot of problems for those media organisations.

Tom Robinson: 02:10 Glynn, it's been a big year.

Glynn Greensmith: 02:10 Yep.

Tom Robinson: 02:12 Politically, socially. Is good journalism, is a strong journalism industry needed more than ever?

Glynn Greensmith: 02:17 Oh my God. Do any of us doubt that as we look out the window? It's so important that we make that separation from what Kathryn was just saying, which is, it's such a simple thing to say. But it really is the ballgame here. Journalism as a concept isn't failing, the business model is.

Glynn Greensmith: 02:34 Now, a lot of these organisations can and did make a profit for a long time. We used to call it in newspapers, 'the rivers of gold'. You want a date, you want an apartment, you want a car, you go to your paper. They were warned well in advance, "Guys, this is not going to last. There's this new thing called the internet." And they all said, almost in a unison around the world, "The internet? Please." And that's why we're seeing a shrinking of newsrooms. It's the business model that has failed to adapt. I cannot look around this world...

Glynn Greensmith: 03:06 I mean, we've seen some extraordinary examples of willful ignorance, around the world and in Australia. We are seeing a new revolution in people's refusal to believe what is real and what is true. Reality is that, of course, which when you don't believe it, it doesn't change. So I'll put that to one side, and that's where the fake news is. It gets very nuanced. There's a difference between not wanting to believe something because it conflicts with your opinion, and refusing to believe that gravity exists, or that the Earth is round. That's a whole different ballgame.

Glynn Greensmith: 03:40 Apart from that, I don't think there's ever been a bigger appetite for the truth and for news. There's this revolutionary re-understanding of journalism, at the same time there's a revolutionary disastrous failure of the business model, and a failure to adapt to the changing environment. And I think it's a really crucial distinction to make.

Tom Robinson: 04:02 What adaptions need to be made?

Glynn Greensmith: 04:04 Well, there's the ballgame, isn't it? How do you pay for this thing? It's simple enough. This thing needs paying for. We need professional journalists doing professional news in the public interest. What we've had for decades when it was just the only game in town, is we shifted the boundaries of what the public needs to know to what the public want to know. And the want-to-know aspect got further than it was ever supposed to.

Glynn Greensmith: 04:33 The want-to-know stuff is what's going to sell more adverts on my radio station or in Kathryn's newspaper. The need-to-know is the foundation of journalism. That is what it is, that's the definition of it. That's why when democracy was invented two and a half thousand years ago, there was a great discussion by Plato and Socrates around the need for an informed citizenry. They said, "Without an informed citizenry, this will fail." Not might, this will fail. They said, "Without a citizenry that knows what's happening, then there will be demagoguery." Will be not, might be.

Glynn Greensmith: 05:10 So everything we are looking at in our world today was entirely predicted at the very foundation of journalism. And all we've done is we just lost a bit of the relationship between, well, you need to know this, but you want to know who's sleeping with whom, who's having a fight, which reality TV ... and that's fine. Human nature says, I kinda want to know some fun stuff because I don't want serious stuff all day. But there's only so much of that we should allow in our society in order to sell you an advert.

Glynn Greensmith: 05:39 So there's just some really fundamental areas that...it wasn't despotic or willful. It was just this subtle way that things get ingrained and cause a shift. And then as you know, once you lose something, it's hard to get it back. We had the plurality. We had a relationship with the news where even when we grew up, I think Kathryn, we're both in our mid 40s, there was a relationship to the evening bulletin. There was a relationship to the local newspaper that was really part of every community. And of course, we've lost that.

Glynn Greensmith: 06:14 So, much of what we're saying is, why did we have that? What did it give us as a society? Can we still have a form of that back again, please?

Tom Robinson: 06:23 Kathryn, how do you balance that need-to-know aspect and that want-to-know aspect when you're training student journalists in the industry in the future?

Kathryn Shine: 06:35 Well, we really focus on the need-to-know aspect here. The want-to-know is that they're not the difficult stories to tell. They're not the investigative stories. They're not the stories where you have to go and seek out the real people in the community and talk to them. So if you get the skills to do the need-to-know stories, you can do the want-to-know. And I think we need to be realistic about the commercial ... how a lot of mainstream media survives, and that is they have to do it via commercial means.

Kathryn Shine: 07:12 I think that there will always be a mix, and that's fine up until a point. So I think when we train journalists, they need to be aware of that, but we want them to be doing the harder stories now while they're learning, and then they can use those skills really to apply that to any kind of reporting later on.

Glynn Greensmith: 07:35 And it's wrong to think that those stories aren't popular. People really have a strong...One of the things we've really seen, and one of the major shifts in the landscape has been a return to real community news. People really do want to know what's going on in their neighbourhood, and they're really interested in the people who are out there, who maybe they're fascinating, maybe they're trying to fix the problems. So we've seen a massive shift.

Glynn Greensmith: 07:58 This is something that the ABC has been doing, but it's actually something that in the program that we have here at Curtin, we've been doing for a while? Is saying, go tell those stories of your town because people do care. When the ABC went out to what they felt were underrepresented communities and said, "What do you want to talk about?" They were really interested in the responses about how much people want to talk about different problems than they see on the news, and solutions to those problems.

Glynn Greensmith: 08:25 Kathryn and I felt that we were really simpatico with that, in what we were preparing our students to do, the kinds of stories we look to engage our students with. That felt very organic to us. So it seems like there are some really positive pathways around what people are looking for. It's not just about knowing the fine detail of governmental corruption or who's paid off whom. People do actually have an interest in these stories. They've just been spoonfed the wrong kind of want-to-know stories for so long that we think there's this elitist idea of I know what's going on in my society, and then everybody else only cares about the sports thing and the reality TV. That's actually not true. People really do care about good stories from their communities, and we do that here.

Tom Robinson: 09:12 In terms of that business model, and I suppose it plays into education and training as well, the federal government right now is trying to get Google and Facebook, these big tech corporations, to pay for sharing content and paying the big media players like News Corp and Fairfax to help them survive through this difficult period.

Tom Robinson: 09:34 I wanted to get both your thoughts on that. Should we be trying to save the status quo, I suppose, or could we be looking to an alternative? Is there a better way to be doing it, which would lend itself to telling more community stories, to telling more of the need-to-know stories?

Kathryn Shine: 09:52 Look, I don't think it's an either/or kind of question, I think we can have those big media players...Can continue to exist, but you can still have perhaps smaller outlets doing more of that community work. It would be very disappointing to see something like the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, or The West Australian suddenly disappear.

Kathryn Shine: 10:19 You don't want to lose your legacy media because they have the history of a place. They often have some extremely good journalists, they are quite well resourced so they can do the big stories. But sometimes they overlook some of those community stories, or they're not engaging with their communities as best as they can. So I think an ideal model includes a bit of everything. And ideally, there should be some support for all of those types of outlets.

Kathryn Shine: 10:48 I completely agree that Facebook and Google should be sharing some of their profits because they use the news to draw people to their sites. And I think the government should be applauded for looking into that. But I think we need to realise that supporting the media financially is going to involve lots of different elements, not just that.

Glynn Greensmith: 11:13 I'd like to make it quite, hopefully simplified in the right way, because I think it's such a complicated argument. I often think that the lessons that I try and convey to the students about this, I actually find have a really ... everyone listening to this is going to be fascinated. Journalism, everyone knows it, everyone's aware of it, but it's so unknown. Still, it's the most remarkable subject in the world. The study of journalism is so fascinating. So we can make that separation. We are training people for a career, but we're also engaged in one of the most fascinating subjects on planet Earth.

Glynn Greensmith: 11:52 What you bring up about Google and Facebook, really if you deconstruct that, what are we talking about? One decision from one government can change the ballgame. Did any of us see double humanities degree fees coming three weeks ago, or four weeks ago? Did any of us see HECS-HELP being disappeared for students? One decision from one government can change the ballgame. So one of the fundamental lessons of the study of journalism that I try and convey, and I want everybody to have a think about this is, do you think everything is the way it is now because it should be? Is this the right natural evolution of our world, this bin fire of a planet is like this because, "Hey, that's the way it should be and let's not question it guys"?

Glynn Greensmith: 12:34 Everything we're talking about here was at one point a decision made by somebody. I'm not going to lie to you, it was usually for self-interest because that's how politics and business works. You know who told us that? Politicians and business people. So when journalism was, if you like, invented in Australia in the 1930s and in the early 1940s, there were very strict rules. You can't own too much. No one from overseas should own stuff. There must be diversity. And then those rules were changed in 1981 and 1987 by a conservative and a Labor government in amendments that were called The Murdoch Amendments, which is just a coincidence. I don't know who they were named after.

Glynn Greensmith: 13:10 They were done to help one businessman who said, "Hey, can you change that law for me? I'd like to buy some more, and I'm an American citizen now." We changed what was working to suit one person for self-interest at that time. We changed them again in 2018, and that's why the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the oldest media company in Australia was sold. And it was sold to a TV station. We lost diversity. It was a decision made. Do any of you know who the communications minister was who made that decision? Do any of you know who the communications minister is now?

Glynn Greensmith: 13:44 These are massive decisions that have a huge impact in the world. They can, and therefore should be challenged. And if you look at, and I happen to think good policy, good discussion, let's make Google and Facebook who, by the way, earn more from advertising than every radio station, TV station and newspaper on the planet combined, combined, so let's make them pay for the news that they're taking. Good decision, look at what that can do. So let's just get out of this idea that these things are set, that they're rigid, that to question them is somehow breaking some sort of oath. That's what we should be doing.

Glynn Greensmith: 14:25 If you gave me one election where we made journalism the focus, and we said whichever government we pick will do excellent journalism, then every election after that from now on, will be better. That's my promise. Easy to promise because we're never going to do it, but that's the power of an informed citizenry voting on things that impact them, just like every student at any university in this country should be going to the next election going, "You want to do what to my fees? You want to do what to my HECS?" It shouldn't be the bad decision that comes in, or the controversial decision that they disagree with for them to start paying attention, which was the whole foundation of journalism in the first place.

Tom Robinson: 15:05 So I suppose you were just talking about the concentrated media ownership basically, here in Australia?

Glynn Greensmith: 15:13 Yes.

Tom Robinson: 15: 13 I suppose that's what I was getting at with this, where sharing content, these new laws about paying for content, and it's going to prop up this concentrated media industry and this concentrated ownership.

Tom Robinson: 15: 28 Do we need another step beyond just keeping these corporations afloat? Do we need more diverse voices? The regional media has been ... well, it's disappeared overnight, particularly over in the east. Do we need more diverse voices as well as strong voices?

Kathryn Shine: 15:45 I think there is diversity there. Like I said, I do think it's a balance, and a lot of those big organisations still are the big employers. And so from my perspective, wanting my students to get jobs, they offer some good opportunities for students.

Kathryn Shine: 16:09 What we've found with the shutdown of some of the regional papers in the east is that already, alternatives have come up. And often, these are real grassroots, local people from their local town now producing a newspaper or a website because that paper has gone. And some of them, it's early days, but they're already making some money and things are looking quite positive. So I do think that there is a real mix.

Kathryn Shine: 16:42 We do talk a lot about the concentration that is often, in the mainstream, big metro media organisations, but there are lots of alternatives. And even in things like the magazine industry which has seen a real decline in recent years, there's a whole new culture of indie magazines from all around the world that are doing really well. So often, something else comes into that place, and sometimes it's a better thing.

Glynn Greensmith: 17:10 There's barely a community in this country that doesn't have some form of outlet, whether it be a community radio station or a community newspaper. It's not difficult for any anthropologist or sociologist to there is no community without news. It just happens when people get together. So appetite has never been lost.

Glynn Greensmith: 17: 31 I was down in a tiny village near Pemberton, Northcliffe and they have something called the karri, the karri tree. So it was the Karri Pigeon. And I popped into the shop and said, "Who's the newspaper?" "Oh, just some volunteers from town, and they put it out once a week." And I went, "I just love that." There are something like 70 community radio licenses across Western Australia. When communities get together, this is a natural part of that evolution of how people interact with each other to know what's going on.

Glynn Greensmith: 18:00 So it's not hard for us to at least put on the table, how do we pay for this? What's a better model? How do we change the ownership laws to better reflect the purpose and direction of this? If everything's designed for somebody in Sydney or somebody in New York to make a billion dollars, then you're telling a fish that it's crap because it can't climb a tree. But if you're saying your purpose is to serve your community, and we're going to find ways to fund you to help you do that, then you are getting a better outcome for it. So these are really actually, quite simple in their essence, metrics and laws.

Glynn Greensmith: 18:37 We've made them incredibly complex, but they're not in their essence. So it's not hard for one government to make one decision to say, "Hey, how do we do this a bit better to better reflect what we think?" A country the size of Australia? Are you kidding me? With our tiny population? It's absolutely essential to our way of life. Let's treat it like that.

Kathryn Shine: 18:56 The federal government has announced grants and has been offering grants to regional news outlets. Probably I think it started last year. So a few years ago, we would have thought that was just never going to happen. The government doesn't give money to a commercial media outlet.

Kathryn Shine: 19:19 But we've already seen that starting to happen because they recognise that those communities need that service. And so the model is changing. There's already been changes to it, and I think all of those things are good things. We need to look wherever we can for ways to keep media outlets going.

Tom Robinson: 19:39 Got time for one more question. It's a bit aside from the topic we've been talking about, but I think it's worth mentioning.

Tom Robinson: 19:46 There's been a lot of stories lately about diverse racial representation in the media, or the lack thereof in Australia, and a lot of Anglo-Saxon people particularly appearing on TV, and the idea that that needs to improve. So I wanted to get your thoughts on these stories that have been coming out.

Kathryn Shine: 20:06 Well, this is a bit of a passion project for me. I think it's great that that report came out and highlighted the Anglo-centric way that journalists are seen on Australian TV in particular. We absolutely need more diversity in terms of the people who are reporting and presenting news, but we also need, and this is part of that report, we need more diversity in the people who are included in news stories.

Kathryn Shine: 20:36 And this is something that we as journalists actually, have some control over. We need to be seeking out people from different cultural backgrounds, people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. At most, we're really trying to include as much diversity as possible in the way that we report things, and I think that can have a profound impact because people are then seeing themselves in the news. They're seeing their voices being included and their perspectives being included.

Kathryn Shine: 21:06 We have quite a diverse student cohort now, that has changed over time. And I think that's a great thing. And I totally encourage students of different backgrounds to go into journalism because I see the value in that. But to me, there's two different elements to it. One is around news sourcing and who we include, and also about who is reporting the news.

Glynn Greensmith: 21:31 That's excellent, and Kathryn is absolutely right. It isn't just about the storyteller, it's who the choices are around who's being interviewed. What you're seeing from Katherine there is the ballgame, isn't it? It's the will first. So as soon as you've got the will, you start workshopping the ideas.

Glynn Greensmith: 21:49 There are so many people who go, "Well, if you haven't got a fully formed idea that I know works, then let's not have the conversation." That's not how that works. Let's have the will to make a positive change and then see how we can do it. Unfortunately, the media is not one thing. It's a terrible word. Mass media is the worst phrase in the world. The ABC has very little in common with News Corp or Channel 7. These are wildly different institutions with different goals and means and mechanisms. So you can't lump them all in.

Glynn Greensmith: 22:19 So to create a singularity of voice and purpose, usually it has to come from those who regulate us, which is the government. And they're run by politicians who are not ideal, because they're really only concerned about them and what they can do for themselves and their next election. And that's just the nature of modern democracy. So we need to look beyond that, and we are embracing, well, what can we do? So Katherine's been working on those ideas of how you get better representation on camera or in the newspaper report.

Glynn Greensmith: 22:48 I'm trying to start a project with my students where we're trying to encourage more Indigenous people to come into a news environment. And I'm happy to talk more about that if and when that project hopefully starts really working and bearing fruit. But that is a cohort of young journalism students here at Curtin University, mostly white, recognising the problem, saying, "Hey, let's try and be part of the solution to bring other people into these." That might cost them a job one day.

Glynn Greensmith: 23:15 So the idea that there's a fight going on, or you have to be from those communities to recognise that is nonsense. There are so many good people with good ideas. So if we all do recognise that and work together with a bit of singularity of purpose, I think the answers are going to be pretty easy.

Tom Robinson: 23:30 Well, hopefully not just myself, but we get all sorts of students coming into the program and doing the extra things that need doing in the future. That's all we have time for today. Thank you, Kathryn and Glynn for sharing your knowledge on this topic.

Kathryn Shine: 23:45 Thank you.

Glynn Greensmith: 23:45 Cheers, Tom.

Tom Robinson: 23:46 You've been listening to The Future Of, a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you have any questions about anything that we raised today, you can get in touch by following the links in the show notes. Bye for now.