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You have to feel for print journalists. (OK, well let’s just say that you do.) They study hard, chisel their research and writing skills, refuse to be swayed by favour or commercial interest in the pursuit of truth (well let’s just say that’s always true). And then, just when someone is finally prepared to pay them to write and then distribute their words, the whole world starts tugging at their bedding.The commercial atrophy of newspapers can be directly traced back to the launch of eBay and craigslist in the US. You might think that a newspaper’s revenue is sustained predominantly by newsstand takings and showy full-page ads, like the ones that pepper the dailies during election campaigns. But these alone could never sustain bloated news organisations, with their armada of executives, foreign bureaus, printers and distribution networks. The real money-tree was classified advertising. The problem is, Tom now sells his Rhodesian Iguanas on eBay, Jane searches for love on RSVP.com.au, Justin rents outs his Double Bay condo on realestate.com.au and Beth finds new jobs on seek.com.au. The web is exploding the bottleneck that once funnelled all of these disparate advertisers and customers onto the rear pages of local newspapers.
Today’s newspaper executives remind me of the coyote who, in dogged pursuit of the road runner, dashes off a cliff and lingers in mid-air until he looks down, realises the ground is no longer there and plummets to his temporary demise.
So newspapers are getting with the program, launching blogs and giving readers (sorry, users) a direct and very public say. (Yes, yes, Anthill is starting to do this too.) But what happens when professionals who are used to being heard over others are suddenly asked to share cyber real estate with the average Joe?
In June, James Farmer, a media blogger for The Age newspaper, posted a rant against allowing online comments directly below the crafted prose of Fairfax journalists.
Let’s consider the design, the dynamics if you will, of a comments thread. It’s a shared space fought over by people with often non-inconsiderable egos. It’s a space in which no one really has ownership of their contributions, where anonymity is encouraged and comments are tossed away into a sea of many hundreds or thousands to sink, undiscerned, under the waves (unless, of course, you manage to really upset someone).
It’s quite a common view among print journalists. A journalist friend of mind recently pointed out that “doctors and judges don’t have their professional work followed immediately by a whip round the local footy crowd to see what they think. The punters will chat among themselves. Why do they have a reserved seat beside me?” Many bloggers, quite rightly, view this attitude as elitist.
The UK’s Guardian newspaper has managed to blend old and new media better than any other major newspaper in the world. One of the terrific speakers at the X|Media|Lab conference held in Melbourne in August was Kevin Anderson, Head of Blogging and Interaction at The Guardian, who addressed the topic of old media building online communities.
Anderson launched his presentation by playing a few of the Sky News ads that have been running in the UK recently, featuring a computer screen as someone types provocative single-lined statements (such as “global warming is a lie”), followed by the line ”Looking for an argument?” and a link to the Sky News discussion forums.
Directly after the ads finished, Anderson asked the audience: “Do you want your community to be like Cheers, where everybody knows your name? Or do you want a community where everyone is filled with naked aggression?” He went on to emphasise that it’s not hard to attract internet trolls, so the last thing you want to be doing is throwing them red meat.
Anderson is adamant that media organisations have a responsibility to set the tone for the conversations they start. The Guardian’s opinion blog, Comment is Free, is the envy of virtually every newspaper editor who has ever been asked to create a vibrant online community that befits a leading news organisation. But the point is, there is very little overlap between the knowledge and skills required to build a successful online community and those that print organisations have traditionally possessed. Anderson and the Guardian have tried to make a graceful shift in media model from patrician (I speak, you listen) to community (let’s discuss). The blueprint for this is what Anderson refers to as the “user engagement cycle”. Much of this involves graduating readers from casual users (just stopping by) to connected users (free sign-up, the odd comment on a blog) to committed users (heavier participation) to, eventually, catalysts (those who tell others about it through word of mouth or blogs).
“We, as journalists, see the internet as information, where as our users see it as communication,” Anderson said.
It’s advice that many journalists and media professionals would do well to heed, including, humbly, we Anthillians.
Paul Ryan is editor and senior journalist at Australian Anthill Magazine.
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