Annabel Crabb on game changing in media

Since Lindsay Tanner's book Sideshow and Joy Rosen's attack, Australian media folk have been want to undertake some introspection. Most of it is self-serving, subjective and dismissive, and therefore dismissed. Some isn't. The Australian has started the Future of Journalism site, the future of which is yet to be determined, given that News Limited is chief among the offenders of shoddy journalism practice. And the ABC has The Drum's spearhead, the wonderful (in my opinion) Annabel Crabb undertaking some worthwhile and meditative introspection.

In an interesting juxtaposition to (or dovetail with) Crispin Hull's piece on how the Internet is changing life, Annabel Crabb has posted this speech on how the net is also changing media, politics, news gathering and consuming. It is a very long piece but an investment of your time.

Annabel has had a wonderful year since jumping onboard the online journalism world through the ABC's The Drum. If anyone has earned a Walkley Award for consistency of quality, it is her.

And because I know few people will read such a long piece, here are some favourite snips, with the best line being the last one:

In Australia, there is a hostile, scratchy feel to politics at the moment. Everyone's fed up to the back teeth with everyone else...The 2010 election was up there with 2001 as a nasty election. It had a bad feel...Whose fault was it that this was such a rubbish election?...the offering from the major parties was so pallid as to actively induce disengagement. How could an electorate fail to be thoroughly confused and repelled by a pair of parties that seemed intent on whittling off any policy rough edges that might otherwise distinguish them one from the other?
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The Canberra press gallery has reported for decades - at a comfortable distance - on industries under which various evolutionary banana skins have been slipped...We have engaged in dispassionate conjecture about the sorts of retraining forestry workers could undertake...as wholesale logging staged its slow-motion collapse in the face of the sustainability argument. And now, it's happening to us. It turns out we've been operating in a protectionist paradise too - we just never thought about it that way. Just think of the monopolistic advantages we enjoyed.
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Western democracy is an evolution of information control. At the beginning, politicians controlled everything. Then the media arrived as agents for the general population. Now, communications technology is allowing motivated individuals to do the job themselves.
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And so content is evaluated. Not outlet by outlet, as it used to be, where audiences developed general impressions of which TV networks or radio stations best appealed to their tastes, by and large, but item by item. Item by item. Individual news stories do not now enjoy the protection simply of being judged by a single editor to be worthy of inclusion in the list of "newsworthy things that happened today". More and more, readers themselves decide what is newsworthy.
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I'm an optimist. Maybe it's because in the end there is not much sense in arguing over something that is - thanks to the evolution of technology - singularly beyond all of our control. The market is evolving to empower the consumer - the reader, the voter. The old gatekeepers are losing control, and arguing against this progression is as pointless as arguing against the sunrise.
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As viewers and readers learn how to find the stuff they like, the old gatekeepers, whose job it used to be to decide what people would or should like, are increasingly redundant. That's why all this hurts so much. Redundancy always does.
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This is a fabulously complicated problem, to which I think the only sensible answer is consistency, and hard work...Political journalism of 50 years ago, in which a prime minister might have got round the whole country just by asking eight favoured journos round for a fireside chat, is no more, and will never return. Politicians will go mad if they think they can satisfy demand in the same way these days. They still crave control of the message, some sense that they are prevailing against the beast. And I say to them, on this front: Abandon ship! You cannot control this, not any more. Use the energy for something else instead, like finding ideas you can stick to. Authenticity is a quality people will recognise no matter what medium conveys it.