The winter of journalism’s content

Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian has a Media section which is often a cracking read for those of us who work in and around newspaper and magazine publishing. The newspaper’s media pages don’t shirk from running stories that debunk common myths (often self-perpetuated myths) about the internal workings of the media and the challenges the industry faces.

A good example is The winter of journalism’s content which points out that online publishing, which is widely expected to supplant newspapers and magazines, will only go so far in replacing them and leave a gaping hole. This has huge implications and is something I’ve worried about for some time now.

The economics of online publishing mean there simply isn’t enough money to pay for the in-depth news investigations and searching features on politics, crime and other social issues that are so important to modern democracies.

As we all know, advertisers are bailing out of print publications. They are drawn to the web because they see it as a more cost-effective and accountable medium (that’s a disputable assumption we’ll leave for another day).

In particular, online advertisers like to place their messages next to niche interest stories to more closely target interested readers. For example car makers prefer to buy banner ads on pages featuring lightweight stories about driving.

Even if a publisher could find the money to produce hard news stories, advertisers wouldn’t want them. The obvious answer is to publish fewer hard news stories and more of the marketable lightweight fluff. However, it’s traditionally been those difficult, hard news stories that have sold printed newspapers that dragged in readers in the first place.

But this vicious economic cycle is nothing compared to what can happen in a society that no longer has a viable mechanism for scrutinising governments and out-of-control corporations.