News fit to print

With the gatekeepers gone, we need a new media model.

Whenever I return to Australia, it’s the differences that are most apparent. Cafes and bakeries on every corner. Supermarkets without a Keurig coffee pod in sight (go espresso!). The small selection of tiny rolls of paper towels rather than aisles of Bounty mega-packs. The women putting effort into looking casually chic, while the men put in no effort and just look … er, casual.

But one difference was particularly jarring. The picture accompanying this post is my Saturday Sydney Morning Herald (and a flat white, natch). The fact it’s gone tabloid is distressing for those of us who love a broadsheet. But what’s really disturbing is how skimpy it’s become. The issue here is 48 pages. 48! It made me incredibly grateful for the still door-stopping Sunday New York Times, bursting with inserts and essays and enough reading to get you through a week, not just a day.

Even accounting for the fact it’s the weekend after Christmas and maybe the interstate edition is abbreviated, the Herald depressed me. When I began my journalism career in the 1990s, it was bigger than big—bigger than the Sunday Times, for sure. Both the Herald and its Melbourne sister newspaper, The Age, were blockbusters. Their influence and affluence was so dominating it led to them being described as “rivers of gold” for their owner, Fairfax. Between the display and classified advertising and subscriber numbers, they printed money.

Those days are gone. And don’t get me wrong: the beginning of the end was two decades ago, just as it was for traditional media globally as the internet gathered pace. And the rivers ran dry in no small part because publishers—Fairfax included—made massive strategic blunders in trying to cling to what they had while simultaneously underestimating the disruptive potential of digital media.

But … it’s still depressing. And it’s depressing not only for those of us with ink in our veins who enjoy reading an actual newspaper, but for what it says about the declining influence of traditional media in a world increasingly awash with misinformation and disinformation and ignorance on a nuclear scale.

In theory, the democratization of news is a good thing. It’s unhealthy to have select, powerful media properties—and proprietors, especially—filtering what we read, see, and hear. But the alternative has ended up being pretty lousy. With absolutely no filter, we’re drowning in both actual and fake news. And the growing percentage of younger people relying on channels like TikTok to learn what’s going on in the world would be almost beyond parody, if it wasn’t so serious.

That’s also why it’s hard not to think about the state of the news business as we head into one of the most consequential US Presidential elections in history. I don’t think it’s a question of whether state actors like Russia and China will interfere in the election—they’d be mad not to. The unique craziness of the US electoral system (more on that here) makes it uniquely vulnerable: do enough to influence a few votes in critical districts of critical states, and you can literally alter the national result. For those who can remember, this is exactly the stench that has long surrounded Donald Trump’s 2016 win: the fact his campaign shared critical internal polling with a known operative of Russian intelligence, and the mystery around how that information was weaponized through social-media in crucial districts.

Back in the day, journalists would weigh the validity of “news” before deciding what to publish or air. I know that’s not perfect. But journalists know when something doesn’t pass the smell test, and we’ve all had editors tell us more digging needs to be done; more facts are required before something is worthy of becoming news. Again, I’m not suggesting a return to a world where a handful of media proprietors make all the decisions about what we get to consume. But when social-media platforms seem both unable and unwilling to play the role of gatekeeper, we’ve got to figure out a new model.

And that’s the problem my skimpy Sydney Morning Herald reminded me of. The thumping newspaper of 25 years ago is gone, never to return (it now does OK online, as does the New York Times and other major establishment media outlets). Yet after all these years, we’re still to crack the code on an adequate replacement that ensures the marketplace of ideas is not just robust, but reality-based.

A note about whatever this is …

After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.

Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.

Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.