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Who Gives a Toss about Saving the Newspapers?

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Attended the ‘Future of Quality Journalism’ panel at Adelaide Writers’ Week on Tuesday. Wasn’t. Impressed.

The members of the panel – ABC documentary presenter Michael Cathcart, and journos Malcolm Knox, Alice Pung, and Ian Townsend – are intelligent people. I’ve read their stuff: it’s damn good.

Unfortunately, they collectively stumbled right from the beginning, misunderstanding ‘the future of quality journalism’ as ‘the future of the media empires which pay our way’. Cathcart seemed to labour under the curious belief that only journalists employed by the ABC have any speck of integrity, while Knox suggested that maybe we need more independent magazines in the vein of The Monthly.

Again, this comes back to the fact that we’re, to flip the phrase sideways, missing the trees for the forest: focussing so damn hard on the big ‘Old World’ content distribution institutions that individual journalists have now completely disappeared from view. Again and again, the question is posed, “How do we save the newspapers (and the broadcasters, and the magazines)?”. Answer: who fucking cares? Newspapers and broadcasters are only as good as the journalists they employ: if journalistic standards slip on an individual level (and, from my perspective, I do think we’re seeing young journalists entering the field who are, as a whole, less qualified and less passionate than their predecessors), it doesn’t matter if we manage to ‘save the newspapers’… because the newspapers will no longer be worth saving.

I guess it comes down to this: who do you believe produces quality journalism? Do you believe quality journalism is ‘produced’ by The Age or the ABC or The New York Times? Or do you believe quality journalism is produced by the hard-working, savvy, talented journalists who just so happen to be writing for those institutions?

Arianna Huffington might be clinically insane, but she gets it. The future of quality journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers. Or, for that matter, on the future of the ABC.

[Note: that's not to say that I don't agree with Knox's assertion that we need more independent magazines, or that we should protect the ABC. I've argued before that we need to ensure writers can continue to get paid. My gripe is in the fact that a bunch of journalists can sit around discussing the future of journalism without actually mentioning the fundamental importance of journalists in the whole equation. Pung tried, I think, but Cathcart, Knox, and Townsend had a nasty habit of talking over the top of her].

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Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Are the Format guys on their way to creating a Third Place for Adelaide?

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Constructing an Internet Bookshelf

Monday, March 1, 2010

One of the problems with reading on the internet seems to be that there’s too much competing for your attention at any one time, and not a huge amount of incentive to persevere with what you’re concentrating on at any moment.

I don’t know about you, but I consider a physical book a challenge. I will start on the first page thinking, “Damn, I’m gonna feel good as soon as soon as I finish this.” There are two things I enjoy about making my way through a book: firstly, the act of reading itself, which is tied to the author’s command of craft; secondly, the really pleasant sense of completion I feel as soon as I hit the final page, which is tied to the form as opposed to the content.

The process of reading a book is like hiking (hello, dodgy metaphor!): you enjoy the journey, sure, but at the same time, the whole point of the exercise is, at least ostensibly, to reach a pre-determined end-point.

When you read online, there’s no end-point, because the internet is unstructured. The hiking equivalent of this would be heading off without a map, without any ability to track where you’ve come from or where you’re going, and with no goal in mind. You can still enjoy the stroll, but it’s fundamentally not so satisfying. One predominant reason people seem to hike is so they can feel they’ve achieved something… and so they can tell others they’ve achieved something (“Yeah, that’s right baby, I hiked Kilimanjaro…”, etc.). Our achievements are the building blocks of identity, so telling our friends of our achievements isn’t so much boasting as it is letting them know ‘where we’re at’. Same deal with reading: we don’t own bookshelves just because we need some place to store our old books. On bookshelves, our books become trophies, markers of achievement, expressions of our own personal identity (“Yeah, that’s right baby, I’ve read Kafka…”, etc.).

The internet is new, and the way we read online isn’t set. If we want the experience of reading online to surpass the experience of book reading, we need a way to mark what we’ve read, to mark out what we will read, and to develop goals for our reading. More than that, we need to mark out what we’ve read, not only for ourselves, but for others to see: we need to develop the web equivalent of a bookshelf.

I’ve been using Marco Arment’s Instapaper for several months. If you’re finding the reading experience online trying or unenjoyable, Instapaper works. The premise is pretty damn basic, but that’s kind of the idea: Instapaper offers a mechanism by which you can save individual blog posts or online articles for reading later. That’s it, really. Find a post you like, click the ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet, and the post will appear at the bottom of your Unread list. Read an article on your Unread list, and it moves to the Archive. It’s nothing fancy, but used properly, it can fundamentally alter your online reading ‘workflow’. No longer will you find yourself ambling randomly from one article to another, with no incentive to stay focussed. Now you’ve got a map, and, with that, the ability to track where you’ve come from and where you’re going.

Even better, once shared, the Archive becomes your bookshelf… and the Unread list replicates that ever growing pile of books-to-be-read sitting by your bedside table.

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Really, You Want to Hate Your Audience

Thursday, February 25, 2010

I was speaking with Josh Fanning (ad man at this magazine) today about the insularity of Adelaide’s artistic community. Josh basically made the point that (and I’m badly paraphrasing here), “We need to get the yuppies coming along to art shows, because they’re the ones with the money to actually buy the art.”

Insularity. It’s what seems to fuck up most artistic communities in the end. Artists promote their shows to other artists, and everybody ends up having a grand old time getting pissed on cheap goon, and everybody slaps everybody else on the back saying, “My gawd, Maureen, you’re so talented”, but nobody ends up selling anything, or buying anything, because nobody has any cash. It all turns into one big circle jerk. Writers start publishing companies to publish other writers (their friends), and market those books to other writers (who are also their friends); young visual artists with cash open galleries and promote the work of other visual artists (their friends) to other visual artists (who are also their friends). The problem with the whole situation is that it’s fundamentally, obviously, not self-sustaining. At some point or other, in order to make a living, you have to pander to those who can support your practice monetarily. You can’t pay rent with compliments (I will note, before I go any further, that sexual favours don’t count).

The problematic fact is that the people with the cash to spend on art (and, to some extent, literature) are often, well, real douchebags. These are people who, you have to remember, have probably made their small fortunes exploiting those beneath them, and who are blowing their cash on art simply because they want to show their friends and colleagues exactly how superior and truly sophisticated they truly are. These are the people who beat you up in high school and now have a Masters in Business Administration. These are the people who will never venture into your friend’s totally awesome gallery, because the downlighting sucks, its on the wrong side of town, and the wine on offer isn’t baco noir. If yuppies still exist, well, yeah, they’re yuppies. They’re also your real-world target audience.

If people you actually like are attending your openings, I’m tempted to think you’re doing it all wrong. You want your audience to be dominated by precisely the kind of Armani-clad arsewipes you thought you were running away from by enrolling in art school.

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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Walter Marsh, a.k.a. Tantivy Fair, a.k.a. Purple Prose. Blog link circle-jerk!

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Those who should write, don’t. Those who can write, shouldn’t.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

This is going to seem super obvious, but I’m of the impression that, generally, those with the most compelling stories to tell are either unwilling or unable to give voice to their experiences.

There’s something inherently pompous about writing, because in writing, you’re basically telling the reader, “Hey, over here. Listen to me! Me me me! What I have to say is important.” If you’re an upper middle class white person, that borders on the offensive. Just because you’re educated,  just because you can write, doesn’t mean your experiences are necessarily worth sharing. Particularly if, in the process of shouting from the rooftops, you’re drowning out other, quieter, possibly less articulate voices.

It comes down to something fundamental, which I think gets at the heart of why modern journalism is in such a foul state: “Those who should write, don’t. Those who can write, shouldn’t.”

By ‘those who should write’, I mean those people who have the first-hand experiences that wow, shock, appal, and inspire. These people will often tell you that, well, they just never considered their experiences worth sharing. Or else that they’re ‘not writers’.

In researching a piece on international students, I found that a huge number of the Chinese and Indian students I spoke to had stories worth sharing. I asked one student whether he’d ever consider writing about his experiences for the magazine. “Oh no,” he told me, laughing. “I couldn’t do that. Writing’s scary.” And yet, he felt entirely comfortable chatting with me for a good half hour. In the typed-up transcript of the interview, he came across as fluent, engaging, funny, and persuasive.

I think this places a great deal of responsibility on capital-W ‘Writers’ to avoid focussing on their own stories at the expense of others’. Those who are lucky enough to be able to write for a living (or, at least, are lucky enough to be in the position of being read) should make it their aim to tell the stories of those who should be writing, but don’t or can’t. Don’t use your position as a writer to drown out other less ‘polished’ voices. That’s douchey.

Say what you will about Dave Eggers, but I think he gets it.

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“Fuck this. I’m gonna be a lawyer”: On Paying Writers

Sunday, February 21, 2010

On the On Dit Facebook page, I posted an editorial suggesting that writers to student magazines should get paid. How? The government should jiggle around their ‘Arts’ funding, and set aside maybe $7000 for every university publication that can demonstrate a commitment to providing a platform for quality writing, photography, and illustration. ($7000 doesn’t go a long way, but I think it would be a fair compromise between burdening taxpayers and ensuring student writers can get a ‘leg up’. Considering there are at least 20 contributors to a standard issue of On Dit, $7000 would allow editors to pay maybe $70 for a well-researched 2,000 article or full-age illustration).

The piece drew a bit of criticism from those who believe the government shouldn’t support writing, full stop. The general argument seemed to be, “If writing has value, then readers will pay for it.” I agree with the general gist of that argument, because, obviously, I’m willing to pay for any magazine that contains quality content. So, yes, if writing has value, some readers will pay for it.

However, let’s work this through. An Australian culture magazine that charges, say, $10 per physical copy, and contains high quality writing, illustration, photography, and literature, is unlikely to have a huge print run. Why? Because you’ll find the vast majority of readers prefer ‘interest’ magazines: ‘men’s interest’, ‘women’s interest’, magazines about cars, or dogs, or hi-fi systems. It should come as no real surprise that you’ll rarely find super high-quality content in an ‘interest’ magazine. You’ll rarely find any probing analysis of social issues, or anything attempting to shift the status quo. That’s not a criticism of ‘interest’ magazines – those magazines have their place.

Now, let’s look through the logistics of writing for a high quality culture/literary magazine (print or online, it’s really irrelevant). Writers must spend many hours polishing their submissions, researching rigorously, pushing out into the world, madly scrambling for evidence and inspiration. Writers for ‘interest’ magazines can often take shortcuts, because readers of ‘interest’ magazines are generally less concerned with quality writing – they just want the juiciest information pertaining to their area of interest.

Thus, we see something curious: those who write for culture/literary magazines spend more time and effort on their pieces than those who contribute to ‘interest’ magazines, but receive less financial incentive to do so. Who knows how many potentially brilliant writers are looking at the state of the publishing market and saying, “Fuck this. I’m going to be a lawyer”? Because we’re undervaluing writing, we’re losing out. And the problem is, a huge number of people just don’t get it. They don’t get why we need to support magazines that are unprofitable, simply on the grounds that the writing is valuable. “If the writing is so valuable”, they say, “why aren’t the magazines (and the writers) raking in the cash?” I can only sigh. Because valuable writing is tricky and challenging, and you just don’t sell magazines by being tricky and challenging. I don’t blame the readers who choose FHM over, say, Meanjin because, fuck it, we all need to relax sometimes. Do I think we’d be better off if more people bought and read Meanjin? Well, fuck yes.

Good writing is key to good thinking. And, duh, the government has a responsibility to support good thinking, if nobody else will. If you don’t believe we need to support writers in this country, that’s okay. But you’re also essentially telling me that you don’t support good thinking, and that’s not.

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