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].