Gazette

From Richard Ackland*

For US$15.96 Amazon will send you a CD with the promise of being able to learn journalism by a subliminal technique.

“Superior Subliminals – Superior Journalism” is the course courtesy of an outfit called Lavish Life:

“Each session contains the same subliminal suggestions carefully crafted by hypnotist Alex Armani, CHT… Successful people across the world are using subliminal programming to help them correct bad habits, improve their health, or acquire new skills faster. Subliminal programming means you will hear NO AUDIBLE VOICE because it has been masked in order to bypass your conscious filters… Through repeated use of this CD, you will notice that you have a knack for journalism and that it comes easier to you. Using this CD for a long period of time will increase your desire and ability for all things related to journalism success.”

Journalism by hypnosis sounds like a winner, and why not? Journalists for yonks have been sending their readers into a collective trance with an overload of repetitive, dull fodder. It’s high time the tables were turned.

There are other exciting implications. Why would anyone bother with the professionalisation of journalism – three year courses requiring the payment of lavish fees and the employment of hoards of journalism educators – when you can learn the trade while fully asleep?

Whichever way you look at it a lot of “journalism”, superior or otherwise, in the decade ahead will be unrecognisable from the hidebound craft it is today.

The technology driving changes to newspapers is driving just as big a revolution in journalism.

The words inked on dead trees or flung over the airwaves, by and large, reflect the limitations of editorial decisions.

Editors chose the stuff deemed most compelling to fit the time and space. It’s the top-down model of media.

For every day’s produced output there is infinitely more news, views and information that remains unmanufactured by the mainstream.

From a consumer’s point of view the most frustrating element of this design is that editors can decide when to switch off the tap. Stories that had a momentum, disappear suddenly from view.

Resources are diverted to fresh missions.

Consequently, most court reports are intermittent, political debates only sketchily covered, and outcomes frequently missed altogether.

The mainstream feeds us this patch-work, editor-selected, view of what’s happening in our world.

Never fear, bloggers, e-zines, online organs of a myriad persuasions are filling the void.

The age-old model whereby journalists deliver little sealed lectures to their readers in the form of six paragraph news reports or 800 word opinion pieces is on its last legs.

Even better, the ancient “he said, she said” form of reporting as a faux form of balance is heading for the dustbin.

New wave technologies have the potential to allow those who actually know what is going on to continually modify and update stories.

Interactive timelines create the capacity to show how news continually evolves.

The editing and fact checking will be an ongoing process that fuses the professional journalist with the audience in ways never before appreciated.

There are other ideas from Google Labs that are in the process of being tested, including Living Stories and Fast Flip.

Jay Rosen, the journalism guru (pic) from New York University, highlights 10 things that are happening to journalism right now. I hope this is a reasonable summary of his position:

* Atomisation is dying. By this he means that people used to have separate relationships with the mass media. Now the internet connects them horizontally, with each other and with the media. The vertical part is still there but now it is joined by a much wider, more integrated community.

* Open systems like blogging and Twitter don’t work like traditional production systems and journalists have been slow to realise that. People coming from closed systems see the open systems as chaotic, but the chaos is really all about more participants creating a better news system.

* Advertising in the mainstream is inefficient, because half the money advertisers spend is untargeted and wasted. They just don’t know which half. The internet provides a more precise way of delivering advertising to the right audience. It looks after the wasted half and by eliminating the inefficiency drives down the price of advertising. In turn this will drive down the price of journalists.

* Sources now can go directly into the media, without being intermediated by journalists. Sources are absolutely critical to journalism, so this change represents a real shift in power.

* The readers can now inform one another without there being a “professional” journalist as part of the process. This is sometimes called “citizen journalism”.

* Allied to this is the disturbing realisation that collectively the readers know infinitely more than the journalist. This greater knowledge now is able to flow into journalism.

* Hybrid forms are the way to go for journalists: professionals working with amateurs and using the strengths of social media for greater “news engagement”.

* There is no such thing as information overload – there’s only filter failure. To date, editors have been the filters, now consumers can do their own filtering, bringing the best stuff to their own front page.

* Journalists should do what they do best, and link to the rest.

* Trust works slightly differently in the online world. Online journalists should tell the audience where they are coming from. It is hard to generate trust online if you claim to be objective. Opinions are news and transparency is the new objectivity.

All of that is a quite different space from that traditionally occupied by journalism and journalists.

And there are implications. How does the law cope with bloggers, Twitterers and hybrids when it comes to the media safe harbour under the Trade Practices Act, the “newspaper rule”, discovery, limitation periods for online archives, and so on?

That is quite a barnfull of difficult animals. Crutching will have to wait for another article on another day.

It was interesting to see that Baroness Buscombe was slapped down last month by one leading blogging identity in England, Sunny Hundal, who is a winner of The Guardian’s blogger of the year award.

Baroness Buscombe (pic) is the chairwoman of the Press Complaints Commission, a beefed-up version of our Australian Press Council, and she had the temerity to suggest that bloggers’ professional standards should be regulated through her organisation.

It seemed a desperate throw by the old media to corral their new media competitors.

Given the PCC’s abject failure to properly probe the excesses of the News of the World celebrity phone bugging scandal, and the crass standards of much of the British red-tops, Hundal had quite a bit of weight in his argument.

See also Commons committee investigation

The Federal Trade Commission in the US hasn’t been squeamish in trying to regulate the chaos.

It issued an edict late in November requiring bloggers, Twitters and others in this stratosphere to disclose when they receive free merchandise or payment for writing about an item.

Payment … Disclosure. Good heavens, what will they think of next?

We are told by managers and investors that journalism is expensive and there is a shrinking pile of loot to pay for journalists.

A new, cheaper, “unprofessional” creature is out of the cave, orchestrating chaos.

You’ll note the Gazette’s idea of interactivity is not sufficiently advanced for you to be able to comment on this or anything else we publish. This is still a top-down outfit.

Nonetheless, for just about everyone else, the future of journalism is racing towards us, and as the former US Vice President Dan Quayle put it so aptly:

“The future will be better tomorrow.”

*Richard Ackland is the publisher of Law Press of Australia and editor of the online law journal Justinian. He writes a regular legal affairs column for The Sydney Morning Herald.