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Sydney Festival of Democracy
The future of journalism & The Conversation
19 August 2014
Revealed: what really went wrong at Fairfax
Death by a 1000 cuts
• Redundancy round after redundancy round
• Take out specialists
• Take out subscriptions to papers and magazines
• Severely limit all travel: just use the phone
• Cut back foreign staff
• Reduce paginations
• Take out staples from tabloid sections (e.g. Epicure)
• Go tabloid
• Outsource production, pictures, etc
• Shut the canteen
• Shut the swtichboard
• Merge newsrooms: now SMH, Age and Fin all share
staff and content. 3 mastheads have become 1.
…And soon the paper won’t even be printed.
To retain profits….
Take costs out faster
than revenues fall:
Get out from inside the Ivory Tower
Commercial
media
Not for profit xAuthors recognised experts xContent free to the public x
Free from commercial agenda xSolution-centric xSafe publishing platform xCreative Commons, access to all xNew voices x
Why we are different
Ethical agenda
• Bound by Editorial
Charter
• Editorial Board oversight
• Final sign off for authors
• Author disclosure
statements, transparency
of funding
Who is reading The Conversation
Where our readers work
Group of Eight Universities on The Conversation
Viral spike:
And tweeted by
Richard Dawkins,
Ricky Gervais, Brian
Cox & others,
The Global Newsroom
Addressing global problems, together
• Ebola
• MH17
• Commonwealth Games
• Wicked problems: e.g. climate change,
ageing, lifestyle disease, privacy, food
security, water, democracy, corruption.
Where next for new global journalism?
• UK edition launched in May 2013.
• Indonesia editor appointed May 2014
• Plans for: US, India, Southern Africa, Netherlands, others…
Editors in New York
Bureaus staffed
by NYT staff
NYT bureau:
Europe
NYT bureau:
AfricaNYT bureau:
Asia
NYT bureau:
Middle East
The old information order: e.g. New York Times
Editors in AU + UK
Academics working together:
joint commissioning, sharing of research outcomes,
topics that require global input, curated by local editors
The new information order: The Conversation model
Malcolm Turnbull: “C’mon, get up to speed”
“The Australian media rarely
reports how different countries
have approached what are
usually shared and very familiar
issues that are topical in our own
country, even if the issue is
dominating the news…
“…Compare this to the business
world, which as long necessarily
been international”.
The Conversation
Academic rigour. Journalistic flair.
Recommended