ACLF 2021 - What next for Australian media

good morning and welcome to the first day of the australian national university's crawford leadership forum we've got a great topic for you this morning this session is also being recorded so if you have any fomo about missing any of the other sessions don't worry you've made the right choice you can go back and see any other sessions that are running at the same time as this uh they'll be distributed by the good people at the crawford leadership forum i've got the most amazing panel assembled for you this morning to tackle this important topic of what's next for australian news media and particularly how do we create an environment in which it can be healthy and trusted and funded and underpin the democracy that we have seen due to events around the world can be fragile and so we have first a terrific senior journalist from sky news laura jace who you'll see on sky with her own program but also throughout other programs and has been with sky for quite a while mark ryan the executive director of the judith nielsen institute who's doing amazing work uh for the creating the future of australia's news media and simon carrera who's formerly the general manager of buzzfeed australia and set up essentially buzzfeed and now is the founder of a media tech startup which is really exciting it's called ps media he'll tell us about that and why it's needed i refer you to to the framing papers that we developed for this session if you are a data person and i imagine many of you are you'll like the material in that short framing paper which uses a number of different resources for example the public interest journalism initiative which has been doing a really good mapping project newsroom mapping project over a number of years capturing uh closures of newsrooms changes in newsrooms moving from analog to digital and all of that data is available free to you i've captured some of it in our framing paper we have a discussion a short discussion in the framing paper about misinformation and disinformation and the differences between the two and the effect on our democracy and generally what the interventions have been to try and resolve this incredibly taxing issue of how do we support news in australia in such a way that particularly local news is sustained so there are government policy mechanisms but there are also private mechanisms and lots of innovation there's much to feel really quite optimistic about even though the starting point can appear quite pessimistic so with that i want to bring in our panel and let them share their wisdom with you so if we can have everyone on screen please do we have everyone we do terrific okay mark's on let's start with you laura i mean you've been a really uh you've been holding people's feet to the fire for a long time with your interviewing you're quite a tough interviewer and i'd be really interested for you to share your views on how particularly social media has changed your job as a professional working journalist well it's definitely more demanding and it means it is literally 24 7. so on a personal level i think every journalist needs to to manage that and there's no real correct answer there it also means that if you don't engage with something it can be taken as tacit approval which is not correct um so that's something you also have to keep in mind when you're working um in mainstream media but also you just can't avoid that social media is still a part of your job it also means that i mean there are huge benefits to it that you reach more people than you would just through my program like am agenda and i think you you reach new people as well so you have a more diverse audience they're less uh predictable but i guess when you're looking at digital and tv they're really different as well and that's something that i've really noticed on i am agenda for example um you know we have time to explain things give analysis and it's complemented by those interviews with politicians or or special interest groups and i feel like social media doesn't really have the patience for that on facebook you know people are looking for confirmation bias on twitter it's the same but they're they're more angry it seems and probably more up for a fight and on instagram people just want information or analysis in list form or a 30 second explainer so you really need to adapt for every uh platform and of course there are good things and bad things about that yes so let's go to some of those how has it changed politicians behavior in media scrutiny and specifically have you adjusted in what you do with your program to navigate those challenges that's a really good question because politicians want to be social media influencers and they want to go viral for all the right reasons of course so i've noticed there's a real like entertainment vibe that's that's crept into the way uh politicians engage they practice their lines they have them ready to go and that's really their aim when they do an interview so if i do an interview for example some politicians try to use that as an opportunity to get those lines out and are not at all phased about what questions ask them i often think that sometimes they're not even really listening instead of them you know doing a selfie with their their phone for facebook they use our slick lighting our professional setup and they um you know then use selective parts of the interview to pump it up on their social media and get it out to their followers so instead of actually wanting to be held to account they don't care if they look like they're dodging a question and they just use the 30 seconds to make them look good so you know here in lies the problem if you if you don't want to be held to account and actually answer the question that questions that need to be asked you know go straight to social media do the selfies and what frustrates me so much is that modern politics has created this cohort of elected officials who don't appear to believe in anything every interview is about delivering lines surviving and not actually saying anything that might be um able to go on the record where they can be held to account in the future so many have mastered that art of saying absolutely nothing delivering sermons of you know vague motherhood statements that mean nothing so what i've found is that the good ones they always come back and they're a pleasure uh to interview because they they don't focus on uh focus groups actually believe in something and they've usually got a thicker skin so the way i've adapted is i just don't have those people on anymore you know you kind of get hit up every day uh from different politicians to come on your show and the ones that just consistently don't answer questions i just don't have on because it's they're boring television they're not what viewers need or want um and frankly um they can do it on their their social social media accounts so and and it's less transactional that way as well so i was finding after being 15 years at sky that um you know if you give a tough interview to some politicians uh they see that as some kind of slight against them and and avoid you you get put on a bit of a black list um so the way i operate now is you know i've kind of put a show together that doesn't rely on me needing them to have them on my show if you know what i mean absolutely and i think you're the advocate for the viewer and if you feel registration then they're feeling frustration so by curating carefully and sometimes easing out those who won't answer the questions you're actually doing the viewer a great service so yes i understand you now mark judith nielsen in institute is absolutely unique in australian philanthropy we don't have a long tradition of corporate philanthropy in australia can you just describe for us what it is and what you've learned about the regulatory environment for supporting public interest journalism because you set up in 2018 so you've got a few years under your belt now sure thanks megan and good morning everyone um yeah look i think you're right uh the judith nielsen institute is somewhat unique in australia but we're really in the vanguard here of the trend that's been underway for a long long time in the us and to a lesser extent in europe um over the last 20 years or so there's been a proliferation of not-for-profit philanthropic organizations that are stepping in to support journalism in all kinds of ways um setting up new platforms in and of themselves playing the kind of role that we do in terms of uh helping to fund uh creative journalism and new forms of journalism so when judith nielsen came up with the idea to support journalism she was really faced with a choice one path she could have taken was to set up a new platform so create a new guardian online or a new news.com or what have you in the end we decided that it was best to set up this institute and try and do many things rather than one thing only and the view we formed was that there were already enough platforms out there it's not as though the world is starved of information or new and emerging platforms but what we thought needed help was journalism that is working at the frontiers of journalism at the frontiers of the media industry working to experiment with how to do contemporary journalism how to get it to new audiences how to retain those audiences so i think when we set up some people were under the mistaken belief that we were here to save journalism or to to fund the existing business models which by and large were failing business models and that's not what we're about what we're more about is helping those that are playing at the frontiers of new journalism and trying to help them make a difference so even though we're well resourced we don't have enough resources to solve all the problems uh overnight but what we can do is provide some uh a bridge if you like or some uh some temporary support to help newsrooms experiment be a little bit more adventurous be a little bit more courageous and oftentimes it's only for for one of relatively small amounts of money that can make the difference between a newsroom risking something and trying something or not and we think that it's in the risking of these new things that the future that's where the future of journalism is so that's really what jni is about we we do three things megan we we're a grant making organization so that's how we help newsrooms experiment and and try new things secondly we're developing an education program which we hope can help keep journalists fit the purpose in this rapidly changing world some of the things that that laura touched on on social media and technology and so on are obviously critical there and thirdly we hope to be a hub a forum for really interesting and sometimes contentious debates about journalism how it should be practiced what's important what's not um and and how can we better serve the audience ultimately and so that three-legged approach has led to 150 programs to date you've been pretty busy so where do you see the area of of most need and what have you found when you've touched on this slightly but perhaps you could drill down a bit further what's the best way to address the needs you've identified well i think the bet the best way is to not try and solve everything in one hit megan i mean the problem is so vast and so variable you know and and even if you take local news for example i'm sure simon will talk to this uh in more detail but um how you solve a local news problem in a given market varies wildly across the country you know what might work in a regional city like newcastle won't work in a small town in country victoria or in remote western australia so it's very hard to come up with a cookie-cutter approach and that's exactly why we set up judith nielsen institute to be relatively small able to move quickly be completely unencumbered by bureaucracy or heavy administrative burdens so we can move we see a need somewhere we can move quickly but i stress that we're not here to we're not a i guess an angel investor in startup media companies we're not here to save businesses but where we see an opportunity or something innovative or a journalist or a newsroom is interested in trying something new that we believe has the potential to to succeed then we'll step in and support it and it's not always money sometimes it's making connections you know we've already built up quite an extensive international network of advisors and supporters and oftentimes it's a matter of connecting people overseas with australians to share ideas and and swap notes on what worked in given markets around the world so we player i think can play a really valuable brokerage role as it were between the media industry and technology and funding and all of these things together so you know there's no one answer to your question megan there are so many challenges that can be tackled in so many different ways and that's why i think jni is well set up to do that that point you've made about making connections and including international connections that's priceless businesses small businesses regional media local media any size really it's very hard to do that on your own so if you are an independent connector that is so valuable for the industry i see that as a really key part of what the judith nielsen institute's doing yeah and what what we're tapping into megan is this this global trend that's been underway for some time for greater collaboration even newsrooms that 10 or 20 years ago were fierce competitors are now prepared to contemplate collaborating where it makes sense to and where it doesn't impinge on their commercial imperatives they're realizing that they can grow the cake they can grow the pie bigger they can each get more out of any given project by collaborating and that means collaborating with competitors collaborating with people like ourselves at jni collaborating with other corporations with universities and so on so i think the industry even though as you said at the outset there's been a lot of gloom around the industry i think there's a lot of um reason for optimism in in this collaboration and these new ways of thinking about journalism i agree and what a natural segway simon so just a little bit into your background simon because you're in a great position to describe some of the macroeconomic factors shaping the current state of news media in australia you would have seen that as the first editor and then the general manager of buzzfeed australia so can you just share with us what you see as the key macro economic factors shaping the current climate sure thanks megan um and it was interesting to talk to hear mark talk and i agree that there's lots of reasons for hope but also there is this um long now systemic kind of issue of sort of two decades of failing business models and we've basically seen that the business model that supports news locally the news media and specifically i think most acutely at the local level it's really really um been massively fragmented i've started my career um like i began my love affair of news delivering newspapers as a kid and really heavy bags of newspapers and then my first job was at the times of london in the late 90s covering the first.com boom and at that stage the sunday times newspaper was this gigantic slab huge slab of newspaper similar to the the big papers in in australia and unfortunately as we know the classified advertising used to bring those rivers of gold that funded these really really big news organizations and and huge teams of reporters has massively declined in the last um couple of decades and in australia first of all we saw the kind of growth of the you know the classified advertising migrating to the internet domain to rea to car sales to seek and um initially that was newscorp and fairfax kind of cannibalizing their kind of parent companies revenue streams and then over the last decade there's been this rise of like the silicon valley-based platforms particularly google and facebook and they you know as we've seen have hoovered up about 75 of the digital advertising so that was the environment that buzzfeed was kind of born into in in 2013 2014 with um you know huge investment from a company called andreas and horovitz initially um in silicon valley so putting in a lot of money we very quickly built this big audience in australia with which was predominantly on the social platforms on facebook on twitter on youtube big big audiences but what we found by the end of the last decade was even that with with you know the huge resources from a venture perspective that we had um companies like buzzfeed like vox like vice we couldn't make enough of a buck on the social platforms as as brands increasingly went directly to consumers and and as those platforms as we know and as we've seen in australia there's been a big um kind of intervention from the government to try and readdress this playing field so i feel that actually in australian terms on this kind of national level there's um you know those looking for national and international news have never really had more options you know we've obviously had those companies that i was part of we've also had the guardian setting up here the mail the new york times most recent washington post so this is huge amount of choice and local players like junkie and pedestrian so there's a lot of you know innovation but i feel that the critical gap is at the local level um and you know i think it's a tragedy really that over the last four or five years australians often have known more you know locally um i have known more about like what the guy in the white house is tweeting about then they've known about what's happening on their block or in their suburb on their town because often you know we've increasingly seen this huge trend of papers closing and that was 100 papers or so closing over the last decade local newspapers that really intensified last year and last year basically since um the beginning of the pandemic we've now had more than 200 local newspapers closing there's some glimmers of hope there's some hyper locals getting going but what we've seen internationally is that often they run out of gas you know they've got a lot of energy they're usually funded by redundancy payments to start with but they they basically run out of gas and so we think this trend um you know i think this trend of news deserts kind of expanding and growing in our regions is a huge problem that disappearance of local news is really it's bad for the reporting of councils it's bad for for people knowing about what's happening you know in their towns in their cities in their suburbs about courts about schools and so you know i think what we've seen internationally what we're concerned about here in australia is that um you know without um that local news coverage to keep you know local officials and power kind of accountable then corruption goes up and there's all these negative kind of social outcomes right so as a result of those conditions you've just very articulately described we've seen a number of healthy interventions by government from an end user perspective someone who wants to keep news media healthy what's worked and what hasn't well i think obviously we saw um you know after the um you know the xenophon um um you know if um policy then changed to ownership rules that the regional small publishers innovation fund over three years but 60 million dollars into the regional local sector and that was a number of different things as we know it was scholarships it was cadet programs and in particular it was this fund for three years that sort of was um devoted to helping small publishers uh regional publishers innovate and so that helped some of them transition and and i worked with five publishers last year in the in the regional space and so you know the reality is that for a lot of those they were just starting their journey and that you know they were you know crazily really at the end of the last decade at the start of this they were just starting to kind of get websites up and running and think about digital revenue despite having seen a decade at least of their revenue declining their print advertising revenue declining double digit every year so that was you know it's a start it was very useful but it certainly only helped some of them get on their journey and then obviously we've seen um this kind of world first um mandatory bargaining code legislation that um you know has made i think a really profound difference addressing some of the power imbalances that we've seen that have really affected the practice of public interest journalism i mean i think what we um know is that the legislation has passed but that because the publishers the platforms haven't been designated these discussions are happening kind of behind closed doors and so while we know that there's tens of millions of dollars coming from the platforms into media companies it's been reported that maybe 90 of that revenue of that money is coming to you know four or five major big companies and so at the local level at the regional level i think there's concern that the code is not really um you know not necessarily going to make a kind of profound difference it's great to see you last week google doing this deal with con press association now with 80 publishers are going to be beneficiaries of that so i think the hope is that we see and we track over time and we see that this is actually fueling and funding public interest journalism so it's you know it's very important and i do think that there's going to be their need for more government interventional support particularly at this local and regional level yeah laura i i know you're a a big city girl but you have spoken publicly about the need to protect local and regional news gathering and you've pointed to the dangers of and i love this expression you've used press release journalism in communities that don't have adequate coverage by journalists so tell us what are you seeing occur and why is it dangerous well there used to be a pathway in journalism particularly when i started and for the decades before that you would almost like a doctor if you like not that i'm equating the two don't worry about that but you used to start in the regions and work your way up to the cities and that was like the training ground of a journalist and and you really cut your teeth so i think what we used to see is young journalists really understanding uh the regions and the bush from very early in their careers and even when they did end up in the city there was great empathy and sympathy for you know the plight of um and the problems they're facing in the bush but that doesn't happen so much anymore mainly because there's more options in the city straight away so there is more employers that you can go to but regional journalism i reckon he's in pretty dire straits at the moment and thank you to the hard-working journalists who do operate outside of the cities because when i say hard working the stuff they have to get across in one day can be extraordinary and there's simply you know not enough of them so we're seeing you know this ingrained trend now where some local papers and radio stations are so stretched that they will literally print a government or department media release word for word not a question asked and this is not a criticism it's just a reality of what they're having to face so tv journalists in the region for example can cover three or four stories a day which they produce themselves but in the city a journalist would do one and have two producers helping them do that imagine it's same in the papers and radio so i mean that's just the reality of what they're facing i think and that becomes a vicious cycle doesn't it because too stretched the quality suffers and that might increase the migration to international news that simon spoke about exactly oh also you know here at sky we are a national broadcaster we simulcast on free to add eight million people in the regions which is great because you've got this mainstream company that does have reach in there so you know for example my work on the show i have huge opportunities to cover the headline issues in the regions whether it be labor shortages agriculture visas water issues and and zoom which we're all very well acquainted with now um means that we have that huge reach and they're not bound by who i can get on the program in the cities or who has access to a studio so that's really great but is it enough no but it is important that the cities also see this regional news as well i can't cover you know regional stories day by day by day because it doesn't speak to enough of the audience if you know what i mean so um look i still think it's important for the cities to know how we get food on the table you know see what grain prices are doing and how that affects fix them and you know see what closed borders and trade wars do and all that kind of thing but when you're talking about local journalism regional papers and radio stations um they just can't be replaced and i just don't think there is the profit there anymore and i think it's been proven that private companies um used to get in the regions that's just not there and that's the market reality abc is taxpayer funded it has a huge responsibility here i think and probably needs to step up a little bit more to re-prioritize the bush and they do a wonderful job but there are still gaps so a publicly funded broadcaster should be covering i think sections of the media that the private sector doesn't so it makes a bit of sense to me there so you see an increasing role in regional and local for the abc yeah and i do think it does a really good job in the regions that have the abc have um the radio of course you know everyone can access the website and they do have a large cohort of regional news but i mean it's a it's a it's a behavioral cultural thing as well um radio stations are so important in the regions perhaps even more so than they are in the cities so i i just think that those gaps in the markets um and you know the regional papers as well they're so stretched that i think maybe there's an opportunity for the abc to fill those gaps even more because as i said before private companies are private companies you can't avoid that they're there for profit and if those profits they can't get in the bush anymore i mean there is a philanthropic element to all of this and a social license but as a sustainable business model it's just not there so we have to get ahead of it well not there yet and we'll hear a bit more about that exactly back to you mark let's i think your international experience is really valuable when you were setting up judith nielsen institute you conducted a global study tour what were the international policy settings that you encountered that really impressed you and you thought that could work here yeah i mean i saw a lot obviously and the experience varies uh depending on where you're looking the u.s is a bit of a paradox in the sense that it's probably the most energetic uh risk-taking lively marketplace for what we're talking about but it does so almost completely devoid of any government support the american culture is such that it it just cannot swallow the idea of government funding of journalism by and large with one or two very very uh modest exceptions europe is very different there's huge public funding that flows into journalism particularly in the scandinavian countries so it does vary widely um in terms of models i mean i think to the point we're talking about local news i i did see i didn't see a silver bullet solution but i certainly saw examples or elements of things that we could try here um one project that i like to direct people to is something called the colorado media project and i think that therein lies something of a potential not solution but uh response policy response for australia now the the funding that simon referred to that grew out of the xenophon amendments or proposals i don't think anybody would argue that they were ideal in their conception or their execution when governments try and fund things it gets very lumpy very bureaucratic very slow moving um very hard to be innovative and move quickly and i think that was a big part of the experience of that let's call it the xenophon uh project the colorado media project i think has elements we could learn from in that it assembled a diverse group of media experts and by the way not all journalists importantly a lot of very experienced business people as well and technology people and they basically created a platform that became a service center if you like for local media in colorado and they were very open-minded about what they'd support and who they would support and how they would support them and as far as i can tell it's been a big success um so it's funded through a whole range of different funding there's a lot of philanthropic funding that goes into it i think even weirdly in america there's some government funding i think from the state government perhaps but the the trick there i think that they've they're starting to the problem they're starting to solve there is that they're they're not setting out with a hard and fast set criteria about what they're going to support and how they're going to support it they're much more fluid much more ready to take on new ideas and move quickly and and to use that silicon valley cliche fail quickly and then move on to the next thing and i think that's what we could benefit from here in australia i mean people like simon are out there coming up with great ideas to re-energize and reinvigorate local uh journalism local news what sort of help does he need where could government funding help um it doesn't and it doesn't have to be big dollars this is the other thing you know when you talk about support for an industry and i think you could make the case that the media industry journalism is somewhat unique i mean it is a pillar of our democracy we all like to say that but does government pay a due regard in the sense of funding that so we might come up with a plan to support the steel industry or the agricultural sector or even the arts sector generally for that matter do we pay the same attention to journalism and for relatively small amounts of money i think you can do a hell of a lot even the 60 80 million dollars that simon referred to i think you could double that or treble that or quadruple that still not make a dent on the on the national budget but have a huge impact on our civic life on our democracy on getting to local communities the sorts of important issues that simon mentioned about what's happening in your backyard so i think there's a there's an increasing role for government i agree with laura that the abc could play a bigger role i know that they've sort of tippy-toed into this area of providing some of their content to local news outlets i think there could be more of that kind of innovative thinking uh particularly in the regions and in local news they have this huge network huge resources and infrastructure let's put it to work make it work more efficiently make it work harder so i think that it's time to all of the measures that have been taken by government to support media have been piecemeal they've been reactive they've arisen out of political fixes at the last minute late at night in the senate how about we step back take a bigger broader look at things and and and have another go at it but in a decade long or two decade long with a two decade long perspective now i think the digital code mandatory code exercise was fantastic i'm really heartened to see that a lot of the funding that's coming from that from the code is flowing back into journalism a lot of people are cynical about the tech platforms but i i i happen to think that google in particular should be um applauded for the focus they're putting on local and regional news i know that they're keen to put money into that uh i know that news corporation likewise looking to reinvent or reinvest some of that money into training of journalists not just in their own user rooms but in regional australia so these are some of the green shoots or the more optimistic points uh developments that are happening out there that i think we should be focusing on i agree with you that it doesn't take huge amounts of money and while your point is well made that perhaps the xenophon project was reactive it only required small amounts for particularly regional media organizations to stand up a website they just didn't have the cash at hand to build a digital version of their traditionally analog product and particularly now that we're in a covert environment being able to distribute news digitally which they didn't have access to before has made a huge difference and so well not perfect it did allow dozens of small businesses small local media businesses to go digital where they couldn't before it did i think you're right megan but importantly to simon's point about sustainability um and this is where things like the colorado media project or even you know jay and i has been working with simon and others in the hyper local area to come up with some kind of solution that can help these businesses become sustainable simon hid the nail on the head these things start off with a burst of enthusiasm high energy often relying on one individual and it's just not sustainable and often that individual might be a great journalist but hopeless a business they might be great at technology but can't write a sentence so people need all kinds of support and i think if we could think about doing developing some kind of you know service center some kind of hub of of practical and intellectual uh and financial support to help these businesses become sustainable beyond that first burst of enthusiasm so yeah i spent a lot of time off um over as as mark knows over the last kind of 18 months um looking internationally before the pandemic and taking a couple of study trips to the u.s and i think that there's this huge ecosystem of innovation in the us and north america it's often funded by philanthropy and then as marx says in in in in europe it's often funded by government support as well and and different um support coming from in different ways from government-funded bodies what we've found in australia and we've been fundraising um since the start of the year here is that despite the last two or three months being basically the frothiest kind of venture capital market in australian history huge amounts of funds going from vcs into all sorts of technological innovation it's going into kind of fintechs and health techs and ag techs and ai techs and climate techs and you'd have to go way down below kind of 50 before you find the dollars going into media there's like a couple of small social media kind of startups one in perth one in um in adelaide and i think that's we found that really challenging to actually get people because people they understand and they know that there's systemic issues in media they know that the platforms have got a lot of power and that a lot of the dollars go there and so they wonder if you know can a startup like mine kind of get up you know in this kind of environment so ps media is basically designed to try and take the longer term view we don't think these problems will be solved overnight and so we're coming out with a really kind of different type of business model for local news and it's profit for purpose it's developing what we believe are innovative revenue streams that aren't reliant on like the display and classified and programmatic that we don't see really making too much of a difference a lot big focus on data and creating data that will power our journalism but also data that will become a commercial product kind of recurring revenue from people and we want to go deeper than subscribers or members and actually have people become co-owners of our business so we're basically building a kind of collaborative local news platform it's going to be co-designed co-owned by the by the communities that we serve and our belief is that we're going to do this together with them so at the moment we're fundraising we're going to start a pilot our first pilot in october um in in a inner city community then we're going to do one in an urban fringe community and then we're going to do one in a regional community and we're going to try and understand first of all you know what are their information problems what are the deficits what are the things that they need to understand that each other and their community at large better and then you know ultimately what we're seeking to do is improve media diversity in that particular place you know and then by by working with this community reduced information deficits the the problems that that they have that news um you know that's catered specifically to them could solve and then um you know we ultimately want to kind of increase kind of accountability of those in power um and you know so it's really working with communities learning from them helping to kind of try and solve their problems and then you know what we believe through through our different um you know approach going deeper like i said than the subscription or membership is that actually you know we saw the 500 000 people that signed mr rod's petition to parliament last year concerned generally about um you know about and the concentration of kind of media ownership in this country and so we think that actually people um you know people and that doesn't just you know i work for news corp for a long time i don't think it necessarily just applies to news corp i think people are frustrated by their inability to control or to have agents in the abc which they fund as well and so you know we we think that asking people to kind of come along on the journey with us and to actually try and make a kind of more diverse media on the local level is something that um you know we're hoping australians are really going to respond to oh hi megan laura was making the point earlier about how important radio is and i've just provided you with a live example underlining her exact point because i live in regional australia and the internet is patchy but radio always works i'm back and here we are simon ask you one more question before we go to q a and it's a point that both you and mark have made about collaboration and collaborative models because you've highlighted this emerging role or emerging model of the collaborative body and sometimes it's housed within a university that's mission is to share learnings and resources between news and media organizations how important are these collaborative bodies and how do you think they'll influence the future shape of the australian news media yeah so i've i'm engaged with quite a lot and mark mentioned this hyper local kind of project that they and jay and i have been working on to try and provide some support and for the this emerging sector so in particular there's a couple of really interesting organizations there's one in new jersey and new jersey's a state the size of new south wales but at the university of montclair they've got this um center for collaborative media cooperative media and they're basically bringing local news publishers from around the state actually around the whole of the us to kind of collaborate to support one another to share insights to share learnings and also to help kind of they do research focusing on emerging kind of trends in kind of business models or best practices to bring people together similarly in cardiff in the uk which is a very well renowned journalism school they have this center of community journalism and that's an a comparable center doing the same kind of things for you know it's focused on wales in the uk but also the whole of europe um you know there's also institutions like the tao center town knight center at the city university of new york which has spent basically a decade now running kind of entrepreneurial journalism projects and and and classes really with amazing industry expertise and that's focus on education it's focused on training um kind of people like myself or other people in legacy media to be entrepreneurial and i think that when we see you know those organizations things like the reuters institute at the university of oxford things like the neiman um labs at harvard there's these these these um organizations usually linked to universities that are providing this ecosystem of kind of collaboration of sharing best practice of helping publishers come together and to try to figure out sustainable futures for news in the digital age and i'm on the board of um ucs's center for media transition and they're looking at these and thinking about is there an opportunity or you know a need for this this kind of body in australia similarly i was at an event in canberra on friday a virtual event in canberra with the news and media research center and they were talking about the need so i'm hoping that you know there will be some sense of like the of the academy helping to kind of foster this kind of spirit of collaboration here and work work with publishers and with government to try and kind of kick start some of this stuff here it's definitely part of the optimism that marx spoke about earlier now the moderators in the zoom environment get switch us off of the virtual world so at this point i'm going to say thank you for all of those who joined us today to listen to this amazing panel and thank you very much panel laura jase from sky news mark ryan from the judith nielsen institute simon carrera from ps media i feel enriched from this discussion and i really appreciate your time and i hope everyone gets to enjoy other parts of the anu's crawford leadership forum which has an excellent lineup so with that good morning thank you we'll see you again thank you very much

Channel: ANU TV

Views: 9

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: ANU, The ANU, Education, Australia, Research, Policy, Academic, University, The Australian National University, Higher education, degree, study, university student

Id: MA8u4oDvGZA

Length: 44min 27sec (2667 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021