In late 2016, the Niemen Lab asked a select group of journalists to make their predictions for how the 2017 year would pan out for journalism.
Some were eerily accurate. Others…less so.
Of the responses, one that definitely falls into the “Nostradamus” category is Mary Walter-Brown’s Getting Comfortable Asking for Money. Walter-Brown’s assessment that “to survive, [news organisations] need to ask their audiences for money” has proven to be a key talking point in discussions about the future of Australian journalism, particularly when the mass Fairfax job cuts and subsequent strike dominated headlines.
With Facebook and Google controlling a staggering amount of Australian advertising revenue, “the old way” is no longer viable for news companies, and that means colossal net losses per annum for nearly all the major Australian corporations (News Corp may not have been as high-profile as Fairfax, but it has been steadily cutting jobs for the last decade).
The general consensus has been that, for Australian journalism to survive, the public needs to pay for it. With the expansion of online journalism over the last 10-15 years, we have become accustomed to accessing our preferred news outlet’s quality content for free, or hidden behind flimsy paywalls that are just one “incognito mode” away.
But with advertising no longer a stable source of income for quality journalism, it is vital that we as consumers make a conscious decision to pay for our content, or the brilliant journalism we’re used to will become no more than trashy celebrity gossip and clickbait. Walter-Brown’s statement may not be accurate just yet, but all the signs are pointing towards it coming to pass in the near future.
However, not all the predictions are so accurate. Carla Zanoni’s Prioritizing Emotional Health optimistically predicted that its title would become a “must-have mindset” in the newsroom. Unfortunately, on multiple occasions, that was proved to be a fierce overestimation of newsroom ethics in some media outlets.
The Daily Mail, for instance, has continued to live up to its salacious reputation, notably following former Essendon coach James Hird’s wife away from the hospital where he was recuperating from a reported suicide attempt, while Herald Sun chief football writer Mark Robinson was lambasted by the public for an insensitive tweet concerning Collingwood’s Alex Fasolo.
While the public response to these incidents has shown a changing societal mindset towards mental health, the fact remains that journalism still has a long way to go in fully respecting mental health issues.
