Nikki Savva to write a column for Nine Newspapers

In 2016 Savva published a book about Tony Abbott and the small coterie of insiders who helped him to govern. In it, she talks about Abbott’s problems. I wrote at the time:

One of the main ones was that all decisions seemed to emanate from a small group of select people in the leader's office, including his chief-of-staff. The type of collegial consultation that members of Parliament are apparently used to in a Westminster democracy were thrown out the door. A tiny clique was doing everything to control the message, but when the leader's popularity failed to turn around people outside that group turned on the leader and replaced him just like that.

That chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, now writes a column for The Australian, where Savva used to run her words. Savva also used to work for Nine Chairman Peter Costello, so the current move is as cosy as Abbott’s counsellors were.

Savva is best known to the general population for her appearances on the ABC’s Sunday chat show, ‘Insiders’, which gets talked about at length on social media. One thing Savva didn’t talk about in her book was the one-term government we’ve seen so much of in recent years in Australia. As I wrote at the time of her book’s appearance:

But this phenomenon of one-term governments is something that the commentariat will have to one day really take a close, hard look at. So far noone has really made the attempt. I think it has something to do with the new public sphere in the age of social media. But a lot of people would despise me for even suggesting something like this.

It'd be very interesting if Savva could turn her attention to such things as these because so far the quantity of discussion about the shiftiness of politics in this country hasn’t percolated through the community to any significant degree. People are aware that something’s changed, but they are not all saying the same thing. Awareness is limited to responses to journalists and politicians who castigate the broader community when debate turns ugly. The common people revel in the icy sobriquets thrown out by the wounded.

The holy grail was always due recompense for use of News Corp content

It’s been 12 years – this 6 April – that the media giant’s Robert Thomson declared in an interview:

"Google encourages promiscuity -- and shamelessly so -- and therefore a significant proportion of their users don't necessarily associate that content with the creator.

"It's certainly true that readers have been socialised – wrongly I believe – that much content should be free."

It was a declaration of war for which the peace has just been announced.  

Under the new three-year agreement, Facebook will pay for news articles from publications such as The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun. Sky News Australia has also signed an agreement with Facebook.

Thomson’s negative animus with regard to Google had converted itself, over the years, into a motion by media outlets in Australia that turned into laws drafted and put to Parliament for debate. At the last minute, Google capitulated and began to sign agreements with media companies. Facebook refused, and historically blocked users from posting news articles to its website. Then the government changed some aspects of the laws and Facebook unblocked the news.

Now this.

The “free” bit is still true – most readers of news won’t pay for it. But this is changing. For some the alignment of the interests of the dreaded Murdoch media and IT giants such as Google and Facebook will seem disturbing. A new bogeyman to revile and slam in a thousand new acerbic tweets flung like refuse out of life’s virtual cage. But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and smaller media companies will also benefit from the new regime.

But note the sunset clause. Such accord will be contingent upon both perceived return and on public opinion. In a way it’s still up to users what kind of dispensation exists in the public sphere, from an economic standpoint at least. If you think that IT behemoths should pay for the privilege of allowing you to share what you like on social media, then get vocal. And forget about your personal brand of politics. 

More is a stake than whether your favourite political party is elected to office. News Corp’s typically sustained activism over a large number of years – something that it specialised in as it works in various public spheres to get change made – has, in the present case, turned out to be a blessing for all news makers. Even a website as progressive as Crikey – which is run by a company named Private Media – can benefit measurably from Murdoch’s intransigence. No doubt its journalists would never have thought they’d see the day that they might be able to praise the feisty and conservative nonagenarian patriarch.

Keeping the bastards honest – Rudd and his crusades

There was something different about Kevin Rudd from the beginning. I remember being at an election night party in 2007 when Rudd led the Labor Party to victory. We all stood out on the balcony of a cute suburban home in Marrickville – veges on the boarder and chooks on the grass – and talked about social media and petrol prices. Rudd’d got our attention with his “greatest moral challenge” address to the National Climate Summit that year. 

But once in power, in 2010 Rudd postponed the introduction of an emissions trading scheme.  It was a stunning backflip that served – at one stroke – to erode the Labor Party leader’s credibility. It signalled a temporary pause on Rudd’s brand of politics, though Bill Shorten flirted with Rudd’s inimitable tendency to engage in virtue signalling. Bill’s EV policy in 2019 had something of Rudd’s messianic zeal about it but it, too, was not a winner and the electorate failed to embrace him. 

I think that part of the reason they did so is because of Rudd’s abiding awfulness. Not only was he a spineless coward – the electorate mused – but he was also a bully, verbally lashing out at subordinates in the most craven manner. From the front: smooth and deliberate. Behind the scenes: a chaos of unreconciled aggressions.

Anthony Albanese is shaping up to be a different kind of leader. Unlike Shorten with his ambitious EV policy – reducing to 105g/km the entire fleet of light vehicles (which would’ve required a total shift to pure-electric EVs for new car purchases) – Albanese is playing a more moderate game of waiting until the Liberal-National Coalition makes a mistake, then statesmanlike fronting the press to give Scott Morrison – the prime minister – a tongue lashing. Not the most effective speaker (like Joe Biden), Albanese sounds a bit diffident, a bit not-quite-there. 

Just like an Opposition’s pre-election policies. Albanese’s method has a lot in common with Barry O’Farrell’s. The Liberal Party leader in New South Wales ran a small-target campaign in the lead-up to the 2011 election and waited for the other side to make mistakes, then took the prize in the end. The Liberal-National Coalition has been in power in the state ever since.

Rudd, meanwhile, is on a new crusade: defanging the Murdoch press. This is a losing battle as nobody will be even remotely interested in repeating Julia Gillard’s loss of face in 2013 – when such reform of media laws was last attempted – a failure that was followed by Labor losing the election to the detestable Tony Abbott. 

The media for its part should be highlighting where Rudd is weakest, and deflect any criticism of Labor onto his shoulders. Doing so’d make it easier for Albanese – the anointed one – to shine, and to beat the L/N Coalition he’ll pretty much need to shine bright. The one good thing that can come of the unpleasant Rudd’s recent visibility is that it can serve as an opportunity to show how decent and electable Albanese is.

Tech boffins shouldn’t risk losing social licence to deal with Australia

When, on 18 February, Facebook stripped its Australian users – people who generate revenues for them, part of that breed of individual whose participation in the platform is the underpinning of all value inhering in it – of the ability to do something as natural and reasonable as sharing links to the news stories they rely on to survive, I was, along with many others, shocked. Here was a company that had called its primary vehicle for sharing – the “news feed” – banning news by blocking links to news websites.

I disabled the app on my iPhone and removed the browser tab from my PC’s start screen but on 23 February the company was back at the bargaining table ready to talk with Australian news producers – people who, in the final analysis, create so much of the value they rely on to keep consumers coming back. 

Juanita Philips does a cross on the ABC news, evening of 23 February.

I was doubly shocked seeing a range of different views in the public sphere – mainly on Twitter. Twitter came into its own for me over these dark days of privation as I’d previously there created a number of different accounts so could hold conversations with different people, but my views were not always echoed and I learned, to my shame, that many people blamed the media for the impasse. In most cases one name came up again and again. A bugbear for all occasions, someone so notorious as to be a byword for poor conduct. I won’t mention the name but I think that anyone who reads my article can imagine what it is. This bias was particularly evident among people on the left and, furthermore, from people living in the United States, where Fox News is, for many, a regretted participant in the public sphere.

But just to denigrate an entire business process on account of your personal revulsion due to one individual media player seemed to me to be counterproductive. There’s a meme on social media about the French philosopher who is said to have quipped something along the lines that holding certain views was regrettable but that the person speaking would defend to the death the right of anyone to have their views heard. The present case makes a mockery of such well-meaning and altruistic principles, and shows us up to be partial and narrow-minded. 

We need to defer to principles in the current debate which is – despite the misleading headlines of last Tuesday – not yet over. Not by a long shot. And we must ask ourselves what living without political speech would be like – for that is what Facebook’s ban means. A world where speech can only be legally conducted upon such subjects as birthdays, pets, and meals eaten in local restaurants. No talk of government policies, of laws that impact on our lives, of court cases, or of diplomatic visits by heads of state. A blanket of silence is discretely drawn across an entire ecosystem of ideas just because a few pampered nobodies in Silicon Valley won’t share. It reminds me of the CCP and their dogged unwillingness – to the point where they simply ban Facebook and Twitter and set up their own social media sites – to share power.

It’s this lack of generosity that is so striking in the case, a lack that says something revealing about ourselves. About the US media pundit who – generously placed on-screen by an eager national broadcaster – poo-poohs the government’s efforts. About the malicious troll who slanders a media baron because others will mindlessly reward their post with likes and shares. About the family member who echoes the same sentiments. About friends who grudgingly – grudgingly! – accept the need for regulation when pressed – when pressed! – but who revert to blaming the mainstream media for not having responded to the technological changes of the past generation with sufficient foresight. 

As if anyone could have done. We need the media more than ever before but it will never be perfect – and this is the tragedy. Because in one person’s eyes the media is flawed therefore the entire system must be overhauled. Because one person cannot stand listening to Sky News after dark a whole group of professionals must be starved of the means to make a living. Just because one person, moreover, likes to read stupid, badly-punctuated and barely literate hot takes by some random posting on an “indie” media site Channel Nine must be punished. 

Or 7 West Media. Or Network Ten. A thousand curses upon the heads of those who criticise the Morrison government for doing the right thing. A million thumbs down for Mark Zuckerberg and his faceless minions, penny-pinching like Scrooge and pretending that they are popular when it is the weird 55-year-old woman you met on Facebook who posts cracked-but-entertaining recaps of her youth who engages you. Or the old friend – over 80 years now but still full of ideas – who resorts to paraphrasing news stories the site has stopped him from sharing. Or the former colleague who puts up pictures of lizards he meets at the beach. Or the goofy right-winger, a friend of a friend, who celebrates Trump in the face of overwhelming pressure to capitulate. It is in these fragments, on the edges of debate, that the real action takes place.

The tech boffins shouldn’t risk losing their social license to deal with Australia. We are the world.

Blog launch

Welcome to Media Magnet. I began to use this as a place to put posts I'd already written elsewhere but that I thought deserved another run on the track. You can't let an old dog just lie in the sun, you've got to throw them a bone on occasion and take them out to the beach for a frolic in the shallows.

When I look back on those old posts I'm reminded of how the internet has changed in the intervening years. How much more polarised it is since every man (and woman) and his dog has come to the park. On 3 January 2016 I wrote in a post about social media:

One possible downside is that people might just edit events to fit an overarching positive narrative, but that takes a lot of effort and work. It's much easier - if you want to increase your followers - to just become more positive and collected yourself, and the benefits will just follow. In a real sense social media is changing the way we live because we have to actually make our lives fit that overarching positive narrative. It's not just a matter of continuously masking the reality by putting a positive spin on things that might actually have been relatively less satisfying or rewarding. We are starting to behave in ways that would anyway receive a welcome from our friends and acquaintances.

How wrong I was! This post is remarkable however for  the fact that -- like the post you're reading now -- it appeared first at the beginning of the year. Five years back. On 29 April 2013 I wrote in another blogpost:

The big question for people who are looking at the future of the media is revenue, but I think that even more important issues are how to drive the public agenda and how to form trust in the media within the public, trust that has been eroded over time.

In that post I thought aloud about different funding models for journalism, and this brought me into contact with a man who started a new website, but I fell out of the loop with them as I felt that my contributions weren't being properly credited. I did write however:

For the Big Two [Fairfax and News Corp], the tempo stays the same - there are just as many stories as ever - as they move toward raising revenue via paywalls, but overall the quantum of effort in the media environment is shifting to well-funded public relations at the expense of in-depth public-interest journalism. Public confidence in the media is eroded, but the Big Two can't slow down or else they'll lose clicks, so they just keep on doing what they've always done.

You could envision a pyramid structure with part of the content for a story available free-of-charge - this can be shared online - and more in-depth items available for a fee. And you could move beyond the flat story, too. For example, you might offer a podcast video free at the top of the pyramid, with a story readable for a fee and then, lower down the pyramid, transcripts of the source material that can be read by people willing to pay more for more context. Interview transcripts can run to thousands of words and you might have three or four interviews for one 1000-word story. Would people be willing to pay for that? I'd like to find out.

The Guardian took up a different tack from the Big Two, and has given people a means to provide funds independent of a subscription. People do this because they like the website, not in order to read the stories, which remain free (though you have to register now to read).

So there are many models. Disappointing however is how people have taken the disarray of the media -- especially since Google has threatened to take its search engine out of Australia -- and turned it into attacks on the media. So, if you dislike Murdoch papers you then lump all media into the same basket  and crow about their malaise.

What happens is still up ion the air, but keep your fingers crossed Google starts to change its approach. I will be crossing my fingers and toes in anticipation of a win for news over tech giants.