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.