Analysis: Media Inquiry should look beyond 'the mainstream media'

Ian Rogers and David Walker
Building up Banking Day and sister publication The Bank Investor has forced the WorkDay Media team to grapple with the economics of delivering useful information to people. So, last month we wrote a submission to the Federal Government's Independent Media Inquiry setting out our views. This submission has now been published by the Inquiry.

Australians are relying less and less on information from "the mainstream media" - that is, existing newspapers, TV and radio stations. Instead, they are getting and exchanging information from a far richer variety of internet-based sources, from email newsletters to expert blogs, to government and company records.

The future for Australian newspapers in this new environment is uncertain. Once they were the gatekeepers; now they are not. They are losing advertisers and readers to a fundamentally more attractive and efficient internet. The media analyst Roger Colman calculates that "all metropolitan newspapers in print editions will be unprofitable, definitely, by 2020".

Many of those who fear for the future of "the mainstream media" in Australia - like academic David McKnight, or publisher Eric Beecher - are concerned about how we will reproduce the activities of big newspaper newsrooms as newspapers gradually go out of business.

But such a focus on the media's past signals a failure of imagination. Big newspaper newsrooms will not be recreated in online form. Facts, news and analysis are all going to have to come out in different ways than they have in the past. They already are.

And the new media environment, for all its faults, is far better than what it is replacing.

Media analysts worry that all these new information sources can't uncover big news the way newspapers have. The worriers are probably wrong. Now, more than ever, the truth will out. Richard Nixon's wrongdoings over Watergate were mostly uncovered by official investigators; Woodward and Bernstein, great journalists though they were, were merely conduits. In the age of the internet, Watergate might have unfolded over weeks, not years.

In just the past year we have seen yet another new information innovation - Wikileaks - whose model suggests secrets will be harder than ever to keep in the decades ahead. More new ideas and more online media players keep popping up.

New online players would already be even more numerous in traditional media areas such as politics, public policy and business if not for the presence of mainstream media - especially newspapers. Mainstream media use their traditional businesses to massively subsidise their online efforts. This is certainly the biggest bar to the expansion of many online information ventures, including WorkDay Media.

Australia has entered an age when media can be created, transformed and transmitted far more easily than ever before. Australians who believe in the importance of an informed society should treat the 2010s as an era of huge optimism and opportunity. For there is every reason to believe that the Australian society of the next 20 years will be better informed than ever before.

Facing such a future, it makes little sense to try to impose a more restrictive regime on the dwindling existing "mainstream media", or to subsidise its continued existence. We can improve the Press Council. We can have governments make more information available to citizens. But there is no need to choose this moment to impose either a new regulatory regime or a new protection scheme.

This is a moment to embrace the information future, not to embalm the media past.

Ian Rogers is the founder and publisher and David Walker is the chief operating officer of WorkDay Media, which publishes the online news services Banking Day and The Bank Investor.
Resources
•    The Australian Government's Independent Media Inquiry
•    The Workday Media submission to the inquiry [PDF file]
•    Updated document - WorkDay Media on the provision of information to Australian communities [PDF file]