7 days ago
Geraldine Doogue takes on the future of journalism in 2025 Andrew Olle lecture
This is an edited version of the 28th annual televised Andrew Olle Media Lecture delivered by ABC journalist Geraldine Doogue in Sydney on Friday, July 25.
What a year to be delivering the lecture on the media of the future — or on any subject that requires some certainties or good prophecy — because nothing seems certain in our lives.
For quite a while after the invitation to present the 2025 Andrew Olle Media Lecture arrived, I'd settled on those immortal WB Yeats lines as my title:
"The centre cannot hold … The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Yes, those words certainly describe our times. But it just felt too defensive and grim, and I didn't want to leave you all like that. So I settled on "Not Drowning, Waving" as my title, which somehow seemed more apt, with a touch of irony.
It is all a bit grim: no doubt about it for those of us who love the media, love working inside it, consuming it, believing it's vital to our way of life.
Roy Greenslade, the UK media analyst, was pretty blunt back in 2016 when he said:
"It is time to recognise that the whole UK newspaper industry is heading for a cliff fall, that tipping point when there is no hope of a reversal of fortune."
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford has been forensically examining this.
Prospect magazine headlined their coverage of the institute's latest report with: "Journalism is in freefall — and the public doesn't care".
That rider has stayed with me.
"The public doesn't miss yesterday's news, but journalists miss the public," writes the article's author, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.
As he explains, current trends suggest at best a continued retreat, as the press serves fewer people.
It may ultimately end up with a role akin to contemporary art or classical music: highly valued by a privileged few, regarded with indifference by the many.
That's our existential crisis, though the fine print of the Reuters research does indicate that the public, in theory, is still with us. It's just that other options loom as better.
An article by 360 Info, an outlet that bills itself as "Research Reuters", argues that media players are involved in a war of attention, competing against outlets whose stock-in-trade is harnessing rage and anger.
Of course, it is also true that media consumers have become our competitors by creating their own bespoke news outlets — a great irony.
"Scare stories about the problems associated with digital media will not bring people back to news," Nielsen writes.
"A wiser course of action might be to impress people, rather than try to depress them.
"The people best positioned to forge a different path are those journalists and publishers who accept that the next step is to meet people where they are. The aim should not be to take journalism backwards, but to create something new."
But what would that look and sound like?
Christopher Clark, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, recently wrote an essay called "The End of Modernity".
"A crisis is unfolding before our eyes — and also in our heads," its subtitle read.
Before the modern age, people obtained information "from individuals, by word of mouth". With the advent of the modern media industry, "rumour-mongers gave way to trained journalists".
The media of the modern era, he writes, "created its own mythology, a story we could tell ourselves, a means of situating ourselves in time, of understanding where we came from and where we were heading".
But this modern system, Professor Clark says, is disintegrating before our eyes.
"The multi-faceted nature of contemporary politics, the present of turmoil and change without a clear sense of direction, is causing enormous uncertainty," he writes.
"It helps explain why we are so easily unsettled by the agitations of the present and why we find it so difficult to plot our course."
Maybe, he wonders, there's a general reversal taking place. The gossip-mongers of the internet have once again seized the initiative, leading to the fragmentation of knowledge and opinions.
"It has never been so difficult to think calmly," Professor Clark writes.
And yet, how necessary it is.
Perhaps our journalistic egos have become wrapped up in hitting the headlines ourselves.
Who among us can honestly say we were impervious to the Woodward-Bernstein achievements around Watergate? Two young bloods, nobly jousting with the deeply flawed Richard Nixon and his establishment and bringing him down.
Journalistic nobility, then super-stardom!
We media workers will always have a duty to warn citizens of danger and incompetence, alert them to what's not solved, why today might be different from yesterday: the classic role of the fourth estate.
However, I do wonder whether the breadth of the community and its range of tastes and interests are sufficiently canvassed, and whether we're more energised by displaying incompetence rather than searching for competence.
The latter could be a real service, though it may not yield that fabulous rush of revelation and schadenfreude.
I have long believed that reporting achievements makes for a very good first paragraph. It might in fact persuade doubters that we really are interested in the wider community, not just overturning governments or winning a scalp.
Mathias Döpfner, head of German media group Alex Springer, believes one of the reasons people are losing trust in the media is because many confuse "journalism for activism".
"More and more young people want to become journalists because they want to improve the world," he told The Sunday Times.
"I think that's a dangerous misunderstanding of journalism."
In this communitarian model I'm reflecting on, I see a renewal of the covenant between the public and the journalist, of clearly making the effort to be fair and accurate.
We're not there to tell people about the comfortable status quo. To some extent, we are there to bother them, to introduce some alert and alarm.
And no, we can't guarantee we'll be fully objective, but we can observably try, and be seen to be doing so or judged for not. The public can draw its own conclusions.
Intellectual openness is, for me, the glittering prize.
That's what I look for in colleagues. And I suspect the public does too.
This all dovetails with other, bigger needs within the culture.
I would argue that we might well have reached peak-individualism, a sociological urge that manifests in all those solitary searches on the net for some bliss — maybe sometimes found.
And yet so many of them are seeking ways to avoid loneliness, separateness or alienation. I don't think we thrive on individualism.
We're all looking for green shoots: that's the truth of it.
After all, the BBC had to invent all those looks and props and sounds around news presentation, which we simply take for granted now. Moving past individual gossip to something more formal involved massive creativity.
We clearly need it again. And to my mind, we need to lionise creativity and service beyond individual achievement to routinely engage lots more people, more regularly.
Otherwise, we simply won't have an industry at scale. It won't be prosperous enough to offer careers or cadetships to young people. All sorts of people will end up as artists working in garrets, rationing their time and money, occasionally striking it rich, mostly doing something else.
That's no answer.
I haven't talked about AI, or the innards of dis- or misinformation. I can't even give you specific new models of this communitarian emphasis I'm discussing. I wish I could.
But if we're passive, we might lose this gem of ours, this buoy of modernity.
We might lose this industry that I adored from day one, back in 1972, when I wandered up the corridor of Newspaper House at 125 St Georges Terrace, Perth, on a hot January day and said, "Is there a way in, I wonder?"
Thank goodness they said yes.
