Jane’s take on the fall of New Matilda
My friend Wyatt (who has started his own independent media revolution at Journalisnt.net) sent me what can only be described as a frantic message of despair the other day:
Sucks that New Matilda has gone down.
What’s the lesson there?? Is it possible to keep a viable alternative afloat and not be bought out, ala Beecher’s Crikey? Answers, Jane, I want answers!!
He was reacting to the sad and unexpected announcement that one of Australia’s most respected and fiercely independent sources of news and commentary, NewMatilda.com, will cease to exist from 25 June because it can no longer be financed “in large part due to the sheer difficulty of selling online advertising in the current media environment”.
Ironically Crikey, oft-considered New Matilda’s leading indie rival, beat me to the punch by providing Wyatt his (and all of us who will miss it) answers through a very respectful column devoted to the site’s demise here.
Crikey’s Margaret Simons summed up what we can ‘learn’ best:
The truth is that opinion-based sites can be trusted to either survive, or be quickly replaced by others.
Opinion is cheap in every sense of the word, which is why News Ltd’s The Punch and Fairfax’s National Times can continue to pay nothing — that’s right, nothing for contributions, and the ABC’s The Drum pays just $200 a piece. It is not a lack of independent opinion and analysis that we need to worry about.
News reporting is a different matter. It involves some of the hard and dirty work of journalism — the hanging around, the developing of contacts, the cold-call telephoning of people who do not want to talk to you, and who are often angry and rude.
While some people may do some of this work for free some of the time, if you want it done consistently and well, then ultimately it has to be paid for.
The media industry is in the thick of the biggest identity crisis it’s ever experienced.
Spoilt for choice of content, the failings of individual content makers are becoming more pronounced, making it increasingly difficult, particularly for traditional media, to keep up with all the things people want to know and all the ways they want to find it out.
It’s in this competitive environment that I believe IF will thrive.
This is a really exciting time in which anything is possible; traditional and new media outlets alike are scrambling to experiment to find out what will work best. I honestly believe that IF will be just one of many small specialist alternative magazines that will rise up now to fill the void, funded by the very people most personally invested in their survival.
The Journalist-Entrepreneurs
There are already number of journalist-cum-entrepreneurs who have recently gained mainstream notoriety (I have yet to join their ranks but I’ll get there!).
They’ve all seen a gap in the market and left the glitz and glamour of mainstream titles to create something new upon revenue models that make their contributors’ salary proportionate to market value. I’m particularly inspired by the genius of 48 Hour Magazine, the first issue of which was recently published in – you guessed it – two days in the United States.
Journalist-entrepreneurship is by no means a new phenomenon. For every quirky feature billing a new generation of media moguls there are a dozen little known bloggers who have maintained independent news sites for years purely out of civic duty.
One example is Anup Shah, who has been running news aggregator Global Issues since 1998 in his spare time, i.e. for FREE. Shah avoided accepting donations and revenue from affiliates such as Google and Amazon.com until recently because he was afraid it would taint the integrity of the site.
But I think that pandering to this notion that readers are somehow ‘entitled’ to free information because its online could actually be the thing killing independent media. If we journalists don’t value our own craft, how do we expect to go on doing it?
Even if Shah had started advertising on the site years ago, the fact that he’d received compensation for his hard work would not have undermined the quality of his content, nor does it now diminish the level of personal accountability Shah has to his audience.
It’s not as though he’s rolling in obscene amounts of cash obtained from Google Adsense. And he’s fairly transparent about the way the money is spent: “If ad revenue is significant this could open up a lot of opportunities for the site…it may allow me to afford more complex services and subscriptions that might help me provide better content on the site.”
The death of New Matilda is as sure a sign as any that the funding model for independent media and particularly new media, must change. The freedom of information will never be reduced to a bidding war between elitists, but we (both journalists and readers) now have to stop defining the word ‘independent’ as ‘free’, rely less on corporate advertising and more on consumer benevolence.
Contrary to popular opinion, journalists can’t survive on booze and cigarettes alone – we need to eat just like everyone else.
So it IS viable to keep a valuable alternative media afloat, but not by the ways we are used to. Sponsorship deals and subscription fees can no longer be seen as tempting vices of ‘lesser’ journalists, but as tools for survival that don’t necessarily compromise editorial integrity.
The death of New Matilda doesn’t signal the end of independent media, only the end of independent media as we know it. It teaches us that if we don’t want the art of independent news to die out entirely, we – all of us – have to show that we truly value it.
Got a bone to pick about the media industry? Email me at theIFprojecteditor [at] gmail [dot] com and I’ll post my answers on the IF blog.
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June 6, 2010
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