tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/the-age-4944/articlesThe Age – The Conversation2022-11-27T08:25:16Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1954212022-11-27T08:25:16Z2022-11-27T08:25:16ZMedia go for drama on Victorian election - and miss the story<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497438/original/file-20221127-14-s38r78.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel Carrett/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For the best part of two weeks, Victorian voters were told by the media that the election on November 26 might result in either a <a href="https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/james-campbell-liberals-preferences-may-result-in-a-weak-labor-government-forced-to-negotiate-with-a-minor-party/news-story/b4733aec0f2323c88a3f951d9efa098f">hung parliament</a> or a <a href="https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/state-election/labor-tipped-to-edge-election-win-but-in-danger-of-minority-government-polling-shows/news-story/0c69e770e6a6b503bfa75a3bbaa7c053">minority Labor government</a>.</p>
<p>In the event, the Labor government was returned with a reduced but clear majority, the size of which is not yet known, while the Coalition has suffered a crushing defeat.</p>
<p>How could the pre-election coverage have been at once so breathless and misleading?</p>
<p>The short answer is because of a combination of groupthink and wishful thinking. Unpacking this requires the disclosure of a few trade secrets.</p>
<p>Two days out from polling day, the Herald Sun published <a href="https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/state-election/labor-on-track-to-lose-up-to-a-dozen-seats-in-victorian-election/news-story/ff9cee2f2e17b47387128e3f1863dfd4">an analysis</a> of some focus-group research by RedBridge Group, carried out over the past two years.</p>
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<p>It stated the likeliest scenario on November 26 would see Labor with 43 seats and therefore forced to form a minority government, given it requires 45 seats for a majority. The best-case scenario for Labor was 48 seats and a return to government in its own right.</p>
<p>Earlier in the campaign there had been loose talk in the Herald Sun, based on no particular data, that there could be a hung parliament.</p>
<p>Then in the last week, a Resolve Strategic poll for The Age <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/labor-coalition-neck-and-neck-as-gap-narrows-between-andrews-and-guy-20221121-p5bzxv.html">showed</a> the primary vote for Labor and the Coalition tied at 36%. </p>
<p>It seemed the race was tightening and perhaps a hung parliament or a minority government were real possibilities.</p>
<p>For the media, this is exciting stuff. It suggests drama, suspense, uncertainty – all powerful news values.</p>
<p>So at rival newsdesks, one can imagine an element of consternation. A chief of staff (COS) can be imagined ringing a state political reporter:</p>
<p>COS: “See the Herald Sun has a survey suggesting a minority government?”</p>
<p>Reporter: “Yeah, but some of it’s two years old.”</p>
<p>COS: “Yeah but a minority government. That’s big. I think we have to have something.”</p>
<p>Reporter: “All right. Something.”</p>
<p>COS: “I mean, we’ll look like dills if we don’t have something and it happens.”</p>
<p>Hours later at news conference, where decisions are made on what stories go where, everyone around the table has seen the Herald Sun. At The Age they’ve also seen the ABC pick it up and at the ABC they’ve seen The Age pick it up. Each reinforces the other’s assessment of the story’s credibility.</p>
<p>The chief of staff assures conference that state rounds are on to it. Minority government becomes the story. Its origin in qualitative data, some of which is two years old, stoked up by the Herald Sun as part of its relentless campaign against the Andrews government, is forgotten or overlooked.</p>
<p>Evidence to support the minority-government hypothesis is assembled, especially the Resolve Strategic quantitative data showing the primary votes neck-and-neck.</p>
<p>News conference’s resident Cassandra raises a voice. “What about the two-party-preferred?”</p>
<p>Editor: “What about it?”</p>
<p>Cass: “Every poll we’ve seen so far has Labor ahead by up to ten percentage points. And they’re up to date, not weeks, months or years old.”</p>
<p>Editor: “So you’re saying we should just ignore the RedBridge stuff?”</p>
<p>Cass: “No, but you can’t ignore the two-party-preferred either.”</p>
<p>Editor: “All right. Put in a parachute about the two-party-preferred but lead on the minority government. I mean there could even be a hung parliament. We’ll look like dills if we downplay this.”</p>
<p>Yep. And that’s how you look when wishful thinking and groupthink cloud hard-minded analysis of all the available data. Taken together, the data showed the likeliest (but journalistically least interesting) outcome was the return of the government with a reduced majority.</p>
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<p>Not only did the two-party-preferred vote not tighten appreciably, but the primary vote turned out not to be neck-and-neck. This is not hindsight. The discrepancy between the two should have raised a red flag: how could the primary vote be neck-and-neck when the two-party-preferred gap was so large?</p>
<p>In fairness, it was reasonable to suppose this could just be a function of how the minor party and independent preferences would flow, which was unknowable at the time. But this seemed not to enter the discussion about the prospect of a minority government.</p>
<p>And a hard-headed look at the RedBridge focus-group data would have revealed to a dispassionate analyst that once the more far-fetched cases had been eliminated, Labor was likely to end up with somewhere between 47 and 50 seats.</p>
<p>The ABC’s election analyst, Antony Green, is giving Labor 52 seats <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/vic/2022/results?filter=all&sort=az">at this stage</a>, with 68% of the vote counted.</p>
<p>Even more curiously, the hung parliament and minority government possibilities were initially generated by the Herald Sun, which acted throughout as a propaganda arm of the Liberal Party. Why on earth would respectable and usually reliable elements of the media such as The Age and the ABC buy into this nonsense?</p>
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<p>The answer is that it is an abiding weakness in newsroom decision-making to prefer the most dramatic possibility, however remote, over the most mundane but strongest probability.</p>
<p>It is a further weakness to wish not to be scooped on the most dramatic possibility, even at the expense of misleading your audience, looking foolish in the aftermath and buying into scenarios created by your most politically partisan and least reliable media rival.</p>
<p>The result was a feverish outburst of speculation in the final week of the campaign that fed into questioning of Andrews about <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/no-deal-will-be-done-with-crossbench-if-labor-in-minority-government-daniel-andrews-20221126-p5c1gs.html">whether he would entertain</a> doing deals with crossbenchers if Labor could not muster the 45 seats necessary to form government in its own right.</p>
<p>He batted it away with his customary dismissiveness, and who could blame him?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195421/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In covering the final days of the Victorian election, mainstream media fell victim to wanting the most dramatic outcome – no matter how weak the evidence for it may have been.Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1672662021-09-06T02:56:26Z2021-09-06T02:56:26Z‘Hope’ versus ‘threat’: how The Age got entangled in competing pandemic storylines<p>Two distinct narratives have emerged in the public debate about COVID-19, a narrative of hope and a narrative of threat.</p>
<p>In the polarised atmosphere of our times, each has become politically branded.</p>
<p>This is partly because of deliberate exploitation by politicians and partly because of a genuine conflict in public attitudes about the management of the pandemic.</p>
<p>It is a conflict vividly demonstrated by the visceral reaction to <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-can-t-go-on-like-this-20210901-p58nql.html">an editorial</a> published by The Age on September 1 headed “Victoria can’t go on like this”.</p>
<p>The fallout was such that the editor, Gay Alcorn, felt the need to write an <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/loved-hated-read-the-editorial-with-the-extraordinary-response-20210903-p58opw.html">open letter</a> explaining how and why the editorial was written, and describing the response. She said in part:</p>
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<p>The reaction to this editorial was extraordinary. Behind our live news blog, this was the most-read article on The Age online, almost unheard of for an editorial.</p>
<p>Some readers were furious, saying we had undermined public-health messages, had politicised the pandemic and that Peter Costello (chairman of The Age’s parent company, Nine Entertainment) must have written it. Then there were comments that it was a relief, the best editorial The Age had published for years and that it had articulated what many people were thinking and feeling at this moment.</p>
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<p>Alcorn summarised the editorial’s argument in these terms:</p>
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<p>It suggested that we had reached a point in Victoria where the harm strict lockdowns are causing should be factored in a little more when decisions about restrictions are made.</p>
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<p>When the editorial is read as a whole, it is a lot stronger than that. The relevant paragraph says:</p>
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<p>But there comes a point, and The Age believes that point has been reached, where the damage caused by the harshest and longest lockdowns in the country needs to be more seriously factored in. Wednesday’s announced “easing” was a harsh and cruel blow. Playgrounds can open on Friday (although, in true Victorian style, only one carer can attend and they cannot remove their mask even to eat or drink). Few experts ever endorsed the playground ban in the first place.</p>
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<p>Among the furious responses was <a href="https://johnmenadue.com/the-age-demeans-itself-as-well-as-the-victorian-public-health-team/">an article</a> submitted to the paper by historian Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking, author of The Palace Papers, the celebrated unearthing of correspondence between Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace concerning the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975.</p>
<p>Hocking’s characterisation of the editorial was quite different from Alcorn’s. By way of illustration, she quoted this passage:</p>
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<p>No more lectures about compliance. No more measures that have limited if any evidence to back them just in case they might assist around the edges.</p>
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<p>This, Hocking wrote,</p>
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<p>would have to be the most irresponsible and divisive editorialising imaginable in the midst of a pandemic. The work of the Victorian public health team over the past 18 months has been exceptional, it demeans The Age as much as it does that team to suggest that they might introduce measures without evidence, “just in case”.</p>
<p>It’s barely a month ago that the prime minister and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (a Victorian, remember!) were applauding NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian for refusing to lockdown early, even as numbers of infections were rising exponentially. </p>
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<p>Hocking’s piece appeared in John Menadue’s blog, Pearls and Irritations, with a footnote saying The Age had declined to publish it.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/right-wing-shock-jock-stoush-reveals-the-awful-truth-about-covid-politics-and-media-ratings-164489">Right-wing shock jock stoush reveals the awful truth about COVID, politics and media ratings</a>
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<p>There is enough in these brief extracts to illustrate the political undercurrents running through the narratives of hope and threat.</p>
<p>It is on the public record that Morrison and Frydenberg repeatedly berated Victoria’s Labor government over its imposition of lockdowns while praising the Liberal-National Coalition government of New South Wales for abjuring lockdowns in favour of reliance on swift contact-tracing: the so-called “gold standard”.</p>
<p>It is looking like fool’s gold now.</p>
<p>With a federal election due inside nine months, Morrison and his ministers have started cranking up the narrative of hope. “There is <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/home-quarantine-should-be-widespread-once-vaccination-target-is-hit-pm-says-20210831-p58njk.html">light at the end of the tunnel</a>” has become a stock phrase.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419482/original/file-20210906-17-5veezm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419482/original/file-20210906-17-5veezm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419482/original/file-20210906-17-5veezm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419482/original/file-20210906-17-5veezm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419482/original/file-20210906-17-5veezm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419482/original/file-20210906-17-5veezm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419482/original/file-20210906-17-5veezm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Prime Minister Scott Morrison has gone hard on the ‘narrative of hope’ in recent weeks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tsikas/AAP</span></span>
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<p>Morrison has also wheeled out the popular if fatuous expression that “it is darkest before dawn”. For him, the narrative of hope is all about positioning himself for the election.</p>
<p>Berejiklian, while criticising his government for the shortage of vaccine, has joined him in the chorus of hope, doubtless hoping to save her own skin too.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the Labor governments of Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia – as well as the Liberal government of South Australia – have adhered to the narrative of threat: threat to people’s health and threat to the sustainability of their hospital systems.</p>
<p>The resounding election wins for Labor in Queensland (2020) and Western Australia (2021) were based on the narrative of threat. They showed it to be a potent political weapon, and one that Morrison cannot get his hands on.</p>
<p>This is the background against which The Age published its editorial.</p>
<p>In Australia’s polarised media landscape, News Corporation champions the right while The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC and Guardian Australia are seen as providing a counterpoint on the centre-left.</p>
<p>In this atmosphere of polarisation, any concession to the narrative of hope by those of the centre-left is seen as a sell-out. Yet, as anyone living through the sixth Melbourne lockdown knows, there is a need for some hope. Nothing reckless, just something.</p>
<p>Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has subtly shifted his messaging in that direction.</p>
<p>The Age’s editorial can be seen as a recognition of this shift in sentiment, but its tone – “enough” – was impatient.</p>
<p>It also called for clear evidence that what it calls harsh restrictions are effective. This is not reasonable.</p>
<p>The Victorian Chief Health Officer, Professor Brett Sutton, has said repeatedly it is difficult to know precisely what contribution each measure makes, but taken together, they keep the rate of infection down. That much is demonstrably true, as a comparison with New South Wales makes clear.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/contrasting-nsw-and-victoria-lockdown-coverage-reveals-much-about-the-politics-of-covid-and-the-media-163482">Contrasting NSW and Victoria lockdown coverage reveals much about the politics of COVID – and the media</a>
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<p>However, evidence about the efficacy of specific measures is likely to be obtainable only in retrospect when enough comparative data from enough jurisdictions can be analysed.</p>
<p>The editorial is on stronger ground when it demands more information on what is known about the patterns of spread and on the modelling that shows the effects of various estimated rates of spread on people’s health and the health system.</p>
<p>The sane elements of the media, of which The Age is one, serve the community better when their opinions are measured and do not feed into the political polarisation developing around the pandemic.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167266/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The sane elements of the media, of which The Age is one, serve the community better when their opinions are measured and do not feed into the political polarisation developing around the pandemic.Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1621732021-06-04T08:39:15Z2021-06-04T08:39:15ZWhy have media outlets been fined more than $1 million for their Pell reporting?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/404440/original/file-20210604-19-1gsdzmt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=80%2C72%2C5311%2C3370&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cardinal George Pell preparing to make a statement at the Vatican in 2017.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gregoria Borgia/AP/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In February, Australian media companies <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/media-companies-plead-guilty-to-breaching-suppression-order-in-pell-stories-20210201-p56yh3.html">pleaded guilty</a> to contempt of court over their reporting of Cardinal George Pell’s conviction on sexual abuse charges.</p>
<p>On Friday, the Victorian Supreme Court <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/04/cardinal-george-pell-news-organisations-contempt-court-fined-more-than-1m-over-reporting-of-sexual-abuse-verdict">handed out more than A$1 million</a> in fines against 12 media organisations. </p>
<p>The most heavily hit were the The Age ($450,000) and news.com.au ($400,000). Other high-profile programs, such as the Today Show also copped fines ($30,000). These heavy fines were meted out despite the fact that the media companies had apologised to the court and had even agreed to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/10/george-pell-contempt-hearing-news-companies-to-pay-cost-of-prosecution">pay the prosecution’s legal costs</a>.</p>
<p>There are many ways the law restricts media freedom in Australia, including laws regarding <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-defamation-suits-in-australia-are-so-ubiquitous-and-difficult-to-defend-for-media-organisations-157143">defamation</a>. But contempt of court, seen here by the media’s breaching of a suppression order, is one of the more <a href="https://www.minterellison.com/articles/vlrc-contempt-of-court-report-implications-for-the-media">controversial mechanisms</a>. It is, however, a limitation the courts impose regularly, and take very seriously.</p>
<h2>How did this start?</h2>
<p>Back in December 2018, the court placed a suppression order on the Pell conviction when he was initially found guilty by a jury (his conviction was <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-george-pell-won-in-the-high-court-on-a-legal-technicality-133156">quashed in April 2020</a>).</p>
<p>At the time, various media outlets referred to a trial of great importance and, by implication, a guilty verdict that would have been of great interest to the public.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-jury-may-be-out-on-the-jury-system-after-george-pells-successful-appeal-135814">The jury may be out on the jury system after George Pell's successful appeal</a>
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<p>The implicit, not explicit, nature of the reporting raises an important point. No Australian media company actually named Pell, but some directed their audiences to international online stories. The Herald Sun published a white headline “CENSORED” across a black front page, thereby piquing Victorians’ interest in seeking out international media reports and internet commentary. </p>
<p>As the paper reported,</p>
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<p>The world is reading a very important story that is relevant to Victorians.</p>
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<p>The point is had any member of the public wanted to find out what the media were talking about, they could have done so.</p>
<h2>Why did the court issue the order?</h2>
<p>So why was there a suppression order on the conviction? </p>
<p>This was to try and ensure a fair trial. At the time of the guilty verdict in December 2018, Pell was also facing a second trial over different charges related to similar alleged conduct. Ultimately, as it happened, the second trial did not proceed after charges against Pell were dropped in February 2019. But the possibility of a second trial was alive at the time of the first trial guilty verdict.</p>
<p>There is a principle in law that a jury must decide guilt or innocence on the basis of the evidence before them, and not to allow other evidence (for example, a conviction for a similar crime) to taint their deliberations. </p>
<p>So it was important a jury in that second trial (had it gone ahead) could not know of the first conviction. Otherwise, it would be breaking the rule against using “<a href="https://www.lexisnexis.co.uk/legal/guidance/witness-evidence-similar-facts-evidence">similar fact evidence</a>”.</p>
<h2>The rules are clear</h2>
<p>Suppression orders are a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/dec/14/suppression-orders-australia-why-you-cant-read-what-you-may-want-to">significant limitation</a> on the freedom of the press to report what happens in our criminal courts, but they exist to guarantee that people who come before the courts get a fair trial.</p>
<p>Contempt of court is a serious offence and can result in jail time. Indeed, journalists have been jailed in the past for similar indiscretions. However, no action was ultimately pursued against individuals here. The court determined the appropriate penalty was for fines to be imposed on media organisations. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/when-a-fair-trial-could-be-at-risk-suppression-is-the-order-of-the-day-109181">When a fair trial could be at risk, suppression is the order of the day</a>
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<p>In contempt matters, the amount of any fine is open-ended and, in this case, we see very heavy penalties. This is because Justice John Dixon took a dim view of what he surmised were the motives of the media corporations. </p>
<p>He said <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-04/george-pell-trial-leads-to-contempt-of-court-fine-for-news-media/100190944">The Age and news.com.au articles</a> especially</p>
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<p>constituted a blatant and wilful defiance of the court’s authority […] each took a deliberate risk by intentionally advancing a collateral attack on the role of suppression orders in Victoria’s criminal justice system.</p>
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<p>In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/04/cardinal-george-pell-news-organisations-contempt-court-fined-more-than-1m-over-reporting-of-sexual-abuse-verdict">his view</a> the “timing” of the media apology – made contemporaneously with the contempt guilty plea – “did not demonstrate any significant degree of remorse and contrition.” </p>
<p>The judge added media companies had not only usurped the function of the court, but had taken it “upon themselves” to decide “where the balance ought to lie” between the cardinal’s right to a fair trial and the public’s right to know about it.</p>
<p>While people might debate the politics and huge public interest in the Pell case, the law is clear — that balance is a matter for the courts and the courts alone to determine.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/162173/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rick Sarre is affiliated with the SA Council for Civil Liberties </span></em></p>There is a clear legal reason why publications including The Age and news.com.au have copped hefty penalties.Rick Sarre, Emeritus Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, University of South AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1127662019-03-05T19:15:38Z2019-03-05T19:15:38ZMedia companies on notice over traumatised journalists after landmark court decision<p>A <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VCC/2019/148.html?context=1;query=defamation;mask_path=">landmark ruling</a> by an Australian court is expected to have international consequences for newsrooms, with media companies on notice they face large compensation claims if they fail to take care of journalists who regularly cover traumatic events.</p>
<p>The Victorian County Court accepted the potential for psychological damage on those whose work requires them to report on traumatic events, including violent crimes. The court ruled on February 22 that an Age journalist be awarded $180,000 for psychological injury suffered during the decade she worked at the Melbourne-based newspaper, from 2003 to 2013.</p>
<p>The journalist, known in court as “YZ” to protect her identity, reported on 32 murders and many more cases as a court reporter. She covered Melbourne’s “gangland wars”, was threatened by one of its notorious figures, and found it increasingly difficult to report on events involving the death of children, such as the case of <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-15/doctors-knew-freeman-was-violent-before-bridge-murder/6620082">four-year-old Darcey Freeman</a> who was thrown by her father from West Gate Bridge in 2009.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-research-reveals-how-australian-journalists-are-faring-four-years-after-redundancy-107520">New research reveals how Australian journalists are faring four years after redundancy</a>
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</p>
<hr>
<p>After complaining that she was “done” with “death and destruction”, the journalist was transferred to the sports desk. But a senior editor later persuaded her, against her wishes, to cover the Supreme Court where she was exposed to detailed, graphic accounts of horrific crimes, including the trials of <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/truly-appalling-killer-mum-donna-fitchett-jailed-for-murdering-sons-20100901-14md6.html">Donna Fitchett</a>, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-09/child-killer-robert-farquharsons-ex-wife-seeks-compensation/6531742">Robert Farquharson</a> and Darcey Freeman’s father.</p>
<p>The repeated exposure to traumatic events had a serious impact on her mental health. YZ took a voluntary redundancy from the newspaper in 2013.</p>
<p>In her court challenge, the journalist alleged The Age:</p>
<ul>
<li>had no system in place to enable her to deal with the trauma of her work</li>
<li>failed to provide support and training in covering traumatic events, including from qualified peers</li>
<li>did not intervene when she and others complained</li>
<li>transferred her to court reporting after she had complained of being unable to cope with trauma experienced from previous crime reporting.</li>
</ul>
<p>The Age contested whether the journalist was actually suffering from post-traumatic stress. It argued that even if a peer-support program had been in place it would not have made a material difference to the journalist’s experience.</p>
<p>Further, The Age denied it knew or should have known there was a foreseeable risk of psychological injury to its journalists and simultaneously argued that the plaintiff knew “by reason of her work she was at high risk of foreseeable injury”.</p>
<p>Judge Chris O’Neill found the journalist’s evidence more compelling than the media company’s, even though the psychological injury she had suffered put her at a disadvantage when being cross-examined in court. </p>
<p>Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma in the United States, says: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is a historic judgment – the first time in the world, to my knowledge, that a news organisation has been found liable for a reporter’s occupational PTSD. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Media companies need to take PTSD seriously</h2>
<p>This is not the first time a journalist has sued over occupational PTSD, as Shapiro calls it, but it is the first time one has succeeded. In 2012, another Australian journalist <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2012/s3636143.htm">unsuccessfully sued the same newspaper</a>.</p>
<p>In that earlier case, discussed by a co-author of this article (Ricketson) in <a href="https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=360559384852891;res=IELLCC;type=pdf">Australian Journalism Review</a>, the judge was reluctant to accept either the psychological impact on journalists covering traumatic events or The Age’s tardiness in implementing a trauma-aware newsroom. In stark contrast, the judge in the YZ case readily accepted both these key concepts.</p>
<p>Historically, the idea of journalists suing their employers for occupational PTSD was unheard of. Newsroom culture dictated that journalists did whatever was asked of them, including intrusions on grieving relatives, or “death knocks” as they are known. Doing these was intrinsic to the so-called “school of hard knocks”. Cadet journalists were blooded in the newsroom by their ability to do these tasks.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://library2.deakin.edu.au/record=b2096175%7ES1">academic literature</a> shows that newsroom culture has been a key contributor to the problem of journalists feeling unable to express concerns about covering traumatic events for fear of appearing weak and unsuited to the job.</p>
<p>What is alarming from the evidence provided to Judge O’Neill is the extent to which these attitudes still hold sway in contemporary newsrooms. YZ said that as a crime reporter she worked in a “blokey environment” where the implicit message was “toughen up, princess”. </p>
<h2>Duty of care</h2>
<p>The YZ case shows The Age had learnt little about its duty of care to journalists from the earlier case it defended. One of its own witnesses, the editorial training manager, gave evidence of his frustration at being unable to persuade management to implement a suitable training and support program. Judge O’Neill found him a compelling witness.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/media-files-guardian-australias-katharine-murphy-and-former-mp-david-feeney-on-the-digital-disruption-of-media-and-politics-103243">Media Files: Guardian Australia's Katharine Murphy and former MP David Feeney on the digital disruption of media and politics</a>
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</p>
<hr>
<p>The Dart Center has a range of <a href="https://dartcenter.org/topic/self-care-peer-support">tip sheets on its website</a> for self-care and peer support. What is clear from this case is that it’s not just about individual journalists and what they do, but about editors and media executive taking action.</p>
<p>One media organisation that is leading the way is the ABC. The national broadcaster has had a <a href="https://dartcenter.org/content/peer-support-for-journalists-watch-video-online">peer-support program</a> in place for a decade.</p>
<p>Such programs are vital, not just for individual journalists, but for democracy and civil society. This is because whatever changes have been sweeping through the news media, there is no change in the incidence of disasters, crimes and traumatic events that need to be covered.</p>
<p>News workers need help. And they are beginning to demand it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112766/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Ricketson is chair of the board of directors of the Dart Centre Asia-Pacific, which is affiliated with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma based in the United States. It is a voluntary position. During part of the period covered by the YZ court case he worked as a journalist at The Age. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexandra Wake is on the Dart Centre Asia Pacific board, and in 2011 was named a Dart Academic Fellow. As part of that process, Alex traveled to Columbia University in New York for training, at Dart's expense.
</span></em></p>In a landmark ruling by a Victorian court, a former Age journalist has successfully sued for damages after consistently covering traumatic cases in her job.Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin UniversityAlexandra Wake, Program Manager, Journalism, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1006672018-07-27T06:05:46Z2018-07-27T06:05:46ZAfter the Nine-Fairfax deal, who will shape Melbourne like The Age once did?<p>Stored somewhere behind the imposing glass edifice of The Age Spencer Street headquarters – keeping up appearances even as the newsroom it trumpets is progressively hacked away – is a cardboard box containing hundreds of envelopes addressed by hand to The Age Independence Committee. Tucked in with them are piles of yellowing forms clipped out of newspapers, with signatures, names and addresses – Doveton and South Yarra, Edithvale and Wheelers Hill, Castlemaine and Korumburra.</p>
<p>Cracking open this modest reliquary might provide some insight into the grief – albeit largely from a certain demographic – flowing from yesterday’s announcement of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/search/result?sg=28a33df8-57d0-41b4-9d6a-08a682818681&sp=1&sr=2&url=%2Fa-modern-tragedy-nine-fairfax-merger-a-disaster-for-quality-media-100584">passing of the House of Fairfax</a>.</p>
<p>As a young reporter, I handled a good swag of the letters in this box back in 1991 at my desk in the tiny, smoky office of The Age’s storied Insight investigations unit, which in this period moonlighted as the headquarters of The Age Independence Committee. Then The Age was situated a couple of blocks north of its present building. It occupied a brutalist chocolate-brick box in what the columnist John Lahey described as the Siberian quarter of the city, a neighbourhood of “unloved warehouses and 7am sandwich shops”, whipped by a wicked wind off what would become Docklands.</p>
<p>Under the editorship of the venerated <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/perkin-edwin-graham-11370">Graham Perkin</a> (1966-75), The Age had been famously recognised as one of the world’s dozen great newspapers, acquiring a circulation of over 220,000. The legacy of that had endured the fraught transition of control from Melbourne’s Syme family to the Sydney-based Fairfax stable, and shaped my understanding of journalism. But by the time I gained a long-coveted desk in the ugly building in 1989 I’d missed the best of it, I was assured by old hands and readers.</p>
<p>Any time I introduced myself or sat down to do an interview I braced for the inevitable critique. People professed love for the paper in the way you might love family – with no inhibitions, indeed an enthusiasm, about highlighting flaws and disappointments. The Age had lost some of the panache of the Perkin era and some of the stylish writing nurtured by his successor, Michael Davie, opined media columnist and Melbourne son Sam Lipski in The Bulletin in 1988. That said, under Creighton Burns (my first editor) it had generally become “a steadier and more balanced paper”, he wrote. “Melbourne burghers like that.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-modern-tragedy-nine-fairfax-merger-a-disaster-for-quality-media-100584">A modern tragedy: Nine-Fairfax merger a disaster for quality media</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A potent force</h2>
<p>It’s difficult to recall, from this distance, what a potent force the paper was in Melbourne and Victoria. When I try to explain this landscape to my journalism students, they retreat behind that blank, politely suffering look you give nostalgic old people. </p>
<p>In 1988, The Age published a special report titled “Who Shapes Melbourne?” It was the product of weeks of reporting by a team of ten journalists who interviewed dozens of the city’s movers and shakers – an enterprise also beyond the comprehension of my students, raised on a diet of impoverished newsroom budgets. As part of the project, 130 of these doyens were asked to rank Melbourne’s most influential individuals and institutions.</p>
<p>Out of a field of 162 men (overwhelmingly) and women, then Premier John Cain emerged as the individual with the most clout. And of 153 nominated institutions, The Age itself romped into first place ahead of the Arts Centre, the National Gallery and the University of Melbourne (tied in second place); the ACTU (third); the ABC and the Victorian Football League (this was pre-AFL) (fourth) and BHP neck-and-neck with the state cabinet/government (fifth). The tabloid Sun came in sixth, The Herald eighth, alongside the Catholic Church and the police. “Whether The Age really is the most influential institution in Melbourne matters less than the perception, among many of its powerful readers, that it is,” observed Lipski.</p>
<p>“The Age’s role is perplexing,” Phillip Adams (now ABC broadcaster, then advertising guru) told another Bulletin reporter, Jan McGuinness, in a 1989 dig into its place in the Melbourne firmament, archly headlined “A pillow of the community” and featuring a photograph of the Syme family mausoleum captioned “a palace under siege”. “The Melbourne Herald hasn’t had a role in my lifetime; the Melbourne Sun does its job, yet has no image,” Adams expanded. “But The Age is tied to Melbourne’s self-esteem. And, as there isn’t much of that left, it’s very important.”</p>
<p>Commentators may have struggled to explain the enduring gravitas of the paper, but enjoyed pricking its pomposity along the way. A special report in The Australian – “Flaws in the Fairfax formula” (April 23 1991) – listed its sins as “self-indulgence, independence, tradition, superiority”. </p>
<p>The article pokes around the cultural ethos of The Age, contrasting it with The Sydney Morning Herald. The Melbourne paper had long cut its cloth in a more “Whiggish” style, it argued, despite serving a more conservative city. It quotes an unnamed senior Fairfax staffer who had worked at both mastheads. “You’ve got to remember that at the Eureka stockade The Age supported the miners while The Sydney Morning Herald supported the police – the Herald has always been the drapers’ paper.”</p>
<p>The same article quotes a young merchant banker, one Malcolm Turnbull, verbatim and at length, arguing “there is a great deal of sanctimoniousness about journalistic independence”, and that newspapers needed to be disciplined in their exercise of independence. “Why is it that Fairfax journalists believe a proprietor can have no hand in the editorial management but a journalist can? As long as the proprietor is acting honestly and responsibly, why can he not?”</p>
<p>When this article ran, John Fairfax Holdings Ltd was in receivership and the odds were high that The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review and other mastheads would soon be sold. Circulation and revenue from the classified “rivers of gold” were still bountiful, the technology that would steal them still evolving out of sight. But the fortunes and vulnerabilities of the paper were being pored over thanks to “Young” Warwick Fairfax’s disastrous play to privatise the publicly listed media empire on the eve of the 1987 stockmarket crash.</p>
<h2>Maintain Your Age</h2>
<p>The Age’s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/ep23age.pdf">Charter of Editorial Independence</a> – the first document of its type in Australia – emerged when British press tycoon Robert Maxwell took a run at the paper in 1988. Age employees banded together to defend the ethos of the masthead, and generous column space was given to reports and opinion pieces explaining to readers the implications of such a sale for editorial integrity and independence. As journalists organised and fortified, mercifully they could not have known this was merely the first skirmish in a 30-year siege to which the Fairfax name suddenly succumbed with a note to the markets just two mornings ago.</p>
<p>“A newspaper cannot function effectively, cannot put the readers first, if the editor and his staff always have their ears cocked to hear what the proprietor wants,” wrote former editor Michael Davie. The newly formed independence committee reached out to readers for support, establishing a fighting fund, which bought a banner advertisement declaring: “The Age must continue to present the news honestly and without fear or favour. It must not become an organ to peddle the views of a person, a political party, or an interest group.”</p>
<p>And here’s where the letters in the cardboard box come in, a small surviving sample of pre-internet clicktivism, requiring scissors, a stamp and a trip to the mailbox. Thousands of coupons poured in over a couple of campaigns, many with encouraging notes and $5 and $10 notes and cheques attached. The operation to save The Age and its editorial culture was coordinated by Insight chief and associate editor David Wilson, the committee’s chargé de mission and hustler, lobbying powerbrokers, opinion-shapers and glitterati for their support. Like so many others in this story, Wilson is deceased, but my recollection from hours listening to him work the phones was that he rarely encountered anything but enthusiasm for the cause, even as he copped no-holds-barred commentary on all that was wrong with the paper. </p>
<p>His greatest coup – assisted by the spirited cadre he led – was getting <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-charter-for-all-ages-20120619-20m4e.html">Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser to clench hands</a> under the “Maintain Your Age” banner at a rally in the Treasury Gardens in October 1991.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229554/original/file-20180727-106502-hhpmsw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229554/original/file-20180727-106502-hhpmsw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229554/original/file-20180727-106502-hhpmsw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229554/original/file-20180727-106502-hhpmsw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229554/original/file-20180727-106502-hhpmsw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229554/original/file-20180727-106502-hhpmsw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229554/original/file-20180727-106502-hhpmsw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229554/original/file-20180727-106502-hhpmsw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Malcolm Fraser joined forces with Gough Whitlam to support Fairfax newspapers’ editorial independence in 1991. The Age associate editor David Wilson is on the left.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">maintainyourage.org</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But his fondest recruit was surgeon and POW Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, who apparently on initial approach assumed the campaign was concerned with elderly rights, but who nonetheless threw himself wholeheartedly behind The Age because that was a good cause too.</p>
<p>The paper was then facing a takeover by a consortium led by Canadian mogul Conrad Black (later jailed) and Australia’s Kerry Packer. Thousands of readers marched up Collins Street. Whitlam moved a motion calling on the Hawke Labor government to do everything possible to prevent further media concentration and foreign ownership. Fraser seconded it.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-keating-unleashes-vitriolic-attack-on-nines-takeover-of-fairfax-100604">Paul Keating unleashes vitriolic attack on Nine's takeover of Fairfax</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>As the columnist Bob Millington had reflected in a piece rifling through the “Maintain Your Age” mailbag, “if politics makes strange bedfellows, defending a newspaper brings an even stranger, yet wonderful, collection of people together”. Over these early years the campaign enlisted support from individuals you could not imagine having any more in common than a football team (it is, after all, Melbourne). BHP chairman Sir James Balderstone, historian Professor Manning Clark, ACTU secretary Bill Kelty, Victorian Farmers Federation chief Heather Mitchell, former Victorian premiers John Cain and Sir Rupert Hamer, philanthropist and prisons campaigner Dame Phyllis Frost, Greens leader Bob Brown and RSL president Bruce Ruxton.</p>
<p>And then there were the coupon signers. Millington unearthed coupons and cheques from descendants of the Syme family and a 12-year-old boy from Brighton. Readers in Albury, Rosanna and Bentleigh declared their decades of subscription, the prize for longevity going to Mrs Florence Williams of St Kilda who “says she reads The Age from cover to cover each day. Mrs Williams will be 99 next Wednesday”. Bless her, and Millo, (both departed), but Mrs Williams represents the extreme end of a once rusted-on and apparently worthless demographic, which the enterprise has long since jettisoned.</p>
<h2>A certain hollowness</h2>
<p>The box of letters sat under my desk when we revived the independence committee a decade ago as we tried to defend the spirit of the charter from the storm of the great disruption. We wearily dusted off and enlisted the old tactics, reaching out to influencers and readers, this time using the infinitely more powerful tools of the same cybersphere that was eating us alive. The response was gratifying, but had a certain hollowness. Was it real, or just an echo?</p>
<p>As efforts crank up to defend Fairfax’s editorial tradition, if not its name, when it is consumed by Nine, I’m all too aware that the institutional journalism that defines my generation and my imagination has all but vanished. When I summon up Fairfax in talking journalism with my students, for me it’s this great warts-and-all beast with a proud history, noble ambition and organic connection to its community; for them it’s a limp tagline in their feed.</p>
<p>Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood yesterday tried to assure journalists that “there will be plenty of Fairfax Media DNA in the merged company and the board”. I hope so, because the remaining journalists and editors continue to produce stories of extraordinary calibre with little time and ever diminishing resources. But I wondered, given the vanishing of the masthead’s resonance in their lives, whether the community Fairfax served has already been lost, and might only be retrieved by extracting DNA from the coupons in the box, like extinct creatures out of amber.</p>
<p>“Where do you get your news?” I asked my students on Monday, as I do at the beginning of every semester. “Twitter” one of them replied. No, actually, you don’t.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Jo Chandler was a journalist at The Age from 1989-2012, and a former chair of the Age Independence Committee.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100667/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jo Chandler has a shareholding in Fairfax Media.</span></em></p>The Age Charter of Editorial Independence – the first document of its type in Australia – first emerged in 1988. It was defended time and again over the following three decades.Jo Chandler, Lecturer, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/783292017-05-27T01:27:08Z2017-05-27T01:27:08ZThe ABC is not siphoning audiences from Fairfax<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171104/original/file-20170526-23241-hlf2q5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Claims that ABC News siphons readers away from Fairfax publications are unfounded. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Joel Carrett</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood has been busy. His company’s announcement on 3 May 2017 that <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/05/03/fairfax-to-cut-125-newsroom-jobs/">Fairfax would sack 125 of its newsroom staff</a> led to Sydney Morning Herald and The Age journalists going on strike, at the <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-03/fairfax-media-cut-further-125-editorial-staff-in-restructure/8492738">worst possible time in the Australian political calendar</a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, media reports highlighted <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/09/fairfax-boss-greg-hywood-paid-more-2016">Hywood’s annual pay of over A$7 million</a> – which at <a href="http://www.payscale.com/research/AU/Job=Journalist/Salary">a median reported salary for journalists of just over A$51,000</a> would comfortably pay for the most of the staff laid off in Hywood’s announcement.</p>
<p>This is not to say that Hywood does not deserve a CEO-level salary, of course. But in light of the criticism of the job losses at Fairfax, <a href="https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/17/fairfax-chief-greg-hywood-refuses-to-discuss-pay-deal-at-senate-hearing">his defence of executive pay levels was tin-eared</a>, to say the least:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We pride ourselves on providing above-market salaries… We need good people to work at this business. You don’t fix the issues confronting the media business by doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet here we are again, with more journalists sacked, and no clear indication of how this is going to make Fairfax’s news outlets more attractive.</p>
<p>Faced with such questioning from the Senate inquiry into public interest journalism, Hywood resorted to a familiar trope for commercial media executives – <a href="https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/17/fairfax-chief-greg-hywood-refuses-to-discuss-pay-deal-at-senate-hearing">blame market distortion by the public broadcaster</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ABC is creating additional pressure on commercial media by aggressively competing for the same audience that commercial media rely on by providing online content for free, undermining our ability to create a sustainable model.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, this seems to be fundamentally ignorant of the fact that for years now, the ABC has done what few commercial news outlets have been prepared to do: promote the news stories published by its competitors.</p>
<h2>Promoting the work of others</h2>
<p>The ABC has long partnered with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to include a block of links to related content from elsewhere on the web alongside its own stories. This recognises audiences’ interest in seeing multiple independent angles on the same story. Sadly, commercial outlets like the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) still lack this basic feature and link only to (often virtually identical) stories on their sister sites, such as The Age.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/170892/original/file-20170524-13190-12d5kb6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/170892/original/file-20170524-13190-12d5kb6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/170892/original/file-20170524-13190-12d5kb6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170892/original/file-20170524-13190-12d5kb6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170892/original/file-20170524-13190-12d5kb6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170892/original/file-20170524-13190-12d5kb6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170892/original/file-20170524-13190-12d5kb6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170892/original/file-20170524-13190-12d5kb6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Related links in a recent ABC News article - including to Fairfax property <em>Australian Financial Review</em>.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screenshot by Axel Bruns</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rather than siphoning eyeballs from its commercial competitors, could ABC News be a driver of traffic to them, then? Traffic data from <a href="http://www.hitwise.com/au">Hitwise</a>, which tracks Australian users’ web browsing patterns, can provide an answer to this question.</p>
<p>First, let us put these sites in perspective. In order to compare like with like, we’ll use the numbers for ABC News here, rather than visits to the main ABC site with its multitude of non-news content.</p>
<p>Hitwise data report that the SMH consistently attracts a much larger volume of visits than ABC News. In March 2017, for instance, its 38.2 million total visits constitute about a quarter more than ABC News’ 29.9 million. The Age receives around 27.5 million total visits over the same period. Neither can compete with undisputed market leader news.com.au, with 72.8 million total visits that month.</p>
<p>Put together, visits to these two Fairfax properties are already more than twice as large as those to ABC News, then – if the ABC is undermining Fairfax’s market position, it’s not making a very good job of it.</p>
<h2>Traffic patterns</h2>
<p>But this is not a zero-sum game, of course. Visitors to ABC News, aided by its helpful links to external content, may well find themselves heading to the Fairfax outlets for more information. Even in the absence of outbound links from Fairfax, the same might be true in reverse, too.</p>
<p>Here, the upstream websites recorded by Hitwise – that is, the sites visited just before coming to the SMH or ABC News – tell an interesting story. The SMH receives the vast plurality of its inbound reader traffic from Google sites: some 38.9% of its traffic enter via Google Australia, Google (international), Google News Australia, or Gmail. Another 7.8% arrive via Facebook or Twitter.</p>
<p>Similar patterns hold for other sites: in March, The Age receives 28.2% of its traffic from Google sites, and 9.2% from Facebook or Twitter. For ABC News, those percentages are 26.9% and 7.9%, respectively. news.com.au gets 32.2% of its traffic from Google sites, and 7.9% from social media.</p>
<p>ABC News’ outbound links are necessarily a much smaller factor than the connections provided by these internet giants, but should not be ignored. In March, 2.1% of the SMH’s traffic began with readers coming in from ABC sites. For The Age, the percentage is even greater: 2.9% of its traffic originated from ABC sites. But the ABC does not play favourites amongst the commercial sites: 2.2% of news.com.au traffic arrived from here.</p>
<p>Such public service is hardly reciprocated, however: only 0.9% of ABC News’ already lower volume of traffic originated from the two Fairfax sites.</p>
<h2>Empty corporate rhetoric</h2>
<p>There are deeper traffic patterns that the Hitwise data cannot reveal. What we see here are only the sites visited immediately before – not pages opened independently in another user session, or arrived at through a more circuitous route. And yes, as quality news publications ABC News and the two Fairfax sites do operate in the same market segment, of course.</p>
<p>But Hywood’s, and other media executives’, statements continue to assume that online audiences make a conscious binary choice between one outlet and another, and that public service media therefore distort the market. This fails to understand <a href="http://www.journalism.org/files/2013/10/facebook_news_10-24-2013.pdf">how serendipitous our news discovery has become</a> in an age of search and social recommendations. It also fails to recognise that serious news followers – the core audience for these sites – will often read multiple stories on the same events, from multiple outlets.</p>
<p>Not least perhaps because they know that understaffed newsrooms now regularly struggle to cover major issues in sufficient detail.</p>
<p>The traffic patterns we have seen here, at any rate, reveal that audiences lost to ABC News should be the least of Greg Hywood’s worries. The major Fairfax sites consistently outperform the ABC in terms of reader traffic, and the public broadcaster is even a net source of visits to the SMH and The Age.</p>
<p>Similarly, <a href="https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/17/fairfax-chief-greg-hywood-refuses-to-discuss-pay-deal-at-senate-hearing">when Hywood calls for</a> “a level playing field which allows local media to take the necessary steps to compete with Google and Facebook”, he fails to recognise that these platforms are the single greatest source of traffic to Fairfax’s sites.</p>
<p>Fairfax, and other news sites, are not competing with Google and Facebook: for better or worse, they fundamentally rely on them for visibility and visitors. Media businesses that cannot adjust to this fact are doomed to struggle.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Data on Australian Internet users’ news browsing patterns are provided courtesy of <a href="http://www.hitwise.com/au">Hitwise</a>. All Hitwise figures based on data for March 2017.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78329/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project "Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere". Axel Bruns is collaborating with The Conversation in the ARC Linkage project "Amplifying Public Value: Scholarly Contributions' Impact on Public Debate".</span></em></p>Explaining Fairfax’s struggles, CEO Greg Hywood blamed the ABC for distorting the market - but the national broadcaster actually drives traffic to its commercial competitors.Axel Bruns, Professor, Creative Industries, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/699732016-12-07T03:18:40Z2016-12-07T03:18:40ZWhy the next editor-in-chief at The Age should be a woman<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148985/original/image-20161207-15334-19if65b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Despite its progressive nature, The Age newspaper has never had a female editor-in-chief.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Mal Fairclough</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/mark-forbes-apologises-quits-as-the-age-editorinchief-after-harassment-probe/news-story/041ce8ad3ba182ff90e7e75e0cb0febc">departing words</a> of The Age’s editor-in-chief, Mark Forbes, who resigned this week amid allegations of sexual harassment, spoke to a gender ideal at a time of reputational damage for the newspaper: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>… our dealings with all women must be respectful and equitable at all times.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These words reflect the socially progressive agenda (relative to the times) of the 159-year-old masthead from the days of the Syme brothers to the digital age. Yet, as progressive as The Age can be, why has it never had a female editor-in-chief?</p>
<p>The answer is clearly more complex than the paper’s editorial position. It leads to a much broader conversation about gender representation in Australia’s public and private institutions.</p>
<h2>Australia trails the world</h2>
<p>This conversation coincides with the <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-woman-in-charge-susan-kiefel-to-become-chief-justice-of-the-high-court-69558">recent appointment</a> of Susan Kiefel to be Australia’s first female High Court chief justice in 113 years. Like the ascension of Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, in 2010, Kiefel’s new role sends a signal to other women and girls that such career heights can be achieved.</p>
<p>But, as significant as these are, they do not erase the fact that women remain systemically under-represented at the top levels of our most powerful institutions – including the media, universities, government, judiciary and corporate sector.</p>
<p>Take Australia’s federal parliament, for example. There, female representation is <a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-should-look-overseas-for-ideas-to-increase-its-number-of-women-mps-63522">low by world standards</a>. </p>
<p>Australia’s ranking of <a href="http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm">50th in the world</a> for the representation of women in parliament is behind countries like Algeria (37th) and Ethiopia (17th). </p>
<p>Rwanda leads the world, with 64% of its parliamentarians also women. Rwanda’s success in getting women elected is driven by gender quotas – at least 30% of seats are reserved for female candidates.</p>
<p>After the 2016 federal election, Australian female representation in parliament rose slightly from 26% to 28.7%. This is a vast improvement on the absence of women in the parliament in 1977. This is largely due to rises in the number of women in Labor ranks, which has been driven by quotas. </p>
<p>In contrast, the number of Coalition women has steadily fallen since the Howard era. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148982/original/image-20161207-15334-7zztdb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148982/original/image-20161207-15334-7zztdb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=344&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148982/original/image-20161207-15334-7zztdb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=344&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148982/original/image-20161207-15334-7zztdb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=344&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148982/original/image-20161207-15334-7zztdb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148982/original/image-20161207-15334-7zztdb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148982/original/image-20161207-15334-7zztdb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Women in federal parliament.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marian Sawer</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The representation of women in the lower houses of state parliaments is also not equal. It ranges from 25% (Western Australia) to 44% (Tasmania).</p>
<p>Labor’s numbers of women MPs have <a href="http://theconversation.com/the-case-for-quotas-in-politics-the-absence-of-women-isnt-merit-based-45297">steadily increased</a> with the adoption of quotas in 1994. Since then, the gap has widened between the two major parties in terms of female parliamentary representation.</p>
<p>Put simply, gender quotas work. They exist in more than 100 countries – and, in the past two decades, the proportion of women in parliaments across the globe has almost doubled.</p>
<p>A similar pattern exists in Australia’s corporate sector: women are underrepresented in top-tier roles. The proportion shrinks as women move up the management levels to CEO. Currently, the percentage of women on <a href="https://www.womenonboards.net/Resources/Boardroom-Diversity-Index">ASX 200 boards</a> is 23%, up from just 8.7% in 2010. </p>
<p>In a bid to increase the representation of women on public boards, the Victorian government changed its rules in 2015 to require at least half of all new appointments to courts and paid government board positions be women.</p>
<h2>Alternatives to lift the numbers of women</h2>
<p>Other than quotas, how can the under-representation of women be improved? </p>
<p>One initiative, modelled on the Harvard Kennedy School program <a href="http://wappp.hks.harvard.edu/oval-office-program">Harvard Square to the Oval Office</a>, is Australia’s first <a href="https://government.unimelb.edu.au/study/pathways-to-politics-for-women">Pathways to Politics program for women</a> to support Australian women to elected office.</p>
<p>Launched this year by Australia’s first female governor-general, Quentin Bryce, a select group of 24 University of Melbourne students and alumni completed the 12-week program and have shown early signs of success. Two participants, <a href="http://greens.org.au/vic/susannenewton">Susanne Newton</a> and <a href="http://greens.org.au/vic/stephamir">Stephanie Amir</a>, were elected as Greens councillors to Darebin City Council in last month’s Victorian local government elections. Another two participants became political staffers (one Liberal and one Labor) and two others ran for ALP preselection.</p>
<p>Applications for the June to October 2017 program <a href="https://government.unimelb.edu.au/pathways-to-politics-for-women-application">open soon</a>. Those selected are given the opportunity to learn from members of parliament, campaign strategists, advisers, consultants and elected officials.</p>
<p>So, if there is any lesson to be learned this month from the positive appointment of a female High Court chief justice and the negative story of The Age, it suggests that for women to be truly equitable they need to be not just included where decisions are made, but also made to feel welcome.</p>
<p>The question yet to be answered is: will the Fairfax board appoint a capable journalist who also happens to be a woman?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69973/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrea Carson is the academic coordinator of Pathway's to Politics in the University of Melbourne's School of Government.
She was also a journalist at the Age 1997-2001.
</span></em></p>Women remain systemically underrepresented at the top levels of Australia’s most powerful institutions – including the media, universities, government, judiciary and corporate sector.Andrea Carson, Lecturer, Media and Politics, School of Social and Political Sciences; Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/657942016-10-21T01:15:55Z2016-10-21T01:15:55ZHow social media is helping Australian journalists uncover stories hidden in plain sight<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142081/original/image-20161017-12418-apjlw6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Journalists with the skills to dig into social media can discover connections between key players in complex, often global stories.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-132469673/stock-photo-woman-hand-pressing-social-media-icon-on-blue-background-with-world-map.html?src=8ZQ-RS0F60BPkHVCx6LHBA-1-73">Mathias Rosenthal via www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Social media has revolutionised how we communicate. In <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-social-media-revolution-31890">this series</a>, we look at how it has changed the media, politics, health, education and the law.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>A stray social media post that cracked open a child abuse scandal brewing in England and Australia for half a century. A Facebook group in the middle of a deadly flood, helping families and the media identify lost loved ones. Asylum seekers washed up on an Indonesian beach, staying in touch with an Australian reporter online.</p>
<p>I’ve spent the past three years researching how Australian investigative journalists use digital technologies in their work – and those are just a few real examples of how social media helped with breaking news stories in The Australian, The Times of London, the Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC’s 7.30 program and more.</p>
<p>At a time of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/newspaper-closures">newspaper closures</a> and <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/newsonomics-the-halving-of-americas-daily-newsrooms/">newsroom cuts around the world</a>, one of the hopeful findings of my research is that digital technologies can help journalists cover stories that would otherwise be too expensive or time-consuming to cover, or else impossible to find. </p>
<h2>Untangling webs of friends and followers</h2>
<p>It was the <a href="http://www.news.com.au/sport/more-sports/see-our-snapshot-of-todays-acc-report-detailing-the-use-of-performance-enhancing-drugs-and-crime-links-in-australian-sport/story-fndukor0-1226572696758">biggest Australian sports story of the year</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It all kicked off with a press conference in which ministers got up and they told the country that beloved football codes had been infiltrated by organised crime and that it was rife with the use of performance-enhancing substances, which was all pretty shocking … The chase was on across radio, television, you name it: who were the doctors? Who were the biochemists? Who were the players that had been allegedly taking this stuff? <strong>– Caro Meldrum-Hanna</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The race was on for interviews with key insiders – especially biochemist Stephen Dank, who had worked with several AFL and NRL clubs including Essendon and Cronulla.</p>
<p>So how did ABC TV current affairs reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna convince Dank to talk, beating so many better-connected sports journalists? </p>
<p>Her skills in digging into social media proved to be the difference, helping her draw connections between key players in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-the-essendon-saga-any-reform-to-anti-doping-regimes-must-give-athletes-a-greater-say-53212">supplements saga</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In order to find those people, ‘cause they were just names on paper, it was absolutely social media. Trawling Facebook, I was trawling YouTube, trawling Twitter, an old Myspace account I think it was, or a Bebo, desperately trying to find pictures of these people, because I didn’t know who they were and I didn’t know what their history was. That was absolutely vital, social media in that regard. And once that had been established and I could say who they were and show them, then after that I got the interview with Steve Dank and the rest sort of snowballed from there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="32" data-image="" data-title="Caro Meldrum-Hanna: social media was 'absolutely vital'." data-size="512417" data-source="Caro Meldrum-Hanna" data-source-url="" data-license="CC BY" data-license-url="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">
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</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Caro Meldrum-Hanna: social media was ‘absolutely vital’.
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Caro Meldrum-Hanna</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a><span class="download"><span>500 KB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/524/link-3-caro-mh-social-media-was-absolutely-vital.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
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<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pkk7BequD_Q?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Stephen Dank breaking his silence in an interview with Caro Meldrum-Hanna on the ABC’s 7.30.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://www.walkleys.com/walkleys-winners/sports_journalism_2013_caro_meldrum-hanna/">Meldrum-Hanna</a> is among the 16 leading Australian investigative journalists I’ve interviewed at length for my research. Together, they identified 14 different investigative tasks in which social media helps them do their jobs better, including finding names and verifying identities, speeding up investigations, verifying associations between people, and crowd sourcing information.</p>
<h2>From families caught in a deadly flood, to an international child abuse scandal</h2>
<p>I began to realise the huge possibilities of social media in 2011, while reporting on the deadly flash flooding in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley for The Australian. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142129/original/image-20161018-16180-qe73vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142129/original/image-20161018-16180-qe73vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142129/original/image-20161018-16180-qe73vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142129/original/image-20161018-16180-qe73vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142129/original/image-20161018-16180-qe73vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142129/original/image-20161018-16180-qe73vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1116&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142129/original/image-20161018-16180-qe73vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1116&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142129/original/image-20161018-16180-qe73vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1116&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The updated edition of The Torrent.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Several families of the missing people posted photographs to Facebook asking for public help to find them. I contacted one family who gave permission for the photograph of the father, Bruce Warhurst, to be used in the newspaper. His daughter told me the terrifying story of <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/the-seconds-that-separated-life-and-death/story-e6frg6nf-1225985909274">their ordeal</a> trying to escape what many people described as an “inland tsunami”. </p>
<p>Social media also helped in finding people who were believed to have drowned, but who had <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/toowoombas-miracle-girl-surfaces-after-being-feared-drowned/story-e6frg6nf-1225991338315">actually survived</a>. (Those and other stories are shared in a new edition of my book <a href="https://penguin.com.au/books/the-torrent-a-true-story-of-hope-and-survival-2nd-edition-9780702259524">The Torrent</a>, <a href="https://penguin.com.au/books/the-torrent-a-true-story-of-hope-and-survival-2nd-edition-9780702259524">due out in January 2017</a>, which follows the survivors’ recovery in the years since.)</p>
<p>More than a year after the flood, I found social media made all the difference in a complex international investigation.</p>
<p>In late 2012, I received an email out of the blue from a man in England who claimed to be a victim of sexual abuse by a very senior cleric, Robert Waddington, whose eulogies after his death in 2007 praised his “<a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/churchs-wall-of-silence-on-sexual-abuse/story-e6frg6z6-1226639077238">special gift for teaching boys</a>”.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/choirboy-haunted-by-painful-memories/story-e6frg6nf-1226639101313">If the account was true</a>, there would be more abuse victims – but I had no names to try to find them. It was a seemingly impossible task. </p>
<p>However, within a couple of hours, I tracked down a post made to a social media site, <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/73855525/Old-Friends-announces-closure">Old Friends</a>, naming Waddington as a paedophile and providing the name of another victim, this time in Australia. </p>
<p>We used a secret Facebook group, email and Skype calls to interview the victims. Over the following six months, <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/churchs-wall-of-silence-on-sexual-abuse/story-e6frg6z6-1226639077238">evidence obtained from police</a> in Manchester, a long-running civil action in Australia, and documents from a failed Australian police investigation verified that decades of abuse by Waddington had been covered up by the Church of England and the Diocese of North Queensland. </p>
<p>Simultaneous front page stories <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/child-sex-scandal-in-two-countries-rocks-anglican-church/story-e6frg6nf-1226639078714">in The Times of London and The Australian</a> broke the story and led to <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/robert-waddingtons-cycle-of-abuse-stretches-beyond-50-years/story-e6frg6nf-1226654874606">more abuse victims</a> speaking out. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cL4lvnNA6RU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Warning: contains details viewers could find distressing. Ray Munn describes how the priest Robert Waddington “groomed” him and other boys for abuse.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Australia, the Anglican Church referred the case to the <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/">Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse</a>. </p>
<p>The Church of England launched an inquiry. There, the case led to a review of the <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/global/top-anglican-calls-lifting-seal-confessional-child-abuse-cases">seal of the confessional</a> and a review of <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10248599/Paedophile-priests-church-re-examines-files-dating-back-60-years.html">clergy records dating back 60 years</a>. The UK inquiry vindicated the victims and led to the <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/anglican-bishop-quits-over-sexual-abuse-coverup/news-story/357ff0d9c077d4c5fc4869af3b83ef1c">resignation</a> of the former Archbishop of York, Lord David Hope of Thornes. North Yorkshire police are currently <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/former-archbishop-investigated-over-claims-of-sex-abuse-cover-up-jrb8h2cpl">investigating the former archbishop</a> over his handling of complaints against Waddington.</p>
<p>As The Australian’s <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/author/Michael+McKenna">Michael McKenna</a>, who collaborated with me on that investigation, has said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no doubt that social media and the internet has completely changed the way that we do business for the greater community of journalists. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The investigation is an example of global investigative journalism, which reaches beyond the <a href="https://theconversation.com/right-to-know-the-nation-the-people-and-the-fourth-estate-21253">“fourth estate”</a> in Australia, and demonstrates that a <em>global</em> fourth estate is emerging. </p>
<h2>Social media is another tool – not a panacea</h2>
<p>Keeping in contact with vulnerable news sources is now much easier, no matter where they are. Fairfax foreign correspondent <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/world/by/Michael-Bachelard-hveki">Michael Bachelard</a> interviewed asylum seekers on the beaches of Indonesia where their boats were washed ashore. Social media then enabled him to keep in touch with those people, who were continually having to move in search of a safe place to live. </p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="24" data-image="" data-title="Michael Bachelard on using Facebook to follow asylum seekers." data-size="393716" data-source="Amanda Gearing" data-source-url="" data-license="CC BY" data-license-url="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">
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Michael Bachelard on using Facebook to follow asylum seekers.
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amanda Gearing</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a><span class="download"><span>384 KB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/528/link-6-bachelard-fb-asylum-seeker-contacts.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
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<p>Social media platforms are not a panacea for investigative journalism in financially stressed times. Some of the journalists I interviewed for my study were still not yet ready to embrace social media platforms for investigation, citing risks such as losing exclusivity on a story, factual error, risk to physical safety and legal risks.</p>
<p>But as I and <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-investigative-journalists-are-using-social-media-to-uncover-the-truth-66393">others have found</a>, social media connections do allow some stories to be reported that would not otherwise be published.</p>
<p>One public post on social media can sometimes make it possible to investigate stories that have gone untold for too long. And powerful institutions that were once able to tightly control information – never imagining the advent of technologies that would allow isolated victims of crime to find one another across the world – can at last be called to account.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65794/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amanda Gearing receives funding from the Australian Government via an Australian Postgraduate Award and Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, via a Deputy Vice Chancellor's Scholarship. Amanda is also the author of The Torrent: A True Story of Heroism and Survival, published by UQP, a new edition of which will be released in January 2017. She is a member of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance. </span></em></p>From a social media post that cracked open a decades-old abuse scandal in the UK and Australia, through to tracking asylum seekers, social media can be vital in breaking investigative news stories.Amanda Gearing, PhD Candidate, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/126422013-03-05T19:39:22Z2013-03-05T19:39:22ZGoing tabloid: one way out of the red(top) for Fairfax<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/20978/original/ns2yzbzs-1362463642.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Neuroresearch has suggested that readers find Fairfax's "compact" newspapers more engaging than broadsheets.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Much of the commentary surrounding Fairfax Media’s decision to go tabloid (or “compact”, as described by Fairfax) has centred around the <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/mediareport/tim-murphy-on-the-nz-herald-move-to-tabloid/4545022">perceived changes to content</a>. Content certainly matters, but not the way that commentators think. </p>
<p>The mis-analysis is based on a fundamental and common misunderstanding of the nature of printing newspapers. The only reason that I, as yet another media commentator and academic to look into the Alice-in-Wonderland shrinkage of the great Fairfax mastheads do understand it, is that I used to own one of the fire-breathing metal monsters that print newspapers. I felt — with every atom in my body — the pain that the Fairfax board must feel when they see the rivers of paper that stream through their presses fail to translate into “rivers of gold” — the classified and advertising revenue of yore.</p>
<p>Let me explain how the printing process works. Newspaper printers take giant multi-tonne rolls of quality toilet paper, thread them through some of the most expensive machines on earth outside of Cape Canaveral, and then — most crucially for this current debate — put the result printed belt of paper through a complicated and fraught folding process: origami at hundreds of metres of paper a minute.</p>
<p>But the presses that will produce the tabloid papers are equally capable of producing broadsheet papers. There is no difference in cost; they are the same presses. In my own experience, tabloid papers per square inch of printed material produced are more expensive than broadsheets to produce. </p>
<p>To produce a tabloid out of a broadsheet paper, you trim off what was formerly the spine of the broadsheet. That paper is sucked out of the folding machine by giant vacuum cleaners, straight to recycling. Wasted. Next, you lose the “gutter” of the tabloid fold. Here’s a little experiment: open up page two of the “new” Herald or the Age and let your eye drift to the rightmost column — and then a little further. White space. That white space wasn’t there when the paper was a broadsheet; that’s lost acreage. Over a single edition of the Herald or the Age, hundreds of acres of what was formerly print is now white space. Wasted.</p>
<p>So, a 64-page tabloid is a dramatically less efficient use of newsprint than a 32-page broadsheet.</p>
<p>So why would a publisher who has to make money out of selling newsprint by the acre decide to produce newsprint by the acre less efficiently? </p>
<p>In fact, there are some very good reasons. They have everything to do with advertising, and nothing to do with content.</p>
<p>First of all, if you’re interested in this sort of stuff, you will have heard rumours that Fairfax sales people are still trying to get advertisers to pay a premium for a full page, and no doubt they’re doing the same with half pages. Even though their new full page only requires half the newsprint of the old full page to produce, in rough terms. Now we’re getting to the rub. The little ads are still going to be sold by the column centimetre, but the big ads are going to be sold by the chunk: half, full and so on. Thing is, the chunk has shrunk.</p>
<p>Secondly, the ads in the tabloid are going to work better, assuming readership doesn’t shrink along with the chunk. As an independent newspaper publisher with the luxury of my own press, I did some unconventional things with my own titles. I sprinkled content throughout the paper that I knew readers wanted to read. I broke convention by even running good content in amongst the classifieds. I practised a principle that the Fairfax board was acting on when they chose to go tabloid. The thing is, we want to read content, and we don’t want to read ads. But unlike with television or radio, where you can change channels, once you’re ‘inside’ a newspaper, you are trapped — at least a little. The key then is to lay the breadcrumbs of content around the ads, and you have the reader doing what the advertiser really wants: either actively or passively reading ads. </p>
<p>In tabloid format, the content comes closer to the ad, whether the reader wants it or not. In that sense, tabloid is “better” than broadsheet. I fear that Fairfax might make the serious mistake of running too many full-page ads in its early pages, simply unable to resist the lure of the loadings that come with “early general news” pages. But if they hold their nerve, and don’t over-egg the product with ads, the advertisers are going to get impact. And when the advertisers get impact, they pay — and they’ll keep coming back.</p>
<p>And one final mistake that Fairfax has already made. For all this talk about the tawdry tabloid, Fairfax could have avoided the problem by actually changing the toilet roll. For 10 or 15% extra, they could have printed the new products on a higher quality, perhaps thinner paper, that would reproduce photos better, smaller, and overall look classier and less tabloid. Instead, they have crept up the font size by 10%, shrunk the amount of acres of content they are printing every day, and missed a chance to really shake things up.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/12642/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Olav Muurlink receives funding from the Australian Research Council, although this funding is unrelated to the content of the article. He was formerly the director and majority owner of Free Media, a printing arm that ran on twin shifts. The company was based in Warwick, and ran titles that covered the border region of Queensland and NSW, as well as publications in Toowoomba, the South Burnett and the Gold Coast, competing primarily with Australian Provincial Newspapers, although some of its competitors were owned by Rural Press (now owned by Fairfax). Free Media also printed for other clients in NSW and Queensland, however, before the company acquired its own press, Free Media's products were printed on (at various stage) Rural Press and Australian Provincial Newspaper presses.</span></em></p>Much of the commentary surrounding Fairfax Media’s decision to go tabloid (or “compact”, as described by Fairfax) has centred around the perceived changes to content. Content certainly matters, but not…Olav Muurlink, Research Fellow, Griffith Business School, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.