Journalism Matters: Jeremy Rose On Media Ownership

See also…

• Scoop Images & Audio: Journalism Matters (Day Two)


• Scoop Images & Audio: Journalism Matters (Day One)

I’m just back from two years in Barcelona where I was a consumer rather than a producer of news stories. One of the first stories I read on arriving was about a McDonald’s restaurant being closed down to a lack of customers.

At first I assumed it was the result of a generalised anti-globalisation sentiment that saw the inhabitants of the city consciously boycotting the fast food chain.

But a few dozen tapas bars later it dawned on me that it was the competition that saw Barcelona residents shunning the fast food industry. Given the choice between a quick bocadillo (or for that matter a leisurely three course menu del dia) from one of the character-filled bars that can be found on every corner and a Big Mac the city’s residents not surprisingly opt for the former.

The bar owners and stall holders at the produce markets - that can be found in every barrio in the city – form the front line in the battle against the corporatisation of food. A frontline reinforced by a population that knows and loves its distinctive cuisine.

It would be nice to think that the McDonaldisation of the media could be confronted in a similar fashion: quality boutique news outlets taking on Fairfax and APN.

But just as putting out a quality daily newspaper has little in common with the production of bake beans, the concentration of resources required to generate quality, original news coverage is quite different from that required to make a tortilla.

Yet to a limited degree it is happening. The proliferation and popularity of blogs appears to have spooked the corporates into increasing the amount of space given over to columnists. But opinion is cheap: which is no doubt why the editors of our daily papers have been able to respond to the perceived threat.

Quality reportage and investigative journalism, on the other hand, require time and resources: time and resources that the corporates are less and less willing to invest in.

And with good reason… if you accept that the over-riding purpose of a media outlet is to maximise profits. It’s the same mentality that saw the Dodge brothers take Henry Ford to court for daring to raise the minimum wage of his workers. They won: paying workers more than you strictly have to, the court ruled, is simply theft from the shareholders. (The brothers Dodge used the proceeds to set up their own car company: giving a whole new layer of meaning to the word “dodgy”.)

The limited debate on ownership that appears in our local media focuses almost exclusively on either foreign versus local or public versus private. Auckland airport is a case in point. The real debate should surely be about whether its ownership structure allows for considerations other than profit to be given priority, not
whether it’s foreign or New Zealand owned.

There are different models

Having just come back from two years in Barcelona, you will have to indulge my regular references to the city. But I found things refreshingly different there.

It’s difficult to visit any museum or public space in the city that doesn’t receive a large part of its funding from the caixas or savings banks that are required by law to return 30 percent of their profits back to the community.

Barça, the local football which is as much a symbol of Catalonia as the All Blacks are of New Zealand, is owned by its 100,000 members. The board elections are hotly contested and well reported by the local media.

Media ownership is a mixture of the familiar and not so familiar. La Vanguardia – the largest circulation paper in Catalonia is family owned. With a circulation of just over 200,000 the paper manages to have its own correspondents in Brussels, London, Washington DC, Mexico City and Buenos Aires.

With GDP per capita roughly the same for Spain as New Zealand it’s difficult to believe that extraordinary investment in journalists can be simply put down to greater profitably.

It may be that competition from national papers such as El Pais - established by journalists following the death of Franco – keeps La Vanguardia on its toes or perhaps its owners are simply prepared to trade off higher profits for an investment in quality and the resulting prestige and influence that brings.

When it comes to family ownership we need to be careful not to fall into the trap of those living under a dictatorship who look back to the monarchy that preceded it with nostalgia and take our lead instead from those who not only imagine a different, more democratic world but take concrete steps to achieve it.

If I won the Spanish lottery tomorrow I would opt for something along the lines of the Scott Trust that publishes the Guardian and Observer newspapers in Britain. The trust’s sole aim is to produce quality newspapers with profits ploughed back into journalism.

Lotto dreams aside: what might some of those concrete steps be?

In response to the prospect of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, Boston University professor Chris Daly recently wrote a blog floating the idea of reader-led take-overs.

The likelihood of the requisite number of readers being prepared, or able, to invest the required $2000 or $3000 per reader is probably not dissimilar to my chances of winning the Spanish Lottery but the idea of “citizen owners” as well as the much touted “citizen reporters” is an attractive one.

And it’s a model with a couple of notable local precedents. Consumer Magazine and AA Directions are both owned by their members/readers.

In the case of Consumer membership subs provide enough income to support a team of writers and researchers and produce an advertising free magazine and website.

But Consumer for all its qualities is a niche magazine that complements and feeds the mainstream media rather than providing competition or an alternative source of news.

To date the only real challenge to the stranglehold of the daily newspapers has come not from alternative providers of news but from the internet delivery of classified advertising.

The extraordinary success of Trade Me on one hand suggests that it is possible to challenge the duopoly and on the other that the greater the challenge the greater the likelihood of being swallowed.

Personally, I welcomed the $700 million Trade Me buy out because I mistakenly assumed that Fairfax had been panicked into paying far too much for what is essentially a bank of computers and the goodwill of a lot of customers.

I was confident, rightly, that alternative New Zealand-owned websites would emerge and thought, wrongly, that we would respond as a “rational economic community” and switch our allegiance and keep the profits in New Zealand.

A quick internet search turns up well in excess of 20 auction sites – many of them attracting barely a handful of sellers. Most have been set up by would-be Sam Morgans with dreams of millions and a few by idealists offering membership shares or a portion of profits to charity.

It seems to me that if the country’s NGOs, schools, sports and social clubs banded together and actively promoted a locally-owned auction site in exchange for a community dividend we could see a large-scale switch of allegiance.

A rational economic community might also decide it was in its interest to back quality independent journalism.

The combined communications budgets of New Zealand’s unions and assorted NGOs – largely wasted on propaganda sheets that nobody reads – would go a long way to covering the costs of a good national weekly newspaper.

However, convincing unions and NGOs to hand over their communications budgets to an independent newspaper on the understanding that it shares certain core values is about as likely as convincing Barry Coleman to hand over the NBR to a trust.

But it does seem possible that unions and NGOs might be willing to support such a paper by paying for bulletins to appear in it. Full-page adverts could replace their current magazine and journals – delivered free to members. The bulletins would be appearing in a newspaper or magazine that people actually want to read – and they would reach non-members.

The challenge is to come up with new and creative ways to ensure a larger pool of journalists are able to dedicate themselves to investigating and writing stories that really matter.

ENDS

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