It’s an old adage but one I’ve been reminded of a lot, recently. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp) has just announced that people will have to pay to view News Corp online stories in the near future, after testing it out with the Wall Street Journal. No doubt other media owners will do likewise, very soon, and with great relief. The general public will no doubt buck and squeal, but in fact, they will be all the better off because of it, because there will be more money to pay for good quality journalism. And payers will no longer be subsidising passengers (or parasites, if I’m in a less charitable mood). If there are too many ticks on the dog the dog dies. Do we all want to be newspaperless, or relying on the likes of Who magazine and A Current Affair for ‘news’ we can rely on as being independent, objective and accurate?!
Where does the money come from to pay journalists to research and write up stories? It comes from their employer, who relies on advertising sale income from businesses, and newspaper and magazine subscriptions from the general public. Where does the money come from to run this website? It comes from book sales. No sales, no website. Non-buyers are being subsidised by buyers, in the same way that newspaper subscribers are providing a free lunch for people who look up news online, but who rarely cough up cash for newspapers.
The amount of cadging of other people’s information, or outright plagiarism, without adding any new information to the story whatsoever, or attributing sources, is mind boggling. It is perhaps especially prevalent in agriculture because the average city-based journalist wouldn’t know one end of a cow from the other; don’t know anyone who knows one end of a cow from the other; but in any case they don’t think it really matters (who cares about what goes on in the bush and whether a rural story is really accurate?); so near enough is good enough. They don’t think it matters if they’ve written about a cattle station as being close to a town that is actually 1,000 kilometres away. Certainly everyone makes mistakes, however there is a vast difference between an honest error and careless journalism (treating the subjects of the story, and the readers also, with no respect; by feeding them inaccurate rubbish). Imagine the outcry if a Sydney newspaper described Sydney as being located near Melbourne, or that the Sydney Opera House was located in Hobart. Residents would not be happy!
The straight out copying of news stories has become obvious to me this year when researching some particular subjects. Often a single journalist has written a story that has ended up as the sole source for a multitude of other articles published on the same subject. How do I know? It’s astonishingly easy to recognise the particular phrasing and words a specific writer has used. And it’s quite spooky to be reading something and suddenly realise it sounds uncannily familiar – then the penny drops and it dawns on you that in fact, it is your own words that someone else has plagiarised. The second way of recognising copying is the most obvious – the repetition of errors. It’s like having a teacher realise you’ve cheated because your errors are identical to those made by the person you copied from. For example, this year we had one journalist write that the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Co-Operative had bought into the AACo. Next thing, there was a raft of stories saying the same thing; though the Dubai-based AACo-shareholding IFFCO appears to be completely unrelated to the India-based IFFCO. (If these two IFFCOs had been one and the same, and the journalist verified this as fact, then it should have been spelt out in the story.)
The Australian Financial Review published a riveting article written by Angus Grigg and Matthew Cranston on 27 July 2009, on the questions being asked about the running of Great Southern – in particular, regarding Sterling Buntine and David McLeod, with quotes from Senator Bill Heffernan. Interestingly, this story has only had a bit of a mention in the online Business Spectator – nowhere else (at least, not that I could see). It seems highly likely that this story didn’t appear elsewhere because AFR online can only be accessed by subscribers; so it was not syndicated like most stories are these days [if you give it away, most people won’t pay for it], but also it was less accessible, so not as easy for others to copy.
I have put my money where my mouth is and subscribed to the Australian Financial Review (I also have another newspaper subscription) and hope that others who do not currently pay for news, do so in future. The internet is still in its infancy and it is evolving rapidly. The days of the internet being a source of good quality free-for-all news, subsidised by businesses large and small, and their customers, may be drawing to a close. It is likely that the internet will metamorphise into two fairly distinct categories – good quality stuff that people have to pay for if they want it (news, information, images, entertainment, goods etc), and free stuff that is poor quality, commonly available and not very reliable.
Of course people will only be prepared to pay for quality. There will be no room for lazy journalists in a paid online news service. This means no more word-for-word publication of media releases, no ‘advertorials’, no American expressions and spellings in Australian news stories, accurate quotes and facts, news that really is news, etc.