The Press Freedom Issue

ISSUE 71 MAY – JUNE 2012 $9.95

WALKLEY INSIDE THE MEDIA IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

The Press Freedom Issue Richard Ackland Paul Barry Rowan Callick Quentin Dempster Christian Kerr Lara Logan Nick McKenzie Cameron Stewart

Bush yarns and home truths Alice Gorman Kerry Staight

Yours abusively… on the receiving end Tim Soutphommasane

R E A D T H E 2 0 1 2 P R E S S F R E E D O M R E P O R T AT : W W W. A L L I A N C E . O R G . A U

Q CONTACTS AND SPONSORS

The Walkley Foundation and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance thank the following organisations for their generous support.

Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance www.alliance.org.au Federal President (Media) Peter Lewis Federal Secretary Christopher Warren Alliance Membership Centre: 1300 656 513 Alliance Inquiry Desk (for all other inquiries): 1300 656 512 FEDERAL OFFICE and NSW 245 Chalmers Street REDFERN NSW 2016 PO Box 723 Strawberry Hills NSW 2012 P: (02) 9333 0999 F: (02) 9333 0933 E: [email protected] VICTORIA Level 3, 365 Queen St MELBOURNE VIC 3000 P: (03) 9691 7100 E: [email protected]

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Australia Post is a proud sponsor of The Walkley Magazine

PRESS-FREEDOM ---2012 The Australian Press Freedom Media Dinner brings together journalists and press freedom advocates, raising funds to support our campaigns, to increase awareness of press freedom issues and to provide emergency assistance to journalists in the Asia- Pacific region. We would like to thank the following companies and individuals for their generous donations, and for supporting our fundraising activities. We could not have done it without you: 4DI 8Hotels Collection A List Entertainment ABC Limelight Magazine Accoutrement Cooking School Adam Pretty Adrian Bohm Presents Annabel Crabb Architecture Media Ari Jewellery

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2012 AUSTRALIAN PRESS FREEDOM MEDIA DINNER

Art Est Art School Art Gallery NSW Atlantic Group Australian Museum Azuma Japanese Restaurant BBC Worldwide Australia Belvoir Berowra Waters Inn Better Being Bistrode CBD Blue Beat Bar & Grill Brian Cassey Brown Brothers Milawa Vineyard Candy Spender Jewels Caroline Baume cdp theatre producers Chamber of Secrets Chocolateria SAN CHURRO Circus Arts Trapeze School Crowne Plaza Terrigal Dance Central Sydney Danks Street Depot Darlinghurst Theatre Co David Rowe Dean Lewins Dean Saffron

Designer Rugs Dove Australia Easton Pearson ebay Ensemble Theatre Essential Wellbeing Fairfax Media Farage Clothing Fiona Katauskas Flying Fish Restaurant Four Seasons Hotel Sydney Foxtel Gregg Porteous Griffin Theatre Haighs Chocolates Heritage Brands High Res Digital Imaging House of Yoga IMAX Theatre Imperial Hotel Paddington iN DEMAND iSUBSCRiBE Jeremy Strode J&J O’Brien bars, restaurants, venues Joshua van Gestal Judy Horacek

Kushiyaki Bar & Grill Lindsay Foyle Lucio’s Italian Restaurant MadMan Entertainment Majestic Cruises Manly Pavillion Dining Room & Bar Mark Knight Matt Bissett-Johnson Matt Golding Melbourne University Publishing Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival Sydney Merivale Moore Park Golf Natio Nikon Nixco NSW Air Otto Ristorante Palace Films Penguin Books Periwinkle Manly Cove Guest House Peter Longworth Phil Hillyard Pier 9 - MURDOCH BOOKS

Quinn Rooney Reg Lynch Richard Morecroft Riley Burnett Ripple Massage Ritz Cinema Randwick Riverside Theatre Roses Only Rushcutters Bay Gallery Sas & Lou Hairdressing Scribe Publications Skye Lifestyle State Library of NSW Sydney Cricket & Sports Ground Trust Sydney Dance Company Sydney Opera House Sydney Symphony Sydney Theatre Company Sydney’s Luna Park Taronga Zoo Tetsuya’s Restaurant Text Publishing Company The Australian Ballet The Basket Factory Vision Personal Training Westfield

Q CONTENTS

PAYING TRIBUTE Marie Colvin Margaret Whitlam Richard (Dick) Muddimer Cliff Neville

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REVIEWS

Editorial

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Newsbites

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OUR MEDIA Yours abusively... The pleasures of hate mail By Tim Soutphommasane When people are abusing you, at least you know they care

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Female and on the frontline 8 By Lara Logan Why it’s important that women doing dangerous work in hostile places are equipped with knowledge and foresight All in the family By Kerry Staight For more than a century The Murray Pioneer has been penned and printed at the same Renmark address

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Truth vigilantes vs spin 10 By Matthew Knott Spin produces froth, but there’s nothing stopping journalists from saying no to bullshit A call for justice heard By Matt Stempeck How did the shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin ignite such a passionate public debate?

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Is journalism being loved to death? 12 By Sue Green and Tom Cowie There are record numbers of journalism graduates at a time when getting a media job has never been tougher Peek efficiencies? 14 By Liz Porter Not showing interviewees your piece before publication may be a law for some reporters, but sometimes it’s smarter to break the rule Newsrooms across the pond 15 By Yaara Bou Melhem The Walkley Foundation’s Young Australian Journalist of the Year saw how other newsrooms live with a visit to the BBC and CNN Take a tablet… 16 By Andrew Gregory Content isn’t the only king for a tablet app – user experience is equally important Whatever happened to the industrial round? 17 By Mark Phillips Why a lack of dedicated IR reporters is bad for our democracy

Farmer wants a voice By Alice Gorman Often ignored by the mainstream, rural Australians are taking to social media in droves to tell their own stories

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Why FB is FAB By Jim Tucker New Zealand journalists are finding their voice on Facebook

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PRESS FREEDOM FOCUS The Media Alliance’s annual report card on press freedom issues Introduction: Chris Warren Finkelstein: Alan Kennedy and Hal Crawford Australian Press Council sets the standard: Julian Disney “Journalists ain’t jockeys”: failure in the UK press: Jonathan Este Public interest: Richard Ackland Privacy: Mark Pearson Freedom of Information: Johan Lidberg Star chambers: Cameron Stewart and Nick McKenzie Suppression orders: Andrea Petrie and Adrian Lowe Secrecy: Christian Kerr ABC and SBS: Quentin Dempster Media ownership: Paul Barry Press freedom in New Zealand: Brent Edwards

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A daughter’s voice By Alan Kennedy Alice Pung takes us on a journey across the killing fields of Cambodia, the migrant experience of two damaged people and the experience of the Australian-born child

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The last rich nation standing By Malcolm Farr George Megalogenis uses his pointy head smarts and tabloid training to make four decades of Australian economic reforms easy to understand

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How not to get sued By Leanne O’Donnell Do you blog or tweet? Then you should read Mark Pearson’s new guide

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Murdoch’s step to the right By David McKnight This extract from Rupert Murdoch: An investigation of political power reveals the media baron wasn’t always a right-winger, but he was always a radical

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Ballad of Goulburn jail 53 By Alan Kennedy Raymond Fitzpatrick and journalist Frank Browne were an unlovely pair, but what federal parliament did to them in 1955 was a scandal

TEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW… … To go from print to radio 54 By Madonna King Breaking news, adding insight, lighting up readers or listeners’ lives matter, whatever the outlet

ON THE COVER Multi Walkley-winning artist Sturt Krygsman on press freedom

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE Nervous Beijing stifles expression By Rowan Callick Something funny happened on Bo Xilai’s way to China’s politburo

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Escaping justice By Grahame Bowland Why won’t the Australian government pursue Mullah Krekar over the murder of cameraman Paul Moran?

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Unwrapping West Papua By Kayt Davies West Papua Media is training locals to get the information foreign news teams can’t

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Repressive habits die hard in Burma 43 By Natasha Grzincic Despite some recent improvements, Burma is still a long, long way from having a free media

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Q EDITORIAL

The continuing fight for press freedom

I A regime under threat from a popular uprising of its own people will look to target the media, the better to suppress stories getting out to the rest of the world

raqi terrorist Mullah Krekar was sentenced in March to five years in a Norwegian jail for making death threats against officials in that country. It’s good that he has finally been jailed, but it feels a bit like Al Capone being jailed for tax evasion. We believe Krekar should also be brought to justice for his part in the murder of ABC cameraman Paul Moran by a suicide bomber in northern Iraq in 2003. Paul Moran was killed while doing his job: keeping the Australian public informed about matters of public interest – the invasion of Iraq. Krekar’s organisation, the Iraqi terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, claimed responsibility for the attack. A diplomatic cable dated 2009, released by WikiLeaks, stated that Norway’s ministry of foreign affairs saw “no obstacles” in extraditing Krekar to Australia. But despite the Media Alliance making a direct representation to the then federal attorney-general, Robert McClelland, Krekar’s extradition was not sought and he is yet to answer for Paul Moran’s death. There is a sad pattern to all this. Journalism is an important but also dangerous occupation, especially for those of our colleagues who pursue their trade in hazardous places. Worse: those responsible for the murders rarely have to answer for their crimes. Few of the killers or those who send them ever face court for their crimes.

Editor: Jacqueline Park [email protected] Press Freedom editor: Jonathan Este Subeditor: Jo McKinnon Editorial staff: Lauren Dixon, Karol Foyle & Andrew Gregory Cover illustration: Sturt Krygsman Solicitors: Minter Ellison Lawyers Design: Louise Summerton Production management: Gadfly Media Address: Walkley Foundation Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance 245 Chalmers Street, Redfern, NSW 2016 Visit our website at walkleys.com Advertising inquiries: Barbara Blackman [email protected] To subscribe visit http://magazine.walkleys.com/ or phone 1300 65 65 13 Disclaimer: The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of The Walkley Foundation or the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance.

CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME The Walkley Magazine, the only forum for discussion of media and professional issues by and for journalists, welcomes contributions from journalists, artists and photographers. To maintain the tradition and be worthy of the Walkleys, The Walkley Magazine aims to be a pithy, intelligent and challenging read, and to stand as a record of interesting news in the craft and profession of journalism. It is published five times a year and guidelines for contributors are available on request.

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In February we were saddened to read of the death of Marie Colvin and her colleague, photographer Rémi Ochlik, in what should have been a safe house for journalists in the Syrian town of Homs. All the indications are that the house they were sheltering in was deliberately targeted by Syria’s security forces. It’s axiomatic that a regime under threat from a popular uprising of its own people will look to target the media, the better to suppress stories getting out to the rest of the world. The deaths of Moran, Colvin and Ochlik focus international attention on this barbarity – but sadly it is the fate of local journalists, in Syria, Iraq and many other countries in strife, that too often go unreported to the wider community. According to the International Federation of Journalists more than 1100 journalists have been killed over the past 12 years because someone did not like what they wrote or said, or because they were in the wrong place in the wrong time. May 3 this year marks World Press Freedom Day. It is a day for all journalists to reflect on the fundamental principles of press freedom; to evaluate press freedom around the world, to defend the media from attacks on their independence and to pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession. In Australia, as we do every year, the Media Alliance and Walkley Foundation

mark the day with a fundraising dinner in Sydney. We use the occasion to launch our annual Press Freedom Report, parts of which you can read in this issue of The Walkley Magazine. In Australia, in the words of human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson: “journalists aren’t being killed, editors aren’t being horsewhipped and newspapers aren’t being closed down as they are in some countries… [but] there is a disturbing pattern of erosion of newsworthy information, an example of a systemic defect in the common law.” World Press Freedom Day is an opportunity to focus on ways in which we can fight for free speech in Australia, but – just as importantly – it is an opportunity to express solidarity with our colleagues in the region whose livelihoods, lives and families are put in danger because of what they do. We use this opportunity to raise money for our brothers and sisters in journalism in the region, to pay for safety training and safe houses for those in danger – and for the education and security of the families of those who have been killed. I’m proud of what we do to help, and I hope you will join us. The Australian Press Freedom Report is available at www.alliance.org.au Christopher Warren Federal secretary Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance

WALKLEY CONTRIBUTORS Richard Ackland Paul Barry Yaara Bou Melhem Simon Bosch Grahame Bowland Joanne Brooker Rowan Callick Jason Chatfield Jenny Coopes David Cohen Tom Cowie Hal Crawford Richard Creswick Kayt Davies Oslo Davis Quentin Dempster

Julian Disney Lyla Duey Andrew Dyson Rod Emmerson Jonathan Este Malcolm Farr Lindsay Foyle Christian Kerr Sturt Krygsman Sue Green Andrew Gregory Alice Gorman Natasha Grzincic Paula Heelan Fiona Katauskas Alan Kennedy

Madonna King Matthew Knott Tom Krause Jon Kudelka Franklin Lamb Simon Letch Johan Lindberg Nick McKenzie David McKnight Susan Mitchell Leanne O’Donnell Mark Pearson Andrea Petrie Mark Phillips Phil Somerville Chris Slane

Liz Porter Michael Rigoll David Rowe Chris Slane Tim Soutphommasane Kerry Staight Matt Stempeck Cameron Stewart Dave Tacon Jim Tucker Andrew Weldon

Thanks to aap, Newspix & Reuters

Q OUR MEDIA

Yours abusively... The pleasures of hate mail Opinion journalism is no place for pussycats, and Tim Soutphommasane gained a small, grotesque pleasure from some of his readers’ correspondence. Cartoon by Jason Chatfield

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o-one gave me a manual when I started writing a column for The Weekend Australian. But if there were a manual, one of the first things it should offer is a note about correspondence from readers. In the two years my “Ask the Philosopher” column ran, I received what I think was a respectable amount of mail. Usually I’d sit down early in the week to open my column email account with just a little dread. While there would always be some positive or complimentary messages – from readers grateful for being introduced to Mill or Hume or Rousseau – inevitably there would also be correspondence that suggested I was a cretin, a Big Australia stooge of Rupert Murdoch’s, or a sinister agent for the Asian invasion of a white, Christian Australia. Yet I derived a strange pleasure from receiving so-called hate mail. There is some validation of your writing when you find yourself on the receiving end of abuse. It means you might be dealing with matters where things are at stake. My antagonists fell into a few categories. There were those who were old-fashioned Trotskyites, such as the reader who accused me of limiting discourse and limiting disagreement with the logic of the capitalist state. “You do much to close down the public conversation, by dramatically narrowing what can be said and understood,” this reader wrote, assuring me that this was “more than simple ideological mesentente”. There were those of a more conservative persuasion who objected to my progressive view of the world. One letter from a reader suggested: “You would be well advised to re-train so that the awful non-sequiturs, scrambled thoughts and random quotes don’t continue to expose you as a cerebrally incontinent crypto-Marxist poseur.” But there was a category of correspondence that truly merited the description of hate mail: that which could only be described as bigoted, chauvinist, even racist. One reader, in response to my suggestion in one column that moral enhancement through biomedical technology could be understood as an act of self-improvement, wrote: Yes, so let’s start with Asians, yourself included, given that they are the most racist of all peoples on the planet. You know it’s true. What is it with Asians and race?

A piece about cricket and Usman Khawaja in the Australian Test team provoked the following response from another reader: More Asian anti-white racism. More Asian arrogance, from a bona fide Asian racist. So Asians taking over the education is ‘equality’ is it Tim? This is why the ‘white’ Australia Policy was put in place Tim, to stop Asians taking over & Aussies who want to protect Anglo culture is jingoistic & nasty? Asians gooood! Whites? Baaaaaaad. Good one Tim. I’m glad we’ve got that sorted. Where are you from Tim? Laos was it? LOL!!!! Go home soon Tim, if you feel an anglo saxon country with an anglo saxon legal system & government doesn’t suit. I’ve got some news for you. You came here from a failed Asian country & a failed inferior culture. Feel free to leave. The sooner the better. In such cases I usually opted not to respond. When there’s so much anger you know you’re not dealing with people out to have a reasoned exchange. There was, however, one occasion when I did reply to a hate mailer. It was in response to the following from Fred, whose letter arrived after an Australia Day piece I wrote in 2010 and began: Tim, Tim, Tim. 1. U were not born here. U have NO ancestral background here. 2. You’re Asian. 3. You’re a left wing academic. 4. Did your relatives fight on foreign battlefields to keep this country free? It continued: You of course are only interested in the

pilloring of white anglo-saxons which makes you nothing but a rascist [sic]. I wrote back only to receive a response from the reader’s wife offering an apology on behalf of her husband: …I’m Iranian myself so I can clearly see your point of view. But what can we do? Each one is entitled to their own opinion. Keep up the good work as it seems racism and minority group hating seems to be on the rise. God bless you. Of course, opinion journalism is no place for pussycats. To put an idea out there as someone offering public comment is analogous to stepping up on a soapbox in those days when people actually gave speeches on a street or park corner. Contending with hecklers was part of the fun, part of the carnival of rhetoric. Rigorous exchanges with readers were very much in the same vein. In any case, I always got an unlikely pleasure out of receiving my hate mail. Many of us have small, sometimes grotesque pleasures in life. For me, there was always a certain gratification in knowing there was nothing that would infuriate my typical, angry, hate correspondent more than seeing a yellow man with slanty eyes, with an unpronounceable name, gazing at him from the pages of his weekend newspaper.

Inevitably there would also be correspondence that suggested I was a cretin, a Big Australia stooge of Rupert Murdoch’s, or a sinister agent for the Asian invasion of a white, Christian Australia

Tim Soutphommasane, a political philosopher at Monash University, wrote the “Ask the Philosopher” column in The Weekend Australian from 2009–11 Jason Chatfield is a Melbourne-based cartoonist; www.jasonchatfield.com

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Q NEWSBITES

Swimming to Rottnest, thinking of Afghanistan There was an unlikely journalistic link between Afghanistan and Rottnest Island off Perth in February this year, when Perth man Brendan McNally swam for more than five hours to raise money for a British freelance photographer, Giles Duley, who lost both legs and an arm after stepping on a mine. Duley was in Kandahar in Afghanistan in February 2011, on a patrol with US and local soldiers, when he stepped on an improvised explosive device. A New York Times photo shows US Army medics tending to Duley in a helicopter as it takes him away from the carnage. Duley spent 45 days hovering between life and death in a Birmingham hospital and the news hit Brendan McNally and his wife, Heather, hard. “We became very close with Giles when we lived in London for three years,” Heather explains. “He used to be a fashion and music photographer for GQ and Esquire but he packed that in for unpaid work that is worth doing. “Now he has ongoing medical expenses – as a freelancer he has no financial support.” Injured photographer Duley described McNally as a “legend”. “I miss having him and Heather here in London. I’ve just had my 30th operation: hopefully that will be it for a while. Next is continued rehab and then I’m hoping to start doing some work by June. “For my work I have to go to some difficult places. It’s in the nature of what I do, so for me to continue working will mean a return to Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo. I’m certainly not keen to return to these places, but I think it’s important that these stories are told.” He adds: “Unfortunately as a freelancer there is little support when something like this happens, and my road through rehab is an expensive and slow one.” Duley called McNally’s 20km swim a “superhuman effort. I’m humbled he did that to help me.” The Rottnest Channel Swim has been an official event for more than 20 years. This year, 2300 swimmers took the plunge, including McNally. “I reckon we raised $3000, which is really good considering no-one knows who Giles is here,” says Heather. Donations can be made to Giles Duley via a trust fund through gilesduley.org. – David Cohen, POST Newspapers

Seven West Media ditches Press Council There was good and bad news for the Australian Press Council in April. The Council announced that it will double its yearly budget to $1.8 million by the 2014 financial year through increased funding from its members, including the Media Alliance. Members will now also need to give a minimum of four years’ notice if they decide to leave the organisation. But on the same day, Seven West Media – which owns The West Australian newspaper and also Pacific Magazines – announced it was withdrawing from the Press Council to form its own in-house complaints handling mechanism. Commenting on Seven West’s decision, the Alliance’s federal secretary, Chris Warren, said: “Now more than ever we need a strong, unified and totally independent complaints handling mechanism that is supported by all media organisations across Australia. “With this in mind, the Alliance is especially disappointed to see that Seven West has decided to withdraw its support for the Press Council and form its own complaints handling process. “In a time when the industry should be doubling its efforts to strengthen the Press Council, it’s disappointing to see this decision from Seven West.” Read more on developments in media regulation on pages 22–24.

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News Ltd puts up another paywall News Limited introduced a paywall at the Herald Sun in March, having put a similar scheme in place at The Australian back in October 2011. The two Murdoch-owned papers remain the only major traditional news providers in Australia to charge their online readers. The Herald Sun is expecting that its large AFL readership will sign up for its exclusive and intensive coverage. Simon Pristel, editor of the Herald Sun, told ABC’s Media Watch that, “We’ve done a lot of research in this space and clearly football, crime and breaking news are the areas that people come to the Herald Sun website for.” The Australian newspaper is hoping that it can build a niche market in quality news journalism told from a national perspective. In March it announced that it had attracted 40,000 subscribers to its digital platforms, exceeding all initial targets set. No other News Limited newspapers have yet announced if they will be implementing a paywall in the near future. News Limited rival, Fairfax Media, has reportedly engaged management consultants McKinsey & Co to evaluate its own possible paywall scheme or alternative.

What about press freedom, Gina? In April, the Media Alliance demanded mining billionaire Gina Rinehart withdraw her legal action against highly respected West Australian journalist Steve Pennells. The action was aimed at forcing Pennells to reveal his sources for several stories he had written about Rinehart’s court battles with three of her four children over the family trust fund. As a part-owner of Fairfax Media and with a seat on the board of the Ten Network, Gina Rinehart was reminded by the Alliance of the importance of press freedom and the Journalists’ Code of Ethics. Media Alliance federal secretary Chris Warren said meaningful statebased shield laws would protect journalists such as Pennells against frivolous legal actions. “The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance urges the WA attorneygeneral, Christian Porter, to examine whether the shield laws currently winding their way through the Western Australian parliament at a snail’s pace are effective enough to protect journalists like Steve Pennells and, if so, they should be passed as soon as possible,” Warren said. “If I was a journalist at Channel Ten or Fairfax I’d be asking if I was going to be next. Where does it all end?” he asked. The Alliance supports Pennells and The West Australian in refusing to hand over any information that may compromise their integrity. Read the full 2012 Alliance Press Freedom Report at www.alliance.org.au.

Cartoon by Andrew Weldon

Freelancers in the spotlight

Tablet news isn’t boosting revenue In news that is sure to please news publishers, The Pew Internet & American Life Project has reported that 54 per cent of news-reading adults in the United States now use mobile phones, tablets or e-readers when reading the news. The report also found that 37 per cent of tablet owners and 35 per cent of e-reader owners are reading more since they switched to digital news. A substantial 65 per cent said they spent at least the same amount of time reading online news as they did with print. The bad news is despite a rise in digital news readership, the equivalent upswing in advertising revenue has not materialised. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that newspapers are losing $7 in print advertising for every $1 of digital revenue they gain. Alan Mutter of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley believes that the figures are actually much worse. He argues that since 2005, news publishers have lost $26.7 billion in print advertising revenues while gaining only $1.2 billion in new digital revenue. He says the Pew Project only looked at the performance of US newspapers in the last two years, a period in which most publishers put more emphasis on building digital revenues to offset their print losses. Regardless, both sets of results echo similar findings from the Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which last year reported that large digital audiences were not translating into larger profits for news publishers, despite significantly larger audiences than print readership. The Tow Center’s report concludes that news providers will have to create a unique experience for the digital user, instead of engaging in a traditional news war with rival news outlets, if they want to succeed financially.

Reporting with flair and vigour from difficult locations across the planet landed photojournalist Dave Tacon the inaugural Walkley Best Freelance Journalist of the Year Award. His articles on subjects from the vibrant Beirut art scene to scavenging Jakarta’s rubbish dumps and street crime in Port Moresby, published in Rolling Stone and Monument magazines, impressed the judging panel. “Dave Tacon reported from three difficult-to-work-in locations with flair and vigour. The Jakarta and Port Moresby stories were particularly strong and newsworthy, told with empathy and passion,” the panel said. “It was versatile freelance journalism at its best, and no aspect of the different disciplines suffered for the other.” Award finalist, Queensland-based Amanda Gearing, was highly commended for her print and radio coverage of the Toowoomba floods, which exhibited “excellence across two mediums, covering the biggest story of the year with depth and empathy” according to judges Mike Carlton, John Donegan and Margaret Simons. Fellow finalist, Sydney’s Elise Potaka, was congratulated for her video and radio work on China and covering the Japan tsunami last year: “Potaka showed intrepidness in covering the devastation of Japan – hard enough for a staffer, let alone a freelance journalist – mixed with a beautiful eye,” the panel said. The award was announced at the Media Alliance Freelance Convention in Melbourne at the end of March, where everything from mojo (mobile journalism) to book publishing, tips on pitching stories to harnessing the power of social media were covered. Freelancers who were unable to attend the convention in person were able to follow the event via Twitter, with guests and speakers tweeting brief summaries, key points from the conference, and handy web links to useful information. During the event, the hashtag #walkleys became one of the top-trending subjects Australia-wide. Delivering the conference opening address, the Alliance’s federal secretary, Chris Warren, said the Alliance would continue advocating for freelancers to major publishing companies. He said the new Freelance Australia website, freelanceaustralia.org.au, would become a one-stop shop for freelancers seeking information and advice.

Staying safe The death of Marie Colvin in Syria earlier this year was a tragic reminder of the dangers that foreign correspondents face when reporting from war zones. But female journalists encounter additional dangers including attempts of humiliation, harassment and sexual attack. These issues and many more have been explored in a new book released by the International News Safety Institute, No Woman’s Land: On the frontlines with female reporters, the first book dedicated to the safety of women journalists. The book was triggered as a result of last year’s attack on CBS’s Lara Logan in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, after the institute was inundated with requests for safety tips for women working in dangerous situations. At the book launch last month, freelance photographer Kate Brooks said on working in Egypt: “Very often in crowds you get groped; it’s unpleasant, it’s relatively minor. Egypt was particularly exceptional whereby the government was using it as a tactic and they were targeting journalists everywhere. There were multiple journalists who got apprehended, interrogated and beaten. With women, it was a tactic that was used against them. What happened in Egypt has really brought this to the forefront.” No Woman’s Land is available to order at www.newssafety.org and all money raised by sales goes towards INSI safety work for women journalists.

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Q EXTRACT

Female and on the frontline

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can’t feel them any more. Their hands. The tearing. It is just the memory. But that’s enough. The memory and everything that comes with it. I do not really understand how I survived that night in Tahrir Square last February. In my work, the people I have seen overwhelmed by a mob all ended up dead. And it does not take long when you are fighting 200 to 300 men in a fury of bloodlust, to realise that your strength is leaving your body and there is truly nothing you can do to stop it. I remember begging for my life. I remember giving up. I remember fighting back. I remember accepting my death. And I remember clearly, making a decision to go down fighting with my last breath. I remember everything. And I now know how easy it is to die. Not in an intellectual way, more of a visceral, carnal understanding that obliterates all light. I know what fear really is, what it feels like when it seeps into the fibre of your being and like your skin, you can’t tear it off or be free of it. And I know now that I will fight for my life, even when I am certain it is futile and will not change the outcome. I will do that because it will be the last thing I do, that defining moment of my death, that will tell my children everything about who I am and why I left them to travel thousands of miles, to tell the story of a people they may never know or understand. It’s not much of a substitute. Instead of having a mother, they will have the knowledge that their mother never gave up on them.

That ancient tactic of terrifying people into submission or silence. I do not believe it should stop or deter women from doing this kind of work

NO WOMAN’S LAND: ON THE FRONTLINES

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Photo courtesy CBS

Just over a year ago, reporter Lara Logan was sexually assaulted by hundreds of baying men in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. She decided to speak out and help other women journalists gain the knowledge they need to work and survive in these places But in the end, all we have is who we are. It’s the one thing not even 300 baying men could take from me that night. The book No Woman’s Land, from the International News Safety Institute, is inspired by what happened to me in that square in Egypt. It is meant to examine what we can do, how we can prepare, what we should know before travelling as journalists into situations that can potentially take our lives, or wound us mortally, or deprive us of our dignity. It is important that we as women doing dangerous work in hostile places are equipped with knowledge and foresight. Knowing how important it is to stay on your feet in a mob, meant that every time my legs stumbled or gave way or were dragged down, I fought my way back up, saying over and over in my mind, “you have to stay on your feet or you will die”. Somehow, somewhere, like a light in the back of your brain, your training and experience kick in, even in the midst of that chaos. But what cannot be taught or trained, is the knowledge of who you are. That is the light that will guide you to recovery in the dark months or years that follow. That is the light that showed me so clearly how important it was to speak out and not to hide. I want the world to know that I am not ashamed of what happened to me. I want everyone to know I was not simply attacked – I was sexually assaulted. This was, from the very first moment, about me as a woman. But ultimately, I was just a tool. This was about something bigger than all of us – it was about what we do as journalists.

New book No Woman’s Land: On the Frontlines focuses on the women who risk their lives to bring us the news: the risks, the challenges, the emotional and physical toll of working in the media. No Woman’s Land features 40 compelling stories of women from a broad spectrum of media

That ancient tactic of terrifying people into submission or silence. I do not believe it should stop or deter women from doing this kind of work. Or travelling to such places. There is no real escape from the realities of life, no matter where you are. But I do feel strongly that a standard was set in my case by a company, my company: CBS News. And that standard is now very clear: you have a duty to stand by your employees, an unconditional, honest, unwavering duty. We should all be very grateful for that, as the importance cannot be overstated. Sexual violence – rape – is a unique, humiliating weapon. It is used to great effect against both men and women. And even though we all know deep down that it could, that it might happen to us, if we didn’t believe we could somehow escape then we would not head out the door to do our work in places and circumstances where our lives mean nothing and are so easily erased. Like that black grime you see between the tiles in a damp, neglected bathroom, an attack like this lives with you. The consequences are not to be underestimated or dismissed. But it can also be washed away. And the ideal of freedom that drives us as journalists, the freedom of speech that we embody, is what is really at stake. Lara Logan is the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News. Please contact the Walkley Foundation to purchase your copy of No Woman’s Land ($35) or order online at www.newssafety.org. All money raised by sales goes towards International News Safety Institute safety work for women journalists.

roles in more than a dozen countries: from prominent correspondents of international news organisations to journalists working at local media outlets in countries such as Mexico, Burma, Russia and Indonesia. No Woman’s Land was triggered by the shocking mob attack on CBS reporter Lara Logan in

Egypt last year and published in the aftermath of veteran correspondent Marie Colvin’s death in Syria this year. Alongside these profiles of brave camerawomen, photographers, correspondents and reporters, the book contains practical safety advice for both women and men of the news media.

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All in the family Harry Taylor’s The Murray Pioneer providing solid farming nous as well as news to inexperienced irrigators in the Riverland. Kerry Staight looks at a Renmark institution

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t’s not one of our major mastheads, in fact most people have probably never heard of it, but this is the story behind an enduring family-owned country rag once described as “the best settlers’ paper in the world”. For more than a century, The Murray Pioneer has been penned and printed at the same Renmark address in South Australia’s Riverland. The building may have undergone some major renovations, but its history has been retained in the battered pages of every edition stacked up inside. The paper started out as The Renmark Pioneer – a fairly unremarkable rag, which was first printed in a tent in 1892. In 1905 Harry Samuel Taylor, a fruit grower turned horticulture writer in Mildura, bought the Pioneer and turned it around. Taylor’s road to reporting was unconventional. Born into a well-off and influential family in Adelaide, he was by all accounts intelligent, idealistic and somewhat eccentric. As a young man, he joined a movement trying to set up a utopian socialist settlement in Paraguay, known as the “New Australia”. “I think that really is what defined the character of Harry Taylor,” says his grandson Paul Taylor. “He was a very generous man and he was always battling for the underdog. So his newspaper reporting in the paper reflected that.” While New Australia ultimately failed, Harry Taylor played a crucial role in putting South Australia’s Riverland on the map. As the editor of the Pioneer, he wrote prolifically on horticulture and agriculture, at a time when inexperienced irrigation pioneers were settling along the River Murray. “They started off with their small holdings wondering how they were going to make a living,” explains Rod Kirkpatrick from the Australian Newspaper History Group. “He encouraged them and informed them through the paper and helped them to achieve a good income.” In just a few years, the once forgettable rag was being lauded by some as “the leading country weekly in Australia” and “the best

Harry Taylor and the editorial staff at The Murray Pioneer in Renmark, SA. Taylor bought the paper in 1905 and turned it into “the leading country weekly in Australia”

irrigation and primary producers’ paper in the Commonwealth”. Whether it was or not, there’s no doubt that under Taylor’s insightful and sometimes controversial editorship, The Murray Pioneer became a highly regarded and influential newspaper. While it didn’t always attract enough advertisers to make lots of money, it had an enviable circulation that in the 1920s, according to Taylor at least, was twice that of any other South Australian country paper. Taylor died in 1932, but his legacy has lived on as the paper passed from one generation to the next, with his greatgrandson Ben Taylor now in charge. The Murray Pioneer is the oldest surviving familyowned rural newspaper in South Australia. Only about one in nine rural newspapers in Australia are family owned; most are in the hands of Fairfax Rural Press and APN News and Media. The Taylors have also stepped up their presence in the industry, buying five other country papers to make their printing press more profitable. Two years ago the viability of the Taylors’ business came under fire, when a newspaper war broke out. Fed up with rising advertising costs, a group of local businesses jumped ship and set up a rival paper called The Riverland Weekly. “It was very hard to combat. Overnight we had a massive shift in advertising dollars to an opposition paper,” says Ben Taylor. The Weekly’s chairman, Brian Smith, admits it’s been a battle for the new player,

“He was a very generous man and he was always battling for the underdog. So his newspaper reporting in the paper reflected that” too, with some advertisers returning to the veteran publication. “The other paper obviously wouldn’t lay down and say ‘well, you win’,” he points out. It’s not just advertisers the Pioneer is battling to retain, with the digital age continuing to put pressure on the more traditional ways of sourcing news. While local content in country newspapers may give them an advantage over metropolitan publications, they’re not immune from falling readership. “We’re all trying to hold our circulation, but, really, it’s a bit of an uphill battle,” says Paul Taylor, the former managing director of The Murray Pioneer. However Ben Taylor is confident that the paper his great-grandfather dedicated so much of his life to, still has another generation or two in it yet. “It’s still very viable... I think we’ve still got a good future ahead of us,” he says. Kerry Staight is the South Australian reporter for the ABC’s long-running rural affairs program Landline

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Truth vigilantes vs spin Matthew Knott knows spin produces froth, but there’s nothing stopping journalists from saying no to bullshit. Cartoon by Fiona Katauskas

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ournalists love to bag spin doctors. Bewailing the growth of the PR industry is one of our favourite pastimes – rivalled only by breaking news and gossiping about our fellow hacks. The incredible proliferation of spin, we tell ourselves, is a threat to journalism and to democracy. We’re right – but let’s not wallow in self-righteous despair. We in the media are key players in the spin cycle, not passive, powerless observers of it. At our best, we disrupt spin; at our worst we encourage it. As former finance minister Lindsay Tanner argues in his book Sideshow, politicians and other figures of public interest have always engaged in exaggeration, obfuscation and distraction. But something troubling, and significant, is happening in contemporary Australia (indeed, around the developed world). “Spin is intensifying,” he writes. “Whereas once it reflected occasional embellishments and evasions, it now lies at the heart of the political process. People are complaining about something that they once ignored or took for granted because it now dominates our public culture.” The media, Tanner argues, must cop some of the blame for this trend – and he’s right. Spin flourishes when we serve up shallow “he said, she said” journalism. When we repackage press releases as news. When we fail to fact-check our sources’ claims. When we hound and harass people for no public benefit. “If there was no market demand for this work it wouldn’t exist,” veteran crisis management consultant Anthony McClellan told me recently. “We exist because the media is ferocious, often unfair and sometimes unethical. Our job is to stand between the client and the 50 journos at the gate – metaphorically speaking but sometimes not.” Hold on a minute, I hear my journalistic comrades protest. Newsrooms are understaffed and under-resourced. We are always being asked to do more with less in half the time. Meanwhile, the ranks of PR pros are swelling. This makes us more vulnerable to spin. It’s all true. But no matter how much we moan and groan, PR professionals are likely to outnumber journalists for the foreseeable future. Crisis management experts will continue to be called in by government and

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big business when bad news breaks. Wishing them away won’t do us any good. The key is to recognise, and embrace, our power to push back. And here’s the good news: there are some promising signs that this is happening. The head honchos at Brisbane’s CourierMail newspaper did something dramatic midway through the recent Queensland election campaign: they pulled their reporters off the election campaign buses and diverted them to other stories. Journalists have long whinged about being herded from one stage-managed event to another, handed a press release and told that the leaders will only answer questions on the policy they’re announcing. This year, The Courier-Mail said enough is enough. While it may not be desirable for every news organisation to ditch the campaign buses, the Courier-Mail’s decision was a reminder that the media doesn’t have to swallow campaign spin just because the pollies want us to. Meanwhile, during the US Republican primaries, The New York Times has been running a fact-check sidebar to assess the validity of the candidates’ statements. The paper’s public editor, Arthur Brisbane, sparked debate in January by asking if reporters should go further and integrate such disclaimers into their stories. For example, when Mitt Romney claimed that Barack Obama had made speeches “apologising for America”, should reporters have noted that the president has never used the word apologise in a speech about US policy or history? Brisbane’s idea of journalists becoming “truth vigilantes” provoked much mirth in the Twittersphere, but I think his underlying point is a compelling one. Journalists, quite rightly, cherish the notions of balance and objectivity. But we should still call bullshit when politicians, business people and interest groups indulge in distortion and obfuscation. In fact, the best reporters already do. Fairfax economic commentator Ross Gittins has recently done a fine job demolishing dodgy economic modelling reports that are used by groups with vested interests to influence public debate. Dogged reporting by The Australian’s Hedley Thomas, questioning the official narrative, forced the Queensland flood inquiry back into session in March. Our best broadcast interviewers refuse to allow

We in the media are key players in the spin cycle, not passive, powerless observers of it

politicians to parrot party talking points by pointing out when they are refusing to directly answer questions. As these examples show, cutting through spin requires experience and leadership. Dealing with the PR industry should be a crucial element of modern-day journalism education – both in universities and professional training programs. In my otherwise excellent journalism degree, which I completed just over a year ago, I learnt a lot about defamation law but very little about how to interact with spinners and media advisers. How do you use a press release effectively? How do you get in touch with decision makers, not just spokespeople? What are the tricks of the trade used by those in the PR game? These are the type of questions up-and-coming journalists need help answering. Not because PR people are the enemy. Indeed, they often help journalists by suggesting story ideas and putting us in contact with busy decision makers. But their mission is – and always should be – different to ours. When the media allows spin to thrive, it’s the public that suffers. Bring on the age of the truth vigilante. Matthew Knott is a journalist at The Power Index. He recently wrote a series of profiles on Australia’s most influential spinners and advisers Fiona Katauskas is a freelance cartoonist; fionakatauskas.com

A call for justice heard How did the shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin ignite such a passionate public debate? Matt Stempeck looks at the trail of old and new media. Illustration by Lyla Duey

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n February 26, 2012, 17-yearold Trayvon Martin went to buy some candy and an iced tea in Sanford, Florida. He was confronted by a “neighborhood watch leader”, George Zimmerman, who pursued and eventually shot and killed him. Despite fully admitting to the crime, Zimmerman was not charged, or even arrested, by the local police department. The story has ignited a national debate in the United States over racial profiling and gun laws, two of the highest voltage topics in American society. The intense public attention forced federal authorities to intervene, and on April 11, more than six weeks after the shooting, George Zimmerman was arrested. The 24-hour media spotlight continues to glare on every aspect of the story, and an impending murder trial will only increase its intensity. But the story came very close to remaining in obscurity. By dissecting how it took off, we can see not only how the many complicated layers of our media ecosystem influence one another, but also the increasingly important role of news consumers in the lifespan of the news. My initial read of the Trayvon Martin story was that the people talking about it online had kept the story alive while the national media slept. I was wrong. After poring over the data and analyses of the early media coverage, it’s astoundingly clear that the story’s exponential growth in coverage occurred thanks to a combination of traditional media outreach, partisan cable news channels, social media influencers, and an online action platform built to amplify citizens’ crusades for justice. The week after Martin was shot, there were a few routine local crime stories about the incident in local newspapers and on a local television station. Combined, these outlets reached well under 500,000 people. For the next six days, there was no professional media coverage. By all traditional measures, this was yet another story about the violent murder of a young black man and it had run its course with regards to media attention. But behind the scenes, a media-savvy lawyer named Benjamin Crump was working pro bono to ensure that the case would receive the attention it needed to deliver justice. In a previous case involving a black teen who died due to mistreatment at a detention centre, Crump had learned the

hard way that winning the media battle is fundamental to winning the overall case. Crump and his team reached out to sympathetic media personalities such as Reverend Al Sharpton. They planned marches and rallies and worked with a local publicist to attract coverage. After more than a week of little to no media coverage, the story re-emerged in a Reuters wire article and the CBS morning news program. The next day, a completely unconnected person named Kevin Cunningham set up a petition on Change. org to demand justice in the case. The petition benefited from the fresh national media coverage but, more importantly, it gave sympathetic citizens an actionable link to share with others. It’s increasingly understood that consumers of the news have made themselves a relevant force in the process of journalism. We’re now starting to see audience involvement well beyond mere commentary. In the case of stories like Trayvon Martin’s, the audience is activist. Media coverage of injustices like Martin’s death has always driven some portion of the audience to act, or at least to want to act. The difference is that today there are online platforms, like Change.org, designed specifically to give passionate citizens a place to organise themselves. Cunningham’s petition began to accrue thousands of signatures. He had, in his own words, “kicked the stone that turned into the snowball that caused the avalanche”. Two weeks after Martin’s death, the national pressure Crump had worked to generate was forcing local officials to respond, which in turn generated more actualities for the media to cover, and created a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The release of the audio from the emergency phone calls the evening of the murder, in particular, created a spike in attention, both in the media and online. While they weren’t the first to bring the story to national attention, the people talking about it online certainly kept it at the forefront. Almost half of the 5 million visits to the Change.org petition were referred by social media sources. Pew’s Research Center for Excellence in Journalism found that Trayvon Martin became the number one topic discussed on Twitter, with “calls for justice” and “sympathy for the victim” dominating the conversations.

The fact that this story ever reached these online masses came down to just a few individuals skilled in decidedly oldschool media outreach

A substantial amount of this traffic was driven by an emerging class of influencers: celebrities. Our music and film stars have always been famous, but they have traditionally had to speak to the public through the media. Using Twitter, they now speak directly to their millions of fans, and proved themselves amazingly responsive to requests like those of Tim Newman, an employee at Change.org. Newman convinced stars such as Spike Lee, MC Hammer and Cher to tweet links to the petition, creating a 900 per cent spike in social media traffic in just one day. The story was later picked up by partisan cable news channels like MSNBC and Fox News. The left sought justice for Martin’s family, and turned renewed scrutiny on racial profiling and the so-called self-defence laws that had kept Zimmerman a free man. The right responded by investigating Martin’s past and accusing media figures like Sharpton of declaring racism where there was none. The combined effect has been wall-to-wall television airtime. Media critic and journalism professor Jay Rosen has written about “the people formerly known as the audience”, who now assert themselves as an active public by taking part in and amplifying stories like Martin’s. Signing and sharing a petition to create public pressure on negligent authorities is an active role. Online tools like Change.org accelerate this transition. And yet, the fact that this story ever reached these online masses came down to just a few individuals skilled in decidedly old-school media outreach. The line between journalism and advocacy will only continue to blur in the years ahead. Matt Stempeck is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. You can read a more detailed version of this account at http://civic.mit.edu/blog/mstem/theinternet-didnt-make-trayvon-national-newsbut-it-did-sustain-the-story Lyla Duey is a Massachusetts based artist

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Is journalism being loved to death? Journalism courses are sprouting record numbers of graduates at the same time as full-time media jobs are collapsing. Sue Green explains why. Illustration by Andrew Dyson

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reat, said friends and colleagues, some of whom had been made redundant. Just what we need – more journalists. It was a common reaction when I began teaching journalism at Swinburne University last year, and with journalism courses taking record enrolments, I’m still hearing it. In December 2010, the Media Alliance estimated that the number of full-time jobs in Australian newsrooms had fallen by about 700 since 2008. More have gone since. At a recent dinner with women friends, all journalists my age, we realised that although we all work, none of us has an actual job. So am I irresponsible? Is Swinburne, with about 130 first-year journalism students and 350 across all years, including those from related courses taking journalism subjects? Are all the universities with journalism courses – six in Melbourne alone? No, say the academics running these courses. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But most are also respected journalists who say not only are media jobs changing, their students are getting skills they can use in other fields. Wendy Bacon, an investigative journalist and journalism professor at UTS, says some switch to other fields, but many UTS journalism graduates do get jobs in the industry. Its changing nature means they have up-to-date multimedia skills that older journalists may lack. “Journalists see journalism education in a particular way – all these people are people who could potentially take my job – but I don’t think that is what it is about,” she says. “There are many more law graduates than lawyers. Journalism is becoming a discipline in a university like history or politics. It can be a good general background for any citizen as well as an education for a particular job.” It’s a view shared by the Alliance. Paul Murphy, the Alliance’s media director, also uses the law degree analogy, saying: “We see no reason why the supply of places in journalism courses should be strictly linked to the supply of journalist jobs… The ability to communicate clearly and concisely is an asset in any occupation, as are skills in research, investigation and analysis.”

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The Age’s editor-in-chief, Paul Ramadge, agrees today’s multiskilled students are training for jobs the old guard (that’s me and you, my friends) could not do. Wannabe trainees arrive with laptops and show sophisticated presentations. They are tested on their knowledge of filing online, launching a blog and comparative analysis using digital tools. At Swinburne, along with the classics – news reporting, ethics, media law – students study digital literacies. Blogging, taking video footage and uploading photographs are as important to them as the news story inverted pyramid they learn in week one. Journalist and academic Professor Julianne Schultz, now editor of the Griffith REVIEW and a member of the ABC board, says the skills and critical thinking learnt in journalism apply to countless occupations and should not be compared to industry training programs. Dr Margaret Simons, the director of Melbourne University’s Centre for Advanced

Deregulation has left the universities under pressure to attract students, and journalism is an attractive course

Journalism, takes a similar angle. Thousands of students graduate with arts degrees and not all will work in their field of study, she points out. So, too, not every journalism student will become a journalist. Simons has written extensively about the ways today’s journalism students will create roles for themselves (see her posting “Journalism Courses and Jobs” at blogs. unimelb.edu.au/caj/). “Is it for universities to say, people you cannot study this, when people want to? Universities in Australia are chronically underfunded, the ways they get money are teaching and research,” she says. “If you have a demand for courses, to say to universities you must not take them, then the question is, where do they go?” Dr Andrew Dodd, convener of journalism at Swinburne, agrees deregulation has left the universities under pressure to attract students, and journalism is an attractive course. “I don’t think that journalism as a profession needs to be threatened by lots

of people learning how to do journalism. I think that society as a whole should welcome this.” But he warns against raising false hopes: “There is never a guarantee that you will end up with a job in the media if you come to us. We begin the first lecture of the first course with a realistic appraisal of the market.” The Age’s Ramadge suggests that changes in the media offer journalism schools opportunities to “become smarter” and closer to industry. “Journalism schools need to stay close to these technological advances and to analyse what it means in training terms for young people,” he says. So are they doing that? “Not enough. And if they are doing it, it is not being well articulated. The challenge is to ensure we retain the best of the past, the craft-based essentials of journalism, and we combine that with the best of technology today. My sense is more could be done and one of the big opportunities... for the major journalism schools is to get closer to industry.” Already many universities, Swinburne included, talk about engagement with the industry and attracting teachers with industry experience. Yet for people like me, who want to remain journalists and not morph into academics, refusing to enrol for a PhD means no permanent job – not even part-time. I appreciate the recognition of my efforts with a title, but the work remains sessional, without permanency or the comfort of annual leave and sick pay. Bacon says journalism must be taught by experienced journalists. “I am concerned that universities under financial pressure and pressure to increase research are understaffing journalism schools,” she says. And she is concerned that work experience placements and stories submitted by students desperate to get published – all unpaid – could undermine full-time jobs. So am I irresponsible? I don’t think so. I don’t pretend to my students that they will all find jobs in journalism as I have known it. A few will, but others will work in the media in new ways, and others still will do something else. And that’s not a bad thing. I am teaching them to think critically, to organise their thoughts and convert them to clear and concise writing, to manage their time, meet deadlines, to understand media law and avoid getting sued for their tweets and Facebook pages. Those are useful skills not just for journalism, but for life. Sue Green is a Melbourne-based freelance journalist and an adjunct teaching fellow at Swinburne University Andrew Dyson is one of the few cartoonists in Australia who combines the roles of cartoonist and columnist

Tom wants got a job Tom Cowie took 38 days to land a job in the media, but he did it in public

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sk any journalism graduate to explain what it’s like trying to find a job in media, and they’ll come back at you with enough hard luck stories to make a front bar full of mug punters blush. Tales abound of budding hacks submitting application after doomed application, often without reply, before managing to land an interview for even the smallest role. The hunt for my first journalism job was not dissimilar, except the whole process was conducted in public. And it worked. It took me just 38 days to land a job in a newsroom, largely thanks to a blog I launched near the end of my studies called Tom Wants a Job. I’ve worked as a journalist at Crikey and its sister site, The Power Index, for nearly two years now, but I’m still regularly asked why I think the blog worked. To me, its success hinged on whether people in the media could relate to it. And most journalists – from senior editors to the legions of unpaid interns – know just how hard it is to break into the news business. Still, I get a little embarrassed at the number of people who recognise my name because of the blog. I know now that major newsrooms were following along and that journalism academics have shown it in classes as an example. Young student reporters still ring me up for stories they’re writing on getting a job in the media. All that from a project spawned on a whim over a coffee with a university lecturer. Two years after that auspicious latte, I think the lessons of starting something like Tom Wants a Job are still relevant. There’s still an expectation that students must do more than acquire a degree and put together a portfolio to land a job. Why this increased pressure is being heaped on young journalists is a question for those at the top of the industry. But the problem lies partly in the increasing number of journalism graduates competing for increasingly rare newsroom opportunities. That’s why I think students need to stand out from the crowd. Standing out means many things to different people. For me, it was trying to get my name on the lips of as many editors as I could. And I thought the best way to achieve this was to publicly diarise my experiences in trying to get noticed in such a competitive field. If you take a look at the blog, you’ll see that I pitched it as a “part online

documentary, part shameless self-promotion”. That about sums it up: I wanted to advertise my skills, while also entertaining an audience by telling a story. To make it an enjoyable read, I blogged in a “to be continued” narrative arc: one day I would ask readers if it was worth applying for a job at lads’ mag ZOO Weekly, the next I’d publish a rejection letter from News Limited. The tone of the blog was also important. I wanted it to be readable and humorous but also show how seriously I take my work. To help get this across I did things such as ask readers to vote on which jobs I should apply for (an internship with Afghanaid in Kabul was popular) and to tell me on Twitter the right tie to wear to an interview (the blue one). The response to the blog was immediate: the address was retweeted all across Twitter within hours of its launch, while traffic to the page went through the roof. In the first month, Tom Wants a Job had 6651 page views and was picked up by media outlets including The Australian, ABC Local Radio and journalism.co.uk. In total it’s been viewed 20,950 times. To take advantage of those numbers, I had my résumé, portfolio and “testimonials” from journalists David Penberthy (news.com.au and The Punch), Ben Fordham (Nine Network) and Jason Whittaker (Crikey) all sitting prominently for anyone to peer through if they wanted. The blog’s promotional success wasn’t appreciated by everyone, particularly those media types with an aversion to anything PR. But the nay-sayers were in the minority and most who took the time to contact me were appreciative. And if all else fails, at least I have got the prospects of a second career to fall back on. One advertising headhunter emailed through to ask if I’d ever thought about a future in marketing, calling me a “natural” talent in the dark arts. After passing on that offer, I eventually succeeded in my original goal and was asked to come in for a six-month trial as a journalist at Crikey. Nearly two years and a lot of coffee later, I’m still there. All it took was getting that foot in the door, something all enthusiastic journalism students crave. You just have to prove you’re ready to do anything to get it.

One advertising headhunter emailed through to ask if I’d ever thought about a future in marketing, calling me a “natural” talent in the dark arts

Tom Cowie is a journalist at Crikey and The Power Index, where he writes profiles on some of the country’s most powerful people

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Peek efficiencies Liz Porter says showing interviewees her stories before publication has avoided a lot of errors going to print, not all of them hers. Cartoon by Rod Emmerson

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an I see the piece before it is published?” For many journalists, “no” is the only possible answer to that question. But I’d argue that on certain occasions the answer could be – and should be –“yes”. In fact, and at the risk of prompting some serious sneering, I believe there are many situations where a piece of journalistic work will benefit greatly from being shown to its subject. Of course “no” remains the correct answer to many classes of interviewees. Clearly you don’t give previews to the subjects of investigative pieces, or to politicians, or to cops. “No” is the sensible answer to a writer you may be profiling. And to artists, movie and theatre people. Say “no” to anyone interviewed in a feature about a town or suburb with an obvious social problem. Why get the deluge of accusations of bias before a piece is published or broadcast as well as after? But what about the many journalists who spend at least part of their working lives generating features to explain complex developments in the world of business and science? I think journalists like this should at least consider letting interviewees see their work – or at least parts of it – before publication. Why? It’s simply a matter of getting the facts right – and that’s not as easy to do as you might think. I remember a business executive mate, a regular subject of press profiles over the years, expressing surprise and delight over having just read a piece about the work of a friend and having found no errors of fact. Almost every time he read a media piece on a project he knew about, he said he spotted an error (and he’s not the only person to have told me this). Sometimes it was subtle: like the suggestion that the interviewee was the sole originator of a project involving six people. At other times, names were mixed up and numbers were wrong. Mistakes aren’t always the journalist’s fault. Certain errors are almost an occupational hazard when you tell someone else’s life or work stories without a follow-up call to check on “facts” (or assumptions that you’ve made without even realising). Too many interviewees tell their stories badly, with events out of sequence, and key moments omitted. The journalist only knows event “A”

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and event “C”, recounted by the subject as if one followed the other, or even caused it. Event “B” has been omitted, an error the subject only realises when he or she sees the published product, complete with the journalist’s assumption of a causal relationship between “A” and “C”. Scientists and business boffins often have trouble explaining their work in words that the average reader can understand. Oversimplified anecdotes work in conversation to get the point across to the journalist. But crystallised into words on the page, the colloquial explanation may be an accurate report of the conversation, but technically “wrong”. Some to and fro with the subject can, in this case, achieve the happy medium of colloquialism paired with factual correctness. In other cases, where the journalist has simply misunderstood the science, this process gets the errors out. When I have shown my work to interview subjects, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. In both my forensic science books, my personal practice of checking back with subjects allowed me to correct many mistakes, some of which were made by interviewees themselves, who had, for example, confused details of different cases. These days I also occasionally write articles for a publisher of university magazines, where the in-house rule is that every profile must be signed off by the subject. Interestingly, the one time this approach misfired was with one of the fluffiest and most inconsequential stories I have ever written: a story about a cattery. The owner of the cattery was fretting that “animal libbers” might read something about cats in cages and picket her. Thinking to put her mind at rest, I gave in and read her the story over the phone. (I didn’t trust her enough to send it to her.) The piece reflected well on the hard work of the young cattery assistant, who knew all the cats’ names and their (many) bad habits. But instead of laughing, the cattery owner kept saying “Oh no… You can’t say that, the owners won’t like it.” After an infuriating half-hour, during which eavesdropping colleagues were weeping with laughter, I suggested a compromise. “Why don’t we just change the bloody cats’ names?” I growled. She agreed. So I ran a footnote, saying that the moggies’

Mistakes aren’t always the journalist’s fault. Certain errors are almost an occupational hazard when you tell someone else’s life or work stories

names had been changed “to protect the sensitivities of their owners”. Finally, I must add that I don’t always show subjects my work. And often I only share factual sections of pieces because I don’t want interviewee input on descriptive passages. I also waver constantly on quote checking, a topic laden with ethical dilemmas. Do you really want to give the eminent academic the time to think better of the juicily controversial quote she gave you on the record during the interview? (I leave that to your own conscience.) Should you have mercy on the first-time interviewee who is saying things that will get her into trouble and allow her to withdraw them – or even suggest it? (I would say: yes.) There are no simple answers. My one unarguable conclusion is that this topic needs far more attention than it gets in the average newsroom. Liz Porter is a freelance journalist, author of Written on the Skin: An Australian forensic casebook (Pan Macmillan, $24.95) and joint winner of the 2007 Ned Kelly award for best true crime book, Cold Case Files (Pan Macmillan, $34.99) Rod Emmerson is the editorial cartoonist for The New Zealand Herald

Q MEDIA SPOTLIGHT

Newsrooms across the pond A 10-person fact-checking desk? Yaara Bou Melhem saw how the other side lives with a visit to the BBC and CNN. Cartoon by Joanne Brooker

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thought it would be just another newsroom, similar to the many I’ve seen before. But this was the BBC. And if international broadcasting had a mothership, the BBC Television Centre would be it. I was in London on the first leg of my trip sponsored by the BBC and CNN International for winning The Walkley Foundation’s Young Australian Journalist of the Year Award. My tour took me around two floors. One had the BBC’s “domestic desk” which was, in fact, a beehive structured set of cubicles arranged to contain a certain number of worker bees staffed to particular programs. Then there was the international floor, again, with the cubicles and, again, pumping with the sort of activity that only the need to feed a 24-hour news machine requires. “Here’s the fact-checking desk. There’s about 10 people here who verify information about countries and the issues that our correspondents are covering,” a producer told me as we walked past different work stations in the sprawling newsroom. I was a little envious of the BBC’s resources. With the comparatively little funding that public broadcasters receive in Australia, a 10-person fact-checking desk seemed like a bit of a luxury. After a week in London, I went on to New York City. CNN International put me up in a hip hotel just a couple of minutes’ walk from its Time Warner Centre in Manhattan. Thank you CNN. There was a buzz in the building. The sound of ambitious journalists working to get noticed, to get the content and to get the ratings. It’s a buzz not unique to commercial television, but it’s a lot louder there. CNN’s New York City bureau feeds at least two prime-time international shows and a host of other domestic content. The Anderson Cooper 360° and Piers Morgan Tonight shows are recorded here and I was interested to see how they’re run. “Our viewers might have already heard about most of the news of the day, so we need to get a new angle, an AC 360 take on it,” one of the producers told me. CNN International places great importance on having presenters that viewers can be familiar with and get to know and trust. Individualising the media is one way to attract viewers in a world with so many

There was a buzz in the building. The sound of ambitious journalists working to get noticed, to get the content and to get the ratings outlets and methods of media consumption. Back in London, the BBC had its personalities, too. As the BBC tour moved us to a control room, a very distinguished looking older man with wispy white hair walked unhurriedly into a glass-enclosed studio. “This is the voice of the empire.” No, wait, that’s not how it went. “This is the voice of your former colonial masters.” Still not quite right. “This is the BBC World Service.” That’s the one. I’d been listening to his imperial tones since before I could remember. Growing up I had always believed that he embodied Britain. Maybe secretly I still do. But the BBC is changing, as all media empires invariably do.

In between pushing buttons and making phone calls, a few of the BBC journalists in the control room were talking about the company’s restructure. More than 500 jobs will be cut in the next five years. Over the next two years, the radio and television news departments from the Television Centre will be moved to BBC Broadcasting House in central London. I was glad I got to see the BBC offices before the change, but I am looking forward to seeing what’s coming next. Yaara Bou Melhem is a Walkley Award winner and the Young Australian Journalist of the Year for 2011 Joanne Brooker is an award-winning professional media artist specialising in portraiture and caricature

THE WALKLEY MAGAZINE

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Q OUR MEDIA

Take a tablet… Content isn’t the only king for a tablet app. User experience is equally important, says Andrew Gregory. Cartoon by Oslo Davis

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n the freewheeling and competitive world of mobile media, the quality of a user’s experience can make or break an app – regardless of how good the content may be. We’ve all heard that “content is king”, but when it comes to tablet-based media, user experience has a rival claim to the throne. Good content is a key ingredient, of course, but providing a good user experience through proper interaction design will help convert curious downloaders of your app into regular users. Imagine you have two apps with roughly the same content. One looks good and is easy to use, while the other is hard to navigate and read. Which one would you prefer?

User experience, interface and interaction The common definition of user experience (UX) is “the way a person feels about using a product, system or service”. UX design is a professional discipline in its own right, and UX designers draw on everything from psychology and heuristic principles to copywriting and computer science. In the relatively new form of digital media that is apps, the specific area of UX which matters most is the user interface (UI) – those elements where humans and machines interact. Navigating through the sections of an app, accessing and reading individual pieces of content, and adjusting the app’s settings are all important UI elements.

Apps and touchscreens Touchscreens have evolved the media experience beyond passive reading to an actual physical activity: using your fingers to swipe between articles, scroll through text, press virtual buttons and pinch photos to zoom in and out. Known in the mobile industry as gestures, these particular movements are intrinsic to the app experience because they are, quite literally, part of the content itself. The word “app” is derived from software application and that’s an apt description (pardon the pun). The point is that people use apps more like a piece of software than traditional media, and so publishers need to think of tablets as more than a one-way media channel. Another complicating factor of mobile media is its relative newness to publishers and audiences, with both still coming to terms with its new ways of reading and engaging with media content. Being a relatively new media form, it’s also important to balance innovation and creativity with a logical and user-friendly interface. In other words, apps must be easy to use and understand. People have been using the internet and websites for more than 20 years now, so we know what that’s

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all about. By comparison, we’ve just reached the two-year anniversary of the first iPad. App designs are diverse and evolving at a rapid rate, meaning that app users must adapt to change. But they’re adapting for the better, and the best designs will flourish and become the standard. In the meantime, app designs tend to simulate our familiar media experiences – print, websites, video and picture galleries – which offer a degree of familiarity and logic to the user experience.

Remember it’s a smaller screen If you place an iPad on a double-paged spread of a broadsheet newspaper, you’ll find that the screen covers less than one-quarter of the media real estate. And compared with a computer monitor, the screen is between one-third and one-half the size. As a mobile content producer, I used this comparison as a reminder of the tablet’s smaller screen when producing visual content such as picture galleries, thumbnail images and composite graphics. For example, detailed graphics that work well on screen or in print are often too small to be readable on the tablet screen, and need a custom edit to work for app users. The same goes for thumbnail pictures for articles and videos. A head-and-shoulders crop of a human subject may be appropriate for the web, but too small for an app user to see clearly. A tighter crop of the subject’s face will be easier to see and recognise on the smaller app screen. It’s easy to ignore or forget that pictures will be scaled down once they hit the tablet screen, especially because app content is usually produced on much bigger computer screens. This is a particular trap during multiplatform production, when you’re producing breaking news under looming deadlines, and the finer points of app media production are drowned out by the ticking of the clock.

Tablets are anywhere and everywhere Beyond the content and UI, it’s also important to recognise the mobility of tablet users: they could be sitting on the train, in the back of a car, watching television at home or curled up in bed. Home users will most likely use their home broadband to update their app content, without having to worry about the relatively small amounts of data required for fresh content, streaming video and system updates. Other tablet owners use the mobile phone network to update their apps, which is almost always slower, more expensive and less consistent than home or office broadband. Publishers should keep these various contexts in mind when commissioning a new app or updating an existing one, and recognise that the user experience

will differ between different locations. On the train ride to News Limited’s Holt Street offices in Sydney, I learned exactly when I could update the Daily Telegraph iPad app successfully and when I could stream YouTube videos to my iPhone, based on the strength of the mobile network signals near each station, and the points at which the mobile signal switched from one mobile phone tower to the next. For example, some newer apps now include the option of downloading video content in full instead of streaming it. This is handy for commuters and long-distance travellers who cannot rely on the mobile network across the length of their journey. Apps which are heavy on video content, or any app targeting the commuter/traveller market, should consider offering the download option to make life easier and possibly cheaper for the audience.

Social media and customer feedback We all know that readers share content via social media giants Facebook and Twitter, smaller but significant online hangouts such as Reddit and Digg, and relative newcomers such as Google+ and Pinterest. Allowing your subscribers to share app content via social media is a bonus feature for them, and also generates publicity for your product. It’s also wise to give customers an opportunity to give feedback within the app itself: to report any bugs, to praise or complain about your mobile media offering. Not only does it show what a thoughtful and responsive publisher you are, it also provides potentially valuable research for bug fixes and future enhancements. Perhaps more importantly, it will give users an alternative to broadcasting their grievances on Twitter, or writing a poor review of your app in the App Store. Andrew Gregory is communications manager for The Walkley Foundation Oslo Davis is a Melbourne-based illustrator and cartoonist

Whatever happened to the

industrial round?

Mark Phillips can count the number of specialist IR reporters in Australia on two hands, and that’s bad for our democracy. Cartoon by Mike Rigoll

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hen Alan Joyce grounded the entire Qantas fleet on October 29 last year, industrial relations was back on the front pages and leading the evening news bulletins. It was arguably the biggest IR story since the 1998 waterfront dispute, but Australia’s media was woefully undermanned. Yes, Court One on level six of Fair Work Australia in Melbourne was packed to the rafters with media for those two nights (and early mornings) of hearings, including the cream of Australia’s IR reporters – all three of them. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you could count the number of specialist IR reporters regularly filing in Australia today on two hands. Three of the best in the business – The Age’s Ben Schneiders, Ewin Hannan of The Australian and the veteran Financial

Review scribe, Mark Skulley – sat it out during two nights of marathon hearings. But outside of Melbourne – which is still the heartland of Australian IR, mainly because it’s home to the ACTU – the round is virtually non-existent. A decade ago, when I plied the round for the Herald Sun, every metropolitan daily had a full-time industrial reporter. Some, like The Age, had two. AAP had industrial rounds in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. And the ABC had a specialist. Then there were the IR scribes at magazines such as BRW and The Bulletin. A few decades before that, a full-blown press gallery operated out of the majestic Victorian Trades Hall building in Lygon Street (and the John Curtin Hotel across the road). Competition for scoops was intense, and the reporters were among the best and most skilled in their organisations. Industrial reporting had traditionally

been one of the most coveted rounds on a newspaper, a fulfilling career in itself for those who chose to make it their specialty, but also a pathway to political reporting for many journalists. Veteran radio talkback host Neil Mitchell, the ABC’s Walkley-winning economics reporter Stephen Long, The Australian’s Washington correspondent Brad Norington, and The Age political columnist Shaun Carney all cut their journalistic teeth on the industrial round. And why not? The industrial round provides all the elements of those great yarns journalists seek: conflict, intrigue, political shenanigans, powerful human stories and colourful personalities. The industrial reporter is an eyewitness to many of the biggest stories of our times. He or she visits a world populated by largerthan-life characters: uncompromising yet idealistic union leaders and hard-nosed X

THE WALKLEY MAGAZINE

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Q OUR MEDIA

And yet this decline has taken place during a period that has been one of the most fertile for industrial relations news as any in our nation’s history. The last decade or so has seen the waterfront dispute, the rise and fall of John Howard’s blind pursuit of labour market deregulation, and the Your Rights at Work campaign orchestrated by the ACTU and the union movement in 2007. It was a period in which unions withstood an attack on their very existence directed from the prime minister’s office, and still managed to engineer outcomes such as the successful

X employer bosses. It’s the scene of conflict in the streets and in the courts, picket lines, lockouts, mass blockades and last-minute court injunctions. Doublecrossing, highwire negotiations, bluff and counter-bluff, power plays, secret deals, outrageous quotes and recriminations are all part of it. And heart-wrenching stories of personal deprivation, struggle, camaraderie, sacrifice and solidarity. Add to that the most fundamental of human struggles: that of dignity, respect, and some measure of personal advancement and self-esteem through work. But for years now, industrial relations has been a dying round and its diminishing band of reporters the last practitioners of what was once one of the most coveted reporting jobs in any media organisation. It’s something that should worry us all. This shrinking of industrial reporting is symptomatic of the decline of quality journalism. It’s a victim of the growth of churnalism, with the pressures of the 24hour news cycle and internet promoting a fast turnaround at the expense of analysis, and it’s also been hit by the short-sighted cost cutting of modern media organisations. In the US, IR has been consigned to the business pages – we are heading that way here. Melbourne academic Andrea Carson says that between 1960 and 1990, there was a constant of about 100 dedicated industrial reporters operating in the UK. But by 1990 that had fallen to 50. Similarly, in the US, the numbers have fallen from about 1000 specialist workplace reporters during the postwar era to just 10 today. The trend is the same in Australia.

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“The demise of the industrial reporting of yesteryear suits big business”

pursuit of James Hardie for its treatment of the victims of its asbestos products. The demise of industrial reporting is a loss for democracy. Workplace relations is one of the most contested areas of public policy, but reporting it fairly and accurately requires experience and knowledge of the field, the players, their agendas and their histories. The errors made in the reporting of the Qantas dispute by mainstream reporters were due to the lack of full-time IR journalists. This lack of knowledge of the intricacies of workplace relations is leading to ignorance of the system and of the work of unions. Would we tolerate a lack of dedicated reporters in any other major policy area? Economics? Environment? Foreign affairs? It would be very easy to shrug a lot of this off and move on – but it matters, because lazy, uninformed reporting can feed public opinion that leads to poor policy outcomes;

and worse, it allows lies and misinformation to be propagated. Take Qantas for example. A multitude of errors were committed in the reporting of the Qantas dispute, including the erroneous and repeated mistake that Qantas was retaliating to strike action (not a single day has been lost to strikes), and that the dispute was over pay and conditions (job security and the retention of Qantas jobs in Australia were the main issues for the workers). Last year, the former BBC labour correspondent Nicholas Jones edited and published a book called The Lost Tribe of Fleet Street. Jones points to the unseen damage the decline of industrial reporting does to our democratic processes. “London’s growth as a world financial centre put paid to the authoritative reporting of old. Tough employment laws, a succession of disastrous defeats and a halving of union membership had already marginalised the reportage of the labour and industrial correspondents, but they were finally displaced by financial journalists and city analysts whose pronouncements frequently go unchecked and unchallenged. Industrial reporters have become the lost tribe of Fleet Street. “The demise of the industrial reporting of yesteryear suits big business: the greater the failure of journalists to report informatively on the reasons for industrial unrest and to explain the ever-tightening restraints on the ability of unions to protect their members and stay within the law, the easier it becomes for managers to flout tried and tested procedures for settling disagreements in the workplace.” So here’s the challenge to an ambitious young journalist. Go to your editor or producer and claim the industrial round as your own. Put in the effort and you will be rewarded with stories that are fascinating, get people talking, and make others notice who you are. Mark Phillips is communications director at the Australian Council of Trade Unions and a former industrial reporter for the Herald Sun and Australian Associated Press Mike Rigoll is a freelance illustrator based in Perth

Farmer wants a voice It seems editors are only interested in rural issues if they affect city dwellers. Alice Gorman thinks farmers deserve better, and social media may be the way to deliver it. Photo by Paula Heelan

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he disappointment in the journalist’s voice was obvious. She was calling from a Brisbane television station to see if the January 2011 floods had wiped out our farm. “No, thankfully we dodged a bullet, we’re all clear here,” I replied. Her loud sigh suggested that wasn’t the answer she was hoping for. “Oh, okay then,” she said despondently. “Do you know anyone who was badly affected?” Eighteen years working in mainstream media – much of it for tabloid newspapers – had prepared me for moments such as these. God knows I’ve been on the other end of these phone calls many times. “So you’re sure no-one in your family is dying from the contaminated sandwiches served at the tuckshop of Sydney’s most prestigious school?” I have asked, without shame. Or: “I know your son has been stuck at sea holding onto an esky for two weeks but do you think he’ll be ready to speak soon, I’m on deadline?” I know about the fast-approaching deadlines, threats that the opposition will get the story before you and the demands of irrational editors – “Get me a flood-affected farmer, his wife and kids now and make sure they’re good-looking!” But now I’m a farmer’s wife first, journalist second and I see the story from the other side – the farmer’s side. Six years ago I married a Queensland vegetable farmer, waved goodbye to my city life and moved west. Since saying “I do” I’ve lived the good, the bad and the ugly of farm life. I know the weather is king. One day fine, next day – total crop devastation. I know how crippling a sudden change in government policy can be for our business; how a petrol, water or power price rise can fatally impact our bottom line. Goodbye profit, hello overdraft. Six years of rural living has also given me new insight into the mainstream media and, in particular, how it reports rural issues. If we in the rural sector aren’t willing to talk about how much or how little rain we’ve had, how mean the supermarket chains are, or how we’re preparing to shoot all our sheep, then we’re lucky to snatch a few paragraphs on page 54 of the Monday paper. Rural stories have to have context – urban context. If farmer’s problem = higher prices at the checkout, then you have yourself a story. If mean nasty supermarket chain = fewer Aussie farmers and more deadly foreign imports, book yourself a seat on the TT / ACA express. If horror storms = crop losses which in turn = price rises at the supermarket, you’ve got a story.

There’s more to life on the land than droughts and floods. Farmers are starting to tell their own stories rather than be fodder for urban spin.

“Get me a floodaffected farmer, his wife and kids now and make sure they’re good looking”

But if your story doesn’t fit the widely accepted city stereotypes of ‘rural life’, don’t hold your breath waiting for a return call. However the days of rural producers trying to convince the mainstream media they have a good story to tell could be over. Rural Australians are taking to social media in droves to tell their own stories. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and farm blogs are closing the gap between city and country. A weekly Twitter conversation, #agchatoz, attracts rural producers from around the country. Every Tuesday night, rural men and women, agricultural advocacy groups, retailers, marketers and hobby farmers get together online and discuss the issues of the week. Through these weekly conversations I’ve met (in a virtual sense) men and women from Far North Queensland, Tasmania, Western Australia and small towns in between. Yet while it’s therapeutic to swap stories and it’s nice to know you’re not the only ones having issues, the #agchatoz discussion is largely farmers talking to farmers. A new Facebook community – Ask an Aussie Farmer – promises to have more cutthrough in the urban market. It’s been started by a group of farmers who met through social media and who want to use the same technology to connect city-based consumers with the people who grow their food. They say their Facebook page will seek to counter misinformation spread about agriculture on social networking sites and in the general media, and promote the positive stories the farming sector has to tell. There’s still a lot of anger and discontent in the rural sector following the live cattle export episode. Many (most) in the rural sector believe the mainstream media didn’t give Australian cattle breeders a fair hearing. Their message was drowned out by the animal liberation activists and that footage. Telling your own story is something that’s further progressed in America, where “agvocates” Troy and Stacy Hadrick are blazing the trail. They’re fifth-generation ranchers from north central South Dakota, and they argue that with every incorrect statement that goes unchallenged in the public domain,

consumer perceptions about agriculture are shifted further from reality. “For far too long, those of us in agriculture have stood by while certain factions in this country have flat out lied about who we are and what we are about,” they write on their website www.advocatesforag.com. “We do not have the luxury of assuming people know the real truth about agriculture. Each and every one of us in agriculture has a fantastic and positive story to tell.” About three years ago I started writing a blog – Farmer Has a Wife. It’s part therapy, part husband-bashing, part information sharing. I’ve steadily been building visitor numbers to the blog and been educating my city friends and their connections about the people who grow their fruit and vegetables and how they do it. Every day I bust myths. No the chain stores aren’t all bad. No we don’t splash chemicals on the crops willy-nilly. No we don’t savage the earth in pursuit of profits. And no, farmers aren’t dumb country hicks who are a stubbie short of a six-pack. In fact in the past six years I’ve met some of the most intelligent, well read, interesting people of my life – all from the country. To survive in agriculture you have to be intelligent, savvy and have a whole lot of courage. Nothing comes cheap in ag and you’re dealing with the most powerful opponent of them all – the weather. Imagine taking everything you own and putting it on black at the casino. Farmers do that every day. With the big risks come big rewards... and potentially bigger losses. Social media offers the rural sector a real opportunity to have their voice heard in an authentic way. I just hope the mainstream media – and in turn the wider community – chooses to listen. Alice Gorman won a Walkley Award in 2004 and now writes from her home southwest of Brisbane. Follow her on Twitter @farmerhasawife or read her blog Farmer Has a Wife at www.alicegorman.com.au Paula Heelan is a freelance journalist based in remote central Queensland

THE WALKLEY MAGAZINE

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Q OUR MEDIA

Why FB is FAB Jim Tucker calls himself an old luddite, but he has harnessed Facebook as a way for NZ journalists to get their voices heard. Illustration by Simon Letch

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t began with my outrage over the summary execution of New Zealand’s sole national news agency last year. When the NZ Press Association closedown was announced in April 2011, I risked wrath of the marital kind during a campervan holiday by starting a Facebook group in protest. It was called – futilely – “Save NZPA”. And although it had no hope of persuading those in charge not to kill off the 135-year-old institution, it proved a cathartic outlet for a lot of journalists whose voices are rarely heard. What struck me is how fast it caught their attention. Within a few days, more than 300 had joined, sharing their despair and anger. Two things resulted, one predictable, the other not so. What was predictable was a sneering comment from one of the people responsible for closing NZPA when we next met. But the other, unpredictable, result was much more important. The experience showed how Facebook might be the answer to a perennial difficulty faced by New Zealand’s small and fragmented journalism community – lack of an open forum. The Kiwi Journalists Association Facebook group was born at the fringes of technology’s reach in a Northland seaside holiday camp called Oakura, a few hours’ drive south from a more famous birthplace, Waitangi. The process was simple enough. Assuming that numbers impress on Facebook, I went through my existing list of FB friends – most of them media people and former students – and joined up about 200. There was no time to ask; I figured those who took offence could simply unjoin themselves. Few did. Then I searched Facebook for the names of well-known journalists and asked them to be FB friends, and when they agreed I joined them up as well (also without asking). It was a bit embarrassing at times, wondering how some of the younger people I approached would react to some old male journo trying to “friend” them. At one stage I made the mistake of trying to share the administrator load by making dozens of people “admin”, but that jammed their email inboxes with FB notifications, which drove less technologically savvy members to distraction until I advised them how to turn the notifications function off. So I had to change tack, instead asking just two other people to share the role – old friend

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and former newspaper rival Gavin Ellis (exeditor-in-chief of the NZ Herald) and Diana Clement, a freelance business journalist who has for several years run the small and successful “JOURNZ” discussion site. Both turned out to be good choices: Ellis for his cautious wisdom and Clement for her diligence and experience with online discussion boards. Early debates churned around what the site should aim to do, was the name appropriate, who should be invited to join, if it was safe to post if what you said pissed off the boss, and whether the FB group should lead to the formation of a more formal association, with democratic and worthy objectives. Despite a few reservations, the name stuck for technical reasons. It turns out you can’t change a Facebook group name after membership climbs above about 100. Most resisted the idea of an association being set up, many agreeing with my sentiment that Kiwi journalists are too busy/ disorganised/apathetic/whatever to bother with constitutions, election of officers and all the things we readily criticise other organisations for not doing properly. We decided to keep the membership reasonably open. After all, it was just a Facebook group and the wider the contributions the better. We just check requests by asking applicants to briefly outline their interest in/background in journalism. It seems to work. Most early debate centred on my plan to set up a confidential advice service, using a broad panel of “seniors” in various media platforms who would respond to cries for help from the less experienced. It would use an email address to which only the three admin people would have access, and requests would be sent out to appropriate panel members to reply directly to the inquirer. Apart from some grumbles about how the panel should be chosen (I simply invited all the experienced people I knew, about 40 of them), the service ran into trouble straight

Assuming that numbers impress on Facebook, I went through my existing list of FB friends – most of them media people and former students – and joined up about 200

away with some senior union members, who saw it as duplicating the union’s role. In fact, the first few requests dealt largely with issues (idiot editors, poor news selection choices, the need for on-the-job training) that were not really union-related, but in each case panel members who provided advice also added, without prompting from me, a suggestion to join the union. But the panel service died after a couple of people posted accounts of being disciplined by employers over comments they had made elsewhere on FB. Inquiries simply stopped coming in. Debate about the panel, as well as the group’s rapid growth, caught the attention of Radio NZ’s Mediawatch program, which carried an item in May. And membership accelerated. It stalled just short of 600 after I intervened in a late-night slanging match by a couple of veteran journalists (I was the main target) and summarily booted them off the site. Rising to their provocation proved unwise, since they raised freedom of expression issues. I restored their comments and invited them to rejoin but they did not return. As a result of this incident, the panel approved a set of simple guidelines that give the administrators (as a group) the right to expel members who write personal attacks or legally risky comments. Since then there have been no further problems, and membership growth has been steady, currently hovering around 755 (there are about 3000 working journalists in NZ). The site has its limitations. A discussion I started about the NZ Law Commission’s recent report suggesting a one-size-fits-all tribunal to handle media regulation led to a boringly long exchange between me and a media law commentator, with few others chiming in. The reason is most journalists and editors probably had no time to read the Commission’s lengthy tome or perhaps felt unqualified to join the post mortem. Who does post? The most regular contributor is Karen Eastgate Dann, a Melbourne media lecturer who began her journalism career in New Zealand. She leads a cast of dozens who have been in the business for many decades, but which also includes beginners and those still at journalism school. Diana Clement adds occasional job lists and journalism news digests. Whether we have found a new voice for New Zealand journalism remains to be seen, but the first murmurings have tended to be thoughtful, interesting, funny and irreverent. It also shows what can happen when a bunch of old luddites gets hold of something this easy and accessible. Jim Tucker is head of journalism at Whitireia Media Training Centre, Wellington, NZ Simon Letch has been illustrating for The Sydney Morning Herald since 1990

Q PRESS FREEDOM

Kicking at the cornerstone An independent, questioning media is a hallmark of a healthy democracy, but our rights in a free media can easily be chipped away, says Christopher Warren. Illustration by Simon Bosch

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free press is a cornerstone of a democratic society. It checks the powerful and holds them to account. It gives a voice to the powerless. So it’s no surprise that governments and their bureaucracies are often uncomfortable with the notion of an independent, aggressive news media that scrutinises their policies and performance. Early this century, free speech and the freedom of the press to hold the powerful to account was slipping in Australia. That’s why, as the voice of Australia’s media workers, we launched the annual Press Freedom report in 2005. And because the challenges here are not unique, we joined with our New Zealand colleagues to make this a cross-Tasman venture. It’s only by tracking the state of freedom of expression that we can challenge the emerging threats. Back in 2007, an audit of free speech conducted by former privacy commissioner Irene Moss on behalf of Australia’s Right to Know, a coalition of news organisations including the Media Alliance, found a crying need to reform a “sclerotic” array of secrecy laws and archaic Freedom of Information laws, while there was also an urgent requirement to introduce protection for whistleblowers and the journalists to whom they talked. The 2007 election brought to power a Labor government which included in its platform a promise to address these restrictions on the freedom of the press in this country. We applauded when the Rudd government announced new Freedom of Information laws (some states haven’t yet joined that party). We were enthusiastic participants in the public hearings that led to new Commonwealth shield laws and urged the states to follow suit. Again, some states are lagging and we use this report to urge them to bring in protection for journalists and their sources. But so much of this promise seems to have slipped away. The latest world press rankings report from Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF) finds that Australia has fallen from 18 to 30 on the ladder. The RSF report specifically canvasses two issues as the reasons for this precipitous fall down the rankings: access to Australia’s detention centres and

the prospect of greater regulation of the press after the Independent Media Inquiry headed by former federal court judge Ray Finkelstein. The Media Alliance has been at the forefront of the industry’s response to both of these issues. With our colleagues in the industry, we have lobbied hard against the restrictive “deed of agreement” that the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) requires journalists to sign before they are allowed into detention centres to report on asylum seekers. It’s a fight that continues – just last month we coordinated a letter with the signatures of the chief executives of 10 of Australia’s biggest media organisations, including my own as federal secretary of the Media Alliance, calling for the deed to be re-examined. I’m hopeful that if we keep up the pressure we will be able to work with DIAC for a better outcome that reflects the profound public interest in this area. Unlike some of our colleagues in the news industry, we welcomed Stephen Conroy’s announcement of an independent inquiry, headed by Ray Finkelstein, into the news media in Australia. While we saw no reason for punitive regulatory measures, we saw an opportunity in the inquiry’s terms of reference for a much-needed and long overdue discussion of the health of the news business and any measures that might be introduced that would ensure the continuing health of Australian journalism. Accordingly, we made a detailed submission to the inquiry which ran through some of the ideas which other countries, with media sectors comparable to our own, are canvassing as they look to the future health of their fourth estates. So, like many, we were disappointed to read Finkelstein’s report when it was released at the beginning of March. Not only did it fail to fully appreciate the urgency of the crises facing journalism in Australia, despite the stark evidence of rapidly diminishing revenues and falling share prices, but the main thrust of the report was a plan for beefed-up regulation of the news media, which appears to answer ethical problems that are evident in the UK, rather than here in Australia. Finkelstein’s blueprint for an Australian Media Council, funded by the government,

It’s only by tracking the state of freedom of expression that we can challenge the emerging threats

compulsory for even the meanest blog and empowered to make decisions about content with no right of appeal, gets dangerously close to a government regulation of journalists. And that will never be acceptable in a society where a free press is a guarantor of real democracy. However, none of us can be blind to the way in which last year’s scandals on Fleet Street have changed the global debate and eroded public support for a free and independent media. There are, of course, significant reasons why the situation in Australia is different. Not least, the continuing role of the Alliance as an independent, and ethical, voice for all journalists – wherever they work – helps sustain the independence of our craft. There have been significant developments since our last Press Freedom Report. There’s still some way to go but we can remain confident that, in Australia and New Zealand at least, the fight to sustain a fair and open system of self-regulation that respects freedom of expression is not over. Christopher Warren is federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance Simon Bosch is a Walkley Award winning illustrator

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Q PRESS FREEDOM

Independent and effective or muzzle for the media? Alan Kennedy says a revamped and fully funded Press Council would provide strong ethical leadership for the news media while, below, Hal Crawford believes it would stifle free speech in Australia. Cartoon by Rod Emmerson

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ong described by critics as a toothless tiger, the Australian Press Council has been given a brand new set of fangs with a radical agreement that doubles its budget from contributing bodies and guarantees funding for at least three years. At the same time, a member of the Council, Seven West Media, publisher of The West Australian and Pacific Magazines, may have chopped a leg off the old tiger by announcing it was leaving the Council and setting up its own complaints handling system. It’s a turbulent time for press regulation in Australia, caused mostly by the federal government’s Finkelstein Inquiry into media standards and regulations recommending that a government-funded regulatory body should handle complaints. It seems to have put the fear of God into most of the publishers. But we have now seen a flurry of activity among the bodies funding the Press Council, which includes the Alliance, to guarantee long-term and adequate money for the Council. Under the new arrangements, publisher members will be required to give four years’ notice of withdrawal from the Council and will remain part of the Council throughout that period. Their obligations to provide funding and comply with Council processes will now become legally binding. Previously publishers could withdraw funding whenever they liked – effectively shutting the Press Council down. It

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f a media-funded press council is a “fig leaf”, as Rupert Murdoch said in 1972, then Finkelstein’s proposed government regulator is a chastity belt. It’s a product of a self-fulfilling distrust: a state-funded overseer who knows what’s in the public good and has the power to enforce its idea of purity. Give me a little bit of hypocritical foliage any day. From an online point of view, much has been made of Finkelstein’s mistake in mentioning 15,000 page views a year as a possible threshold for regulation. When I was reading it, I assumed he meant 15 million, which is around the right size for any kind of influence in Australia. The broader question of which sites over that size are regulated, and which are not, is deep and goes to the heart of how this media inquiry fails to understand online. Search

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What you are left with is a regulatory regime that, like the Maginot Line, has been designed for the last war

was this implied threat, said the Press Council’s critics, which stifled the Council’s independence. The soon-to-be-released government report on media convergence is expected to recommend a media-wide council handling everything from print to radio to television and online. A revised Press Council, which can show it is independent and effective, would be well placed to morph into a mediawide self-regulatory body. The Council is already discussing new applications from web-based publishers and more are expected in the coming months. But the departure of Seven West may

engines and social networks aren’t part of the Finkelstein world model. Tumblr, Twitter and Pinterest and whatever else comes out of the world’s geek garages in the next decade won’t be part of it. What is the point of this regulator if these massive avenues of information propagation are ignored? International outfits – the BBC is the ninth biggest news site in Australia – are also exempt. What you are left with is a regulatory regime that, like the Maginot Line, has been designed for the last war. It can only be applied to digital publishers that have the misfortune of bearing a passing resemblance to offline media. So ninemsn, Yahoo!7, the sites of the newspaper mastheads and a handful of digital-only news outfits, such as Crikey, are subject to regulation, while pure aggregators and those who provide

put a spanner in the works. It appears to be driven by rejection of the Finkelstein model and, to a certain extent, the revised Press Council. The Alliance’s federal secretary, Christopher Warren, expressed the concerns of most of us when he said: “Now more than ever we need a strong, unified and totally independent complaints handling mechanism that is supported by all media organisations across Australia. It’s difficult to see the general public believing in the credibility of an in-house complaints handling mechanism at a time when building public trust in media is critical.” As the Alliance representative on the Press Council I am delighted with the new-found commitment to the Council by the big publishers – News Limited and Fairfax – and puzzled by the Seven West exit. Let me say I have never found the Press Council to be a “toothless tiger”. At the moment it is upholding just over 70 per cent of complaints and its advocacy role in matters such as reporting of suicide has been exemplary. One hopes Seven West will return to the fold in the coming years. Alan Kennedy is a member of the Australian Press Council, spent 10 years on the Walkley Advisory Board and is a former president of the Media section of the Alliance Rod Emmerson is the editorial cartoonist for The New Zealand Herald

“platforms” are not. My feeling is that at the base of Finkelstein’s argument is a flawed premise: that publishing is a difficult and expensive business to get into. If it is, then it follows that those few people who wield the power should be made to feel the responsibility. But it is not – there is no barrier to entry any more. Paradoxically, in this scenario it is government regulation that represents the biggest threat to accountability as a new barrier is raised in the interest of the “public good”. And for the record, the Australian Press Council needn’t be a fig leaf. If it champions press freedom and sets the ground rules for reporting in a way that works for digital publishers, then it has ninemsn’s support. Hal Crawford is editor-in-chief of ninemsn

Towards a better, stronger Press Council The Australian Press Council’s Julian Disney outlines his vision for a new media regulator. Cartoon by Lindsay Foyle

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arly last year the Australian Press Council began a sustained program to strengthen our resources, complaints-handling processes, and the setting and monitoring of standards of media practice. We also increased our focus on online publishing by print publishers over whose websites we already had jurisdiction and by online-only publishers. A key goal was to strengthen media standards and so enhance public access to reliable information and to genuine freedom of expression. Another goal was to strengthen the media’s credibility when resisting unwarranted interference on its freedom by governments, corporations or other powerful interests. The Council’s program recognised the need for convergent regulation of news media, a key aspect of the Convergence Review established by the federal government in 2010. It also foreshadowed the print media inquiry by Ray Finkelstein, which the government established in September 2011, especially the term of reference concerning: Ways of substantially strengthening the independence and effectiveness of the Australian Press Council, including in relation to online publications, and with particular reference to the handling of complaints. The Council’s submission to the Convergence Review proposed a two-phase approach. First our structures and processes for both print and online media would be strengthened. Then, this model could be drawn on to create an independent council with responsibility for all news media. Most (though not all) funding for this council would be from publishers, but the chair and most members would be chosen independently. This balance is greatly preferable to a regulator which is appointed and fully funded by government or, on the other hand, dominated by publishers. Our submission to the Finkelstein Inquiry concentrated on the first phase, with detailed proposals aimed at greatly boosting

This balance is greatly preferable to a regulator which is appointed and fully funded by government or, on the other hand, dominated by publishers

the adequacy and security of our funding arrangements as well as the independence and effectiveness of our work handling complaints and setting standards. Finkelstein endorsed the general direction, and much of the detail, of the Council’s submission, but some publishers’ evidence led him to believe they would not provide the necessary resources. So he proposed a new body, entirely funded by government and without any direct publisher representation, although broadly similar in other ways to a strengthened Press Council. At the time of writing, the Convergence Review’s report has not been published and the government’s response to it and Finkelstein’s report is unknown. But the Press Council has continued to develop our strengthening program and in early April we announced a major agreement with publishers to strengthen our funding and independence. The agreement addresses three key areas of concern which we put to the Finkelstein Inquiry and were acknowledged in its report. The first is that the publishers’ core funding for the Council will double from July this year and increase by a further 10 per cent in the following year. Staffing will grow to at least seven of the eight positions we need, and the eighth can be sought through project funding. Complaints will be able to be dealt with more promptly and rigorously. The setting and monitoring of standards of media practice will be greatly strengthened, especially as we can now expand our flagship Standards Project with the assistance of an advisory panel of eminent Australians. The second element is that publishers will have to give four years’ notice if they wish to withdraw from the Council. Throughout that period they will remain subject to the Council’s jurisdiction to adjudicate on complaints about their publications. Their funding obligations will continue for all but the final year. This lengthy notice period is fundamentally important for the Council’s independence.

It greatly reduces our vulnerability to publishers who might wish to withdraw peremptorily because they do not like some of the Council’s adjudications. The effect is reinforced by each publisher’s obligations being fixed two to three years in advance. The third element is that publishers’ obligations to provide funding and to comply with our complaints processes will become legally binding. This includes, for example, the requirements to publish our adjudications with due prominence; a matter which has been of great concern to some complainants and ourselves. One publisher member of the Council, Seven West Media, was unwilling to strengthen our effectiveness in these ways and decided to withdraw before the fouryear notice period took effect. This helped to demonstrate the significance of the agreement to which News Limited, Fairfax and the other members had agreed. The new arrangements are crucially important for our growing involvement with online publishing. A number of publishers who operate only online, such as ninemsn and Crikey, have recently expressed interest in joining the Council. The first group will be admitted in the very near future and they will have a key role in our new high-priority work on online standards. With our new resources and independence, the Press Council is much better placed to develop structures and processes for print and online media, which are suitable for broader adoption as convergent regulation proceeds. This will strengthen the case for a system of convergent regulation which is sufficiently independent of government and publishers to command public confidence, enhancing freedom of information and expression for the media and the broader community. But much depends, of course, on the government’s response to the Finkelstein Inquiry and Convergence Review. Julian Disney, AO, is chair of the Australian Press Council

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Journalists ain’t jockeys The UK’s press is now so tarnished even the union is calling for an end to self-regulation, says Jonathan Este. Cartoon by David Rowe

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nora O’Neill rather neatly summed up the public mood when she addressed the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism last November and made a case for stricter regulation of the press in the United Kingdom, arguing that “What is sauce for the political goose is surely also sauce for the media gander”. Baroness O’Neill, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and crossbench peer, said that whenever ethical standards within journalism were called into question, editors and other defenders of the fourth estate reached for the public interest defence. But the phone-hacking scandal – and revelations brought to light by various inquiries into the media since – had shown that their understanding of the public interest tended to be heavily coloured by self-interest. “The evidence to date is that selfregulation has not been effective or ethically adequate, so the burden of proof now lies with those who think that it could be reformed to make it effective or adequate,” she said. O’Neill, along with many respected editors and media commentators, believes that for the media to regain the public’s trust in the UK, some sort of statutory regulation is now necessary. After being champions of journalistic ethics and strong supporters of industry self-regulation for more than 40 years, the UK’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has “reluctantly” come to the conclusion that self-regulation has “failed the test every time”, according to NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet. In the union’s submission to the Leveson Inquiry, Stanistreet wrote: “Whilst the NUJ is hugely disappointed that we have reached this point, despite more than 20 years of campaigning for reform of the Press Complaints Commission and press regulation, we now see it as inevitable that there should be some statutory provision for a new regulator. “Regulation is a way of controlling the balance that must exist between freedom of expression and other universal human rights such as reputation, privacy and fair trial. Freedom of expression is vital to a fair, democratic society and is a right often best manifested by the media on behalf of the individual when subjecting the powerful to

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scrutiny. To suggest that only self-regulation is capable of doing this balancing act is to fly in the face of clear evidence that selfregulation has failed and that other systems can work extremely well for other industries or in other jurisdictions.” Paul Dacre, the pugnacious editor of the Daily Mail, has proposed a new certification system for journalists – or “kitemark” as he calls it. Journalists not carrying an accredited card would be barred from covering events such as key government briefings or interviews relating to sporting fixtures. He also proposed that a new ombudsman for standards should have the right to recommend a journalist be struck off, just as doctors can be struck off by the General Medical Council. “The public at large would know the journalists carrying such cards are bona fide operators, committed to a set of standards and a body to whom complaints can be made,” he said. This echoed the views of both the opposition Labour Party’s former culture spokesman, Ivan Lewis, and Chris Blackhurst, the editor of The Independent, who famously likened journalists to jockeys: “The Jockey Club bars jockeys from riding horses – why can’t we bar journalists from writing articles,” he said. Blackhurst believes that a new regulator should have the power to seize documents and computers and act proactively in the way of Britain’s General Medical Council, which regulates doctors, or the Financial Services Authority, which regulate banking. The Labour leadership was very quick to distance itself from what one observer referred to on Twitter as an “Orwellian” suggestion. “Ed [Miliband] has always made it clear throughout that we believe in selfregulation,” a Labour spokesman said, pointing out that the same could not be said of the UK prime minister, David Cameron. Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian sits very close to the Australian Press Council’s Julian Disney on the idea of providing incentives for media groups to sign up to a new regulatory body: “Potential refuseniks may need incentives – whether carrots or sticks. These could, for instance, be in the form of real economic incentives to participate (and conversely, therefore, disincentives for opting out),” he wrote in

For the media to regain the public’s trust in the UK, some sort of statutory regulation is now necessary

a supplementary submission to the Leveson Inquiry lodged in January this year. He went on to add that: “If statute can improve press regulation and press freedom… then let’s explore it.” Refuseniks include Richard Desmond, of Northern and Shell, whose daily and Sunday newspapers [the Daily Express and Star mastheads] command a circulation of more than 2.4 million between them. Desmond, not known for the moderation of his attitudes – or his newspapers’ – told the Leveson Inquiry that the UK’s Press Complaints Commission was ineffective and run by the sort of people who wanted to close him down. So if proprietors won’t voluntarily submit to an independent standards body, surely there has to be a way of making them an offer they can’t refuse? Baroness O’Neill believes that it is not so much press “content” that should be regulated as “process”: “It seems to me that only a body with a statutory basis could have the necessary powers to call for evidence or sanction, but that such a body could be confined to regulating media process and explicitly prohibited from regulating media content.” And, hopefully, if you get the ways and means right, the end will be justifiable. Which is a rather neat inversion of the public interest argument. Jonathan Este is a freelance journalist and editor of the 2012 Press Freedom Report David Rowe is a Walkley Award winning cartoonist and illustrator with The Australian Financial Review

Sex, drugs and the public interest excuse Many a juicy tale is told in the name of the ‘public interest’, but what is that exactly asks Richard Ackland. Cartoon by Jenny Coopes

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hat’s for our readers to tell. That will be determined by the number of people that buy the paper.” So said the deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph, Helen McCabe, when asked by Media Watch in 2009 what was the public interest in her paper publishing those pouty photos of a young Pauline Hanson, in lingerie. Except, as it expensively transpired, it was not Pauline Hanson. It’s not the first time journalists boldly have conflated the public interest with the circulation of newspapers. The blurring of the public interest with what journalists and editors calculate is interesting to the public has an elemental appeal. Five News Limited Sunday publications stumped up $15,000 between them to buy the snaps from a former soldier, who claimed to have been Hanson’s lover in the 1970s. The case for News Limited didn’t improve when Sunday Herald Sun columnist Robyn Riley opined, on March 15, 2009: “Public people are public property whether they like it or not. If Ms Hanson expects to be elected at this month’s Queensland elections to represent the people in the seat of Beaudesert, then her ideals, opinions, behaviour and beliefs must be scrutinised.” The Seven Network also clutched the public interest to its manly bosom in an effort to justify a story in 2010 about the then NSW minister for transport, David Campbell, visiting for two hours a men-only gay club and steam facility known as Ken’s at Kensington. In fact, a series of public interests were advanced in an effort to justify this invasion of the victim’s privacy. They were wheeled out in succession, each one collapsing under the weight of its own stupidity. At first there was the public interest in the use of a ministerial car to drive from Macquarie Street to Ken’s on Anzac Parade. In fact, the use of the car was within the applicable guidelines. There was the possibility the minister might be blackmailed. That too didn’t wash. Then there was the public interest in the exposure of the minister’s hypocrisy because he also wanted to be seen as a good family man. The notion that a person couldn’t be a good and loving family man if they visited Ken’s at Kensington didn’t take long to evaporate completely.

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Public interest is a far more nuanced concept than simply saying, “public people are public property whether they like it or not”

The only public interest, torturously conjured, was a public interest in knowing that Campbell had resigned from the ministry because Seven was about to air its story about him. The peculiar circularity of that justification appealed to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), because that was the basis of its finding that the breach in this instance of the privacy provisions of the commercial TV code of practice was justified “in the public interest”. The Hanson and Campbell cases occupy firm places in journalism’s darker corners. Regardless of the special pleading by News Limited editors and columnists and the unfathomable logic of ACMA, few others recognised those two stories lay anywhere close to “the public interest”. It is not always so clear. At which end of the public interest spectrum lies the story The Age and Nationwide News wished to publish in 2006, revealing the identity of AFL players who tested positive at least once to the use of illicit drugs? The AFL and the AFL Players’ Association had a policy where players were allowed to test positive to drugs on two occasions and their names would be kept confidential. If a player tested positive a third time they were reported to the AFL Tribunal, outing them publicly. The main Melbourne papers wanted to publish the names of players who had tested positive on at least one occasion. Many of those names were already published on blogs

and online discussions. Justice Murray Kellam ruled that publication of this information would not amount to disclosure of an “iniquity”, which otherwise would justify a breach of confidence. In any event, he didn’t think a public interest defence would be applicable in this case. Moving further along the spectrometer, how strong is the public interest case for The Sydney Morning Herald’s interesting stories about former NSW premier Neville Wran’s dementia and the squabble over family money? Are people who used to be public figures as much public property as real live public figures? What about the application of dodgy techniques to get news that is in the public interest? The Brits are particularly good at this. Sky News approved the hacking of John Darwin’s emails and wound up with a wonderful story. Darwin was known as the “canoe man” who “disappeared” while paddling in the North Sea, so that his wife could cash in his insurance policy. The email hack revealed that Mrs Darwin was in on the scam and, as she was being investigated for allegedly being part of the deception, Sky passed the information onto the police. This was a factor in securing her conviction and enabled Sky News to run a detailed postconviction story. If here the public interest in the disclosure of a crime outweighed the right to privacy where is the cut-off point? Does it X

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X become acceptable to hack emails and phone messages of anyone charged with an offence in the expectation of revealing public interest information? Sky News boss John Ryley has since apologised to the Justice Leveson for misleading his inquiry on this issue when he wrote that his journalists had never “intercepted communications”. He said he had reasonably thought this meant phone hacking. Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator has said it will investigate the affair. The Sunday Times got an important scalp recently when one of the co-treasurers of the Conservative Party was caught by hidden camera boosting access by wealthy corporate donors to the inner sanctum of No 10. The means involved subterfuge, but the revelation undoubtedly was in the public interest. At the highest pinnacle of British law, the Supreme Court, there was a valiant attempt in March this year to get to grips with the public interest. The case was Flood v Times Newspaper and, thankfully, the judges reinforced the responsible journalism defence in defamation. The story published in The Times in June 2006 concerned information that the Metropolitan Police was investigating allegations that ISC Global, a British security company with wealthy Russian clients, had

The point at which the public interest and material of interest to the public intersect is the high point of journalism

corruptly paid Gary Flood, a police officer, for access to information about moves by the Kremlin to seek the extradition of Russians living in Britain. The trial judge found there was a public interest defence for the print version of the story and partly for the online version. The Court of Appeal found that the public interest claim by the paper could not be sustained because the journalists had not acted responsibly. Times Newspapers appealed and we got some interesting reasons. The president of the court, Lord Phillips, had this to say: “The public interest is whether, and in what circumstances, it is in the public interest to refer to the fact that accusations have been made, and in particular that accusations have been made to the police, that a named person has committed a criminal offence. “This issue embraces the question of whether, if it is in the public interest to report the fact of the accusation, it is also in the public interest to report the details of the accusation.” He seems to be saying the public interest

is what is in the public interest, and then it becomes a two-step process: the public interest in reporting an accusation against someone and the public interest in going further and reporting many of the details. Once judges start fiddling around with the public interest you know things are going to get horribly complicated and uncertain. Happily it ended well for The Times, but it does show that the public interest is a far more nuanced concept than simply saying, “public people are public property whether they like it or not”. Ideally, the point at which the public interest and material of interest to the public intersect is the high point of journalism. In the Finkelstein report into the media, the phrase “public interest” was used 85 times. In each application of the phrase you can be certain that in the hands of editors, journalists, judges or media regulators it would take on a different interpretation. As Humpty Dumpty put it so eloquently to Alice: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Richard Ackland is a Gold Walkley winner, editor of Justinian and law columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald Jenny Coopes is a cartoonist, illustrator and head of law journal Justinian’s art department

NIKON-WALKLEY PHOTOGRAPHERS’

The Nikon-Walkley Photographers’ Slide Nights are coming to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for a third year. These nights are an annual celebration of Australian press photography – a chance for photographers to show off the projects they’re really passionate about to an engaged and thoughtful audience of their peers and general photo-lovers alike. For full submission guidelines visit: www.walkleys.com/slidenights SYDNEY SLIDE NIGHT

IN ASSOCIATION WITH HEAD ON FESTIVAL

Date & time: 6pm, Wednesday, May 9 2012 Venue: Metcalfe Auditorium State Library of New South Wales Macquarie Street Sydney NSW 2000 Sydney - Submissions open Monday, March 19 and close Friday, April 20

MELBOURNE SLIDE NIGHT Date & time: 6pm, Tuesday, July 24 2012 Venue: Eleven40 Studio Gallery, 1140 Malvern Road, Malvern VIC 3144 Melbourne - Submissions open Tuesday, June 12 and close Monday, July 9

Ipswich flooding by Rob McColl

BRISBANE SLIDE NIGHT Date & time: 6pm, Tuesday, August 7 2012 Venue: Turbine Platform Brisbane Powerhouse 119 Lamington Street, New Farm QLD 4005 Brisbane - Submissions open Monday, July 2 and close Friday, July 20 Follow us on:

@walkleys The Walkley Foundation

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Don’t open a honey pot A legislated right to privacy needs to be balanced with a right to free expression, or celebrity gold diggers will come out to play warns Mark Pearson. Cartoon by Jon Kudelka

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he right to privacy is a relatively modern legal concept. Until the late 19th century, gentlemen used the strictly codified practice of the duel to settle their disputes over embarrassing exposés of their private lives. The first celebrity to convert his personal affront into a legal suit was the author of The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas père, who in 1867 sued a photographer who had attempted to register copyright of some steamy images of Dumas with the Paris Hilton of the day – 32-year-old actress, Adah Isaacs Menken. The court held his property rights hadn’t been infringed but that Dumas did have a right to privacy and that the photographer had infringed it. Across the Atlantic in 1890, the top US jurist Samuel D. Warren teamed with future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to write the seminal Harvard Law Review article “The right to privacy”, after a newspaper printed the guest list of a party held at the Warren family mansion in Boston. Warren and Brandeis wrote: “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery.” Celebrities, lawyers, paparazzi and the gossip media were there at the birth of the right to privacy – and the same players occupy that terrain today. While both privacy and free expression are recognised in many national constitutions and in international human rights treaties, Australia is rare among Western democracies in that it has no constitutional or Bill of Rights protection for either. That distinguishes us from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand which all have constitutional or rights charter requirements that proposed laws must be considered for their potential impact on free expression. It is one of the main reasons for the complex array of legislation, court decisions and industry codes of practice limiting Australian journalists’ intrusion into the affairs of their fellow citizens. Laws covering defamation, trespass, data protection, surveillance, confidentiality, discrimination, consumer law, stalking, court publishing restrictions, suppression orders and copyright all have a privacy dimension.

Celebrities, lawyers, paparazzi and the gossip media were there at the birth of the right to privacy – and the same players occupy that terrain today

The Privacy Act controls the collection and storage of private information by corporations and government. There are very few situations where media intrusion into privacy isn’t covered by either one of these laws or the Journalists’ Code of Ethics. Proposals to replace the self-regulated ethics systems with a statutory news media regulator would add yet another layer to the regulation of privacy intrusions. The crux of the proposed “statutory cause of action for a serious invasion of privacy” is whether a citizen should have the right to sue over a privacy breach and receive an award of damages or an injunction to stop publication. Over the ditch, Kiwi journalists now have to navigate a judge-made right to privacy that, interestingly, developed from a celebrity suit in which the plaintiffs lost the case.

Mike and Marie Hosking were New Zealand media personalities who had adopted twins and later separated. They asked for their privacy, but a magazine photographer snapped the mother walking the twins in their stroller in a public place. They sued, claiming breach of privacy. The NZ Court of Appeal invented a new action for breach of privacy, but held that it did not apply in this particular case. The Kiwi privacy invasion test requires “the existence of facts in respect of which there is a reasonable expectation of privacy” and that “publicity given to those private facts that would be considered highly offensive to an objective reasonable person”. But this is set against the backdrop of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act which protects free expression. Australia’s High Court famously left the door open for a possible privacy tort in the

ABC v. Lenah Game Meats case in 2001, after animal liberationists had secretly filmed the slaughter of possums in an abattoir in Tasmania and the ABC wanted to broadcast the footage – the fruits of the trespass. It is hard to quarantine this latest push by the federal government from the News of the World scandal in the UK and the Greens-championed Finkelstein Inquiry into media regulation. The government had effectively sat on the Australian Law Reform Commission’s proposal for the statutory cause of action for three years before it released its Issues Paper: A Commonwealth Statutory Cause of Action for Serious Invasion of Privacy last September, in the wake of the UK phone-hacking scandal. Few journalists or their media organisations object to the notion of their fellow citizens’ embarrassing private information being kept secret. However, it is in the midst of a breaking story like that involving collar-bomb extortion victim Madeleine Pulver, a celebrity scoop like the Sonny Bill Williams toilet tryst image or the case of the fake Pauline Hanson photos that genuine public interest gives way to audience gratification and the resulting boost to circulation, ratings or page views. Free expression is already greatly diminished by this mire of privacy-related laws and regulations without adding a new statutory cause of action for privacy. But if this latest proposal is advanced further, journalists should insist on: %a free expression and public interest defence reinforced in the strongest possible terms %removal of the existing laws it would duplicate %a strong “offer of amends” defence like that now operating in defamation law and alternative dispute resolution provisions to deter celebrity gold diggers. Short of a Bill of Rights enshrining the freedom of the press and free expression, these demands amount to the minimum the news media deserve in a Western democracy. Mark Pearson is professor of journalism at Bond University, author of Blogging and Tweeting Without Getting Sued (Allen & Unwin, $22.99) and The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law (Allen & Unwin, $59.99), and Australian correspondent for Reporters Without Borders. He blogs from journlaw. com and tweets from @journlaw Jon Kudelka is a Hobart-based cartoonist

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Australia’s two-speed FoI It’s become easier for journalists to access government-held information in half of Australia, now we’re waiting for the other states to catch up, says Johan Lidberg. Cartoon by Chris Slane

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ccessing government-held information in Australia became a little easier in 2011, but a twospeed situation has developed. Some jurisdictions are promoting disclosure of information through websites and other means, while others are sticking with their old, restrictive regimes. Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania and the Commonwealth have undertaken major reforms and amendments to their Freedom of Information (FoI) laws, bringing these systems closer to international best practice. FoI has even been renamed as RTI – Right To Information – reflecting the move toward pro-active disclosure of information by government agencies. The changes to the Commonwealth FoI Act came into force in November 2010. The application fee for FoI requests was dropped, and also cancelled were the papallike conclusive certificate powers granted to ministers, which gave them the right to decide what information was in the public interest to release. But the jury is still out on how much impact the reforms have had on practical information access. The latest major development in federal FoI is that the Australian information commissioner, Professor John McMillan, released his review into fees and charges – instruments that had been used by some agencies to block information requests. The report made it clear that the current fee structure was confusing and inconsistent, but that, nonetheless, some sort of fee system was needed to hold off so-called vexatious (unjustified and annoying) requests. Similar to his fellow Queensland and NSW information commissioners, Professor McMillan sees FoI/RTI requests as a last resort. Most information should be accessed via the pro-active disclosure of information or via what he terms “administrative access”. Put simply – you pick up the phone or email an agency and ask for the information, bypassing the formal request process. If this works it is clearly a win-win situation. It is cheaper to process and the requestor gets close to instant access. Tasmania has also passed a new RTI law, but the pro-active disclosure provisions are weaker compared to the other reformed laws. However the pro-active disclosure and administrative access models hinge on a major change in attitude by public servants and ministers.

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Compared to international best practice, the Australian law had too many blanket exemptions for agencies holding sensitive information

There are some signs of a shift away from the view the government owns the information, to the idea that it holds it on behalf of the public. Facilitating this culture change has been and remains the biggest challenge in reforming information access in Australia. This is long-term work and will most likely take at least a decade. The FoI laws in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the ACT are lagging far behind other reformed systems. Victoria is in the process of passing a bill creating an FoI commissioner, but the bill does not include major reforms to the outdated Victorian FoI law, which will severely hamper the actions of the future commissioner. This again illustrates that promising extensive FoI reform is easy in opposition but much harder to deliver when you are in government. In a 2011 international comparison of the 89 current FoI/RTI laws globally, Australia’s Commonwealth Act came in at number 39 – the middle of the pack. It is somewhat disappointing that a newly reformed system like Australia’s federal FoI law did not rank higher. Its downfall was in the categories “scope” and “exemptions and refusals”. The rating found that compared to international best practice, the Australian law had too many blanket exemptions for agencies holding sensitive information. The prime example is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In best practice laws, such as the US and Sweden, there are no blanket exemptions. It is not very likely that journalists using FoI will get any information from the CIA or the Swedish equivalent, but it is symbolically important that no government agencies are exempt from the goal of openness and transparency.

The exclusion of Cabinet notebooks is another example that brings down the Australian score. However 2011 saw no movement at all in the most challenging areas of independent information access – corporate information. This is noteworthy as the actions of big corporations arguably have as much influence (at times more) over our daily lives as a government’s. Access to corporate information remains the final frontier in the information access battle. The other side of the information access equation is protection of whistleblowers and journalistic sources. NSW and Commonwealth shield laws to protect journalistic sources were passed in 2011, but have yet to be used in practice, so it’s too early to judge their effectiveness. A bill with shield law properties is currently before parliament in WA and will probably pass during 2012. The bill does improve the situation for both journalists and their sources, but does not deal with Section 81 of the WA Criminal Code, which is similar to Section 70 of the federal Crimes Act that states: Disclosure of information by Commonwealth officers (1) A person who, being a Commonwealth officer, publishes or communicates, except to some person to whom he or she is authorised to publish or communicate it, any fact or document which comes to his or her knowledge, or into his or her possession, by virtue of being a Commonwealth officer, and which it is his or her duty not to disclose, shall be guilty of an offence. (2) A person who, having been a Commonwealth officer, publishes or communicates, without lawful authority or excuse (proof whereof shall lie upon him or her), any fact or document which came to his or her knowledge, or into his or her possession, by virtue of having been a Commonwealth officer, and which, at the time when he or she ceased to be a Commonwealth officer, it was his or her duty not to disclose, shall be guilty of an offence. Penalty: Imprisonment for 2 years. These laws are draconian, outdated and internationally embarrassing. As long as they are in force, whistleblowers would be well advised to work with a journalist covered by one of the two existing shield laws and hope those laws deliver source protection. Johan Lidberg is a senior lecturer in journalism at Monash University Chris Slane is a New Zealand cartoonist

In the star chambers’ cross-hairs Nick McKenzie and Cameron Stewart agree there’s a need for anti-corruption and crime agencies, but why are they wasting resources harassing reporters and hunting down whistleblowers? Illustration by Joanne Brooker

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hy is it that the anti-corruption and crime agencies are targeting reporters and their sources with increasing zealousness? Does it equate to a paradigm shift in the attitude of law enforcement and government agencies toward the media? Over the past two years, up to a dozen reporters in Australia have been served with subpoenas to give evidence about their sources or had demands to have their phone records checked. They include the authors of this article [Nick McKenzie from The Age and Cameron Stewart from The Australian], and Linton Besser and Dylan Welch from The Sydney Morning Herald, whose sources in the law enforcement community were pursued after the pair published stories that raised questions about the NSW Crime Commission. The purpose of most of these investigations is to identify the sources of a reporter’s stories and have them punished. The demand on a journalist to appear before a star chamber is never a pleasant experience. In most cases, coercive hearing subpoenas come with a confidentiality clause that prevents a reporter from telling anyone, including their own partners, that they have been hauled in front of one of these agencies. Once before the hearing, if you refuse to divulge a source, you can be charged and jailed. The recent federal shield laws may provide some protection in court cases, but this comfort does not extend to star chamber hearings. It leaves reporters with a bleak choice: give up a source or be charged with a serious criminal offence. But the coercive hearing is only one tool in the leak hunter’s trade. Advances in technology means an agency may have no need to summons a reporter to a grilling. State-of-theart tracking of phone calls, phone tapping and email monitoring mean that a source can be discovered without asking any questions of a reporter at all. Accordingly, it’s no longer sufficient for a reporter to simply stay staunch and refuse to name names. To evade this technology, journalists must avoid using any communications that can be tracked and stick to old-fashioned ways of contact: face-to-face meetings, preferably in a place that can’t be bugged. So why are agencies going to such lengths to uncover sources? Although the industry tends not to readily admit it,

The purpose of most of these investigations is to identify the sources of a reporter’s stories and have them punished there are examples where a journalist’s conduct deserves official scrutiny. Does a journalist, whose trading or publishing of information serves no public interest but leads to the compromising of an important inquiry, deserve protection? What if a public official sold information to a reporter to serve a purely corrupt purpose? It’s hard to argue that in such cases, reporters and their sources aren’t fair game. The conduct exposed recently in the United Kingdom is a reminder that journalists can and will employ corrupt or unethical methods to get a salacious story, regardless of whether it’s in the public interest. In Australia, the agency most recently in the spotlight over its pursuit of journalist’s sources is Victoria’s Office of Police Integrity (OPI). The OPI recently spent months scrutinising a case in which it was alleged (apparently incorrectly) that a journalist aired information that served no public interest but which had inadvertently aided the corrupt by undermining an important police probe. Superficially at least, this seems to be a case worthy of OPI scrutiny. But for every example such as this one, there are many more where inquiries into journalistsource relationships are about leaks that are manifestly in the public interest. Justifying these probes, the authorities talk of fighting a culture of leaking and attempting to deter future offenders. Rarely do authorities acknowledge that whistleblowing and the sort of journalism it produces is of vital importance to democracy; that it can lead to reforms or, indeed, the creation of the very anti-corruption agencies that later turn their attention to leakers.

Take the groundbreaking investigative journalism of Chris Masters in the 1980s. Without brave officials prepared to leak to Masters, there would have been no Royal Commission and no landmark reform process that cleaned up the Queensland police service and government. Yet the officials assisting Masters in his corruption exposé were more than likely breaking the law or, at the very least, their employer’s regulations. The OPI would most likely have never have been formed if it wasn’t for brave Victorian police risking their careers to speak to reporters about corruption that wasn’t being properly investigated. But the OPI has been one of the most aggressive agencies when it comes to pursuing a reporter’s sources. While its investigation into now former deputy commissioner Sir Ken Jones is still being scrutinised by the Victorian ombudsman, it appears it was started on the basis of allegations (which have never been proven) that Jones was the source of articles that were manifestly in the public interest, and whose publishing compromised no operations. Leak inquiries have also been ramped up in response to reporting on national security issues, from defence to foreign affairs. Journalists who cover such rounds are routinely in contact with public servants who help disclose mismanagement, misconduct and sometimes corruption within the system. This has always been so, but in the past it was generally tolerated as an accepted part of the rough and tumble of the democratic process. In recent years, suspected leakers are increasingly viewed as lawbreakers who must be hunted X down, rooted out and, if necessary, jailed.

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X Within the past year, the defence department in Canberra has, on two separate occasions, ordered a search of phone and email records to try to locate sources for articles written by one of the authors of this article. The offending articles involved the disclosure of a major navy shipbuilding bungle that involved the waste of millions in taxpayer dollars. The other story involved an emergency aboard a submarine, a potentially deadly equipment failure that could have cost lives. Both articles were in the public interest and yet both triggered a secret, sweeping attempt by the department to locate confidential sources for stories that, a decade ago, would have been begrudgingly shrugged off. Anecdotally at least, the recent trend does indeed appear to target journalism and whistleblowing that is clearly in the public interest. It is these cases on which the media needs to take a stand. The argument is clear: agencies should devote their resources to investigating genuine crime and corruption, rather than whistleblowing and journalism that tells the public something they have a right to know. Unfortunately, given the competitive and often poisonous nature of Australia’s media, a leak inquiry that involves the working of one newspaper often provokes only mirth

Anticorruption agencies are fallible, prone to politicisation and abuse of power

from another. When media outlets fail to back up each other in important source protection cases, it fuels an environment in which journalists and their sources can be more freely targeted. It weakens us all. Such advocacy requires careful examination of individual cases and a recognition that journalists are not, and should never be, above the law. But anticorruption agencies and governments should be left in no doubt that public servants who leak material that’s truly in the public interest should not be targeted for investigation without good reason. Some forward the argument that with the advent of anti-corruption agencies and whistleblower laws, you don’t need leakers because now public servants with concerns will have appropriate channels through which to raise their complaint. But anti-corruption agencies are fallible, prone to politicisation and abuse of power. Sometimes a lack of resources means they can’t investigate something that needs to be exposed. Again, the media is needed to keep an eye on such agencies and to pick up on corruption that is not adequately investigated. It is curious that leak inquiries appear to be increasing at a time when shield laws have been introduced federally, but many gaps remain at the state level.

In Victoria, the debate over the state’s new anti-corruption commission has been all but silent on the issue of whether journalists will be allowed to protect sources without fear of prosecution or if the new watchdog will act zealously against leaks, regardless of public interest considerations. A sensible solution may involve watchdogs adopting an agreed position that they will not investigate journalists unless the case involves grave issues of corruption or national security. Even then, journalists deserve the protection of shield laws, allowing them to legally refuse demands by these watchdogs to divulge confidential sources unless a judge reverses that right on public interest grounds. However, for the near future at least, it seems journalists and their sources will remain targets. This is all the more reason for the industry to present a united front and a strong voice, when a journalist next refuses to answer a subpoena or finds their phone monitored and sources targeted because they have helped to tell the public something they deserve to know. Nick McKenzie is a Fairfax investigative journalist and multiple Walkley winner Cameron Stewart is The Australian’s associate editor and investigative journalist Joanne Brooker is a media artist specialising in portraiture and caricature

HELP US WRITE THE STORIES OF CONTEMP OR ARY AUSTR ALIA Australia is world famous for its beautiful natural environment and unique lifestyle. But with an abundance of talented people at home and abroad, Australia today is as clever as it is beautiful. In fact, there are so many Australians doing truly worldclass work as business leaders, academics, scientists, administrators, innovators, creators and social entrepreneurs that we’ve created

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australiaunlimited.com and an Australia Unlimited iPad magazine to tell their stories. The editorial team are looking for great writers to help showcase the intellectual, commercial and creative credentials of Australians at home and around the world. If you’d like to be involved as a contributor visit www.australiaunlimited.com/contribute

Silence outside the court Andrea Petrie and Adrian Lowe know how suppression orders can make a court reporter’s life a nightmare. Cartoon by Lindsay Foyle

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here is a question that inspires fear in every court reporter: are there any suppression orders in this case? Finding the answer is often a lot more difficult than you expect and can become a reporter’s nightmare. Suppression orders are often the last thing that judges consider in a case, so they can sometimes be awkwardly worded or ill-considered. Previous orders made in other courts are frequently forgotten and in many cases judges may not even be aware of their existence. Legal argument about whether an order should be granted tends to take place late in the day, creating all sorts of difficulties in terms of deadlines and obtaining legal representation. This, along with cutbacks in newsroom budgets, means information that should not be kept from the public often is. It also means that journalists are occasionally forced to present legal submissions against senior and queen’s counsels. The nature of suppression and nonpublication orders not only vary in each case, but also on the judicial officer making them. Some judges, with extensive experience in dealing with the media, will question counsel why such orders are necessary. But others will not hesitate in agreeing to make an order prohibiting publication of details in a case, even if it is unnecessary. Take, for example, the case of a serial paedophile in Victoria. With 18 victims in 25 years, the man was eventually jailed for 26 years. Like all sexual assault cases in the state, the victims’ identities were protected under the Judicial Proceedings Reports Act. Under this legislation, reporters cannot name or identify anything about a victim of a sexual offence – unless the victim consents. Despite this, in a completely superfluous exercise, the County Court judge hearing the case suppressed the names of the victims. When the prosecutor later pointed out the existence of the Act, the judge was surprised and admitted to having never been made aware of the legislation. Other judges are inexperienced in criminal matters because they spend most of their time in the civil jurisdiction, which can also create problems regarding media coverage of a court case. In the trial of Travis Bowling, convicted of the assault of AFL legend Ron Barassi last year, a County Court judge suppressed

Last year, 1077 nonpublication orders were granted. Of these… just three were made in WA and one in Queensland

pre-trial argument in which it was revealed Bowling had told a paramedic “Ron got me”. Bowling’s defence to the charge was that it was a case of mistaken identity and that he had not even been involved in the melee. Such orders were already unnecessary considering the laws of sub judice which stipulate that no details of the case can be reported close to or during the trial unless they are heard by the jury. After Bowling had been convicted, media lawyers sought revocation of the order to report the pre-trial argument. But the judge, who thought an application had to be submitted for such an appearance, told the lawyer: “I won’t be hearing from you today.” A potentially great story – or at least an important aspect of the overall story – went untold because of the judge’s ignorance. Within a few days, possibly after learning that such appearances were common, the suppression order was rescinded. But by then, it was no longer a story. Judicial officers’ ignorance can also lead to extraordinary orders being granted, as was the case involving a Victorian businessman accused of tax evasion. The judge made an interim order of suppression to allow him time to create arguments as to why a permanent nonpublication order should be granted. This gave him enough time to complete a lucrative property deal, without the buyer being made aware of his financial woes. While some suppression orders include an expiry date, others do not. Some stipulate

that they remain valid until “further order” and, as such, remain in force indefinitely, long after the need to suppress the information has passed. This can create enormous problems for journalists who might mention the story, or aspects of it, years later and unwittingly breach the order. By law, suppression orders should only be made when they are essential to prevent a threat to justice. Protecting someone’s privacy, reputation or business should not be a factor as they are considered to be an unfortunate by-product of our open system of justice. But that does not stop judicial officers granting such orders, as seen in the recent NSW case which put radio broadcaster Derryn Hinch back in the headlines. The order prohibited publication of a sex offender’s name because his lawyer successfully argued it might affect his business interests. Case law has established the necessity test to obtain a non-publication order as being a difficult one. In the Queen v Robert Scott Pomeroy (2002), Justice Bernard Teague of the Victorian Supreme Court ruled: “There can be no doubt that because of the word ‘necessary’ in Section 19 (of the Supreme Court Act), the bar must be very high. It will be reached only in wholly exceptional circumstances. The requirement of necessity is an integral part of other exceptions to the open justice principle.” Last year, 1077 non-publication orders were granted across Australia. Of these, 644 – more than half – were issued in Victoria, 41 per cent which suppressed the identity of the accused person, a witness or victim. In 71 per cent of cases, evidence was suppressed. In New South Wales for the same period, 241 orders were granted, 46 per cent relating to a person’s identity, while 43 per cent related to evidence presented in the case. And in South Australia during 2011, 157 suppression orders were issued, 64 per cent relating to identity and 31 per cent to evidence. For the entire year, just three orders were made in Western Australia and one in Queensland. The transparent administration of justice is a fundamental principle of our legal system and while some orders for suppression and non-publication are necessary, they should not be made as routinely as they are. It is encouraging to see a more vigilant attitude being demonstrated by the judiciary in testing the merits of such applications, in Victoria at least. Andrea Petrie is The Age’s Supreme Court reporter. Adrian Lowe covered courts for The Age for three years until earlier this year Lindsay Foyle is a former deputy editor of The Bulletin and a past president of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association. Since 2008 he has been working freelance

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Playing the secrecy game Christian Kerr sees a bureaucracy still obsessed with keeping secrets, despite Freedom of Information reforms. Cartoon by Phil Somerville

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hen the go-go ’80s turned into the go-slow ’90s and the recession we had to have began to bite, the parties finished for a friend in financial PR – but not before one final bash. Their largest client’s results were due. They were ugly. Very ugly indeed. The company was going under. Virtually everyone knew, or had guessed it. It was just a matter of the formalities. But there were names and egos involved, so these had to be handled sensitively. The decision was made. The results would go out on Holy Thursday. There would be no papers the following day and other distractions on the long long weekend. A few journos caught a whiff of the plans. They wanted to know what time the results would be dropped. Requests turned to pleading. It was all in vain. The plan was in place. There were drinks in the office that afternoon. Afternoon turned into evening. And at about nine o’clock we clinked our glasses, pushed the button on the fax machine and sent the news of one of Australia’s bigger corporate collapses out into the ether. It was now all a matter for the lawyers and the liquidators. Why do I start a piece on government secrecy with this story? Well, when I worked in a state premier’s office, we handled Freedom of Information (FoI) requests in much the same way. There was no bending of the letter of the law, but the spirit was not necessarily taken into account. Releases of material to the media were often timed to be as awkward as possible. They occurred after deadline or, better still, after deadline on a Friday. They were factored into the media schedule for the week. On other occasions, their handling seemed more capricious than strategic. And that’s what government secrecy appears to be. I’ve spent months following the fiasco of the abandoned tender for the Australia Network soft diplomacy television service. Earlier this year I lodged an FoI seeking details of the questions put to the bidders, the ABC and Sky, after they lodged their initial documents. The department found five of the eight documents were completely whited out and the others heavily redacted. Sources close to

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the tender process suggest that something like only 10 per cent of the questions asked of the bidder were actually released. The rest were refused, according to the department, as it was necessary for “the preservation of the integrity of the government’s tender processes”. Yet this was a tender that, in the responsible minister’s own words, had been “compromised”; compromised to such an extent that the government had to order both an Australian Federal Police investigation and auditor-general’s inquiry. So much for integrity! Another story I’ve been tracking involved working through hundreds of pages of

ASIO files from the 1960s and ’70s. Many of these are heavily redacted. Many make no sense at all. But I’ve had help from Sherpas, from the ASIO old boys’ network. Not only do they know how to read between the lines – or to read what has been blacked out; in some cases they wrote the original ASIO documents. Some of the redactions amuse them. But they’re horrified at some of the references in the handwritten margin notes on the documents. Most of these appear just to be initials or internal references. But my sources say some are so secret they should not see the light of day. Government knows it has a problem with secrecy. Secrecy engenders suspicion – suspicion of cock-ups, lies and hypocrisy. The problem has been clear since The Australian’s then FoI editor Michael McKinnon chased federal treasurer Peter Costello all the way to the High Court after documents on tax bracket creep. He didn’t win, but Costello’s response to his actions made it clear enough the Howard government’s commitment to smaller government and lower taxes was

Government knows it has a problem with secrecy. Secrecy engenders suspicion – suspicion of cock-ups, lies and hypocrisy

largely rhetorical. The two-year-old Secrecy Laws and Open Government in Australia report the then attorney-general Robert McClelland asked the Australian Law Reform Commission to undertake in 2008 is yet to bear fruit. FoI law reform has happened, yet the federal information commissioner, John McMillan, a former ombudsman, has warned that Labor’s supposed commitment to open government is being undermined by its refusal to adequately resource the oversight of Freedom of Information and privacy laws. Professor McMillan has complained that the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner only has three quarters of the staff foreshadowed when it was created at the end of 2010. He has warned the 2.5 per cent efficiency dividend may lead to staff losses. Then there are the cultural aspects of secrecy, so deeply engrained in the bureaucratic soul. Last year we saw the risible situation when Lauren Primozic, the acting principal legal officer of the Administrative Law Section in the Legal Services Branch of the Department of Climate Change warned Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) researcher Tim Wilson he could be declared a “vexatious applicant” under Part VIII, Division 1 of the FoI Act for lodging too many applications. Wilson, in response, admitted he had lodged several hundred applications. But his explanation seemed sound. “The actual number of subject items I am after are small,” he wrote back to the department. “The requests are often broken into different parts to ensure documents don’t get delayed because of a single issue and hold up the department from providing documents where there are not problems.” He politely ignored the large ethical elephant in the room – that it is not a department’s place to decide that a citizen is unworthy of receiving information because they have determined he is waging a political campaign. But it was telling that Primozic’s letter to Wilson was leaked to The Age, a publication not necessarily in step with the IPA’s views on climate change. The bureaucracy’s attitude to the free flow of information remains unchanged. And despite changes in rhetoric and even law, governmental approaches to secrecy still seem to be manipulative and capricious. Christian Kerr is a political reporter with The Australian Phil Somerville is a Sydney-based cartoonist; www.somervillecartoons.com

Public broadcasting under pressure Will the digital revolution boost the ABC and SBS, or see the public broadcasters underfunded and flailing? Quentin Dempster warns of dangerous times ahead. Illustration by Andrew Dyson

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he appointment of James Spigelman AC QC, the former chief justice of the NSW Supreme Court, as the next chairman of the ABC comes at a crucial time for public broadcasting in Australia. He takes up his duties as the Gillard government completes its Convergence Review, with a new media regulatory regime for what is called “the digital economy” expected to change the way content can be produced and exploited. In media, convergence merges broadcasting, telecommunications and broadband/internet to smash national boundaries, empowering domestic audiences to browse and access text, audio and video content from any URL in the world. You can now beam your digital TV at your wi-fi modem and watch television from anywhere in the world at no additional cost – even downloading it to a hard drive for more convenient viewing at a later time. While this is exciting for consumers, it’s fraught with danger for Australian content producers. Remember, we would not have a local TV production industry without the 55 per cent local content quota imposed by legislation since the start of television in 1956. The current broadcast licence system imposes news and other content creation obligations on licensees. Those financiers seeking to claw back the massive debt they took on buying commercial free-to-air TV licences in Australia are pushing the federal government towards what they call “regulatory parity”. That could be taken as code for the same regulation for all platforms or simply for no regulation at all. The interim Convergence Review recommended that the allocation of a broadcast licence “should no longer be a precondition for the provision of content”. The principle underpinning this change is said to be “that individuals and enterprises should be able to communicate freely in a converged environment… If regulatory obligations are to be imposed, they should be imposed consistently, irrespective of the

The ABC already is Sydney-centric, and Sydney-based financial controllers do not seem to be able to see beyond their breath-fogged windows at Harris Street, Ultimo delivery platform.” What do they mean: if ? Australians at work in the local content industries, and those imagining future careers in the sector, should now be praying to our political and regulatory masters that they do not stuff this up. There are always the ABC and SBS to save local content creation, you might argue, but that only works if they are adequately funded for the task. Already the ABC has an internal problem sustaining current levels of multiplatform output with inelastic operational funding. And there has been a dispute about a management strategy to outsource to the commercial TV production sector all drama, all documentary and most features programming. In Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia, local ABC content creation – including local sports coverage – is being destroyed. Public broadcasting supporters want a genuine mixed production model where the ABC retains a critical mass of the

intellectual property and the archive, instead of surrendering all copyright to vested interests in return for a first-time showing with some repeats. This model of commissioning content is commercialising ABC TV programming, with co-investors (state and federal screen and film financiers and lotteries funds, etc) only signing up to a program if they consider the business plan to be bankable. That is why more and more ABC content seems to be mimicking commercial Underbelly-style formulaic fare. In one laughable episode of a recent Underbelly derivative, a fictionalised tattooed thug was lacerated to death by fake tropical stingers in a Cairns swimming pool. With one or two exceptions, audiences are underwhelmed by the ABC’s junk outsourced drama. Think undertainment. The ABC has made itself totally reliant on this external funding model, and the ABC board has expressed no concern whatsoever about the de-skilling of the broadcaster and centralising production in Sydney and Melbourne. So much for our commitment to training, finding and developing fresh creative talent. There needs to be an audit into this external funding model to see exactly to whom the work and the money has gone. There is no transparency in this contentious process and no formal X

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Q PRESS FREEDOM

X report on the productivity and cost efficiency of the model published in the ABC’s annual report to parliament. Why is this so? Inside the ABC we are expecting substantial staff redundancies unless the broadcaster can persuade the government to increase operational base funding. But with both the federal treasurer, Wayne Swan, and his opposition counterpart, Joe Hockey, outpromising each other in rapid deficit reduction, the pressing needs of the public broadcasters are unlikely to get a look in. SBS’s current funding position is dire. SBS has been interrupting TV programs with incessant low-rent ads, but this strategy has not built the broadcaster into Australia’s fourth commercial TV channel. SBS ad revenue 2010–11: $50 million. Audience loyalty: destroyed. The federal government so far has failed to heed the pleas of SBS supporters to rescue SBS from this full-scale commerciality, although the government recently seemed moved to save the broadcaster from insolvency with some carry-on funding. SBS chairman, Joe Skrzynski, coincidentally a mate of ABC chairman Spigelman, has been sounding more multicultural as he tries to reaffirm what SBS is here to do: service the inclusive needs of Australia’s forever expanding migrant populations. At the ABC, news management has engaged consultants from the United Kingdom for an objective look at how the ABC gathers its news across platforms: multichannel domestic and international radio, television and online. Management has assured already pressured journalists operating under budget cuts (no overtime, no travel, freelance and casual work cut) that the consultants are not on a cost cutting time-and-motion exercise. Sounds reassuring. But there has been free use of the term “platform agnosticism” in their UK nomenclature. Presumably “platform agnosticism” means not believing in any one delivery platform. This may mean that ABC journalism is about to be restructured to meet the immediate and relentless demands of continuous news first and

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The federal government so far has failed to heed the pleas of SBS supporters to rescue SBS from this full-scale commerciality

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foremost. News programs like the statebased 7pm TV news on ABC 1 may soon be rendered just part of the 24/7 continuum, to be thrown into a continuous roster with the ABC’s multichannel News 24 and network radio’s NewsRadio and ABC Online. The big problem is that to be credible as a taxpayer-funded news source in Australia, the ABC must maintain a strong journalistic presence across the regions of Australia. This is primarily achieved in radio, TV being capital city-based. Those of us hoping to enhance localism through TV digital multichannelling have watched cynically as TV and radio go more network, not less. It is undoubtedly cheaper. But what is the ABC for if it cannot exploit digital multichannelling to build services for local/regional audiences? Public broadcasting supporters will have to be vigilant and belligerent on this point. The ABC already is Sydney-centric, and Sydney-based financial controllers do not seem to be able to see beyond their breathfogged windows at Harris Street, Ultimo. So here’s a memo to ABC chairman Jim Spigelman: Welcome to the ABC, Mr Chairman. Please ask the managing director to explain how outsourcing all TV production except news and current affairs is cost efficient when production facilities in which taxpayers have invested millions go idle; when half an hour of an outsourced TV satire proves to be more expensive than a high-end drama? Please ask the MD to explain how the relentless demands of multiplatform broadcasting can be sustained without a significant enhancement of operational funds? Please ask the MD to brief you on exactly how you, as chairman, can persuade a government in deficit to adequately fund the ABC given other deserving demands on the public purse. And a memo to SBS chairman Joe Skrzynski: Please make a sincere public apology on behalf of the SBS board to your audiences that you made a monumental mistake in breaking into programs with advertising. Please formally ask the federal government to legislate to amend the SBS Act to prohibit advertising on the broadcaster, so that the commercial networks can recover the revenues that you,

as a taxpayer-subsidised entity, are filching from them. Wear a hair shirt as a symbol of your contrition and then go about rebuilding SBS’s support base in the nowdiverse and growing ethnic communities of Australia. These communities can be powerful allies for a refunding strategy to rebuild SBS. The ABC and SBS are great national media institutions and content creators and deserve to be supported. SBS’s multiple language services are vital to Australia’s success as an inclusive multicultural society. Through the digital revolution, both the ABC and SBS have extended their engagement with and value to the tax-paying public. A re-investment above current levels of funding will see the ABC and SBS grow and enhance their creativity and journalism. A pause to that investment will only bring contraction, endless repeats and, in the case of SBS, more galling ads interrupting documentaries, films, news and current affairs programs. Around 90 per cent of all households are now watching digital broadcasts, and analogue transmission will switch off next year. Accordingly, both the ABC and SBS have a strong case to incorporate their saved analogue transmission costs (2010–11 $95 million in the ABC’s case) as part of their annual operational base funding appropriation. Therein lies survival for both broadcasters in the short term. But the public broadcasters’ future is by no means secure. While everyone in the Australian media industry hopes the digital revolution produces more opportunities for content creation, not less, public broadcasting supporters, like their commercial counterparts, will have to fight hard as policy and regulation are fundamentally rewritten. Let our content creation mantra be: THINK GLOBAL… CREATE LOCAL. And, as a subheading: PLEASE DON’T STUFF THIS UP! Quentin Dempster is an ABC journalist and ABC staff-elected director ‘in exile’. He is a former chairman of the Walkley Advisory Board Andrew Dyson is one of the few cartoonists in Australia who combines the role of cartoonist and columnist

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Concentrate, concentrate… It’s dangerous when one person controls the majority of Australia’s news outlets, says Paul Barry. Cartoon by Fiona Katauskas

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f you think media diversity doesn’t matter, try this mental exercise. Imagine an Australia in which the only voices on the radio are Ray Hadley and Alan Jones, ranting about asylum seekers, Ju-Liar and the dangers of a Labor government. Imagine the only columnists in your daily newspaper – harping on about similar themes – are Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman. Or, if it scares you more, imagine an Australia where Phillip Adams, Robert Manne and Adele Horin are the only people whose opinions are published in mainstream media. We’re not yet at that stage in Australia, but media ownership in this country is far more concentrated than anywhere else in the world, and a huge amount of power rests in the hands of one proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, who has shown over many years that he’s happy to use it. According to the recent Finkelstein report on Australia’s print media, 65 per cent of our national and metropolitan daily papers (by circulation) are now produced by Murdoch’s News Limited, while the rest (except in Perth) are published by Fairfax. Murdoch owns the two big tabloids in Sydney and Melbourne, The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun, which are the biggest-selling dailies in Australia. In Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin and most of Queensland, his papers are all that you will find on the newsstands. In every capital city except Canberra, News also owns the biggest-selling (and often the only) Sunday paper. It also owns three of the top eight news websites in the country in news.com.au, heraldsun.com.au, and telegraph.com.au; respectively, they reach monthly audiences of 2.4 million, 1.75 million and 1.25 million people, according to Nielsen Research. And finally, News Limited has a major share in Australian Associated Press, which generates much of what gets into our print and broadcast media, and a share in Sky News, which is starting to rival the influence of free-to-air stations in its political coverage. So is this a problem? Well, yes. In the United Kingdom, where Rupert is now battling the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and allegations of corrupt payments to police and public officials by The Sun, politicians are complaining that 35 per cent of the national newspaper market gives Murdoch far too much power. In Australia he has double that, if you include News’s 140-odd suburban and regional titles. What’s more, most of

Murdoch’s metropolitan and national dailies here syndicate top news stories, political coverage and columnists, which allows Australia’s most powerful right-wing media warrior, Andrew Bolt, to preach to 3 million people a week, right around the nation. But what makes Murdoch’s power far more dangerous is that he uses it to champion his view of the world and advance his commercial interests. He’s an interventionist (and often inspirational) proprietor, who takes an intense interest in what his papers say and how they say it. He also likes backing winners in politics – which is what makes him a confidant of prime ministers and presidents – and he loves his newspapers to run campaigns. He is a player at the highest level. And he wants his papers to play the game, too. “IT WAS THE SUN WOT WON IT”, his favourite British tabloid bragged in 1992 after Labour leader Neil Kinnock crashed to defeat in the general election. As voters had gone to the polls, The Sun had covered its front page with a picture of the red-headed Welshman in a lightbulb, captioned: “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.” Murdoch’s Australian papers have never plumbed such depths, but they made and broke Gough Whitlam in the 1970s, backed Hawke and Keating in the 1980s (to be rewarded with media laws that let Rupert buy Melbourne’s Herald & Weekly Times), and supported Howard almost to the end. More recently and controversially, The Australian and the Daily Telegraph have been hammering the Labor government of Rudd and Gillard, with campaigns against the carbon tax, the mining tax, the Greens, the National Broadband Network and the supposedly scandalous waste of the BER’s school-building program. Most worryingly, these campaigns have often been waged through news stories rather than editorials. As Robert Manne put it in his Quarterly Essay, “Bad News”, journalists at The Australian covering the NBN and BER “appear to begin with their editorially determined conclusion and then seek out evidence to support it.” On ABC Media Watch in September 2010, I examined what appeared to be a concerted attack by The Australian on the Greens, who were helping to keep Gillard in power. In the program, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Brown both accused the Murdoch press of systematic bias, prompting The Australian’s to respond, in its leader column: “We wear Senator Brown’s criticism with pride. We believe he

In the United Kingdom politicians are complaining that 35 per cent of the national newspaper market gives Murdoch far too much power

and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box.” Is that something that newspapers should set out to do? As David McKnight argues in his new book, Rupert Murdoch: An investigation of political power (Allen & Unwin, $32.99): “If News owned 70 per cent but was a hands-off organisation with genuinely independent editors, so some papers were for the Iraq War, for example, and others against, then it wouldn’t be such a problem.” The question is if anything can be done about it. One answer might be to force News to sell some of its national or metropolitan newspapers, reducing its audience reach to, say, 40 per cent. But it’s unlikely any government will ever contemplate doing that. Another way might be to allow a tougher media regulator to act as a watchdog against bias, as the Australian Communications and Media Authority can do in radio (and has recently done with Alan Jones at 2GB). But that’s not likely to happen either. Nor would most journalists support it. The third and perhaps the only way is for journalists to raise their game and do what we all joined up for, which is to tell the truth to the public and to do our best to be fair. Is that too naïve? I guess it is. But it’s our job to strive for it. Paul Barry is the editor of The Power Index Fiona Katauskas is a freelance cartoonist; fionakatauskas.com

THE WALKLEY MAGAZINE

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Q PRESS FREEDOM

NZ’s new media watchdog New media platforms have blurred the divide between print media and broadcasters, and the regulators are just catching up. Brent Edwards looks at what may come next for NZ media. Cartoon by Chris Slane

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egulation of the New Zealand news media is in for a shake-up following the Law Commission’s report The News Media Meets New Media. Submissions on the report closed in March, and it’s likely legislation will be developed to put into effect the Commission’s final recommendations. Some in the industry fear it will lead to some form of political control over the news media. Others accept that change is inevitable and that the current system for regulating the media cannot last. At the moment the print media is regulated by the New Zealand Press Council, while broadcasters are regulated by a statutory body, the Broadcasting Standards Authority. This line between self-regulation and statutory regulation is no longer tenable. But it does not mean an extension of statutory regulation to all news media. Convergence means it is no longer possible to easily separate broadcast media from print media. Broadcasters now carry text on their websites just as print media websites include video and audio. As the Commission points out, it is further complicated by the fact that many others – not just traditional news media organisations – also engage in journalism, or at least something similar. The report asked the question: Who are the news media and how should they be regulated? It argues that new media has created a decentralised and democratised model for the generation and dissemination of news and current affairs. But it raises the question of what sort of media organisations should qualify for statutory privileges and exemptions which, at the moment, apply to news media. The Commission’s main recommendation is that a new regulator should be set up covering all news media. It would be set up by law, but be independent of both government and the news industry. Appointments to the regulator would be made by an independent panel. It would include both public and media representatives, but with the public members making up the majority, as is the case with the Press Council. Under the Commission’s proposal, the regulator would be funded by members and subsidised by the state. It is the idea of a statutory body and the fact it would be subsidised by the state that has some in the news industry worried.

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The purpose of any change must be to protect and strengthen press freedoms, not undermine or dilute them

But most appear to accept the need for a new regulator and generally agree with the Commission’s recommendation as long as the regulator is absolutely independent. Other problems then arise. Who would be covered by the new regulator? The Commission envisages membership could be wide, on the condition that all those covered by the regulator must be governed by codes of ethics. The codes do not need to be the same. Bloggers, for example, could have their own code, different to the code that might govern traditional media. The Commission recognises, though, that many bloggers might not want to be covered at all by a code of ethics or the regulator. They could continue to express themselves freely without being constrained by a code or regulation. Another important question is if membership should be voluntary or compulsory. Under the first option, it would be voluntary for any news media organisation to be covered by the regulator. Those who chose not to, though, would not enjoy the legal privileges, such as exemptions from the Privacy Act, available to organisations covered by the regulator. Under the second option, all media that operate as a business or commercial entity and those providing a general news service to a wide public would have to be members of the new regulatory body. For other media organisations, such as bloggers, membership would be voluntary.

In its submission on the report, the union representing journalists in New Zealand, the EPMU, supports the proposal for a single media regulator, so long as it has the level of independence from the state as proposed by the Commission. The union submission argues that the new regulator cannot be some amended version of the Broadcasting Standards Authority. The purpose of any change must be to protect and strengthen press freedoms, not undermine or dilute them. Under the Law Commission’s proposal, print media would lose their current system of self-regulation. In practice, though, the new independent regulator should not impinge on the freedoms newspapers currently enjoy. And broadcasters, who are already under a statutory regime, would be in a better position. The union also argued that the involvement of working journalists – as distinct from proprietors, managers and editors – must be an essential part of the competence and independence sought by the Commission for the new regulator. While there is much to admire in the Commission’s report, the debate is only just beginning. Journalists will have to keep a watchful eye to ensure the Commission’s commitment to an independent regulator is borne out by what finally becomes law. Brent Edwards is the convener of the EPMU’s Print and Media Council Chris Slane is a New Zealand cartoonist

Q FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE

Nervous Beijing stifles expression… again

Something funny happened on Bo Xilai’s way to China’s politburo, and the censors and net police are now on full alert says Rowan Callick. Photo by Dave Tacon

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his is yet another big year for China and, consequently, an especially testing one for Chinese journalists, bloggers and tweeters. In the last four years, China has staged both the Beijing Olympics and then the World Expo in Shanghai in an aweinspiring yet icy manner. It has kept powering through the global financial crisis, leading world economic growth, and now it is preparing for a once-in-a-decade leadership transition. Such a transition provides challenges for the Chinese media. For stability means almost everything to the Chinese Communist Party, and for the media that means eschewing speculation and analysis, and waiting patiently for whichever new leaders the comrades anoint to emerge. The Communist Party has been in power for almost 63 years and must be judged to be the most powerful organisation in the world today. But despite these generations in unchallenged control, the party remains

Chinese military provide a human chain along East Nanjing Road to separate traffic from the crowds caused by National Day holidays, Shanghai, China, October 3, 2011. (Dave Tacon/Polaris)

anxious about its legitimacy, and about events such as a leadership change which might put its natural right to rule at the forefront of people’s minds. China watchers had anticipated an especially tightly managed run-up to the five-yearly National Party Congress to be held in Beijing in October, when Xi Jinping will emerge as the next party general secretary and the nation’s paramount leader. But something happened on the way to this buttoned-down forum. Bo Xilai, one of China’s highest profile leaders, lost his way, and his job, following a series of incidents that might have been scripted by a Chinese John le Carré. X

“I believe this is the worst time for writers since 1989,” the year of the Tiananmen protests which led to a violent crackdown THE WALKLEY MAGAZINE

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Q FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE

X And the internet exploded with excitement, sending the “net police” scrabbling to put out one fire after another. The Justice Ministry had anticipated and sought to suffocate such jumpiness in March, by ordering all Chinese lawyers to take a loyalty oath to the party. Its statement said this was needed “to firmly establish among the vast circle of lawyers, faith in socialism with Chinese characteristics... and effectively improve the quality of lawyers’ political ideology.” The lawyers must now swear: “I promise to faithfully fulfil the sacred mission of socialism with Chinese characteristics... to be loyal to the motherland and its people, and to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party of China.” The government also sought to get to grips with the Weibo phenomenon – China’s equivalent of Twitter, with users doubling in 2011 to about 300 million. Also in March, the government imposed on Sina Corp, which runs Weibo, a requirement that all users must provide authentic identification when they register an account, including their real name and their government identification number. Every post by a user with more than 100,000 followers will now be subject to examination, and no post can be broadcast online before it is cleared by the net police. All posts deemed harmful or illegal will be deleted within five minutes. The technical interface of the microblog will be open to specialised search engines deployed by public security agencies. The authorities will introduce a system informing them of future events of potential interest, and evaluating them. And filters removing keywords that have been designated as harmful will be applied 10 minutes after the ban is issued. Terms that have been banned include leadership change, three variations of the word dissident, democracy, one party rule and cultural revolution. Earlier, last November, new rules issued by the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) included requiring reporters to “guard against using rumours as sources, to insist on doing their reporting in the field and not rely on unverified hearsay or other non-first-hand information in their reports.” The GAPP said it would revoke reporters’ cards – without which they cannot be employed – for more than five years if they were found to have fabricated stories that result in “serious consequences”. The new rules require “at least two different news sources in critical reporting”. Last December, writers Chen Wei and Chen Xi were jailed for nine and 10 years respectively for “inciting subversion”. In

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Every post by a user with more than 100,000 followers will now be subject to examination, and no post can be broadcast online before it is cleared by the net police January, writer Li Tie was jailed for 10 years for “subversion of state power”. Yu Jie, one of the most famous Chinese dissident writers – who was forced into exile last year with his wife and three-yearold son – said: “I believe this is the worst time for writers since 1989,” the year of the Tiananmen protests which led to a violent crackdown. The main talking point as the party congress began to approach in October, was whether Bo Xilai, the party secretary and so the most powerful figure in Chongqing, the massive municipality next to Sichuan in China’s central south, and/or Wang Yang, his predecessor who has gone on to head Guangdong province bordering Hong Kong, would be promoted into the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) of nine. These are the men – no woman has yet reached the PSC – who really rule China. Bo, a taizidang or princeling son of a famous veteran party leader, is a flamboyant figure with a flamboyant, red-Ferraridriving, Oxford-and-Harvard-educated son. He was mayor of Dalian in north-east China for 17 years, became the commerce minister, and was then promoted to run Chongqing. This he did with considerable verve, encouraging people to chang hong – to “sing red songs” that harked back to the Mao Zedong era. He also led a dahei (strike back) drive against corruption and gangsters, who were disposed of in often peremptory ways. Bo had brought with him from the north-east, police chief Wang Lijun. For a reason subject to many rumours, Wang was moved aside in February to a role as head of environmental compliance. Then Wang suddenly drove six hours to the American consulate in nearby Chengdu. When he

left the consulate after 10 still mysterious hours, he was arrested by security officials. Crucially, these officials were from Beijing rather than Chongqing, where he appeared to fear that he would face the same grim fate as the many whom he had rounded up. Soon afterwards – and presumably on evidence provided by Wang Lijun – Bo was removed from his job in Chongqing, and Premier Wen Jiabao warned that China risks another “historical tragedy” like the Cultural Revolution unless it enacts political reforms, an apparent reference to Bo’s chang hong style. This triggered an initial cascade of blogs and weibo and – in the braver publications – mass media reports. The Weibo users in particular derided the official hints that Bo is corrupt, before Sina was forced to rein them in. Then came the injection of further, foreign intrigue into the story, with British media linking Bo’s demise and Wang’s flight with the mysterious death in Chongqing of an upper class English wheeler and dealer called Neil Heywood. The resulting trails of evidence and conjecture may well keep the media and its audiences riveted almost through to the appointment of Xi Jinping and his Politburo Standing Committee in October. The natural Chinese official response – to attempt to close down and cover up such reportage – will fuel rather than suppress this still unfolding story, underlining the selfharm that is usually one of the outcomes of suppression. Editor’s note: Following the arrest of his wife, Gu Kailai, on the suspicion of the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, Bo Xilai has been suspended from the party’s elite politburo and it would appear that his political career has come to a spectacular end. Rowan Callick is the Asia-Pacific editor of The Australian newspaper Dave Tacon is the inaugural winner of the Walkley Freelance Journalist of the Year

Q OUR MEDIA

Escaping justice Terror mastermind Mullah Krekar is now in a Norwegian jail, so why won’t the Australian government pursue him over the murder of cameraman Paul Moran? Grahame Bowland reports

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n March 2003, a suicide bombing in northern Iraq killed one Australian journalist and seriously injured another. The man killed was Paul Moran, a 39-year-old freelance cameraman working for ABC News. The bombing was carried out by the radical Islamic group Ansar al-Islam. Mullah Krekar, the group’s spiritual leader, resides in Norway and is yet to be prosecuted for the terror acts he allegedly masterminded. Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks late last year have revealed that in 2009 a senior official in Norway’s ministry of foreign affairs concluded there were “no obstacles he could see” to Krekar being extradited to Australia for trial in the matter of Paul Moran’s death. The content of this cable was reported last year by the Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang, but it wasn’t mentioned in the Australian media until this April, when it was reported on by the ABC. Norway’s willingness to extradite Krekar can be found within a flurry of cables sparked by the Media Alliance’s 2009 letter to the then federal attorney-general, Robert McClelland, which requested he refer the murder of Paul Moran for investigation, with the aim of extraditing Krekar to Australia. McClelland gave the matter to the Australian Federal Police (AFP). In November 2010, the AFP responded that an evaluation of the available information “did not identify evidence to support the allegation against Mr Krekar”. As a result, the AFP declined to open a formal investigation. But the Australian press had already gathered some convincing evidence. Veteran ABC reporter Mark Corcoran had travelled to Norway in 2007 to confront Krekar, and produced “Norwegian Jihad: An investigation of Mullah Krekar” which was screened on the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent. In a candid interview, Krekar said: “There’s no difference between suicide bombs and using Kalashnikov. What’s the difference when you send the fighters to death? What’s the difference between someone who uses only on/off or someone who use his finger? What’s the difference? It’s the same.”

Krekar went on to describe the suicide bomber and his actions before the attack, showing detailed operational knowledge: Krekar: “Who was this man? He is from Saudi Arabia. His name is Yasin Bahad. He came to Ansar al-Islam. He bought the car – they did suicide bombs, and, he paid the money the money that he had – about five thousand dollars – to the Kurdish friends and he change his shoes also. It was new, he changed with another one, old shoes.” Corcoran: “This is before the attack.” Krekar: “Before he, yeah, he start after that.” Krekar emigrated to Norway with his Kurdish family in 1991 as a quota refugee. His subsequent application for citizenship was revoked on character grounds. He went on to travel regularly between Oslo and Iraq while setting up Ansar al-Islam. Norway refuses to extradite people to countries which practise torture or capital punishment – including the United States and Iraq. As Krekar’s alleged crimes have occurred in such countries, he has been able to use Norway’s progressive legal code as a shield. In 2002 Krekar was detained on the Iranian border and deported to Norway. While transiting through Amsterdam, he was arrested by Dutch authorities acting on a Jordanian extradition request. Diplomatic cables reveal that both the Dutch and American governments provided legal assistance as Jordan made its case. Particular energy was spent ensuring that Jordan’s assurances it would not apply the death penalty would be acceptable to a Dutch court. A fear expressed by the Dutch was that the extradition attempt could fail in conjunction with a Norwegian revocation of Krekar’s refugee status. In such an event, they would have been forced to release Krekar into the Dutch community. Doubtless, similar fears have come into play when the governments of other nations – including the Australian government – have considered extraditing or detaining Krekar. Ultimately Jordan’s extradition attempt failed, and Krekar was returned to Norway. Despite several more attempts to expel him – and an alleged attempt by the United States to apply “extraordinary rendition”

Flowers are placed in front of a photo of slain Australian cameraman Paul Moran during a memorial service for him in the city of Suleimaniya, after he was killed in a suicide attack at a checkpoint outside village of Khormal in northern Iraq in 2003. (Newspix)

“There’s no difference between suicide bombs and using Kalashnikov. What’s the difference when you send the fighters to death?”

and kidnap the mullah – he remains in the country. His presence has sparked fears of radicalisation among Norway’s Islamic community. He has been used as a poster boy by the Norwegian far right to push their anti-Islamic line. A Facebook group was even established to collect funds for his murder. In 2010 Krekar stated that “Norway will pay a heavy price for my death”, adding that “if Erna Solberg [leader of Norway’s Conservative Party] sends me out, and I die, she will suffer the same fate.” Subsequent to these comments, Norwegian prosecutors filed charges. On March 26, Krekar was sentenced to five years in jail for issuing death threats against Erna Solberg and others. When The Walkley Magazine contacted Shabana Rehman, a writer, stand-up comic and prominent member of Oslo’s immigrant community, she noted that Krekar is so without friends in Norway that supporters had to be flown in from the UK for his trial. Rehman is known for bodily lifting Krekar during an event they both attended, in an attempt to diminish his status as a figure to be feared. There seems little prospect of further action against Krekar by the Australian government. In response to an enquiry, the AFP stated, “there was insufficient information available to justify an investigation.” The attorney-general’s department said only that it “does not disclose whether or not it has made or received an extradition request before a person is arrested.” The Alliance had written to the attorneygeneral back in 2009 on the heels of the AFP’s war crimes probe into the 1975 murder of five journalists in Balibo, East Timor. As justice seemed near for those journalists, it was hoped it might also be near for Paul Moran. In April, the Alliance’s federal secretary, Chris Warren, issued a renewed call for Krekar’s extradition in light of the ABC’s report on the diplomatic cable. The opportunity is still present – if the government will take it. Grahame Bowland is a freelance journalist and software engineer based in Perth

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Q FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE

Unwrapping West Papua

Kayt Davies finds out how West Papua Media is training locals to get the information foreign news teams can’t

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uzzwords about different forms of journalism come and go but there’s a new one taking hold, “witness journalism”. As the tide of spin – both corporate and political – has been rising, newsroom editors have stood by the value of first-hand eyewitness statements. They have sought to send out their own crews to see for themselves what is happening and to ask the people there, on the spot, what they saw with their own eyes. When these reports come back the editors trust them because they trust their own people. But with newsrooms now shrinking, and atrocities happening in places they can’t send people to, a problem has emerged – and in response a solution is taking shape. West Papua Media was one of the very first media projects to start nurturing witness journalism. It came into being because Indonesia’s foreign media ban was making it increasingly difficult for international news crews to get into West Papua to document events.

In 2007, four fixers who had been working with news crews in West Papua started thinking that it may be easier to train West Papuans to properly and credibly document the events and send the information out, rather than get the news crews in. Australian Nick Chesterfield was one of those four. The group’s approach was to borrow the field-research methodology used by human rights organisations and customise it to yield the sort of information journalists and newsrooms need to construct hard news articles. It includes the classic question set ‘WWWWW and How’, and tables for recording body counts and injuries. They created some easy-to-use software and protocols to handle the data and set about recruiting Papuans in Papua to become their network of stringers. The first recruits were 10 people they already knew and trusted, who as well as being trained to use the new methodology, gave them what Chesterfield calls “a laundry list of all of the sorts of things that they needed access to and training for”. The list

included basic journalism training, as well as skills with cameras, audio recorders, laptops, mobile phones, and how to secure, disseminate and back up their material. For the past four years, the West Papua Media crew and their supporters, who include many of the journalists they have worked with as fixers, have been working their way through the list, developing the capacity of the Papuans to be credible witness journalists. West Papua Media has trained 34 others since 2008, expanding the reach of its network through the troubled territory. Running parallel with the development of this project has been the evolution of both the non-violent protest movement and the armed resistance in West Papua. There has also been a rapid uptake of new technologies by West Papuans in both urban and remote locations. This has meant more opportunities for citizens to capture video of news events as they unfold. But Chesterfield worries that people trying to film events involving live X

Forkorus Yobeisembut (front), Edison Waromi and other members of the Jayapura 5, speaking to journalists outside the Third Papuan Peoples’ Congress treason trial on February 8, 2012. In March, the West Papuan leaders were sentenced to three years’ jail for their involvement in pro-independence statements made at the Congress last year. (West Papua Media)

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Q FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE

X ammunition, without basic training in how to stay safe while doing that, are risking their lives. In 2010 the West Papua Media crew created a new training module called the Safe Witness Broadcasting Training. It’s a comprehensive run-through of the dos and don’ts of reporting in civil resistance and repressive contexts that goes far beyond what is taught in most Australian journalism courses. In Chesterfield’s words: “In Papua anyone with a camera will take a photo if they see something happening and this is why we want to expand, because it’s extremely dangerous. We want anyone who wants to hold up a camera to be a journalist, and we want them to be a safe journalist. There are ways, for instance, in a situation with live fire to ensure that footage is taken without putting yourself or your friends in harm’s way.” The training is a heavily modified version of Hostile Environment First Aid Training, which some of the West Papua Media crew were already familiar with, having previously worked for human rights monitoring organisations. It has been extended and customised to include journalism scenarios, requiring news judgment and levelheadedness in the face of threats to personal safety. It doesn’t assume that the people in uniforms are likely to be helpful, or that there is any chance of a helicopter being sent to airlift you out of the situation. If finances allow, West Papua Media plans to do more training in West Papua in 2012, but funding is a sticking point as the project relies entirely on donations from individuals and all-too-rare payments from media companies for the content they use. When it comes to dissemination, West Papua Media has two strategies. It has evolved from being a newswire that in its early days simply sent breaking news to an email list of journalists, to being a website (westpapuamedia.info) that distributes news via Facebook, Twitter and bulletins for subscribers. It also continues to liaise

PRESS-FREEDOM ---2012 Kicking at the cornerstone of democracy: The State of Press Freedom in Australia, 2012

42 T H E W A L K L E Y M A G A Z I N E

“We want anyone who wants to hold up a camera to be a journalist, and we want them to be a safe journalist”

with media companies, offering both fixing services and access to text, images, audio and footage when big news stories break or investigative pieces are completed. While the project has had some success in getting news onto Australian front pages and TV screens, Chesterfield believes the situation in West Papua is still underreported in Australia – given Australia’s support of the Indonesian regime and the involvement of Australian mining companies. He offers a few reasons for this. One is that the story is complex, but he suspects it’s also a case of: “If they start covering it now, people will ask why they didn’t cover it before.” Another stumbling block is that editors tend to want their own staff to do the eyewitness reporting. But getting into Papua is difficult and requires the help of fixers, who as part of West Papua Media make stringent demands about the protection of sources, including limiting the carriage and use of mobile phones that can be triangulated and tracked, and in some cases disguising or not revealing their identities. According to Chesterfield, the West Papua Media source protection conditions sometimes evoke responses such as, “Oh! We can’t take those sorts of precautions, you know it’s all about openness and accountability,” to which he responds, “Yeah, but you’re going to get people killed.” The other possible source of news out of Papua could be via local media outlets. The territory has several newspapers, radio and TV stations. But according to Chesterfield, most newsrooms in Papua: “operate with an Indonesian intelligence officer in their

A free press is one of the cornerstones of a liberal democracy. Only with a truly free and independent press can we hold governments to account and speak truth to power. The Media Alliance champions press freedom through our annual report, the most comprehensive run-down on legal issues affecting journalists in Australia and New Zealand, covering: % FOI % Privacy % Secrecy % Press regulation % Shield laws % Whistleblower protection

newsroom or as their cameraman, which is extremely daunting for any honest journalist when they see that. You know in Australia there’s self-censorship because people might not get a career advance, but in Papua there’s self-censorship because when you go home from work you might be killed.” While in an Australian context this sounds a little alarmist, he quotes the Pacific Media Freedom Report published in the Pacific Journalism Review late last year, which described West Papua as “extremely unsafe for journalists”. He adds that in West Papua journalists are “routinely stabbed, routinely attacked and murdered because intimidation of journalists is a normal part of the Indonesian operation manual.” The reality of these risks highlights the value of the witness journalism work that West Papua Media is now producing. Chesterfield wishes it was better understood by Australian news editors, who routinely put the task of sorting spin from fact about West Papua in the too-hard basket. Asked what West Papua Media has to offer editors that the international news agencies don’t, he says: “Talent on the ground, and a process that prioritises finding credible eyewitnesses, rather than simply asking the security forces public affairs departments for their versions of what happened.” Asked why news editors should believe the version of events presented by the West Papua Media stringers, especially as in some cases they can’t be named (or they would be targeted), he says: “It’s because we are adamant about our stringers following our process. Whenever there is any reason to doubt what they send us, we request confirmation from another source or two sources, or more information, and they send us the raw data as well, which we archive – and news editors who want to see the raw data only have to ask for it.” Dr Kayt Davies is a senior lecturer in journalism at Edith Cowan University

% Access to detention centres % Media ownership % Suppression orders % Defamation law This year’s report features essays from top journalists, lawyers and academics including: % Paul Barry % Richard Ackland % Julian Disney % Michael McKinnon % Andrea Petrie % Ursula Cheer % Cameron Stewart % Nick McKenzie

“Jam-packed with information and informed comment on all the relevant issues - freedom of information, secrecy, whistleblowing, shield laws, privacy, copyright, open justice, national security, censorship and more.” Peter Timmins on the 2011 Press Freedom report. You can find this year’s press freedom report at: www.alliance.org.au

Q PRESS FREEDOM

Repressive habits die hard in Burma Despite some recent improvements, Burma is still a long, long way from having a free media says Natasha Grzincic

F

ollowing Aung San Suu Kyi’s electoral victory in April, the Australian government has rewarded Burma for its move toward democratic reform by announcing it will lift travel restrictions on Burmese leaders and other sanctions. Together with press freedom achievements since late last year – at least 10 jailed journalists were freed, journalists have been able to set up an independent network unimpeded, and some journalists in exile were granted visas to return to their homeland – you’d think that media freedom was flourishing. But as long as the army holds ultimate power there are no guarantees that these gains won’t be reversed.

New media law doesn’t look promising The government is drafting a new media law that is meant to replace the old censorship body before the end of this year. A conference in March on the promised media reforms was attended by a host of press freedom groups, exiled Burmese media and local journalists. But participants left the meeting ambivalent about the government’s intentions. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) voiced concern that the new media legislation will merely employ different tools of suppression, “similar to the legal restrictions on the press in neighbouring countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam.” So will the new law prevent threats to the media and allow anyone to publish items on sensitive issues? That’s still anybody’s guess, as the full text of the draft law has not been made public.

Laws still criminalise dissent There is still no indication that the regime intends to overturn the various repressive laws on its books. Key offenders include the Electronics Act, which allows for jail terms for anyone who sends unauthorised information over the internet. Authorities frequently have used the law to repress and imprison journalists, according to the CPJ. There is also Section 122 of the Penal Code of Burma 1957, which prohibits any criticism of the government or the state. The Printers and Publishers Registration Act 1962 establishes the government’s controversial censorship arm, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD), and broadcasting censorship board, which approve all press, television, radio and cinema content before it can be published.

Plus, there are big problems with the system in general. The judicial system does not yet act independently or protect the rule of law, and Burma has yet to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Censorship prevails While it’s true that pre-publication censorship has been relaxed in recent months (namely around fluffier lifestyle and entertainment stories), a recent International Media Support (IMS) report found that Burma’s censorship board still orders the removal of approximately 20 to 25 per cent of articles submitted by newspapers and magazines covering current affairs. Censorship concerns were underscored when the PSRD banned a critical commentary about the March media reform conference written by veteran journalist Ludu Sein Win. The banned article was later published by The Irrawaddy, an exile-run magazine and website. Even as the conference was underway, the ministry of mining was bringing a criminal defamation action against Kyaw Min Swe, publisher of The Voice, for reporting alleged corruption claims against it.

Election coverage was restricted The April by-elections in Burma were subject to media restrictions. Ahead of the elections, the PSRD issued a list of “Do’s and don’ts for the media covering the by-elections”, including a ban on taking photographs or conducting interviews within 500 metres of a polling station. In the weeks leading up to the elections, the PSRD summoned and reprimanded the editors of two opposition-aligned newspapers for articles that were deemed overly critical of the government. The National League for Democracy’s D-Wave was warned for publishing a political cartoon that depicted the PSRD as a chain preventing a news publication called “Press Freedom” from reaching clouds labelled “Democratic Sky”. Officials called it “harsh, offensive and rude”. The Rakhine Nationalities Development Party’s (RNDP) journal was reprimanded for a February 29 article called “From a green military uniform government to a yellow-skirt democracy”, which poked fun at the recent transition from a military to a quasi-civilian government. Even Suu Kyi complained that government officials had censored a segment of one of her campaign speeches before it was aired on state-controlled media. The banned passage

Aung San Suu Kyi also complained her speeches were censored. (© NEWSPIX)

As long as the army holds ultimate power there are no guarantees that these gains won’t be reversed

was critical of the previous military junta’s abuse of laws to repress the population, and violated an Election Commission list of forbidden campaign topics. “The nine-point list of banned topics has effectively muted critical debate on the campaign trail and as a result blunted any hard-hitting news coverage of the preelection period,” said the CPJ.

Burma still has political prisoners In January, Burma released more than 300 political prisoners in a presidential amnesty, including high-profile blogger Nay Phone Latt and all the jailed Democratic Voice of Burma journalists. The number of documented political prisoners before the release ranged from 500 to 1500, according to freedom of expression group ARTICLE 19. Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF) says at least five of those still locked away are journalists and bloggers (Zaw Tun, Win Saing, Ne Min, Aung Htun and Kaung Myat Hlaing, who’s also known as Nat Soe). The journalists released along with other political prisoners have been paroled, not amnestied, which means they could end up serving their sentences if they are once again arrested. “Unfortunately, without a free press or freedom of speech, we do not know how many political prisoners remain languishing in Burmese jails. We urge the international community to remember that without free expression, Burma can never be truly free,” says ARTICLE 19. Natasha Grzincic is the online editor at IFEX, a global network of committed organisations working to defend and promote free expression

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Q PAYING TRIBUTE

A brave heart Marie Colvin January 12, 1956 – February 22, 2012 “My job is to bear witness. I have never been

interested in knowing what make of plane had just bombed a village or whether the artillery that fired at it was 120mm or 155mm. I write about people so that others might understand the truth.”

M

arie Colvin left Beirut on Valentine’s Day on a fateful mission to illegally enter Syria and document the conditions of the civilian population in Homs, who had been under heavy attack for the preceding two weeks. With more than 25 years’ experience in the Middle East, she had made contact through friends in Beirut with smugglers. They agreed to take her and her colleague, French photographer Rémi Ochlik, to a makeshift media centre in the besieged neighbourhood of Baba Amr in Homs. Marie reassured apprehensive friends in Beirut. She told me she would return “no later than one week maximum, certainly I’ll be back by your birthday Franklin! (Feb. 26).” Her mother, Rosemarie, who lives in New York City, said Marie planned to arrive back in Beirut on February 22. As it turned out, that was the day she was killed as 11 artillery shells slammed into her cramped quarters. An accident? Eleven rounds all fired into one 10-metre-wide, two-storey building? Or were Colvin and her colleagues targeted, as is widely claimed by witnesses on the scene in Baba Amr? Jean-Pierre Perrin, a journalist for the Paris-based Liberation newspaper who was with Marie until the day she died, said the journalists had been told that the Syrian Army was “deliberately” going to shell their centre. “A few days ago we were advised to leave the city urgently and we were told: ‘if they (the Syrian Army) find you they will kill you.’ I then left the city with Marie but she decided to go back when she saw that the major offensive had not yet taken place.” It was clear to her friends that Marie needed to document the story of Homs. She had to tell the story and give a voice to the voiceless, who had been under bombardment since February 3. Her mother says Colvin had been told twice by her editor to leave Syria because of the danger she was facing, but Marie replied that she “wanted to finish one more story”. She had a highly accomplished career as a journalist – she was twice named foreign reporter of the year (2001 and 2010) in the British Press Awards. She was given an

“You just try to find out the truth of what’s going on and report it the best way you can”

International Women’s Media Foundation award for courage in journalism for her coverage of Kosovo and Chechnya. And the Foreign Press Association named her as journalist of the year in 2000. The London Times editorialised that her reporting and subsequent death had strengthened global opposition to oppression and that “Marie stood for truth and courage, which, when brought together, are the greatest moral force on the planet.” Sunday Times editor John Witherow said in a statement that Colvin “believed profoundly that reporting could curtail the excesses of brutal regimes and make the international community take notice.” Simon Kelner, chief executive of The Journalism Foundation in London, wrote: “Marie Colvin embodied all the qualities required of a great journalist: bravery, integrity and a fearless desire to seek the truth. At a time when newspapers are under intense scrutiny, her work is a reminder of the fundamental purpose of journalism, and her death, along with the French photographer Rémi Ochlik, represents a dark day indeed.” Marie explained not long ago how she viewed a reporter’s job. “You hear all this talk about the meaning of the media, the need for integrity, etc,” she said during a November 2010 talk at London’s St Bride’s Church, the “journalists’ church” on Fleet Street, at an event to honour fallen journalists. “But isn’t it quite simple? You just try to find out the truth of what’s going on and report it the best way you can. And because we are kind of romantic, our sympathy goes towards the underdog.” It was after she lost her left eye in 2001, while reporting on the Tamil resistance in Sri Lanka, that she elaborated publicly on her reason for covering wars. She wrote of the importance of telling people what really happens and about “humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable”. Her final audio report during the night of February 21 was a British ITN news report from Homs – arguably the world’s most dangerous war zone. “The Syrians are not allowing civilians to leave; anyone who gets on the street is hit by a shell. If they are not hit by a shell they are hit by snipers. There are snipers all around on the high buildings. I think the sickening thing is the complete merciless nature. They are hitting the civilian buildings absolutely mercilessly and without caring and the scale of it is just shocking.” The next morning, shortly before she died, Marie filed her final written report. It is testimony to the quality of her reporting, her humanity and her skill and passion in telling the human drama she witnessed. “The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one… On the lips of everyone was the question: ‘Why have we

been abandoned by the world?’” Marie Catherine Colvin will never be far from the hearts of those who were honoured to know her from her writings and sincere friendship. Marie’s murder is a great loss for all people of goodwill. Franklin Lamb is an author, journalist and activist; [email protected]

One of a kind Margaret Whitlam November 19, 1919 – March 17, 2012

M

argaret Whitlam had not been in the public limelight as a prime minister’s wife for well over 40 years. So what was it about this woman that touched the hearts and lives of so many Australians? Why has she become one of the most admired and beloved of Australian women? These were the questions that were foremost in my mind when I began the archaeological dig that ultimately became my biography of her. Many of the answers to these questions lie in the early years of her life before she met Gough Whitlam and married him. She knew from an early age what it was to be different. She was tall, very tall compared to others of her own age. As a little girl of four, her mother agreed to make her a fairy dress, her reason being “before she got too large”. Margaret Dovey was always too tall for shop-bought clothes and her mother hand-sewed dresses for her all her life. Both her parents were determined that being tall was never going to prevent their daughter from doing anything she wanted to do or be. She was enrolled in ballet lessons, piano lessons, swimming lessons, and played basketball, hockey and tennis. She was greatly loved and always included in music and theatre outings by her parents, future Supreme Court judge Bill Dovey and his wife, Mary. She was a doer and threw herself into every activity with enthusiasm. Life for her was a grand adventure and it was important to enjoy every minute of it. Being very tall – in her prime she was 6 foot 2 inches (188cm) – may be an advantage if you are a man. But as a girl born in 1919, her height not only set her apart but was something that people endlessly felt the need to comment on. “How’s the air up there?” was a constant refrain and difficult to answer with civility when you have X heard it a thousand times.

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Q PAYING TRIBUTE

She thrilled the British media by announcing, “ask me an outrageous question and I’ll give you an outrageous answer” It was her mother who taught her how to overcome adolescent shyness with people she didn’t know. She jollied her out of it by saying, “just stand there by the door, Margaret, look around, and if you know anybody, go up to them. If you don’t know anybody, then ask questions and find out who they are.” Every time I accompanied Margaret to an outing, as a friend as well as a biographer, she always made the effort to talk to everyone and make you feel included and at ease. There was an unpretentious warmth that drew people to her. This was of course a great asset as the wife of a politician, particularly a politician like Gough, who was not given to small talk and casual conversation. Her first choice of a career was journalism. Her father, a barrister, took her to meet Frank Packer for whom he did legal work. Packer was the largest owner of newspapers and magazines at the time. At a meeting in his office he said to her, “So, girlie, what do you want to do – the social notes?” She replied that while she liked socialising, she didn’t want to write about it. “Well, What do you fancy doing then?” he queried. “Court reporting or crime or something like that,” she announced boldly. “Oh no girlie,” he said, “our girls only do social work.” That ruled out journalism for her. She didn’t however let it depress her. Throughout her life, whatever happened

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she always looked forwards, never backwards. “I always feel when something ends, something new is going to begin and it’s going to be just as exciting.” It was, however, many years later, as the wife of the prime minister, when the editor of the Woman’s Day rang and asked her if she would write a weekly column about her life, much as Eleanor Roosevelt had done in her column “My Day”. Margaret leapt at the opportunity as she had always wanted to write. For many years she had jotted down in a notebook her impressions and descriptions of various happenings and events. More importantly, she saw it as a chance to share her experiences with people, particularly women, who would never have those opportunities. “I came to represent all the ungainly people, the too-tall ones, the too-fat ones and the housebound, as I had been, who’d never get the chance to go to China or Buckingham Palace, and who experienced it all through me,” she told The National Times in 1985. Not everyone approved of her indulging in this sharing activity with the Australian public. Many letter writers to Woman’s Day complained that she was breaking protocol by divulging details of the royal family to ordinary Australians. Margaret was unrepentant. In her deeply felt democratic spirit she wanted these so-called “ordinary Australians” to ride on her shoulders and enjoy such things with her. She was equally unapologetic about voicing her own opinions on issues social and political. Many found it shocking when she openly stated her belief in the legalisation of marijuana. “I am not a mouthpiece for my husband, or the ALP, and it is very frustrating for me when people assume that I am,” she said. It was statements like these that shattered the long-held view that the wife of a PM should be seen and not heard, that her role was to utter a few tired platitudes and disappear to the big house on the hill. She thrilled the British media by announcing, “ask me an outrageous question and I’ll give you an outrageous answer.” Members of the Australian media found her “a breath of fresh air”. And she never ceased to be so. While she was a loss to journalism, she was a great gift to the nation. There has never been a woman in our political life who could hold a candle to her. Susan Mitchell is a novelist, playwright, newspaper columnist and writer, radio interviewer and speaker

The Darwin principle Richard (Dick) Muddimer June 24, 1929 – March 3, 2012

T

he journalist credited with being the first to get news of Darwin’s devastation by Cyclone Tracy to the world has died in Darwin aged 83. Dick Muddimer had lived in the Northern Territory for almost 50 years, having arrived in Australia as a “ten quid immigrant” in 1963. Born in London, he was educated and grew up in Leicester. Faced with the unwelcome prospect of becoming a provincial accountant, he was saved by his two years of National Service, which included time in post-war Germany. Afterwards he had the freedom to enter what some of his family saw as the disreputable trade of journalism. He worked as a reporter in Leicester, Margate and Nottingham, but when the Nottingham papers closed he decided to try the Australian government’s Assisted Migration Program. Dick arrived in Sydney aboard the Fairsea and within days had found work on Sir Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph. However the outback, which had entranced him from his early cinema-going days, lured him and after only six months on the Telly he found himself in Alice Springs. There followed a series of jobs: digging house foundations, working on seismic surveys for oil in the Centre, and then in Queensland on the MV Poseidon delivering supplies from Cairns to Thursday Island. But the Territory had entered his heart. He thought about returning to Alice Springs, but when the bus reached Three Ways at the junction of the Stuart and Barkly Highways, he flipped a coin and instead headed north to Darwin. His first job at the Rum Jungle uranium mine soon palled and when the ABC’s sole radio journalist in Darwin, Bud Eastley, was looking for an assistant, Muddimer got the job. However he was attracted to the more exciting journalism of the Northern Territory News under legendary editor Jim Bowditch, then operating out of a building known as “The Tin Shed” – a leaky wartime Sidney Williams hut. In 1971, Darwin became the last mainland capital to get television with the opening of ABC Channel 6. To prepare for the expansion of news activities to

His story that “Darwin is a blitzed city” was felt by a sub to be a bit of an exaggeration and was watered down

television, the newsroom went from three to seven journalists and Dick gained a permanent slot as the morning reporter. His colleagues at that time included the journalist-in-charge, Geoff Hughes, who went on to be a foreign correspondent in Kuala Lumpur and New Delhi, and Mike Hayes, renowned as a broadcaster and writer of the “Prickle Farm” books and programs. Dick was a journalist of the old school, uncomfortable with both radio and television but a good writer with a nose for news. This capacity came to the fore in December 1974 when Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin. He was not rostered to work on Christmas Day (that was to be my job), but at daybreak he looked out from his unroofed and flooded single-storey flat in the inner suburb of Stuart Park and knew he was a part of a major story. With the bonnet ripped from his Mini Moke and the engine saturated, he set off to walk the three kilometres to the ABC studios with the aftermath of the cyclone still making itself felt. The walk gave him a chance to see more of the devastation. Finding no communications at the ABC, the police headquarters, the Overland Telecommunications Commission or anywhere else in the city, he headed to the TV transmitters in Blake Street, a walk of another couple of kilometres. By 1974 the microwave link had been extended to Darwin and at the transmitters he found one of the microwave bearers was being held open for a planned Papal broadcast on the commercial television station NTD8. He persuaded the duty technician to get a message via a technician in Mount Isa to the ABC and so the world heard of the devastation, though not as Dick had described it. His story that “Darwin is a blitzed city” (a comparison he could readily make from his wartime experiences) was felt by a sub to be a bit of an exaggeration and was watered down. The first television footage of the disaster, filmed by Keith Bushnell, showed the accuracy of Dick’s assessment of the damage, and won Bushnell the inaugural Thorn Award. For some years after Cyclone Tracy all television programming – by then in colour – came via the microwave link from Queensland, with local content (still in blackand-white) inserted into brief windows. In the late 1970s, Muddimer returned to the Northern Territory News as chief political reporter. It was a position he held until, as he told it, he was compulsorily retired by the paper’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch himself. Dick would happily have worked on, probably for years. Dick had earned some local notoriety as a founding member of the Darwin Sun Club

and was a campaigner for a nudist beach, a fight won when the government declared the Casuarina free beach. Writing in 1989 of the Sun Club’s demise, just short of its 21st anniversary, Dick found it ironic that the success of the free beach fight had hastened the club’s demise. He never married, and in later years led a Spartan existence in a small 1950s cottage in prestigious Fannie Bay, surrounded by books and his succession of beloved dogs. A network of neighbours and former work colleagues cared for him in a variety of ways, including taking him shopping and making telephone calls, because Dick resolutely refused to install a phone. He had always been a pipe smoker, a habit only relinquished in the last months of his life when his doctor told him it was contributing to the circulation problems making it harder for him to walk. He was admitted to Royal Darwin Hospital in March for a procedure to improve his circulation, but when he was returned to the ward he suffered a heart attack. He instructed doctors that if it happened again he was not to be revived and died peacefully in his sleep the following morning. Dick Muddimer was not only a journo of the old school, he was universally seen as a thorough gentleman of the old-English type. Always a bit unkempt, Dick was set in his ways, independent, occasionally irascible, but unfailingly polite. He is survived by his brother and sister, John and Sally, and several nieces and nephews, all living in England. Richard Creswick was a journalist with the ABC in Perth and Darwin.

A class act Cliff Neville April 3, 1948 – March 20, 2012

“C

liff Neville was the perfect chiefof-staff. His calm and relaxed exterior belied a very good and very quick brain. He was aware of all the ramifications of any story.” That was Andrew Haughton, a former 60 Minutes producer, talking about his friend, the supervising producer of the Nine Network’s flagship current affairs program, who died of cancer in March, aged 63. From 1984 to 2002, Cliff Neville was the glue that held 60 Minutes together. He thrived first under the guidance of the program’s founding executive producer, Gerald Stone, who taught him the best lesson a manager

“In an industry with no class, he was class personified”

can learn: “Praise in public, and criticise in private.” A later boss at 60 Minutes, Peter Meakin, now the news and current affairs director at the Seven Network, told The Australian he “would have gone bananas” without Neville as his deputy: “Cliff was a rock – solid, dependable, wise and loyal. A friend to all, a servant to none.” Cliff was educated in the hard world of Sydney journalism in the ’60s and ’70s, and the pubs where journalists such as Mark Day and Phil Cornford would tell you in no uncertain terms where you had gone right or wrong. He started as a cadet with Sydney’s Daily Telegraph in the late ’60s, then became a feature writer with the Sunday Telegraph before moving to the UK and the role of London correspondent for The Australian in the mid-’70s. He returned to Sydney in 1976 to become chief-of-staff of The Australian, where he earned his legendary status. Demonstrating dignity, courtesy and class, he was able to motivate and inspire staff to work long hours and break big stories. The journos loved him. Neville moved to television in 1982 as deputy news director at the Seven Network under Vincent Smith. Graham Davis, a Walkley and Logie winner, was a young reporter at Seven and remembers Neville as a master mentor: “No-one was treated as more important than anyone else. He forged lasting friendships with even the most junior of his charges and took great pleasure in their subsequent success. “In 1984, Cliff went to 60 Minutes where he made his real mark in television: pitching story ideas and bringing people together at lunch – healing wounds that would have festered if they hadn’t been brought out into the open. “After taking a voluntary redundancy in 2002, Cliff produced stories as a freelancer for 60 Minutes and later for Seven’s Sunday Night program on subjects as diverse as Burt Bacharach, Sophie Delezio, Twiggy Forrest and Black Caviar. He also was a Walkley judge.” Cliff Neville was renowned for his medical knowledge and years ago knew he had bowel cancer before his doctors did. He used to say: “There is no such thing as a battle against cancer or a good death.” But he did die at home with his long-time partner, Jocelyn Dent, and his faithful Jack Russell terrier, Fobwatch, the chairman of his company Fobwatch Productions, nearby. Andrew Haughton sums up his legacy: “In an industry with no class, he was class personified. No-one will remember Cliff without a smile on his or her face.” Tom Krause was a long-time friend of Cliff Neville’s and worked with him at The Australian and the Seven and Nine networks

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Q REVIEWS

A daughter’s voice Alan Kennedy shares a book about a father and daughter that everyone should read

I

t’s time we talked about Alice – Alice Pung that is. Her memorable name began popping up in The Monthly on quirky little stories that had a particular ‘voice’: appealing, informative and with a fine sense of humour and irony in the undercurrent. Then I saw a speech of hers to women lawyers which, for all its worthiness, sounds like a stuffy affair and yet here is young Pung making a speech about the law in which at one stage she says: “In the wise words of Spider-Man – ‘with great power comes great responsibility’.” She went on: “But I think to my first days of practising the law, writing that first tender submission in Dad’s office, and writing that will that made me parent of my siblings if anything should happen to my parents. And my community’s ‘stupid’ and ‘zany’ ideas about what the law should be – practical, useful, helpful, easy to understand. And I am reminded of the words of Charles Lamb – ‘Lawyers too, were once children’ [sic]. And I realised, the practice of the law is not really all about legal texts. It’s not even about words – because sometimes, you have to look beyond the multitudes of words, to see the things and the people that the words don’t cover – those without words, students without conventionally accepted carer status, women without employment contracts, men without shelter.” Now while some may claim it was SpiderMan’s Uncle Ben or even Voltaire who said that, this is pure Pung, a speech full of humour, humanity and empathy. Her book Her Father’s Daughter is one I have pressed on everyone I meet. The opening chapters are breathtaking in the projection of this unique voice which takes us on a journey across the killing fields of Cambodia, the migrant experience of two damaged people and the experience of the Australian-born child who wants to grow up in her new world but who feels the pull of her parents who are puzzled, confused and full of unspoken anxieties. It is funny and emotional. You almost have to close your eyes as you read what her father went through

This unique voice… takes us on a journey across the killing fields of Cambodia, the migrant experience of two damaged people and the experience of the Australianborn child

in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. How could anyone survive this? And yet he became the owner of a Retravision outlet, bought a home and educated his children. But his anxieties about separation from his children and an almost obsessive wish to protect them from the world were always there. He doesn’t understand Alice’s decision to live in college. He stresses about her being outside his protective shield. Then you read of Alice’s first nights in college in a room of her own. All her life she has lived in a crowded family home where privacy is a foreign concept and they bunk down like puppies. She slept with her sisters. It is a magic journey as the young Alice appreciates what makes her tick and what makes her parents tick. Near the end is a chapter I have read and re-read about a birthday lunch in a restaurant in Melbourne’s Chinatown. “Sometimes he looked at his wife and thought this is what I have done to another human being. This is what my love has demanded of her. Three decades and four children later, and she was a middle-aged woman who still could not read or write, but who commanded staff at his store, carried vacuum cleaners and food processors and laptop computers from the warehouse to the shop floor, and sold more stock than anyone. “And now she was sitting there without thinking feeding him with a pair of chopsticks. ‘My old man, what are you thinking about?’ she asked. Inside he felt the same as when he was 30. That was when he was born again. Not born to Christ or even to the Buddha, but just born and that was enough.” Pung is one of the best young writers in Australia. Her Father’s Daughter is an exhilarating journey. Take it. Her Father’s Daughter by Alice Pung, published by Black Inc., RRP $29.95. Contribute to the Walkley book blog . If you have read a book you want to share let us know. Email your review to [email protected]

NATIONAL INTEREST BY AIDAN FENNESSY

A powerful account of a family’s belated justice for the shocking fate of their son, one of the Balibo Five.

6 JUNE TO 21 JULY mtc.com.au

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A co-production with Black Swan State Theatre Company

The last rich nation standing Australia is the last rich nation standing after the GFC, and a new book by George Megalogenis looks at the four decades of reform that got us there, writes Malcolm Farr

H

ere’s a good start to a political parlour game. Who said this? “Few predicted the extent of the present world recession. For a period we in Australia were fortunate not to feel its full effect.” And a bit more: “Our economic policies and relative energy endowments created a more favourable investment climate in Australia than in most other countries. This sustained our economic growth beyond that of others.” So who said it? A grateful treasurer Wayne Swan some time after the global financial crisis? Nope. It was treasurer John Howard delivering the 1982–83 Budget. The Australian Moment by George Megalogenis is a wonderful source for such quizzes. It shows how often our top politicians were caught within the same economic cycles over the past 40 years and were condemned to repeat mistakes. But Megalogenis has not set out to aid and abet parlour games. He has charted the past 40 years of economic debate, of how national economic management has evolved since the early 1970s when the first, heavily contested steps towards exposing Australia to the swirl and dominance of global markets were taken. After years of simply being occasions to see if beer and cigarette taxes would rise, federal budgets suddenly became important more broadly for an electorate that was swiftly teaching itself more sophisticated economic theory. The world outside Australia was intruding on our economy more vigorously. Bob Menzies had to deal with a wool boom after the Korean War, Britain’s Common Market entry and the importance of growth in Japan’s output. But his successors had to handle unprecedented problems, from contrived energy emergencies after politically

George Megalogenis is a proud broadsheet pointy head who has been blessed by tabloid training.

motivated oil crunches imposed by OPEC, to the movement of the economic centre to Asia, to the worldwide contagion of banking collapses as seen in the GFC. Plodding boldly through all this – the changes were daring but they did take a while – was a succession of governments which dropped tariffs, floated the currency, handed interest rate settings to the central bank, and de-fanged the union movement’s wage-setting traditions. The collective result has been a nation positioned more confidently than any other to exploit the reshaped international economy of the 21st century. George Megalogenis is a proud broadsheet pointy head who has been blessed by tabloid training. He wallows in statistics and theory but tells his story cleanly so it is readily digested. In The Australian Moment he charts the flubs and hesitancies of opening up the economy. One definition of madness is doing the same thing several times in hope of a different outcome. By that definition there were times when management of Australia’s economy was in the bonkers bananas category. Megalogenis highlights one episode which involves that type of mental frailty but also anchors the story of economy’s progress until today. One of the most poignant images of post-war politics is that of a crumpled, unshaven Rex Connor, Whitlam’s minerals minister, waiting in his office through the Canberra nights for a telex message confirming that a British-based spiv named Khemlani had negotiated with Middle Eastern oil tsars a massive loan to pay for the modernisation of Australia’s resources industry. Connor’s young friend Paul Keating told him, “For God’s sake Rex, this is no way for a minister to behave.” Megalogenis marks the importance of the sad, failed vigil. “The loans affair was a dummy run for the global financial crisis 34 years later,” he writes. “The two fiascos are connected by the same flawed assumption: that borrowing

carries no risk if the purpose is nation building. The oil shock delivered windfall surpluses to the Mid East that the West assumed would be better off back in the hands of the original consumer.” Two political generations later it wasn’t oil money the West was attempting to repatriate. It was manufacturing trade money held by China. Both pursuits led to disaster. Writing of our immediate past history, Megalogenis outlines the big US borrowing to fund home ownership and notes: “The biggest banks in America, Europe and Japan had thought they had unlocked the secret to perpetual profit. “They were to economic rationalism what the politicians of the 1970s had been to Keynesianism – the zealots who took the theory too far.” And Megalogenis explains why Australia didn’t fall for the same trick a second time. First, our banks were regulated more than those overseas and prevented from granting housing loans to people a payday away from bankruptcy. And the Reserve Bank increased interest rates between 2004 and 2006, blocking a housing bubble here as a massive housing decompression was about to hit US banks. Megalogenis addresses some myths in his book. He stands up for Gough Whitlam’s economic management, something you don’t read every day. He points out the global pressure the Australian economy was bashed by between 1972 and 1975, not to mention the destructive, pigheaded chase for wage rises through the ACTU led by Bob Hawke. When Liberal Malcolm Fraser departed the prime minister’s office in 1983 he left behind twice the unemployment rate Whitlam produced in 1975 and an inflation rate only slightly lower. The Australian Moment: How we were made for these times by George Megalogenis, published by Penguin (Viking imprint), RRP $32.95. Malcolm Farr is Canberra-based national political editor for news.com.au and regular contributor to thepunch.com.au

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Q REVIEWS

How not to get sued Do you blog or tweet? Then you should read Mark Pearson’s new guide says Leanne O’Donnell

M

ark Pearson’s new book, Blogging & Tweeting Without Getting Sued: A global guide to the law for anyone writing online – is a very accessible guide to laws relevant to all those writing online. Pearson is a professor of journalism at Bond University, and co-author of The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law (Allen & Unwin, $59.99). Importantly for a book of this nature, he also regularly blogs and tweets: journlaw.com and Twitter:@journlaw His book isn’t aimed at lawyers or academics, but at bloggers and social media users “who realise they now have the same legal obligations as large organisations, but lack their experience, knowledge and muscle.” We can never be quite sure where our online words, sounds and images might finish up, so Pearson cuts through the legalese and gives a global overview of laws such as defamation, privacy, identity

SEND US

theft, contempt of court, confidentiality, breach of copyright, false advertising, hate speech and sedition as they operate in a range of countries. The book is also replete with interesting cases – including tweeting from the court house in Julian Assange’s bail hearing in London, the superinjunction concerning an English footballer, Derryn Hinch’s breach of suppression orders, and the #twitdef threat of defamation action levelled at journalist and academic Julie Posetti by the editor of The Australian. Each chapter is introduced with a “twit brief ” that summarises the chapter to the length of a tweet (140 characters). There’s also an “in brief ” conclusion to

2O12

WALKLEY ARD BOOKYOUAR W BEST WORK!

We can never be quite sure where our online words, sounds and images might finish up

The Walkley Book Award celebrates excellence in non-fiction writing. The growing contribution Australian authors and journalists are making to literature reinforces the vital role journalism plays in documenting the first cut of history. Now in its eighth year, the award is open to Australian journalists or writers whose work was published in the 12 months from September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2012. Entrants must be Australian citizens or permanent Australian residents. Entries may encompass a variety of subject matter, including true crime, biographies, political analysis, business writing, war reportage, investigative journalism and foreign correspondence. Judges will determine a long-list and shortlist of nominees prior to the winner announcement at the 57th Walkley Awards on November 30, 2012.

50 T H E W A L K L E Y M A G A Z I N E

the principles looked at in each chapter, such as: X Never forward or retweet material or links without reading and viewing them first. X If you have an anger-management issue or just can’t let go of emotional baggage, see both a psychologist and a lawyer before you launch a campaign of cyber-revenge. The need for such a book is evident and it should be required reading for all of us who blog for work or pleasure. Blogging & Tweeting Without Getting Sued: A global guide to the law for anyone writing online by Mark Pearson, published by Allen & Unwin, RRP $22.99. Leanne O’Donnell is a senior associate at Herbert Geer where she specialises in copyright and media law. Her review originally appeared in the Gazette of Law & Journalism

ENTRIES ARE NOW OPEN For books published between September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2012. The deadlines for 2012 entries are: First round entries close Friday, June 29 2012 Second round entries close Friday, August 31 2012 Download an entry form at www.walkleys.com/ non-fiction-book-award

Q EXTRACT

Murdoch’s step to the right Rupert Murdoch wasn’t always a right-winger, but he was always a radical. David McKnight charts the media baron’s shift from left to right in this extract from his book. Cartoon by Andrew Weldon

I

n 1969, Rupert Murdoch took his first step towards global expansion with the purchase of the News of the World, Britain’s biggest selling Sunday newspaper at the time. It was a sensationalist tabloid whose standard stories were of ministers of religion accused of adultery or scoutmasters charged with interfering with small boys. It was universally known among journalists as “News of the Screws”. Nevertheless, Murdoch’s capture of the newspaper showed that a determined “colonial” could outsmart the Brits and seize a British institution from under their noses. Shortly after taking control of the paper, Murdoch decided to spice it up by recycling the memoirs of Christine Keeler, an attractive callgirl whose liaison with a Tory minister and a Russian official had created a sensation some years earlier. This time, the newspaper promised, it would tell “the full story” and add new revelations. It didn’t do this, but its publishing of the memoirs brought about events through which Murdoch first articulated his nascent view that life was mostly about the struggle against elites and establishments. In the eyes of the establishment, the Tory minister at the centre of the sex scandal, John Profumo, was expiating his guilt by working for a charity assisting the London poor. One of those who felt sorry that Profumo’s private life was being exhumed for a cheap newspaper sensation was the television journalist David Frost, who invited Murdoch onto his chat show. This proved a disaster for Murdoch: rather than chat, Frost grilled him relentlessly with questions about his shameless ethics and cheap sensationalism. To a sweating, fidgeting Murdoch, this was a show of moral superiority that evoked his Australian contempt for British snobs and their patronising attitude to colonials like himself. The weekly Private Eye dubbed Murdoch the “Dirty Digger”, a nickname he hated. He later told an interviewer: “The British always thought in terms of their empire and were pretty patronising toward us Australians, pat you on your head and say, ‘You’ll do well,’ and when you do well they kick you to death.” When the Press Council criticised the News of the World for publishing the salacious memoirs, Murdoch’s response was blunt: “If the Press Council is going to behave like an arm of the establishment, I’m not going to take any notice of it.”

The weekly Private Eye dubbed Murdoch the “Dirty Digger”, a nickname he hated.

In the same year, Murdoch bought the most important newspaper of his life: it turned into a money machine, funding his purchases of US film studios and television channels and, more importantly, it gave him an unrivalled position at the heart of British politics. The Sun was originally owned by the Trade Union Congress and then sold to the Mirror group, which wanted to offload the sickly broadsheet. Murdoch believed he could boost its circulation into the millions and told other journalists the Sun would become a “radical” newspaper. The new Sun began by serialising the spicy novel The Love Machine, giving inside gossip on soccer and offering competitions to win cars and television sets. In late 1970, it published its first bare-breasted model and relished the ensuing scandal. The Sun’s political stance for Labour was clear: the tabloid carried a long interview with Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister, as well as the slogan “forward with the people”. When the newspaper was accused of being unprincipled, Murdoch retorted that it did have principles, and in a two-page editorial he explained them. He produced, in fact, a check list of the politics of the 1960s, which he later came to despise. The Sun opposed capital punishment, apartheid in South Africa, racism in Britain, the Vietnam War, entry to the European Common Market and the hydrogen bomb. It endorsed, above all, the permissive society. “Anyone – from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Mick Jagger – is entitled to put forward his own moral code,” Murdoch said. Evoking the newspaper’s antiestablishment views, an early editorial called for the abolition of the honours system that

had bestowed a knighthood on Murdoch’s father, Keith Murdoch. In the Sun’s first few months, Harold Wilson made a point of cultivating an alliance with Murdoch. He lunched several times at Murdoch’s offices and later invited Murdoch and other newspaper editors to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence. For a 39-year-old Australian junior press baron, this was enormously flattering. For the 1970 British election the Sun’s headline was “Why it must be Labour”, and an editorial explained that Labour cared more about ordinary people and social justice, and it opposed the Conservative Party’s scare campaign on immigration and law and order. But at the election, Labour lost to Conservative Ted Heath. Murdoch’s reaction was not to dump Labour and cosy up to the new prime minister, however. When Heath declared a state of emergency to deal with the 1972 miners’ strike, the Sun supported the miners and opposed restrictions on trade union laws. Murdoch later commented: “We certainly pushed public opinion very hard behind the miners.” For the man who 10 years later destroyed the unions’ grip on the newspaper industry, this was a remarkable statement. The 1970s were a time of political upheaval for Britain. In 1974, as an economic crisis engulfed the country, an editorial in the Sun described Murdoch’s own views of the election choices at the time: The Sun is a radical newspaper. All our instincts are Left rather than Right. We would vote for any candidate who could properly describe himself as a social democrat. This much is sure. Neither Heath nor Wilson will do. They are tired and discredited. They do not inspire. Murdoch’s views were beginning to change, and he gave unenthusiastic editorial support to the Conservatives in early 1974. Another influence in Murdoch’s political transformation occurred in London. Murdoch’s purchase of the News of the World and the Sun was a brilliantly successful gamble for a young and very minor newspaper baron from Australia. He jazzed up the papers, and this soon began to pay off and set the stage for more newspaper conquests. But there was a problem: around the world a technological revolution was sweeping through the printing industry. X

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51

Q EXTRACT

Q LETTER TO THE EDITOR

The new computer terminals allowed journalists to type their stories, subedit them and then produce a photographic image of the text that could be pasted down on mock pages, the whole thing photographed and a printing plate produced. The process replaced the traditional method, in which journalists’ stories were typeset in hot lead using linotype machines, a job done by the “inkies”, blue-collar printers who worked in the grimy bowels of newspaper offices. Printers and their trade unions had to either accept that technological change was inevitable and cut a deal (meaning big job losses) or resist the change and fight to the death. Britain’s printers were in a strong position: they controlled the production process and could use this to advance their pay and conditions. They chose to resist the change, thereby continuing the history of conflict between themselves and the newspaper owners. From the moment they started to strike, press owners such as Murdoch were losing money. In one dispute, the Times simply did not appear for almost a year. Strikes became frequent, and production was often a nightly confrontation. Unsurprisingly, this enraged Murdoch. As a young Fabian socialist and Labor supporter, he had not previously despised trade unions, but his encounter with the printers in London changed his opinion. He later told one interviewer: “I was pretty much turned into a pretty strong free market type conservative by. . . the most searing experience of my life [which was] having 17 years of dealing with the Fleet Street chapels.” By the end of the 1970s, Murdoch had lost all connections and sympathy with the left side of politics, though he wasn’t particularly enamoured of traditional conservatism either, since he considered himself a radical and an innovator. But on the horizon was a political leader to whom Murdoch ultimately showed the most sincere admiration. His Sun editor Larry Lamb, also a former Labour sympathiser, identified her attraction first. His editorials and stories began to favour the leader of the Conservative opposition, Margaret Thatcher. Murdoch was initially unenthusiastic, worrying that this would alienate the paper’s working-class readership. He would telephone Lamb, asking with

WALKLEY

MEDIA TALKS In association with the State Library of NSW

52 T H E W A L K L E Y M A G A Z I N E

exasperation: “Are you still pushing that bloody woman?” But his prejudice soon gave way to enthusiastic support, which lasted for the next 10 years. At the 1979 British election, the Sun’s huge front-page editorial was headlined: “Vote Tory this time, it’s the only way to stop the rot.” An accompanying headline explained that this was “a message to Labour supporters”. By this time, the Sun had overtaken the Labour-oriented Daily Mirror in circulation. The 1979 election was a watershed in Britain, and its influence extended further afield. Margaret Thatcher delivered radical change, rather than stability, after she took office. Her militant brand of politics was a break from traditional conservatism. She began to emphasise the free market and meritocracy rather than respect for the class system and established authority. A new conservative politics was emerging, based on a backlash against the cultural revolution of the 1960s. It appealed to people who were disturbed by attacks on authority, the rejection of religion and the rise of feminism, anti-racism and gay liberation. Thatcher was able to appeal to working-class voters and claimed to better represent the interests of ordinary people. Later, Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in the United States made the same appeal, courting traditional working-class voters, who became known as “Reagan Democrats”. At the same time, this conservatism picked up on the new spirit of freedom of the 1960s and channelled it into support for small government, low taxes and the free market, bringing about the birth of a new populism, which claimed to represent the little people against big government, big unions and political correctness fostered by the new social movements. David McKnight is associate professor in the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of NSW, and a former journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald and ABC TV’s Four Corners. This is an edited extract from his book Rupert Murdoch: An investigation of political power (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) Andrew Weldon is a freelance cartoonist based in Melbourne; www.scratch.com.au/aweldon

Immerse yourself in the exciting world of a globe-trotting journalist at Walkley Media Talks: Foreign Correspondence – a free public event at the State Library of NSW. Join the BBC’s Nick Bryant and Brian Thomson from SBS on a journey from the world’s most dangerous conflict zones to the highest halls of political power, with plenty of wild and fascinating detours. Audience members get their chance to ask the tough questions, in the always-lively Question and Answer session immediately following this hotly anticipated talk.

Don’t gloss over abuse

I

refer to “Rebel without a pause”, the review of Alex Mitchell’s memoirs by Laurie Oakes in the last issue of The Walkley Magazine. With respect to Alex Mitchell’s time as the editor of the Workers Revolutionary Party newspaper, it states: “It culminated in the WRP’s leader, Gerry Healy, being framed in a sex scandal…”. Readers might assume that Healy’s political enemies had contrived, for example, to have him photographed in compromising positions with prostitutes. In fact, Healy was a serial sexual and emotional abuser of young women. He misused his position of trust and authority with respect to his many victims. He was not “framed”. There is voluminous evidence, plenty of it in the public domain. It was many years ago, and of tangential relevance to some of your readers. But those of us who were there at the time feel it’s important not to allow false impressions to gain currency. Even in the Catholic church, long-past sexual abuse cases are now treated seriously. Sexual abuse cases are treated seriously by Catholic congregations who have defied hierarchy to unmask perpetrators, dead or alive, from no matter how long ago. The journalistic profession should take the same attitude to Healy’s case. Simon Pirani News Line journalist 1977–1985; writer on the former Soviet Union.

Seating is strictly limited and early booking is essential to secure your place at this exciting event. Reserve your seats now by contacting the State Library of NSW at sl.nsw.gov.au or (02) 9273 1414. Where: Dixson Room, State Library of NSW, Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000 When: From 6.30pm-7.30pm on Wednesday, 30th of May, 2012 Cost: Free (Guests must register with the State Library of NSW)

Q REVIEW

Ballad of Goulburn jail Alan Kennedy recognises that Raymond Fitzpatrick and journalist Frank Browne were an unlovely pair, but what federal parliament did to them in 1955 was a scandal

I

n June 1955 two men, Bankstown businessman Raymond Fitzpatrick and journalist Frank Browne, went before the bar of the Australian parliament where they faced a charge of abuse of parliamentary privilege. They are the only people in Australia’s history to have been brought there and so seriously did the parliamentarians see this breach of privilege, both men were jailed for three months. It was an extraordinary event, or it should have been, but it is a chapter in Australia’s history where the bare facts as outlined above have usually been where the story began and ended. In June 1955, parliament exercised a right it has always had but which common sense says should never be exercised. Parliament showed it was above all the laws of habeas corpus, natural justice and trial by jury and just sent two blokes to the slammer for writing something they didn’t like. No court in the land could overturn this decision and if they had sent them to jail for life they would have stayed there. Other legal avenues had been open, including defamation, but they were left untouched. At the time the then prime minister, Robert Menzies, solemnly told the parliament: “The degree to which this House preserves the freedom of its members to speak and to think will be the measure of democracy.” Pious poppycock from the man who didn’t feel this freedom to speak extended to members of the Communist Party which he tried to ban, only to be thwarted by the High Court. Reading Mr Big of Bankstown: The scandalous Fitzpatrick and Browne affair by Andrew Moore, you have to wonder why it has taken so long for there to be a book about the events leading up to June 1955. In it we find deep questions about freedom of speech and the abuse of power by parliamentarians. Oddly enough, the breach involved a false story that the member for Reid in western Sydney, Charlie Morgan, was involved in an immigration scam. The story was written by Browne and published in Fitzgerald’s paper, The Bankstown Observer. Morgan is described by author Moore as a “plodding backbencher” which is damning with faint praise. He ended up being on the wrong side of the rank and file in his electorate when he backed the Catholic

Apart from the parade of larger than life characters who strut this stage of post-war Sydney, there are the more serious issues of free press, free speech and the limits of parliamentary power “Groupers” in Labor’s great schism of the mid ’50s and was subsequently rolled by a young boxer and former POW called Tom Uren. Apart from the beige figure of Morgan, the book is full of astonishing characters – not least the journalist Frank Browne. While Fitzpatrick was shattered after his three months in Goulburn’s jail, Browne parleyed his imprisonment into a quest for self-appointed martyrdom, pulling the cloak of free speech and free press around him and working it for all it was worth. He had a point. Even now, reading about the process of dragging these blokes before parliament leaves you uneasy. It’s proof of that old adage that when you’re defending the right of free speech, you may find yourself defending some pretty odious characters. Browne was seen as an outsider by the mainstream media, especially the tightly controlled Canberra press gallery which had its opinion leaders like Alan Reid. Browne published a news sheet called Things I Hear, which was known by everyone as “Things I Smear”. In it he dropped buckets of smelly mud on all politicians. It was a scurrilous rag, and when Browne was called before the bar of parliament he had no friends in the chamber and few friends in the media. The pollies lined up

to give Browne a kicking and there was no media campaign howling at the thought of parliament imposing itself in such a dictatorial fashion. And while Fitzpatrick was a man of many criminal faults, in this he was really collateral damage. Browne had an extreme right-wing bent; there is a picture of him in the book addressing a rally of the Australian neo Nazi party in the Domain in 1955. He was the party’s self-appointed fuehrer. He spent the 1930s fighting the “Marxists” in Australia, writing at one stage “we are not afraid of the sight of our own blood provided it mingle with the blood of those planning national destruction.” He left Australia in the mid 1970s to go to what was then Rhodesia and fight with the whites against the black majority which wanted its land back. Moore says Browne returned complaining about the Somerset Maugham lifestyle of the whites, adding “the whites weren’t worth fighting for.” Browne remained a well-connected gadfly in Australia but also worked as a publicist for BHP, CSR and TNT. In 1981 he was found in a “squalid flat in Kings Cross that reeked of whisky” and he died the old journo death of cirrhosis of the liver. Fitzgerald is a character who deserves a bigger place in the annals of the wild men of Sydney. A street-fighting roughnut who makes Queensland’s white shoe brigade look like choirboys, he wheeled and dealed through the Bankstown area as the post-war property boom exploded and the area went from semi-rural to high-density living. The tentacles of his corruption spread through into the police force and the NSW parliament, plus ça change. The lure of easy money from dodgy property deals is the lietmotif of Sydney and probably began as Governor Phillip was raising the Union Jack on Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788. This book should have been written 40 years ago, but thank goodness it has been written now. Apart from the parade of larger than life characters who strut this stage of post-war Sydney, there are the more serious issues of free press, free speech and the limits of parliamentary power. Back in 1955 we had an immigration scandal and Fitzpatrick starting his own newspaper to progress his interests. All sounds just too familiar, doesn’t it? Mr Big of Bankstown: The scandalous Fitzpatrick and Browne affair by Andrew Moore, published by UWA Publishing, RRP $34.95.

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Q 10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW…

To go from print to radio When Madonna King applied her 20 years’ experience as a print journalist to radio, she knew things would be different. But then, some things were the same. Cartoon by Rod Emmerson

1

7

A radio interview isn’t a conversation. One of my early interviews was with a senior politician I had previously spoken with dozens of times. I started as I would any newspaper interview, with the usual courtesies about the weather and the family and then realised, with a producer in one ear, that three-quarters of the interview time had gone on what listeners would think were banalities.

Good print journalists never lose the common touch. They make sure they write about the most complex subjects simply and keep themselves grounded by engaging with readers who might not be experts but have personal experience of what they are writing about.

8

Good radio journalists never lose the common touch. They tell stories simply because there is no scope for the listener to reread the previous paragraph or study the lead to get its meaning. And talkback callers are an asset, not just in fleshing out the story, but sometimes becoming the story.

2

A radio interview is a conversation. Because radio is so intimate for listeners who are mainly in their car, office or home alone, they become more involved if they are listening to two people just talking. Richard Fidler’s Conversation Hour is a strong example.

But there’s still one important difference…

Clear so far? Then try this.

9

Deadlines are crucial for radio where bulletins are on the hour. Sometimes, if the story’s big enough, they’re immediate. There’s no luxury of filing for a first edition sometime in the early evening.

3

The best print stories let the readers hear the voice and get a sense of the interview subject. They describe their surroundings and environment. But, most of all, they showcase the central character’s words, expression and turn of phrase.

4

The best radio stories let the listeners hear the voice and get a sense of the interview subject. They describe their surroundings and environment. But most of all they let the talent (as they’re described in radioland) talk. Now we’re on a roll.

5

The best print journalism comes from talking to a lot of different people but, most importantly, being able to find knowledgeable sources and convince them to give you that nugget of information which will separate your story or column from the opposition – perhaps even push

it into award-winning territory. Every phone number, email address or Twitter account you can accumulate counts.

6

The best radio journalism comes from talking to a lot of different people and extracting that nugget of information from the knowledgeable source. But add in the need to get them to agree to a recorded interview and, if you’re presenting a morning radio program, teeing them up before 6.30am, and you learn that every contact detail you can accumulate REALLY counts.

Breaking news, adding insight, lighting up readers or listeners’ lives matter, whatever the outlet

Are you getting the idea here?

10

Deadlines are crucial for newspapers where increased effort has gone towards the internet. The imperative is to break news immediately online or via social media. No luxury (any more) of filing for a first edition sometime in the early evening. Two types of media, so different, but one thing is the same. And that’s the story. Breaking news, adding insight, lighting up readers or listeners’ lives matter, whatever the outlet. And always will. Madonna King is an award-winning newspaper and radio journalist, commentator and author

SYLVIA LAWSON DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE Seven Essays on Resistance

Available Now

RRP$32.99

54 T H E W A L K L E Y M A G A Z I N E

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Track your parcel to NZ, the UK or USA for an extra $6. *

For just $6 more than Airmail, Pack and Track International enables you to follow the progress of any parcel up to 2 kg all the way to its final destination in NZ, the UK or USA. It’s available at participating Australia Post outlets. So rather than getting your feathers ruffled, enjoy peace of mind when you post. *Pack and Track International costs $6 more than the standard Airmail product for parcels up to 2 kgs. Conditions apply. Service conditions available at auspost.com.au

Your super’s investing in you You might not realise it, but Media Super helps create jobs by investing in a wide range of Australian TV & film productions through our partnership with Fulcrum Media Finance. After all, we are your industry super fund.

Wish You Were

Here

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The Hunter

Nettheim Photo by Matt King Photo by Ben Tomasetti Photo by Lisa

It pays to join the super fund that invests in you. For friendly advice from people who understand your industry, phone 1800 640 886 or visit mediasuper.com.au

Disclaimer: This advertisement provides general information only and does not take into consideration your personal objectives, situation or needs. You should assess your own financial situation and needs, read the Product Disclosure Statement and consult a financial adviser (if required) before making any financial decisions. Investment returns are not guaranteed and past performance gives no indication of future performance. Issued April 2012 by Media Super Limited ABN 30 059 502 948, AFSL 230254. MSUP 33464