Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Beating The Drum on On Line Opinion

By Graham Young - posted Monday, 25 July 2016


The ABC was established to tackle market failure. Unfortunately it has run far beyond that, and in some cases is responsible for some failures in the market.

An example of that is the ABC's online op-ed page, The Drum, which has just been "closed".

I'm never happy to see a publication die, but this was one that should never have been started, doing damage to On Line Opinion, amongst other online publishers.

Advertisement

It was arguably a breach of the ABC's charter, in that it was rarely balanced, because it is hard to be balanced with opinion.

There is also no obvious market gap that The Drum needed to fill. It published analysis and opinion. Well, the Internet is full of opinion, because it is cheap, and everyone has one. There are a number of very good blogs out there, as well as boutique publications like us and Crikey, and all of the mainstream media, who provide high quality opinion every day of the week.

Likewise there is a lot of good analysis out there.

The ABC has a charter. It is a broadcaster, and it has a special responsibility to rural and regional Australians, and to provide services where it is not viable for commercial broadcasters to provide those services.

When it comes to regional services, ABC radio does a pretty good job, with regional news services and local radio stations, including frequently the only remaining news talkback programs. The same can't be said of its television services. Once upon a time each state capital had its own version of the 7:30 report. Now it is all centralised in Sydney and concentrates on Canberra.

The ABC used to be a source of reliable overseas news, in a globalised world arguably more important than ever before. Nowadays there are very few overseas correspondents, often with the one person apparently covering a whole continent.

Advertisement

These services haven't been cut because ABC funding has been cut, but rather funds have been diverted to other areas. With the rise of the Internet, the ABC has morphed into a major online publisher, alongside its role as a broadcaster. But, apart from posting transcripts of broadcast programs online, there is no obvious need for this.

But newspapers everywhere are struggling, with a major reason being the haemorrhaging of revenues because of free content online.

In Australia the ABC makes this problem larger because not only does it give content away for free, but it has a brand that is superior to that of any blog and most alternative news services, and it cross-promotes via its broadcast platforms.

Add to that a lavish budget of close to $1.3bn, mostly provided by the Australian taxpayer, and the squeeze on commercial publishers is severe.

At the same time it also makes it more difficult for mainstream media to migrate to the online subscription model, which is the only viable financial option for them, because the ABC will always offer similar content for free. (This is different from the broadcast model where everything has been free-to-air).

And not only is the ABC creating failures in the market, but it is stifling innovation.

Although On Line Opinion persists we are no longer a financially viable publication. Other publications, such as Punch and the National Times, have failed completely and no longer exist, and there are a myriad of publications that must have been still born.

On Line Opinion pioneered the genre of the online op-ed page in Australia. We started in April 1999 with the modest aim of publishing 4 to 5 articles each month. Microsoft FrontPage was our publishing platform. We now have 18,331 articles archived from 4,885 individual authors on a diversity of topics. We have broken stories others dared not published, and been threatened with legal action for publishing what was once considered offensive.

By 2006 we were the most popular politics website in Australia and we'd built our own content management system, as well as other platforms including a virtual parliament (aggregating material from members of parliament in a special site), a blog, a blog aggregator, online qualitative polling, and candidate-driven directory sites for a number of state and federal elections.

In 2007, along with QUT and the Brisbane Institute we even ran a television panel series during the federal election called YouDecide 2007. There was enough money from advertising to employ a full-time editor, and invest in further development.

In this you might even perceive the genesis of what The Drum would subsequently do, starting as an online op-ed page and then becoming a TV show.

We weren't the only ones doing interesting things in the news and current affairs space online. There was of course Crikey, but there was also a flotilla of blog sites, and Peter Fray's excursion into the field of Fact Checking.

The Drum wasn't the only reason that On Line Opinion has struggled.

The GFC cut advertising revenues, now permanently decimated as online advertising becomes a commodity, and our premium advertisers were also targeted by anti-free speech gay rights campaigners (for details see here).

But The Drum was a significant factor.

The principles underlying On Line Opinion were that we would be non-partisan, publishing a wide range of views. And that we would seek out specialists, who weren't necessarily professional writers, to present their views. This was partly a response to the first rise of Pauline Hanson and a perception that mainstream media was not only unjustifiably narrowing political debate to what was politically correct, but that people with real knowledge and expertise were being marginalised in favour of professional writers whose skill was in turning a pretty and glib phrase, rather than a deep and exhaustive knowledge of any subject area.

The end result of this was that substantial numbers of Australians felt their views were being ignored so were prepared to invest in Hanson to make a point, leading to further marginalisation of their views.

A further invidious effect of The Drum was to magnify these defects. While it did employ some dissidents, such as the IPA's Chris Berg, most of the opinion it published was predictable left-wing stodge produced by ABC favourites. (Declaration of interest: I was commissioned once to write a piece for The Drum).

The Drum also had a budget to pay contributors, so it meant it was harder at the margin for a not-for-profit like ourselves to recruit.

The Drum is not the only ABC operation to make life difficult for us. We've been doing online surveys for 15 years, and in fact suggested a working relationship to the ABC at one stage. They've now imported Vote Compass from Canada, presumably at some cost to the taxpayer.

Vote Compass regularly gets over a million responses, which dwarfs our 1,500 or so, but its model of how people make political decisions is flawed and biased, and the results, despite the sample, less insightful.

The ABC needs to refocus. I'm not sure that closing The Drum means much, but hopefully it is the first sign of a change.

Not only does the ABC need to become more inclusive of a wide-range of views, but it needs to seek out experts, rather than recycling journalistic opinion as expertise.

I would certainly not begrudge it a budgetary allocation from the Commonwealth if it were to re-establish state based television current affairs programs, and deepen its network of foreign correspondents (particularly in our near neighbourhood).

A good first step would be to examine the areas of genuine market failure when it comes to news and current affairs on the net, and try to prioritise those, while withdrawing from all other areas.

Above all the ABC needs to be guided by genuine need, rather than journalist and management egos trying to produce a media empire for its own sake.

That way publications like On Line Opinion, and those of News Corp and Fairfax et al are more likely to prosper and make an innovative and valuable contribution to Australian democracy.

Maintaining a healthy media ecosystem is an implicit part of the Commission's charter which is being progressively ignored.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

46 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Graham Young

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Graham Young
Article Tools
Comment 46 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy