Opinion

Screen Australia needs to stop acting like a club

Screen AustraliaToday sees academia-meets-journalism website The Conversation launching a new section covering the creative industries. It’s partly thanks to $50,000 from Screen Australia. But the lack of obvious process from Screen Australia in handing over the money raises serious questions about how the government-funded body does business, argues Tim Burrowes.

I must confess, I’ve been feeling uneasy about Screen Australia for some time now.

I’ve never been able to shake the impression that the whole thing is something of a club. When announcements come through of the latest beneficiaries of the millions of taxpayer dollars that go into feature and television production, the same names tend to pop up again and again. Even if their films lose money at the box office again and again.

And in part, I’m uneasy because I feel conflicted about whether those millions of dollars should be spent at all, when they as often as not appear to be used to prop up a local film industry incapable of standing on its own feet, rather than in primarily funding the telling Australian stories. The decision to pour millions of dollars into the quintessentially American story The Great Gatsby is a good recent example. If the car industry no longer needs propping up, why should the production sector? But that’s a debate for another day.

The reason for writing this now though is the fact that it emerged last week that Screen Australia had ponied up $50k to get The Conversation writing about the screen industry more regularly.

I say emerged, because normally, Screen Australia holds a board meeting, then issues press releases about the projects it intends to fund.

Andrew Jaspan's note to The COnversation subscribers

Andrew Jaspan’s note to The Conversation subscribers

This time, there was no announcement from Screen Australia. An email to subscribers to The Conversation from its founder Andrew Jaspan made brief mention of Screen Australia as a supporter, which is what led us to ask questions.

If you’re not familiar with The Conversation, it’s an excellent addition to the online debate.

Andrew Jaspan The Conversation

Andrew Jaspan in The Conversation’s newsroom

Jaspan has edited some of the world’s great newspapers – The Scotsman, The Observer and The Age amongst them. And he deserves huge credit for conceiving – and even more impressively launching – The Conversation. Funded primarily by the universities, the site gives voice to their academics via a team of journalists who help get their work into shape.

Jaspan has created a business model where many others have failed.

Conversation-234x37The quality of The Conversation is always good and sometimes excellent. It’s also recently launched in the UK.

And it’s prolific, offering many articles every day.

It also does its bit for the wider comment sphere. So long as you attribute, any media outlet can run its content – we often do ourselves.

So I have no problem with The Conversation getting the funding. Indirectly, this site may benefit if it leads to more articles on the creative industries that we can republish. So in terms of pure self interest, I shouldn’t be writing this piece.

But my problem is that in signing the cheque, Screen Australia is indulging itself like some kind of old fashioned philanthropist, rather than a public funding body with obligations to provide a level playing field.

Because this funding did not come from an existing scheme, it was not open for others to put themselves forward.

I’m sure that Private Media, which is about to launch The Daily Review, might have been interested in putting their hat in the ring, for instance.

And we do come back to this question of public dollars potentially distorting the market. Will it be harder for The Daily Review to make a go of it, now that the publicly funded The Conversation is offering a similar service?

A further declaration of interest – we also publish Encore which has its roots in the screen production sector. If we’d known this funding was up for grabs we might have been interested.

However, I’m not certain that we would have applied if Screen Australia had advertised that it wanted to support coverage in this area, but we’d have certainly given it some thought.

The reason we wouldn’t automatically have jumped at the opportunity is the risk around perceived conflict of interest. I note that having only written about Screen Australia six times in the previous two-and-a-half-years, The Conversation wrote about the organisation three times last week (we republished one of those pieces ourselves).

It was also interesting how The Conversation covered Screen Australia’s report on the year in screen last week. In keeping with the press release, the opinion piece angled on what a good year it had been for TV drama. As it happens, we went with the rather more downbeat (and played down in the press release) finding, that film spending had gone backwards.

I’m not claiming that The Conversation chose this angle to keep Screen Australia happy, by the way. I’m pointing out that when you take $50,000 from an organisation, there is a danger that there can be a perception of conflict of interest. I’m sure we’ll see them ask hard questions of the organisation in the coming months.

It was only after we published the news that the funds had been provided to The Conversation that Screen Australia revealed that it had granted $50,000.

georgie mcclean screen australiaIt then issued us a statement from Georgie McClean, Screen Australia’s manager of strategy, research and communications saying “Screen Australia has sponsored The Conversation’s new arts, culture and creative industries section (with $50K) as a platform for new research and public debate on the Australian screen sector. Screen Australia’s remit includes support for Australian screen culture, in which discussion, debate and research play important roles. The Conversation is one of Australia’s largest independent news and commentary sites and its evidence-based, open access platform is a good site for such debate, particularly at a time when arts journalism is under pressure. Articles on The Conversation can be republished in arts sections of newspapers and websites across Australia.”

By “sponsored”, it means that Screen Australia was able to give the money without going through the board or opening up the opportunity for others to put themselves forward.

We asked what Screen Australia was receiving as part of this “sponsorship” deal. The replied:

“The benefits of Screen Australia’s sponsorship arrangement with The Conversation, agreed to by Georgie McClean, Screen Australia’s Manager of Strategy, Research and Communications, include providing a platform to disseminate the agency’s research outcomes, detailed tracking information and logo and name recognition. The Conversation give no special favour in terms of the writers they approach, or the direction of their coverage, to those who do or don’t fund or partner with them. It is a not-for-profit media organisation that delivers ‘evidence based journalism’ and is a platform for research outcomes, primarily funded by academic institutions.”

Does that sound like a typical sponsorship deal to you? It doesn’t to me.

I’m heartened that Screen Australia now recognises that “arts journalism is under pressure”. Based on our previous experience, Screen Australia doesn’t spend its “sponsorship” money easily. In the four years or so we’ve owned Encore – which is the oldest title of its type with a three decade heritage in the production sector – our sales team have never been successful in persuading them to spend a single dollar on sponsorship or marketing – and indeed they never once put out a brief. A cynic might say that they don’t like some of the things we’ve written so it was never going to happen anyway. But there again, perhaps our sales director, otherwise excellent at his job, just had a series of off days on the five or six occasions he went in to see them. Either way, having closed the loss making print edition last year, I can’t help ruminate on what a difference $50k would have made to the title.

But I can’t help thinking that the explanation is more likely to be that Screen Australia took a liking to the cut of The Conversation’s jib, and decided to find a way of helping it out. If you’re wealthy like Global Mail’s funder Graeme Woods or are a business with a budget for this sort of thing like CommBank, that’s fair enough. But if you’re a public body, you have a duty to do these things in a fair and above board way, no matter how worthy the recipient.

I think The Conversation deserves the money. I just don’t think that Screen Australia can justify how it made the decision.

If you don’t want people to think you’re a club, then don’t act like one.

Tim Burrowes is the editor-in-chief of Mumbrella and Encore

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