Junkee co-founder slams Australian publishing for lack of ambition
Tim Duggan's ambitious challenge to the Mumbrella Publish audience
Digital Publishers Alliance chair and co-founder of Junkee Tim Duggan has called for more ambition from Australian publishers in a rallying cry address at Mumbrella’s Publish conference.
Duggan also used the session to announce a DPA associate membership tier for smaller players as part of a program to “build up the next generation coming through”.
In outlining the challenge facing the publishing industry, Duggan initially ran through three major problems: AI generation and summary; declining audience trust; and government inertia.
Rather than dwelling on these big but external factors, Duggan framed them as less important than the fundamental issues of self-belief, optimism, and energy: in short, ambition.
“What I’m really trying to interrogate at the moment is why don’t we have ambition anymore? Why is it so hard to start a media company today?”
In building his case that lack of ambition was the industry’s biggest challenge, he ran through examples of world-leading Australian initiatives: Rupert Murdoch turning two Adelaide papers into a global empire, the News Media Bargaining Code, and the Walkley Awards.
Tim Duggan and Mumbrella’s Cat McGinn during the Q+A
“ I can almost count on one hand the number of media businesses that are part of the DPA that have started in the last five years,” he said.
According to Duggan, the average age of the association’s members is 18, indicating a big lack of content startups scaling at all in the last five years.
“In order to be a member of the DPA, you need to have at least three full-time staff and at least half a million dollars of revenue.”
Countering this trend was the first item in Duggan’s ambition antidote, building up the next generation of publishers.
To that end, he announced that the DPA membership criteria would be relaxed for a new associate member tier.
”When people come into the DPA and they are able to meet other members and get trained and ask and answer questions, we’ve seen the impact that can have.”
“ I would like to put the challenge back to everyone here of thinking of how you can help that next generation of media coming through,” he said.
“Train them, mentor them, lean into it, try and figure out why are they not able to take that leap into being a sustainable business, because at the moment it’s not happening.”
Other remedies to the ambition deficit were having a permanent seat at the government’s table, confronting the challenges of AI head on, and coming together more as an industry.
“We really cannot do this alone,” he said.
“One publisher’s not going to solve this. 50 publishers might solve it. 500 publishers are definitely going to have a better chance than one publisher.”
Duggan ended with an argument that, give, Australia’s wealth and relatively moderate politics, it should be “the best place in the world to start and grow a media business.”
“ This is something I think we as an industry can all try and get behind.”
