Something is missing from the public interest journalism debate
It’s not necessarily the investigative journalism that’s most damaged by challenges to newspapers’ business model – it’s the nitty gritty and the nuance, argues The Conversation’s Misha Ketchell
Let’s start with a few things on which we can all agree, chief among them that public interest journalism is a Good Thing. The fourth estate has a crucial role in holding power to account. The big stories that journalists uncover can spark meaningful change: Watergate, or the Moonlight State corruption revelations in Queensland, or the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe that uncovered sexual abuse by the clergy.
As the senate inquiry on the future of public interest journalism in Australia heard the year, there is also broad agreement that this type of activity is now in peril. Putting public broadcasters to one side, all the big commercial institutions that used to produce public interest journalism are increasingly starved of cash as Google and Facebook relentlessly hoover up advertising dollars (all while paying depressingly little tax).
According to the MEAA, more than three thousand Australian journalists have lost their jobs since 2011 and this mirrors a global trend. Meanwhile, pretty much every media organisation is struggling with precarious funding. Many new players, as well as many once great and powerful media companies, now devote much of their time to discussing paywall strategy and begging readers for donations. Time they once spent scaring the wits out of politicians and business leaders is now spent fighting for survival.
I think most people broadly understand this, and share in an increasing sense of the urgency to do something to disrupt the dominance of spin, misinformation and fake news.
