Most of us take stock on a birthday – maybe a glass of bubbles and a pause for thought about where we’ve actually landed, for all that rushing and striving in the previous year.
This weekend Guardian Australia turns five. At no point during those five years has there been much time to pause for anything.
We launched in May 2013 as a tiny startup desperately trying to appear bigger than we were. (Our launch editor, Katharine Viner – now the Guardian’s global editor-in-chief – our first managing director, Ian McClelland, and I reminisce a little about that exhilaratingly mad time in this podcast chat.)
Then – just as we were finding our feet – the entire news media felt the full blast of Google and Facebook’s domination as they swallowed the ad market and swamped readers with a torrent of “news”, regardless of its quality or even veracity, warping financial incentives in the process so that the best journalism was often rewarded the least.
The existential questions for the media, and for society, posed by that disruption are being debated and investigated around the world, in Australia most importantly via an inquiry by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
Meanwhile, those of us in the news business have had to find a way to get on with it. Some put up paywalls, but we took a different path. We asked you – our readers – for your support and tens of thousands of you are making voluntary contributions. We crowdfunded some of the journalism we really wanted to do. Most recently we have expanded our investigative capacity using philanthropic grants.
And, one way or another, we are bigger than we thought we would be at five – 80 staff across editorial and commercial rather than the 50 we had planned – and on track to make an operating profit this year, which will go straight back into our journalism.
But none of that answers the most important question. Are we doing our job as well as we could be? That’s a much tougher question than it sounds.
Last year Viner published a deeply thoughtful essay seeking to define our purpose and chart a path for Guardian journalism in this time of technological and political disruption. I recommend reading it in full, but here are some of the markers she set for our reporting.
We will ask the questions that people are asking, and the questions that no one is asking.
If people long to understand the world, then news organisations must provide them with clarity: facts they can trust, information that they need, reported and written and edited with care and precision.
If people long to create a better world, then we must use our platform to nurture imagination – hopeful ideas, fresh alternatives, belief that the way things are isn’t the way things need to be. We cannot merely criticise the status quo; we must also explore the new ideas that might displace it. We must build hope.
But how to translate that ambition to our small just-out-of-startup Australian business when we have to stay in “the race” at least enough to cover the news of the day sufficiently that readers don’t feel they need to go elsewhere to get an overview, but still find the resources to interrogate the most important things with the persistence to have an impact. How should we balance those competing priorities?
It’s a vexing question when the national conversation seems incapable of holding a thought for longer than a single news cycle and when the disconnect seems wider than ever between the topics hogging mainstream debate and things about which people care.
Part of the answer lies in setting our own path, our own clear priorities, which have from the start included policy-focused reporting on politics, asylum, Indigenous affairs, the environment, social inequality and welfare. Of course we can always do better and we can never do enough. As we grow we’ll take on some of the really important stories I so wish we could be reporting on now.
Another part of the answer comes from listening to what you want.
Every day I start our morning news conference by asking the audience editor,“What did our readers like yesterday?”
These analytics give us real time feedback, sometimes thrilling, sometimes brutal. We hear which stories you viewed the most – important to know because a story has no impact if it’s not being read, but not an answer in itself because if we published meaningless clickbait that was turbocharged through social media, it could top the charts. We also hear which stories held your attention for longest – a better measure of what you value.
The best indication of all is when we hear from you directly and, happily for us, you seem to want the kind of reporting that Viner describes. You like it when we ask our own questions and set different priorities.
Earlier this year, for example, we ran a crowdfunding appeal so we could do more serious investigative environmental reporting, the kind that had fallen away as newsrooms contracted and that we could do only in a limited way with our single environment reporter.
You were not just financially generous, you also responded in your hundreds with useful information and excellent ideas, and – according to our analytics – you are enjoying the series of investigations we call Our Wide Brown Land.
Just last week you were enthusiastic about another series, Life on the Breadline, in which we will hear directly from a group of Australians living below the poverty line, rather than simply reporting what is being said about them. Our data suggests you love long essays about toxic masculinity, deep investigations into a deadly virus disproportionately affecting central Australian Indigenous communities and tough analyses calling out politicians’ nonsense with an unassailable wall of facts. And our blow-by-blow politics live blog has a large and loyal following.
Being increasingly reliant on reader donations anchors our financial future to the same foundations as our journalism. But listening cannot mean always agreeing, and it remains our job to present diverse and challenging views.
We certainly don’t want to follow a model some use to survive in a world where an audience can splinter away to an almost infinite number of online news options; creating a loyal, hyper-partisan community by dialling up outrage and manufacturing dissent in opposition to a confected rival “tribe”.
“You need to be radical in order to gain market share,” Sam Lessin, a former vice-president of product management at Facebook was quoted as saying in an essay on Wired that discussed this trend. “Reasonableness gets you no points.”
Guardian Australia readers certainly get outraged at times, often with good reason. And you do tend to click on stories about the figures that outrage you the most. It would be easy to just feed that outrage but that would be doing you, and ourselves, a disservice. Our job is to provide facts, context, background, solutions and sometimes an opposing view. And, contrary to Lessin’s opinion, many of you seem to crave the “reasonable” approach.
So, with that rough mud map for the next phase, I’m going to raise a glass this weekend, to all the rushing and striving and hard work by everyone on the Guardian Australia team, to all those who’ve helped and supported us and, most importantly, to you, our readers.
If you happen to have a few seconds to pause and think about the news you want to read over the next five years, I’d love to hear your ideas.
