I'm in New Zealand and today gave a speech to a conference entitled Downunder: the future of the media in the digital age, organised by the Journalism Education Association of New Zealand (JEANZ). I pointed to the advances towards multi-platform journalism in certain British national and regional newspapers, but the burden of my lecture was devoted to urging journalists to accept that newspapers are dying (date of death: irrelevant) and to get involved in building a strategy for the transition to a screen-based future.
I repeated the call on a TVNZ television business programme too, and I'll be conveying a similar message to the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Auckland tomorrow. What I've been saying has been generally well received though the editors of the country's two leading papers, who were on a panel with me, were sceptical about losing their readers. Tim Murphy, editor of the New Zealand Herald (owned by part of Tony O'Reilly's media empire), said his paper has lost fewer than 2% of sales in recent years and expected to retain his readers for generations to come. Cate Brett, editor of the Fairfax-owned Sunday Star-Times, was equally sure of her readers' continued loyalty. Both also pointed out that broadband development was not yet as advanced as it should be in New Zealand and, even where it existed, Brett said that studies had shown a marked indifference to internet usage at weekends.
Another panel speaker, Philippa Stevenson, a freelance journalist with her own website, gave a spirited response, arguing that she had spent much of her newspaper career arguing with news editors to get her serious science-based articles into print. Now the net is allowing her, and thousands of other freelances and "amateurs", to publish their work. Her message: the "stand alone journalist" is on the rise. And thank goodness for that. It's better in the long run for them and for society.
I also attended a couple of later sessions which dealt with privacy and crime. Both illustrated the growing influence of net-based journalism, and the challenges it offered, some good, some bad. The central, inescapable point is that there cannot be a discussion about journalism any longer that doesn't deal with its online manifestation. And that fact is shining through many of the papers being presented here over the three days of the conference. The vast majority deal solely with digital journalism in one form or another. So print editors may say what they like: everyone else has read the runes and knows the truth - the future is here.
