THESE days they call it trivial pursuit. Forty years ago this week it was general knowledge and, for me, the pursuit was not trivial.

The then editor of The Canberra Times, John Allan, was rattling through the questions. I, a prospective cadet journalist, was doing my best to answer them. I knew the names of the Premiers and obscure African capitals and then I was stumped.

“Where are the Limestone Plains?” he demanded.

I shuffled and ummed and aahhed and then said, “I’m sorry, I could not even hazard a guess at that.”

Gruff John Allan replied in triumph, “You’re sitting on them.”

My brilliant career was about to go bung before it had begun. All I could do was laugh.

“Well, at least you have got a sense of humour as well as a university degree,” Allan said. “You can start on Sunday. Mrs Pitt will give you a formal letter.”

Mrs Pitt was his secretary. A Mr Pitt was never mentioned, and a given name was out of the question.

And so, 40 years ago I began a career in journalism. Perhaps those years represent a fifth of journalism’s real history.

For those 200 years, the essential craft has remained the same, even if its practice has changed somewhat. The craft has been to dispassionately inform, uncover, explain, interpret and, yes, to entertain and to evoke emotion. But to do so about other human beings, not so much about the natural world, which is the job of scientists. We try to explain advances in science, but we do not do the science.

Sure, stories have been told since pre-historic times. But much of that comes under the headings novelist or poet if fiction and historian for non-fiction.

The profession or craft of journalism is much more recent. It grew with the technology that provided fast, widespread dissemination of the printed word. And it spread further with the technologies that provided fast, widespread dissemination of the spoken word in the form of radio and television.

Now it is on the cusp of radical change – so radical that it might constitute the evolution of a new species.

In its 200 years, journalism has chanelled. It has been conducted, by and large, by employed journalists, through mediums, such as newspapers and broadcast stations, which are controlled by well-resourced corporations, individuals or the state.

And until recently in that 200-year history these mediums were the only way to deliver information to the mass market. Unless you went through the mediums, you did not get access to the mass audience.

It meant, of course, that those people and organisations that wanted access to mass audiences depended on journalists.

It gave journalists power, privilege and responsibility – which I have enjoyed and trust not abused for 40 years. It also gave the organisations which employed the journalists power, privilege and responsibility. For they presented things about the activities of people and organisations to the people at large and the people at large were almost totally dependent on them.

As then senator Barack Obama said in the Audacity of Hope: “For the broad public at least, I am who the media says I am, I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.”

And it was Obama who having recognised this, set out to change it. And other politicians have followed.

Through mass internet campaigning he sought to cut out the mediums and journalist or at least reduce their influence.

The internet makes this possible. It has made it possible for corporations and other individuals, as well.

The internet, in short, allows people and organisations access to the mass audience without the need for journalists. Everyone is a journalist now. Do-it-yourself journalism is possible because one no longer needs a broadcasting licence, expensive transmitting equipment or an expensive press to get the message to the mass audience.

Some consequences are obvious, such as the drying up of “the rivers of gold” from classified advertising that have financed the bulk of newspaper journalism for so long. Faster delivery and more feedback warp news values and the very latest becomes more newsworthy than the most important, and the “most hit” tells news selectors that consumers want the prurient and the sensational.

But there are two broader consequences. First, many non-journalists

have been writing in social media, on websites of their own or other people’s websites about their own work – academics, professionals, business people, politicians and the like. Secondly, organisations are doing the same thing.

Both are cutting out the middleman – the journalist. They might well argue that they are cutting out misinterpretation, misrepresentation and bias. On the other hand, they are also cutting out the journalists’ communications skills – how to present complex matters in an understandable way to a broad audience.

Many professionals do not have that skill. However, many do and they can explain their own work much better than any journalist. Theconversation.edu.au is a good example. Now they have access to a broad audience quite cheaply. Moreover, that broad audience might well like getting material from the horse’s mouth.

On the other hand, organisations and politicians may well argue they are cutting out journalists’ biases and selective quoting. In using Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, for example, they might be accused of using 10 second grabs, but they can respond that at least those 10-second grabs are their 10 second grabs.

The loss here, however, is the journalists’ pledge to be dispassionate, which a business or a politician writing their own “journalism” cannot pretend to be.

As the internet grows and more non-journalists use it, the classic symbiosis between politicians and others, on one hand, and journalists on the other is severed.

Before the internet, contacts (or talent, as broadcaster say) were more beholden to journalists. And they were more concerned about what journalists wrote – enough to bully, complain or sue because it was so important. Now they have others ways to get their message to the broad audience. Worse than being corrected, contradicted or abused for your reporting is being ignored.

The death of journalism, no. A fundamental evolution of journalism and society, yes.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 22 September 2012.