(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

It’s an election year. It’s a post-COVID return-to-normalcy year — although perhaps later rather than sooner. What’s that likely to mean for Australia’s media? Here are the trends to watch for.

Will Australians follow Americans off the news engagement cliff?

News engagement is so 2020, according to a data dive by US news service Axios, showing it plummeted in 2021 and “it doesn’t look like 2022 will be much better”. The report looked at global data, albeit through a very American lens, tracking the decline to the departure of Donald Trump (and his exclusion from social media) and the country’s early loss of interest in COVID-19. 

It’s a grim picture for news media: social media interactions with news, cable news audiences, news app downloads and unique visits to major news sites all down on global figures.

A quick dig around Australian data suggests that the Americans are some distance ahead of us, while the peculiarities of our defamation law limits social media comments and shares. 

Still there are a few pointers to suggest that interest is waning here, too, including the loss of audiences for the daily premier pressers and the continued slide of free-to-air TV audiences. Maybe it’s just summer. Or maybe once we move past the election we’ll see Australians play true to form: do whatever Americans are doing, just a year or so later.

How will that play out? It leaves news with two choices: double down on the hunt for mass scale through crime, celebrities and the political gimmickry of the news cycle of the government of the day or, maybe, pivot to a more issues-based/solutions-focused style of reporting to enthuse an emerging news audience. 

Last year we saw how that worked when journalism empowered women’s voices. It changed journalism and society for the better. This year maybe we’ll see it happen with some of the other big issues that matter to Australians like, maybe, the climate crisis or the campaign for the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Expect it to happen too at the local level where traditional mass media have abandoned the field to new and emerging players. This is the year — and an election year — when those new voices will need to entrench their place in the new post-COVID normal.

Life, the Metaverse and everything web3

The quarter-century of the commercialised web has forced journalism and news media to twist and turn its way through the one-to-many distribution of Web 1.0 and the many-to-many of the social Web 2.0. Now finding a role for journalism in the emerging Web 3.0, aka web3 — an immersive, decentralised, robust digital world — is proving more complex.

Think back four years to the summer of 2018, when US-based Civil tried to apply the robust power of the blockchain to restore trust in journalism. It gave up two years later.

Or further back into 2015 when The New York Times distributed about a million cardboard viewers to promote its next generation “virtual reality” journalism that immersed you in the world of child refugees. Most of them seemed to have ended up in recycling bins.

By then VR had already been the next big thing for about five years, highlighted by Facebook’s US$2 billion purchase of Oculus in early 2014. 

Last year Facebook took that still next big thing to break through its peak moment by rebranding as Meta and to announce its pivot to the Metaverse™. So far its play has attracted more ridicule than applause and the company’s shares have slumped 10% off the back of the announcement.

But expect Amara’s law to come into play: while, as Civil and the NYT did, we overestimate innovations in the short-term, we underestimate them in the long-term. Democracy needs journalism to work out where it fits in web3. Expect a few more stabs this year.

Old tech lingers — until it doesn’t

Last week, one of the original tech disruptors turned disrupted when Blackberry finally turned off the service for its smart phone software, some 15 years after Apple trumped it with the iPhone. Here’s the lesson: old technologies can linger as long as they make enough money. 

Remember printed newspapers? At the moment, print newspapers offer a sort of retro-schtick to key advertisers — like Peter V’landys’ racing details, Harvey Norman’s home furnishing catalogues and Clive Palmer’s UAP. Sooner or later, one or more will lose interest and print will vanish soon after. Is 2022 that year?