(Image: Private Media)

This week another battlefront opened in the conflict between old media and new voices over competing visions: old media struggling to sustain its monopoly voices into the 21st century; new media demanding recognition of (and support for) a more vibrant and diverse ecosystem.

It’s happening at an “existential moment” for media, as Nobel peace prize laureate Maria Ressa reminded us on Monday. The business model is broken, she said, in a call for more support for media. She urged developed countries to dedicate 0.03% of aid funding to global media development. (On current figures, this would be just $1.2 million for Australia.)

In Australia, Ressa’s call has echoed a more tawdry fight over money — specifically over philanthropic support from the $100 million Judith Neilson Institute: should it be to fill the holes left in old media by the cascading collapse in ad dollars? Or should it be targeted at all media to make an ecosystem-wide transition to a more diverse future?

According to news reports, JNI’s eponymous founder reckons that old media companies have had enough hole-filling money from her institute, particularly now they’re picking up a lazy $100 million a year between them thanks to the Frydenberg-brokered pay-off from Google and Facebook.

Problem is, as Crikey’s been reporting over the past couple of weeks, the big media pivot to a subscriber-supported future is hitting a wall. They’re discovering you can build news media with reader support but you can’t build the sort of 20th-century commercial mass media monopolies that turned families like the Murdochs and the Packers into billionaires.

Worse, when philanthropic support shifts from hole-filling to digital start-up and transition support, big media’s monopoly ambitions take a second hit. It delivers the last thing they want: a whole lot more competition for fragmenting audiences.

Australia’s transition to a modern media ecosystem has been hamstrung by our local big media’s rent seeking — with the active collaboration of the lost decade of the Abbott to Morrison years.

Even a positive 2017 reform of grants to help Australian-owned small and independent regional media through the digital transition was, in 2020, transformed into more open slather public interest news-gathering grants. Pre-empting Ressa’s call this week to develop independent media, the Morrison government in 2019 announced a three-year $17 million grant to Australian commercial broadcasters to on-sell programming to the Pacific.  

The ABC, too, has been more problem than solution. Although internally it’s doing plenty of exciting innovation in its programming and journalism, it’s been too ready to play safe by tolerating the ambitions of the commercial monopolies — rewarding News Corp, say, with regular appearances on Insiders, while ignoring new media (like *cough* Crikey). 

Under pressure from the Liberals, it cut the news feed to the government’s most hated new media voice, industry super-owned New Daily. Across the Tasman, by comparison, Radio New Zealand has been a key supporter of media innovation (for old and new media) with a free news feed and collaboration over podcast creation.

In this context, when JNI first launched, the old media monopolies weren’t sure how to take it: threat or opportunity? The foundation responded with “every kid wins a prize” assurances, making sure all the big media got money out of their initial grants rounds. (Crikey received “emergency” funding from JNI to help keep employing casual subeditors.)

But the institute eschewed the more controversial — and more necessary —  targeted support for the digital media transition.

Smart politics. Maybe, in the Australian media culture, even necessary politics. But not so helpful in building the media ecosystem we need for the future.

Some of its grants have provided real value: it funded Guardian Australia’s program to build a Pacific network. It supported a proposal to link Indigenous journalists and media in the region.

But there are better models. The Omidyar Foundation’s India arm, for example, has invested in digital news start-ups like Scroll and News Laundry. The George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation spun off the media development investment fund in the 1990s to provide low-cost financing for new media in emerging democracies. It’s been critical in supporting Indonesia’s diverse media.

In the US, Matter VC used the US west coast venture capital fund-raising boom to provide seed funding through a media-focused accelerator program. The Walkley Foundation raised funding (from Google, among others) for a four-year Media Incubator and Innovation Fund from 2013, which supported more than 25 media ventures and experiments. (Disclosure: I was a trustee when the fund was launched.)

Journalism-supporting institutions work better when they work with others, rather than duplicating (do we really need another journalism award?) or attempting to rival or supplant the work of, say, the various university journalism schools and research centres.

There’s a big need for something like the JNI in Australia, particularly if it helps speed up the change we need.