Griffen-Foley October 07

Licence to be curious

Bridget Griffen-Foley

Margaret Simons
The Content Makers: Understanding the Media in Australia
Penguin, $34.95 pb, 513 pp, 9780143007852

Margaret Simons is a writer familiar to her readers. There she was in Fit to Print: Inside the Canberra Press Gallery (1999), first driving with her husband and young children to the national capital, then following Michelle Grattan’s blue dress around Parliament House. Here she is again in The Content Makers: Understanding the Media in Australia, telling us about her experiences in daily journalism, her move into freelance journalism, writing for the e-mail news service Crikey and attending last year’s infamous 2006 Walkley Awards dinner.

In the 1980s, early in her career, Simons discovered that journalism gave her a ‘licence to be curious’. She has retained that curiosity, relentlessly asking questions of her industry in an attempt to – as the subtitle of her new book suggests – understand it. The Content Makers is the account of both an insider (at times the author can only get access to newsrooms and people when they are told ‘she’s been a journalist for years’) and an outsider. Simons speaks of the importance of ‘making a difference’ and describes the challenges facing content providers in the modern world as a ‘search for meaning’. She describes herself as a ‘believer and a practitioner of the religion of journalism’ experiencing a ‘crisis of faith’; remonstrates with newspapers for failing to have ‘faith in content’; and teases out her own ethical dilemmas. The tone is somewhat reminiscent of that of Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004), although not always so successful. The Content Makers is sometimes too earnest and lacking in irony, but it is impossible to doubt the sincerity of the author who writes, ‘we should be good. The journalist has power over how individuals and organisations are represented in public … somehow, surely, a way must be found to be both independent and accountable, both courageous and humble.’

The acknowledgments reveal that this book was the idea of Bob Sessions at Penguin. Sessions and/or Penguin were responsible for two other notable contributions to the field. One was Keith Windschuttle’s The Media: A New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia (1984), a landmark study that challenged dominant right and left interpretations of the media and looked at the content of commercial media as an expression of an authentic popular culture. The other was R.S. Whitington’s Sir Frank: The Frank Packer Story (1971), whose hagiographical approach revealed more about the (then still living) media proprietor’s power than did its reverential and often inaccurate contents. Sir Frank was greeted with derision by journalists and editors, whether or not they had worked for Packer; The Media was treated seriously and on its merits, well before Windschuttle became mired in what we now call the ‘culture wars’.

It is encouraging to see Penguin still seeking out a long and important book. And yet, for all The Content Makers’ interest in media audiences, it is somewhat difficult to discern the audience for this book. There is a sense that The Content Makers, replete with break-out boxes (often useful, sometimes disruptive), has journalism students partly in mind. But the autobiographical incursions, together with the structure, might jar with students. The book is divided into five parts: ‘Change and Constancy’; a tour of key media organisations; ‘The Journalists’; ‘The Owners’; and ‘Government’. However, the foregrounding of content is sometimes at the expense of context, and the first section is too short. Anyone wanting to understand the media in contemporary Australia needs to be introduced earlier to a succinct discussion of the key owners and policy decisions of past generations. There is some terrific stuff on the culture of News Limited, but not much exposition of how this developed. Simons’s point about the fragmentation of media audiences was one that had surfaced by the 1960s, with the rise of niche-market publications and transistor radios. This book is best seen as a study of Australia’s post-1980s media landscape, and as it might become (possibly replete with advertisements in the sky and on conveyor belts at supermarket checkouts).

Simons’s monograph, like Windschuttle’s, focuses on content. She is concerned to distinguish between the content of media and the business of media. For Simons, ‘content’ implies the plastic solider and not the packaging. Her interest is in journalism, drama and any kind of content that ‘really matters’, and the opportunities and risks now confronting content makers. As the books’ subtitles indicate, and as Simons makes clear, the contemporary media is vastly more ubiquitous and complex than it was in the 1980s. She does an admirable job unpacking for readers the ‘alphabet soup of acronyms and seemingly impenetrable technical jargon’ of the new media, and includes a simple glossary for good measure. Strangely, though, there are no images of the content makers to whom we are introduced, or of their content.

The focus is really on the Australian media rather than on the media in Australia. Astute connections are drawn with British press traditions, the American public journalism movement, and international broadcasting on-demand and Internet models, although there is not a great deal of analysis of the overseas media content that has penetrated Australia. This is not a criticism of the author, for she covers some considerable terrain. Simons usefully extends her gaze from big media players to the likes of the Burnie Advocate, and the Melbourne Leader and Adelaide Messenger groups. Her vivid, insightful portraits of contemporary journalists and newsrooms will be invaluable for future generations of Australia’s media historians. And her argument that Australia is, as a country, under-reported is disturbingly persuasive.

Perhaps inevitably, this omnibus of a book will leave some readers wanting more. Almost nothing is said about journalism education, now a booming industry in Australian universities, even though the author occasionally alludes to her own involvement in training journalists. She is fascinated by user-generated content, but does not really explore how seriously the old media (with the exception of Sunrise) regards and deals with the text messages, e-mails, photographs and opinions they now solicit so assiduously. Simons is not as strong on radio as was Windschuttle. ‘Cash for comment’, the saga of the publication of Chris Masters’s Jonestown (2006), and some key findings of Graeme Turner’s talk-back radio project appear, but little else. On page thirty-two, we learn of a study showing that commercial radio is a key source of news and information for Australians; a few pages later, another study is quoted showing that only two per cent of Australians nominate talk-back radio as their key source of news and information. Is there an inconsistency here? The practice of radio journalism rates barely a mention. We are told that concentrated ownership of music radio stations ‘probably doesn’t make much difference to anything but bottom lines’. Disenfranchised young Australian musicians and listeners would beg to differ.

Simons must have been madly scrambling to amend the proofs of this lucid and thoughtful book in mid 2007, as some of the implications of last year’s changes in media ownership laws became evident and signs of a post-colonial media era emerged. That, under these circumstances, the text and endnotes are almost entirely free of typographical errors, and the index functions so well, is a tribute to the author and her publisher. In 1987, following the Hawke government’s rewriting of the rules of media ownership, Penguin released an updated edition of Windschuttle’s The Media. Fittingly for a book that considers new media at some length, The Content Makers is instead accompanied by its own website. One hopes that it really will be regularly updated, and not be allowed to disappear like some of the sites and blogs identified by Simons.

Bridget Griffen-Foley is the Director of the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University.