Australia’s media movers and shakers on the biggest threats to journalism
From Kate McClymont to Waleed Aly to Joe Aston, we asked 200 of the nation's most influential media figures what they’re most concerned about and how the sector has shifted.
DEC 12, 2024
It has been a dire, unpredictable year for the Australian media. Jobs have been cut en masse, outlets grappled with ideals of objectivity, newspapers prosecuted campaigns that could see wholesale changes to how audiences interact with news, new outlets formed, others died, there were landmark defamation decisions and investigations into newsroom culture, and an executive allegedly shoulder-charged a reporter.
After a year of volatility, job cuts, uncertainty and brilliance, Crikey chased down Australia’s biggest media figures — from journalists to editors to defamation lawyers to academics — to pick their brains about our industry. What they shared has formed the backbone of a multi-part Crikey series, Movers and Shakers, holding a mirror up to the industry and asking it to reflect on itself.
We emailed roughly 200 people the same eight questions and about one in four got back to us. It was an imperfect list — if we missed you, let us know for next year — but we contacted people from the following outlets: Nine’s major metropolitan mastheads as well as people in its broadcast divisions, The Australian Financial Review, Network Ten, Seven, SBS, the ABC, 2GB, Sky News Australia, Guardian Australia, the News Corp newspapers, The Conversation, Daily Mail Australia, Australian Associated Press, Apple News, Mamamia, Pedestrianand Schwartz Media.
We also included journalism academics, media lawyers and industry body executives, as well as people from smaller outlets like The Nightly, Quillette, Unmade, Capital Brief, the Koori Mail, About Time, The Daily Aus, Women’s Agenda, IndigenousX, Mumbrella, 6 News Australia and of course Crikey.
More than 50 people generously offered us their insightful, searing and sometimes cheeky thoughts on the state of the industry. In this instalment, here’s what they had to say on the biggest threats to journalism in Australia and what has shifted most over their careers.
What’s the biggest threat to journalism in Australia? Defamation? AI? A soft ad market? A news-fatigued audience?
Kate McClymont, chief investigative reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald: A combination of news fatigue, the fragmenting of the advertising spend and the reluctance of consumers to pay. News outlets like The New York Times can do very well out of their subscriptions, but in Australia, with our much smaller population, the subscription model is not going to save journalism.
Waleed Aly, co-host of Network 10’s The Project: Ultimately, every threat to Australian journalism boils down to the collapsing business model. Advertising in one form or another will fund less and less journalism, so media companies will have to cut costs. Lots of dangers flow from that: smaller newsrooms, reporting more from a distance, AI being used to generate content. And the result will almost certainly be a worse product.
Myriam Robin, editor of The Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window: I have trouble getting too worked up about AI (it’s hard to get people to read masterpieces — they’re not going to read automated guff). The thing that troubles me about this brave new world is an economic environment that makes journalism a precious, short-lived career. Most journalists need swagger, creativity and ambition to do anything worthwhile, and those traits are eroded by an avalanche of criticism, a surfeit of experience and a lack of institutional backing.
Sue Chrysanthou SC, barrister: A lack of trust in the media. In my view that is caused by partisan outlets (on all sides) failing to report news and instead pushing a biased narrative that fails to in fact report what occurred. I think that is the biggest change I have observed over my career. It seems to me that agendas determine what is published rather than facts.
Janine Perrett, journalist, broadcaster and commentator: Restrictive defamation laws. If we could write all the stories we knew to be true, especially about all the shonks and sleazebags in public life, then more people might want to read or watch the stories, thus attracting more advertisers. The so-called new-fatigued audiences have made podcasts, documentaries, true crime stories and Netflix dramas based on journalist’s stories, the basis of most popular content and culture today. So they still have the appetite for our work in the end.
Justin Stevens, ABC director of news: Outlets that abandon quality journalism, either by choice or forced by market pressures, pose the biggest threat to journalism in Australia because it threatens the value offering to the public. Outlets that take a short-term approach to performance and abandon values of accuracy, impartiality and fairness diminish the public’s perception of our profession and undermine their trust in what we do.
Chris Janz, CEO of Capital Brief: The history of media policy in Australia — from the news media bargaining code to the public interest news gathering program, licence fee relief and even changes to media ownership laws — has focused on supporting incumbents. Future policy must consider the broader landscape to ensure we don’t have a handful of survivors but also new entrants that are pursuing different stories and business models.
Peter Lalor, Cricket Et Al: Poverty. The business model is broken. The lack of resources — the desperation — forces outlets into haphazard and impoverished decision-making and shortcuts. Chasing clicks and data-driven journalism is a race to the bottom unless it is done with intelligence. That and the lazy culture-wars model damage the credibility of outlets in the audience’s eyes and allow bad actors to fill the space with “freebie” opinion pieces from think tanks whose thinking is biased, vapid and little more than a paint-by-numbers response to every issue.
Everyone is searching for attention and shouting. Col Allan, of all people, said to me 30 years ago that if you have a good story, you don’t need to shout. I recall when Chris Mitchell licensed a few of us to blog on The Australian — he called us in and warned us against chasing clicks. These days, unfortunately, your performance is judged by those clicks. That said, I now sweat on the data on the Cricket Et Al site, but while we like a story that works well, we are determined that our first principle is to write what we think is worth writing.
Paul Barry, former host of ABC’s Media Watch: AI. Its power is frightening. It is already almost impossible to tell fact from fiction, but it’s getting harder every day. How will we ever know the truth of what we’re seeing and reading when public figures can be made to say anything? One Polish radio station recently sacked all its presenters and replaced them with AI avatars. And Channel 1 News on TV is also 100% AI. Crazy stuff.
Marc Dodd, editor of nine.com.au: Google, the ad market, fatigue, etc, all those things are certainly challenges. But the biggest threat to journalism itself is the media companies if they don’t keep moving forward and innovating and reaching audiences in new places. But I am hugely optimistic. Nine and other media companies are meeting those challenges. We have smart people in Australia finding smart solutions.
Cam Wilson, associate editor at Crikey:The biggest threat is outlets, editors and journalists huffing their own farts and being tricked by flimsy metrics rather than thinking deeply about and discovering what their audience cares and values. Digital platforms crushing news, AI siphoning value, the increasingly well-resourced spinners and legal operations of powerful people — all this stuff is hugely important. But fundamentally nothing matters if we’re not making ourselves essential to the lives of our readers.
Sally Neighbour, former EP of ABC’s Four Corners and 7:30: Irrelevance, in the face of an infinite array of information and entertainment choices. Why would anyone bother to watch the 7pm news or pick up a newspaper when they can get everything they think they need to know on their social media feed? And why spend time on the mundane and often depressing fare offered up by traditional news outlets when there is a whole world of entertainment literally at their fingertips?
Social media is both the biggest threat and the biggest opportunity for journalism. Mainstream media can and must compete with/on social media by not just being there but also by providing content (journalism) that is unique, exciting and relevant to people’s lives. People do want to be informed and I believe there is a huge hunger for high-quality information among the masses of dross.
Margaret Simons, journalist and author: So many. But if I had to choose one, it would still be the collapse of the business model, and the failure (with a few exceptions) of government and civil society to adequately respond. The results undermine everything from capacity to a sense of mission and social purpose.
Gabrielle Jackson, deputy editor at Guardian Australia: News fatigue is the biggest issue facing media in Australia.
Misha Ketchell, editor of The ConversationAustralia: Digital media platforms like Meta and X. Their business models are built on section 230 law passed in the US in 1996 that exempted them from most of the ordinary legal responsibility publishers bear. And they’ve used this get-out-of-jail-free card to build massively profitable businesses that are utterly exploitative, ruthless and indifferent to the truth. It’s becoming increasingly clear that there is reality-based media and cowboys who spread misinformation and disinformation that allows populists and frauds to flourish.
Louise Milligan, reporter at ABC’s Four Corners: The cynical cottage industry that is defamation. I think news avoidance and a generation that has not grown up with daily news are the biggest threats to the general journalistic business model.
Kishor Napier-Raman, CBD columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald: Literally everything you mentioned. Also our audiences are dying, the kids aren’t interested in legacy media. And the constant threat of redundancies and cuts. All this leads to a real loss of confidence, or “swagger” as one US pundit put it.
John Buckley, media reporter for Capital Brief: A failure to see past, or push past, commodity news. My personal view is that a growing news aggregation apparatus — news influencers! AI slop! In-house media teams! — will ultimately force a reckoning in Australia that flushes out jobs focused on churning public announcements. There are, of course, exceptions where expertise, physical presence or sheer speed offer a value-add (like on interest rates, in conflict zones, or other “major events”, where the best story often is just the main bar). We’ve seen this in the United States, which up until recently arguably wasn’t as competitive a media market as the UK. In a sense, it’s kind of always been true of the Australian media market — I just expect it to get more competitive.
Dave Earley, audience editor at Guardian Australia: Look, a lack of funding. We can and should worry about the profession of journalism and speaking truth to power, and our ability to continue doing that with the many short- or long-term threats and their varying impacts, but if you can’t keep the doors open the rest of it doesn’t matter. There are very real impacts of the threat of defamation silencing legitimate reporting in the public interest and the self-censorship that comes with that, a soft ad market will mean less money now, a news-fatigued audience may mean slowly diminishing eyeballs over time to serve those ads to. They’re all dangers. But the danger they pose is how they impact our ability to continue to pay the bills of doing journalism. One of the biggest impacts of that over the long term is trust. And I actually think that’s the danger of AI for journalism, not that it will take jobs, but that it could degrade trust in the media even further if it’s used inappropriately, and it will be.
Mandi Wicks, SBS director of news and current affairs (cut down for brevity):There are a number of threats to journalism in Australia:
- Future investment in journalism is currently at risk because of the softening advertising market and the news media bargaining code
- The volatility of third-party platforms is a challenge and can impact the ability of news organisations to reach audiences on these platforms. Combatting misinformation and disinformation is becoming increasingly difficult — and generative AI will increase misinformation and disinformation by creating deepfakes — including fake images, videos and audio clips.
- Trust in news has been declining during the past few years, news avoidance has been increasing and misinformation and disinformation pervade our social feeds and threaten to undermine our democratic way of life.
Steve Austin, host of ABC Radio Brisbane Mornings: A loss of trust in us by the audience! Without trust nothing works. The use of journalists as commentators who give opinions about politics is a sure way to destroy journalism’s reputation. A poor grasp of historical context will lead eventually to the same loss of trust in media.
Morry Schwartz, founder of Schwartz Media: The biggest threat to journalism today is not defamation law, AI, a soft market nor a news-fatigued audience — it is the ease of entry into scale communications. Everyone is a publisher!
Karen Barlow, chief political correspondent at The Saturday Paper: A lack of public trust in media/journalism. This is compounded as it is exploited for political gain. I am also concerned about the general state of journalistic leadership.
Sophie Black, editor-in-chief at Crikey: There are many but it still comes down to funding — the bottom falling out of the business model. Outlets are beholden to tech companies and the information architecture that they need to use to reach audiences (especially younger ones), but they’re also vulnerable to news fatigue, and cost of living biting, and in Australia we’re especially vulnerable because of our tiny market.
Karen Percy, media president at MEAA:Eroding trust with the public who are increasingly going to sites and accessing information that is not verified, not sourced, is not produced ethically or under any journalistic standards. How do you burst those bubbles? Connected to this is the hostility towards journalists, and undermining of the role of journalism by politicians and other public figures. Connected to this is the rise of AI, which not only threatens journalism but is also potentially a danger to audiences because of the way it’s being used to distort facts and events and spread misinformation.
Connected to this is the idea that everybody is an expert about journalism and what makes a journalist. It is very troubling to see politicians, PR agents, lawyers, judges, academics, intelligence officers and others weigh in on this, trying to decide who’s in the tent and who’s not. It’s dangerous and bears the hallmarks of repressive regimes, not an open democracy. Journalists are rightly the protectors of journalism.
Calum Jaspan, media writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age:Shrinking budgets and a lack of funding. They are down to a number of factors and have deep, deep knock-on effects.
Paddy Manning, journalist and author: A) spin/advertorial overwhelming journalistic integrity and ethics. B) our defamation laws definitely limiting free speech. C) AI promising a deluge of unreliable or fake journalism, but hopefully also tools to combat mis- and disinformation by establishing, for example, the provenance of news stories, which is often the key.
Dean Levitan, media lawyer at MinterEllison: Defamation. While we’ve witnessed a recent drop in defamation cases in Australia, the shadow of a defamation action always looms large for journos and editors. There are plenty of quality investigations that aren’t seeing the light of day because of the fears relating to a defamation claim.
Leo Puglisi, founder of 6 News Australia: AI has developed so fast in the past 24 months and so I’m definitely concerned about its threat to journalism — not just the risk of replacing actual journalists in writing stories, but also risking trust in media in the event that AI-generated text or images are mistakenly published because it’s hard to tell what is real.
Rachel Withers, freelance writer: Our increasingly disengaged, rightfully distrustful audience. Very few outlets have figured out how to reach them or regain their trust.
Paul Bongiorno, political journalist:Restrictive defamation laws, forcing media outlets to be too timid and cautious because of the huge expense of defending stories, even ones thoroughly researched.
Gay Alcorn, former editor of The Age:Money, but not only money. Good journalism takes money to pay journalists, to give them time to dig and develop expertise, and that is under serious strain. We have seen regional and local papers disappear, a terrible thing for democracy, and widespread redundancies due to the fall-off in advertising, the end of the Meta deal and the continuing fragmenting of the media and digital advertising shifting to Google and Meta. Subscription growth for the commercial media right now is pretty good, but it’s a big challenge to make up for this decline.
The other major issue is trust. The “media” is very broad — everything from Kyle Sandilands to Kate McClymont — but we are often lumped into one group and we are not trusted by citizens. We do not often ask why.
What’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in Australian journalism in your career and what do you reckon is the next one?
Joe Aston, former Rear Window columnist: When I started at the AFR in 2011, it was making just $4 million a year. The Australianwas losing an incredible amount of money. But the News Corp tabloids were raking in vast fortunes. In the subsequent dozen years, that equation has completely turned on its head. As mass-market advertising revenue has collapsed for publishers, recurring reader revenue has emerged as their saviour — but particularly for high-end titles. The Oz and the AFR are now very profitable mastheads, but News Corp’s tabloids are not. Don’t ask me about the next trend. I’d rather take the piss out of futurists than try and be one.
Peter Hitchener, television presenter at Nine: Among many changes in television news since the late 1950s, one of the most significant is technology. Back then, before the internet, reports were filmed on 16-millimeter black-and-white stock, which needed processing (which took an hour), then manual editing (with a razor blade!) These days everyone has a mobile phone and therefore the ability to become a citizen journalist. And broadcasters can cross for live coverage of news events almost anywhere in the world… or even outer space. However, as always, it’s the content that counts, and that has always been so.
Bridie Jabour, associate editor (audio/visual) at Guardian Australia: The coverage of domestic violence is the starkest change in my personal experience. I remember being a teenage cadet at the Gold Coast Bulletin posted in the police scanner room and constantly hearing DV cases. If our ears pricked up at one of them, it wouldn’t be long before it was casually dismissed by one of us as “Oh it’s just a DV case”. That was not unique to that newspaper either; at every outlet it was considered niche, and even private business. The change in how we treat it in the media during my adult life is staggering. And yet, it’s increased this year with one woman now killed every four days in Australia due to family violence.
Alan Kohler, founder of Eureka Report: The biggest shift was classified advertising moving to specialised publications online, and then social media. The next will be AI I suppose.
Lisa Davies, CEO of AAP: The gravitational pull towards opinion writing, that has been the biggest change. When I started as a journalist, I couldn’t begin to imagine readers caring one iota what my thoughts on an issue were. These days, young reporters want to write opinion pieces before they’ve learned how to find the facts to support their argument.
Misha Ketchell, editor of The ConversationAustralia: There have been some huge shifts in journalism in my time. The drinking culture is all but gone, and that’s no bad thing because it made us all sick and less kind than we could have been. And writing a story without a hangover is much easier.
Women taking leading roles in journalism has been a slow process, but its contribution to the breadth and quality of the work we do is astonishing. Margaret Simons has written very well about the ways in which male police reporters (and some female ones) once totally ignored stories about domestic violence. It took a lot of principled and energetic female reporters to put that on the agenda.
The other massive change has been the emergence of social media and digital platforms, which have been terrible for the industry. Not enough journalists these days have the time or the skills to spend time with the people on whom they report. There’s too much angry opinion and not enough quiet understanding. I don’t know what the next shift is, but I hope it’s not driven by AI!
Kate McClymont, chief investigative reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald:When I started as a journalist back in 1985, we had an industrial relations reporter, a reporter covering religion and someone who only covered the High Court. There were separate teams of health, science and medical reporters as well as an art department with 20 cartoonists, graphic artists and illustrators.
Nowadays the media struggles to do more with less. With the slide of the advertising market, that is going to continue to happen and it worries me that those less well-read stories will fall victim to further cost-cutting no matter how important they might be.
Alex Bruce-Smith, head of editorial at Pedestrian: That’s easy — the rise and fall of Facebook. No other social platform had such a marked impact on media. As for the next one, we’re already in it: content creation. The journalists who survive will be the ones who have built their own audience, and the publications that survive will be the ones who can turn their staff into talent. We’re not just competing with other outlets anymore. We’re competing with 22-year-old content creators.
Nick Feik, freelancer and former editor of The Monthly: Sorry, I have three answers: The rise of social media; the weakening of the ABC and other sources of public-interest journalism; the increasing shamelessness and lack of standards of right-wing media, especially the house of Murdoch.
Neil Griffiths, Mumbrella editor: TikTok being a news source — and I mean that both in a positive and negative way. News being shared online spreads fast, that makes complete sense. But when users with large followings share their opinion like it’s fact and it’s being seen and digested far and wide, that is something we all need to be careful of.
Waleed Aly, co-host of Network 10’s The Project: The fragmentation has been astonishing. The “town hall” effect of mainstream media has greatly diminished, and content is much more highly curated. So it feels a lot more than everyone is in a subculture now. Related to that, people seem much more likely to take in news via some form of commentary or “take” than they used to. It comes already packaged with a perspective. I remember the first time one of my columns was published at the top of the website, where the news section always was. I was deeply shocked. Now I’m surprised if it isn’t.
Nic Christensen, former head of corporate communications at SBS and head of corporate affairs at Nine: I’m fascinated by the rise of journalism personalities. This is nothing necessarily new about this, but you are seeing the up-and-coming crop of journalists building their profiles in new and interesting ways (re TikTok, not Twitter). Look at someone like 9News’ Chris Kohler and his Instagram/TikTok stories — he is telling business stories in fun and interesting ways that connect particularly to younger audiences. This will become bigger and is important, especially amid the rise of the so-called “newsfluencers”.
Janine Perrett, journalist, broadcaster and commentator: The biggest shift has been the loss of corporate memory from experienced journalists replaced with cheaper younger ones who often — not always, of course — don’t have the same experience and are much less trained to stand up to power. They in turn are taking the executive positions and don’t stand up to bullying and don’t protect their journalists.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misattributed Misha Ketchell’s quote on the biggest shift in journalism to Kate McClymont. It has been updated to correctly attribute both quotes. We apologise for the error.