Political journalism for Australians

A response to Amy Remeikis

Journalist Amy Remeikis used to work at Guardian Australia but has recently taken up a job with the Australia Institute: very much the Oz Institute's gain.¹ On Sunday, she used the currently booming social media platform, Bluesky, to ask readers for some ideas about “how to cover politics in Australia a bit differently.”

“What would you like to see?” she asked.

The fact that she received hundreds of replies—even allowing for the obvious self-selecting bias of a site like Bluesky—bears out my regular contention that people who are interested in politics are absolutely desperate for good journalism. They yearn for authoritative, reliable and trustworthy outlets capable of holding politicians to account, informing them, and explaining things in a meaningful and entertaining way.²

People clearly feel legacy media is not providing any of this.

I’m not throwing shade, but it is no coincidence that it is a non-media organisation like the Australia Institute that is canvassing solutions in this way. Everyone knows that the mainstream media is in a crisis and that the more engaged people are with politics, the less likely they are to be satisfied with what conventional journalism has to offer. They know that the mainstream still treats the audience—the punters as too many journalists still call us—with a degree of suspicion and contempt. It remains true that, even after thirty-odd years of decline, few mainstream outlets are looking to “cover politics a bit differently”. They remain wedded to a father-knows-best, top-down model of news.³

But audiences also want something more than the endless doomscrolling of algorithmically manipulated tech platforms that distract and depress in equal measure.

In short, there are no easy answers to Remeikis’ questions, but I thought I’d try to tease out some of the underlying issues.⁴ A number of what I’ll call—a bit grandly— foundational questions have to be answered first, otherwise the exercise of finding something “a bit different” risks becoming no more than a wish list.

So, my foundational questions are these:

• Who is the audience?

• What is the business/funding model?

• Niche or mass?

• Short or long?

• Advocacy or objectivity?

The answer any particular organisation gives to these questions will have a bearing on the work they do—the content they provide—and different organisations will answer those questions differently. In posing them, I am speaking more generally than simply responding to Remeikis. I won’t address each point in detail, but I will go through them to try to set up the bigger conversation that needs to happen. So, let’s start with audience.

If you really want to cover politics differently, and better, you need to skew your audience younger. You have to build loyalty and trust over a lifetime and the earlier you start the better; and the more sustainable your venture will be. By pitching at a younger audience, you are also more likely to think beyond journalism as practiced by legacy organisations and thus avoid reproducing their mistakes.

Unfortunately, skewing younger mitigates against the second point, the funding or business model. Young people have less money. Inevitably, the business model is going to be the biggest problem, but it will definitely involve subscriptions of some sort, so you need to get your head around that. Subscriptions—or memberships—give people a sense of ownership, and you should reward that by keeping most content free. But that model also means you need to find the sweet spot between catering and pandering so that people are willing to pay for things they may disagree with.

One way of finding this sweet spot is to include direct community engagement, real-life get-togethers of various sorts, in the modus operandi. Such events are not only another source of revenue, they impart knowledge and help build support and solidarity: a sense of community between journalists and their audience.

News is now digital, it happens on screens, and that means it is niche not mass. Digital is a niche ecosphere, an ecosphere of niches. You need to develop your niche and own it, to be the best, most useful source of information within that niche. You can’t be a one-stop-shop trying to appeal to everyone.

Building this sort of audience and business model is hard, especially now that platforms and social media strangle rather than encourage linking. You have to create your own networks and that means interacting and openly promoting other sources of news and discussion. It means knowing intimately the ecosphere in which your audience gets their news and being in that space with them. Don’t pretend you know everything, and don’t act as if you are the only kid on the block. Start conversations. Curate. Make connections. Facilitate introductions. Be useful. Change the incentives.⁵⁶

And now to the final two points.

Sometimes short works better than long, but don’t fall for the idea that people are just grazing and only want a mouthful at a time, or that they have limited attention spans. The best advice I ever got when I worked in retail and was responsible for advertising and marketing was that long copy sells, and I have always found this to be true. This counterintuitive lesson came from one of the original Mad Men, David Ogilvy, in his book Ogilvy on Advertising:

All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short…Direct response advertisers know that short copy doesn’t sell. In split-run tests, long copy invariably outsells short copy.

News is not advertising, of course, but when people are interested in something, they want to know all about it. Sure, your job is to make the information interesting, to hold people’s attention, but length per se is not a deterrent. “An advertisement’s chance for success invariably increases,” Ogilvy writes, “as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases.”

On this point, it is worth watching this video by music analyst Rick Beato. It provides a useful perspective for anyone trying to cover politics differently.⁷

Beato makes a number of interesting points but none more pertinent than the fact that his interviews have received 100 million views and the average length of an interview is one hour. Some are as long as three hours. Compare that—as Beato does in the clip—with what tends to happen on network television, where the same musicians are interviewed for mere minutes, often with no reference to their actual work. Such interviews get a fraction of the traffic.

(And just to note, my best-read pieces on this newsletter tend to be the longer ones.)⁸

Something else Ogilvy wrote applies here too: “Advertising people have an unconscious belief that advertisements have to look like advertisements. They have inherited the graphic conventions which telegraph to the reader, ‘This is only an advertisement. Skip it.’”

Learn the same lesson: don’t telegraph to your audience that this is the same old news. Your news doesn’t have to look like news and you don’t need to ape the conventions of traditional news reporting. By avoiding them, you will tend to talk/write about your topic like a normal person and will more likely resist the top-down, condescending tone built into those traditional forms.

Purplepingers doesn’t have 203,000 followers on TikTok, with 5 million likes, because he looks and sounds like legacy media.

If you are going to be on BlueSky, one of the last unmoated, news-and-link friendly platforms out there with any sort of reach, or on any other platform, don’t treat them like your own personal broadcast channel. This was something Rachel Karten noted in an excellent newsletter recently. She was addressing legacy media journalists and their social media teams, but her comments apply to anyone trying to build an audience or do journalism differently:

[S]ocial media can no longer just be thought of as “distribution.” The news needs to happen natively on these platforms, where more and more young people are going for their news already. After all, millions of people watched election night live not on cable television but on Hasan Piker’s Twitch stream or with other livestream content creators. Clipping a podcast or breaking down a full story on a social platform doesn’t devalue journalistic work or cheapen a media company’s brand—it simply meets people where they are. You’re fishing where the fish are. In the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka referred to this as the “creatorification of journalism” within legacy institutions. I view it as the future of social media relevance for any legacy institution that wants to survive.

As for my final foundational question, objectivity or activism—or if you like, fact versus opinion—it is dangerous to think of them as opposed. Yes, you must aim to be factual, truthful, and verifiable, but this will almost certainly lead you to a position. If you then try to hide that position behind euphemism, passive-voice constructions, and other techniques of view-from-nowhere journalism, all you will be doing is telling your audience how cluelessness or naive you are.

“American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims...”

—Jay Rosen

Besides, neutrality only helps the oppressors.⁹

As James Livingston argues (and I’ve quoted this before):

The daft notion of "objectivity" in reporting (and analyzing) the events of the day is bound to produce a vacuous detachment from reality, of precisely the kind that makes Trump and Vance look like normal candidates seeking election to office. For the truth is that there are no facts absent values, because there is no body of fact independent of the purposes you bring to the project of discovery; and those purposes derive, without exception, from your values, from what you hold most dear, what you believe without thinking, on faith. Objectivity is not a noble dream, it’s a chimera, a delusion born of the inability to acknowledge the ubiquity of ideology, or, what is the same thing, an inability to recognize the fact that no one stands outside or above their ideological dispositions, not even those dedicated to the ideal of objectivity in reporting the facts—or especially those so dedicated.

America has already fallen, is on its way to fascism-with-Trump-characteristics, and legacy media did little to prevent it. In fact, it helped pave the way. And even now, it continues to pander.

The point is, we need alternative journalism of the sort Amy Remeikis and others are trying to conjure, and it is encouraging to see her and the Australia Institute lending their weight and expertise to the task. We need journalism that speaks to us as equals and to our own lived experience; journalism that is useful and meaningful for us, and that isn’t trapped in some out-of-date West Wing fantasy of what journalism and politics are supposed to be. We are way past that.

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PS: one final point about audience

Audience is everything, and it is important to remember you are speaking to and about Australians. The context is always Australian institutions, practices, norms and history, and our political journalism should reflect that. We are not America, or anywhere else, and comparisons with Trump, or whomever, mislead more than they enlighten (as I’ve said before). Power flows differently here and journalism should be alive to its currents, large and small. It should be alive to our institutional peculiarities and to our strengths as well as our weaknesses. We have a long history of democratic innovation and are currently going through a period of self-examination and reinvention that is transforming the relationship between citizens and politicians: and this is largely citizen led. Give that the respect it deserves.

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1. Remeikis’ move from one to the other is itself an interesting indication of the changing media landscape.

2. Yes, I said yearn.

3. Okay, I threw a bit of shade.

4. Just note, I am talking about political journalism in this article, not every other sort of journalism.

5. There is actually a thriving alt media in Australia these days, and no-one is doing more to make people aware of it than Denise Shrivell and her TrueNorth daily newsletter.

6. Ages ago, Jeff Jarvis used to say, do what you do best and link to the rest. What I am saying is a version of that.

7. Just note, some of the calculations he does in the early part of the video are misplaced.

8. I would encourage people to read this earlier piece where I talked about Taylor Lorenz’s move away from The Washington Post.

9. The most insightful and accurate journalists in Weimar Germany, the ones who saw what Hitler was long before anyone else and were calling him out—while the New York Times was still reporting that people had nothing to fear from the Nazi leader—were the socialist newspapers, particularly the Münchener Post (Munich Post). A measure of their presence was not only that Hitler nicknamed the paper the Poison Kitchen, but also that its journalists and editors were amongst the first “enemies of the state” he rounded up after 1933 and deposited in the earliest concentration camps.

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