Category Archives: MWF events
On Afghanistan
By now, Malalai Joya should need no introduction. If you haven’t read the interview with her in the current edition of Overland, or the except of it in The Age last Monday; if you didn’t catch her on Q&A on Monday night or speaking to John Faine in the Conversation Hour, or even picked up a copy of her autobiography Raising My Voice, then I hope you were lucky enough to catch one of her sessions at the MWF.
On Saturday night, Joya addressed a packed BMW Edge, speaking frankly about life in Afghanistan today. 10 years of occupation has doubled the misery of the Afghan people, she claimed. The US-led invasion that was instigated as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and justified since with references to the dire situation for women and children (Afghanistan is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman, according to UNIFEM) and the serious human rights abuses perpetrated by the Taliban, has not made things better for the Afghan people, Joya claimed. In fact, they have made them worse. If, in the time of Taliban rule, some women in Kabul were mildly better off, certainly nobody listens to their voices now. They are lashed in public, raped by corrupt police, shot. Women sell their babies for loose change because they cannot afford to feed them. Men are hung for being pro-democratic, and then their bodies are harvested for organs.
“Democracy never came from bombing a wedding party.”
Afghanistan has billions of dollars in mineral resources, Joya explained, that could be exploited for the benefit of the people. However, they also have the second most corrupt regime in the world, so the Afghan people don’t see any of the benefits from these resources. The money goes straight into the pockets of the already wealthy, powerful and ruling elite. In attempting to bring about democracy and bring down the Taliban, the NATO forces have, in Joya’s words, ‘propped up’ a regime of ‘criminal war lords’. These war lords only differ from the Taliban in their fiscal approach, not their anti-democratic or anti-humanitarian mentalities.
Joya does not deny that things are bad. After years of underground activism and persecution, she knows better than anyone that they are devastating. But the Afghan people are ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ now because foreign military forces are occupying the country. The people dropping bombs and killing civilians in air strikes are NATO forces. In fact, some of the worst massacres, she claimed, happened in Afghanistan after President Obama came into power. Nobody wants to believe that a superpower like the US would lend its support to these kinds of travesties, and yet 14 countries are allied with them over the war in Afghanistan. The lawlessness that exists because of their presence is their excuse to stay longer. They are currently scheduled to leave mid 2014, but they are now talking about setting up permanent military bases in the country. This is part of the reason why Joya believes they are not in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people but for their own strategic interests. ‘I do not believe it is a war on terror,’ Joya said, ‘simply war crime.’
The most striking thing about Joya’s speech – and the part of her message that I think is most crucial, and perhaps what is lost in the contemporary mainstream coverage about Australia’s presence in Afghanistan – is her focus on what the people of Afghanistan want. Neither the war lords currently in power nor the Taliban act in the interests of the people, she says. To assume that the Afghan people want these corrupt and violent war lords in power – and further, to assume that outside forces negotiating with them at gunpoint could possibly bring about democracy – is naïve, as though a population would choose to be exploited, to be tortured, to be oppressed. And yet by trying to work within the existing power structures, she claims, the NATO forces are actually uniting the enemies of the people against the people.
“Democracy without independence or justice is meaningless.”
Afghanistan needs honest helping hands, Joya said – they need schools and they need hospitals. But through the military occupation, the money and power falls into the pockets and hands of the corrupt. The media never reports the internal resistance, to not only the Taliban and the war lords, but to the NATO forces themselves. The question is always asked: ‘But what will happen if the troops leave?’ Except, Joya said, that nobody asks what is already happening while NATO forces occupy the country. Civil war in Afghanistan is not a possibility; it is an actuality. But if the foreign troops leave, she said, actually leave, the backbone of the corrupt regime will break. And then, finally, perhaps the people of Afghanistan will be able to liberate themselves.
Switching to Fiction: Christopher Kremmer, Anna Funder, Leslie Cannold and Malcolm Knox
When Christopher Kremmer fled from an op shop where he’d found a bound collection of old Sydney Morning Herald newspapers from the period when his father had been a jockey in the Melbourne Cup, he realised that his ‘whole life was about running away from the past’. This time, he decided to turn back around and face it, and was drawn into the stories of the horseracing world. His novel The Chase tells the story of a scientist, Jean Campbell, trying to root out drug use in the horse racing industry. Even for the experienced non-fiction writer and journalist, research was nigh impossible: ‘the world of horseracing is a world of secrets … it’s all about masking what goes on to increase the odds’. To make his task even more complicated, the real-life scientist Kremmer was basing Campbell on had never left any records.
Then there’s the balancing act between a non-fiction writer’s research instinct and the novelist’s creative impulse: ‘You overresearch it, but you get to a point where you need to let go of those real people. Once you start doing that you start to be able to pour yourself into these character.’
Chair Geordie Williamson asked whether there was any pressure on Anna Funder to follow up her acclaimed account of the former East Germany, Stasiland, with something in a similar vein? ‘My husband said I had second-album syndrome, which I don’t think is true,’ said Funder of her new novel, All That I Am.
In non-fiction, Funder believes, it’s important to honour the people you’re writing about, so in Stasiland, for which she spoke
with people whose courage had been ‘almost unbelievable’, she wanted to pay tribute to that. With All That I Am, though, the people on which Funder based her characters are no longer alive, and what happened isn’t known, so ‘I looked at shards of history and put together a plot which I think is the most likely thing that happened’. While this lack of material might seem less advantageous, there is an upside: ‘The biggest moral limit of non-fiction is not being able to represent the consciousness of your characters from the inside. That was a huge liberation.’
Leslie Cannold ‘didn’t make a conscious choice to write a novel’. The impetus for writing The Book of Rachael was a BBC documentary attempting to unearth historical truths about the life of Jesus. Cannold ‘started wondering what my family were up to’ at this time – but it became clear that the historical record was not concerned with women. Fronting up to the library, Cannold demanded everything that existed on Jesus’s sisters, but she was told there was basically no existing material on the subject. Cannold decided it would be her responsibility to tell such a story.
Where fiction and non-fiction do mix, suggested Malcolm Knox, was ghostwriting. Someone like the famously laconic Bart Cummings is hard to write a 300-page book about, so the tools of fiction can assist in creating a narrative. Yet there is a point at which you have to stop and go no further – you can’t make anything up. In regard to Knox’s novel The Life, there was at least one good reason not to write a biography of surfer Michael Peterson – one had already been written. But he ‘was always about 50 per cent fiction anyway’, said Knox.
All the guests thought of fiction as serving a different purpose to non-fiction in telling a story. Cannold thought that if she wanted to write about something about which there was very little known, she would elect to use fiction. Kremmer thought that, for his next book, he would probably be returning to the more familiar ground of non-fiction, but not because fiction was unsatisfying: ‘I found it one of the great experiences of my writing career’.
The Connected Book: what are the possibilities?
Now that we’ve accepted the ereader, it’s time to look at some of the creative possibilities afforded by digital texts. Publisher of Booksquare.com, Kassia Krozser; author of digital fiction Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths, Kate Pullinger; founder of audio digital library LibriVox, Hugh McGuire; and if:book’s Simon Groth this evening discussed what multilayered media, text enriched with images, sound and interactive features might soon do to revolutionise a bookshelf near you.
What exactly do digital texts offer? Screen-based formats allow for so much more than just reflowable text, Groth said in his introduction, which alone is a huge leap from the print workflow; even the humble hyperlink has the potential to change reading. And then there’s ‘networking to other texts, augmentation through images and other media: a book is not a petri dish, it’s a living thing connected to a wider community’. But how do we capture all the facets of this connection?
To answer this question, Groth asked another. How did Pullinger’s networked novels first come about? In thinking about new forms of writing online, she spent a year thinking about what it meant to put a story on a screen – what that opened up for storytelling. She’s continued to write traditional forms such as short stories, but although Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths both have text at their hearts, they also use music, images and games to tell stories. But is this still a ‘reading’ experience? Groth agreed that it was reading, but perhaps enhanced reading – not gaming, or any other activity.
And how exactly do you publish these digital texts? McGuire started LibriVox in 2005. The website brings readers and listeners together from around the world to publish user-recorded audio of public domain books. In doing this, McGuire said, he’d created a publishing entity that ‘broke every rule’ – they’ve got no quality control process, for example. But it’s extremely productive: around 100 books a month. After that project he thought about how you would create a text publisher that suited the online climate, and he came up with Pressbooks, which is still in its testing phase. Pressbooks uses a blogging platform, WordPress. What was the logic behind this? ‘There’s no technical difference between blogging and writing a book, though the thought process is obviously very different.’
The discussion of these new platforms and user-created content raised the question of what is publishing, and who are publishers? For Kroszer, this depends on how you define a book; a blog, for example, is more like a newspaper or a magazine than a book. Bloggers and readers of blogs might agree that some blog pieces aren’t crafted enough to warrant the process of publishing, marketing, reproducing and distributing. Kroszer though that perhaps pulling some blog posts out and creating a compendium of them would be worth doing if the particular pieces would stand the test of time.
The connected book, though, might be more than just the object or location of text online. Authors can connect with readers in a much more immediate way through social media, Pullinger has found. For example, smartphones can allow you to interact with a story in new ways depending on your location.
McGuire thought that though the core text of what we call a book today might still exist in a particular place on the web – ebooks still look like books, after all – but we will see layers of response to this text, through comments and other reader-generated interactions. The book will be central, core thing, but engagement will compile around and on top of that.
Kroszer was excited by this: ‘You’re making me question the definition of a book!’ She thought that this is a question that 
everyone in publishing is struggling with. Think of a cookbook: though you might love the idea of a print book with beautiful pictures of the end product, you might want to take an ingredient list to the supermarket. On top of this, readers might want to rate recipes – connect to others’ interpretations of the content.
There were many considered questions from the audience, including one pertaining to new terms for a ‘book’ and even for ‘reading’ – are these nouns appropriate for connected interaction with content? McGuire cheerily joked that even the word ‘content’ was fraught – in some quarters, people ‘will kill you if you describe it as “content” rather than as some kind of sacred text.’
But what do you think? Is ‘book’ going to continue to be a useful term? What about ‘reading’?
Get political
Feel like a bit of grit in your Saturday?
Power Without Responsibility
Over the last 10 years, The Australian has become one of the most prominent conservative political campaigners in this country – so comfortable in this assumed role that in an editorial in September 2010, the paper announced that it believed the Greens ‘should be destroyed at the ballot box’. But what does it mean for a newspaper, which claims to uphold the ideals of fair and balanced reporting, to be such an overt political actor? And what effect does this have on the political debate in Australia? 
If you’re quick this morning you could get along to BMW Edge at 10am to see Robert Manne and Eric Beecher talk about Manne’s new Quarterly Essay: Bad News – Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation, examining The Australian’s political voice and it’s role in public debate. For those of you still coming down from the New News conference and Jay Rosen’s excellent keynote last week, this could be the perfect antidote.
Middle East – Spring or Fall?
The popular uprising in Egypt that began on January 25 toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Soon Egypt will be holding its first elections post-uprisings. But how did the uprising come about? What did it mean for the people? What are the complications involved and how might it be seen in the context of the revolutions occurring all across the Middle East? Professor Amin Saikal, commentator Mona Eltahawy and narrative non-fiction writer Joseph Braude will be discussing with Louise Adler the history and the possibilities for the region, today at 2:30pm in BMW Edge.
Big Ideas: 10 Years After 9/11 – Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Struggle for Democracy
“They are wasting your taxpayers’ money and the blood of your soldiers.”
If you haven’t yet heard former Afghan parliamentarian Malalai Joya speak – if you missed her Monday night appearance on Q&A, or her appearance on the Conversation Hour with John Faine on Friday morning – here’s your chance. Joya’s uncompromising politics are underpinned by years of underground activism for women’s rights, a public fight against internal corruption in Afghanistan, foreign occupation and war. Defying death threats and surviving assassination attempts, Joya continues to speak out despite attempts to silence her, making her one of the strongest and clearest voices against the war. She is speaking tonight at BMW Edge at 6:30pm as part of the MWF’s Big Ideas program.
Uncomfortable truths: gender matters
Women continue to be marginalised in our culture. Their words are deemed less interesting, less knowledgeable, less well-formed, less worldly and less worthy.
If you are in any doubt that gender matters, you need only ask a scientist. Yesterday in ACMI Cinema 2, Robert Brooks, Cordelia Fine and Jane McCredie got together to discuss with Monica Dux the science of sex differences. Fine spoke first. ‘We have a tendency to see male and female as fixed and immovable categories,’ she said. Neurology and biology are called upon and expected to explain existing sexual power differentials, achievement biases, social norms and gender stereotypes. But it’s important to critique this ‘sexist science’, Fine said, because – as she writes in Delusions of Gender – ‘from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers.’ Self-help books and the popular media capitalise on these categories and trends, and refer to ‘the science’ as justification for the status quo.
Brooks picked up where Fine left off. ‘Male and female are seldom as different as we would like to think,’ he said, and nature v. nurture is a false dichotomy. Yes, to understand power and the inequalities of existing power structures, we need to look at the social, political and economic contexts that created them. But this is not incompatible with evolutionary biology. In fact, Brooks argued, engaging with evolutionary biology is essential to understanding the implications those very same forces might have for individual people.
When Jane McCredie spoke, she said she said she found it frustrating how science, in seeking to make everything precise, sought to find clear categories in which to place people. For instance, we could dismiss trans and intersex people as aberrations of type, she said, but to do so would be a failure of nerve. Nobody fits a category unequivocally. Science needs to accomodate all of our differences, not seek to push them back into a pre-existing, restrictive boxes.
It would have been difficult for anyone to come away from this session believing that scientific discourse is divorced from the politics of gender. But if you were in any doubt that there are social and political reasons to argue against this kind of sexism and all others besides, Sophie Cunningham’s A Long, Long Way To Go: Why We Still Need Feminism would have left you with the conviction that sexual inequality is indeed very real, and evident in statistic after sobering statistic. 
In Australia, Cunningham explained, only 58% of women are in the workforce, compared to 78% of men. Only 54% of ASX200 companies have women in management roles, and only 10.7% of executive managers are women. 56% of law graduates are women, but only 25% of practicing lawyers over 40 are women, and those women in law suffer a 62% pay gap. The arts are nowhere near exempt from these kind of telling numbers. When the May issue of Esquire listed 75 books every man should read, only one woman made the cut. The 2009 and 2011 Miles Franklin shortlists were all male. Since the award began in 1957, it has been awarded 51 times. Out of those 51 awards, only 13 recipients have been women. In theatre, visual and fine arts, these trends are mirrored, if not worse. And one set of numbers Cunningham didn’t give: in the 16 years since the MWF instituted an opening night keynote address, that headlining festival role has been occupied only twice by a woman – by the same woman: Germaine Greer.
So do these things matter? Cunningham asked. Are women just feeling left out? Earlier in the afternoon, when Fine discussed women’s performances in mathematics, she explained how women who believed that they were ‘naturally’ bad at mathematics performed badly. When they believed that they were bad at mathematics not through any deficiency of their own but because of external factors, their scores went up significantly. Cunningham argued a similar point: ‘Erasure of female talent… has a quantifiable effect on women’s careers and their capacity to earn money.’
Perhaps many of these biases are unconscious, Cunningham said. But if our biases are unconscious, that is no defence against failing to act on their recognition. It is in understanding this that Cunningham and a group of writers, editors and feminists created the Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing. But change is not just a matter of recognising what exists, but of creating a culture in which that is valued, and in which women are further able to access the means to pursue their vocations. Unconscious inequality requires conscious action to correct it. And because of this, a new wave of feminism, says Cunningham, ‘a fourth wave, if you will, is both needed and soon to arrive.’
A Classical Education?
As the clouds came out again over Melbourne, Peter Rose, Eliot Weinberger, Barry Hill and Ian Morris gathered to discuss the influence of the classics on contemporary writing.
What is a classic, anyway? When I was at school, classical societies and cultures were those of ancient Greece and Rome. Morris, who is Willard Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University, described a redefinition of ‘classic’ that was taking place in scholarly and educational circles: ‘It would be silly to carry on acting like they did in the 19th century, when there was a real focus on Western culture.’ Where Western civilisation courses used to be ubiquitous, they have now have been replaced by world history courses. Of course, this means that ‘there’s going to be less of a focus on Greek and Roman literature – but that’s not such a bad thing’.
Classics do still play a part in modern literature, poet and historian (among other things) Hill reminded us, as he had been reminded last week at a series of events featuring philosopher Raimond Gaita. Plato features in Gaita’s work, as does Socrates – Gaita clearly has a passion for ‘the examined life’. As the attendees discussed Gaita’s Romulus, My Father and Gaita’s new book, Hill realised they were engaging in the ritual of rendering a new book as a classic – by recalling the classics that helped shape it, and lauding it in terms of the classics we admire. A paradox of the ‘classic’ occurred to him: the classic is there to be used and reused (and abused), but is also sacred, unique.
It’s universal that every culture venerates its ancestors, said a jetlagged Weinberger (‘One is stupid, but when jetlagged, one has an excuse for one’s stupidity.’) ‘It’s hard to think of any culture that doesn’t’; perhaps we’re at a moment where the poets have lost the past and the classics have dropped out, in a nod to postmodernism.
An audience question suggested that history is being poorly covered in schools; did the panellists find this depressing? Morris didn’t, and said he didn’t worry about it because history is being covered abundantly on television and being watched like never before, although the coverage was perhaps not what a historian would choose to watch.
The Cameron government has made huge cuts to university funding, too, Rose said, raising the question of what sort of 
education should be produced under financial constraints. Morris agreed there was a push towards career-oriented disciplines, such as finance, and that the lack of funds prompted reflection: is there any point to a humanist education? But reflection needn’t be so defeatist, Morris said – perhaps humanists aren’t making an attempt to teach relevant content that interests people.
At session’s end, Weinberger revisited the idea of what defines a classic, pointing again to the expansion of this idea of what is classic: not just Greece and Rome, but also artefacts from Asia, and Aboriginal culture, closer to home. ‘The ancient is always lurking under the parking lot and it has an unpredictable way of resurfacing.’
Playing the blame game: on politics and journalism
At the MWF on Friday, as the New News sessions were running hot in the Wheeler Centre, BBC correspondent Nick Bryant, political journalist for the Australian George Megalogenis, commentator and former staffer of Kevin Rudd, Tim Soutphommassane, and Stuart Littlemore, Media Watch presenter between 1989 and 1998, got together to discuss the intersection between journalism and politics.
Bryant posed the question: who is to blame for the infantilisation of politics? Megalogenis for the most part appeared to argue around an answer, apportioning blame everywhere and nowhere. Soutphommassane argued that politicians are not passive victims – a poor actor cannot just blame the script – and in the professionalisation of politics, ‘conviction’ becomes not a determination to make a firmly-held philosophy into reality, but a matter of political marketing. He then went a step further, however, to claim that the public are culpable for continual media focus on the trivial: that if we as a people are not prepared to call politicians out for their kneejerk policies or vapid media stunts, then we get the politicians we deserve.
Perhaps it was to be expected that Littlemore would turn on the journalists, but in the circumstances it wasn’t unwarranted, as neither Megalogenis nor Soutphommassane acknowledged any form of media accountability in shaping political debate. Littlemore didn’t entirely disagree with either of them, but ‘I have difficulty blaming the citizen,’ he said. ‘And I have difficulty leaving the journalist out of it.’ As the discussion continued, it wasn’t hard to see the cycle of blame emerging: journalists abdicating responsibility for the pitiful nature of their political coverage; politicians blaming a relentless and superficial media for the nature of their policies; and the public becoming outraged at both the calibre of politician they have to vote for and the generally useless information they are fed in the guise of ‘political coverage’ by the popular media.
When the issue of asylum seekers came to the fore, Littlemore put Megalogenis on the spot. One cannot divorce the journalist from growing racism and Islamophobia in society, he claimed, and ‘your employer is one of the worst!’ Editorial is not the same as journalism, Megalogenis countered, and at least the Australian is upfront about its agenda when it does editorialise.
Perhaps these comments would have slid away from memory, like a talking point spouted by a politician in an orange vest on the 6pm news, had this session not been followed up by Jay Rosen’s New News keynote. The crux of the problem of political coverage, Rosen claimed, is that journalists identify with the wrong people. They reframe politics as entertainment because it’s cheaper than presenting it as problem-solving or consensus-building. And in positioning politics as a horse-race or a sport, journalists position themselves as ‘insiders’, and this ‘cult of savviness’ becomes fodder for political coverage itself.
In response to an audience question, Rosen drew attention to the Murdoch media machine – a tool for bullying and intimidation, and wielded by men seeking to influence power and policy. In order for this machine to function in the way it does, he said, a strange culture of denial exists. The people paid to write for it need to believe that they are merely doing honest jobs as journalists, and that there’s no ‘conspiracy’ involved in the broader corporate structure to dominate or control the direction of policy and politics. And of course there isn’t a conspiracy, Rosen said, because it’s an openly recognised fact that this is the case.
It would be ‘bizarre and irresponsible’ Rosen claimed on Twitter later, to interpret his speech to mean that the media was to blame for poor government policy. Indeed, as he said on Lateline, ‘Political actors and producers of news are interdependent at this point.’ But this conception of politics as an inside game – this cult of savviness – is ‘an attack on solidarity.’ If journalists are not fulfilling their responsibility of enabling the public to be more active participants in their own democracy by reporting facts and separating spin from spit, then they are failing at their job. Seen in this light, Littlemore’s comment, made only two hours earlier, seems a lot less arbitrary, and a lot more scary: ‘Popular media is an assault on democracy.’
Birds don’t have to be for anything: Jonathan Franzen and Sean Dooley on birds
Jonathan Franzen is a renowned bird-watcher and conservationist, as is Sean Dooley (The Big Twitch). They spoke this afternoon to ABC Radio’s Michael Veitch (himself a keen bird-watcher) about their mutual passion. Is there something about the elusiveness of birds that attracts writers?
To kick off, Veitch polled audience members, who mostly proved at least either bird-watchers or Franzen/Dooley readers, if not a combination of both. For fairness’ sake, Veitch also asked ‘How many of you are bird watchers who have never heard of Jonathan Franzen or Sean Dooley?’ Two lone but brazen birders put their hands up and received an air-kiss from Franzen in response.
Audience bona fides having been ascertained, it was time to test the panellists, who went to the Werribee sewage farm yesterday (which Franzen called ‘one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been’). Veitch reeled off a list of Victorian birds, and it turned out the intrepid travellers hadn’t seen very many (one particular species had been sighted ‘very distantly, through heat shimmers’, but Franzen joked ‘Yes, we missed almost everything’) even though the site is renowned for its birdlife: ‘25 kilometres of open poo ponds’ that Dooley said birds love. Apparently 370 species of birds have been sighted there in the past fifty years or so.
Writing is an isolating pastime, but, Veitch asked, is birding something you can enjoy doing with others? ‘More eyes means you see more stuff’, Franzen agreed, but it can also be done alone; ‘I prefer to be myself. It’s a great, great activity … who wants to go to a party when you can slip out and see a bird or two?’ Indeed, those hoping to see Franzen at MWF parties may be disappointed, as Dooley then happened to mention there was somewhere near Federation Square where they could slip out to see some avian life instead.
Dooley agreed: ‘I basically go bird-watching for the birds, not for the bird-watchers.’ Not surprising from someone who blew his inheritance on buying a four-wheel drive and bird-watching for a year, an experience he wrote about in The Big Twitch: ‘It was a good chance to get out into nature.’
Not only is it a chance to reconnect with nature, but bird-watching is also a pursuit that has changed the way Franzen responds to nature. Instead of approaching it as something that’s for him, for his contemplation – ‘Am I alone enough?’ – it’s now the habitat of the creatures he loves.
Do the writers write differently thanks to their interest in birds? Franzen: ‘More carefully … As a reader I turn off if I’m about to be subjected to too much appreciation of nature.’
Then to the cerulean warbler, the bird made arguably a thousand times more famous by its inclusion in Franzen’s latest novel, Freedom. Why did he decide to feature this bird, a ‘bluish, small and unintelligent looking’ one? ‘It’s arguably the fastest declining songbird in North America,’ Franzen explained, ‘and happens to have a stronghold in West Virginia’, where the novel is set. That location is ‘a dystopian vision of what America is becoming’, with the environmental destruction, out-of-town interested making money, and residents maintaining a relatively low quality of life. ‘It’s a pan-American bird,’ which winters in South America, and ‘it’s pretty’.
Veitch had purposely avoided asking his guests why birding was such an important pursuit for them, but by session’s end, Franzen had kind of answered it anyway: ‘I feel like it’s good to have something to do for my own sake – I have a Protestant work ethic that I can’t get away from except when I fall into a bird-watching trance.’ He’s become involved in bird conservation ‘as a way of justifying post hoc these days I spend for no other reason out in the bush other than it brings me pleasure’. Nevertheless, this doesn’t detract from the fact that birds are beloved and interesting qua birds: ‘Birds don’t have to be for anything.’
New News: Innovation in Journalism – what might it look like?
The time is ripe for change and innovation in journalism, with the proliferation of new technology, information sourcing devices constantly at punters’ fingertips and widely publicised missteps by media behemoths. David Higgins, News Limited’s innovations editor, Sam Doust, ABC Innovation,’s creative director and Jay Rosen, New York University joined Margaret Simons to discuss their ideas on how to innovate in journalism.
Where did the idea for this session come from? When writing a story on the future of Fairfax for The Monthly, Simons asked a senior executive how they were going to innovate journalism, the interviewee said ‘What do you mean’? Although the media is changing quickly, the core of the journalistic method hasn’t changed very much since printing press was invented; Simons argued that no other industry can say the core product has stayed so constant.
Is it possible to change the way we tell stories or communicate news? Higgins suggested that it’s possible to vary the presentation of news and reach different audiences through ‘gamification’. During his tenure as website editor for the Sydney Morning Herald and news.com.au, fighting in Sudan was intensifying, yet he ‘couldn’t get people to read these stories no matter how good the journalism was’. MTV, of all outlets, said Higgins, came up with an idea that cut through this – a computer game called Darfur is Dying. The difference between this method of storytelling and how a journalist or foreign correspondent would tell the story was startling, and Higgins stressed that he wasn’t suggesting games as the new face of journalism, but one ‘attempt to get a level of differentiation into journalism – why we’re suffering is there’s so many similar versions of the same stories out there’.
Sam Doust took to the projector to demonstrate some of the new presentation and marketing ideas the ABC is using to showcase its work. Their The Explainer tumblr contains many of these examples. For instance, to complement the Rear Vision radio program on how to get out of Guantanamo Bay, an interactive flash and html animation was created. This was just one way to reach people who might not beading the articles; the Journey through Climate History moving timeline is a visually engaging interface for engaging with the information itself, which, Doust said was of course more important than any visualisation technique.
Jay Rosen agreed with this, saying that innovation doesn’t necessarily involve building new tools or programming machines: ‘The tools I’m interested in are people, ideas, and the will to do things differently’. Rosen called this ‘soft’ innovation – changing the way you do journalism, which often uses new tools but isn’t strictly about that. What kinds of innovations would involve readers working with journalists (‘mutualisation’ in Rosen’s parlance)? Take a look at openfile.ca – anyone who wants to can ‘open a file’; that is, prompt an investigation. Editors then assign a story to a reporter. Stories that come up through this method are five to seven times more visited than those their editors suggested. Another way to do this is covered in Rosen’s blog post, The 100 Percent Solution: decide on what you want to cover, and work out how to cover all of it. How exactly could you do this? Deputise your users in, for example, tweeting comments, scores and images.
Many of the audience members either took this advice to heart or didn’t need it: the #newnews hashtag was getting a thorough workout, with heads bent over smartphones and fingers tapping away on laptops throughout the session.
