Investigative Journalism, Democracy and the Digital Age

Andrea Carson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315514277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Theoretically grounded and using quantitative data spanning more than 50 years together with qualitative research, this book examines investigative journalism's role in liberal democracies in the past and in the digital age. In its ideal form, investigative reporting provides a check on power in society and therefore can strengthen democratic accountability. The capacity is important to address now because the political and economic environment for journalism has changed substantially in recent decades. In particular, the commercialization of the Internet has disrupted the business model of traditional media outlets and the ways news content is gathered and disseminated. Despite these disruptions, this book's central aim is to demonstrate using empirical research that investigative journalism is not in fact in decline in developed economies, as is often feared.

1
From ‘Rivers of Gold’ to the Digital Economy

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, by any criterion the press has a far less central role among the mass media, and by all the most tangible measures newspapers are in relative and, increasingly, in absolute decline.

(Tiffen 2010a, p. 127)

Introduction

This chapter examines dramatic political and economic changes to the landscape of traditional mainstream news media since the late 20th century with the arrival of the digital era. It identifies international trends in the financial underpinnings of the press in developed economies with a focus on the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. It traces the days from when print newspaper advertising revenue flowed like ‘rivers of gold’ to the digital age, in which advertising revenue has largely evaporated, resulting in industry-wide financial duress and concerns about the future of investigative reporting.

The chapter charts the economic decline of print newspapers in developed economies and uses Australia as a case study for more detailed analyses. Although Australia’s print media sector is smaller than those of the United States, Britain, and some of the larger economies of Europe, it has similar attributes in its historical reliance on display and classified advertising for the majority of its revenue and in its long tradition of investigative journalism. Australia has also experienced almost identical effects to other developed economies from the arrival of the digital age, particularly since the global financial crisis of 2007–09. As in the United States, Britain, and Europe, collapsing advertising revenue across the Australian print media sector has led to cost-cutting, extensive journalism job losses, masthead closures (mainly regional), and plummeting company share prices. The financial plight of newspaper publishers in these countries has given rise to fears about the future of journalism, and in particular investigative journalism (Franklin 2008; Sampson 1996). This chapter presents evidence to support these concerns, particularly in relation to elite and broadsheet newspapers that have been leaders in investigative journalism since the mid-20th century. Yet while it is likely many legacy news titles across developed economies will ultimately not survive the digital revolution, it is argued in later chapters that fears of investigative journalism’s demise are unfounded. It will be shown that the way that media outlets have responded to their new economic (and global) media landscape has seen investigative journalism escape the deepest cutbacks, and that newsrooms have adapted in ways so that watchdog reporting endures in the 21st century.

In charting the financial trajectory of the press from one century to the next, this chapter is divided into two sections. The first provides an overview of prominent Australian newspaper titles that have historically been local leaders in investigative journalism. These are mainly newspapers in the broadsheet tradition, which have won the most national peer-reviewed Walkley Awards for their investigative journalism (see Chapter 4). While the next chapter examines in detail how investigative journalism can be defined, for the purposes of this chapter, in its simplest expression it is often regarded as the pursuit of a truth that someone wants hidden, which is in the public interest (de Burgh 2000). The second section traces the decline of the print newspaper market in Australia, Britain, and the United States, using various indices to understand the basis of concern for investigative reporting’s future. It tracks newspaper revenues and circulations from the heady days of the 20th century through to the arrival of the digital age in the 1990s, the GFC of 2007–09, and up to 2018. The chapter concludes with some observations and conclusions about the implications of the changed news media landscape for investigative journalism in Australia and other developed countries.

A Brief History of the Australian Newspaper Market

Australia’s first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette and NSW Advertiser, was launched as a weekly on 5 March 1803 under government control (Walker 1980, p. 1). Following the lifting of government censorship in 1824, the first independent newspapers emerged (Mayer 1964, p. 10), among them the Sydney Morning Herald (known as the Sydney Herald from 1831 to 1841) (Walker 1980, p. 4) and The Age in Melbourne in 1854 (Mayer 1964, p. 10). Both were launched as broadsheets, in the British tradition of the time, and both went on to prosper and become leaders in Australian investigative journalism.

The Australian newspaper industry expanded for more than 100 years from about the middle of the 19 th century. Between 1848 and 1886, the number of daily titles grew from 11 to 48, including regional dailies (Mayer 1964, p. 44). Expansion of daily titles slowed in the 20th century, with the total number hitting 54 by 1958 and peaking at 57 in 1984 (Tiffen 2015, p. 69). The 1980s was also the industry’s financial peak, with historically large profits built on advertising revenue flows characterised in the industry as ‘rivers of gold’ (Hills 2010, p. 505).

The first significant signs of declining fortunes appeared towards the end of the 1980s; by 1990 the last of Australia’s daily evening newspapers, The Herald, had ceased publication (Tiffen and Gittins 2009, p. 9; Tiffen 2015, p. 69). This coincided with broad destabilisation in the industry, with changes to cross-media ownership laws leading to a rush of acquisitions and mergers that resulted in an increase in print media ownership concentration across Australia.

In the 1990s came the biggest disrupter of all for newspapers across the developed world: commercialisation of the internet and the dawn of the digital media age. Until then, and for much of the 20th century, Australian newspapers had prospered financially by utilising their market power to sell display and classified advertising at premium prices, with journalism used as the lure to attract what the advertisers wanted: readers. The rise of digital media from the mid-1990s quickly eroded the monopoly position of newspapers in their advertising segments, particularly for classified ads. Competing online advertising platforms with low cost bases (and no journalism) had emerged, undercutting newspapers by offering vastly cheaper rates. In just a few years, news publishers lost much of the lucrative classified advertising revenue streams that had previously underpinned their businesses—and supported their journalism—particularly in the real estate, auto and job ad markets. The subsequent rise of global online behemoths Google and Facebook in the 2000s wreaked yet more havoc, attracting large volumes of newspapers’ remaining advertising and reader bases away from their online sites and print products. By the start of 2016, it was estimated that Google, Face-book, and other digital companies had secured between A$4 billion and A$5 billion of a A$13.9 billion Australian advertising pool, or 35–40 per cent of the total (Morgan Stanley Research 2016).

The mass migration of ad revenue to the digital giants has resulted in extensive cuts in journalism jobs and other austerity measures by newspaper publishers. In this context, it may be surprising that more newspaper mastheads have not totally disappeared. By mid-2018, the number of Australian daily papers—including regionals—had slipped below its 1980s peak of 54, to 45 (Audit Bureau of Circulations 2017). But of the remaining titles, only 12 were metropolitan dailies—half the number that existed at the turn of the 20th century. Figure 1.1 shows the number of metropolitan dailies and number of owners in Australia from their peak of 26 (not including daily regionals) published by 21 different proprietors in 1923 (Walker 1980, p. 225), compared to 12 daily papers published by just three owners in 2018.

The Australian experience is mirrored in varying degrees internationally. In 1940 the United States had 1,878 daily weekday newspapers (Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism [PRCPEJ] 2011). By 2016 their numbers had fallen by one third, to 1,286. As in Australia, the first wave of closures in the United States from the 1970s involved evening papers. In this century we are now increasingly seeing the demise of morning dailies.

Figure 1.1 Number of Australian Daily Metropolitan Newspapers, 1901–2017

Source: Author, analysis of data from: Tiffen (2015, p. 66); Audit Bureau of Circulations. (2017). ABC Paid Media Audit (June 2017).

With masthead closures, news media diversity has suffered. In 1909, 689 American cities had two or more competing daily paid newspapers. By 2011, diversity had declined dramatically, with just 11 cities having competing daily mastheads (Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido 2013). In comparison, Australia has just two cities with competing mastheads: Melbourne and Sydney. Since the GFC, many surviving single-town newspapers in the United States have struggled financially.

A feature of the decline of the newspaper industry in Australia over recent decades has been a simultaneous reduction in the number of newspaper owners. Australia now has the highest newspaper ownership concentration of any developed economy, with more than 90 per cent of its daily papers owned by two proprietors: News Corp Australia and Fairfax Media (Tiffen 2010a, p. 87; IBISWorld 2017, p. 16). The potentially negative implications for society and democracy from a lack of media diversity are discussed in Chapter 3.

In early 2018 there were three major metropolitan print media owners in Australia. By the end of 2018, the second-largest newspaper company, Fairfax Media—owner of The Age in Melbourne and The Sydney Morning Herald, among other quality titles—had merged with free-to-air television network Channel Nine, further consolidating Australian media ownership. The deal ended the 177-year-old Fairfax brand. Fairfax’s media assets included magazines, radio, the online real estate site Domain, streaming service Stan (already co-owned with Nine), and metropolitan and regional newspapers. At the time of writing, the future of Fairfax’s regional mast-heads such as the Newcastle Herald was unclear, as Channel Nine indicated during the merger talks that it had little interest in keeping them. Since the merger they have been purchased by former Fairfax manager Antony Catalano and billionaire Alex Waislitz’s Thorney Investment Group. They purchased 170 regional and country newspapers from Nine Entertainment Co in April 2019. It is too early to predict what this purchase will mean for their journalism. This is of concern for investigative journalism because Fairfax has a long history of producing investigative reporting, as does its Newcastle paper. Of note was the Newcastle Herald’s standout investigation by reporter Joanne McCarthy into child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. McCarthy’s investigation began in 2006 and led to the establishment in 2012 of a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse.

Australia’s third-largest newspaper owner is Seven West Media, controlled by self-made billionaire Kerry Stokes. Among Seven West’s diverse media businesses (television, magazines, radio, online, and regional newspapers) is Perth’s only hardcopy daily, the West Australian (Seven West Media 2017).

The largest of Australia’s print proprietors is News Corp Australia (Finkelstein and Ricketson 2012, p. 58). It is the local subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s international News Corporation. News Corp Australia¹ (henceforth News Corp) is a multi-platform media company with interests in pay television, magazines, online media, and newspapers. To illustrate Australia’s concentration of ownership, in 2012 Murdoch’s Australian company owned almost 150 national, metropolitan, suburban, regional, and Sunday print titles, including mass audience daily metropolitans, in every state and territory. By 2018, News Corp had extended its ownership to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Studying Investigative Journalism
• 1 From ‘Rivers of Gold’ to the Digital Economy
• 2 What Is Investigative Journalism?
• 3 Why Watchdog Reporting Endures: Theories About the Public Sphere, Media Power, and Democracy
• 4 Six Decades of Investigative Journalism: The 1950s to the 2000s
• 5 The Rise of Collaborative Investigative Journalism
• 6 New Frontiers: Big Data, Leaks, and Large-Scale Investigative Journalism
• 7 Bankrolling Journalism to Support Investigative Reporting
• Conclusion: The Future of Investigative Journalism: Reasons for Optimism
• Appendix: Tools for Defining Investigative Journalism (Operative Definition)
• Index