Fairfax and Channel 9 are to merge. This is the final nail in the coffin for corporate-free bias for the likes of The Age .
Surely now it's time for Australians to start seriously considering co-op media models, where the people own the joint, and have a say in what is reported.
As I'm a Melburnian, this is what I envisage: a Melbourne-focussed digital paper with maybe a Sunday print paper ??? (I dunno if that would work or if it's just a nostalgic throwback to the Sundays of my 20s in the 1990s where I would buy copies each of The Age, The Australian and the Herald Sun. Wouldn't touch the last two with a bargepole these days but then there was good stuff, expensive to produce).
I envisage quality, in-depth, multi-viewed reporting viewed through a prism of strengthening and informing and edifying and challenging the society of Melbourne - not the rich, not the corporates, but the people. Us. The ones who've had our public commons systematically ripped out from underneath us by weak politicians needing to feed the economic beast when it started showing signs of cancer in the 1970s.
I envisage it based on the Steem blockchain. I envisage it being a home to the many excellent journalists, writers and artists who live in Melbourne and whose souls are starving to death writing copy for Lockheed Martin.
But it's maybe not possible, in such an expensive city, in a time when people can get everything they want online for free, is it? Or are we tired of corporate puff and nutritionally decrepit crap? Would Melburnians be willing to pay to be members of their paper?
Of course, this is a vast step down from the vision that really makes me fizzy - a worker's cooperative in the true sense of the world, owned by the writers, journalists and artists themselves and maybe aided by donations from the general public. That's the vision that really gets me flying high. But these kinds of co-ops have been quite precarious in the past and I don't even know if any have been successful in Australia.
Or if they could now. I just don't know. But I would love to find out. Maybe something like that was not possible in the past because there wasn't crowdfunding and crypto. But why wouldn't it have already been started?
There just simply has not been a new model to replace the revenue that used to come from classified ads. And so the media flounders, with the main voices increasingly unquestioning, with a whole bunch of assumptions that are unspoken and a worldview that's not status quo capitalism that never gets questioned. Freelancers get conservative when they're trying to get their pitches accepted.
Imagine a paper that is not ashamed to address and examine issues that do not have the economy at the centre of every. fucking. story.
We deserve that, in swirly, scary times. I wish someone could make it happen.
Because we're worth it.
(Fuck off, Pantene).
The state of the structures that allow quality journalism in Australia CC0
