Abstract
The Rise of the Fifth Estate
by Marija Taflaga
In a year that saw the US Republican presidential convention undermined by citizen fact-checkers, that saw Fairfax Media apologise to the Prime Minister after a story claiming that she may have broken the law was swiftly dissected and discredited on Twitter and that also witnessed a major restructure of the Australian media landscape, Australia needed a book about social media. Part history and description of the Australian blogging scene, part personal blogging autobiography, Greg Jericho’s The Rise of the Fifth Estate offers a thoughtful and timely analysis of the rise and development of blogging and social media in Australia and the response by established stakeholders in both the media and Australia’s political parties.
Written in the first person, Jericho’s popular non-fiction is also a highly personal account of his own experiences as a blogger, Twitter user and combatant with the mainstream media — or MSM as it’s known online. The book’s style invites the reader to consider their own engagement with the vast changes in the media landscape given the author’s enthusiasm for citizen-journalism and interaction. The book also discusses what blogging entails, questions why women are less likely to blog about politics and details his own experience of being outed as the anonymous blogger ‘Grog’s Gamut’ by The Australian. Importantly for political scientists, the book describes Australia’s blogging scene for the first time.
As The Fifth Estate details, blogging about Australian politics started in the early 2000s. Back then it was a small community of mostly men, many of whom were tied to academia either through employment or study or had significant expertise in their blogging interest. These bloggers started writing online for pleasure and to be part of a community. Indeed, it is this sense of community that Jericho argues that separates blogging from content found on MSM websites.
The Fifth Estate is strongest in its analysis of the relationship between the fourth and the fifth estates. Jericho argues that traditional media organisations’ response to social media was uncoordinated and often reactionary. Media organisations were quick to take offence to bloggers’ critiques of their work and with the advent of Twitter they struggled with the ability of readers to contact and criticise reporters directly. As illustrated in the book, media companies were generally quicker to understand the impact of Twitter, the micro-blogging website, establishing themselves on the site early (in 2007 or 2008) compared with journalists in the press gallery who then joined en masse in 2009 after Twitter had become the on-stop-shop for political news and announcements.
Jericho argues convincingly that the majority of journalists treat Twitter as merely ‘another tool’ and do not understand the medium’s full potential. This he argues, is reflected in the press gallery’s shallow interaction with other Twitter users and that many have failed to recognise the online space as a place to share information rather than as either an instantaneous wire service, a megaphone to broadcast their employers’ content, or as a place to ‘lurk’ for gaffes and quotable lines by politicians and celebrities. This is a criticism he levels convincingly at politicians as well.
The book is sometimes defensive, and understandably so, given Jericho’s personal history and interaction with the press gallery. To date, interaction between the fourth and fifth estate is often defensive as both groups contest the right to comment on public affairs. For his part, Jericho diagnoses the media’s defensiveness as a result of the world of bloggers increasingly blurring into the professional world of paid and gated journalism. But perhaps more importantly, it is bloggers’ increasingly ability to have an impact on the news agenda and because blogging highlights the analytical deficiencies of the MSM that causes the most anxiety in the press gallery.
Criticism of the press in social media and by Jericho boil down to their frustration with a lack of truth-seeking by the media through careful fact-checking and researching of the policy proclamations of political and interest groups. Journalists, The Fifth Estate argues, don’t use the full potential of Twitter, blogs and other forms of crowd-sourcing because they are too committed to the traditional patterns of journalistic competition that favour the increasingly outmoded concept of an exclusive story and wilfully ignore the success of their competitors when they produce high quality analysis.
However, Jericho doesn’t fully consider other possibilities that drive lacklustre coverage in the MSM: that in a media environment where profit margins are tight, detailed policy journalism might not raise sufficient revenue. While major media organisations are shifting to ‘digital first’, a comparison of their websites and the hardcopy of the paper reveals that content online that is focused on policy is still driven by the limited space available in the hardcopy newspaper. Is it then any surprise that detailed policy stories have a hard time competing with more locally focused or sensationalist coverage?
Blogging, as Jericho argues is more akin to academic work or a niche magazine and as such bloggers have been very successful at narrowcasting to select audiences. Journalists are in a bind: they write for large mass audiences and in today’s environment need to pitch stories that have a heavy human interest angle or are entertaining in order to get their stories published, especially when there is less space than ever before for the ‘worthy but boring’ news items to get into the paper. Politicians know this and exploit this reality. Yet, despite all this, Jericho’s conclusion that journalists and media organisations need to adapt is difficult to argue against.
For political scientists, Jericho’s popular non-fiction has lifted the lid on a field currently poorly understood by the discipline and raises important questions worthy of research. First, we need to know more about bloggers and Twitter and their changing role in political communication. Second, we need to know more about how political parties and politicians build voting coalitions in a fragmented and decentred polity. Many more questions will be raised as the lines between social and traditional media progressively blur. This book is a good start.
Marija Taflaga is a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University and researcher in the Australian Press Gallery.
Greg Gericho, The Rise of the Fifth Estate, Scribe Publishing 2012.