A week of gushing about gas at News Corp climaxed on Friday with the “news” that the gas in the Beetaloo Basin could power Australian homes for 400 years.
To recap: The News Corp tabloids have had a week of advertorial splashes and spreads outlining the gas supply “crisis” fuelling spiralling power prices.
The hero of the story? The gas industry, which is prepared to swoop in and solve everything. Tamboran, for example, is preparing to start drilling in the basin. But the energy infrastructure firm, APA Group, warns ominously that the work could be delayed by legal and environmental challenges.
And the sponsor of the stories? The gas industry, including Tamboran.
Read Adam Morton’s excellent piece here for all the background and the bunkum.
The director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, Andrew Dodd, accused News Corp of being hypocritical, disgraceful, deceptive in it’s coverage and “an egregious case of poor journalism”.
Dodd pointed out that News Corp has accused the ABC of “blatant energy activism” and criticised the funding of the Environmental Defenders Office.
“But they’re nothing like as transparent when it comes to revealing the amount of money they’re receiving for this campaign,” he said.
“That constitutes hypocrisy.”
He said it also showed little regard for their audiences. “They’re hoodwinking them,” he said.
“It’s deceptive in so many ways. It is disgraceful and it damages or diminishes journalism. It is an egregious case of poor journalism, an egregious case of campaigning dressed up as journalism.
“The scale is breathtaking, the fact they’re giving over the front pages of their most-read newspapers across the nation for as much as a week indicates the breadth and depth [of it].”
Dodd’s colleague at the centre, senior lecturer Denis Muller, described it as “propaganda”.
The campaign neglected to highlight how Australia’s export of gas affects its pricing, he said, adding that it was a “tactic”.
“It may have an effect on some people, but more to the point it helps to spook the politicians … they realise that News Corp are continuing down this climate denial path and that it causes hesitancy among those politicians, and among climate scientists, many of whom have been on the receiving end of campaigns by News Corporation,” he said.
News Corp has been contacted for comment.
Unfortunate timing
A drunk tech journalist’s live reporting on the political chaos in South Korea this week captivated the audience on social media platform BlueSky. For some, it evoked nostalgia for the days when X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, was, well, Twitter. For others, it was a rollicking and informative way to follow the madness.
Sarah Jeong said her presence at the protests after the (swiftly reversed) declaration of martial law was “just a weird fucking thing that happened”.
Jeong is a Korean-born American and a deputy features editor at technology news site The Verge. She usually works in the US, but happened to be in Seoul when all hell broke loose, and couldn’t find a freelancer. So she went out to see what she could “clumsily report”, she posted on BlueSky, despite being out on the town and somewhat “blasted”.
She told Guardian Australia she did not expect the reaction, which saw her existing fanbase swell by tens of thousands of followers.
“The fact that I was just randomly there, I think, was really interesting … the fact that there weren’t that many English speakers on the ground … and the bureaux sort of have a more faceless thing going on, so you don’t quite form the same bond with your audience, as opposed to having a journalist there,” she said.
On the night, she made it clear that she does not report on Korean politics.
“I’m out here because my (drunk) freelancer requests received a ‘can’t do’ so I just set off on my own,” she wrote.
“This is genuinely the most clumsy scene report possible. I really want to be honest about that.
“I’m fucking blasted and hanging out in the weirdest scene because history happened at a deeply inconvenient hour. So it goes.”
You can read her finished piece here.
Halloween scare
Solstice Media has laid off four editorial staff from its Adelaide InDaily news room in a round of redundancies announced to staff while some were dressed in costume for Halloween.
The potential for layoffs had been foreshadowed in the wake of Meta (Facebook’s) decision to end its agreement to pay newsrooms for sharing their reporting on its platform and comes amid a broader restructure of Solstice media’s operations.
An editor at the company’s Brisbane operation had been let go in the weeks leading up to the decision.
In the lead up to the layoffs, staff at the company’s Adelaide operation had been encouraged to come to work in costume for Halloween. The event had been advertised in staff emails for at least a fortnight.
On the day, several members of staff dressed up, including a group dressed as the characters from the musical Wicked.
A meeting was called that morning where journalists and production staff associated with its news and lifestyle publications, some of whom were in costume and one wearing a false moustache, were told about the impending redundancies.
Those affected were told an email would be sent around later with more details about what came next and were offered the opportunity to take a voluntary redundancy.
One staff member took a voluntary redundancy and three were let go.
Solstice media’s founder, Paul Hamra, said it was an “unfortunate coincidence” that staff came to work in costume the same day as the redundancy round was announced. Asked whether management could have put off the announcement given the circumstances and the advance notice, he said: “No.”
Hamra said the end of the arrangement with Meta/Facebook and news fatigue fed into the decision to restructure.
“Media is having the same problem all around the world and it’s smaller cities, and small communities that are all struggling because the advertising market has changed. And the other funding sources, such as the platform funding is not guaranteed,” he said.
“The audiences are changing to, their appetites are changing in what they want to read, there’s a little bit of news avoidance around issues such as the war, and cost of living.
“Our research is that people don’t want to feel bad reading the news. So news as a category is suffering from news avoidance and some of issues where advertisers want to avoid being in the bad news.”
The decision leaves only two full-time reporters writing for InDaily, with others spread across its lifestyle titles..
Go west
The first 7PM News broadcast from Auntie’s spanking new Parramatta studios will go out on Sunday.
The shift from Ultimo to the suburbs has not been enthusiastically embraced by all, but ABC news director, Justin Stevens, said it would put the newsroom “within one of Australia’s largest, fastest growing and most diverse communities”.
Jeremy Fernandez and Nakari Thorpe will host, and the show will feature much whiz bangery, with new cloud-based video production and editing systems. The set “features a Parramatta Square skyline and once its augmented reality elements are implemented will incorporate full perspective tracking”, the ABC said in a statement.
Crash through
News Corp has cloned the voice of Robert “Crash” Craddock, chief sports writer at the Courier Mail.
The technology could allow reporters to write scripts from a noisy press conference or sports match, send it off, and have it converted into their own voices – without the pesky background noise.
“Effectively, I can be in two places at one time – I can be at the cricket and yet off-site (video editors) can be producing my voice on the highlights of the day and I don’t have to be there,” Crash said.
For those days when too much cricket commentating is barely enough.
Barry’s swan song
Paul Barry has put the media under the microscope for the final time as host of ABC’s Media Watch, signing off after 11 and a half years from a role he described as “a pleasure, a privilege and a lot of fun”.
Barry’s final episode was something of a lament for the state of the media landscape in Australia, examining the effect of the precipitous declines in newspaper circulation and advertising revenue, revenue for commercial TV and the number of jobs lost in Australian journalism since he started his tenure: 11,000 jobs, or half of the industry.
“Over the years I have hosted Media Watch, several executives have wanted me sacked.
— Media Watch (@ABCmediawatch) December 2, 2024
But they left and I survived. As did the program. And I need to thank the ABC for that.
It’s remarkable that any broadcaster tolerates a program that rips into it as we have done.” #MediaWatch pic.twitter.com/Poe0TE5A58
Among the woes besetting the news industry, Barry bemoaned the coverage of celebrities, clickbait of news sites like the Daily Mail and advertising and product placement making their way into news bulletins.
But he reserved his strongest ire for climate denialism, highlighting Sky News and the Australian’s coverage in particular.
Sky News, Barry said, boasted a “prime time line up of right-wing barkers bashing Labor, demonising migrants and asylum seekers, and denying science with a relentless campaign to hold back action on climate change, which in my view is the media’s worst crime in my time in the job”.
