ANZCA09 Conference – comments

SBS has been working with QUT on a citizen journalism project for the last couple of years and as such I’ve been invited to join a panel at the ANZCA09 conference.

I’ll be joining a panel to discuss: SBS in the 21st Century: Public Service Media and new ways of thinking about Citizenship

I was asked to speak for 10 minutes to kick-start proceedings so I’ve pasted my comments below in case anyone wants to refer to them later on:

ANZCA09 – July 8^th 2009

SBS in the 21st Century: Public Service Media and new ways of thinking about citizenship”.

Good afternoon,

My name is Valerio Veo and I’m the Executive Producer of News & Current Affairs online at SBS.

I’m responsible for the online and digital presence of World News Australia, Dateline, Insight & Living Black – each of which presents a unique online proposition – and all of which are undergoing a transformation to serve what is a rapidly changing media environment and an increasingly demanding and engaged audience.

As such I thought it best to address the question posed in this session by giving you our take on this changing media landscape and explain a little on what we’re doing to better engage with our audiences online.

From our perspective the media is changing fundamentally – not only in the way it is consumed but also the way it interacts with its audiences.

The media as we know it has been traditionally defined by a ‘one to many’ model of communication – delivered via the mass media vehicles of newspapers, radio and television.

But with the advent of Pay-TV and the internet we’re seeing that mass media market fragment into thousands of niches.

With an enormous amount of information available on almost every interest imaginable there’s no fanboy, Anorak or obsessive-compulsive who can’t get their fix or form communities in this new internet age.

Due to zero government funding for online SBS has moved late into the digital space – but the changing media landscape is one that we hope to benefit from significantly.

For decades we’ve flown the flag for minority ethnic groups & football fans…

We’re now reaching out to new audiences via our online food and film properties – both of which are growing rapidly – not to mention the legion of bleary-eyed cycling fans that are glued to our Tour de France coverage day & night.

In my area of expertise – journalism – we’re also seeing a fundamental shift in the way news is gathered – one that sits uncomfortably with so many in the industry used to the traditional ‘one to many’ communication model.

Initially coined ‘user-generated’ content, then ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘crowd sourcing’ – I think the term that best describes it is ‘collaborative journalism’ – call it what you will but the underlying trends and behaviours are the same.

Suddenly the audiences we have served are becoming the best place to source information and feed the never-ending news cycle.

The skill of the journalist is changing from a single-voice of trusted information into a curator of trusted information. The skills are the same – journalists are needed to verify, challenge and update information – then create a clear narrative from this ‘many-to-many’ conversation taking place on the internet.

Smart news organisations are embracing this change – others fear it. For many rusted-on hacks the tried and tested methods of sourcing information has changed virtually overnight.

There are many recent examples of this collaborative journalism – recent events in Iran being the most dramatic.

With news organisations either thrown out of the country or banned from covering anti-government protests – the young, tech-savvy population used technology like YouTube and Twitter to get their messages out despite best efforts of the government to prevent just that.

News organisations who embraced the change spent their days vetting, verifying and curating…

For me The Huffington Post provided excellent coverage of the Iran protests and gave some method to the madness made up of millions of tweets, thousands of YouTube videos and very little ‘verified information’.

The protests & cyclone in Burma, the terror attacks in Mumbai, that famous plane crash in the Hudson river in New York – the examples keep growing by the week.

Our online news team regularly trawls for content on breaking news stories in social spaces including Twitter & YouTube.

It doesn’t apply to all stories and verification is often an issue - but overall the benefits outweigh the negatives by a huge margin.

The power of this content and the fact we can even see it at all in many cases, is undoubtedly a positive development for the media.

We’re also trying to embrace this collaborative style through our Current Affairs properties – using social networks and platforms to communicate directly with our audiences where they gather instead of expecting them to always come to us.

This perfectly suits a forum program such as Insight, where we use Twitter during live shows to communicate with our audience and inject their feedback into our debates … while our live online chats have been hugely popular with our audience and even the guests themselves.

The new Dateline site allows its audience to not just debate the issues but contribute to the coverage by suggesting links to other websites on the issues of the day.

For the audience it’s about acknowledging their needs and their online behaviour and ensuring we’re relevant. For us it’s a nil-cost, high-yield way of getting our content onto new platforms and ensuring relevancy to this new market of a thousand niches.

Our funding challenges, while significant, have helped us focus on what is most important to our audiences and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that we will continue to be a valuable voice on the Australian media landscape.