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Dear Readers,
With the summer holidays and the Australia Day long weekend now over I’d like to look ahead at another year of transformative change for the Australian media and The Conversation.
In the coming months, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age will go tabloid. It won’t just be a change of format, but a merging of the two. There will be some regional differences; footy codes, property and restaurants. But much more will be the same.
The two papers will also switch their editorial positioning away from the high ground occupied in the past by Fairfax’s metro mastheads and towards what is referred internally as “Middle Australia”. That means more mid-market fare: sport, showbiz, gossip, and fast news.
The plan appears to involve aping the UK’s successful Daily Mail, which is strange as the Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph already own the rights to run Daily Mail copy. That middle market is also in fast decline: it’s like two bald men fighting over a comb. Can’t we do better in Australia, particularly given our relative lack of diversity?
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, in strides The Guardian, which has just announced the launch of an Australian edition of its online service. It already produces a US website and the Australian site will be similar.
Funding comes from Graeme Wood, the entrepreneur and founder of travel website Wotif, Greens supporter and chair of The Global Mail website. Although he’s the paymaster, The Guardian has promised Wood will have “an arms-length relationship with us.” But for all that we welcome a new player to the Australian market, especially as it will provide a real alternative and fill the niche for high quality content vacated by Fairfax and News Limited.
So that brings us back to The Conversation. On March 24 we will celebrate our second anniversary since launch. In that short time we have grown to be the largest independent news and commentary website with 670,000 unique visits a month.
Most pleasingly we’ve done it with a commitment to high-quality, intelligent, and independent analysis, comment and research, penned by academics with real expertise. We always thought there would be an appetite for something more nourishing than middle-market fudge.
And because we are committed to publishing everything under Creative Commons licence, it’s free for anyone to read and republish, unlike the rest of the media who retain copyright. So there are countless websites every day republishing our material.
Finally, our unique independent publishing model relies on the support from our Partners, the universities, research institutes and corporations that support us.
We owe a very special thanks to our university Founding Partners: Melbourne, Monash, Western Australia, and UTS (Sydney). In addition, we'd like to acknowledge CSIRO, our fifth Founding Partner, and RMIT, our Strategic Partner.
And to those other Members who support us: Canberra, Charles Darwin, Deakin, Flinders, Griffith, La Trobe, Murdoch, Newcastle, QUT, South Australia, Southern Queensland, Swinburne, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Sydney.
We also owe a special thanks to our Corporate Partners, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Corrs Chambers Westgarth, and AAP; plus the Commonwealth’s Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Higher Education; and the Department of Business and Innovation in Victoria.
And rest assured, we remain committed to further enhancements of our service. If you’d like to help our development, you will be able to contribute, support and donate to The Conversation. Details soon.
All the best for a quality 2013.
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