Laurie Oakes

Transcription

>> Journalism matters in our society. It's fundamental to the operation of our democratic system. It's a noble craft, maybe more than that. I came across an interesting line in a Huffington Post article recently. It read, "Someone very sexy once told me journalism is a sexy profession." I hope to say I can't quite say that myself. Maybe I'm wrong. If journalism was sexy it might help to answer a question that's been puzzling me. Why are so many really bright young people still enthusiastic about studying journalism when career prospect these days are certainly uncertain? Why does including the word journalism in the title of a course apparently continue to guarantee bums on seats? I'm pleased that people still want to be journalists. I can't imagine a better job but it must be obvious to everyone by now that we're producing many more journalists, more journalism graduates than are ever likely to find jobs in the news business in its present state. A well-known American academic and commentator on media issues named Clay Shirky from New York University has attacked in quite stark terms people who encourage false hope among young would-be journalists at a time when so much of the industry is battling for survival. He wrote, "Pretending that business models might suddenly start working has crossed over from sentimentality to child abuse. It's self-evidence that under attack from new technology, print is in retreat everywhere." Earlier this year an American ambassador, Washington's new envoy to Switzerland chose to take the oath of office on a Kindle. Last year recruits to the Atlantic City Fire Brigade were sworn in using a Bible app on an iPad. If even the Bible isn't sacred what hope do newspapers have? The answer is in the longer term, not much. But they're not on their own. Eventually the idea of television signals being transmitted through the ether would be just as redundant as print on paper. That almost certainly goes for radio as well. Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull describes what the Internet is producing as a universal Uber platform. Everything will be on the Net, all on this Uber platform accessible from any device anywhere, anytime. What this will ultimately mean for journalism is still very cloudy. As you've been aware there's been a lot of pessimistic commentary about the future of journalism especially quality journalism and I've engaged in a fair share of it myself. Cost-cutting and job losses have seemed to vindicate the pessimism. I want to say to you tonight though that I'm starting to feel more upbeat about where journalism might be going and about the prospects of journalism graduates. My more hopeful attitude is based to a considerable extent on what's happening in the U.S. I watch American developments in journalism and in the media closely not because of any cultural cringe but because it's a way of predicting what will happen here. A crystal ball if you like that makes it possible to look a little way into our future. To illustrate the lag newspaper advertising revenue peeked in the U.S. in 2005, here in 2008. Most redundancies hit Australian newspapers three years after the job-shedding tsunami struck the American newspaper business. So watching trends there is a useful early warning system for us in Australia. It could also give us advance notice of encouraging developments. Before I go into Pollyanna mode though I want to talk about a couple of issues that come into the early warning category which in my view have series implications particularly for my field of political reporting. The first is the growing ability that digital revolution gives politicians and others for that matter, to bypass journalists. The second is the near possibility of political and investigative journalists being able to protect sources in the digital age. In an article earlier this year John Lloyd who's the director of journalism at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University described how Barack Obama won the 2012 U.S. presidential election by speaking to millions via social media. Lloyd then asked pointedly, "Who needs the press?" It's an even more sobering question when you consider how Obama having revolutionised campaigning is now pioneering the use of social media and digital technology in governing. Lloyd's conclusion was journalism now has to fight another threat which is as stark as falling revenue, irrelevance. I'll moderate that just a little irrelevance I think is just too strong but we do face the threat I think of the inevitability of reduced relevance. Malcolm Turnbull is the Australia politician who best understands this sort of thing. You remember Tony Abbott's assertion that Turnbull quite virtually invented the Internet in this country. I guess that puts him up there with Al Gore. Speaking at the Australia National University two months ago, Turnbull declared that politicians should not complain about the media anymore because they no longer need journalists as intermediaries between themselves and the public in the way they used to. "Politicians," he said, "have now got their own megaphones." Kevin Rudd showed the way to a considerable extent in the period between being deposed as prime minister by Julia Gillard and then returning to the job as the desperate last hope of a doomed government Rudd kept his profile up to what amounted to do-it-yourself coverage. He was his own media outlet which opens any smart politician to do the same thing. With Twitter, Facebook and his own YouTube channel plus a staffer with a $50 video camera and a laptop for editing Rudd could deliver what was effectively news content to a substantial audience without having to rely on media organisations and it helped him get coverage from mainstream media organisation as well. They quite often took his material off YouTube and used it themselves. I've looked closely at the Obama operation much as reading about it but also talking to people in Washington connected with the White House or who had been connected with the White House. It really is impressive but if you believe in the importance of watchdog journalism to the working of our democratic system it's also of concern not that there's any possibility of turning back the clock. Two years ago in a Walkley Itinerary lecture predicting that politicians would assume journalistic functions in the digital age I said, they'll be our competitors as well as our subject matter. Well, in Washington it's happening in a significant way. A New York Times article published another headline "The YouTube Presidency" put it this way. "Obama's team has led the pack to become the new media on the White House beat." The writer added, "Does that strike anyone as unsettling?" Well, it strikes me as unsettling if it results in less contact with media that's not in-house. It's unsettling if independent journalists have their access curbed or cut off. It's unsettling if it enables the administration to limit its exposure to the kind of probing by which governments are held to account all of which it seems is coming to pass. Let me tell you what I've learnt about the engine room of the YouTube Presidency the White House Office of Digital Strategy. It is in reality a reasonably substantial news operation. It has a staff of 20 plus. Some are from journalism. Some are computer nerds. Some are policy wonks. There's a unit producing video with the videographers having unprecedented access to the President and everything here they see the administration do. There are staff that are specialised in social media, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Vine, etcetera. Vine in case you didn't know, I didn't, is a social media app that does six second videos. There's an analytics unit gathering and studying data to work out how best to reach people and get them to engage with the administration. There are people writing blog posts and scripting videos and other content and there's a team responsible for website design and infographics. I'd say that mix is pretty much what the typical newsroom is becoming in the digital age. Malcolm Turnbull with would be pleased to know that the President calls the office, my megaphone. He told staff he wants it to get his message through to the American people unfiltered, in other words bypassing the media is a key aim. The way the White House website puts it, "the office quite uses digital platforms to amplify the President's message and engage with citizens around the country online." The product is pretty polished. If you want to get a taste of it download the White House app on your Smartphone. It's free. Check the app and you'll see a blog including photographs and videos that covers most of what's happening at the White House. What the blog has to offer today I had a look just before I arrived here. President Obama chairs the U.N. Security Council meeting on foreign terrorist fighters, the Affordable Care Act is working, the First Lady, "We've made tremendous progress in educating the world's young women." President Obama on the significance of civil society, why we can't wait to act on climate change. That's just a few of the things that are there today. If you tap the app on the menu you get what's called the Briefing Room and that enables you to access all the White House press releases transcripts and so on. The app offers a separate section of photographs of the President taken by the White House's own photographic staff often at events or informal activities that the White House press corps doesn't get access to, ditto a whole a lot of videos. It's entirely flattering of course. You're not going to see a tired or stressed or cranky president here. There's a section where you can watch presidential news conferences and other news streamed live. There's a favourites button so you can save your favourite articles, photos and videos. The app is being developed further just as some news organisations now send notifications to your mobile phone about breaking news or developments you might be interested in the White House is going to do the same. If there's a breaking news development the administration wants to talk about you'll get a message on your Smartphone. The Office of Digital Strategy produces regular video messages from the President. At times the White House uses it to make public announcements via social media rather than to the press corps. It's responsible for a number of sophisticated with websites. An example is a community channel on "BuzzFeed" starring Vice President Joe Biden and dealing with Obamacare. The State of the Union Address has been live streamed through an iPhone app which then invited questions from viewers so that the President could answer them in a White House produced a YouTube interview a few days later. And there's "West Wing Week." It's effectively a news bulletin put out every Friday looking back at what the President's done in the previous seven days. It's on YouTube, on the app, on the website. One experienced White House correspondent has described it as somewhat bitterly as five minutes of their own video and sound from events the press didn't know about. That's not strictly true. Public events are covered too in the "West Wing Week" but what makes it so effective and so annoying to the White House press corps is the way the White House's own videographers are able to capture off-camera moments that the independent media don't get to see as well as events that the mainstream use to see but now gets shut out of or aren't even told about. It would be only a small step to turn "West Wing Week" into a daily newscast. I think we should watch this space. A Washington insider who has seen the operation at close range told me we are the first administration to have the opportunity to tell our story exactly as we want to tell it instead of having to go through ABC or NBC or CNN or Fox News to tell the story. The politicians have always yearned for a way to sideline journalists to communicate directly with voters. Now with digital technology they have the means at last. To put it bluntly politicians and governments can report on themselves. They much less rely on journalists than they used to be and because of that they can be much less constrained about ignoring reporters or making it more difficult for them to access information. The White House press corps is starting to feel the hot breath of irrelevance that John Lloyd talked about. This was reflected in a report published last year title, "The Obama Administration and the Press." It was commissioned by the U.S. Committee to Protect Journalists and prepared by Leonard Downey Jr. An award winning investigative reporter before he did a seven day news stint as executive editor of the Washington Post. Digital technology according to Downey gives government many new levers for controlling the message. He wrote in his report of a strategy honed during Obama's presidential campaign to use the Internet to dispense to the public large amounts of favourable information and images generated by his administrations while limiting his exposure to probing by the press. Barack Obama in fact joked about all this at the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, a journalistic institution in Washington. "Some of you have said that I'm ignoring the Washington Press Corps, that we're too controlling," the President said. "Well, you know what? You were right. I was wrong. And I want to apologise in a video you can watch exclusively at White House.gov." As I said earlier my interest in what happens to journalism and media in the U.S. derives from the fact that it's like looking in the crystal ball and seeing what will happen in Australia. There will be a time lag but the Obama approach will be reflected here. No one should have any doubt about that. Just before he stepped down as White House press secretary a few months ago Jay Carney said, "It would have been malpractice for him and others responsible for media strategy of the White House not to take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital technology." He's right. So don't expect our politicians in their minders to be guilty of that malpractice either. We journalists can whinge all we like but the technology is in there for politicians to change the game and they would be mad not to use it. Canada is interesting. The Prime Minister Stephen Harper almost since he took office has been at war with the national media and he said openly he wants to bypass them. In January this year he announced a new video magazine called "24 Seven," a week in the life of the prime minister which, he said, would keep Canadians in the know so Ottawa is well on the way. We know that Tony Abbott is not a tech head. He's the bloke who dismissed social media as "kind of like electronic graffiti" and he attracted scorn when he said, "It's pretty obvious that the main usage for the NBN is going to be Internet-based television, video entertainment and gaming." There are undoubtedly people around our prime minister who have taken notice of what's happening in the White House. Very early in the life of the Abbott government a videographer was hired by the Prime Minister's office. Josh Wilson, a cameraman and video editor who learnt his trade in the Nine Network Canberra Bureau, so he's pretty good. Josh, because he's with the PM all the time inevitably gets access to stuff that outside media don't. He shoots and edits a weekly video addressed by the PM that goes up on YouTube and is available to any media organisation that wants it. It's distributed by the Prime Minister's press office every week. He produces between 10 and 15 other prime ministerial video messages a week for groups that the PM wants to reach out to. He's crucial in the Abbott Office of Social Media Strategy which predominantly means Facebook. Facebook's become important for political messaging. The effectiveness of Facebook depends on strong images. If you watch Insiders on the ABC you've probably seen Josh without realising it. There's a clip there of Mr. Abbott and President Obama in the Oval Office. One of Josh's tasks is to make sure that when people are photographing the Prime Minister or filming him there's no one in the background to distract attention. Well, in the Oval Office you'll see a third figure behind the President and Tony Abbott. It's Josh. He can laugh about it now. I think it's a claim to fame by the way the photo-bombing the President and the Prime Minister. The Abbott operation is not primarily about bypassing the Press Gallery, not at this stage anyway. The justification is that adding someone with Josh's skills is part of the evolution of a more professional media office but it is just the beginning. We got a look at the future yesterday morning in fact. The Prime Minister flying to New York to attend the United Nations Tourism Meeting had a brief refuelling stop over in Honolulu. Back in Australia teen-age tourism suspect had stabbed two police officers in Melbourne. There was no media on the PM's plane but Josh Wilson was there. Mr. Abbott spoke with ministers and security officials on a secure line then Josh set up his camera stuck a microphone on the prime ministerial lapel and Mr. Abbott made a statement about the incidence to Josh Wilson. There was even a backdrop with Australian Coat of Arms and two Australian flags presumably part of the Wilson luggage. The result was uploaded to YouTube. The PM got back on his plane and as he took off the transcript plus video and audio were being sent out to media organisations by the PM's press office in Canterbury. Who needs journalists indeed? John Howard tried to use talk-back radio to bypass the press gallery but radio hosts are intermediaries just like journalists. Howard could only dream of the day when it would be possible for governments to get out unfiltered messages by producing and distributing their own news content. Not only governments of course there's nothing to stop an opposition doing an Obama as well and some Labour Party politicians are quite aware of the possibilities. One of them offered a view in a private conversation recently that opportunities provided to Labour by digital technology combined with the damage that technology is doing to newspapers meant the party will be able to stop worrying about the Murdoch Press within two election cycles. Gough Whitlam saw no such light at the end of the tunnel 40 years ago when he incurred the disapproval of a certain newspaper proprietor. Bill Hayden one of his ministers commented that if Gough had walked across Lake Burley Griffin one of our leading national newspapers would have published a story under the heading "Whitlam Can't Swim." There is another point to be made in the context of digital technology wrecking media business models and fragmenting the industry. Weakened media organisations having cut journalistic staff in a frenzy of cost reduction are bound to be less scrupulous than they might once have been about using subsidised content material produced by others that doesn't cost them anything. So material from Obama's Office of Digital Strategy or produced in-house by Tony Abbott's inside operation or by the Labour Party as it gears up to bypass news corporations can be expected to find its way into the mainstream media. Beggars are not going to be choosers. That too strengthens the hand of politicians vis a vis journalists and feeds into the relevance discussion. Anything that reduces the relevance of political journalism is bad for the health of our democratic system. Power won't hold itself to account. Governments are hardly likely to face difficult questions from their own media and politicians will only use the new opportunities available to them to distribute information on things they want to public to know about. The only way I see for journalists to deal with what will be a growing challenge is to apply traditional journalistic skills, especially the cultivation of sources with renewed vigour, consistently digging out politicians and others in positions of power don't want revealed is the best guarantee of continued relevance. Which brings me to the second matter of concern that I mentioned, the increasing difficulty journalists face in this digital era in protecting sources. If we can't protect them they are hardly likely to talk to us in the first place and with without leaks and without whistle blowers democracy just can't work very well. They're absolutely necessary to keep the bastards on us. The bastards being our political masters. Again, it's instructive to look at what's happened in the U.S. The Obama administration has been marked by leak inquiries and prosecutions far more than under any other previous president. Journalists have been in the middle of them often subpoenaed to face demands that they identify their sources, name their sources and refusal to do so of course, carries the threat of gaol there just as it does here. In mid-2011 at a conference on government secrecy involving journalists, lawyers and intelligence officials in Aspen, Colorado the journalist raise the matter of opposed shield law to protect reporters from being forced to reveal their sources. According to Lucy dalGlish from The U.S. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press quoted in Leonard Downey Jr.'s report the response from the government legal team was, "You can get your shield law but you've probably seen your last subpoena anyway. We don't need you anymore." In other words, it's no longer necessary to drag journalists into court to try to get the names of their informants because sources can be identified these days by other means. Our contacts and movements can be monitored by the digital trail that we leave. Phone and e-mail records, Internet activity, credit card information, airline bookings, toll road payments and so on they're all accessible and our mobile phone service GPS trackers. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame likes to refer to the Smartphone as a surveillance device that makes calls. Let's talk about phones for a minute. There was an outcry in the U.S. last year when it was revealed that federal investigators had obtained two months of phone records of reporters and editors of the Associated Press. The Justice Department secretly obtained a subpoena to compel AP's phone company to provide to records. The subpoena covered 28 people, phone lines and switchboards as well as the home phone lines and mobile phone lines of individual reporters. Details of thousands and thousands of news gathering calls by more than 100 journalists were seized, a veritable harvest of information about communications with confidential sources across all of AP's operations. It was widely condemned in America as judicial overreach. The angry media reaction compelled Obama to tighten the rules under which such action could be taken in the future. I'll tell you something sobering though. It could happen here without any judicial involvement at all, no need for subpoena. We're not just talking national security which was the excuse for the action against the AP. In this country enforcement agencies as well as ATF can get information from telecommunications companies without needing a warrant as long as it's for the purpose of enforcing the criminal law or a law that imposes a pecuniary penalty or is for the protection of the public revenue. In other words, it will be on police forces and crime commissions and anti-corruption agencies. The RSPCA fits the definition of an enforcement agency under our Telecommunications Interception and Access Act. In the U.S., sorry and this act is used to hunt general sources. A few years ago after I reported details of a cabinet document that embarrassed the then government over a botched plan monitor petrol prices, not national security petrol process, an Australian National University academic got a knock on her door. She had been a friend of mine for 40 years, had nothing to do with politics, the government or the public service or petrol but two detectives were in there from the AFP demanding to know why she had spoken to Laurie Oakes on his mobile phone at such and such a time on such and such a day. Who knows how many other people I had spoken to on the telephone during that time got the same visit from the wallopers? It's not just phone calls, e-mails and even Internet activities were covered as well. Information handed over is restricted to metadata. Who you communicate with, when, for how long, where from and that sort of thing and then the debate going on at the moment over new national security laws that would compel telecommunications companies to retain such metadata for two years. The fact that the contents of communications would not be accessed is presented as a reassurance. But it's not very reassuring and it shouldn't be reassuring for journalists. As my expert witness on this I'm going to call Edward Snowden sometimes referred to as the most wanted man in the world. Snowden, a computer expert, former CIA systems administrator and counter intelligence trainer is the American National Security Agency contractor who leaked thousands of classified documents mainly to "The Guardian's" journalist Glenn Greenwald exposing mass electronic surveillance programmes around the world. The U.S. wants him on espionage charges. He's been granted temporary asylum by Russia. Whether you think he's a traitor or whistle-blower Snowden definitely knows about surveillance. Here's what he said about metadata in an interview in Moscow with "The Guardian." "Metadata can be an analogized to the details that a private eyes produces in the course of an investigation. For example, the private eye might follow you to a diner where you meet a friend, you meet a lover. They see who you meet. They see where you meet. They see when you went there and they may even know the bored topics of your conversation." If you replace friend or lover with source you see the problem for journalists. Obviously journalists can't do their job properly with a digital private eye following them 24 hours a day and watching their every move. Here's what Snowden said specifically about journalism in the digital age, "An unfortunate side effect of the development of all these new surveillance technologies is that the work of the journalist has become immeasurably harder than it's ever been in the past. Journalists have to be particularly conscious about any sort of network signalling, any sort of connexion, any sort of licence plate reading device that they pass on their way to a meeting point, any place they use their credit card, any place they take their phone, any e-mail contact they have with a source." It's an important issue. However, with the threat of terrorist attack being used as justification for the sort of electronic surveillance and tracking I'm talking about journalists' concerns inevitably are going to be heavily discounted. It's possibly why many media organisations seem reluctant to even raise the matter for discussion. But we shouldn't be reluctant. We should press the case for anti-terrorism laws but as far as possible don't infringe on press freedom. Bernard Keane from Crikey who has taken a strong interest in this issue has written to journalists, editors and producers need to get working knowledge of basic encryption, surveillance techniques and IT hygiene so sources can contact them with confidence and information can be stored safely out of reach of authorities. But there are simpler actions we could consider as well. I was reading recently how the German parliamentary enquiry set out to investigate electronic eavesdropping now protects itself from online snooping. It's acquired a manual typewriter for the preparation of confidential documents and sensitive messages. So maybe using typewriters is sort of a novel idea for journalists to think about. There certainly not much doubt we'll need to return to at least some of our old ways at least. Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie, the star investigative reporters from "The Age" talked about this in an address at Walkley Foundation's Press Freedom Dinner last year. They said, "With surveillance technology increasing it's harder than at any time ever before to contact a whistle blower over the phone or a computer without leaving a trace." They said, "That meeting over a beer or coffee face to face was the safest form of contact with sources but even those meetings have to be set up and one call or text message from your office phone or mobile can be enough to put a source's job or even liberty in jeopardy." Baker and McKenzie described what they call today's trade craft for journalists. Use a public phone if you can find one but good luck with that. And you can't call a phone box back anyway. Better to use a SIM card bought under an fictitious name or Skype your contact from an Internet cafe. An American judge in a leak case I read about not long ago said, "Reporters might find themselves as a matter of practical necessity contacting sources the way I understand drug dealers to reach theirs by use of clandestine cellphones and meeting in darkened doorways." So this is what we've come to. Forty years after Watergate we're probably back to signalling sources by moving pot plants around on the balcony at night and having midnight designations in underground car parks. Sorry, scrub that. These days car parks would have CC-TV. A long time ago I had a source in the Defence Department who called himself Red Duck. When he wanted to pass on information or a document he'd get a message to me saying, "The Red Duck flies by night" which meant that I had to meet him at a particular spot on the shore of Lake Burley Gryphon at midnight. Back then I think he did it that way for the excitement. But if Red Duck was around now it would be a necessity and we'd both need to leave our phones/GPS beacons at home, otherwise he'd be dead duck. Despite all that I'm feeling as I mentioned earlier a bit more positive about some aspects of the transformation that's occurring in the craft that I've been engaged in for more than 50 years. Now I'm not Robinson Crusoe. The most recent state of the news media report from the Pew Research Centre in the U.S. says in the opening paragraph, "That there's a new sense of optimism or perhaps hope for the future of American journalism." And I believe that applies in this country to the future of Australian journalism. Increasingly it's possible to see a way ahead by which real journalism, journalism of substance rather than the click-bait McNugget variety will survive and perhaps even flourish in the online world. So let me give you a half-dozen reasons why I'm feeling a little more upbeat about where journalism might be headed. In the digital era I think this is called a "listicle" though the pre-digital Bible, the big buzz word listicles were The Ten Commandments, I think. Reason for optimism number one, newspapers are still with us. At an international symposium on online journalism this year the executive editor of the Washington Post, Marty Baron exalted, "We've survived. We're still here." Now he had the comfort of knowing the founder of Amazon and therefore somebody who understands the Internet who just bought the Post for a quarter of a billion dollars and who was investing heavily to ensure it has a digital future but the point is right. Newspapers have proved more resilient than many expected. It's more than five years since Malcolm Tucker the foul-mouthed Scottish spin doctor in the TV series, "The Thick of It" said, "These are hard times for print journalists. One day you're writing for the papers, the next you're F-ing sleeping under them." But for the time being newspapers here and overseas are hanging on while they're in debt to find ways to finance journalism on the Uber platform. There's no encouraging evidence that part of the newspaper market is rusted on and surprisingly unaffected by price rises. There's a hard core of newspaper addicts who will stick to the habit even though it costs them more and newspapers, especially quality papers it seems can raise their cover prices it seems significantly without losing these print loyalists. Reason for optimism number two, despite the bad news we keep hearing about declining advertising revenue, falling the newspaper circulation and job losses good journalism, quality journalism is still being produced and a lot of it. Carl Bernstein who along with Bob Woodward uncovered the Watergate scandal and brought down a president asserted with some passion in a recent lecture that I saw on YouTube. He said that vibrant journalism is being done every day in newspapers, online, in magazines and on television. He was talking about the U.S. but it applies here too I think with a vengeance. I know that because as I mentioned for three years until last May I chaired the Walkley Advisory Board which I have say, in the Walkley Awards and conducts the final judging. It is a privileged position because I get a close-up look each year at the best of the best in all forms of the media from all parts of the country and declared a brilliant investigative reporting that in just those three years led to a royal commission on institutional sexual abuse of children, a senate enquiry into dodgy dealings among Commonwealth Bank financial planners that cost thousands of Australians their life savings, a bribery trial involving a foreign subsidiary of a major government institution, corruption inquires that rocked and keep rocking both sides of New South Wales politics, a series of inquires into sexual abuse in the defence force. That one involved a Curtin graduate not to abuse, the story. And then so on. The assumption is made that the investigative journalism in particular would suffer badly from the new media reality of diminishing resources combined with a spate of that news cycle and a requirement to produce surmountable platforms but investigative journalists are still doing great work. Why? Well if I can quote Carl Bernstein again, "The instinct of reporters is to report." Reason for optimism number three, pay walls are starting to give hope. This is really important I think. The matter of money has been at the bottom of much of the pessimism about the future of journalism with traditional business model broken how is journalism to be financed? While it was being given away the future looked bleak indeed except perhaps for an operation like "The Guardian" backed by a charitable trust or the media outlets are able to depend on philanthropic supporters, over publically funded media, organisations like the RBC and the BBC. So when the New York Times had a breakthrough in 2011 with its meted pay wall allowing some free access but charging for unlimited use the whole industry breathed a huge sigh of relief. Various kind of pay walls have now been tried here and overseas, some of them quite inventive and a number seem to be yielding encouraging results to the point where the prominent American News Industry analysts Ken Doctor says, "Acquired from Minneapolis to Colombia to Hamburg traffic often begins to grow markedly after the initial shock of a paywall. It may take months or a couple of years but traffic is essentially reset and can be rebuilt." The way Malcolm Turnbull put it when he launched the Saturday paper in February was that many media organisations are using porous paywalls to slowly train people to start paying for content and it's working. Surprisingly perhaps the 2014 Deloitte Media Consumer Survey found that people aged between 25 and 34 are more willing to pay for their elders, more willing pay than their elders. I beg your pardon and that's actually a great sign. Paywalls are certainly not the entire answer to the problem of funding great journalism into the future but they're part of it. The charging for journalism provides what's been called a quality imperative. If you're giving news away and simply relying on high traffic volumes to attract digital advertising revenue then what works best is large quantities of click batik and crap. But if you want to sell something it has to be worth buying. It's early days but it could be that media organisations that gave redundancies to their best storytellers and allowed investigative resources to wither or come to regret it. I hope so. Reason for optimism number four; concern for quality is now affecting online outlets that used to scorn traditional journalistic standards and values. There was a big divide between the traditional view of journalism and the new online approach because the Internet is all about speed and informality and democracy. It was argued about getting things right, checking facts before you're published, providing context were old-fashioned. What mattered was to get the stuff out there quickly. Things could be checked and changed later. If you posted something that was wrong the people would let you know. The Internet was self-correcting. The truth would emerge eventually. Well that sort of attitude is now less in evidence. The brash startups and the digital natives seem to have decided delightedly that credibility actually matters after all. Traditional values are now being embraced by online newsrooms in places like "BuzzFeed." Originally "BuzzFeed" was all entertainment. Its big thing was cat videos that went viral. Anything that was fun, big on the Web was called business but now after eight years it's getting a well over a million people a month and it's becoming a news organisation that packs some punch. After hiring Ben Smith a serious journalist from "Politico" he's the either and chief now, the cats and gossip and mysticals are still in there but serious journalistic explorations sit alongside them. Ben Smith talked about the culture changes he's trying to produce. In an interview with the Colombia journalism review in March he said, "People used to see "BuzzFeed" as a place where you could find really fun stuff but not really a place you could trust. Now they're seeing it as a place where you can get your news." "BuzzFeed" has hired a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter to head a new investigative unit. "BuzzFeed's" narrative features and investigations will be edited, copy edited and fact-checked Smith says. He recently sacked a staffer for plagiarism. Lesson, rubbish that makes money on the Net can be used to build a platform for more serious reporting. Reason for optimism number five, the idea that people would access raw information on the Net without the need for journalistic involvement has proved overblown. In their book, "Out of Print: Newspaper Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age" George Brock describes how the founders of WikiLeaks believed that information spoke most powerfully if not mediated by journalists. But they found that when material was presented online raw, without commentary or explanation much of it was incomprehensible so all their lay documents hardly made an impact. Brock, the head of journalism at City University London writes, "The disclosures only reached an audience of any size when picked up by mainstream media." Julian Assange eventually adopted the technique of partnering with well-known newspapers. The WikiLeaks experience showed that information needs to be distilled, put into context and explained. Journalism is required to sift, edit and give meaning. This is encouraging. I think that journalists do remain relevant. Finally reason for optimism number six, the story-telling capabilities and techniques available to us are greater than ever. New journalistic tools provided by digital technology are astonishing. Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes in the U.S. for 12 years said when he retired earlier this year, "In many ways we've entered the golden age of journalism." Now I baulked at the term golden age when I first read it but the more I think about it the fewer of reservations I have. Our table is Exhibit A, Google Glass. You probably know about Google Glass. It's something still being tested by Google. It's essentially a tiny video camera, computer and screen built into a pair of spectacles. An American journalist named Tim Pool he does what he calls mobile first person journalism got access to it through an early adapters programme and tweaked it so it runs to serve his journalistic needs. He can live stream video from his Google Glass camera, access his desktop computer at home from wherever he happens to be and have files displayed in his field of vision, use a voice translation app when he's in a non-English speaking country. In fact he's used it to order a gas mask when he was being tear-gassed in Turkey. He can see and talk to his producers back at HQ from thousands of kilometres away and check with people on social media all while he's broadcasting. Pool has used Google Glass to cover riots, as I said in Istanbul and he covered the Occupy Wall Street protests that were in New York. He could do it all hands-free which is important when he's in the middle of a violent demonstration or dodging plastic bullets. He can't afford to be distracted by peering into a camera. The viewer sees and hears what he sees and hears in realtime. I don't know about you but to me that's enough to almost make an old hack which he was just starting out again. Finally, to illustrate the point about these wonderful tools I think the fundamental change we're going to see is a marriage of tradition journalism and computer science. You might have heard the phrase hacker journalism. It doesn't relate to anything illegal, nothing to do with news of the world. Hacker journalists is computer science skills not just to provide expertise in the presentation of information online but more importantly to access and interpret data in new ways uncover truths and report them, accord journalistic tasks. Combining computer science and journalism degrees I think will be the new in-thing in institutions like this one especially in light of the need of journalists to learn IT hygiene and encryption techniques to outsmart big brother and protect sources. Thank you. [Applause]