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2009 AJR 31-2 That's Gold.Pdf (PDF, 198.67KB) That's Gold! Thinking about excellence in Australian Journalism Penny O’Donnell Abstract This paper reports on the first national study of the annual Walkley Awards for excellence in Australian journalism, the premier media prizes in this country. The research is designed to investigate the meaning of quality journalism at a time of flux in the news industry, as newspapers move online and become multi-platform rather than single-medium news providers. Academic critique of journalism habitually dwells on malpractice and poor performance; this paper proposes instead to critically examine exemplary forms of successful journalistic practice, asking what they might tell us about quality journalism. No- table characteristics of the top prize, the Gold Walkley, awarded in the period between 1988 and 2008, are highlighted in the analysis. These are interpreted in relation to the research literature on prize-winning journalism. Quality journalism emerges as a complex practice that resists quantification and “monetisation”. The paper argues that, nonetheless, excellence in journalism, properly conceived, requires attention to – and engagement with – the public’s ideas about journalism. Introduction For the brickbats are many, the laurels few, and the recurring images of vultures and hounds lurking near the prey are a sharp reminder that the media will never be perfect, nor totally loved (John Hurst, 1988). The annual Walkley Awards for excellence in Australian journalism are changing. In July 2009, the Walkley Foundation announced a new award category of “Best online journalism” in recognition of the growing industry importance of digital media (Dempster, 2009, p. 25). Two all-media awards, one for “outstanding continuous coverage of an issue or event”, the other for “best scoop of the year”, have been introduced for the same reason (Dempster, 2009, p. 25). The changes are one outcome of a 2009 internal review of the awards. Further changes are promised. Work is under way to radically restructure the award categories to recognise core journalistic skills and values, including reporting, writing, interviewing and investigating. Categories based on separate delivery platforms (print, radio, television and online) may be phased out. As Walkley Advisory Board chair Quentin Dempster (2009) explains, digital media have fundamentally altered the public’s ideas about who can be a journalist and what the work involves. It follows, then, that if journalism is to have a sustainable future, journalists need to communicate more about the skills and values that differentiate professional practice from blogs and social media. 1 The Walkleys are the profession’s own way of encouraging high standards of work and promoting quality across the field. Created by petroleum magnate Sir William Gaston Walkley in 1956, and now administered by the Walkley Foundation and the journalists’ union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), the awards are open to all journalists on the basis of self-nomination, and are judged by distinguished media industry figures. At its best, this reward system can be seen as an exercise in critical peer review and capacity- building; less generous assessments suggest the awards amount to little more than an “orgy of ... back-slapping” (Thompson, 2005). The task of this paper is to offer a dispassionate appraisal of Australia’s best journalism, as judged by journalists themselves. Theoretically, the analysis moves away from academic critiques of journalism that habitually dwell on negative instances of bad practice, proposing instead to direct critical attention at prize- winning or successful journalism. I argue the awards offer a new and under-researched starting point for thinking about journalism practice, including the profession’s processes of self-evaluation, the public’s ideas about journalism, and the relationship between journalism prizes and public understanding of news quality. Notable characteristics of Gold Walkley award-winning pieces of journalism from the past 21 years are highlighted in the analysis. The sample opens in 1988 with Radio National broadcaster Dr Norman Swan of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) taking the top prize for revealing scientific fraud; it ends with Ross Coulthart and Nick Farrow’s 2008 award-winning television exposé of a doctor known as the “Butcher of Bega”, who criminally assaulted his patients (Sunday, Nine Network). This recent unprecedented win for commercial television current affairs suggests new awareness of audience preferences as well as professional news values. I argue that excellence in journalism, properly conceived, requires attention to and engagement with the public’s ideas about journalism. The Walkley Foundation is aware of this imperative (Dempster, 2009); the challenge ahead lies in answering its increasingly urgent call. Quality in journalism Debates about how well journalists do their job and other aspects of media performance are dealt with extensively in international media and journalism research (Liebes & Kampf, 2009; Statham, 2008; Bennett, 2007; Gardner et al., 2001; Tumber, 2000; McQuail, 1992; Rivers & Schramm, 1969), but in the literature there is little evidence of consensus on how to 2 define professional journalism standards, the concepts of quality and excellence, or the parameters for empirical investigations of these categories. Four approaches to “quality” are canvassed in this section: the quality/popular division for judging newspaper content; quality as a product of newsroom resources; quality as creative work valued by news readers and professional peers; and quality as a democratic value. The quality-popular division Australian research on the theme of quality in journalism is limited but insightful (see Mayer, 1968; Turner, 1993, 1996; Henningham, 1996; Hanusch, 2008; Harrington, 2008). The first efforts to trace out some of the difficulties of researching “quality” newspapers emerged in Henry Mayer’s landmark study, The press in Australia (1968). He identifies the quality- popular division as the most widely accepted international standard for judging newspaper content (1968, p. 8), but argues it is marred by essentialism, vagueness and unhelpful moralistic overtones: The notion of the quality Press is an essentialist one: certain papers alone are assumed to have absorbed “the essence” of “the” newspaper as such. The question of whether the popular Press has not qualitative features of its own is thus ignored, and that Press is, from the start, put in a morally inferior position. (Mayer, 1968, p. 6) Mayer shows how this division had developed historically from schematic comparisons of newspaper content and muddle-headed ideas about readership. Quality content is typically seen as opinion-forming, serious, lengthy and soberly presented for an elite, well-educated and well- heeled readership, while popular journalism is “light”, entertaining, visual and replete with gimmicks and competitions that are designed to appeal to the majority of the population. Yet Mayer points to the difficulties of trying to define or measure quality. He argues the London Times and The New York Times acquired their undisputed status as the two top quality papers in the English- speaking world through critical acclaim (and advertising hype), rather than any hard evidence about their content standards or circulation figures (1968, p. 4). He further claims that Australian conditions (such as small population, high costs of media market entry) mean that no Australia newspaper is in a position to compete “unsubsidised” with The Times or The New York Times, although local commentators like to single out The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age as more “serious” than the rest of the country’s capital city dailies (1968, pp. 7-8). Put another way, ac- cording to international standards, there have never been any quality newspapers in Australia (1968, 3 p. 8), just a popular press offering more or less crime, vice, visuals, ads, editorials and serious political news (1968, p. 24). Mayer thus suggests it is difficult to have a serious debate about quality journalism in Australian. A more recent version of this quality sceptics’ position can be found in Michael Bromley’s (2006) commentary on the parlous state of journalism research in Australia, in which he argues industry practice simply cannot be leveraged into worthwhile research because it lacks quality. He writes that “with only a very few notable exceptions, Australian mainstream journalism is characterized by a singular lack of investigation, understanding or even, at times, comprehensibility” (2006, p. 212). I argue instead that the quality-popular division highlighted by Mayer (1968) is based too narrowly on medium or delivery platform and, therefore, is outdated. It obscures more about journalistic practice than it reveals, suggesting quality is a function of specific news formats rather than a potential feature of all types of journalism. Newsroom resources The second approach to media quality focuses on the link between newsroom resources, media content and issues such as media concentration, corporatisation, newsroom job cuts and public disaffection with the media. This is a strong theme in US journalism and media management research, notably in the Newspaper Research Journal (Lacy & Fico, 1991; Bogart, 2004: Meyer, 2004: Picard, 2004; Culbertson, 2007) and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (Gladney, 1996; Henningham, 1996). Stephen Lacy and Frederick Fico (1991) point to “the profit
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