Geraldine Doogue delivers the 2025 Andrew Olle Media Lecture

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

'NOT DROWNING, WAVING---A MODERN MEDIA TALE'
This invitation is particularly gratifying because it carries quite a lot of personal weight. Andrew's sudden collapse and then death was the most terrible shock for thousands of us, but especially in my very ABC household.
My late husband Ian Carroll was technically one of his bosses (now called Leads) as Exec Producer of the 7.30 Report: and together with Television Division leaders, the decision was made back then in 1995 to refresh the whole early evening television current affairs line-up; that it would benefit from being beefed-up to a national approach (as it is now) and the decision was made to appoint the experienced Kerry O'Brien in the chair.
It was all rather secretive, as these things tend to be, up till the point that it wasn't! And the news doesn't emerge… neatly , as you know. No alternative role had yet been fully devised for Andrew on television though his 702 morning radio role would remain the same. Word got out about the changes. Then, Andrew collapsed from this tumour….and died.
Obviously we all wondered whether pressure over his future had played any role and we'll never know…but I don't really think Ian ever forgot that sense of responsibility for his part in the decision-making, and whether it could have been improved.
There was such a lot of grief, shock…and dismay, visibly conveyed. It was not an easy time cos it was all so sudden, there was such sheer sadness, at losing the fabulous, reliable generalist Andrew Olle. So as I say, I'm especially delighted to be here tonight to honour his memory….and in the presence of Annette and the family.
And what a year to be delivering the lecture, on media of the future! On any subject that requires good prophecy. Because NOTHING seems certain in our lives.
For quite a while after the invitation arrived, I'd settled on those immortal WB Yeats lines as my title tonight: 'Can The Centre Hold?'…followed by those unforgettable lines… The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.'
Those words certainly describe our times. But it just felt too defensive and grim… and I didn't want to leave you all like that.
'Not drowning, waving', the distinctly Australian rock group formed in the year my lovely daughter Eliza was born, 1983….somehow seemed to convey my sentiments with a bit more irony, as we grapple with what many of us see as our epic challenge: helping our profession survive.
Because It IS all bit grim to be frank, for those of us who love the media, love working inside it, consuming it, believing it's vital to our way of life, our identities.
Roy Greenslade, the UK media analyst was pretty blunt back in 2016: 'It's time to recognise that the whole UK newspaper/media industry is heading for a cliff-fall, that tipping point when there's no hope of a reversal of fortune….Space in newsprint papers can be filled. The end result is something that looks like a paper but the content lacks any real value. And of course readers gradually catch on and stop buying.' And advertisers can stop advertising, knowing that many subscribers have switched to inidividualised screens.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford has been forensically examining things. (headline below)
' Journalism is in freefall---and the public doesn't care . What should the media do next?' was how Prospect magazine headlined their coverage of Reuters' latest overview, with a good piece by a senior research associate, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.
….and the public doesn't care! That rider has stayed with me.
'The public doesn't miss yesterday's news, but journalists miss the public.'
Nielsen says current trends suggest at best a continued retreat , as the press serves fewer and fewer people, ultimately ending up with a role akin to contemporary art or classical music: highly valued by a privileged few, regarded with indifference by the many. (one could argue this….but I think you get the analogy)
Consumers' lack of grief about these changes was because THEY felt they WERE keeping sufficiently up-to-date without their (so-called) legacy media…. And maybe they are!
Are we still needed? That's our existential crisis….though the fine print of the Reuters research does indicate that the public in theory is still with us …it's just that other information-distraction options loom up as better, perfect vehicles, as I read recently, for skimming rather than close reading .
…all part of what Andrew Denton described to me as 'information-sickness'.
That newish outfit of Andrew Jaspan, 360 Info, a sort of research Reuters, describes us all being involved in a ' war-of-attention' …to work out how we counter (or at least compete) with the outlets whose stock-in-trade is harnessing community rage and anger, often legitimate.
Mind you, the Reuters people have also found the hated algorithm that directs people to other-than-conventional-news-sites slightly broadens people's news outlets too. And of course it is true that our consumers have, in some key ways, have become our competitors , via their own bespoke news outlets, that they set up themselves---one of the great ironies!
'While many people retain a sound scepticism of aspects of the digital media environment, they also appreciate much of what it has to offer and choose it every day at the expense of declining legacy media. Scare stories about the problems associated with digital media will not bring people back to news,' says Reuters.
'A wiser course of action might be to impress people…rather than try to depress them.
'The people best positioned to forge a different path are those journalists and publishers who accept that the next step is to meet people where they are. The aim should not be to take journalism backwards….but to create something new.'
But what? What would that look and sound like?
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Well for further context, I was very diverted by the thoughts of one of Australia's great intellectual exports Christopher Clark, who's professor of modern history at Cambridge University (and a guest on Global Roaming next week btw): he wrote that book 'Sleepwalkers' about the terrible drift into WW1, it was considered possibly the best book to emerge from that deluge of scholarship around the Great War centenary in 2018.
He recently wrote an essay called 'The End Of Modernity—A Crisis Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes…And Also In Our Heads.' (not quite Yeats' elan!)
We can't---or shouldn't---avert our gaze, he says. He sees the global blocs of the 20th century dissolving, therefore a return to the more 'mobile and unpredictable world of the 19th century'…that Vladimir Putin et al aim to exploit all this, to 'crush the moral spine of Europe'….to undo entirely the international order established in the aftermath of WW2.
Then he went further. The anchors for the collective identities of the era that he'd roughly called The Modern---with its hugely accelerated industrialisation, big growth in population, welfare states, political parties…coincided with 'the age of the great supra-regional newspapers plus the emergence of national radio and television networks'…all had created their own mythology…a story we could tell ourselves in time, of understanding where we came from and where we were heading'.
'It meant mediatization,' he writes. 'In old Europe…people obtained their information from friends and acquaintances, or even from strangers, but always from individuals , by word of mouth. In modern times, by contrast, information was increasingly disseminated through influential media channels---rumour-mongers gave way to trained journalists. '
Well, this modernity, Clark says, is disintegrating before our eyes.
'The multi-faceted nature of contemporary politics, the present of turmoil and change without a clear sense of direction, is causing enormous uncertainty. It helps explain why we are so easily unsettled by the agitations of the present and why we find it so difficult to plot our course.'
Maybe, he wondered, there's a general reversal of the process of mediatization….in the sense that the gossip-mongers of the Internet have once again seized the initiative, leaving fragmentation of knowledge and opinions.
Here's his great summary-line. 'It has never been so difficult to think calmly.' Yet so necessary!
Now here I am, 15 minutes or so in, leaving you maybe even more ready to escape to a cave than you were on arrival! Not my intention.
I have come to wonder whether what's needed is a more communitarian sensibility to our work in the media, and our approach to news, information and the characters of our communities: more than we've necessarily prioritised in our anxiety to survive and cut through all the noise.
…..in other words, fleshing out that vital interaction between individualism and the communal, an individual's relationship with their community: the precious good soil that underpins a thriving culture, putting the community at the centre of social and political thought.
I do wonder whether our individual journalistic egos have become very wrapped up with hitting the headlines ourselves while also pursuing time-honoured goals: holding the powerful to account, lifting the lid on established unfairness within our systems.
We will always have a duty to warn citizens of danger and incompetence, alerting them to what's NOT solved, why today might be different from yesterday, the classic role of the 4th Estate: advising of the cyclone's or bushfire's incipient arrival is obviously the day-to-day duty of the good journalist, she who'll never reveal her sources .
….and hey, who among us can honestly say we were impervious to the Woodward-Bernstein achievements around Watergate, sensationally recreated in 'All The Presidents Men': two young bloods, nobly jousting with the deeply flawed leader Richard Nixon and his establishment…and yay, bringing him down (with some help from others}. Journalistic nobility---then Super-stardom! Why wouldn't the world of journalism shift, I ask you!
However I do wonder whether the breadth of the community and its range of tastes and interests, is sufficiently canvassed?
Whether we're far more energised by displaying the incompetence on display rather than searching for the competence? Of course it may not yield that fabulous rush of revelation, of schadenfreude…as Mike Carlton once put it in his SMH column..'the definition of schadenfreude? the awful joy of watching a human catastrophe unfold'.
For instance, will all the current emphasis on investigative journalism save us? All that brilliance and tenacity of investigative journalists who labour away so impressively: will that amount to the 'glittering prize' that ensures the public remains sufficiently grateful to keep subscribing? I'm not at all sure it will.
Naming the guilty man or woman---or institution---should not be the ONLY part of the story yet it often is, especially e.g. around Royal Commissions who've long frustrated me with their total focus on the knaves among us…rather than what I imagined was their broader remit, which was to examine the full scope of actors in a relevant industry, so that we, the people, could pass better judgement.
(One of the people I spoke to preparing for tonight wondered a 'sacriligeous thought' our loud----should the fact that a report was seen to 'prompt a Royal Commission' necessarily be the clincher in determining worth, going to that question of Impact, one of the categories required for Walkley Award success….quite thought-provoking.)
I have long believed---and my colleagues here tonight will know this---that new patterns of achievement make very good first pars…plus act as a drawcard for imitators…plus might in fact persuade doubting citizens that we really ARE interested in the wider community not merely claiming a political scalp….and it just might in fact encourage them to persist with their subscriptions.
I heard a nice story recently about Matthias Doepfner, who leads the giant German media group Alex Springer, reacting to American research showing very bright young emerging Americans wanting to devote all their energies to 'investigative reporting'….was he thrilled at all this intellectual grunt arriving in his industry, he was asked? 'No, I'm not,' he apparently said…. 'I think that's a dangerous misunderstanding of journalism.'
He believes one of the reasons people are losing trust in the media is because many reporters confuse journalism for activism - telling us what the world should look like and ignoring inconvenient news. And that the public can see it and doesn't necessarily like it.
Does that matter? Well yes I think it does.
In this communitarian model I'm reflecting on, I see a renewal of the covenant between the public and the journalist: that we will clearly make the effort to be fair and accurate. (We could spend the night exchanging clever memes about News definitions. So I won't do that)
I've always liked that definition: we're reporting on that which differs from the norm , we're not there to tell people about the comfortable status quo. To that extent, we are there to bother people, to introduce some alert-and-alarm. And no we can't GUARANTEE we'll be fully objective….but we can observably try , and be seen to be doing so or judged for not. The public can draw its own conclusions.
I remember the respected social researcher Neer Korn a few years back telling the ABC Board that 'trust' was possibly the ABC's vital power, its secret sauce…that of course the audience made their minds up in their own households about those of us on telly or the radio or online and our 'take on the world'.
Intellectual openness is, for me, the essential aim, it really is: impartiality is articulated a lot as a goal but I actually find the word openness to be more inviting, maybe more active, as a concept? That's certainly what I look for in colleagues. And I suspect the public does too.
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Allow me to ponder some more about this more communal, service model of journalism. (As an aside, I remember being incredibly moved during those 50th anniversary docos of Cyclone Tracey to hear Alan Kohler describe emerging as a 21 yr old from the rubble, with his two mates Dave Johnson and Lorna King, using every means possible to put out a little information broadsheet, handed out to whoever they could find, with as much detail as they could grab, just to spread the word that Darwin was alive…just!)
Now Alan HAS become justly famous well beyond that episode….but it does say quite a bit about his essential-journalist within!
I do propose that refreshing this communal model (many of you here tonight probably feel you already access it) would mean the public would FEEL an overt embrace of wider community characteristics: and that might indeed restore more trust in us over time.
This won't be an instant salvo against TikTok et al of course: Andrew Jaspan's 360 Degree outfit did a big Digital News report in June, noting that Facebook was still the most visited social media site for news (38%), alongside YouTube, Instagram and TikTok…now at 14% up from 12% in 2020.
Worryingly, of the 48 countries surveyed, Australians had the highest levelof concern about what is real or fake online…amidst a loss of interest in news and growing news avoidance (going back to that Reuters survey). News literacy training, a subset of media literacy, Jaspan thinks is crucial here: he believes people would benefit from knowing how the sausage is made, might in fact value that outcome more.
(I do admire Andrew Jaspan for stepping outside established moulds, when he championed that other major break-out of information, The Conversation, where he worked out that universities contained masses of new, relevant material that could be transformed into news features…and the rest is history, as they say….now an absolute fixture in our lives, with an obvious public purpose…so clever in my view and really out on his own )
I do keep an eye out now for where a clear association between the public and the media occurs:
*Podcasts…the phenomenon of our recent times: lots of ego, I can assure you, but less rules (maybe) around the conversational tone, meaning a wider exposure of the relevant people and topics, less curated than straight Radio? (which is still my first love, I want to reassure you)
*Special events, like ABC Classic 100 in that first week of June----with some composer or instrument chosen as a focus, Beethoven, piano music, with the community voting on the best, always with huge take-up, of all ages and skills. …you can hear it, instant market research on offer. (Tell story of Russell Torrance, on the Monday after the weekend, playing Mozart Piano Concerto No 27, which did NOT make the top 100! A Qld woman texted in…'I had a baby 7 hours ago, she's sleeping beside me now, with Mozart by her side.' I think that might be the pinnacle of engagement between mainstream media and its audience, frankly it doesn't get much better than that.) Triple J's Hottest 100 is obviously another candidate.
*Explainers… I sat on the Walkley judging panel for this category's second year in 2024 (called Explanatory Journalism); SO incredibly impressive to see this instinct among journalists. It was invariably team work , I noticed, generally involving some institutional backing, incredibly imaginative, bold, demanding, huge amounts of work often in people's own time, driven by curiosity and, I would say, a desire to tell stories by CLARIFYING complexity----a time-honoured drive to serve!
Follow-ups to natural disasters: I've come to believe this matters a great deal. It proves that the media is genuinely curious about deeper stories, slower stories, as much as crisis-management, in the full knowledge that the way people, animals and the natural world adapt is a vital, if diffuse story. ABC News did some wonderful, repeated reporting after the last bushfires in ways that were both incredibly moving, deeply informative and genuinely fresh.
There are some interesting developments overseas, by say Swedish Radio, developing a system of classifying content, to more clearly determine public service journalism drivers, and help younger arrivals to the industry Apparently the Finns are looking at this along with other European countries: the idea being that increasingly diverse news items are evaluated via four tests: how high is the general news value? How long is the life span of the story? Are unique voices from affected people included in the coverage? Does it align with significant Swedish Radio values?
Media literacy is apparently becoming a massive thing in the Asian region…with some quite fascinating projects, like one in Nepal, called Hello CIN (Community Information Network ), combining radio, talkback and citizen-driven solutions journalism: people voice-record questions often about local governance or education issues….then it's played to the relevant govt official, who responds directly, all on air: an average of 15,000 questions, complaints and issues are resolved, publicly, via this platform each year. And it's widely appreciated.
Now, I can hear some of you thinking….does she really think these compete with some fabulous scoop? No, I love those big-beast stories of course I do: who doesn't, and we've certainly experienced a few in these past two years. But my tastes won't deliver an industry of scale in the future, sadly.
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This all dovetails with other bigger needs within the culture of course. I would argue that we might well have reached peak-individualism, which manifests in all those solitary searches on the Net for some bliss, sometimes found. And yet so many of them are seeking ways to avoid loneliness or separateness or alienation…. I don't think we thrive on individualism!
Many of you will know of my interest in Catholic and religious matters ---in fact it's been quite surprising to see the overlap between the challenges facing the media and the Churches in terms of reading the signs-of-the-times: how to revive We and Us versus I? Religion thrives on community…so might we in the media!
And doing it better just might recruit more of those consumers to leave aside their complacency and push back against the autocrats on-the-march. It just might.
We're all looking for green-shoots: that's the truth of it and maybe some new 21st century media grammar. After all, in the 1930s the BBC had to 'invent' all those looks and props and sounds that we simply take for granted now that mark studio news presentation.
Moving past individual gossip to something more formal involved massive creativity. We clearly need it again.
We surely need to lionise creativity and service beyond individual achievement and fame in order to routinely engage lots more people, more regularly: because otherwise we simply won't have an industry-at-scale, it won't be prosperous enough to offer careers, or cadetships to young people----all sorts of people will end up as artists-working-in-garrets, rationing their time and money, occasionally striking it rich, mostly doing something else. That's no answer. And there'll certainly be a much less certain audience for investigative journalism, which can change big things.
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I haven't talked about AI, or the innards of socials, or dis- or mis-information, weaponised or 'disordered' information. I know I won't satisfy all those people who are just SEETHING at the structures of money and power and clowns on display these days…..I spoke to several of them preparing for tonight!
I can't even give you specific new models of this communitarian emphasis I'm emphasising: I wish I could.
If we're passive, we might lose this gem of ours, this marker-buoy of modernity? This industry that I adored from Day One, back in 1972, when I wandered up the corridor of Newspaper House at 125 St Georges Tce, Perth on a hot December day and said…is there a way in here? Thank goodness they said yes, there is!