This might seem like wisdom after the event. But I’ve actually been mulling over these thoughts on The Global Mail for a while. My reluctance to criticise the site until now, after it has lost its inaugural editor, might have had something with the hostile reception the site got on its first day. There were a lot of comments then on the side-scrolling design, adding to which seemed redundant. I decided to leave off, and just haven’t had a chance to say my piece until now. (and yes, hello blog, I promise to try not to neglect you). From the outset, let it be clear that I wish the next iteration of the GM all the best, and I write from a sense of frustration that a well-resourced new entrant has fallen so flat, so quickly. I write from a sense of disappointment, given the excitement I felt before the launch.
My problem wasn’t the side-scrolling design as such. It was more the way that this design combined with other features of the site, and the content, to suggest that the Global Mail was only reluctantly an online enterprise.
The site’s design suggested to this progressively less frequent reader that the brief was to make it look like a glossy magazine. When you combined that with the lack of a comments facility, and the lack of links and engagement with other sites in the stories, a distinct impression was formed. This was a website that was only grudgingly online. To me the presentation of the site framed the Internet as a necessary evil – a handy distribution method for a pretty old-fashioned product, not a medium with its own possibilities, which might be usefully engaged with. The lack of capacity for readers to make their own contribution suggested an aversion to the culture of online debate.
The stories reflected this mindset, I think. The photographic essays by Mike Bowers are gorgeous, and always worth a look. But otherwise too many stories were worthy-but-dull, with news and editorial values seemingly informed by a pretty wooly set of ideas about “quality journalism”. (Rumopur has it that there was tension over the rate at which stories were commissioned, so this may not have been the fault of the writers involved).
Too often they were at the weekend supplement level rather than approaching the gold standards of online longform journalism – The Atlantic, The New Yorker, TNR. One never felt sure as one does in checking those sites or their feeds, that one would learn something genuinely new, something which you will always want to shoot to instapaper.
So it seemed like GM combined unfulfilled aspirations to be a quality longform project with an apparent unwillingness to be integrated with the rest of the Internet. These went some way towards robbing the GM of the spark, cheekiness, willingness to experiment, competitive elan, doggedness and fight of more durable and interesting online news ventures. Crikey might have a ramshackle site but it also has shown itself able to compel readers with a different take on the daily agenda, and tweaked the noses of bigger players on the way. Think of Mumbrella or New Matilda, which speak for and to well-defined audiences. Think of On Line Opinion‘s sense of mission. Think of the personality that the more successful Australian blogs manage to project. Think of the best things that have happened at ABC Online in recent years – the Drum and ABC Open, which have harnessed the energy of outsiders. Then pop over to Alexa and do the traffic comparisons.
For all its claims to innovation in design, we never saw GM under Attard do anything really innovative as an online publication. There was no data journalism or visualisation, no experiments with interactive features, no live coverage, no standout social media work, no multimedia offerings.
It’s one thing to be away from the news cycle, it’s another to be so irrelevant that you’re not able to get any traction on the agenda. There seemed to be a desire to put foreign affairs and broad progressive issues on the public radar. But the Global Mail seemed too satisfied with itself from the outset to elbow its way into a place in the national conversation. The audience was taken for granted, not competed for.
When it started, it was claimed that its target market was everyone. This seemed impossibly vague at the time; in retrospect it seems like a disavowal. I think the imagined audience was clear enough – it was the editor and other like minds, who were committed to a similar normative old-media ideal of quality (which might just be redundant, if not obsolete) and a similar suite of soft-left causes. But this audience was just not large enough for the publication to have the desired impact.
Perhaps Attard’s background was not ideal for shepherding a new online outlet. She was a storied foreign correspondent with a long tenure in the ABC’s star system. Perhaps by their nature these things need hungry outsiders, who want to do more than dispense patronage to producing a kind of journalism which is exemplified better elsewhere. Perhaps the eye-popping level of support given to the venture was part of the problem – the whole thing just felt complacent from the outset.
It makes you think, though. When she was in the Media Watch chair, is the Global Mail what Attard wanted the Australian media to look like?
PS Tim Burrowes makes some related points, in the form of a list, on Mumbrella.
I don’t know why, but the bottom banner kept chopping off the bottoms of the paragraphs (vista HP, most recent versions of Firefox, Seamonkey and Chrome), so there was no point in scrolling sideways, and after a few tries I gave up.
My impression was that they were so busy being clever with bells and whistles, they forgot to check if their site worked widely.
Once they get a normal web site, I’ll go back and form a judgement about the journalism once the delivery vehicle stops preventing me from reading it.
I emailed them to let them know, and was ignored – the sure sign you have ABC-trained people handing consumer feedback. The assumed entitlement to the consumer’s attention is something I wish they had left behind at Auntie.
Jason — great article, and I think you’ve hit on many of the issues that have stymied the Global Mail. However, the main one, that you’ve only alluded to, is that GM sat so outside of the current media model that it sidelined itself. (Mumbrella also touches on this.)
By this I refer to the symbiosis between journalists and public relations professionals. Over 60% of what appears on TV, radio and newspapers is driven by public relations. Most “interesting” non-random events and stories (e.g. natural disasters) are PR driven.
Attard said, in one of the interviews I heard, that she wanted to insulate GM from the daily barrage of PR media releases. Their unresponsive nature was due to wanting to avoid the influence of PR and media spinners.
Unfortunately, that’s how our news works. Journos get tips and insights from PR staffers and insiders. If you’re isolating yourself from that, you’re not going to get the juicy stories and exclusives. Investigative journalism can’t compensate for that.
This can explain the lack of content — they simply excluded themselves from the loop.
As a sessional lecturer in media management at VU, I can attest that every first year student is taught that journalism and PR go hand in hand since the dawn of time. Journalism has always been about filling the gaps between the ads.
There was never a golden age of journalism as imagined by Attard and the rest of the Global Mail crew (including Wood). Journalism and the media is an essential part of the promotion cycle — and it just doesn’t work without PR.
As you say, The Atlantic produces amazing content. But you can be the regular journalists on the books are tapped into the PR beltway — as I imagine the freelancers would be.
More here: http://alexwhite.org/2012/05/the-global-mail-journalism-and-pr/
Pingback: The Global Mail, journalism and PR | Alex White
I agree with most of the criticisms you’ve mentioned here. I’ve never been a very regular reader of the Global Mail, but one of the reports that really stuck out for me was their investigation into aged care. It was notable for actually having what you said the site lacked, in terms of data journalism/visualisation and interactive features. I think lots of online publications would love to do more of this kind of thing but are hamstrung by limited resources, so it’s a shame it’s been so rare at the Global Mail, so far at least.
The Global Mail does not seem to understand the changed behaviours of their target audience.
Leaving aside the website design, and the lack of digital native storytelling forms like data visualisation and interactives, they seemed to have little sense of how people find and consume media in the current era.
Tim’s points at Mumbrella count the ways.
Thus far it has been a failure of marketing; not in a publicity sense, but in the sense of matching a service to an audience need or desire. Your point, Jason, about their stated target audience being ‘everyone’ reinforces my impression that they didn’t think about their audience at all.
Let’s assume that we’re talking about a politically engaged, educated, relatively affluent target. These people are likely to have access to huge amounts of great content, have existing sites, services or platforms they habitually use to consume content, and little real need in their life for what The Global Mail was publishing. Interest perhaps, and best wishes perhaps, but no real compelling need.
In that context simply putting up a website, having a tiny link down the bottom to subscribe to their newsletter, having a single teaser only RSS feed, publishing infrequently inside a walled garden, generally gives the impression that they expect to win their audience’s loyalty very easily and deeply. Very confident indeed.
There are still large audiences for serious, considered journalism and analysis; take a look at the long-reads phenomenon or the rising audience for The Economist or The Atlantic. I’ve got no quarrel with The Global Mail’s mission, just their execution.
Alex – the point you make about PR is fair enough as far as it goes. I agree that the tribalism around journalism vs PR is often bone-headed, and in practice the two roles are often symbiotic, and have been ever since newspapers started to break away from partisan sponsors and become independent. But the Mail’s problems went deeper, as I think the comparison with other similar independent media websites. Still it’s a very interesting perspective.
Rosanna – the exception that proves the rule? I still think that the whole presence of the GM online seemed very reluctant, and the odd foray into data journalism might just show that while the editors knew what it was, they by and large weren’t interested.
Fergus – I think that’s all spot on, sadly. They did everything they could to deter readers and return visitors.
Jason — yes, you’re right. There are many factors to the problems besetting the Global Mail. Divorcing yourself from the PR spin cycle has proven detrimental, along with all of the other areas mentioned.
Welcome to your blog Jason
Interesting post but I think you failed to highlight perhaps the most pertenent p[oint which is that while in this digital world of ourrs I know it is very fashionable to rely on the electronic gadgets such as computers and computer screens some of us still like to read off paper and while I respect other’s peoples desire to use electronic reading technologies I for one like to print out my internet on paper but the Globule Mail either does not have print button or I can’t not find it on the page (sic)
This is communist bullshit