The Australian Blogosphere

By Tim Dunlop 05 June 2012

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The blog had, and still does have, the potential to change the media landscape. Has Twitter killed its potential?

I was recently part of a public discussion at the University of Melbourne where the topic was the role played by anonymous sources in contemporary journalism. Also, of course, we speculated about the role the internet and various social media had played in altering the media landscape.

One of the other panelists, journalist George Megalogenis, made the point that the one area where old media still outflanked new media, was in the ability of journalists like himself to pick up a phone and talk to important and influential people. This is something still not available to bloggers or other so-called citizen journalists.

My response was that that might be true in Australia but it certainly isn’t true in the US. The US blogosphere is quite comfortably integrated with the mainstream media, there are no restrictions on bloggers gaining access to prominent public figures, and it has been that way for years. In fact, at the time that the Howard Government was blocking Crikey’s access to the Budget lock-up (in the early-mid 2000s), both major parties in the US were organising frequent blogger “meet-ups”, a practice that continues to this day.

Why the difference between here and the US?

The question has been raised by some others in recent weeks. The editor of one of Australia’s most successful blogs, Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute (a foreign policy think-tank), wrote a piece the other day that lamented the dominance of Twitter in Australian political discourse because, he argued, it had come at the expense of a fully networked Australian blogosphere. He wrote:

...blogging reaches its full promise when all those voices form a network (one which has come to acquire the unlovely term “’blogosphere’’). What blogs exploit is the internet’s power for conversation. But that conversation can only be sustained by high numbers of bloggers and readers, and by their mutual desire to engage with one another.

That model of blogging has never quite caught on in Australia. Instead, we now see that conversational energy focused on Twitter, which has captured the imagination of the Australian political class. Senior Australian journalists, commentators and political figures (Annabel Crabb, Mark Colvin, Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd come to mind) are now enjoying the network effects of Twitter, getting a new distribution channel for their ideas, instant feedback and tips for new reading.

Sam got a lot of grief for his comments but I think most of the criticism was ill-directed. It is simply a fact that Twitter has been embraced by the mainstream Australian media in a way that blogs never were and it is interesting to consider why.

Between about mid-2002 and, say, 2005, Australia did have a blogosphere worthy of the name. That was when I was doing The Road to Surfdom from the US, and there was definitely a strong network of Australian blogs that used to interact with each other in that full-on, networked way.

The question for me is why it didn’t grow from that promising start into something more sustainable. There are a few answers, but size and money are at the heart of it.

Ultimately, what sustained blogging in the US — the reason it was able to move from a bunch of keen amateurs into something more professional and enduring — was that the US market is big enough to support that transition.

The first big breakthrough was when the company Blogads launched. They were able to aggregate individual blogs into a single “market” and thus interest advertisers in their combined reach. There were enough small and mid-size businesses to find that new (cheap) market attractive and so they started using it. Suddenly, a number of part-time bloggers had an income. Blogads is entirely the reason why, for example, Duncan Black (Atrios of Eschaton) was able to quit his job as an economics professor and blog full-time.

Other people to benefit were Josh Marshall and Matt Yglesias.

The other thing that happened was US bloggers started to be employed by mid-size magazines and think tanks. Kevin Drum went to the Washington Monthly (he’s now with Mother Jones); Matthew Yglesias was picked up by The American Prospect (then The Atlantic, then Centre for American Progress, now Slate); American Prospect also picked up Ezra Klein (and he’s now at The Washington Post); Andrew Sullivan went from solo blogger (who was able to raise more than $100,000 via an appeal to his readers in c.2003) to The Atlantic and is now at The Daily Beast. To name just a few.

During the same period, established journos (Eric Altman, James Fallows, Greg Mitchell, Charles Pierce and many others) started using blogs as their primary genre, whereas maybe they would’ve been columnists in another era. Again, this was largely sustained by the mid-size magazines and think tanks and only later spread to the mainstream (WaPo, NYTimes etc). The net effect was to legitimise the form.

All of this was possible because of the size of their market and this just didn’t pertain to Australia. Apart from overall market size, we completely lacked that mid-size magazine infrastructure. To this day, I think I am one of only two Australian amateur bloggers given a paying gig with a major media outlet (the other is Peter Brent, aka Mumble, who works for The Oz).

In the absence of that sort of market, the original Australian political blogosphere just evaporated. The people who had sustained it simply couldn’t keep up the pace (not without payment anyway) and so they went off and got proper paying jobs. Some still operate of course but they tend to be people like John Quiggin who are gainfully employed elsewhere.

Even in the last few weeks we’ve seen the demise of one the mainstays of Australian blogging, with Mark Bahnisch and his collaborators closing down the long-running Larvatus Prodeo blog.

News Limited had some sway here – basically, I think, by employing me and launching Andrew Bolt as a blogger, they took the wind out of the independent blogosphere. But that theory requires more space than I can give it here.

Any chance that the Australian blogosphere might revive itself in the way Rogeveen is talking about was, I think, killed by the rise of Twitter. Suddenly, this shortform, less time-consuming form of social media seemed like the best option for people who might otherwise have tried to take blogging seriously. I think most of them thought their prospects of making anything like a living out of blogging in Australia were next to nothing and Twitter was the obvious default.

The embrace of Twitter by mainstream journalists is interesting. Australian journos shunned blogging (Peter Martin is an obvious exception) and so their interest in Twitter is noteworthy.

All I can suggest is that they felt blogs, in the early days, were a genuine threat and thus there was an amazing hostility towards them -- and I’m speaking as one who experienced it. The only blogger local journalists took remotely seriously (ironically) was Tim Blair and that was because he was “one of theirs”, a “proper” journalist. The rest of us were to be ignored.

Bloggers were initially shunned in the US too, but by being able to gain employment in the mid-range magazine market and in think tanks, they established their legitimacy. Eventually, they were simply present in too many established forums to be dismissed.

For Australian journalists, Twitter suffered the same taint as the blogosphere. It was never competition to what they did, simply an adjunct to it. It was a way of promoting their work, of talking to each other and of building a fan base. The dip-in, dip-out shortform aspect of it is also attractive to people who have fulltime jobs.

Overall, I think it’s a tragedy. Those early days of political blogging (between early 2002 and around 2005) threw up a lot of very good and interesting writers, it’s our loss that more of them couldn’t find gainful, sustained employment somewhere in the media. Had mainstream editors been less hostile and more adventurous, or if the local market had an adequate supply of smaller outlets capable of employing and nurturing some of them, the Australian media landscape might’ve wound up a much more interesting place.

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