The Crucial Role of Public Interest Journalism in Australia and the Economic Forces Affecting It

Abstract

Public interest journalism plays a crucial role in promoting the quality of public life, protecting individuals from misconduct on the part of government and the private sector, and giving real content to the public’s ‘right to know’.

Its vitality and sustainability into the future are therefore matters of legitimate concern, all the more so as the media experiences an often difficult, but ultimately immensely rewarding, transition to a digital age. While tomorrow’s media will no doubt be profoundly different from yesterday’s and today’s, there are, in our view, good reasons to believe that public interest journalism will continue to be produced and perform the important role it has played in the past.

We do not offer a firm prediction about the media landscape of the future. Rather, our objective has been to clarify some of the economic forces that will affect it and which will determine the prospects for public interest journalism. Even with a better understanding of these forces, many uncertainties remain. Policy makers should be cognisant of those uncertainties, and of the harm that ill-conceived interventions could cause in so dynamic an environment. Public policy should further intervene only if there is clear and unequivocal evidence that public interest journalism is not viable under the available array of potential business models. The poor track record overseas of government interventions aimed at protecting the traditional media underscore the dangers of a precipitate response. Whatever the risks, it would be a great shame if the attempt to fix a problem which may well not exist, or at least not exist to the extent currently suggested, were to undermine the gains ‘digital disruption’ has already brought to Australians and will, we believe, bring for many years to come.