Let's talk Bindi and Eddie on new-fangled internet
ON MEDIA
Mark Day
February 01, 2007
FOR years these weekly warblings have been known in newspaper parlance as a column - a kind of declamatory place somewhat akin to shouting from the rooftops. Today, with the wave of a wand and a program called Expression Engine, it's a blog.
You've gotta keep up with the times, folks.
I'm not sure where this will take us, except deeper into the world of interactivity. It is part of the constant speeding up of the news and information gathering game - another step down the road towards the borderless interactive newspaper of tomorrow.
Newspapers have traditionally tried to react to their audiences, but with limited effect. Readers who have felt like giving the editor a good horse whipping have generally had to settle for a letter to the editor which may or (more likely) may not be published.
In more modern times columns such as this have been signed with an email address so that readers can easily and quickly put their point of view. Sometimes in my experience the weekly email response was zero; other times they were in the hundreds, often with lashings of flaming abuse that would make a pirate blush.
But these efforts have been largely a one-way conversation. Individual readers could put their point of view and perhaps get a personal response, but it would not be seen by all readers.

Enter the blog. We can carry on as before, raising issues, critiquing journalism, discussing government policy and so on, and you can agree, disagree, or comment via a single mouse click - and we all get to see online what everybody has to say.

It may be fairly said I have come late to the world of blogging. Millions have gone before me; the web is awash with blogs. My only excuse is that I am of the pre-internet generation which either does not comprehend, or is suspicious of, the new-fangled ways of the web. I still ponder what previously hidden part of the human spirit demands that we set up alternative existences in places such as MySpace, but hey, can 130 million people be wrong?
A decade ago most newspaper editors and managers were in the web Luddite category. They saw the internet as a threat; they could see their content being given away over the net and wondered how long people would continue to pay for a hard copy. They could see classified advertising leaching away, and they wondered who would pay their salaries and how they could sustain the costly business of journalism.
Today the net is seen as a friend, not an enemy. It is an adjunct to the hard copy; an extension of the masthead that makes it truly borderless and gives the brand limitless accessibility.
The Times in London has a daily hard-copy circulation well short of a million, yet its website records 10 million hits a week. The time must surely come soon when newspapers work out how to combine their hard copy readership with online readership to come up with a total to present to advertisers.

Fred Hilmer, the former Fairfax CEO who is making waves this week with his recollections of his seven years at the helm, used to publicly worry about how to "monetise" the web. He needn't have bothered - the same advertising revenues that supported hard copy newspapers will support high-traffic web news sites. The total dollars spent online today may be small by comparison with traditional newspaper or TV spends - but the rate of growth is phenomenal. So, there's little point in sitting back and observing this major change in what we do and how we do it. Best get stuck into it with a couple of initial propositions. I WATCH with dread the Bindi-isation of the world. Like 1.6 million fellow Australians I tuned into the Steve Irwin Ocean's Deadliest special on Nine on Monday night with morbid curiosity to see how close they came to the death scene. In the end, it wasn't exploitative, but the thought of it was enough to turn a fairly average quality wildlife doco into a prime time hit for Nine.
The Irwin story is a tragedy. And I fear it is not yet over, because it appears that Irwin's eight-year-old daughter Bindi is being groomed to take his place as a worldwide wildlife warrior.
She's an appealing little thing; a kind of latter-day Shirley Temple bubbling with a desire to do good. But she's a little kid, who should be allowed to do the things kids do, and grow up without the pressures of being pulled this way and that by ambitious family or managers, or promotional hucksters with their eyes on their bank balances rather than the child's wellbeing. Sure, Bindi says she only does what she wants to do, but (a) what kids want is not always right for them and (b) how would she know?

THE year ahead in television is shaping up as a reality and quiz show festival. Monday night's slugfest centred on Eddie McGuire's 1 vs 100 battle with Andrew O'Keefe's The Rich List (an odd comparison, really, given that they were in different timeslots) but the rest of the night was decidedly summer schedule - a repeat of Desperate Housewives on Seven, followed by an ugly and exploitative special on skinny models; a pair of Steve Irwin specials bookending Eddie on Nine.
And half a world away an Indian model was scoring millions of quid after being racially slandered on a Big Brother show which led to riots on the sub-continent. What have we wrought?
Anyway, the summer TV drought again proves the truth of the Springsteen song about umpteen channels and nothing to watch. It doesn't matter whether it's 55, 150 or 500 channels available, if they all go into recess at the same time the viewer is dudded.