The Growing 'long tail' in Australian Journalism

6:00pm Arrive / Socialise / Grab a drink

6:30pm Dr John Cokley

7:00pm More socialising / Drinks / Food

7:30pm (Potential second speaker)

8:00pm Close / Socialise

Presently the climate around job security in journalism can be described as grim at best. Despite this a recent study (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10304312.2015.1099152?scroll=top&needAccess=true) by Dr Cokley suggests that the number of paid journalism jobs in Australia in 2013 was more than double the number in 2007 and that it’s a positive gradient. Interestingly, and perhaps an explanation for the discrepency in rhetoric is that the distribution of those jobs as mostly OUTSIDE Big Media, in small-to-medium sized editorial publishing enterprises but across a wide range of topics … so “not just food, celebrity and gardening”. There are journalism SMEs in investigative, politics, finance, sport and many of the “typical” journalism topic areas previously held in monopoly by “Mainstream Media” companies.

The key difference is that the current environment requires journalists to be entrepreneurial, not just wage-slaves and salary earners. It requires journalists to take business risks and to generate revenue by identifying “what people want” in their journalism, “what they’re willing to pay money for”, and “how much they’re willing to pay” … and to build their businesses accordingingly. This three-pronged definition is introduced in Dr Cokley's recent book Shopping News: Agenda Setting: What the Audience Does Before the News. Australian Scholarly Publishing. http://scholarly.info/book/421/

Dr Cokley will take us through some of the key points in this new realm of journalism entrepreneurship.

Sponsors

Hacks/Hackers is supported by a number of wonderful sponsors. Our presentation partner hub4101 (http://www.hub4101.com/) provides event support and does a great job of promoting innovation, creativity and digital technology in the 4101 postcode (http://www.hub4101.com/map/).

We're very pleased to have sponsorship for this event from ThoughtWorks (https://www.thoughtworks.com/) (who provide food and drink) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (http://www.abc.net.au/) (who provide our venue).

If you have any other questions or suggestions for this event or to make 2017 a great year for Hacks/Hackers Brisbane, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

You can email us ( simon@elvery.net or d.angus@uq.edu.au ) or get in touch via Twitter (@hackshackersbne (https://twitter.com/hackshackersbne)).