The Lucky Country<\/em>:<\/p>\nAustralia has never had a cultivated leisure class and lacks one now. There are no periodicals or quality press, so that people get away with expressing things that would not be tolerated in more sophisticated societies; politicians go unsatirised. Intellectuals, in the sense of creative thinkers who are publicly influential, simply do not exist in Australia.<\/p>\n
In fairness, Horne\u2019s view was probably more nuanced than that single quote implies, but it was the unnuanced version that persisted in the literature. \u2018Australian intellectual\u2019 was often presented as an oxymoron.<\/p>\n
What I hated about that was not just that it was demonstrably wrong, but also that it reeked of the sort of colonial, cringing attitude that extended to public debate as a whole. If our betters thought that our intellectuals were dumb, second-rate hacks, imagine what they thought of the rest of us. My thesis was aimed at coming up with an understanding that not only challenged this outdated view of intellectual life in Australia, but that also rethought the whole relationship between intellectuals \u2014 those with either expertise or some other privileged access to public discussion \u2014 and the rest of the population.<\/p>\n
But even as it stood staring me in the face, I completely missed the significance of Webdiary. In fact, I was quite suspicious of the whole notion, from the moment I read the first piece Kingston posted:<\/p>\n
Welcome to my Canberra diary. I\u2019m allowed to say what I think whenever I like, and lucky you can interact if you like. The downside for this indulgence is that all the words stay forever so I can be judged for my sins.<\/p>\n
If this weird idea survives, I\u2019m going to lobby for the \u2026 techheads to add a program called \u2018MPoll\u2019, where I\u2019ll ask a question and you can vote (and suggest your own). I\u2019ll send the results to whoever is responsible for the question or the answer and publish their response, if any.<\/p>\n
What did she mean we could \u2018interact\u2019 with her? What did she mean she could write what she liked? If she was allowed to say what she thought in Webdiary, what was she saying in articles published elsewhere?<\/p>\n
Looking back on it now, I realise I didn\u2019t trust her. Here was a journalist telling me that she was starting the sort of project that thesis-me, citizen-me would consider a good and desirable thing, but I simply didn\u2019t believe her. I can distinctly remember being quite cross about the whole thing, as if she were trying to put one over on me. It is perhaps a measure of the disadvantage that all new journalistic endeavours begin with, given the low standing the profession has with the public at large, that they first have to overcome this trust deficit just to get people to pay attention, let alone give them the benefit of the doubt. And I know this seems to contradict what I wrote earlier about people presuming that what they read in the newspaper or see on the nightly news is the truth, but that is the paradox. The media is so embedded in a particular understanding most of us have of our society that we do tend to presume that they are, within certain parameters, telling the truth. How could they be allowed to lie to us? we wonder. On a day-to-day basis we don\u2019t give the matter much conscious thought; but when something comes along that forces us to really think about what they are doing, our scepticism is engaged.<\/p>\n
Talking to Kingston and others associated with Webdiary, it became apparent that the site was a seat-of-the-pants operation, especially in its early days. It is also hard to overstate just how marginal online journalism was in the scheme of things at Fairfax (or at any other news organisation). \u2018I didn\u2019t have a clue about it,\u2019 Kingston said. \u2018All I knew was that Tom [Burton] ran this funny thing. I mean, I never looked at the Herald online site. No journo did. It was on its own, with these wild people doing these wild music things, and a rugby column or something.\u2019<\/p>\n
Kingston\u2019s online editor at the time, Stephen Hutcheon, concurred. \u2018Online wasn\u2019t taken seriously. We started out as a bunch of ne\u2019er-do-wells, lost souls, burnt-out subs, and copy kids eager to break into journalism.\u2019<\/p>\n
In fact, truth be told, Webdiary was in large part Fairfax\u2019s solution to a perceived problem \u2014 Margo Kingston. Management saw her as a maverick, and there was a desire to rein her in. As Hutcheon explained: \u2018Ever since I\u2019ve known Margo \u2026 she has pushed that line of demarcation to the extreme. While it didn\u2019t worry me as much, it pissed off a lot of the senior editorial management at the time. And to be fair, they were the ones that fielded the complaints.\u2019<\/p>\n
Kingston understood how she was viewed: \u2018There were clearly complaints about my coverage coming from politicians because I was playing hard.\u2019<\/p>\n
But despite Fairfax management\u2019s view of Webdiary, Kingston embraced her new ghetto. From the beginning, she was almost painfully transparent about what she was doing. She knew that \u2018by some strange and mysterious quirk of fate\u2019 she had been given \u2018this rare and extraordinary opportunity to write and edit my own work and to be totally responsible for every aspect of it and to have complete freedom to write what I liked\u2019. But she also knew that this meant she had to have \u2018a very strict policy\u2019 on ethics. \u2018I wanted readers to know that if I got something wrong I would correct immediately and that any conflict of interest I would disclose and that I would hold myself accountable if someone picked up something that I hadn\u2019t done.\u2019<\/p>\n
Over time, Webdiary began to win me over. It did so because of Kingston\u2019s openness. She engaged. She published comments \u2014 even lengthy articles \u2014 from her readers, and she argued with them in good faith. She did her best to address their concerns. The key was that she grasped the difference between online and conventional newspaper journalism: the relationship with her audience.<\/p>\n
There were plenty of times when I thought she was wrong about things, but big deal. We were there for the discussion, not to have our prejudices pandered to, and so she pushed back against what we said and allowed us to argue with each other. The interactions weren\u2019t always satisfactory; I was never happy, for instance, about her willingness to allow anonymous attacks on those of us who wrote under our real names, and I told her as much many times as I began to use the site more frequently. But the experimental nature of what she was doing was well understood by those involved, and so lots of slack was cut. It was close to exactly what Froomkin argued would be the ideal if journalists were starting an online paper from scratch today: \u2018not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values\u2019.<\/p>\n
When I interviewed Kingston in 2012, I asked her if she had previously thought much about the relationship between journalists and readers. \u2018I feel that I was woken up about it,\u2019 she said. \u2018I was always what would be considered a romantic journalist, [believing] that we were there on behalf of the people. But I didn\u2019t actually live it, and the evidence of that is when Pauline Hanson gave her maiden speech, I thought she should be ignored. But then I forced myself to experience the audience by covering her in depth, and I wrote the book about it. The question I got from the Hanson campaign and all those weird things that happened was, can we actually find a space for civil discourse between opposing views?<\/p>\n
\u2018Once I understood that, and once people started writing in to Webdiary, I just thought, okay, I\u2019ve a got a chance to put this theory into practice. I thought journalism had to change.\u2019<\/p>\n
But at the same time as she was becoming comfortable with the form, Kingston was also being blindsided by how much people mistrusted journalists, something that became apparent once she started interacting with readers at Webdiary. \u2018I was shocked. And I think it was because I subconsciously exempted myself. I felt that I was definitely okay, that people would trust me. But they didn\u2019t.\u2019 This conflict goes to the heart of the media\u2019s image of itself as a profession, its understanding of its role in the formation of public opinion, and, most importantly, its understanding of the source of its power, as both a gatekeeper deciding who gets to participate, and as interpreter of the national conversation. Once you let the audience in as an equal player, much of that power dissipates.<\/p>\n
That was precisely what brought Kingston\u2019s role as chief of staff in Canberra and her role as sole organiser of Webdiary into irreconcilable conflict. A large part of what her managers didn\u2019t like was that she discussed with her readers her opinions about which questions journalists should have been asking. \u2018The Peter Reith telecard affair was probably the earliest case, up close and personal, of where I\u2019d get the readers involved in the actual internal workings of the bureau,\u2019 Kingston told me. (In the incident Kingston is referring to, Peter Reith, the minister for workplace relations, gave his son the pin number to his parliamentary telephone account, and the son, and some others who gained access to the pin, ran up a bill of some $50,000 at the taxpayers\u2019 expense.) \u2018I went in hard on that. Very, very hard. And some at Fairfax didn\u2019t like it \u2026 I\u2019d say on Webdiary, \u201cThe Herald has just sent this list of questions to Peter Reith. This is what he needs to answer.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n
I was stunned to hear that a media organisation was concerned about a journalist \u2018going in hard\u2019. I asked Kingston, isn\u2019t that what you\u2019re all meant to do? Isn\u2019t the job to go in hard? \u2018Well,\u2019 she replied, \u2018that\u2019s the theory, but it\u2019s not the way it is.\u2019<\/p>\n
Kingston came under pressure to stop running with the story. \u2018In retrospect, that led to me resigning as chief of staff, because it got so tense. I got so overwhelmed having to do full-time chief of staff and Webdiary that I had a bit of a meltdown. I needed to take time out.\u2019<\/p>\n
It seems the only reason she kept her job at this stage was that Tom Burton intervened on her behalf, suggesting she could be deployed as part of the online team, where she could contribute and learn the ropes. \u2018But from the minute I got to Sydney,\u2019 Kingston recalled, \u2018I didn\u2019t learn about any of the online operation. I just focused on Webdiary, and that\u2019s when it became my full-time job.\u2019<\/p>\n
Historically, it is important to understand that Webdiary was seen as a marginal site within a marginal division being run by an increasingly marginalised journalist. The involvement of readers in generating the content only added to its marginality. The site had few friends within Fairfax, and I was surprised when I asked Kingston about the sort of response she received from her peers, other journalists at Fairfax. \u2018None,\u2019 she said. \u2018They didn\u2019t read it. It wasn\u2019t in the psyche. I honestly think it was considered irrelevant. Not where the big game was.\u2019<\/p>\n
Still, some momentum had begun to develop. Kingston was working in close proximity to the online editor and other staff, and there was inevitably interaction between them. They began linking to Webdiary content, including content written by its readers, via the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> website. (For instance, a piece I wrote on dairy deregulation was linked off the front page, and it generated some interest \u2014 including an exchange between me and former Labor politician Mark Latham that ended with him declaring that I was an agrarian socialist!)<\/p>\nKingston pointed out that traffic to the site was relatively small but, \u2018It became almost a completely transparent space. I\u2019d say, \u201cI think I\u2019d better do something about this, what do you reckon?\u201d I\u2019d write a comment piece, but then the readers would go off and blast me, or come up with a different view, and there\u2019d be a debate.\u2019<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t easy. The technology, by today\u2019s standards, was primitive. There were no simple control panels on the backend, as there are today on various blogging programs, allowing people to easily format a piece for online publication. All the coding had to be done by hand, a big ask for someone without the technical training. What\u2019s more, all of Kingston\u2019s contact with readers happened via email, as there was no comments facility; that technology was not yet invented.<\/p>\n
Despite all this, the site was breaking new ground. The Tampa incident, in particular, changed Kingston\u2019s understanding of what was possible. \u2018I\u2019ll never forget Tampa. It was just brilliant. I\u2019d post all this stuff, maybe five huge posts on Tampa, and I\u2019d sit there till midnight and be ready to go home and there\u2019d be another pile of emails coming through.<\/p>\n
\u2018Who am I to say I have to go home and sleep? Besides, I know if I do that, I come back in the morning there\u2019ll be a hundred and fifty waiting for me.\u2019<\/p>\n
Kingston saw Webdiary as the only place in the mainstream media that was giving voice to dissenting opinion on the topic. \u2018I felt such a responsibility because it was crystal clear that the people writing in wanted to be on the public record as dissenting. Because they were in such a minority.\u2019<\/p>\n
This was a confronting position to take, and it caused concerns at Fairfax. I must say, too, that to me, as a reader, the pages and pages of complaint about Tampa that Webdiary published did end up looking like a fairly mindless, anti-Australian barrage. I was sympathetic to the contributors\u2019 views, but I nonetheless felt strongly enough about the tone and volume of what was being published to email in my concerns about it. I made the point that the \u2018all Australians are racist\u2019 sentiment that pervaded much of the material Kingston was publishing was self-serving and that maybe people could be a bit more focused in their approach.<\/p>\n
The email was published, but was pretty soon buried and forgotten.<\/p>\n
What is interesting is that despite sharing so many principles and practices with independent blogs, Kingston felt that she was still very much a part of the newspaper and the mainstream media. \u2018I was consciously trying to develop something that would allow integration to the paper,\u2019 she told me. \u2018I never saw myself as part of the blogging world. I saw myself as part of The Sydney Morning Herald<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\nI suggested to Kingston that, from an outsider\u2019s point of view, this differentiation between what she was doing and the blogosphere was odd. Her response was unequivocal. \u2018Well, there had to be [a distinction],\u2019 she said. \u2018We\u2019re a big company. We are read.\u2019 But while she was very aware of her site being part of The Sydney Morning Herald<\/em>, she was nonetheless willing to use the relative freedom it provided her within that mainstream structure to pursue journalism in a way that was, it has to be said, groundbreaking.<\/p>\nYet by 2004, Webdiary was accumulating the sort of management concerns that no employee is likely to survive long term, despite the fact that the site was increasingly attracting a decent readership and was providing readers with access unmatched elsewhere in the mainstream media.<\/p>\n
As well, Kingston was in constant demand for media appearances: not only did she have her regular spot on Phillip Adams\u2019 radio show Late Night Live<\/em>, but she was a sought-after guest on programs such as Lateline<\/em>.<\/p>\nPressure was coming from all sorts of areas. Kingston had published a post in which journalist Antony Loewenstein and Greens member of the New South Wales upper house Ian Cohen each wrote about their response to the fact that Palestinian scholar and activist Dr Hanan Ashrawi had been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. Both articles wrote in favour of Ashrawi receiving the prize, and the issue provoked an outcry on Webdiary (and throughout the media generally). Much to Kingston\u2019s surprise, the pieces by Loewenstein and Cohen disappeared from the site. At first she thought it was a technical glitch, but she was eventually told they had been pulled. The reason she was given was that The Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> had received complaints from a number of prominent Jewish readers saying that the pieces were anti-Semitic. According to Kingston, she was told that in such circumstances the first reaction is to remove the offending pieces. She was stunned. After some robust discussion, the pieces were reposted, but the incident was indicative of the resistance she was meeting.<\/p>\nFairfax management was also receiving complaints about Kingston from within the federal government, including from the office of Prime Minister John Howard. Going into the 2004 federal election campaign, Kingston was touring the country promoting her book Not Happy, John<\/em>, in which she made the case that the Howard government was undermining Australian democracy through deceptions associated with the Iraq War and other examples of what she saw as curtailments of free speech.<\/p>\nAlthough her publishers had, at Kingston\u2019s suggestion, set up a website dedicated to the book \u2014 the first time an Australian book had been promoted in this way \u2014 Webdiary nonetheless became ground zero for discussion of the book and its thesis.<\/p>\n
Not happy, Margo, was the response from Fairfax management. \u2018They\u2019re dealing with an activist reporter who they have control over, so of course they\u2019re getting fucking complaints from Howard,\u2019 she told me. \u2018I mean, wouldn\u2019t you [complain] if you were Howard?\u2019<\/p>\n
As Crikey<\/em> commented at the time, \u2018The Herald editors just wish Margo would go away … Kingston has been marginalised and by marginalising her you also marginalize your readership base. Lord knows she\u2019s not an easy person to live with and many have been toe to toe with Margo, but … constantly pissing in the readers\u2019 faces is not a way to ensure a long term future.\u2019<\/p>\nFairfax and the government were not the only ones applying pressure. ABC management told Phillip Adams to drop Kingston\u2019s regular \u2018Canberra Babylon\u2019 piece from his show. When Adams refused, the ABC told him that at the very least he had to include someone else who would \u2018balance\u2019 Kingston. Eventually he was forced to end the segment on the grounds that Kingston was no longer based in the national capital and that therefore there was no longer a \u2018Canberra\u2019 in Canberra Babylon.<\/p>\n
To add to her problems, Kingston\u2019s health was deteriorating. She had for years nursed a chronic back problem, and this was getting worse. Webdiary was taking more and more of her time, especially dealing with the comments. Then, during the 2004 election campaign, Fairfax decided to close Webdiary.<\/p>\n
Naturally, Kingston wanted to keep the site open, and she asked management how that might be possible. They told her that they were willing to allow her to take a \u2018seachange\u2019 package, an arrangement that would become common a decade later as Australia\u2019s newspapers cut staff in the wake of falling revenues. Essentially, this meant that she went onto a contract at a greatly reduced wage and was more or less restricted to work on Webdiary, something she was willing to do to save the site. One bright spot in all this was that management also offered to install a comments system, which everyone thought would make it easier to deal with reader correspondence. \u2018Famous last words!\u2019 Kingston told me in our interview.<\/p>\n
Comments flooded in. In a way that would become familiar to those involved in online media well into the future, including to me when I was running a blog for News Limited, the moderation of comments became the most taxing and time-consuming part of the job. \u2018It just got completely out of control,\u2019 Kingston explained. At one point, she actually used her own money to employ someone to help her, but this was clearly not a long-term solution.<\/p>\n
So, in the tradition of the approach that was her hallmark at Webdiary, she asked her readers if they had any suggestions. She was inundated with offers.<\/p>\n
Kingston sighed as she recounted this. \u2018We put a proposal to Fairfax that the community would run it and manage it and we would just contract Webdiary to them<\/p>\n[Fairfax]. It made sense. It actually saved them money, and the online people at Fairfax said yes, but then it was no from senior management. I finally got jack of it.\u2019<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t quite over yet. In early 2005, management sent her a memo saying that they thought Webdiary was too much work for her and they had a plan to help. They would introduce a new raft of bloggers, using software that would be uniform for all of them, and they would employ moderators to handle the comments. There were some conditions, however. The code of ethics Kingston had developed for Webdiary had to go. Equally galling, the regular contributions she published from among her readers would no longer be accepted. This violated the interactive nature of what Webdiary had become, especially as Kingston felt that part of her success had been in nurturing new writing talent. \u2018I used to say to my editor and others at the Herald, \u201cLook, I\u2019m actually developing a stable of extremely talented writers; why don\u2019t we select a piece I like, or the paper likes, and publish it in the paper?\u201d They just thought that was ridiculous.\u2019<\/p>\n
The biggest change was that Kingston would no longer be able to post directly to Webdiary. Everything she wrote, under this new proposal, would have to go through a vetting process.<\/p>\n
Stephen Hutcheon later explained that there was nothing unusual in this. \u2018These days, it\u2019s difficult to do that because so many people are filing or tweeting or posting at any given moment. Back then, the velocity of new material hitting the website between major updates was relatively small and such editorial oversight was possible. \u2018Anyway, she didn\u2019t observe that instruction. I went into her post to edit something she had written \u2014 as was my right \u2014 and that was the end of a beautiful experiment that was ahead of its time. She pulled the pin and went indy.\u2019<\/p>\n
Kingston\u2019s departure ended the first full-scale attempt by a mainstream Australian media organisation to come to terms with the disruptions caused by the new online technology. And as tempting as it is to view it as a noble experiment that didn\u2019t quite get off the ground, I think we have to be careful not to impose in hindsight a shape and intention that was never really there. It is a teachable moment in the history of Australian media \u2014 it was certainly an important development \u2014 but it was also an idiosyncratic experiment.<\/p>\n
As Stephen Hutcheon put it to me, \u2018Based on what we know now, I think you can describe it as a trailblazer. I\u2019m particularly proud of many things we did. Not the least was the Grass Roots project during one federal election, where we worked with large groups of students from UTS to file stories from their own electorates about local issues. That was awesome. And difficult. And a bit patchy. But it was innovative.<\/p>\n
\u2018I think Margo was unique in terms of her passion, and the rest was just happenstance \u2014 the right place, the right time, the right person, the right boss.\u2019<\/p>\n
I asked him if he thought that it was a missed opportunity for Fairfax, that they might\u2019ve had their own Huffington Post on their hands, and he said, \u2018There were lots of lost opportunities in the early 2000s. That said, Fairfax did continue to develop its online operations as a separate business, insulated from print. Perhaps Webdiary could have become a HuffPo, but that\u2019s with the benefit of hindsight.\u2019<\/p>\n
The story of Webdiary cannot be separated from the personality of Margo Kingston. It was as much about Kingston\u2019s relationship with the management at Fairfax as it was about anything intrinsic to online media. Fairfax made mistakes. A braver, less conservative organisation might have found a way to make it work. At various points in the process, they did attempt to accommodate this brave new world that was evolving right before their eyes, but ultimately they weren\u2019t up to the challenge. Stephen Hutcheon told me that \u2018there wasn\u2019t much appreciation at the time about the trailblazing role [Kingston] was setting in what we now know as crowdsourcing, social media and community engagement. We\u2019re talking about the early 2000s and Big Media still thought it was bullet-proof from digital disruption\u2019.<\/p>\n
Whatever you think about Kingston\u2019s work and what finally happened to her, she was 15 years ahead of virtually everyone else in Australian journalism. As the debates continue throughout the world about the future of the profession, as hands are wrung and oracles \u2014 I mean social-media experts \u2014 are consulted, few are saying anything more than what Margo Kingston was saying, and practising, at Webdiary. She made mistakes \u2014 of course she did. She nonetheless figured out some key answers years before anyone else was asking the questions. She deserves enormous respect for that.<\/p>\n
Kingston was a gatekeeper who considered it her job to let uncredentialled, unknown, unfamous, ordinary citizens in on the national conversation, rather than to lock them out. To this day, there is no one in the Australian mainstream media who has been willing to play that role to the same extent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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My return to journalism via Twitter was enabled by several readers and contributors to Webdiary, which I’m told by online media academic Axel Bruns was the world’s first Mainstream media interactive blog. I’m now committed to telling my story in journalism in a professional memoir, which will comprise part of a PhD. In A collaborative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,3402,2021,67,585,21,26],"tags":[121,137,599,690,165,177,531,749,2565,2574,598,358,2606,458,1208,493],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-5vz","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n![\"TheNewFrontPage_300dpi_titlecover\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nofibs.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/TheNewFrontPage_300dpi_titlecover.jpg?resize=206%2C320\")
Tim Dunlop, who joined Webdiary early and became