5 November, 2012 3:49PM AEDT

Transcript: Mark Colvin's Andrew Olle Media Lecture

Veteran ABC broadcaster Mark Colvin delivered the 2012 Andrew Olle Media Lecture in Sydney on Friday November 2. A full transcript of the speech can be found below.

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Good evening. Unaccustomed as I am to sentences of more than 140 characters ...

Thank you so much. I'm doubly sensible of the honour of presenting this lecture tonight.

First because I've attended all but one of these events - I was still posted overseas when the first one happened - and that means I'm intensely aware of being in the distinguished company of those who've spoken before me.

But second, because Andrew Olle was a good friend of mine, and probably the colleague I most admired as well.

We first became friends in 1979, on the then-new program Nationwide.

The program was led by John Penlington, a pioneer of current affairs television in Australia in the early days of Four Corners.

Paul Murphy, Jenny Brockie, Richard Carleton and Geraldine Doogue were among the reporters and presenters.

But Andrew stood out. He came to Nationwide already fully armoured as a journalist - Years of standing up to Joh 'feed the chooks' Bjelke Petersen saw to that.

In fact one of Andrew's badges of honour was that Joh ended up refusing to talk to him.



Like every other reporter on the program, I used to write links for him to read before and after the story I'd put together.

Andrew would retire to his office and shut his door, and after awhile, like every other reporter on the program, I'd find that he had torn my links apart and come up with something completely different.

It would have been annoying, but in almost every case you had to admit that he'd improved on your work.

He had a particular talent for finding the one key aspect of the story you hadn't emphasised enough, and bringing it to light.

Andrew was also at the time Australia's best interviewer.

I think someone described it as tactful tenacity: but the fact that, as so many people remarked after his death, his politics were a mystery even to his friends, meant that he could be equally tough on either side.

And Andrew's principles of interviewing, built around the base of close listening and short, well-researched questions, were just as effective in morning radio here in Sydney as they were in cross-questioning Bob Hawke or Alan Bond on Four Corners.

I still can't think without strong emotion of the day I answered the phone on assignment in Venice, of all places, to hear the news that Andrew Olle had been struck down.

Whatever else happens tonight, please do give as much as you can to the evening's principal cause: research into brain tumours.

Andrew was 47 when he died: as Annette and Nick and Sam and Nina would tell you, and as so many of his friends and his audience would agree, much, much too young.

It's Andrew I think of when I read, as I do daily now, attacks on what are variously called "old media", dead tree media", the MSM, for Main Stream Media, or the Lamestream media.

Andrew with his meticulous attention to facts and his scrupulous fairness represented the best of old media.

And let me say right up front, because much of what I say tonight will sound bleak or even apocalyptic, that I'm a journalism romantic.

I joined the ABC as a half-English dilettante with an arts degree and a Pommy accent.

I remember going for an interview at the Herald.

First mistake - I went to the Hunter St office,which was just their corporate headquarters, not the actual newspaper.

Then I asked someone the way, but apparently the way I said 'Herald' was unintelligible, because I ended up at Harold Park.

I did make it to Broadway on time despite all that, but the Herald found my minimal charm and talent easy to resist.

Somehow, Aunty, where the BBC voice was still pretty prevalent in those days, saw something in me and, stylish in a denim jacket with patch pockets and a pair of flared trousers, I turned up on February the eleventh 1974 at 164 William St, headquarters of ABC News.

It was a time of turmoil in Australia and elsewhere. Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister. President Nixon was in trouble at home over Watergate, and losing the war overseas in Vietnam.

Britain, where I'd been at university until the previous year, was sinking further into a slough of intractable industrial disputes, three day weeks and power cuts. The Cultural Revolution in China was still not over, Brezhnev's stultifying rule still had a decade to run in the Soviet Union.

And so it was that a mere two months later, on what was effectively cadet work experience in Canberra, with most of my colleagues at lunch in the late lamented non-Members' bar, I found myself writing the ABC News story of the double dissolution of Parliament and the announcement of the Federal election.

It was only a few pars for a radio bulletin, but it brought home to me in a tiny way the old adage that journalism is the first draft of history.

Later in 1974, I was working at the ABC's office in Orange, filling in for the correspondent there.

Great experience, because ABC Radio was so central to people's lives in the bush - and you learned the importance of sweating the small stuff and getting it right for them.

But a huge bushfire broke out around Cobar, and for about a day I covered it by phone, ringing the fire service and anyone else I could find.

Cobar's about halfway to Broken Hill, 450 k's from Orange by road, and I had three local bulletins to file a day, so I thought I didn't have a choice.

Then a bloke called Terry Berkrey, who was an announcer there under the slightly more butch name of Burke Rees, said to me: "Why don't we hire a plane and fly up there?" I was still so green that this struck me as an astounding idea, but I rang Sydney and they OK'd it, and someone else took over the local bulletins, and we went.

As we flew towards Cobar, you could see the fire as a wall of smoke and flame stretching many kilometres along the ground, and hundreds of metres into the air.

A fire that big sucks in powerful winds at its base and creates huge thermal eddies all around it. The plane was thrown about the sky, and the pilot had to wrestle to keep it on course.

I scribbled a description of what we'd seen from the air, and filed from the airfield. When I arrived at the emergency centre, people were listening to the ABC bulletin - and I was the national lead.

A word about technology: I was carrying a Nagra, a superb Swiss tape recorder we used in those days. Nagras were highly engineered, almost unbreakable - years later I saw one that was still working after being run over outside the Soviet Embassy in Paris by Mikhail Gorbachev's limousine - but they weighed several kilos and they had to be regularly refilled with a dozen D- Cell batteries at a time.


But when you'd used your Nagra to do an interview with the local fire chief, how to transmit it back to base?

The answer, I discovered, was to make friends with the PMG. The PMG - the postmaster-General's department - was what we had before Telstra or even Telecom.

A friendly tech ushered me behind the scenes into a world of switching-boxes, cords and plugholes, and lo and behold, my audio was on the line to Sydney.


I remember interviewing people who'd seen rabbits and kangaroos with their fur burning running, panicked, across firebreaks and spreading the blaze to new areas.

I remember seeing the air over and around a stand of trees - not the trees themselves - explode into flame as a spark hit the halo of evaporated eucalyptus oil they were giving off in the heat.


I hitched a ride on an RAAF Hercules back to Sydney. When I got there, I was surprised to see a bunch of other ABC reporters cadging lifts north.

The news of Cyclone Tracy flattening Darwin had come through while I was out of the loop. I got a cab into the city and reported for duty. Could I go to Darwin, please? Very sensibly - because I was still a raw cadet - they said no, and sent me home for Christmas.

But by then I was hooked.

Around that time I read a lot of books by journalists and about journalism.

My favourite was Point of Departure, by the British writer James Cameron,who'd worked for everybody from the British tabloids to the BBC.

He was a guy who could dictate a thousand word column from the back of beyond down the phone to a copy taker without a written note - but he was also a reporter with an exceptional eye, and a humanist whose empathy shone out of every piece he ever did. I saw an old interview with him on YouTube recently.

This is what he said about this trade: "I was very unhappy sometimes and frequently very lonely, but on the other hand what other job could I have been doing where I would have been able to whizz all over the place at somebody else's expense, meet people of significance, meaningful people, who wouldn't have had the slightest time for me as an individual but did have some time for me as a newspaperman."

It's one of the most succinct descriptions you could get of the somewhat rackety, slightly disreputable, but always varied world of reporting at the time when I entered the trade.

That was, in fact, the way it had been for most of the twentieth century.

But by the twenty-first, it had changed a lot and was still changing fast - for better and for worse. Technology was making the job easier - easier to research, easier to file, easier to distribute.

But the economic ground was already beginning to shift under the industry's feet. We'd already seen the omens here in the 1980s.

I remember chasing down the street after young Warwick Fairfax in 1988, doing a story for Four Corners.

The Fairfaxes were old fashioned proprietors. They liked the paper business for the solid income it brought in, and for the access to power it gave them, which they used as ruthlessly as any Murdoch or Packer when it suited them.

But they weren't in the business of maximising every asset and trying to achieve 20 per cent growth every quarter.

Young Warwick and his cohort of advisers were, and they were prepared to pile up debt and risk the mastheads to do it.

That's how Australia lost the National Times, among other things, one of the most remarkable engines of investigative journalism the country's seen.

This was happening worldwide too. It wasn't just family companies selling up, it was companies like Time, famous for its news magazine, merging with Warners, famous for entertainment.

The idea of journalism as worthwhile in itself, rather than a source of shareholder dividends, was already seriously eroded.

Ten years ago, the fine American reporter, foreign correspondent and satirist Russell Baker, wrote this in the New York Review of Books. I printed it out and stuck it on my wall at work.

"This is journalism's age of melancholy. Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder. They have discovered that their prime duty is no longer to maintain the republic in well-informed condition; or to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, as the old gospel has; but to serve the stock market with a good earnings report every three months or, in plainer English, to comfort the comfortable".

Russell Baker wrote that, as I say, in 2002, and if only it had stopped there.

But in the last ten years the changes roiling the journalism industry have just speeded up.

And you can only describe 2012 - as the Queen once said - as an annus horribilis.

Probably most in this room have seen friends and colleagues take redundancy this year, from both of the country's biggest media conglomerates, News and Fairfax. The whole country saw the reality of the Fairfax cuts last Monday, in fact, on Australian Story.

It's a world wide trend.

We have to face the fact that we are all - the best and the worst of us - facing revolutionary times.

I've always been a Groucho Marxist rather than the other sort, but Karl and his mate Fred had some fairly perceptive things to say back in 1848, things which apply today in ways they never anticipated.

This time it's not industrialisation,but digitisation, that's creating the revolution which Marx and Engels described in 1848:

"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away ... All that is solid melts into air."

Or if you prefer your analysis from an Austrian free market economist, try Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote of the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism."

In that sense, digitisation is just capitalism on steroids.

I look back on my predecessors' lectures here - you can find them on the web at the ABC site, though I'd rather you looked them up later than now with your iPhone under the table - I look back on them and what stands out is how little discussion there's been of the way digitisation has threatened the very ground we stand on.

It's understandable: Questions of ethics and profitability and monopoly or oligopoly seemed to loom larger at the time.

But all the while, this existential juggernaut was coming down the track.

Even the most far-sighted of them, Eric Beecher, walked to the brink of the abyss in 2000 but wouldn't look down: because, as he said, "the alternative is too horrible to contemplate".

And it's not as if there weren't useful precedents.

I heard an interview with the singer David Byrne on the BBC the other day. His band, Talking Heads, made money making records in the 70s and 80s - plenty of it. Enough to give him the freedom to write, and design, and make art.

But this is his view of the music industry now: I quote.

"They failed to predict the changes because things just kept going better and better for them. You can look at the amount of money that was rolling in,especially with CDs which they decided that even though they didn't cost any more than vinyl, they could charge about three times as much ... And as with most people, Wall St, wherever you want to look, when things are going that good, they don't want to hear any bad news, they don't want to hear "Guys, the bubble's gonna burst any second" ... You can kind of see it coming, pretty early on, in music and with music technology and you can see it in other media forms that haven't burst yet but are probably about to".

Sound familiar?

I remember filming at the loading docks at the Sydney Morning Herald on a Friday at midnight, with people queuing to get the first editions so they could pore over the real estate ads and get in first with their bids in the morning.

I think of the phrase 'rivers of gold' referring to the classified ad revenue at Fairfax, and I think back to the late nineties, when the "brilliant" Professor of Business Administration Fred Hilmer was Fairfax CEO.

As David Byrne says, the money was just pouring in.

They didn't want to hear the bad news.

And so they missed the moment, the moment when they could have really aggressively set up carsales websites and housesales websites and jobs forums and so on, and transferred at least a big part of the market they controlled, from print to web.

Yes, to be fair, some of the caution was driven by the dotcom crash at the end of the nineties: but it lasted too long for that to be an excuse.

And just in the last couple of weeks, Eric Beecher has published an account in which he told of giving the Fairfax board - as late as 2004 - a clear set of warnings of the economic catastrophe if they didn't do something to staunch the bleeding of their classified ads.

He claims that the current Chairman Roger Corbett - though Mr Corbett disputes this - said he never again wanted to hear from anyone who said people would buy houses or cars or jobs without "this" - brandishing the paper.

Whether Beecher's account is right or Corbett's, we know what actually came to pass.

And here we are. As a friend of mine at one of the big news publishers said to me the other day, "we are all Comical Alis, standing there denying the fact that the tanks are on the lawn".

There are exceptions, mainly in places like India where the distribution of the internet is still very patchy, but generally newspapers around the world are seeing their circulation and advertising revenues going off a cliff.

As an American advertising website put it, newspaper dollars have turned to digital dimes - ten cent pieces - and those in turn are turning into mobile pennies.

The digitisation tsunami has finally hit, and that means that mainstream media in Australia and around the world face not one, but several crises at the same time.


There's a crisis of authority, in which institutions that have tended to hand down pronouncements like stone tablets from the mountaintop now often find themselves subject to disagreement, abuse or even ridicule.

And there's a crisis of credibility, as, Wizard of Oz- like, the curtain is pulled away from so-called authorities like News Corp and the BBC to reveal the sometimes despicable reality.


Let's take them in order, then.

What do I mean by a crisis of consensus?

I'm talking about the way people can create their own reality stream now.

It's particularly far advanced in America, because a quarter of a century ago they abandoned the fairness doctrine, a federal regulation which mandated a degree of balance on the airwaves.

So now you can run a creationist channel that rigorously excludes Darwinists from the airwaves - you can say again and again that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and refuse even to look at the documentary evidence, and so on.

In 2004, the writer Ron Suskind wrote a famous piece in which he quoted a Bush aide - reliably believed to be Karl Rove - as follows:

"The aide said", wrote Suskind, "that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality judiciously, as you will we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors;and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

I imagine most of us here tonight would categorise ourselves as the reality based community, but we too are beleaguered.

Here in Australia we still regulate the airwaves. Not often, but sometimes.

ACMA famously ordered fact-checking training for Alan Jones after he repeatedly used figures which were - egregiously - scientifically and mathematically wrong about carbon dioxide.

But even if this has the desired effect on Jones, which I doubt, it's still shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

You no longer need Fox News or radio shock jocks to feed your prejudices and screen out the facts.

You just create a world where you get all your news from the twitter and Facebook and blog sources you've chosen.

And that world's already upon us.

A September Pew research study showed that a third of under thirties in the US already get their news from social media - far, far more than newspapers and equal with TV. Australia's famously a land of technological early adopters, and I believe the figures here would be similar.

Like all the trends I'm talking about tonight, this one is not really reversible.

The best you can do as members of the reality based community is - like Voltaire's Candide - to cultivate your own garden.

Oh, and go hell for leather to ensure that your radio or print or TV content is available and palatable for a social media audience. Even in the most hermetically sealed worlds, it's still possible for facts to get through.

Indeed in my view, the only responsible way to act in face of this crumbling of the consensus is to become even more rigorous.

Let me give you an example. Media around the world from 1998 onwards used what I call 'false balance' on the question of the MMR vaccine and autism.

It took only a couple of years after the original paper on the alleged link before the London Sunday Times found ethical breaches by the scare's author, Dr Andrew Wakefield.

But I find it absolutely unacceptable that so many media were still pushing the story by 2010, when the General Medical Council finally found Wakefield guilty of serious professional misconduct in May 2010 and struck him off.

Nearly a decade, when the incidence of measles and mumps - potentially fatal diseases in children - rose as a result. Children died because of this appalling hoax.

Yes, the fall of the consensus empowers fanatics - defined by Winston Churchill as those who "can't change their minds and won't change the subject". We have to hope, we of the reality based community, that we can still penetrate some prejudices with facts.

But we can't do it just by pronouncing it so. Not any more.

Because the second linked crisis is one of authority, and here my own approach is to welcome the change wholeheartedly, because again there is no going back.

The authority of the newspapers and the TV networks was an artefact of scarcity, and we don't just live in a time of media abundance but super-abundance.

We can no longer realistically hand down pronouncements from the mountaintop.

The newspaper editorial guiding us on how to think or vote looks bizarre to the Web generation - and that means everybody under the age of 35.

Even the letters page, with its carefully chosen and subbed missives, seems dated and genteel compared to the continuous rolling maul of the comments section on websites.

We may regret those things, but we can't go back.


I present PM, yes, but my role is different from those who went before me, like Huw Evans, Ellen Fanning, Paul Murphy and Monica Attard.

It's different because it's interactive, and subject to constant real time scrutiny.

As the web thinker and writer Clay Shirky says, Walter Cronkite, the US anchor who announced the death of JFK and whose reporting is credited with helping end the Vietnam war, just could not exist now: Cronkite defined media authority for a generation, but, says Shirky, "there will be no more men like him, because there will be no more jobs like his. To assume that this situation can be reversed, and everyone else will voluntarily sign on to the beliefs of some culturally dominant group, is a fantasy".

How do we react and move on?

These are some lessons I've learned, in nearly four years on Twitter.

Crowd-source. That can mean anything from checking a date to asking people, as the Guardian regularly does now, to help scour through big government document dumps and Commission reports.

It's amazing how much more information you can find with thousands of willing helpers. I spoke to an archaeologist just a couple of days ago who's crowd-sourcing the attempted translation of five and a half thousand year old cuneiform texts.

Ask your readers, listeners and viewers to contribute.

That Cobar bushfire I covered in 1974? Now we'd have mobile phone photos and videos, eyewitness accounts, Skype interviews with people who'd posted on social media, and all probably hours before the first reporter even got her boots on the ground.

Be a presence on social media, giving as much as you. Don't just plug your own stuff: encourage conversation and join in others' discussions.

Use Twitter as a rolling news wire, but subject it to the verification tools developed by journalists over decades.

Take the Japanese tsunami - Twitter put us way ahead when that happened. And I don't just mean ahead of the TV coverage - ahead of all the mainstream media.

Admit you can be wrong, but correct yourself as soon as possible.

Be aware that people will come to you as an act of free choice, and not because you're the only game in town.

You're not and you never will be again. You have to work for your place, 365 days a year.

And if you're an institution, admit that you're not monolithic. You're a collection of individuals, as good and as fallible as those individuals and the culture you create around them.

So we come to the third crisis, the crisis of credibility.

What can I add, after a month when the BBC, held up as a bastion of editorial rectitude and even prudery, has been revealed as having sheltered and enabled for nearly half a century one of Britain's worst ever serial paedophiles?

What more is there to say after a couple of years of revelations about phone hacking in Rupert Murdoch's UK tabloids, recently even yielding an apology for computer hacking from his once august London Times, and the growing certainty that almost all the papers in London used private eyes with dubious methods.

Perhaps I can give you some personal insight - not mine but that of Mary Ellen Field, an Australian who had her life nearly destroyed by phone hacking. She's spoken to me several times on PM, and we maintain a regular phone and email connection.

Many of you will know the story of how she was sacked by Elle McPherson because messages she left on Elle's voicemail were hacked, and in the absence of an explanation Ms Field got the blame.

You may not be aware that in a bid to retain employment she agreed to a stint at the Meadows, a Grade 1 psychiatric institution in the US.

After ten days, the psychiatrists released her and told her employer that she was "neither an alcoholic nor a manic depressive as accused".

But Mary Ellen Field's nightmare was not over. Se returned to London to be fired first by Elle McPherson and then by her firm for losing Elle's business.

This was 2005. Seven years on, Mary Ellen Field is still seeking justice from News Corp, even though Elle McPherson has been repeatedly reported to have been one of the first hacking victims they settled with.

As I understand it, their latest legal move is to claim that their extraction software has destroyed millions of emails and they don't know if they will ever be able to retrieve them.

Credibility is not just about what you put in the paper, or out on the airwaves, it's about how you get that information, what you do with it, and more broadly, how you conduct yourself as a corporation.

It's not nearly enough in my view for BBC top brass to say they didn't know about Jimmy Savile - and it's not nearly enough for Rupert Murdoch to have closed down the News of the World as expiation for hacking Milly Dowler's phone.

The British tabloid press - and by no means only the Murdoch press - in my view needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to clean the stables.

Maybe the Leveson Inquiry will help. We shall see.

One thing that certainly would make a difference is simply to enforce the existing laws.

Senior coppers were on the payroll of the newspapers, some as suspiciously highly paid columnists, some receiving backhanded rolls of fifties in pubs.

Powerful people, including Government Ministers, stayed silent.

Remember that it's now a matter of record that News Corp set private detectives to follow lawyers who opposed them, and MPs on the committee that could have looked into them.

There are strong suggestions that certain tabloid editors held salacious photo and video material over the heads of government ministers. Hard not to describe that as what it is - blackmail.

In 2006, a private eye and a News of the world reporter were jailed for phone hacking.

For the Australian expat Mary Ellen Field, years of knocking on doors, making phone calls and writing letters followed, but she remained in limbo.

But as she recounts, John Prescott said to her this year she shouldn't feel bad that none of the letters she'd written to the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and politicians were ever answered.

He said "I was the Deputy Prime Minister for ten years and I wrote to the same people you did and they didn't respond to me either".

From the pattern of arrests in Britain we can conclude that there was a huge network of bribery that took in not just senior police, but members of the armed forces, airport employees, and more.


I don't believe that's the case here in Australia: I think we would have seen evidence by now. I also don't see here the kind of stories that make you think 'how did they get that'? and conclude, 'probably only by blagging'.

And over about eleven years working in London and Brussels in the 80s and 90s, reading those papers daily, I thought that many, many times.

But we do have to face the fact that the hacking scandal and many other incidents have coloured the credibility of the mainstream media here and around the world.

It couldn't - for all kinds of reasons I've alluded to tonight - have happened at a worse time.

I do not, however, argue for less freedom of the press.

In fact I tend to agree with the British-American campaigner Heather Brooke, who was central in the investigation that exposed the massive UK MPs' expenses scandal.

In an interview on PM, she pointed out that much of what the private eyes in London did - not the hacking of course - was "just basic fact finding".

Did people have criminal records; finding out where people lived; doing reverse phone directory searches.

As Heather Brooke points out, in America all that stuff is legal and legitimate - in Britain, she says, it's not, so instantly you're pushed into this blackmarket". Unquote.

In Australia too.

I'd add the libel laws as a factor, though Britain's are so extraordinarily punitive they certainly helped Jimmy Savile escape the law, and now ours have been reformed I'm not sure they would do the same, especially if a tough well-funded editor pushed the story.

But that brings us inexorably to the economic crisis.

Are tough well-funded editors - like Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post exposing Watergate or Harold Evans of the Sunday Times revealing the scandal of thalidomide, or Graham Perkin at the Age pursuing police corruption - are editors like that a thing of the past?

Even in the most liberal freedom of information climate, the best stories are often hard, long and expensive to dig up.

A well funded media with a broad readership is essential to fund and support that.

Increasingly that looks like wishful thinking.

A useful if bleakly titled website called Newspaper DeathWatch lists the major US metropolitan dailies that have closed since the site opened in 2007.

The names ring out like a funeral bell: The Tucson Citizen, The Rocky Mountain News, The Baltimore Examiner, The Kentucky Post, The Cincinnati Post, The Albuquerque Tribune, the list rolls on.

Then there are ten more so-called Works in Progress, papers that have cut down from dailies to weekenders, or gone digital only.

The New York Times has just announced a 22 per cent earnings fall, driven mainly by the paper's inability to pull in the advertising big bucks.

Interestingly their new paywall strategy is bringing in more readers, but that's not enough to stop the bleeding of advertising dollars.

Newsweek and Time - for most of my life they've been like Hertz and Avis or Coke and Pepsi - but again in the last two weeks, Newsweek's announced it'll no longer be a physical magazine, but a digital only entity.

In London, The Guardian, whose editor Alan Rusbridger lectured here in 2010, is still a journalism powerhouse, but it's losing about 50 million pound sterling a year, and even the deep pockets of the CP Scott Trust can't keep that up for ever.

The Guardian's gamble is to try to grow its US and world leadership so fast and so large that advertising will catch up.

But a gamble and a big one is what that is.

Where is the money to employ journalists going to come from?

It's not all bleak.

One recent ray of light: The London Evening Standard, for example, actually claims to have made a profit for the first time since it dropped its cover price to zero.

It did so mainly by radically slashing its distribution costs.

Instead of carrying the paper to 9000 different outlets a day, they now drop big bundles of the Standard in train and tube stations, for people to pick up before boarding their trains.

Result - readership up from 100,000 to an astonishing 700,000 - which means a corresponding advertising bonanza.

But the Evening Standard only hit profit after a multimillion dollar Russian oligarch cash injection.

The Lebedev father and son so far look like benevolent hands-off proprietors, but how many of us know one of those with millions to spare?

Britain's satirical fortnightly Private Eye is still doing very well thank you by swimming strongly against the tide and having almost no web presence.

But it provides a mixture of serious and humorous content available absolutely nowhere else.

For most papers and magazines the switch from newsprint to digital looks unavoidable - if not in the next five years, probably in the next ten.

Those million dollar printing presses are not just a capital drag, you can't use them any more to make money printing for others on the side.

Delivery to Dubbo or Hamilton or Karratha is expensive and the more connected people are, the more apps and digital editions will have to substitute.

A number of American papers have gone to digital editions during the week and kept their Saturday or Sunday editions in print, and that's a half way house I expect to see here sometime soon.

But what content are they going to sell? In the US, a company called Narrative Science is already selling thousands of stories about Little League Baseball games and stock market movements to local papers and outlets like Forbes.com.

This is really happening, and fast.

Computer algorithms doing our jobs.

Narrative Science's cofounder, Kristian Hammond, believes that in 15 years "more than 90 percent" of news stories will be computer-generated.

Narrative Science is already working on a way to suck out the data from Twitter and produce news.

If you've tracked the progress of a natural disaster on Twitter, for instance, you'll know this can be done.

At that moment I will start demanding royalties by the way.

Local newspaper chains in the US have also started outsourcing news stories to the Philippines, because it's really really cheap.

What all that means is that rolling and local news will be worth almost nothing.

Computerised stories will be so cheap that Microsoft or Telstra or the AFL, which already have their toes in the water, will be able to do a huge amount of the job now done by newspapers.

Once again it's simple economics.

News itself is going from a scarce product to a superabundant one.

At News Corp, James Murdoch and Kim Williams have both in their different ways argued for restrictions on the BBC's and the ABC's new media operations.

But the ABC will be just one more player in this brave new world - that's the reality you'll be competing with, whether or not future governments fund public broadcasting.

Already you can see a pattern: the journalism sites that make money are the ones that CAN make money for readers, like the Economist, the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times - or the ones that add value through investigation, expertise, political insider information and analysis, great writing, humour, and consistent quality.

A good example of that would be the New Yorker. The Monthly, Crikey and the Global Mail in different ways are trying to build something similar here, along with a number of smaller players.

My biggest worry is about where the fewer journalists who'll be needed for this high level - let's call it ten percent - journalism are going to come from.

Who for example, to return to the story I told at the start, who in this social media sourced world - will still hire a plane to send a young reporter hundreds of kilometres to cover a bushfire? I'm only where I am today because of that assignment and hundreds more like it.

One thousand two hundred young people applied for cadetships at the ABC this year. Just a couple of score or so will get training jobs with us or somewhere in the media.

Hundreds, though, will probably end up in PR. A story by Sally Jackson in the Australian in May showed figures which strongly indicated that the number of public relations professionals in Australia would match the number of working journalists by the end of the year -probably sometime around now -and might even overtake them. We'll be outnumbered.

Back in June, Tina Alldis, head of publicity at the Sydney PR agency Mango, greeted the news of mass layoffs at News and Fairfax in a column with these words: "Great news for our clients". She and the agency later apologised for any offence to the recently sacked, but the column remains on the web. And what it gives you is the clearest indication that in its more honest moments, PR regards fewer staff at papers as a golden chance to mainline their product directly into a news outlet's vein.

Of course we all still have to compete with each other in this difficult market, but before we journalists cut each others' throats we should remember that we face other threats, and among the biggest is being steamrolled or bypassed by spin doctors and publicists.

If we want a world in which journalists can be paid to tell the truth - or at least the first version of it - we have to negotiate all these massive changes, and we have to negotiate them all at the same time.

For news institutions, for journalists and for would be journalists, these crises I've outlined tonight are hardly science fiction. They're already here or just over the horizon.

This is the world we all have to travel through.

I wish I could give you a roadmap and some certainty. I can't, and anyone who says they can is a charlatan.

All I can give you is my profound conviction that good journalism - journalism of integrity - is a social good and an essential part of democracy, and we have to do everything we can to try to preserve it.