Best of the week: Media slush funds; the rise of Domain; and the continuing fall of Bauer

BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome back to Best of the Week, our new Saturday contemplation of what’s been big for the media and marketing industry. Week four, and the experiment is starting to become a habit. Last week’s trial run on LinkedIn went reasonably well - seven comments, 51 likes and 300 article views. Somewhat better than the previous crosspost to Facebook, which you may recall was something of a text-heavy, algorithm-repelling flop. So in addition to this email version, I’ll give LinkedIn another run today and let you know how it goes. This week: Media slush funds, the rise and rise of Domain, and the fall and fall of Bauer Pork for everyone I’ll start by sharing two things: First, despite a decade’s notice, I missed out on all the newsroom action when the reforms finally passed on Thursday night. And second, and more significantly, I’m feeling a tad conflicted. While the Upper House was finally passing the biggest media law reforms in many many years, I was in the tenth hour of what should have been a 90 minute trip home from the Sunshine Coast. Wednesday night saw members of the Mumbrella360 team head to the glamorous environs of Caloundra for the Australian Event Awards. However, four categories into the ceremony, we’d already been knocked off our perch as best meeting or conference by TedxSydney. The hungover journey home turned out to be exponentially longer than our few minutes as awards contenders. And it was perhaps not the showcase of the accessibility of the Sunshine Coast to the country’s events community that the local tourism board would have hoped. Winds in Sydney meant that the trip home would involve a 100km Uber journey to Brisbane, a hop to Newcastle in a glorified minibus with wings, a 160km hire car ride to Sydney, and a ferry journey just to top things off. While all the time, the media reforms were edging closer. By the time I finally crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge (accidentally: we missed the turn for Neutral Bay - it was that kind of day) on Thursday evening,[the vote had finally passed.]( As an owner of an independent media outlet, I guess I should be delighted as I might have a seat at the pork barrel. As a media commentator, I feel as though everyone (except the poor old ABC) has been bought off. This has been a set of media reforms to satisfy every commercial media player which has an audience that votes. The TV networks get to kill off the 75% reach rule, so expect to see consolidation of the metro and regional players. Also out is the two-out-of-three rule. So there’s no barrier to owning free TV, radio and newspaper interests in the same city. (Could Lachlan Murdoch and Bruce Gordon yet snatch Ten from CBS?) The largesse also sees the TV networks no longer have to pay a licence fee to use the public airways to bring in their $4bn a year in advertising. Luckily, government budget repair doesn’t count when the TV networks come knocking. The danger of course, was that there might not be enough in all this for News Corp, which would have been a political problem for the government. So there was that smelly $30m for News Corp’s Fox Sports, with the fig leaf that it should spend it on boosting coverage of underrepresented sports. The most charitable interpretation of all this is that it was a grand deal, carefully pieced together to bring the ancient media ownership laws up to date. Everyone (except the tax payer) a winner. Less charitably, it was a piece of pandering by the government to powerful media players, who it will need onside come the election. And it was easy to take that view - and ask where was the public interest in all this - when it was just the big boys getting a turn at the pork barrel. But the price of Nick Xenophon’s support for the measures was something for the little players too. Initially it sounded like tax breaks for public interest journalism. And perhaps inevitably (it was difficult to see how that sort of tax break would ever work in practice) that got too hard. Instead it became a [$50m regional and small publishers fund, plus a bunch of regional cadetships.]( As a co-owner of a small publisher, you may understand my conflict. Depending on the fine print, we might be eligible to access the slush fund. A slice of that pot ($16.7m a year for three years) potentially goes a long way at the small end of town. But at the same time, I’m cynical about where it will end up and how it will get spent. There are plenty of outlets it might help. The remaining family owned local papers around the country. Independent players like Solstice Media, publishers of InDaily in Adelaide. Crikey’s owner, Private Media. The Monthly and The Saturday Paper publisher Schwartz Media. Maybe the universities-backed The Conversation. Even Mamamia. And, as a couple of people have pointed out to me, Mumbrella. There will be hurdles. You’ve got to be Australian managed and Australian owned. You have to be be independent, which seems to have been written to lock out the superannuation industry-backed The New Daily. And you can’t spend it on salaries. Remember when Labor built all those unnecessary school halls? Soon, there’ll be a podcast studio in every newsroom. You’ve also got to be a member of the Australian Press Council or similar. As it happens, Mumbrella joined the APC five years ago, and I’m a strong believer in the need for the organisation. But... It’s important there’s an independent umpire. Yet in terms of freedom of the press, it’s also important that the APC is not government-aligned. Who gets to decide whether an organisation that isn’t a member has “a robust and transparent complaints process”? Actually, the Australian Communications and Media Authority will be the one that gets to decide, as it’s been hand balled the job of administering the fund. You’ve got to be doing civic or public service journalism to be eligible. But in commercial outlets, what does that mean? Again, the ACMA will have to decide. Issuing grants is not something the ACMA has done before. So it’s got a lot of work to do before it distributes its first cheques next July 1. But what bothers me most about this process is that it reminds me of the cosy world of the publicly funded screen production community. It sometimes strikes me that there are certain production companies that are better at writing proposals that meet all of the Screen Australia funding criteria of a particular scheme than they are at making programs. Want transmedia storytelling? They’ve got just the proposal. Story’s told using VR? Check. The publicly funded shows tend to then quickly vanish without trace, and indeed without cultural impact. From the outside, it often feels like more of a job creating scheme for the struggling screen industry. And for a select club of people at that. And if that’s what it is, then so be it. But let’s not pretend it’s an innovation fund in that case. Will Mumbrella apply for the small publishers innovation fund if we’re eligible? You betcha. We’d be crazy not to, if the money is there. And we’ll try to spend it wisely. Meanwhile, I’m even less enamoured with the scheme to create 200 journalism cadetships. I fear it will have the opposite effect of the one intended. Given the choice between employing an experienced journalist at full cost, or a cadet with a wage subsidy of $40,000, which path do you think publishers will choose? And where will be the senior jobs at the end of these cadetships? I’d like to see employers obliged to offer a path to a permanent role. Otherwise it will end up being, I suspect, a free $10m induction course to the public relations industry. Domain attraction Meanwhile, on Tuesday night, Domain was showing off what may be the nicest media company office in the country. Walking into the Pyrmont warehouse conversion, it felt more like a creative agency space than a content company. But what was most interesting about the short presentation - mainly pitched to media agencies - is that boss [Antony Catalano has ambitions that go way beyond real estate.]( Once the company separates from Fairfax in a couple of months time, I think we’ll see it emerging as yet another competitor to its parent. In lifestyle coverage soon, however, given the overlap of Domain’s journalism with its marketing team - they showed a Venn diagram demonstrating as much - I’m not sure the company’s current editorial philosophy is open to the delivery of hard news. Yet. I’m also not sure whether this widening focus is a hedge against the coming Australian property crash (and they were certainly cherry-picking the stats to try to tell a positive real estate story at the event), or whether it simply reflects boss Antony Catalano’s desire to rule the world. Either way, it dawned on me on Tuesday night, Domain is about to become a mainstream media player in its own right. Bauer’s bad week And Friday ended, as it often does these days, with Bauer slipping out some bad news. This time it was a doozy. [The company has closed its custom arm Bauer Works, and folded what remains of it into the company.]( If this was an action taken by any other big publisher, it would raise wider questions for the native and custom sector. But in this case, it feels more like a reflection of the ongoing instability at Bauer. It wasn’t even their worst piece of news of the week. That was on Wednesday, with the company being ordered to pay out $4.5m in its lost libel case against actor Rebel Wilson - a case it thought it was going to win. At some point Bauer will hit bottom and may start to come up the other side. But at the moment, with management churning, circulations in freefall (I presume anyhow; they don’t release audited data any more) and an incomprehensible digital strategy), I’m not quite sure when that moment will actually arrive. I meanwhile, have also hit rock bottom. On Friday I moved house. As a colleague pointed out, moving is the worst thing that can happen to middle class people. And I shall now return to the hell of unpacking. I hope you enjoy your weekend more than me. Toodlepip… Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella [Unsubscribe]( / [Manage Subscriptions](