Book review: Aggregating the News: Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority, Mark Coddington (2019)

In April 2011 a story I had written about what was then the world’s hottest chilli, a story which had been published on the website of Australian Geographic, was plagiarised. They took the quotes, changed some text, rewrote the content, and published their version on their own website. I don’t remember if they put a link to the story I had written with my editor’s help. But this kind of thing happens all the time and journalists complain, particularly, about a media outlet that originated in the UK (which I shall not name here, but the name rhymes with “fail”). You see their gripes in comments on Twitter all the time.

So I was intrigued by Cottington’s idea of writing a book – which he seems to have started researching by at least 2015 – about aggregators. In fact it turns out to be a highly interesting and revealing book about journalism in the digital age more generally, so can be read profitably by many people. The point of the book is summed up as much by the second half of the subtitle as it is by the first half.

Even though aggregators – who assemble finished stories and videos mainly using material they source from the websites of other news outlets – are aware of the opprobrium that is aimed at them, their stories are read each week by hundreds of thousands, in fact by millions, of people. You wonder if perhaps (as I suggested in 2013) media literacy shouldn't be taught at secondary schools. In fact the reason that Coddington’s book is so interesting is precisely because of the profound changes that are happening in journalism, in politics, and in the public sphere more generally. This is a global phenomenon.

The matter of authority versus readability – who are all these people clicking on these secondhand stories? – presents us with something of a conundrum. Presumably people know that what they are clicking on is cobbled together from other sources, but it seems they cannot help themselves. They need the hit that news can provide if it is about something that is close to their hearts. The trivial is more compelling than the in-depth, and consumer behaviour confirms this fact.

But still people complain. I have written before, on this blog, about how people say the media is superficial. In my mind all news stories are proxies for larger debates, and aggregation in particular emphasises this point.

Yet while people know that aggregation is not based on actual reporting – in the traditional sense of the word – still they click, and companies that specialise in aggregation – plus branches of larger media companies involved in the practice as well – rake in the money that their overworked, often young, and inexperienced journalists make every day. Coddington takes time to examine how such people feel, and this is a good thing to do. It’s hard enough for regular journalists to avoid public criticism – everyone wants something from journalists then, at the drop of a hat, people turn around and criticise you – so how much harder is life for people doing aggregation?

I was a bit surprised by one fact the book unearths. An employee at one aggregator (at least one, I don’t remember the details precisely) said they don’t use sources on blogs. It seems rather restricting to limit yourself to only mainstream media outlets. Many good stories have come from blogs initially, such as the Theranos investigation. In fact, using blogs as sources could result in a higher-quality product from aggregators. There is a lot of repetition even among media outlets that do original reporting, but it seems that people in the community don’t mind.

When it comes down to it the public is in charge. They don’t have to click, but Coddington doesn’t analyse this aspect of the business in any detail, just as he doesn’t talk about how the news cycle is characterised by sharp peaks and troughs. People don’t stick with one issue for very long but when they do, they do so obsessively. A major issue, such as the US Democrats’ announcement recently of a presidential impeachment investigation, can die down within a few days.

Coddington also doesn’t talk about how people use narratives to create community, something which, since language is innate, is a species behaviour. I’ve written about these things on the blog many times over the past year or so. For example, on 2 July 2018, in the first in what would turn out to be a series of posts with theories of the act of narrative. A recent study has confirmed this intuition. It talks about “moral grandstanding” as an expression of “status-seeking personality traits”.

Coddington keeps his focus squarely on the aggregators themselves, and in doing so he goes into a lot of detail about a shadowy industry. Keeping in mind the reservations I express, I think that this is a very illuminating book. It forms a kind of corrective to the streams of criticism (and worse) that is aimed at journalists every day.

To finish off, just a small point for the publisher: the subtitle given on the book’s web page and on the graphic used for the cover of the Kindle edition is ‘Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority’, which is not what appears on the title page of the Kindle edition. Here you read ‘Secondhand Storytelling and the Changing World of Digital Journalism’ which, Coddington told me, was just a preliminary version. 

Book review: On Drugs, Chris Fleming (2019)

This brilliant memoir chronicles a life, but particularly that part of Fleming’s life that involved the use of drugs and alcohol.

Addiction is common and the use to excess of alcohol, illicit substances, and gambling is widespread. The huge influence of the Australian Hotels Association, the stupendous size of the criminal drug trade, and the massive scale of the gambling industry (which, to borrow a common media trope, state governments, themselves, are addicted to via taxation) all attest to the need of people to seek comfort from chemicals in order to escape the boredom and pain – perhaps best expressed by Hunter Thompson: “fear and loathing” – that mundane life can bring with its endless procession of small events and its petty struggles.

What Fleming so humorously does – as though someone had crossed Winnie the Pooh with Nick Cave to arrive at a sort of surreal hybrid form of entertainer (because this book is very entertaining) – is to display the pathos of this kind of life (the only one we have) – and hint at the tragedy that lies waiting if we lose the things that can keep us on an even keel. What must be those techniques, totems, prayers, incantations, or spells?

It seems there isn’t a one-size-fits-all method of staying sober and sane. Just as every society, in its own way, has to learn the hard lessons that lead to peace and to progress.

From the outset, you’re hooked (reading is a benign kind of addiction, since it actually does you good, as studies have shown). What does the trick is the whimsy and intelligence of the prose, the thoroughness of this academic’s approach to unearthing the truth, and what seems like a supernatural memory.

But like all really good nonfiction, this book turns up things that are unrelated to the subject immediately at hand and, in doing so, expresses something profound about the human condition. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book and I highly recommend it. 

Visual disturbances: Three

There are 42 files in this selection of a total of 669 photos taken on 29 June 2008. The photos shown below were taken on that day between 2.09pm and 3pm. I had walked back southwest from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, heading through the city. On the way I dropped into a couple of shopping centres (“malls” in US parlance), snapping images as I made my way through the crowds of people.

The first photo in the series was out of focus by accident because it was taken while walking on the footpath. But, instantly, taking a liking to the result I took another photo – the second one in the series created for this post – in order to create a blurring effect. To do this blurring I moved the camera slightly with my hands as I used my finger to exert downward pressure on the shutter control.

This subsequently became a pattern I followed for the next hour or so as I went to Town Hall Station to catch the train home. On 8 May of the same year I had already taken some photos that were deliberately blurred. These were of programs I was watching on the TV. So there was some precedent for this June day’s innovation in my practice as a photographer. In an earlier post on this blog, using photos taken during the day on 29 June, I show distorted images containing cars and buses.

You have to consciously want to take this kind of photo. The automated focusing mechanism in your standard digital camera takes a few seconds to zero-in on the object you are aiming at but, once it has settled on it, the device will readily and reliably give you a crystal-clear image. If you want an out-of-focus result, you have to snap the shutter before this adjustment has finished. In other words, before the software in the camera has finished processing. But if you want a shaky image, like most of the ones shown in this post, you need to move the camera slightly just as you are pressing the shutter button. So, in either case, to reliably disturb the camera’s operation requires the use of judgement and a little practice.

In the photos that appear below, people’s faces are not clear and their bodies are often ghostly, as though they were composed of little more than air. Or else microscopic particles, empty space between them, held in formation by mysterious forces over which people have no control. Quantum bodies.

Strange forces can serve to form relationships between people as well. As I walked along the pavement, holding the silver-coloured camera in front of my chest, sometimes people would look at my face but mostly people didn’t take any notice of me. This was over a decade ago so I was younger than I am now but I was already overweight and had a habit of wearing plain clothes. After a certain age, in any case, you almost become invisible.

The shoes I was wearing on that day were probably a pair with brown leather uppers. I still keep a pair like this in the closet (don’t ask me why) and though I don’t wear them anymore I still use a belt that I bought one year around then. It is made out of suede and has blue-and-white Nylon trim sewn over its edges. Its end tip is leather.

Like the spaces between the molecules that form our bodies, life is full of empty moments or, at least, they seem so though our minds rarely rest. Even when we are unconscious, at night in our beds, we often dream. Our fallible consciousnesses are subject to irrational effects as feelings, memories, and fears operate on us in addition to more reliable sensory inputs (which, however, are themselves often imperfect or fragmentary).

I could hazard an opinion that images like the ones that follow more accurately reflect the real nature of existence than do precisely composed, in-focus, well-defined images of a more conventional sort. Art is art though, even if it links to our thoughts. Artistic convention has rules that are meant to be broken.

Book review: The Arsonist, Chloe Hooper (2018)

If you wanted to look at this work of creative nonfiction through a narrow lens you could say that it is about the Black Saturday fires of 2009 and the man who was accused of setting them. But given this is Chloe Hooper doing the work you will likely take a wider view and look at the story as an allegory.

The man at the centre of the drama, Brendan Sokaluk, turns out to be someone with particular problems and he is evidently intellectually challenged. But it is his tendency to indulge in irrational, unpredictable, and aggressive behaviour that make it easy to see Brendan as more than just a suspect arsonist. In my mind he was a stand-in for Everyman, the people we turn into when we think no-one else can see us, or when we don’t care what people think of us, or when we hide behind anonymity online.

And then there are the others in the small rural town, who aim their hatred at Brendan. The irrational is embodied in the people in the community Sokaluk lived in, the everyday Australians in this poor part of the country who helped to form the social fabric that provides a foundation upon which the rest of the narrative lies.

Hooper’s book offers Australians a challenge in the form of a question. If we have basic freedoms and human rights enshrined in law, law that applies to everyone equally, then why do we abuse that freedom by bullying people who are different and by committing crimes that can lead to suffering and, even, to death? Freedom is thus a double-edged sword and Hooper illustrates this conundrum in her masterful work.

In it you find tinder-dry bush in a summer that had followed a decade of low rainfall. This combination of factors made the eruption of the bushfire seem almost inevitable, especially given that some people are prone to set fires deliberately. Just as the likelihood of cataclysmic effects of climate change seem inevitable in the light of the political systems and the commercial imperatives that drive communities, made up of imperfect individuals who are competitive and who are motivated, by greed, to behave in the ways they do. The difference in the two cases being that our actions with regard to the environment and climate change were not deliberate but are and have been, instead, a by-product of our struggle to survive.

Hooper is prone to make you think, which is why I like her writing, especially her nonfiction, so much. This book took over a decade to write and if you know what is involved in making a finished product of this nature, you can only marvel at Hooper’s persistence and her drive to unearth the truth.

Whether she succeeded in achieving her ambition is something each reader will have to decide for him- or herself. It is something of a puzzle why this book has not been more talked-about in the public sphere, especially considering how it touches on the topical issue of anthropogenic climate change. ‘The Tall Man’, Hooper’s previous nonfiction work, was more prominent following its publication in 2008.

From my perspective, I felt that, in just over 250 pages of concise and well-edited prose, Hooper in ‘The Arsonist’ provides a striking type of portrait of the species. And it’s not flattering. Not in the least bit.

Flashback to the GFC: ABC news and ‘7.30 Report’

On 31 October 2007, the All Ordinaries, an Australian equities index, was at 6873 and by 6 March 2009 it had fallen to 3111, losing almost half its value. Now, a decade later, it is sitting at around 6640.

How much has (slowly) changed. In the 10 photos below, which were taken on 8 May 2008 between 7.18pm and 7.31pm, you can see the US-dollar to Aussie-dollar exchange rate was, in May 2008, sitting at 94 US cents to the Aussie. The US stock market also lost about 50 percent of its value after the global financial crisis (GFC) began, or at least the S&P 500 index did. But as early as 28 March 2013 the S&P 500 surpassed the high it had hit in 2007, while the All Ordinaries is still, now, struggling to regain all the losses it suffered in the years since October 2007. The Aussie dollar is currently worth about 68 US cents.

These photos are just a few out of 122 taken between 7.04pm and 7.32pm while watching TV, starting with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) 30-minute news program and then its magazine current affairs program the ‘7.30 Report’ (the name has since been changed to just ‘7.30’). Kerry O’Brien was its host in those days and some people in the community miss him. Like the current host, Leigh Sales, O’Brien had a forthright interviewing style.

One of the images you can see below shows preparations for the hosting of the summer Olympics which, that year, were held in China. More significant however than Beijing’s optimistic PR stunt was what is shown in another photo that appears underneath the text you are reading. In this image, Australian artist Vincent Fantauzzo is standing in front of his portrait of Heath Ledger who had died, tragically for someone so young and with so much talent, in January of that year.

Ledger would have been a megastar if he had lived, a person with gravitas enough to rival any of the major male actors alive today. His death reminds me of how hard it must be to live with the kind of exposure that fame brings, and of the unique challenges that famous people face. It also reminds me of the need for men to be more open about their problems, and to talk through things rather than relying on themselves to pull through difficult times. We also need, I think, to treat substance abuse as a health problem, and to decriminalise illicit substances.

The actor had finished, not long before, the work needed for the movie ‘The Dark Knight’, which centres on the character of the Joker from the ‘Batman’ opus. The villain was played by Ledger. As usual, his performance was masterful. The movie was released in July 2008. In 2019, at the time this post was being written, the community was talking about another film in the same franchise, this time titled simply ‘Joker’. It had polarised people, many of whom thought it terrific and others who thought it terrible.

For his part, Fantauzzo is not earth-shatteringly original in his approach to painting but his work does, on the other hand, readily appeal to the broader public. His ideas seem, to me, to be strong and while his style is determinedly figurative (in other words, his works use realism to depict the things or ideas contained in them), his compositions are vigorous and suggestive.

When I was working on this blogpost I saw in my Twitter feed a quote from the artist Anselm Kiefer, in French, which went: « Je me méfie de la réalité, tout en sachant qu’à leur niveau les œuvres d’art sont également illusion. » This translates as: “I distrust reality, all the while knowing that at their level works of art are equally illusion.” It’s a very postmodern thing to say, and is typical of its time. But it illustrates the truth that, at the end of the day, even a figurative work is just a composition. It might give us an illusion of reality but its power lies in the disturbing effects produced by the artifice used to make it.

In recent years, figurative art has made a comeback but what is now produced in this mode is different from the types of figurative works that were made in the centuries before Modernism and Postmodernism emerged. Now, every mode that can be used for making art is acceptable, although prizes like the Archibald show us that figurative work never really ever went away.

‘Heath’ won the People’s Choice Award in 2008 and was subsequently acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which runs the Archibald Prize at around the same time every year. A decade later, in 2018, Fantauzzo, still entering paintings in the competition, won the same award, this time for a portrait of Julia Gillard, who had been the country’s prime minister.