You've probably been unable to escape the announcement of The Nightly from out of Seven West Media WA (yes, the WA wing is more or less its own business, with its own CEO and everything).
If you haven't, the westside chapter of Kerry Stokes' pet media company has started a new "digital newspaper", published each weeknight at 6pm. It says that its focus will be "politics, business, policy, culture" and that it is "economically conservative, socially progressive". It's delivered as an old-school digital edition (you know, basically a PDF with hotlinks) and a website.
I normally wouldn't comment on something like this which is getting plenty of notice elsewhere, and also feels deeply unexceptional - yet another have-a-crack-and-see-what-sticks pet project as happens frequently in large media companies (remember Goat from Nova?)
Another recent example of this throw-jelly-at-a-wall strategy can be seen at The West Australian itself, which attempted a perplexing daily live (yes, live) online radio show that was rigorously plugged at the top and bottom of every page on the website, which now appears to have had most mentions removed and has instead been relegated to a standard podcast format.
In this particular case, the Nightly product appears to be once again built on the technology stack and architecture that my team at the time and I designed in 2016 and that has been evolving since then. I'm very proud of our work at that time, and I'm pleased that this platform (Gotham, Batcave, Clayface, and all of the other Batman-related codenames) has been seen fit to meet the needs of not just The West Australian and PerthNow, but also 7News and now this.
However, from a media landscape perspective, if the pathway to create new media titles that fill gaps in our commentary and reporting landscape is reliant on a thinning number of major players making pretty unimaginative attempts funded by (in this case) "Mineral Resources founder Mr Ellison, Harvey Norman CEO Ms Page and Hancock Prospecting’s Mrs Rinehart", and led by hires like Chris Dore not long after he conveniently became available on the job market, it feels like we're missing a trick.
We are desperately in need of new, fresh reporting and amplification of under-heard voices in Australian media. But this won't happen if we just keep drawing from the same highly regurgitated talent pool while being backed by funding that has a long history of strongly influencing which voices are heard and why.
It's a tough time for media. The value placed by the population on quality journalism is declining by the day, and it's being reflected in media P&L.
But actions like this make you ask: are people going to give a shit if this is the best our largest players can do? And why's it so hard for fledgling media startups to get a foothold?
Less Coles and Woolies in our media, please.
