Australia is truly turning inside out. From The Australian:
Tomorrow ANZ Bank will launch a new online media publication, Blue Notes, to be edited by Walkley Award-winning journalist Andrew Cornell.
According to ANZ’s group head of strategic content and digital media Amanda Gome — a respected senior journalist and publisher formerly of Fairfax and Eric Beecher’s Private Media — the bank now employs more than a dozen editorial staff to create its own digital and video content.
The result is “a new type of media”, according to Gome. Others call it brand journalism.
“We have a corporate newsroom that draws upon the expertise in the bank and outside,” Gome says. “We’ve got subeditors and a publishing hub. We’ve got a video studio. It’s really well-resourced.
“There are a number of journalists, Andrew, and a contributor budget as well. If you were there you wouldn’t feel it was that different from a normal newsroom.”
ANZ is aiming to produce a “thought-leading publication that talks to the people that matter,” Gome says: customers, influencers, corporate clients and others.
“We will also be breaking our own stories,” she says. “Our aim is to work hand-in-hand with (traditional media) journalists.”
New type of media, Amanda? This is the oldest type of media in the world. Michael West discussed the context on the weekend:
So the whistleblowers will need to find a journalist somewhere, someone keen to duel with the bank’s PR people and lawyers. Then the editors in the media organisation will have to risk losing advertising – a big ask in the current environment – not to mention combat the defamation menace from the cuff-linked pettifoggers.
So the odds are still in your favour as, even if the media organisation manages to tell the story in intelligible form, it is unlikely to be picked up by other media organisations as, one, they rely on advertising too, and two, it wasn’t their yarn so you can count on them ignoring it.
As regular readers already know, MB sometimes jokingly refers to the SMH as the Sydney Morning Domain because it’s obvious that it struggles to publish anything other than housing favourable journalism, given its dependence upon the advertising revenue.
A recent example was the bizarre publication across the dailies and AFR of a CBA-produced “housing bubble Q&A” with no byline:
Here are 16 questions that CBA says bore straight down to the facts about the residential property market…
Unsurprisingly it argued that:
Sustained low inflation allowed lower interest rates. More households can access credit markets as a result. Housing demand lifted relative to a supply that doesn’t change very quickly. A lift in house prices relative to incomes was inescapable. The shift in housing preference reflects the desire to build bigger and more elaborate dwellings. The “house” part of valuation calculations is higher as a result.
It wasn’t represented as a comment or analysis, just “facts” delivered from your friendly CBA, with no disclosure of any kind about conflicts.
As West hints at, ANZ and other banks have increasingly poached bank journalism talent over the past year with the very obvious goal of producing a favourable public narrative. Such flacking is not new even if it’s getting more common. But now the movement is advancing to the next stage – a fully bank owned, fully bank operated media outlet, staffed by journalists carrying Walkleys – in which everyone depends directly upon the bank for their jobs.
