Carol Altmann – The Terrier

An intermission. I was thrilled to be invited to be a part of this new podcast, Journo, put together by Nick Bryant, a stellar journo, and former BBC correspondent in New York who is now living in Sydney.

If you have 39.09 mins to spare, you may enjoy a listen to how The Terrier and other small, nippy, independent sites are holding those in power to account. The link is here: https://pod.fo/e/f13ef

See you Sunday.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty lousy shot.

As we know, the owner of Facebook last week took aim at the big players in the Australian media, and ended up wounding all of the little ones.

This little Terrier was hit right in the bum by the shrapnel.

Bang! Wiped off Facebook overnight.

Now I am temporarily running a “florist”, but I am not pushing up the daisies just yet.

I am, however, mulling over what is a sustainable and realistic way to get through this.

Because what Mr Zuckerberg has exposed by releasing the Facebook trapdoor is the vulnerable, soft underbelly of small, super local media voices like The Terrier.

We are the little tackers trying to keep independent, public interest journalism alive in little corners of Australia like Warrnambool and Daylesford and Cygnet and Manning River and Ararat and Naracoorte….

None of what Facebook, Google and the Federal Government are fighting about right now will make this battle any easier.

They are fighting over money that most of the little terriers will never see.

Under a planned new media code, Facebook and Google will pay millions to the major media players – the big guns – as compensation for losing advertising revenue.

But to be part of this deal and negotiate with Facebook and co, a media organisation must make at least $150,000 a year.

In the past two years, I have made nowhere near that, but The Terrier has shown that readers still want investigative journalism that is not afraid to ask the hard questions, and is not scared off by the pushback (#justablogger).

But will alone is not enough.

I had hoped, as part of its media rules overhaul, the Federal Government might use funds from the likes of Facebook and Google to set up a public interest journalism fund that all media outlets could apply for, no matter how big or small, provided that outlet could prove it had journalistic runs on the board.

The Terrier has some significant runs on the board.

But it is not enough.

There is still no fund. The cavalry is yet to crest the horizon.

But we keep hanging in there, because this fight is much bigger than Facebook and much broader than Google.

As it sits, the big media companies stand to get stronger – yet with no guarantees their newsrooms will get bigger – and the smaller, independent voices stand to be crushed.

This includes The Terrier and whoever might come along next, especially if I have to start building an audience, on a new platform, all over again.

So last week was a whack that I didn’t see coming and it hurt, but terriers are tough little buggers.

We open florist shops, we take a little time to smell the roses, and we keep working with those who want us to survive.

Thanks a bunch for hanging in here.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

[The following piece first appeared in Crikey (www.crikey.com.au) on 28 May 2020. If you are not already a subscriber to Crikey, please give its 21-day free trial a go. Crikey is 20 years young and still a trailblazer in quality, online journalism.]

If the arrival of the internet left regional newspapers staggering and dazed, it will be the fallout from COVID-19 that could finally kill them — after what has already been a long, slow death by a thousand cuts.

And yet there is hope for maintaining a media voice in our country towns and I am proof of that hope.

I returned to my home town of Warrnambool, in south-west Victoria, and started what has since morphed into The Terrier, a wholly online, extremely nimble, one-person operation that I run from the front room of my house.

I use a website and social media to reach my readers, who have grown from a few hundred to more than 4500 followers in a city of 35,000 people, and seen The Terrier move from the periphery to become an influential voice in the community.

The secret to the growing success of The Terrier has been to keep my overheads extremely low and my connection with the readers extremely high.

In so doing, I have had to throw out a lot of my old concepts of what journalism must be and adapt to what the reader now wants it to be, which is to not only tell them what is happening, but why and what — if necessary — we can do about it.

This doesn’t mean throwing out all of the essential skills of journalism — fact gathering, research, interviews, composing well-written pieces without spelling mistakes. What it does mean is no longer being afraid to advocate, or take a side, or express a point of view.

I found this uncomfortable at first, but I have since come to learn that my readers don’t want me to simply repeat what their friends have already “reported” to them on social media about a car accident in the main street; they want me to dig deeper into the power structures of their home town and to be their eyes and ears. To be, in other words, their terrier.

At the same time, I invite the reader in to be part of the chase.

They report to me on what they have found, read, heard and investigated themselves, so that I have not one terrier on the case, but many, with me the ultimate fact checker. We are doing a great job.

In fact two of the biggest stories to come out of Warrnambool in the past 12 months were both products of The Terrier, with one now the subject of an ombudsman’s investigation.

But how do you make any money, I hear you ask? I rely on contributions from readers through my tip jar which has also been gathering strength, but I know such a model needs more than tips to be viable in the longer term.

To me, a combination of dramatically reducing overheads, reader support, government support, tax deductibility and philanthropy holds the key to financial viability.

Resource sharing and collaborations are another critical step that we are yet to take, with old journalistic rivalries given priority over the needs of the readers we purport to serve.

What I have found most interesting through the whole journey of The Terrier, is that the reader doesn’t want more bells and whistles from me in what is already a noisy world.

I don’t use video, I am pondering a podcast, and I don’t even have a regular publishing schedule beyond a loose “two or three times a week”.

The key is that I keep it simple and it works.

This is where regional journalism can go and indeed must go if it’s to survive, and I am loving being a part of it.

Carol Altmann is a journalist and the publisher of The Terrier.