Kerry O’Brien talks about the internet and media

Transcript

GEORGINA SWAN: I’m Georgina Swan, editor of CIO and tonight we’re on Fort Denison in Sydney, at a HP/CIO networking event.

Earlier, I spoke to Kerry O’Brien, where we talked about interviewing skills and negotiation techniques.

The internet has played such a big part in so many of our lives and I asked Kerry about what that meant for media.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Well, I think, the internet is part of the end game – it’s part of where we find ourselves now – but the technological revolution has really been going on since the first computer. And it is a just a process that has been going from fast, to fast, to faster, to whirlwind.

And I think that the impact of technology on both journalism – the way news is reported – and the fact that you’ve now got convergence of news between print and electronic — and so there is just this continuous stream of 24-hour news, there is an instant deadline at any moment, of any day. And I don’t think that the news industry is actually dealing with that pretty well at this stage.

I think that has interacted with politics; in some ways it has increased scrutiny and in some ways that’s good. In other ways, it has put a pressure on politicians to feel that they have to be constantly coming out and making new announcements. And, again, very often those announcements are old announcements dressed up as new just so that they feel they have something to say.

The end result of all that is, I think, is that news is becoming more superficial than ever and politics is in a pretty sorry state.