Scenes from March in March rally in front of Parliament House in Canberra. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen And good on them. They were in good company. The mall was verdant with the green. Enough Irishmen and would-be Irishmen that a decent local paper or news site would have been remiss not to cover the day and the parade, if only for a bit of colour and community record keeping. So you got your Paddy’s Day stories from us, from Lord Rupert and of course from the vast, roaring firehouse of new media in the form of tweets, Instagrams, blog posts, Facebook updates and so on. What you didn’t hear much about from us or from Rupe or anyone in the mainstream media, really, were the parades and marches and protests across the city, the state and the nation that sometimes matched and sometimes dwarfed the bucolic cosplay of Paddy’s Day. These community events, organised online from the bottom up, and generating vastly more traffic across social media than Paddy’s Day, were the #MarchinMarch protests, a gathering of the randomly but deeply aggrieved to give voice to the anger of people increasingly feeling themselves to be utterly powerless in the face of the social and political re-engineering of their country to serve the interests of powerful corporations and the true elites – not latte drinkers and ABC watchers, but millionaires, billionaires and their Praetorian Guard in the political system. They were big protests.

Not huge. Just big. And whether they signify anything in the long run will have to be left to the long run to answer. It is rare, however, for mass social movements of the left or right to spontaneously and instantly emerge as true alternative power centres. The process of undermining established power takes time. When protesters do emerge in significant numbers, however, it is the job of the news media to report them. It is indeed one of our most basic functions and one which we abjectly failed to perform on the weekend, first ignoring the twenty-thousand citizens who rallied across rural and regional Australia, before ignoring or underreporting the much larger numbers who rallied in the state capitals on Sunday. Again, these were not mass protests of the size and style of the Vietnam era. They weren’t as large and certainly not as violent and disorderly as civil rights protests in Queensland in the 1970s and 80s. But they were large enough to be worthy of more basic news coverage than they received. They were arguably more important to community record keeping than a bit of colour and movement on Paddy’s Day. And inarguably more important than the other 'top' stories which enjoyed more prominence; the 'attack' of a body boarder by a dolphin, the "Real Housewife's Toy-boy All-Nighter", and Lara Bingle's insta-boob shot.

This is not a reflection on the politics of the events. If they had been organised by, for instance, a conservative talkback radio demagogue to protest a progressive government’s re-engineering of traditional social values, they would have been just as important to record. The total disconnect between what might be termed citizen-initiated reportage on social media and mainstream coverage of the weekend’s protests was in no way mitigated by the scramble of the MSM on Monday to play catch up. Stepping away from the all of the issues captured by a thousand different placards on Saturday and Sunday, the systemic failure to recognise the significance of the story speaks to a deeper fear I have about the news media, which is not that we might die out as Google gorges itself on the last scraps of our advertising based business model… but that it won’t matter. Loading That you won’t care, and that there will be no reason to care.

Because we failed you, long before we failed to do our jobs. There's a case to be made that new media, in the form of professional blogs and even some of the better amateur sites, have already embarrassed us in a dozen different specialist areas that used to compromise the various desks of the old metro dailies; sport, fashion (the 'ladies pages'), entertainment, science and tech, international politics, maybe even national politics. But the meat and potatoes of local coverage? No, that still belonged to us. Or I thought it did. Increasingly, however, I wonder whether the question, "Will you miss us when we're gone", is one which answers itself.