While not mentioned by Schudson, nothing spoke to the rise of “objective journalism” more clearly than the rise of “scientific” polling: the attempt to document “the voice of the people” based on interviews that, in principle, gave every citizen an equal chance of being heard, of saying what they had to say, via questions free of bias, that bane of objectivity.

George Gallup, a figure central to the spread of polling, presented poll-takers, in his polling manifesto The Pulse of Democracy (1940), as people “moving freely about all sorts and conditions of men and noting how they are affected by the news or arguments brought from day to day to their knowledge.” Gallup took this model from James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888), but his own polling, with its set questions and predetermined response categories, was far removed from the kind of observation Bryce favoured

In reality, Gallup followed a news-making model — the model exemplified by press conferences and media releases, where news is made for the press without being controlled by the press. Gallup not only created news, controlling what was asked, how it was asked and when; he also syndicated his results to a broad range of newspapers. Having his polls published by papers whose politics ranged widely shored up his claims to objectivity.

A parallel existed with the Associated Press, America’s first wire service. Since it “gathered news for publication in a variety of papers with widely different political allegiances,” Schudson notes, “it could only succeed by making its reporting “objective” enough to be acceptable to all its members and clients.”

While servicing a diverse range of outlets was central to Gallup in America, this is not what happened in Australia. When Keith Murdoch introduced the Gallup Poll here in 1941 he made sure that the company he set up to run it was controlled by his own Herald and Weekly Times and its associates in various states. Although Australian Public Opinion Polls (“The Gallup Method”) was notionally independent, executives from the Herald and Weekly Times, including Murdoch, could (and did) influence the questions Roy Morgan, APOP’s managing director, asked, including whether they should be repeated from poll to poll.

Whereas the American Gallup boasted subscribing newspapers that were Republican (as Gallup himself may have been), Democrat and independent, none of the newspapers that subscribed to the Australian Gallup Poll are likely to have ever editorialised in favour of federal Labor; for many years, Morgan himself was an anti-Labor member of the Melbourne City Council.

Much of the polling done in America and later in Australia, however, fits a third model: things that the press creates either directly (in-house polling; for example, of a newspaper’s own readers) or indirectly (by commissioning an independent market research firm to ask questions on the newspaper’s behalf). Media products that fit this category range from Clyde Packer’s creation of the Miss Australia contest in the 1920s (also copied from America) and the Australian Financial Review’s endless business “summits” in the 2020s, to the media’s ubiquitous sit-down interviews with politicians and celebrities. This is now the dominant model.

Creating news is the surest route to having an “exclusive” and creating “product differentiation.” If the “exclusive” is produced often enough, is highly valued, and prominently flagged — polling is now featured on the front page — it becomes a way of building “brand loyalty.” Newspapers that regularly commission polls from the same source, or that have a regular but non-financial relationship with a pollster, hope for all of this. Media that don’t commission their own polls — television and radio, especially — are often happy to recycle polls published in the press.

Brand loyalty is a way of building a readership. When it comes to polling, it generally means not citing polls generated by competing brands — especially polls that could raise doubts about one’s own polls. Where different polls produce different — even conflicting — results, this usually means that the rules of objectivity that require journalists to confirm their stories using more than one source are readily abandoned. While some newspapers are more brand-focused than others, journalists consulting their own polls and not others has become standard practice.

In polling, the strength of any brand — the reputation of the poll — depends on the prestige of the news outlet that publishes it. It also depends on the poll’s record, and that record is assessed against the few objective measures that exist: election results and referendums.

Polls that score well on these measures are more likely to be trusted on things other than the vote. That, at least, is the hope of the companies that poll for the press or have their polls publicised by the press. Companies involved in the prediction business try to ensure that their polls come as close as possible to predicting the actual vote — closer, certainly, than any of their rivals.

What pollsters hope to be trusted on, as a result of the accuracy on these measures, is everything else they do for the press — notably, reporting on the popularity of party leaders and taking “the pulse” (as Gallup liked to say) on issues of public policy. More than that, they are after a spillover or halo effect for their market research businesses more generally; financially, this is the point of involving themselves in the not particularly lucrative business of predicting votes. Trust is important because what companies report on matters other than the vote typically cannot be checked directly against any external measure.

Absent any objective check, there is always a risk of polling that panders, consciously or otherwise, to the client’s agenda or the pollster’s preferences. Against this happening, the guardrails erected by industry bodies like the relatively new Australian Polling Council or the old (Market) Research Society are either weak or non-existent — the APC mostly concerned that pollsters explain their methods and post their questionnaires online, a very welcome development but one that stops well short of setting wide-ranging standards in relation to the questions members ask; the Research Society mostly concerned to reassure respondents about the way polling companies protect their privacy.

Newspoll — and other polls

Enter Newspoll, a brand owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Established for a high-end newspaper, the Australian — whose news and views are seen by some as exerting an out-size influence on conservative politics — Newspoll can claim a record of predicting national elections second to none.

In the course of conducting its most recent poll — a fortnightly event that usually grabs the headlines for what it has to say about national voting intentions, leadership satisfaction and preferred prime minister — Newspoll raised the issue of nuclear power. “There is a proposal to build several small modular nuclear reactors around Australia to produce zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired,” Newspoll told respondents (emphasis in the original). It then asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?” Respondents were invited to select one answer: “Strongly approve” (22 per cent); “Somewhat approve” (33 per cent); “Somewhat disapprove” (14 per cent); “Strongly disapprove” (17 per cent); “Don’t know” (14 per cent). In short: 55 per cent in favour; 31 per cent against; 14 per cent not prepared to say either way.

As Newspoll might have anticipated on an issue as contentious as this, its question generated controversy. Unimpressed, the economist John Quiggin proposed — tongue-in-cheek — a quite different way the question might have been worded: “There is a proposal to keep coal-fired power stations operating until the development of small nuclear reactors which might, in the future, supply zero-emissions energy. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?”

A question on nuclear power could have been asked in any number of ways: by putting the arguments for and against nuclear power; by taking the timeline for getting nuclear power up and running and comparing it to the timeline for wind + solar + hydro; by asking who should pay (governments, consumers, industry, etc.) for different forms of energy with zero emissions, and how much they should pay; by qualifying the “zero-emissions” solution with some reference to the waste disposal problem; by omitting the words “small, modular” — not just descriptors but, potentially at least, words of reassurance; and so on.

Different questions might still have produced a majority in favour of nuclear energy. A question asked for the Institute of Public Affairs by Dynata, in April 2022, on whether Australia should build nuclear power plants to supply electricity and reduce carbon emissions,” found a majority (53 per cent agreeing), and an even lower level of opposition (23 per cent).

As with Newspoll, the IPA poll raised considerations that invited an affirmative response: “small modular,” “zero-emissions energy,” “on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired” (Newspoll); “to supply electricity,” “reduce carbon omissions” (IPA). Not a single consideration in either poll might have prompted a negative response.

The high proportion in the IPA survey neither agreeing nor disagreeing (24 per cent) — an option Newspoll didn’t offer — allowed respondents who actually had an opinion to conceal it, Swedish research on attitudes to nuclear power suggests. So, while the level of opposition recorded by the IPA might have been higher without the “easy out,” the level of support might have been higher too.

Other questions about nuclear power failed to attract majority support. Asked in September by Freshwater “if Australia needs nuclear power” (the precise question was not published), and presented with a set of response options similar to those offered by the IPA, 37 per cent of respondents supported nuclear power and 36 per cent opposed it, 18 per cent saying they were “neutral” and 12 per cent “unsure.” Apart from coal (supported by 33 per cent), every other energy source received wider support: hydrogen (47 per cent), natural gas (56 per cent), offshore wind (58 per cent), onshore wind (61 per cent) and solar (84 per cent).

Asked in the same poll whether “Australia should remove the ban on nuclear power development,” 44 per cent agreed. But asked whether they agreed or disagreed that “Australia does not need to generate any energy from nuclear power,” 36 per cent disagreed. Similarly, no more than 35 per agreed that “the federal government must consider small nuclear modular reactors as part of the future energy mix” — a much lower figure than Newspoll’s, even if the question isn’t necessarily better.

Freshwater also asked respondents to choose between two trade-offs: “Australia builds nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are replaced earlier” (44 per cent chose this one) and “Australia does not build nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are extended” (38 per cent); 18 per cent were “unsure.” Respondents opposed to both coal and nuclear power were left with only one place to go — “unsure.” But on the poll’s own evidence — 33 per cent supporting coal, 36 per cent supporting nuclear — the figure of 18 per cent appears to underestimate this group considerably.

Another question on nuclear power, this time asked by RedBridge, is said to have shown a 35–32 split over “the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy need.” As yet, however, neither the question nor any figures have been posted on its website.

Yet another question, asked in February by Resolve for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, also failed to show majority support for nuclear power. Told that “there has been some debate about the use of nuclear power in Australia recently” and asked for their “own view,” respondents split four ways: “I support the use of nuclear power in Australia” (36 per cent); “I do not have a strong view and am open to the government investigating its use” (27 per cent); “I oppose the use of nuclear power in Australia” (25 per cent); and “Undecided” (15 per cent).

In reporting this “exclusive survey,” David Crowe, chief political correspondent for the two papers, made no reference to the Newspoll published the previous day. This, notwithstanding that in reporting the Resolve poll Crowe gave pride of place to “mining billionaire” Andrew Forrest’s attack on the Coalition’s nuclear policy — a policy the Australian suggested had received a “boost” from the Newspoll. Nor did Crowe refer to any other poll.

On one reading, most respondents (61 per cent in the Resolve poll compared to 39 per cent in Newspoll) had “a strong view” (the respondents who declined to say “I do not have a strong view…”), those without “a strong view” either being “open to the government investigating” the use of nuclear power or “undecided.” More likely, the question didn’t measure how strong any of the views were — some of those without strong views being “open to the government investigating its use,” others joining those who harboured strong views (respondents Resolve didn’t directly identify) to indicate either their support or their opposition to nuclear power.

Effectively, the Resolve poll rolled three questions into one — one, about support or opposition to nuclear power; another about the strength of these opinions; and another about “the government investigating” the “use” of nuclear power. But since responses to one of these questions would not necessarily have determined responses to any other, Resolve’s shortcut obscures more about public opinion than it illuminates; a respondent with a strong view, for example, might still have been “open to the government investigating its use.”

In October 2023, Resolve asked another question — this one reportedly commissioned by the consulting firm Society Advisory, and run “exclusively” by Sky News. The result suggested a degree of openness to nuclear power that was even higher than that indicated by Resolve’s poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Asked if “Australia should rethink its moratorium (ban) on nuclear power to give more flexibility in the future,” half (49 per cent) of the respondents were in favour, less than half that number (18 per cent) were against, opposition to “flexibility” requiring some strength, with an extraordinary 33 per cent “unsure” — a sign that this question too was a poor one.

Not only do answers depend on the question, they also depend on the response options. In an extensive survey — not just a one- or two-item poll — conducted in October–November 2023, the British firm Savanta asked respondents “to what extent, if at all,” they supported or opposed using nuclear energy “to generate electricity” in Australia? While 40 per cent said “strongly support” or “tend to support,” 36 per cent said “strongly oppose” or “tend to oppose,” 7 per cent said “Don’t know,” and 17 per cent said they “neither support nor oppose.”

As with the Resolve poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Savanta’s response options — which included “neither support nor oppose” — reduced the chance that its question, however worded, would yield a majority either in favour of nuclear energy or against it; almost as many opposed nuclear energy as supported it, a quarter (24 per cent) choosing to sit on the fence. In the Newspoll, where 55 per cent approved and 31 per cent disapproved, there was no box marked “neither approve nor disapprove.” If there had been, then almost certainly Newspoll would not have found majority support either.

The Savanta survey also shows what happens to support for a single option — here, nuclear power — when respondents are given a range of options. Asked to think about how their “country might shift its current energy generation mix” and given a list of five alternatives, only 23 per cent nominated “nuclear energy”; 41 per cent, almost twice as many, nominated “large-scale solar farms.” Of the rest, 15 per cent nominated “onshore wind farms,” 6 per cent “gas carbon and storage (CCS),” and 4 per cent “biomass from trees.”

Newspoll made no attempt to ascertain whether the public had heard of “small modular nuclear reactors” much less what the public knew about such things. In the Guardian, the proposal was described as “an uncosted Coalition thought-bubble”; in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, former deputy Reserve Bank governor Stephen Grenville noted that there were “just two operational SMRs, both research reactors” and that work on what “was expected to be the first operational commercial SMR” had “been halted as the revised cost per kWH is uneconomic for the distributors who had signed up.” Elsewhere, an academic specialising in electricity generation described SMRs as “not, by any stretch of the imagination, what most people would consider small.”

On what the public knows — or, more accurately, on how much it thinks it knows — the Savanta survey is again useful. When asked what they had heard of nuclear energy, few (8 per cent) said “I have not heard about this energy option” or “don’t know.” But just 18 per cent said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a lot about how it works.” Most said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a little about how it works” (41 per cent) or “I have heard about this energy option, but don’t know how it works (33 per cent).

In a poll conducted by Pure Profile, reported in May 2022, 70 per cent said they didn’t understand “the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.”

… and the Australian

Keen to publicise the result of its Newspoll — a result the paper openly welcomed — the Australian’s reporting of the poll and its commentary around it was tendentious.

The distinction between respondents’ having a view and their having a “strong” view was one it mostly ignored or fudged. The paper’s political editor Simon Benson, reported in Crikey to be “responsible” for the poll, ignored it. He repeatedly represented “majority” support as “strong” support. The fact that pollsters themselves regularly make this mistake shouldn’t make it any more acceptable. If support is a metre wide, it isn’t necessarily a metre deep.

The headline in the print edition — “Powerful Majority Supports Nuclear Option for Energy Security” — fudged the distinction. In itself, 55 per cent is not an overwhelming majority; in 2017, same-sex marriage was supported in the nationwide “survey” by 62 per cent. In itself,  55 per cent is hardly a “powerful” number — one that politicians ignore at their peril; in the lead-up to the same-sex marriage decision, both John Howard and Tony Abbott made it clear that they wouldn’t consider anything less than 60 per cent in favour to be a number that the parliament would have to heed. Had 55 per cent (not 36 per cent) “strongly” approved nuclear reactors, the Australian would have had a defensible case. But even in polls that offer a binary choice, “strong” majorities are rare.

Rather than representing a “powerful majority” in favour of the “nuclear option,” Newspoll’s figures might equally be said to show that most respondents (61 per cent) did not feel strongly one way or the other — a majority that the Australian would not have wanted to call “powerful.”

A highlight, Benson argued, was the fact that respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four — “the demographic most concerned about climate change” — was the demographic most likely to support nuclear power, 65–32. “There is no fear of the technology for most people under 40,” he concluded. This line was one that impressed shadow climate change and energy minister, Ted O’Brien, when he discussed the poll on Sky News.

It also resonated with opposition leader Peter Dutton. Attacking the prime minister for being out of touch with public opinion, which he was reported to have said was “warming to nuclear power,” Dutton noted that nuclear power was “supported by a lot of younger people because they are well-read and they know that it’s zero emissions, and it can firm up renewables in the system.”

The news that “NewsPoll [sic] showed a majority of young Australians supporting small-scale nuclear power generation,” even prompted a discussion of the pros and cons of nuclear power — not the pros and cons of the polling — on the ABC.

But eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds as the age group most favourably disposed to nuclear power is not what Essential shows, not what Savanta shows, and not what RedBridge shows. In October’s Essential poll, no more than 46 per cent of respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four supported “nuclear power plants” — the same proportion as those aged thirty-six to fifty-four but a smaller proportion than those aged fifty-five-plus (56 per cent); the proportion of “strong” supporters was actually lower among those aged eighteen to thirty-four than in either of the other age-groups.

In the Savanta survey, those aged eighteen to thirty-four were the least likely to favour nuclear energy; only about 36 per cent were in favour, strongly or otherwise, not much more than half the number that Newspoll reported.

And according to a report of the polling conducted in February by RedBridge, sourced to Tony Barry, a partner and former deputy state director of the Victorian Liberal Party, “[w]here there is support” for nuclear power. “it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.”

In the Australian, the leader writer observed that “public support for considering nuclear power in Australia is rising as the cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge becomes more real.” But Newspoll had never sought to establish what respondents think are the “cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge” so it could hardly have shown whether these thoughts have changed.

Benson’s remark, on the Australian’s front page, that the poll showed “growing community support” for nuclear power was also without warrant; “growing community support” is something that the poll does not show and that Benson made no attempt to document. Since the question posed by Newspoll had never been asked before, and since polled opinion is sensitive to the way questions are asked, “growing community support” is one thing the poll could not show.

Subsequently, Benson cited Liberal Party polling conducted “immediately after the [May] 2022 election loss” which “had support at 31 per cent.” The question? Benson doesn’t say. Is it really likely, as Benson believes, that in a “short space of time,” as he describes it — less than two years — support for nuclear power could have jumped from 31 per cent to 55 per cent? The considerable shift in polled opinion on same-sex marriage that Wikipedia suggests happened sometime between 2004 and 2007 is hardly likely to have happened since 2022 in relation to nuclear energy.

Peta Credlin, Australian columnist and Sky News presenter, argued the growing-support line by stringing together: a poll conducted in 2015 (by Essential, though she didn’t identify it as an Essential poll), which had support at 40 per cent; the IPA poll (which it was safe to name) from 2022, which had support at 53 per cent; and the Newspoll, which had it at 55 per cent. Not only was each of these conducted by a different pollster, hence subject to different “house effects”; each had posed their own question.

Had the Australian wanted to see whether support really was growing it might have considered re-running one of the questions it had asked years before — or, preferably, re-run more than one. But perhaps the point of the polling was not to show that support was growing but to create the impression that it was growing — that it had a momentum that might leave Labor, “in its fanatical opposition to nuclear power,” as Benson wrote, stranded on “the wrong side of history.”

This was not the first time the Australian has interpreted the results of a Newspoll as heralding a turning point on this issue. In 2007, shortly before prime minister John Howard announced that the Coalition would set up a nuclear regulatory regime and remove any unreasonable impediments to the building of nuclear power plants in Australia, the Australian told its readers that there had been a “dramatic shift” in support for nuclear power. The basis of its claim: questions asked by Newspoll — two in 2006, one in 2007. (In those days Newspoll was a market research company, not a polling brand whose field work had been outsourced first to YouGov and more recently to Pyxis.)

The questions asked in 2006 were not the same as the question asked in 2007. In May and December 2006, Newspoll told respondents: “Currently, while there is a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney used for medical and scientific purposes, there are no nuclear power stations being built in Australia.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against nuclear power stations in Australia?” The majority was against: 38–51, in May; 35–50, in December.

In March 2007, Newspoll changed the question, and framed it quite differently: “Thinking now about reducing gas emissions to help address climate change,” it asked, “are you personally in favour or against the development of a nuclear power industry in Australia, as one of a range of energy solutions to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?” On this, opinion was fairly evenly split: 45–40. The majority were not against; in fact, there was a plurality in favour. The Australian’s interpretation: in just four months, Dennis Shanahan and Sid Marris concluded, the attitude of Australians to nuclear energy had “dramatically reversed.”

Not so. After commissioning Newspoll to ask the 2006 question again, in April 2007, the Australia Institute found that the level of support for “nuclear power stations being built in Australia” was 36 per cent (35 per cent in December 2006), the level of opposition was now 46 per cent (previously, 50 per cent), and the “don’t knows” were now 18 per cent (previously 15 per cent). In short, whereas opposition had exceeded support by fifteen percentage points, 50­–35, it now exceeded support by ten points, 46–36 — a decline of five points, but no reversal, dramatic or otherwise.

This time around, both the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald have asked questions similar to the one Newspoll asked in February, but in polls of their readers not in a public opinion poll. Asked, in July 2023, whether Australia should “consider small nuclear reactors as one solution to moving away from fossil fuels?,” the Financial Review’s readers favoured “consider[ing]” the idea, 58–30. Asked, in July 2023, whether “small nuclear power reactors should be part of Australia’s energy mix,” the Herald’s readers opposed the idea, 32–55. Even if these questions had been included in national polls, the Australian might have baulked at citing the results of either, since it would have given oxygen to another brand.

There is evidence of a growth in support for nuclear power between June 2019 and March 2022, but there is no convincing evidence that points to “growing support” in the two years since. When the Lowy Poll asked respondents, in March 2022, whether they supported or opposed “removing the existing ban on nuclear power,” 52 per cent said they supported it, an increase on the level of support in March 2021 (47 per cent). And in September 2021, when Essential asked respondents whether they supported or opposed “Australia developing nuclear power plants for the generation of electricity,” 50 per cent said they supported nuclear power, a sharp increase on the level of support (39 per cent) it reported in June 2019. However, when Essential asked the question again, in October 2023, the level of support hadn’t moved.

The only evidence for a recent shift comes from Resolve. In October 2023, when Resolve first asked the question it asked in February 2024, 33 per cent (compared with 36 per cent in February) supported “the use of nuclear power” and 24 per cent (23 per cent in February) opposed it. (Nine Entertainment appears not to have previously published Resolve’s result for October.) Its February poll represents an increase of four percentage points in the gap between the level of support and the level of opposition, from nine points to thirteen.

But a shift of four points is well within the range one might expect given the vagaries of sampling — the “margin of error” that pollsters regularly parade but just as regularly ignore. Non-sampling error — a much bigger problem than pollsters acknowledge — also might have played a part, especially given a question as complex and confused as the one Resolve asked. Errors of both kinds are compounded by the widespread use by pollsters of opt-in rather than probability-based panels.

Jim Reed, who runs Resolve, is reported as saying that voters “were increasingly open to the potential of nuclear power now the Coalition was advocating for existing technology in large-scale plants.” According to Reed, support has “swung towards at least openness to nuclear power.” But Nine did not reveal what change, if any, Resolve had detected since October in the number without “a strong view” and “open to the government investigating its use (27 per cent in February).” Support, Reed added, was “weak… at the moment simply because people aren’t being asked to approve an actual site.” Even if he had measured strength, which it appears he hadn’t, one could equally imagine support becoming weaker, not stronger, once voters were asked to “asked to approve an actual site.”

What sort of voters did he think were now supportive or at least “open’? “We’ve got a new generation of younger people who are quite positive towards nuclear power,” Reed said. Was this “new generation” evident in October or did it only become evident in February? If it was evident in October, was it responsible for February’s four-point shift? Nothing in what Nine published allows us to say.

While Reed restricted himself, largely, to interpreting the actual data, in the Australian the commentary strayed much further. It wrote, for example, of “the costs and risks of renewable energy” having “become clearer.” But it offered no evidence that those costs and risks had become clearer to the public — not surprisingly, since these too were things about which Newspoll had not asked.

Leveraging the Newspoll result to predict that “most Australians would back a move to small scale nuclear power,” the headline in the online edition of the Australian ignored another distinction — not between strong and weak opinion but between polls that showed un-mobilised opinion and polls that showed mobilised opinion; so, too did Sky News. Any “move to small-scale nuclear power” would be politically contested, and once contested opinion might shift.

Subsequently, Benson ventured a more sober assessment of the Coalition’s prospects of carrying the day. “For Dutton to win the argument,” an argument that would take “courage” to mount, “any Coalition energy policy must be framed in a cost-of-living context that can demonstrate how nuclear power will deliver cheaper and more reliable power into the future,” he wrote. For Dutton to position nuclear power as “a central component” of his energy policy, Benson declared, was “as big and brave as it gets.”

Others went further. In a rare note of dissent within News Corp, James Campbell, national weekend political editor for Saturday and Sunday News Corp newspapers and websites across Australia, called the idea of Dutton “going to the next federal election with plans to introduce nuclear power” as “stark raving mad.” One thing the Coalition should have learnt from the Voice referendum was that “support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition.” And, he added, “there’s the unity problem. Do you really think Liberal candidates in ‘tealy’ places are going to face the front on this?”

Benson, meanwhile, had back-tracked. Pointing again to the distribution of opinion among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds, he advanced a quite different assessment: “the onus is now on Labor to convince Australians why we shouldn’t have nuclear power.” Chris Kenny, the Australian’s associate editor, thought “the nuclear argument could play well in the teal seats where there is an eagerness for climate change and a high degree of economic realism.”

If Benson was right the first time, however, and the Coalition needs to take care over how it frames the debate, then the Savanta data suggest that it may face a few challenges. Asked what impact nuclear energy would have on their “energy bills,” about a third (35 per cent) of its respondents said it would make their bills “much cheaper” or “slightly cheaper,” less than a third (28 per cent) thought it would make them “much more expensive” or “slightly more expensive,” but more than a third (38 per cent) said they either didn’t know or thought it would make “no difference.”

In the Essential poll, conducted around the same time, respondents saw little difference in “total cost including infrastructure and household price” between three energy sources: “renewable energy, such as wind and solar” (38 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 35 per cent, the “least expensive”), nuclear power (34 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 34 per cent, the “least expensive”), and “fossil fuels, such as coal and gas” (28 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 31 per cent, the “least expensive”).

Supporters of nuclear energy may also have to address some of the concerns Benson didn’t mention. In the Savanta study, 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (45 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (32 per cent) about “waste management”; 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (47 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (30 per cent) about “health & safety (ie. nuclear meltdowns, impact on people living nearby)”; and 56 per cent were either “very concerned” (23 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (33 per cent) about the “time it takes to build.”

In another poll, this one conducted by Pure Profile in the first half of 2022, respondents were asked how they would feel if a new nuclear power station were built in their city. Around 50 per cent said they would feel “uncomfortable,” more than a quarter “extremely uncomfortable”; just 7 per cent would have felt “extremely at ease.”

It would be reassuring to think that any newspaper that wanted its polling taken seriously would need to commission better polling than the polling the Australian was so keen to promote. But the Newspoll results were taken seriously by a rival masthead. “The Newspoll published in the Australian,” the political editor of the Australian Financial Review, Phillip Coorey wrote, “found there was now majority support for the power source.”

A week after its poll was published, and its results — with a nod to the Coalition — described as “powerful,” the Australian’s front page led with another “exclusive,” this time courtesy of the Coalition: its “signature energy policy” to be announced “before the May federal budget” would include “a plan identifying potential sites for small nuclear reactors as future net zero sources.” The following day, Benson wrote that Newspoll had “demonstrated strong support for the proposal that Dutton is working on announcing soon.” But the policy Dutton was working on, apparently, was not the policy Newspoll had tested. “The Coalition energy plan,” Benson revealed the same day in another front-page “exclusive,” was “likely to include next-generation large-scale nuclear reactors — not just the small-modular reactors.”

A newspaper that has a position on nuclear power and thinks of polls as an objective measure of public opinion should make sure that the questions it gets (or allows) pollsters to ask, and the results it gets journalists to write up, look fair and reasonable to those on different sides of the debate. In effect, this was the discipline George Gallup placed on himself when he signed up newspapers with divergent views.

Even if a newspaper wanted to use its polling to gee-up its preferred party, it might also think about using its polling to identify some of the risks of pursuing a policy it backed — risks that no party wanting to win an election could sensibly ignore — not just the opportunities to pursue that policy.

Whether Michael Schudson left polling out of his account of objectivity because it didn’t fit with his argument about objectivity as an ideology, or because he didn’t think it a part of journalism — neither journalism nor market research being a profession in the sense that law or medicine are professions — or simply because of an oversight, is unclear.

Better, more comprehensive, polling wouldn’t end the political debate or the debate about the objectivity of the polls. Nor should it. Nonetheless, it might be a good place from which to progress these debates.

Of course, for those who don’t want to foster a debate about the policy or about the polls, any plea for do better is entirely beside the point. •

The post Nuclear power, Newspoll and the nuances of polled opinion appeared first on Inside Story.

We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priest. Practice and policy. Show me the church manipulated the systems so that these guys wouldn’t have to face charges. Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again. Show me that it was systemic, that it came from the top down. We’re going after the system. I think that’s the bigger story.

The team, led by Walter Robinson, kept digging and eventually revealed not only the shocking extent of the abuse but the lengths to which the church hierarchy went to protect the abusers. The team’s 600-plus stories during 2002 eventually led to the resignation of Boston’s archbishop, Bernard Law.

The dramatisation of these events, Spotlight, was released in 2015 and won the Academy Award for best picture. Perhaps even more than All the President’s Men, it is a film that makes journalists feel proud of what their work can achieve.

Less than a decade later, though, Spotlight feels like a relic from a bygone era. Since 2015 the size and influence of the legacy news media have diminished markedly within a media ecosystem in which the majority of people in the United States and Australia get their news from social media.

As Brian Stelter documents in his books Hoax (2020) and Network of Lies (2023), news from established outlets like the New York Times sloshes around the internet alongside the toxic swill from Fox News and elsewhere. This tsunami of news and opinion is further polluted by torrents of misinformation and disinformation on social media, whether it’s about vaccines, the 2020 US presidential election or the Voice referendum.

Into this changed, and changing, environment comes Collision of Power, Baron’s memoir of a forty-five-year career in journalism that took him from the Miami Herald via the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times to eleven years editing the Boston Globe and eight years as executive editor of the Washington Post. He stepped down from that last posting, aged sixty-seven, in February 2021.

Baron has spent his entire career in newspapers and is resolutely old school in his belief in the continuing value of public interest journalism and orthodox notions of journalistic objectivity. Collision of Power reads as something of a collision between the world he grew up in, inspired by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1970s reporting on Watergate for the newspaper he eventually edited, and a world in which countless journalistic disclosures about Donald Trump’s manifest unfitness for office made not a jot of difference to his supporter base.

Does this mean Baron’s memoir should be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the dinosaurs of print? Well, unlike many journalists’ memoirs, this one is not marinated in tales of derring-do and all-night drinking marathons. Baron spent most of his career as an editor rather than on-the-road journalist and his book is all about the work.

I only know that Baron rarely drinks because he said so after winning the 2016 Christopher Hitchens prize, and then only to compare himself with the famously lubricated Hitchens and make a larger point — that they might have approached life differently but they shared the same journalistic values. But he does wryly acknowledge the accuracy of Schreiber’s portrayal of him in Spotlight as “humourless, laconic, and yet resolute.”

The three main threads running throughout Collision of Power are flagged in its subtitle: “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.” Baron was appointed executive editor of that newspaper in 2013, a time when Donald Trump’s name was still good for a laugh, courtesy of Barack Obama, at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. He stepped down the month after Trump left office still proclaiming he had won the previous November’s election.

Baron reflects that the Post, like the rest of the mainstream news media, had underestimated Trump’s appeal to many Americans. After the 2016 election he resolved to devote more resources to getting reporters out across the country to tap into ordinary people’s experiences and concerns. He also concedes that the Post put too much weight on Hillary Clinton’s slipshod secrecy about her emails during her presidential campaign.

Before the election, Baron and his journalists had learnt how Trump dealt with the media — how he alternated between feeding them stories and gossip, as he had done for years as a New York property developer, and threatening to cut off access or, worse, if he became president, change the libel laws to make it easier for public figures to sue journalists. As Trump railed about “the fake news media” and levelled personal insults at individual journalists, Baron stressed that “We’re not at war with the administration. We’re at work.”

The “work” was published continuously, including in a multi-authored book, Trump Revealed, that covered many aspects of the candidate’s life, from real estate to allegations of sexual harassment, and from his business ventures to his television career. The newspaper’s fact-checking unit tracked Trump’s runaway capacity for exaggeration and deceit, finding that during his presidency he told 30,573 lies.

When the Post’s David Fahrenthold decided to test Trump’s self-seeded reputation as a philanthropist, for instance, he found fallow ground. The Trump Foundation had received US$5.5 million but claimed to have pledged US$8.5 million to various causes. Notoriously, one donation made by Trump was for a portrait of himself that Fahrenthold’s citizen sleuths on social media found in his Florida golf resort. Fahrenthold also broke the story of the notorious Access Hollywood tapes.

Throughout the Trump presidency, the Washington Post and the New York Times competed hard to break stories that would hold Trump and his staff to account. The sheer number of important disclosures they made is easy to forget, partly because there seemed no end of chaos in the Trump administration and partly because no matter what Trump did he was exonerated because the Republicans had the numbers in the Senate. Almost without exception, they refused to examine issues on their merits and voted out of blind, fearful loyalty to Trump.

Baron’s careful recounting of the many scandals of the Trump administration is both a salutary and a dispiriting experience for the reader. Salutary because we may have forgotten how damaging Trump’s presidency was to so many (remember the one million–plus US deaths from Covid-19?) and dispiriting because he continues to evade responsibility for his actions.

As Trump heads towards the Republican nomination for the 2024 election, the various court cases brought against him are mired in process, delays and appeals. Baron’s memoir reminds us that it was the Post’s reporter Amy Gardner who broke the story that led to one of the most serious post–2020 election cases: how Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, received a phone call from Trump urging him to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the southern state.

According to the recording Gardner obtained, Trump said to Raffensperger: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Trump faces thirteen criminal charges for trying to undo the Georgia result.

Baron’s acute awareness of the threat posed by a second Trump presidency explains why he feels compelled to go over events in such detail. What he doesn’t reflect on is how and why Trump has been able to recover from the ignominy surrounding his 2020 loss. It is a commonplace of commentary to say that Trump’s rise is a symptom of disease in the Republican Party. But has there ever been a symptom so potent and deep-seated, given that the Republican Party is now the Trump Party in all but name?

The media’s role in aiding and abetting Trump’s rise from the ashes of 2020 is something Baron could also have reflected on. Trump is an attention magnet, and the news media has been unable to resist the pull of a figure who sees politics in the hyperventilating, hypermasculine style of pro wrestling. Unable but also, perhaps, unwilling: Les Moonves, the chairman of the CBS television company, infamously said in 2016 that Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

The evidence is in on the “may not be good for America” part, so it is truly galling to see the news media rushing to cover Trump’s every recent move in classic horserace style. Left behind at the starter’s gate is context, history or a strong enough sense of the grave risk to democracy.

As New York journalism professor Jay Rosen says, the organising principle for the news media as it covers the 2024 presidential election should be “not the odds, but the stakes.” That is, “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy, given what’s possible in this election.” He points to a 2023 piece by Brynn Tannehill in the New Republic as an example of “stakes commentary” whose analysis is both plausible and terrifying. It’s well worth reading.

Collision of Power’s second thread is Jeff Bezos’s surprise purchase in 2013 of the Washington Post from the Graham family, which had owned it since 1933. Like many other media outlets, the Post was struggling to adapt its business model to survive commercially in the digital media age.

One of the world’s richest men (he was worth US$25 billion at the time), Bezos bought the paper out of his own pocket for US$250 million rather than through the company he founded, Amazon. According to Baron, he did so out of a commitment to sustaining public interest journalism.

Bezos’s motivation and plans for the paper attracted a lot of scepticism at the time. Why would a leader of one of the global tech behemoths that had laid waste to the print media’s business model want to buy one of these financially ailing newspapers? Would he allow the Washington Post to report without fear or favour on Amazon, especially given the company’s long history of stonewalling journalists probing its hostility to labour unions, to take one example among many? Would he be an interventionist proprietor?

Soon after buying the paper, Bezos met staff in the “windowless, cavernous and thoroughly charmless ‘community room’” next to the newspaper’s auditorium and fielded questions, including one from famed veteran investigative reporter, Bob Woodward: “How and why did you decide to buy the Post?” (“Hardball,” cracked another journalist.) Bezos answered that he had asked himself three questions before making the decision. Was the newspaper an important institution? Yes, of course. Did it have a future? Yes, in the right circumstances. Did he have anything to contribute, especially as he lived on the opposite coast, in Seattle? Yes, he could provide “runway”; that is, long-term investment that would allow time for experiments to succeed or fail.

And on the question of the newspaper’s coverage of him and his company? “Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.” According to Baron, the newspaper did just that. Its resolve was tested in 2019 when the National Enquirer revealed Bezos had been conducting an affair with a media personality, Lauren Sánchez, including sending her “dick pics.” Baron says the Post covered the issue professionally but acknowledges it could not quite nail down whether the National Enquirer’s story was a political hit job.

The Enquirer, known to be close to Donald Trump, is a supermarket tabloid that engages in “catch and kill”: using a legally enforceable non-disclosure agreement, it buys exclusive rights to “catch” the damaging story from an individual before “killing” it for the benefit of a third party. Trump had been pursuing a vendetta against Bezos and what he called “the Amazon Post.”

On the question of proprietorial interference, though, Baron is adamant: “Bezos never interfered in the Post’s journalism during my seven years plus under his ownership, even if coverage of Amazon put the company in an unfavourable light. For all the speculation that Bezos would use the Post to exercise influence, I never saw any evidence he had or would. I got the sense Bezos relished the challenge of turning around the Post.”

Not that Bezos initially understood exactly how journalism is produced. Like Fred Hilmer, the management consultant who was Fairfax Media’s CEO between 1998 and 2005, Bezos was, and is, obsessed by metrics. He wanted the newspaper’s online website to devote more of its resources to “aggregating” other outlets’ stories into shorter pieces with clickbait headlines, and he wanted each story done in fifteen minutes.

Baron could see the idea’s commercial savvy — it was a “bargain-basement way to profit off the work of others” — but found it intensely annoying that the readers he wanted to consume the newspaper’s original reporting would be drawn in by these “digital gillnets.”

Bezos separated journalists into two categories: those whose work had a “direct impact on the product” (reporters) and those who had an indirect impact (editors). Hire more of the former and fewer of the latter, Baron was told, but he resisted. He believed good editors were essential to “directing and coordinating coverage and ensuring that it meets our quality standards.”

Baron tussled with Bezos on these issues throughout his tenure. He came to appreciate Bezos’s genuine insights into improving the company’s efficiency, and he welcomed Bezos’s commitment to deepening and broadening coverage by hiring more journalists. The number of political journalists at the paper doubled during Baron’s time there, and before the 2016 election an eight-person “rapid-response investigative team” was established. In time, improvements in how the paper’s stories were packaged and delivered to readers reaped rewards in both reach and subscription numbers.

Bezos also came to appreciate the particular role newspapers play in society and the particular culture a newsroom needs if its staff are going to publish stories that anger and upset powerful people, including presidents. When Ben Bradlee, a legendary predecessor of Baron who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, died in 2014, Bezos was not planning to attend the funeral until he received an email from Bob Woodward reminding him not only of Bradlee’s importance in the paper’s history but also that he was “the soul of the institution that’s now yours.” Bezos attended, and afterwards described it as an “awakening” for him.

The new owner imbibed the example of Katharine Graham, publisher between 1963 and 1991, whose steadfast support of the paper during Watergate earned her the ire of the Nixon administration, which planned payback by encouraging its allies to challenge the licences of the Graham family’s television stations.

Trump initially tried charming Bezos before asking him to use his position to secure favourable coverage. When Bezos rebuffed his demands, Trump launched a ferocious campaign against Amazon. He claimed the company should pay higher postal rates for its goods and more tax — a bit rich coming from someone who had boasted about not paying much tax.

Partly because of Amazon’s public unpopularity, many underplayed what Trump was doing. Baron, however, cites a 2019 article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine: “The story here is almost certainly a massive scandal, probably more significant than the Ukraine scandal that spurred impeachment proceedings. Trump improperly used government policy to punish the owner of an independent newspaper as retribution for critical coverage.”

Running alongside commercially oriented discussions are sharpening challenges to Baron’s sense of journalistic ethics. In the third thread in Collision of Power he discusses his stewardship of an important newspaper during what has been, and continues to be, a difficult period for the news media. He illustrates the challenges with detailed accounts of the cases of Wes Lowery and Felicia Sonmez.

Lowery won a Pulitzer for his reporting on police shootings in 2015; Sonmez was a breaking news reporter. Both fell foul of the newspaper’s social media policy by tweeting their views on various controversies, including Trump’s racist comments about four progressive congresswomen of colour (Lowery) and sexual assault allegations against high-profile sports stars and other journalists (Sonmez).

Lowery left the newspaper and began speaking out about what he saw as the bankrupt nature of objectivity in journalism. Last year he wrote a thought-provoking essay, “A Test of the News,” for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he highlighted how journalists from diverse backgrounds are feeling increasingly frustrated and disenchanted by how news stories are chosen and framed from what Lowery sees as a predominantly upper-class, white, male perspective.

The lack of diversity in American (and for that matter Australian) newsrooms has been a problem for many years. In 1971, according to the American Journalist Project, just 3.9 per cent of those working in newsrooms were Black. By 2013 the percentage figure had still only nudged up to 4.1.

Journalistic objectivity has also been the subject of controversy for many years. Historically, journalists and editors liked to think their decisions about news selection were arrived at dispassionately. At best they were discounting, and at worst they were oblivious to, the values — personal, cultural and ideological — underpinning their decisions. Even the language of the newsroom, with its talk of “a nose for news” or, more formally, “news values,” gives the game away. Whose nose, what values?

Behind the cloak of objectivity are hidden all sorts of journalistic shibboleths. The horserace coverage of electoral contests, for instance, has been analysed in the academic literature since at least 1980, but the news media seems unable or unwilling to recognise the problems of reporting politics as if it were a sporting event.

Another example: people in positions of power and authority, especially presidents and prime ministers, are accorded at least 50 per cent of space in news items simply because of their status. When an allegation is made against them, they must be asked for a response. When president George W. Bush built the case — spurious as it turned out — to invade Iraq in 2003, he was able to game the journalistic requirement for balance. Donald Trump, of course, has pushed that game several moves down the board.

Objectivity in a scientific sense is unattainable. Journalists are human beings. The news media industry’s relentless pushing of the idea that news reporting can be objective has simply sent an open invitation to everyone to play spot the bias.

What journalists can and should pursue is an objective method of verification, as is cogently outlined in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s essential guide, The Elements of Journalism. At its simplest, this means seeking out all perspectives on an issue, especially a contentious issue, and reporting viewpoints dispassionately. Drawing on a range of views blunts a journalist’s tendency to serve up their biases or simply opine.

That doesn’t mean accepting any and every view. As the quote variously attributed to Jonathan Foster and Hubert Mewhinney has it: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”

First published in 2001, Kovach and Rosenstiel’s book has been revised three times to keep up to date with trends and debates, including on newsroom diversity. They cite a Black business executive, Peter Bell, who says arguments for greater diversity in newsrooms presuppose that all Black people or all women think alike. “What is the Black position on any given issue? The answer, of course, is that there isn’t one.”

Conversely, a Black journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, says the rage she feels about racial injustice drives her reporting. Rather than the word objectivity, she talks about meticulous research, evidence and transparency as guiding principles that strengthen her storytelling.

For Kovach and Rosenstiel, “Independence from faction suggests there is a way to produce journalism without either denying the influence of personal experience or being hostage to it.” As much as greater diversity along racial, gender or gender-identity lines is needed, they argue that newsrooms also need intellectual and ideological diversity.

In 1971, 26 per cent of American journalists identified themselves as Republicans, 36 per cent as Democrats and 33 per cent as independents. By 2013, the number of Republicans had dropped to 7 per cent while the number of Democrats had fallen slightly to 28 per cent and the number of independents had risen to 50 per cent.

In practice, according to Kovach and Rosenstiel, this means “on the crush of deadline, journalists often expect everyone in the newsroom to think the same way rather than embracing debate inspired by personal background… It has been safer to default to a vision of journalistic consciousness that pretends politics doesn’t enter into it.”

Baron, for his part, supports the need for greater newsroom diversity and has seen the benefit of journalists using social media for their work. But he is also a socially conservative person for whom the story is what matters, not him or his opinions. As much as anything, that was what he disapproved of when Lowery (whose work he greatly admired) took to Twitter.

This is a valuable book by a self-effacing but outstanding editor. It is no small irony that, having been inspired by the newspaper’s Watergate reporting, Baron seems blind to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the first newspaper journalists to become celebrities. It was their book, All the President’s Men, and the film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (with Jason Robards as Bradlee) that created the Watergate legend.

The horse known as the unheralded journalist has long since bolted. The doors of the stable containing the social media horse were also flung open several years ago. The question now is whether media outlets and their journalists can find the balance between opinion and reporting and between free speech and company loyalty. •

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post
By Martin Baron | Flatiron Books | $74.99 | 548 pages

The post We’re not at war. We’re at work appeared first on Inside Story.

If Armstrong is ever to pursue such a possibility he could do a lot worse than take out options on two new books that tell the story of the original succession, when Rupert Murdoch inherited the keys to his media kingdom from his father Keith. Together, they not only provide a Succession-worthy dose of power plays and court intrigue; they also offer a profound insight into where Rupert Murdoch came from, what he would become and how he has shaped our world.

Walter Marsh’s Young Rupert provides a richly detailed and intricately interwoven close-up view of the young Murdoch on the make in 1950s Adelaide, building the business he inherited from his father. Media Monsters, the second volume of Sally Young’s exhaustively researched and endlessly fascinating history of the Australian media, tells that story in more condensed form but takes it further, as Murdoch extends his operations to the east coast, creates the Australian and throws all his weight behind the election of the Whitlam-led Labor Party in 1972.

The first succession, it turns out, involved at least as much Machiavellian intrigue, internecine struggle and human frailty as the present one; its consequences, it need hardly be said, are still being felt today.

The story begins, inevitably enough, with a very powerful man who, despite age and ailment, can’t bring himself to relinquish control. In 1949, Keith Murdoch was chairman of the board and managing director of Australia’s largest newspaper company, the Herald and Weekly Times, or HWT. There he had grown accustomed to unrivalled influence, claiming credit for the rise and fall of governments and prime ministers.

“I put him there and I’ll put him out,” Murdoch contemptuously said of prime minister Joseph Lyons in the 1930s. When Bob Menzies became prime minister for the second time he immediately sent Murdoch a note thanking him for using his newspapers to energetically campaign on his behalf. There was nothing self-effacing in Murdoch’s reply, which noted that the swing to Menzies was largest where his papers held sway.

But ill-health was catching up with Murdoch, forcing him to spend long periods away from the office. And so he announced a kind-of-retirement. While he would remain on as chairman, he was stepping down as managing director, charging one of his “bright young men,” Jack Williams, with responsibility for day-to-day affairs.

Except Murdoch couldn’t let go. He surrounded Williams with rivals, bad-mouthed him behind his back and sometimes to his face, and constantly interfered in day-to-day management. Williams had his faults, not least a serious drinking problem; one night he was arrested for urinating in Melbourne’s Alfred Place. But friends believed it was Murdoch who was driving Williams to drink.

The simmering tension between the chairman and his erstwhile protégé came to a head in late 1952 when Murdoch gathered together his fellow board members and persuaded them that Williams had to go. Having reclaimed undiluted control, Murdoch travelled out to his property on the Mornington Peninsula to spend the weekend.

And there he died. Within hours of the news, Williams had returned to the HWT offices where he ordered an engineer to blast open the now deceased chairman’s private safe. Armed with the revelations contained therein, he managed to persuade the remaining board members to reconsider their decision to terminate his own employment. At a hastily convened meeting he was reinstated — and the minutes of the previous meeting were expunged from the record.

For all that Keith Murdoch had refused, in the last years of his life, to let power slip from his hands at the Herald and Weekly Times, much of his energy had been focused elsewhere. As a minor HWT shareholder, he knew he would never be in a position to pass on the reins to his young son, Rupert. Thus he had devoted himself to building a media business of his own, one to which the laws of primogeniture would apply.

To set up his son’s inheritance, Murdoch had taken on substantial debt and a shady business partner, refusing to let his fiduciary duties to HWT shareholders stand in the way of securing the succession he cared about most. Or, as Young puts the matter bluntly, Murdoch “conned News Limited off [the HWT] for his son.”

Three years before his death Murdoch had told the HWT board that their position in Adelaide, where the company had effective control of both the city’s daily newspapers, was no longer tenable. In the wake of a royal commission into the press in Britain, monopoly power was under intense scrutiny. It would be prudent, he suggested, to pre-empt government intervention and offload one of their papers.

But Murdoch was less than candid about how such a move might benefit him personally. “When Murdoch told the annual meeting of shareholders in December 1949 that the HWT’s shares in News Limited had been sold,” writes Marsh, “he did not disclose that he was the purchaser.”

Murdoch’s extracurricular activities, as Marsh aptly describes them, were no secret by the time of his death. But his private papers revealed the full extent of these operations and the tremendous conflicts of interest they entailed. Like the secret negotiations Murdoch was conducting to defect from the HWT and merge his company with the owner of one of its main Melbourne rivals, the Argus. Or the fact that Murdoch’s partner in Queensland Newspapers, owner of the Courier-Mail, was none other than the underworld figure made famous by Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory, John Wren.

Jack Williams was back in charge, and one of his first tasks was to produce a glowing obituary for his mentor-turned-nemesis; he would also serve as a pallbearer at Murdoch’s funeral some days later. As Marsh wryly observes, “It’s hard to imagine any circumstances in which Sir Keith would have approved of this chain of events, but as Williams helped carry him from the church, he was in no position to object.”

Nor could Murdoch object as his old colleagues at the HWT sought to reacquire the company he had prized from it, News Limited. Barely had Keith been buried before his young widow, Elisabeth, was approached. The HWT, she was informed, was about to begin a Sunday edition of the Advertiser that would in all likelihood kill off News Limited’s Sunday Mail. Wouldn’t she prefer to sell first, they asked. Indeed, wouldn’t life be easier without the burdens of owning and running her late husband’s entire newspaper business?

Elisabeth didn’t take the bait. But — determined to clear the significant debt her late husband had racked up — she sold them the Courier-Mail. The young Rupert, who had hurried back from Oxford to claim his inheritance, was bitterly disappointed. “Cunning old bastards,” he called his dad’s former colleagues, but he must have recognised that his father was the most cunning of them all, and he was the prime beneficiary of the bastardry.

Thus Marsh and Young tell a story that revolves around not one succession but two — the fates of the very large business Keith Murdoch managed and the much smaller one he owned — and the conflict between the two. The resulting inheritance might have been smaller than both Keith and Rupert had hoped but, as Sally Young emphasises, it was nothing to complain about: three newspapers (the daily News and the Sunday Mail in Adelaide, and the Barrier Miner in Broken Hill) as well as a significant stake in the weekly women’s magazine New Idea, and a number of radio stations.

But young Rupert inherited more than assets with the potential to generate substantial revenue. He entered an elite club that exercised enormous control over Australia’s political and economic life. A large part of Sally Young’s achievement in Media Monsters is to lay bare the true extent of that power; in so doing she offers a profound insight into what Keith Murdoch really bequeathed his son.

As familiar as the troubling relationship between politicians and newspaper proprietors is, the effect of Young’s meticulous research is to surface details that still retain their power to shock (as well as containing remarkable contemporary resonances).

Witness the remarkable role of the press barons in the founding of the Liberal Party. In late 1944, Menzies was invited to dinner at the Melbourne home of a senior mining executive. In attendance were all the country’s leading media figures, including Keith Murdoch, Frank Packer and Rupert Henderson, manager of the Sydney Morning Herald. By the end of the evening, all those present had agreed to do everything in their power — which was considerable — to bring the Liberal Party into existence. “None of this secret compact was disclosed in the attendees’ respective newspapers,” Young sharply observes, “and nor is the remarkable dinner mentioned in official accounts of the Liberal Party’s history.”

The press proprietors collectively backed the party to the hilt over subsequent decades. Measured in terms of editorial support during federal elections, Australia’s daily newspapers supported the Liberals 90 per cent of the time during the fifties and sixties. But it’s the details of this cosy collaboration that are truly revealing. After the half-Senate election in 1953, Menzies sent a message to the editor of the Courier-Mail, Colin Bednall. “My dear Colin,” Menzies wrote, “I cannot go abroad without writing to let you know how much we have all appreciated the attitude of the Courier-Mail during the Senate campaign. No government could have asked for its case to be better or more enthusiastically presented.”

Menzies received an equally sympathetic hearing on radio. He requested, and received, extraordinary, unfettered access to the listening public through weekly ten-minute Man to Man broadcasts on forty stations across the country. The media barons hoped the opposition leader, H.V. Evatt, “would not complain or demand equal time,” Young explains. “He did both, but was ignored.”

The Liberal leader made sure these favours didn’t go unrequited, making a series of decisions that shaped the new medium of television in the interests of his powerful media allies. When he announced a royal commission into the introduction of television, the first commissioner chosen was the aforementioned Courier-Mail editor, Colin Bednall. Suitably stacked, the commission delivered predictably congenial recommendations, and Menzies did the rest to ensure the newspaper proprietors who already had a licence to print money would be well positioned to make even more.

The television market established by the Menzies government was at once highly concentrated and poorly regulated, lacking the pluralism and diversity of American television on the one hand, or the public service character of the British model on the other.

The UHF band already in operation in the United States could carry hundreds of television stations, including channels reserved for community groups and educational purposes; Australia opted for the much more restricted VHF band. In Britain commercial broadcasting took place under a public service model with similar obligations and programming standards to the BBC’s. In Australia, such regulation and oversight was successfully resisted, and private ownership of television transmitters made it practically impossible to revoke commercial television licences, and therefore to rigorously enforce any standards.

If blatant partisanship, the parlaying of political support into commercial benefit and the concomitant degradation of the public sphere would, in time, come to epitomise Rupert Murdoch’s way of doing business, what is remarkable in both Young’s and Marsh’s accounts is the extent to which he initially resisted playing this game. To be sure, he took to the role of publisher with gusto, fending off the HWT’s assault on his lucrative Sunday paper in Adelaide, acquiring Perth’s Sunday Times in 1954 (where he first exhibited his talent for tabloid sensationalism) and securing the license for the NWS-9 station when television came to Adelaide in 1958.

Marsh comprehensively establishes that Murdoch was always ruthlessly ambitious and that intellectual consistency was never really his thing (he believed in the benefits of competition as long as he was the beneficiary). But, for all that, the young magnate forms a striking contrast to his father, his contemporaries and, above all, his older self.

It may just be a historical curiosity that the young Rupert was an ardent socialist known as Comrade Murdoch at Geelong Grammar; that he installed a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford; or that he engaged in an admiring correspondence with Ben Chifley. But even after he had taken over the family business his politics retained a decidedly leftist hue. In Adelaide he hobnobbed with future Whitlam minister Clyde Cameron, and flirted with the Fabian Society. “He was much further left than me,” Cameron recalled in his memoir.

Even if Cameron exaggerated for effect, his recollection clearly contains a strong kernel of truth. Sally Young describes the Adelaide News in the 1950s as “the most liberal daily paper in the country, one with a social conscience that published very different views to the establishment Advertiser.” Similarly, in its early years the Australian was exceptional in its willingness to question conservative governments. It was the sole morning newspaper to editorialise against Australia’s commitment of troops to Vietnam. Then, of course, there was Murdoch’s energetic and enthusiastic campaigning for Labor in 1972, prior to his rejection of Whitlam and his long march to the right.

The most revealing insight into Murdoch’s politics in this period is found in Marsh’s rich account of the case of Arrernte man and itinerant carnival worker Rupert Max Stuart, sentenced to death in 1959 for the gruesome rape and murder of a young girl. In the wake of Stuart’s trial, Murdoch’s News ran a series of reports that brought the veracity and justice of the conviction into serious question. First, it was revealed that Stuart had neither translator nor legal representation on hand when he made a confession; then that it had been beaten out of him; and finally that he appeared to have an alibi. With financial support from the News, a concerned clergyman had tracked down Stuart’s former employer, now interstate, who testified that the convicted man was with him at the time the crime occurred. PRIEST: STUART HAS PERFECT ALIBI, ran the headline in the News, DELAY THIS HANGING.

South Australian premier Tom Playford announced a royal commission and a one-month reprieve for Stuart, and one British newspaper described Murdoch’s editor, Rohan Rivett, as the “Zola of South Australia.” But Murdoch’s convictions were about to be tested further, when the royal commission the News had done so much to establish ended in acrimony, with Stuart’s counsel, Jack Shand, walking out. COMMISSION BREAKS UP — SHAND BLASTS NAPIER, read one News headline; SHAND QUITS — “YOU WON’T GIVE STUART FAIR GO” blared another.

If, with the passing of half a century, these statements seem like a pretty reasonable rendering of what had transpired, that was not how they were received at the time. The News was deemed to have impugned the integrity of the court, and Rivett and Murdoch found themselves facing a series of libel and seditious libel charges. They stuck it out and, ultimately, the charges were dropped but only after a long, expensive and intimidating legal action. Meanwhile, Max Stuart’s conviction stood, and he served out a lengthy jail sentence (the question of his guilt remains murky). But his life was spared.

It’s impossible to absorb these events, also comprehensively covered in Media Monsters, without reflecting on the story of a similar — and similarly horrifying case — that occurred three decades earlier. On the last day of 1922 a twelve-year-old girl was found raped and murdered in an alley off Melbourne’s Little Collins Street. Soon a local publican, Colin Ross, was in the police’s crosshairs. The editor of the Melbourne Herald, Keith Murdoch, was thrilled: he had learned firsthand from his British mentor, Lord Northcliffe, what a good murder could do for circulation.

Under Keith’s direction, the sensational allegations against Ross were flogged for all they were worth, sales nearly doubled, and Ross — who was exonerated by DNA evidence seventy-five years later — was convicted and hanged. So notorious was the Herald’s commercialisation of the case that its new headquarters on Flinders Street, built in the years following Ross’s hanging, were long known as the Colin Ross Memorial. The Colin Ross Memorial was where the teenaged Rupert Murdoch would get his first taste of the newspaper business. It is difficult to believe the case was far from his mind as he campaigned against the execution of Max Stuart throughout 1958 and 1959.

For all that the Stuart case exhibited Murdoch’s long-lost idealism, it also taught the young proprietor a critical lesson about the newspaper business and the consequences of offending the advertisers who were his main source of revenue. With the case still in full swing Murdoch told Clyde Cameron, “I’m in a spot Clyde. Myers have phoned to say that unless we drop our campaign in favour of Stuart, they are going to withdraw all of their advertising from the News and that means a lot to us…”

In the short term, Murdoch withstood the pressure, but only weeks after the conclusion of legal action against the News, he sacked Rohan Rivett. Keith Murdoch had confidently predicted, a year before his death, that his then socialist son would “eventually travel the same course of his father.” This sacking was one of the first signs that Keith would in time be proved completely correct (with interest on top); it also indicated that Rupert had fully registered the true commercial consequences of his editor’s campaigns.

Around the same time, Murdoch learned an even more important lesson about surviving and thriving in a business in which the majority of revenue came from selling advertising, when he witnessed the spectacular failure of the Melbourne Argus. In 1949, the Argus’s editorial line had taken a sharp turn to the left, a marked departure from the arch-conservatism that had characterised the paper for most of the preceding century.

The shift from right to left was effected at dizzying speed and in the process the paper’s new British owners made a number of serious missteps. But, as Sally Young explains, when the Argus was shuttered in 1957 its audience had actually grown. The problem was that “advertisers had shunned the bolshy, down-market, more left-wing paper. That was the deathblow, rather than a loss of readers,” writes Young. “When the paper closed in 1957, it had 170,000 readers, and that was 42,000 more than the Age, and a higher circulation than five other capital city dailies had at that time.” The Argus failed because its moderate leftwards tendency attracted less pecunious readers who were less sought after by advertisers.

The case of the Argus is crucial to understanding the nature of the Australian press in Rupert Murdoch’s formative years. The ideological commitments of proprietors provides one explanation for the overwhelming conservatism of Australia’s newspapers, but not the only one. After all, the proprietors had to win a readership and this meant selling their papers to a nation that was roughly equally politically divided. Even at its high watermark in 1966, the Coalition’s two-party-preferred vote was only 57 per cent — evidence of a far more politically divided nation than its daily newspapers suggested.

What the Argus experiment clearly indicated was that the preferences of readers were of secondary financial importance to the preferences of advertisers for the attention of a particular type of reader — one with high disposable income. Left-wing working-class newspapers faced a structural obstacle: a lesson not lost on Rupert Murdoch who, Young notes, “would use the Argus as a cautionary tale. He said a lack of advertiser support killed it and only 5 per cent more advertising would have made a big difference to its future.”

In their seminal history of the British press, Power Without Responsibility, James Curran and Jean Seaton attribute a decisive role to advertising in determining the commercial viability of newspapers since the nineteenth century. And they also tell a story of central importance in the career of Rupert Murdoch: the strange death of a newspaper called the Daily Herald and its rebirth under a new name, the Sun.

The demise of the Daily Herald was similar in nature to that of the Argus, only amplified in scale and consequence. When it was shut down in 1964 its circulation was 1.26 million, greater than that of the Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined. Surveys indicated that its readers took in more of their paper than the readers of other major dailies — and felt more attached to it. Its problem? It ultimately couldn’t compete financially with rivals who enjoyed the favour of advertisers. The Daily Herald readership might have been very large but it was overwhelmingly working-class, with minimal disposable income, reflective of the paper’s radical politics, and thus relatively unattractive to advertisers. Despite obtaining 8.1 per cent of national daily circulation in its final years, the Herald received only 3.5 per cent of net advertising revenue.

A decade before its downfall, the Daily Herald’s owners had recognised that they faced a choice. Either they could go really mass-market and cater to the advertisers who were more interested in quantity than “quality.” To do this, the paper would have to shed its political identity, and associated coverage of union matters, and ratchet up the human-interest stories, cartoons and horoscopes. Or they could go for quality by focusing on attracting the young, affluent audience that advertisers were willing to pay top dollar for.

The rebranding of the paper as the Sun was a belated attempt to pursue this latter strategy, but its half-hearted execution lacked strong internal support. And so, in 1969, the floundering paper was offloaded to Rupert Murdoch. Unlike the previous owners, Murdoch decided to take the Sun down-market and brought an unabashed and unqualified commitment to doing so. “I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it,” was the edict delivered to the Sun’s new editor. Circulation doubled within twelve months.

Rupert Murdoch is, of course, far from the first person to cast aside youthful ideals in pursuit of profit and power, or to tread the path from rebellion to reaction, a journey abetted in his case by the coincidence of middle age with the global turn to neoliberalism. But if a person is ultimately an opportunist it pays to attend to the opportunities the world affords them. The young media mogul on the make was consistently confronted with a powerful set of commercial incentives that decisively shaped his course: avoid offending advertisers and maximise the audiences that advertisers are willing to pay for.

When Murdoch made his next big move, to the United States, he entered a media landscape that had been powerfully shaped by the same forces he had encountered in Australia and the United Kingdom. In the 2019 book No Longer Newsworthy the American media scholar Christopher R. Martin describes how postwar American newspapers became increasingly defined by the pursuit of high socioeconomic status readers, the kind advertisers desired. Editorially, that meant a declining coverage of industrial relations, and strikes in particular. And when strikes were reported, the framing shifted from open-minded engagement with workers’ demands to an increasingly dominant focus on inconvenienced consumers.

As reporters were taken off industrial relations beats, financial self-help columns and coverage of the stock market increased. And as the mainstream media stopped telling working-class stories, right-wing cultural warriors were only too willing to fill the vacuum, with figures like televangelist Pat Robertson and ultraconservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh stepping into the void — as, eventually, did Murdoch’s Fox News. But, says Martin, America’s “right-wing media complex got its start with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post in 1976.” •

Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire
By Walter Marsh | Scribe | $35.00 | 352 pages
Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires
By Sally Young | UNSW Press | $49.99 | 576 pages

The post The first succession… and its consequences appeared first on Inside Story.

Petty in the Australian, 25 March 1967. Flinders University Museum of Art

In a cross made of newsprint, the words on the upright are Ho Chi Minh’s and those on the crosspiece are Lyndon Johnson’s. You can imagine the indigestion at the breakfast tables of a still very white Australia when politicians’ words burdened a shockingly Vietnamese Christ on a modern via dolorosa. It isn’t pretty or funny, but it is morally and intellectually arresting. It has historical and symbolic depth as well as contemporary bite.

If you’re looking for ground zero of the idea that cartoonists are “of the left” in Australia, Petty’s stint at the Australian during its first decade is it. He sided with the little guy, then asked how the system worked to keep him little and the usual suspects (captains of industry, financiers, the military industrial complex) big. His cartoons can be busy because he thinks in systems and mechanisms and wants to make them operate more fairly and generously.

Petty was always inclined to treat politicians more as lackeys of vested interests and playthings of historical processes than as proper villains in their own right. This, I think, made him deeper than most other cartoonists or, indeed, most other satirists. I put no statute of limitations on this view. Juvenal looks like a grumpy whinger with a brilliant turn of phrase by comparison. Bill Leak could play the man superbly in his caricatures and punchlines, but the shafts of lightning didn’t shed consistent light on Australia as it is, and as it could be.

Petty’s cartoons did just that. The critique changed with the times, as the times demanded, but the golden thread of wanting a better, fairer, more intelligent and independent nation never disappeared into the fabric of daily affairs. On my first visit to interview him in the late nineties, he pointed me to a cupboard where there were “a few pictures of mine.” It was less than a dozen — Petty visited the past often to learn lessons, but never to dwell there. He lived for tomorrow’s paper, and the current art project.

He came a long way from a fruit farm in Doncaster as a child of the Depression, but he never lost the practical attitude to problems and sense of guiding purpose. Every cartoon asks something like “How do you fix this bloody thing, and get it to do what we want?” More or less sequentially, his satire had four great themes.

I have already illustrated the first — the horror and stupidity of war, particularly the Vietnam war. He had been to London and witnessed the collapse of Empire made explicit in decolonisation and the Suez Crisis of 1956. He returned to Australia via Southeast Asia in time to be cartooning during the death of Kennedy, the resignation of Menzies and, most importantly, the incremental decision to join the United States in Vietnam.

Rupert Murdoch’s adventure in national influence, the Australian, was in its initial (wildly) progressive phase, and Petty was its standard-bearer. He was half a generation older than baby boomers threatened with conscription and increasingly inclined to flood the street with moratoria. He also blew up the pomposity of Anzac Day in 1969 with a dismembered soldier’s corpse from the actual war diverting a pious procession of “lest we forget.”

Meanwhile, the Coalition governments were deteriorating comically, and Petty especially “owned” the image of Billy McMahon as a hapless, vainglorious fool with very big ears:

Broadsheet, November 1972. National Gallery of Victoria

It’s funny, in a bitter kind of way, how often people have had recourse to the “worst PM since McMahon” trope in recent years. I wonder if Morrison has reset the clock on that one.

In a series of cartoon books as well as at the Australian, he sought to shape the rebirth of interest in national character and destiny in the dawning post-British age. In the heroic age of this project, the hero — and the exemplar of Petty’s second theme — was Gough Whitlam:

The Australian, 14 November 1972.

The fulfilment of the dream of an open, egalitarian and cosmopolitan Australia under Whitlam was messy and exciting — Petty even donated a logo to the 1974 election campaign. The big hump in his career was when the dream collided with the first of several stages of reaction to the dismissal at the end of 1975. Malcolm Fraser wrongly assumed that normal postwar boom conditions would return with sensible chaps back in the big white cars, a trick Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison tried in recent years with even less success.

Petty spent the second half of his life exploring his third and fourth themes, a long, intelligent dissent from this “Lucky Country” mentality and from the Reaganite confidence in market forces that came in its train. He never tired of showing how and why the economy should serve human needs and desires rather than its own geometry of indices. And he was farmer’s son enough to recognise that you have to protect long-term interests from human rapacity. Two cartoons, from 1977 and 2015 respectively, show that you can be right a long time as a satirist and not necessarily be attended to:

The Age, 30 April 1977.

The Age, 17 August 2015.

When the Age suggested that he stop cartooning in 2016, at the ridiculously premature age of eighty-six, he was annoyed and disappointed. He lived for the work, and kept drawing anyway, right up to the last months. He understood ideas and the weight of the past, but it was the next paper, the next crop, the next generation that always mattered most. His optimism was informed by clear-eyed experience but was also incredibly robust.

What would he say to the nation today? With his genius for being stern yet quizzical, I don’t think he’d mind having this cartoon thrown back into the current debate over what it is to be a proper nation, one true to its past, present and future:

The Age, 20 April 2015.

Though he is gone now, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to look again into the satirical mirror he held up to us for so many decades. We might see something we could fix. •

The post Petty’s golden thread appeared first on Inside Story.

It was frightening and depressing. Some reporters were even attacked in the street. Hidden by the violent actions and rhetoric, though, was another, less explicit message. What the protesters wanted most was basic, accurate information — including about themselves — even as they were attacking those most likely to provide it.

At the order of the police, the livestream from the news media helicopter was cut. (The ban was later overturned by the courts.) The protesters had been using it to find each other, and without it they were lost. Appeals went out on Telegram for people in tall buildings to post shots of the street to help guide them.

Confusion grew about where to meet, and where the police were. Social media channels were filled with conflicting messages and instructions. Almost certainly the groups were being disrupted by misinformation from outsiders, and perhaps also from undercover police.

After the first frightening two days, dwindling groups of protesters roamed the city, sometimes literally in circles, trying to find their fellows and amass sufficient numbers to mount a meaningful protest. In this chaotic and leaderless display of civic unrest, social media could only get them so far.

The lesson? To take effective political action you need a lot of things, not least information you can trust. But that’s the optimistic take; pessimistic conclusions can also be drawn.

While mainstream media organisations needed to hire private security to protect their journalists, others were out in the field without need of protection. These “alternative” media and “citizen journalists” included the Real Rukshan and the far-right Rebel News. Rukshan’s live YouTube feeds of the demonstration even gained the attention of mainstream media, which is one of many ironies. The protesters loved him, chanting his name when he appeared among them. He lacked the access to interview the premier or CFMEU boss John Setka, as he said on his livestream, but he could speak to the people on the streets.

All this is food for reflecting on the widespread hostility to mainstream media, and the difference between professional and “alternative” or “citizen” journalism.

Campaigns against mainstream media outlets from what we might broadly call the left have been a feature of the pandemic, especially in the lockdown capital, Melbourne. (I’m using the words left and right as a crude shorthand. They are inadequate descriptors of the spectrums of beliefs in the groups I am talking about.)

Rather than advocating violence, these campaigns have used social media to encourage people to cancel their subscriptions to the city’s newspapers, the Herald Sun and the Age, because they are perceived to have undermined the Labor state government’s public health measures and failed to take the side of their readers against business figures who want the lockdowns to end.

The longest-standing and most organised campaign has targeted the Herald Sun. It was begun by Dave Milner, a columnist for the Shot — itself an “alternative” outlet, and an offshoot of the Chaser — which has added reportage and commentary to its traditionally satirical repertoire. Milner wrote a series of articles excoriating the Murdoch press for its critical reporting of the first lockdown, and for doing an “appalling job of conveying what life is like here to the rest of the country… making a difficult situation even harder.”

In October last year, Milner drew a comparison with the British city of Liverpool, which successfully boycotted Rupert Murdoch’s Sun after it blamed the survivors of the 1989 Hillsborough stadium crush for the deaths of its ninety-six victims. The Herald Sun was doing something similar, he said, and deserved a similar boycott. “It needs to be socially unacceptable to read and sell the Herald Sun… Cafes shouldn’t stock it. Newsagents shouldn’t sell it. If people see it in the supermarket it should be moved to the toilet paper aisle where it belongs… This is personal now, like it was for Liverpool.”

In what Milner describes as an “organic” response to his articles, the Shot began to sell stickers and other items bearing slogans such as “Fuck Murdoch” and “Don’t Read the Herald Sun.” About 30,000 stickers have been sold, he says, mostly to Victorians. “Don’t Read the Herald Sun” and “Fuck the Herald Sun” remain the top sellers.

More recently, a much lower-key campaign, largely confined to Twitter, has run against the Age in the wake of its publishing what has become known as the “enough” editorial on 1 September this year. The Age called on public health authorities to better factor in the damage caused by lockdowns.

As media academic Denis Muller commented in the Conversation, it received a visceral reaction, feeding into the highly politicised narratives of hope and threat that have become inextricably bound up in the pandemic response in Australia. In a letter to subscribers about the “extraordinary” response, editor Gay Alcorn acknowledged that some people had cancelled their subscriptions, but said they were outweighed by new subscribers.

To its credit, the Age published letters to the editor slamming the editorial as well as boosting it, and also republished Muller’s piece.

I hope you’re getting the picture here. Mainstream media outlets no longer have the field to themselves. They are still key players, but in a messy, ratty, vibrant and sometimes frightening ecosystem. They are constantly being nipped and jabbed. At the extremes, during the far-right protests on Melbourne’s streets, their reporters have been threatened and physically attacked.

The Age’s “enough” editorial sparked a Twitter campaign kicked off by the anonymous @PRGuy17, in which people were urged to cancel their subscriptions. @PRGuy17 has been one of Twitter’s most prominent supporters of premier Dan Andrews and the #istandwithDan hashtag. (He did not respond when I sought comment.)

So have the campaigns calling on people to cancel their subscriptions had any impact in the world outside the silos of social and alternative media? The anecdotes are many, but the truth is hard to determine.

There’s no perfect way of measuring news media readership across all platforms, but the industry has made various attempts. This year the Enhanced Media Metrics Australia system, or EMMA, launched with fanfare eight years ago, was dropped and replaced by Think News Brands, or TNB, which uses data compiled by Roy Morgan. Whereas the EMMA data was published quarterly, the TNB figures have so far been available only in boosterish reports that don’t break down readership by individual masthead.

On request, though, TNB provided me with these figures for news readership among people fourteen and older at two points in the pandemic:

Herald Sun
June 2020: 4.593 million
June 2021: 4.719 million

Age
June 2020: 5.913 million
June 2021: 5.963 million

Not much encouragement there for the cancellation campaigners — and this pattern accords with research by the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre.

But I don’t think the TNB figures give us a definitive answer to the question of whether the mainstream media are pissing off their subscribers. They are based on the assumption that the outlets’ readership is a certain multiple of the numbers of paid subscriptions. News Corporation’s most recent quarterly earnings statement shows the Herald Sun has 146,026 paid subscribers, combined print and digital, as of 30 June 2021. The non-subscription paid circulation of its print masthead — through newsstands and newsagents — which wasn’t declared this year, was 213,964 in 2020.

As for the Age, the TNB–Roy Morgan report claims 5.9 million readers over the age of fourteen, which is about 400,000 more than Victoria’s total over-fourteen population.

Given these outlets are paywalled, how can they have readerships so much larger than their subscription and other paid-circulation base? Asked to explain, Roy Morgan offered “a couple of things to consider.” These included out-of-state readership on digital platforms, and the fact that some “off-platform aggregations,” such as Apple News, don’t have paywalls. The figures also included readership in cafes, offices and the like — though that would surely be insignificant during lockdown.

Even taking all that on board, I regard these figures as rubbery and optimistic. A reader revolt could well be hidden within them.

When I sought comment from the Age and News Corp about the impact of the campaigns, a News Corp spokesperson told me that paid subscriptions for the company’s Australian mastheads were growing strongly — from 647,600 in June last year to 810,000 this year — “demonstrating how strongly our journalism resonates with mainstream Australia.”

The editor of the Age, Gay Alcorn, sent a longer and more thoughtful response. She acknowledged that the paper was less than perfect. “Do we sometimes publish a poor headline? Yes. Do we sometimes do a story that I worry later was not quite there? Of course.” She said:

The accusation seems to be that anything critical or questioning of state government Covid policy is inherently undermining of public health messages and is therefore irresponsible to publish. It has been strange at times. A piece by Greens candidate Celeste Liddle questioning the Victorian curfew was attacked as irresponsible to publish — I am not sure most people who attacked the headline even read the piece. A piece by Jon Faine — who our conservative readers say is pro-Andrews — was attacked because he suggested that lockdown fatigue was real and the government had to change its language to reflect that. This was supposedly an example of Age hostility to Andrews.

I think our health and science coverage has been second to none. Our state political coverage is the best in Victoria. We have striven to go deeper, with Explainers and Q and As on complex issues. We have covered in depth the vaccine rollout, the long-term impact on the CBD economically and socially, the equity divide revealed by the pandemic, the impact on universities, the civil rights issues, Australians stranded overseas, and many more. Recently, we sought reader questions about what they wanted to know about the roadmap and were inundated with questions and we continue to answer them. That is useful journalism, essential during these times.

And in an increasingly polarised media landscape, she added, the Age was “different” because it sometimes challenged its readers’ prejudices.

This is an important point. Most professional journalists, asked to distinguish themselves from “citizen journalists” and alternative media, would reach for concepts such as adherence to the facts and impartiality.

But what are we to make of those claims when faced with front-page headlines from the Herald Sun such as “Premier’s Grab for Absolute Power” and “Dictator Dan no longer just a nickname.” The paper has run good, straight reporting on the pandemic as well, but at times it seems to believe that taking a provocative and partisan stance is just as much a part of its business model as it is for the Real Rukshan.

The Age has not been so partisan, but it too has sometimes mixed reportage with opinion and failed to adequately correct errors, including on public health matters.

All this means the line between professional and partisan “alternative” media is less clearly drawn than journalists like to pretend. Which is another way of saying that — even as business models erode and attacks mount — the mainstream needs to do better.

The University of Canberra research shows that trust in media among its survey respondents rose to 53 per cent at the beginning of the pandemic — a record figure. By June this year, though, just 43 per cent of respondents said they trusted the news media. Meanwhile the number of heavy news consumers had fallen back to four points below pre-pandemic levels.

These figures suggest that readers are indeed turning away. That should worry us all. As those protesters found, we all need information on which we can rely; without it, we are going round in circles, hardly knowing who or where we are. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Information warfare appeared first on Inside Story.

In fact, the time it has been allowed to brew is perhaps the most worrying thing about it. It suggests, if any more evidence were needed, that our system of media self-regulation is far from fit for purpose.

The matter has been brought to a head by an article published by Matthew Ricketson in the latest issue of Australian Journalism Review, in which he alleges that the Australian has exercised an effective veto over his serving on adjudication panels concerning its journalism. Ricketson sits on the Press Council as a representative of the journalists’ union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, or MEAA, a position that has been controversial.

Interviewed for this article, Ricketson makes his criticism in an even more pointed fashion. “I think it is outrageous that any publisher should be trying to dictate to the Press Council who should and who shouldn’t sit on an adjudication panel hearing a complaint about their journalism… It flies in the face of what genuine self-regulation of the news media is about.”

When I put a series of questions to the Australian, it responded with a short burst from editor-in-chief Christopher Dore. “Professor Ricketson’s new article only confirms our belief he has a genuine conflict of interest. It is an excellently articulated piece explaining why our concerns about his personal conflicts were thoroughly justified and remain so.”

In other words, there is no easy way out of this conflict.

The Press Council confirms that the matter will be discussed at its next meeting, on 19 November. Whichever way it goes, we can expect outrage, perhaps walkouts, and further doubts about the council’s ability to do its job.

The story begins ten years ago when Ricketson was appointed as a member of the Independent Inquiry into the Media and Media Regulation, created by the Labor government in the wake of Britain’s telephone hacking scandal and headed by Ray Finkelstein QC. The inquiry’s central recommendation was that there should be government-funded regulation of the news media because the Press Council and other existing mechanisms were not up to the job. The industry united in opposition to his report.

From this distance, it’s hard to recall the vehemence of the attacks on Finkelstein, his colleagues and Stephen Conroy, the minister who commissioned the report. Conroy was depicted as Stalin on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. As Ricketson recalls, “The next day, the newspaper apologised — to Stalin.”

In defending themselves from the threat of external regulation, the media organisations talked up how well the Press Council worked — even though all but one of its former and current chairs had told Finkelstein that the lack of independence from its major funders, the big media groups, was hobbling its ability to do its job. (For more on this history, see my piece from earlier this year.)

Finkelstein’s recommendations came to nothing, but Ricketson’s card was clearly marked.

Fast-forward to 2015, when the MEAA asked Ricketson to be its representative on the Press Council. This was odd, because the MEAA, like most of the industry, had opposed the Finkelstein recommendations, in which Ricketson had clearly had a role. Nevertheless, he accepted the post on the understanding, according to an MEAA statement, that he would represent the union’s policy positions.

“I was keen to see how I could contribute to effective self-regulation,” Ricketson writes in the Australian Journalism Review, “especially as the Press Council was now better resourced and the industry affirmed its commitment.”

Predictably, the usual Murdoch mascots fired up about his appointment and he became the latest in a long line of public figures to be subjected to one of the Australian’s campaigns of sustained vituperation. The tone of the five articles, two comment pieces, an editorial, a diary item and a cartoon can be judged from a piece by the paper’s excitable legal affairs correspondent, Chris Merritt, who wrote that “Matthew Ricketson deserves no blame for his appointment to the Press Council. To criticise him would be as senseless as blaming a rabid dog for having rabies. The blame rests with those who have overlooked his innate nature [sic].”

Eventually the campaign subsided, as these things do. But then, in 2017, Ricketson contributed to a series in Crikey about how the Australian targets its critics — referencing campaigns against Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Tim Flannery, Gillian Triggs and (I must declare) me.*

It was the Crikey series that spurred the Australian’s managing editor, Helen Trinca, to write to the Press Council arguing that Ricketson had an “inherent bias” against the publication and demanding he be excluded from any adjudication panels concerning it. The paper declared it would not take part in or accept any adjudication in which Ricketson was involved.

Trinca’s demand fell between two chairs, literally. Council chair David Weisbrot had left over a controversy about the appointment of Carla McGrath, deputy chair of GetUp!, as a public member. Many people — including me — considered that appointment inappropriate, but what horrified Weisbrot was how decisions of the council as a whole were being attributed to him by News Corp. The current chair, Neville Stevens, had not yet been appointed.

In other words, just in case the irony is not clear, a complaint about Ricketson pinging the Australian for vituperative personal attacks failed to be dealt with partly because the Press Council’s chair had resigned because of vituperative personal attacks by the Australian.

The council considered the Ricketson matter, but it was not resolved. Since then, says Ricketson, he has made himself available to sit on complaint adjudication panels but has been appointed to just four, none of them concerning the Australian.

He has raised the issue on several occasions, he says, “with increasing urgency. The council’s chair, Neville Stevens, told me at the council’s most recent meeting, on 13 May, that he would look into the issue of me sitting on panels. Perhaps he will, but I have heard nothing.”

In the intervening period, the MEAA has announced that it intends to leave the Press Council and is now serving out a notice period.

The council confirmed to me that the November meeting will “consider” the matter. It also said it had “comprehensive policies in place to deal with actual, perceived or potential conflicts of interest.” Comprehensive, perhaps. But clearly not speedy.

Reassuringly, in this context, the council recently issued a robust adjudication declaring that the Australian had breached fairness and accuracy guidelines in its coverage of gender-affirming healthcare. Ricketson obviously had nothing to do with that one, but the Australian nevertheless refused to accept it, using a combative editorial to argue that the decision was “wrongheaded” and “swayed unduly by a concerted campaign by activists.”

In further evidence that the newspaper has had an “irony-ectomy,” as Ricketson puts it, the Australian claimed to be a victim of “cancel culture.”

So what are we to make of the Ricketson matter? I was among those who thought it odd that he accepted the MEAA appointment in the first place, given the Finkelstein history. But ultimately that was a matter between him and those he was representing.

The Australian suggests in some of its communications that Ricketson has a conflict of interest. There is nothing in his conduct to suggest that’s the case.

Rather, the issue is perceived bias. But is he considered biased because he has criticised the Australian or because it has criticised him? And if critique does equal bias, a very long list of media academics and journalists would be disqualified from adjudicating complaints against various outlets. It is also, of course, part of a journalism academic’s job to critique. And Ricketson has repeatedly acknowledged that the Australian also does excellent journalism.

In other contexts, the Australian would surely assert that it is possible to critique public figures and institutions without being biased against them.

But the real shame is that this matter has been allowed to remain unresolved for so long. After nearly four years of inaction since the Australian’s complaint against Ricketson was first received, the matter can no longer be dodged. Could the council be about to lose another member — News Corp, its largest funder? Or will Ricketson walk — a largely symbolic move, given the MEAA is already going?

The Press Council’s travails don’t end there. The public hearings of the current Senate inquiry into media diversity — the inquiry spurred by Kevin Rudd’s petition to parliament calling for a royal commission into the Murdoch press — have revived memories of the Finkelstein finding that the council “suffers from serious structural constraints” and lacks “the necessary powers or the required funds to carry out its designated functions.”

On the other hand, the council recently welcomed a new chief executive, appointed after an extensive search. The woman in the hot seat is Yvette Lamont, previously group general counsel and company secretary of APN News and Media, now HT&E Limited.

I wonder if she realises what she is letting herself in for. •

* Further declarations could go on for a while, but those who are interested in my own history with the Australian will find an account in the Monthly back in 2012. Should I be tempted to seek appointment to the Australian Press Council, I suspect I too would be unacceptable to the Australian because of this history and other critiques. I disagreed with the central recommendation of the Finkelstein inquiry, but also thought aspects of the report were accurate and worthwhile. While we disagree on some of these matters, Ricketson and I have been friends and colleagues since starting together as cadets at the Age in 1982.

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The Australian versus the Press Council, again appeared first on Inside Story.

During his golden years as editor of the Northern Echo (1961–66) and Sunday Times (1967–81), this rare blend of qualities propelled a chain of power-shaking scoops on many topics: from air pollution and cervical smear tests, through corporate tax avoidance and espionage cover-ups, to the blighting foetal deformities caused by an unsafe pregnancy treatment produced by the multinational Distillers company. Such hard-won breaches in the ramparts of official and corporate secrecy helped change laws and lives.

These two decades of editorial clout, fortuitously aligned with the liberalising arc of the 1960s and 70s, were the pinnacle in a working life of astounding longevity. Their foremost legacy is a perpetual glow around the very name of Harold Evans. Understandably so, for by turning both the Sunday Times’s “investigative journalism” and its “Insight” team into kinetic brands — then, at their climax, invoking editorial independence to resist Rupert Murdoch’s effort to sack him — he made himself one too.

The overlaid memory of that joust, as of Insight’s prosecutory storylines and courtroom skirmishes, would seal Evans’s reputation, and be reflected in many awards from his peers, from the worthy (two press institutes’ gold medals for lifetime achievement) to the cringy: an ever-trumpeted 2002 choice by a self-chosen handful of readers of the British Journalism Review and Press Gazette as “greatest newspaper editor of all time,” above twenty other nominees, all British and male, many distant and long unsung.

In the latter case, Evans’s tour de force acceptance essay (“My first thought was to check out the obituary page of The Times for reassurance”) paid those forerunners rich tribute, claimed a retroactive vote of his own, drew precepts from a tour of his greatest hits — and thus, in overall effect, flattered the wisdom of the exercise and its verdict. At seventy-four, Harry’s showmanship and genius for self-promotion, as much as his sheer panache in making words sing, were undimmed.

Decades earlier at the Sunday Times, a thriving paper known for “exposure reporting” long before Evans’s arrival, many had shared in the credit for its next-generation coups. Its burgeoning Insight squad, with Phillip Knightley, Bruce Page and Murray Sayle among the paper’s self-styled “Australian mafia,” continued to deliver the goods, far-sighted editor-in-chief Denis Hamilton the guidance, munificent proprietor Roy (Lord) Thomson the funds. The unstinting Evans, a wizard of publicity to match his editorial flair, was the catalyst. “Harold could be wild and impulsive, but he had the sort of crusading energy a Sunday editor requires,” Hamilton would say of his appointee, this much-recycled utterance invariably losing a qualifier: that Harold had “need always for a stronger figure behind him to see that his talents were not wrecked by his misjudgements.”

A midlife switch was to freeze Evans’s newspaper romance in aspic, and his early fame with it. In plain terms, a vain year-long shutdown of Times Newspapers Ltd from November 1978, sparked by printing unions’ staff demands and resistance to new technology, led to the company’s papers (including the daily Times) being auctioned. From a scrum of financial and political intrigue, Rupert Murdoch’s News International emerged in March 1981 holding the murky ball (“the challenge of my life,” said the tycoon, describing Evans as “one of the world’s great editors”).

Evans was persuaded to become editor of the Times, across a short bridge at the papers’ joint works at Thomson House on Gray’s Inn Road. But a fractious year later he was asked by Murdoch to resign, which he did after holding out for a week (itself a media sensation). Evans’s eventual formula was that he resigned “over policy differences relating to editorial independence.” His embittered memoir of the saga (Good Times, Bad Times) complete, he relocated to New York in 1984 with his second wife, zippy magazine editor Tina Brown, working there for Atlantic Monthly Press, editing US News & World Report and launching Condé Nast Traveler. Then, from 1990, he was publisher at Random House, where Joe Klein’s (initially “Anonymous’s”) Primary Colors was among his successes. Propulsive coupledom, reaching its zenith in the mid 1990s, buoyed his profile, as would his steadfast bashing of Murdoch (not least during the Leveson press inquiry of 2011–12) and of resurgent threats to the type of journalism he cherished.

This disjunction in Harry’s career — the ultimate British newspaperman turned transatlantic celebrity publisher — would always make it hard to see the whole. More so, as the surface contrast between its two halves was acute. Where the fitful second was laced with high-end networking and lucrative dealmaking, the first had a perfect narrative arc whose climactic duel simulated a mighty clash of values. The fact that martyr and villain stuck fast to their allotted roles (or could easily be portrayed as such) kept the storyline ever exhumable. On occasion their paths would cross, as when Murdoch’s own manuscript briefly landed on Evans’s desk. “The wheel of fortune makes me your publisher as you used to be mine,” wrote Harry, leading Rupert to call the whole thing off.

In that first half, the dramatic symmetry of Evans’s long rise and slow-motion fall also fitted the culturally potent image of the valiant journalist or editor. His Panglossian autobiography My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, published in 2009, evokes the “newspaper films” of his childhood: “I identified with the small-town editor standing up to crooks, and tough reporters winning the story and the girl, and the foreign correspondent outwitting enemy agents.” That art’s blessing was a life in its image conferred on Evans a halo, dutifully polished in Britain’s media circles whenever his name came up, to which the details of his American experience (including citizenship, in 1993) would add not a speck.

As in the movies, uneven reality — in this case Evans’s editorial virtuosity, the feats (ever more roseate) of those Northern Echo and Sunday Times years, and the events of 1981–82 — was tidied into a seamless fable. His exit from London allowed it room to grow; fond tales of the press’s glory days gave it regular watering. A trade entering the digitised rapids could do with a hero to muffle its fears, and Evans, epitome of the age now under siege, was in a class of his own.

The campaigner

In a longer view, fate and chance, as well as exceptional will and ability, won Evans that esteem. Harry Evans’s steep ascent from modest origins in Patricroft, a district of Eccles — an “L.S. Lowry landscape of bent stick figures scurrying past sooty monuments of the industrial revolution,” in his words — was testing all the way. Equally, his early years were a good foundation: deeply loved as the eldest of four brothers, the family edging beyond poverty and upwards, remarkable parents who “[took] it for granted their boys would climb Everest.”

My Paper Chase’s portrait of his parents — father’s “phenomenal numeracy” and comedic gift (“We were part of the performance and his performance, like good theatre, always seemed fresh”), mother’s “ambitions for a better life,” which led from factory floor to her turning the terraced house’s front room into a grocer’s shop — signal that no child had a better start. Pride in his parents, whose evocative 1924 wedding-day photo is a highlight of the book, joined that in the leap from his mid-Wales grandfather, who left school at nine in 1863 for a labouring life, to his editorship of the Times. Yet Harry was phenomenal in his own right: such was his preternatural energy, it is tempting to imagine almost every obstacle in the route from Patricroft’s Liverpool Road via Gray’s Inn Road to Broadway giving up the ghost at the first encounter. Harry would never stop earning his charmed life.

Here he is as captain of St Mary’s school in Manchester in 1943, for example, where “[the] English teachers nominated a handful of candidates” for a planned magazine “and I was utterly shameless in campaigning to win the editorship,” or applying for his first newspaper job a year later and redrafting his headmaster’s testimonial (excising “too impetuous at present,” inserting “I wish him the glittering success he so deserves.”) Already, the ballast of Harry’s ultra-competitive spirit was a fervent attachment to the idea of newspaper journalism as his life’s purpose.

That sense of vocation had been seeded, he would often recall, by a holiday encounter with “weary and haggard” British soldiers in coastal north Wales in mid 1940. The mood of these survivors of the Dunkirk evacuation, sent across the country to recuperate, so contrasted with uplifting press reports of strong morale that the nearly twelve-year-old Harry — trailing his “compulsively gregarious” Welsh father, a train driver, who strode over from the beach to talk to the men — was bewildered. “Only two years later, when my ambitions to be a newspaper reporter flowered, did I understand that Dad was doing what a good reporter would do. Asking questions. Listening.”

This “epiphany on Rhyl beach,” the “first vague stirring of doubt about my untutored trust in newspapers,” also crystallised Harry’s eagerness to “involve myself in their mysteries.” Arrival at the Ashton-under-Lyne Weekly Reporter in 1944 would yield graphic social history, also in My Paper Chase, in the language of rapture: the huge Linotype “iron monsters” operating with the “autocratic urgency of hot metal marinated by printer’s ink,” men “crouched in communion” before them, an office “piled high with papers, telephone directories, pots of glue, spikes and a full-size glass kiosk with a chair and a candlestick telephone inside.”

Harry was never one to under-egg the pudding. Completing a portrait that mirrors, doubtless with its own fictive touches, the ennui of Michael Frayn’s evergreen “Fleet Street novel,” itself published in 1967 but set a decade earlier, are a “ginger-haired middle-aged reporter with a pipe clenched in his teeth” and “another wizened walnut of a man hunched over a desk [at] a window overlooking the market square,” working with “ancient typewriters on even more ancient desks that were sloped for writing by hand.” .

Two years’ solid experience at this century-old local paper with its thirteen daily editions was followed by two more of national service, where Evans created a newspaper for fellow Royal Air Force conscripts. That opened a channel to university study at historic Durham, a north-east cathedral city, where he edited the student magazine and went on to complete a masters in American foreign policy. Back home as assistant editor at the Manchester Evening Times from 1952, and soon married to Enid Parker, a biology graduate and now schoolteacher, he was awarded a Harkness fellowship in 1956-57 to study in the United States, where the young couple’s extensive travels provided a close-up view of the civil-rights tumult.

Harry, still under thirty, going places for sixteen years, was now a coming man. The Guardian, sister paper of the Evening Times, was mooted as his next berth, a move stymied by the top brass’s opposition to internal staff transfers. Instead, in 1961 he became editor of the Northern Echo, a historically Liberal daily based in Darlington, a market town and railway hub twenty miles south of Durham. A prominent regional paper, its main rival the Leeds-based Yorkshire Post, the Echo had been edited through the 1870s by W.T. Stead, daredevil inventor of popular journalism in Britain, for whom the job was “a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil.”

Evans soon made a splash. His team spotlighted the malodorous, lung-busting pall issuing from Middlesbrough’s chemical plants and the ear-drilling roar of mega-lorries through Echo readers’ towns and villages. A brief Sunday Times item on British Columbia’s cervical cytology program led to his reporter Kenneth Hooper’s landmark 1963 series, “Saving Mothers from Cancer,” its full-page opener, “The Tragedy of Thousands Who Need Not Die,” kindling the armoury of pressure that a year later saw cervical smear tests available in principle to every woman in Britain.

So often, that knack for noticing, and being nagged by, an issue already in circulation would produce a big story — one, moreover, that came to be associated chiefly with Harry himself, in part by his insistent coverage, in part by the way (expansively selective, it might be said) he orchestrated the plaudits.

There had, for example, been four books, a joint press effort and a parliamentary debate airing claims of a miscarriage of justice over Timothy Evans, a pliant Welshman hanged in 1950 for killing his infant daughter in a Notting Hill flat (and charged too, though not tried, for strangling his wife, Beryl). When a local Liberal manufacturer wrote to the paper exhorting a new push to exonerate a man whose bad breaks in life included having a mass murderer as a downstairs neighbour, the Echo’s newsroom initially featured the letter as a slow day’s stopgap. But Harry’s promotional nous swiftly made his namesake the Echo’s new lead cause, with “Man On Our Conscience” following “The Lorry Menace,” “The Smell,” and more.

A senior judge’s review of the case denied full vindication to Timothy Evans, even perversely deducing that he was innocent over the baby but had murdered Beryl. Yet the momentum for redress did secure the executed man a pardon in 1966, and three years later Harold Wilson’s Labour government, having already suspended the death penalty, abolished it. That Harry reworked the saga with himself as the linchpin might have led even W.T. Stead’s glowering portrait on the Northern Echo’s wall to crack a smile.

The moment

The high road to London was opening. Evans was already known there, and not just by Fleet Street’s talent spotters. In 1962, he had joined the presenters’ roster on What the Papers Say, a pacy late-night weekly round-up on Granada, the groundbreaking Manchester-based arm of Independent Television. The program displayed choice extracts from the week’s headlines, reports and columns, each given a pitch-perfect comedic slant by offscreen voice actors, threaded by pithy scripts from a single, straight-to-camera journalist. With his dapper good looks and dry Mancunian tones, Harry was a clever hire among a rolling mix of seniors and thrusters.

Such opportunities arose in a definite social moment, from 1957 to 1963, when the abrasions of rapid social change were most vividly felt in industrial northern England. In these years, “the north,” that country of the mind — far from coterminous with the actual region, as with Fleet Street and the newspaper industry — was catapulted to an unexpectedly modish berth in the national imaginary.

The northern vogue had been heralded in its ur-text, Richard Hoggart’s celebratory lament The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957. It spread via a tranche of emotionally truthful novels, films and plays, as well as Granada’s Coronation Street serial, which dramatised the theme of generational tension (while offering London a voyage of discovery to an outlying planet). Just as quickly, against a backdrop of exultant ridicule from the concurrent, largely Oxbridge, satire boom, it sank into imitation and canny nostalgia.

Above all, the Beatles’ early success brought the phase to a suitably ambiguous close. The group’s electrifying jolt added joy, wit and optimism to the north’s new–old connotations (authenticity, poverty, melancholy, communalism, boorish masculinity, dreams of escape often thwarted). In crowning the region’s enhanced appeal — and hauling its centre of gravity west to the Atlantic port city of Liverpool — the Beatles also made its previous terms look antiquated.

The moment’s principal benefit was to Harry’s cohort: northern working-class boys born just too late for a wartime call-up, adolescents in the 1940–51 Churchill–Attlee era, nourished by family, public library and welfarism, their sound basic education providing a ladder to grammar school, perhaps university, two years of national service fuelling impatient ambition. Together, these influences formed an apprenticeship to the middle class, even to the part of creator or activator.

Evans was among the older of the group, like Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving), Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall (Billy Liar) and Tony Richardson (the middle-class director who adapted Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey) — all bar the precocious Delaney born in 1928–29. Its members carried the uncharted ambiguities as well as the enticements of their newly mobile class and regional status. Some of those who, unlike Billy Liar, did jump on the train south became luminaries of British public life by making an asset of their northernness, while others did so by shedding local attachments, and accents, in order to fit in. Harry’s was a third way: when he invoked his northern background to New York audiences, most often to deride England’s taints of class, this would serve as a measure of how far he had come.

The mentor

Within the newspaper world, Evans’s performance at the Northern Echo and on What the Papers Say turned into an audition for the London stage. The big break, in 1966, came as an invitation from Sunday Times editor Denis Hamilton to work as his assistant. A year later Evans landed the editorship when the Thomson organisation, owners of the paper, purchased the Times and Hamilton became editor-in-chief of both. The venerable pair (the daily being founded in 1795, the weekly in 1822) were thus brought under the same owner for the first time, a factor — often masked by their similar titles — that took on greater significance as Times Newspapers Ltd, or TNL, entered crisis in the late 1970s.

Now Evans was again walking in Stead’s shoes, the earlier Northern Echo editor having become deputy to John Morley at the Pall Mall Gazette in 1880 then, three years later, succeeding him in the chair. Stead had quickly netted an array of scoops, culminating in an 1885 exposé of the business of child sexual exploitation by London toffs under the authorities’ blind eye. Procuring a thirteen-year-old girl as evidence of the traffic, Stead was sent to jail for three months via a parliamentary bill rushed into law in response to his own story.

The Stead–Evans parallels are resounding. Many colleagues would come to speak of Evans in terms that eerily chimed with those of Stead’s assistant at the Pall Mall Gazette, Alfred Milner: “I cannot recall one who was anything like his equal in vitality… I don’t suppose any editor was ever so beloved by his staff… It was such fun to work with him. The tremendous ‘drive,’ the endless surprises, the red-hot pace at which everything was carried on… His sympathy, his generosity, his kindliness were lavished on all who came within his reach.”

Also akin to Harry’s finest were Stead’s walloping, if in his case prurient, taste in headlines (“The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”) and eclectic investigative unit — veteran feminist reformer Josephine Butler, the Salvation Army’s Bramwell Booth and brothel-keeper turned activist Rebecca Jarrett. And if Evans wasn’t locked up for his principles, he raised the prospect, with a touch of melodrama, in replying to Phillip Knightley’s tip that rivals, disregarding legal qualms, were about to usurp him over the thalidomide story: “I’m tempted to publish anyway. I’ll go to jail. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go to jail. Bloody hell, it’d be worth it!”

The audacity of Stead and Evans, each a decade younger than their patrons, led them to eclipse the latter in what passes for journalism’s collective memory. Ineluctable or not, that is a disservice to Morley, a principled, scholarly Liberal from Blackburn, north of Manchester, who eventually left journalism for politics; and to Hamilton, a Middlesbrough reporter in his teens who rose by his mid twenties to acting brigadier in war and returned to steer a newspaper group before himself editing the Sunday Times. Equally, it is a disservice to history, for it hoists the whirlwind talents of the more glamorous pair above the singular weave (of inheritance, relationship, contingency and action) in which these talents were enmeshed.

Hamilton, for his part, as well as recruiting Evans laid the groundwork of the latter’s good times in London. He had spent a decade running the Kemsley stable, a mix of national and provincial papers, when in 1958 he made use of his war service under Montgomery to clinch serialisation of the field-marshal’s memoirs for the Sunday Times, a coup that widened a circulation lead over its Observer rival opened by the 1956 Suez crisis. Hamilton became editor in 1961, two years after Thomson’s buyout of Kemsley, and in his six years at the helm took the paper’s sales from under a million in 1959 to a record 1.5 million.

If by this time Denis Hamilton was a consummate establishment insider, eventually to be knighted, his distinction was to be an innovator with foresight. From the editorial plan, graduate training scheme and “big read” of the Kemsley era to the colour magazine, Insight and business section of the Thomson one, Hamilton made the newspaper a weekly event, outpacing the rival Observer and new Sunday Telegraph, while keeping the horizon in view. “More and more I was convinced the Sunday Times should analyse and amplify the news and what lay behind it [in order] to do what television didn’t do,” he reflected, thus drawing “potential readers with greater leisure and affluence.” Hamilton’s strategy, from the big read (“our secret weapon”) to “Atticus,” vignettes of upper-class life by Kemsley’s influential foreign manager Ian Fleming, anticipated the blockbuster weekend newspapers of the 1980s.

The original Insight team of Ron Hall, Clive Irving and Jeremy Wallington was enlisted by Hamilton in 1962 after the youthful trio’s experimental, admired news-in-depth weekly Topic had folded after a few months. At the Sunday Times, their exposure of London’s rental housing underworld (symbolised by the figure of Peter Rachman), a fake Beaujolais scam, and the Profumo affair’s tentacles added punch to the paper. Working on the scandal that brought down Britain’s defence secretary, said Irving, “would tip us into the future of long-form, narrative reporting.”

The nous that had led Hamilton to these bright sparks informed his choice of a replacement when Kemsley’s purchase of the Times forced a company reshuffle. Roy Thomson, self-made son of a Canadian barber, now domiciled in his ancestors’ Scotland, strictly upheld editorial independence (“no person or group can buy or influence editorial support from any newspaper in the Thomson group” was his “creed”) but also took against Frank Giles, number three at the paper and the obvious choice. “Harold’s north country cheek matched Roy’s own,” recalled Hamilton. “In order to convince myself — and others — that Harold was the man, I asked him to set out his ideas of where, over the next few years, the Sunday Times should go. This paper, written over a weekend, was an impressive document that tipped the scales.”

To adapt an old phrase, those who talk of Harold Evans shouldn’t be silent about Denis Hamilton. The British Library’s former head of newspapers, Ed King, wrote of his memoirs: “I was struck time and again by Hamilton’s great capacities: for dealing with people successfully, for being able to take criticism, for delegating work and responsibilities, for learning, for sustained hard work, for seizing the moment, for his incorruptibility. Above all, he had the (constantly exercised) ability to reflect on gaps in the newspaper market, to think ahead, to plan a campaign of action for the future. For many years, Fleet Street was a sufficiently large canvas for his abilities to show at their best.”

For Hamilton, hiring Evans was a conscious act of rejuvenation, one of many. Yet as with Morley vis-à-vis Stead, collaboration sharpened differences. Evans “proved himself an editor with immense flair,” Hamilton would reflect, but “had a great weakness for self-projection” and “was the world’s worst recruiter”; Harry, invited to read a poem at Denis’s funeral in 1988, called him “my mentor for some twenty years,” a note never repeated, even in My Paper Chase (whose 500 pages and ample bibliography, moreover, contained zero reference to his own Good Times, Bad Times). For all that, their partnership — and Roy Thomson’s fortune — helped deliver another decade of dominance for the Sunday Times, until in the late 1970s the paper’s share of Britain’s fracturing social contract brought the whole operation to an impasse.

The boy scout

“I’m handing you a Rolls Royce,” Denis told Harry as they descended to the composing room to see off the last edition of the Hamilton era at Gray’s Inn Road in January 1967. The weekly, sixty-four page (later seventy-two) ad-friendly package of features, serials, comment and foreign reportage, strong on graphics and photographs, had maintained a firm commercial lead. Harry soon made its reportorial language more direct and its presentation more appealing, its muckraking busier if increasingly distended.

Above all, the Sunday Times took on a distinct swagger, which tended to make it more envied than admired in press circles. That had a rationale, for the paper’s assets — market dominance, cash to burn, abundant staff, a hotshot editor-ringmaster touting his wares on TV chat and quiz shows — were hardly those of an underdog. And when Harry sued the satirical magazine Private Eye for needling him as “Dame” (he saw its feeble link to the actress Dame Edith Evans as an “imputation of effeminacy”), the crusader evinced a censorious instinct and odd sense of priorities.

Yet even taking account of the unlimited resources at his disposal, Evans’s exploits as editor were substantial. Several of the major Sunday Times investigations of the next decade entered journalistic folklore, in large part because they entailed positional or legal tussles with a state intent on the lid staying clamped. Among them were the backstory of Kim Philby, the suave British NKVD agent who infiltrated MI6 at the top level and in 1963 fled to Moscow; reporting of Northern Ireland’s conflict that filleted the official version of key episodes; publication of Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman’s diaries, penetrating thick walls of confidentiality; and exposure of negligence and cover-up over the birth of thousands of disfigured babies (mainly between 1955 and 1962) whose expectant mothers had taken thalidomide for morning sickness.

In each case, a “state of knowledge” timeline was the basis of a detailed narrative, constantly updated, with plenty of personal dramas and cliffhanger moments. It might branch in all directions — Elaine Potter’s meticulous research into the pregnancy drug’s testing failures, and Marjorie Wallace’s tender interviews with stricken families, for example, counterpointed by reports and graphics on the issues at stake: press freedom, state secrecy, corporate powers, citizens’ rights. A book-length Insight-branded digest could soon follow, its sales (as of the Philby or Ulster potboilers) recouping much of the newspaper’s costs. Chance and design had made for a winning formula: albeit the hunt for more makeweight quarry, and there was plenty, exposed little beyond Insight’s style of portentous urgency.

At its best, the Sunday Times’s journalistic alchemy saw Evans’s sparkling life-force, quicksilver judgement and ire at restrictive laws — libel, contempt of court, official secrecy — kindle his smart newshounds’ ingenuity and grit. Evans was an “all-rounder, a brilliant technician, famously courageous,” recalled Godfrey Hodgson, Insight editor for four years. “He could grasp the point and scope of a story at speed. When Anthony Mascarenhas brought in his 1971 scoop on the repression in then East Bengal, which led to the birth of Bangladesh amid millions of refugees, a cholera epidemic and war, Evans swept away a pedestrian headline (written by myself) and replaced it with a single word, “Genocide,” in 72-point type.” Then, “after the first edition had gone on a Saturday night” his “seminars over a glass of scotch were models of instruction and motivation.”

Harry’s lessons went beyond the inner sanctum. On broadcast media and contributions to the weekly Listener or New Society, he was a lucid champion of bold journalism as pillar of a free society, and the more persuasive for his framing the case in moral and empirical, as opposed to doctrinal, terms. In the same spirit, his Northern Echo proselytising had been circumstantial rather than planned, he declared, “arising from frustrations and disquiet as we encountered instances of a vast carelessness in public life,” while at the Sunday Times, seeing London’s hidebound institutions at close range, he had come to detect “a chronic but unsuspected malaise in the functioning of British democracy.”

If such sentiments dovetailed with the social progressivism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Evans was more inclined to finesse anti-establishment sentiment than inhale it. In the spirit of Stead’s “government by journalism,” he wanted to clean up the temple, not pull it down. This disposition marked his whole career: just as at Durham’s student debates, a natural Labourite and go-getter, he had recoiled from “the warriors of cold reason,” he was averse to the heavy radicalism of the 1960s and 70s, and — this time born just too early — rueful in missing that elusive thing, the sexual revolution.

For all his cogent justifications of dragon-slaying, Harry remained the boy scout he had in fact been: neither cynic, ideologue, nor even much of a political animal at all (an “apolitical liberal,” his buddy Robert Harris called him). Proximity to the exalted, with their titles and trappings, could beguile as ideas did not. “He sometimes seemed too keen to please the powerful,” the scrupulous Hodgson listed among his faults.

At root, this deferential streak was just another part of Evans’s all-embracing, all-consuming personality. The tendency might be overt, as when he held back Murray Sayle’s timely dissection of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, or enfolded into investigative work’s grey zones, such as liaising with MI6-adjacent personnel during the Philby story to keep the intelligence agency in the loop and at bay. Harry was too bumptious for artifice anyway: in an office lie-detection experiment in 1979 with visiting celebrities he “failed to lie successfully” (as did Sunday Times reporter Isabel Hilton, who wrote a deadpan account of the episode).

That personality, always more consequential than any public views Evans might espouse, drove (and could also block) the paper. Insight’s investigations bore its imprint, from their often drawn-out gestation to the way their ambivalent endings were oversold as victories. Harry’s divided attention, and his intoxication with a process under his nominal control, could entail a loss of focus. The Philby story, for example, had to be rushed out when it was found that the Observer was splashing on the memoirs of Eleanor Philby, third wife of the “third man.” Similarly, the trigger for launching the thalidomide campaign in 1972 was that a trio of Daily Mail features on an afflicted family had got ahead of the Sunday Times’s long delayed coverage after Mail editor David English decided to brave legal constraints. Worse, the resolute father was now telling lead reporter Phillip Knightley that Murdoch’s News of the World had its own thalidomide series in the works.

Knightley, going to his editor with the information (and aware that “Rupert doesn’t give a damn about the Attorney-General”) found a panicky Evans “determined not to lose the story.” Looking back in his 1997 autobiography A Hack’s Progress, he cited the Sunday Times’s snail’s pace, as well as families’ distress over skewed compensation and media exposure, to argue that the whole thalidomide effort “was not the great success it was made out to be, and that the full story is as much about the failures of journalism as about its triumphs.”

Fleet Street’s competitiveness was central to investigative journalism in the period. So too, and also barely recognised, is the role of Denis Hamilton before and after Evans’s arrival at the Sunday Times. In his own account Hamilton found that the “emotional and highly strung” Evans needed “constant counsel and comfort — for instance, when we took on the law over the Thalidomide case (which was his idea) I controlled the whole campaign. No sentence appeared in the newspaper without my having seen it beforehand, and I ran the strategy, as I did the fight against the Cabinet Office over the Crossman Diaries. [In] the end we won the right to publish the diaries, though in the book which Harold Evans later commissioned to record the case my name did not appear, to my great interest. I didn’t object — I came to know, over the succeeding twelve years, Harold Evans’s strengths and weaknesses better than any man in Fleet Street.”

This blunt rectifying impulse is alone of its kind in Hamilton’s overview of his career, taped during cancer treatment by his historian son, Nigel, and published in 1989 as Editor-in-Chief: The Fleet Street Memoirs of Sir Denis Hamilton. The reams of exalted make-believe that two decades later would fill Evans’s own My Paper Chase, treating Hamilton (where present at all) as in effect a hapless extra in Harry’s biopic, were his posthumous reward. That aside, an Evans-centric prism impedes grasp of these Sunday Times years. They are far more complicated, and thus far more interesting, than chronic romanticism and veneration allow.

The lord of misrule

The Sunday Times’s illumination of shadowy worlds added to its own glare. But Harry, the editor as impresario, always had much more on his plate — as well as in his pockets, up his sleeves and under his hat. On the inside, life at the paper became more of a rollicking Range Rover ride across bumpy terrain.

Prue Leith, a freelance food writer, once entered Harry’s office as he faced the window, doing star-jumps. “As he shook out his arms and legs, he said, ‘Oh, I just have to get rid of some energy.’” Skiing was a new passion, he went on, and — anticipating reality TV by decades — he intended to commission a band of journos also in their forties to learn its joys. He did too, and a book (How We Learned to Ski) came out of it. All the while, he was completing the instructional Editing and Design: A Five Volume Manual of English, Typography and Layout (comprising Essential English for Journalists and Writers, Handling Newspaper Text, News Headlines: An Illustrated Guide, Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism, Graphics and Picture Editing, and Newspaper Design).

Harry “understood the craft of journalism better than any of us,” said his colleague Magnus Linklater, editor of the “Spectrum” pages, who also recalled daytime squash games at a Pall Mall club where he “would turn up late, clutching a sheaf of papers and gallop to the telephone. Then he’d scurry into the changing rooms, talking nineteen to the dozen. I can never remember him motionless. His walk was a half-run. He was exhausting to compete against… and liked beating me, partly because I was fourteen years younger.” Linklater, an urbane Scots Etonian, also spoke of Harry’s “combination of intellectual ferment with almost naiveté,” as when he would buttonhole the corridor “tea ladies” to ask if they found the paper’s stories offensive.

At Gray’s Inn Road he managed to be at once ubiquitous and elusive. “‘Where’s Harry?’ was the cry that went up most days on the editorial floor,” wrote features sub Elizabeth Grice, where the editor “was quite often a blur. A slight, mercurial figure, he moved so fast and with such will-o’-the-wisp unpredictability between the editorial floors and the print room that it was impossible to locate him with any certainty. Sightings were passed from reporter to reporter in the event that someone needed to know. He boasted that his door was always open but he was not always inside it.”

Harry’s relentlessness could irk colleagues, as when at the last moment he would needlessly sub-edit copy (or duplicate the paper’s chess notation on a miniature set to confirm its accuracy). It could also elicit awe, in terms again reminiscent of Milner on Stead: “He would go on debating, with the printers screaming for ‘copy,’ till he sometimes left himself less than half an hour to write or dictate a leading article; then he would dash it off at top-speed and embody in it, with astonishing facility, the whole gist and essence of the preceding discussion.”

Richard Dowden recalls a 10pm alert that a rival paper was reporting the collapse of DeLorean, a flagship sports car company in Northern Ireland. When Dowden got through to the owner, Harry, “dancing with agitation,” seized the phone, “scribbled some notes and threw them at me. ‘Clear the front page!’ he shouted. I couldn’t read Harry’s shorthand so he began to type at frenetic speed. He gave it to the compositor. In a matter of minutes Harry Evans had taken lightning shorthand, typed out the story, and relaid the front page, making the interview with [John] De Lorean most of it. He then went to the stone, where the hot type was set, and within minutes the presses were rolling again. He then began calling government ministers. The problem was that the story was wrong. But as a newspaperman Harry Evans had an unsurpassed brilliance.”

Dowden’s vignette is in fact from Evans’s Times coda, a month before his sacking by Murdoch, thus evidence that he hadn’t changed. Many colleagues’ fondness is similarly fringed with ambivalence. The Sunday Times’s literary editor Claire Tomalin compared working under Evans to “being at the court of Louis XIV. When he beamed his attention fully on any one of us, we were all, men and women, a little in love with him… Harry was loved, even if we sometimes swore at him when his attention was distracted or his favours divided.”

The sense of a quasi-monarchy under arbitrary rule persists, albeit infused with genuine warmth. Philip Norman, whose competition entry had earned him a place on staff, was touched by the editor’s balm: “With Harold Evans it was more than working for a newspaper, you felt personally that you worked for Harry. Editors tended to be sulking autocrats… but Harry was everywhere, running from the subs desk to the writers, perpetually in motion… He was the boy king, Henry V, and anybody would have done anything for him. He didn’t overlook anybody, we were all special.” For Godfrey Hodgson, the editor “was, in fact, loved by most of his staff, not an easy thing for a man with power over the careers and reputations of ferociously ambitious and competitive people.”

A recollection by Knightley hints at the ambiguities at play. “[Harold Evans] wore his editor’s skills so lightly. He was master of every branch of journalism. He could lay out a page, choose a photograph, dash off a leader, write a headline. The only thing he couldn’t do was say ‘No.’ So he gave a job to anyone who asked, which meant that the Sunday Times was wildly overmanned. It had so many curious staffing arrangements that I doubt anyone really knew how many journalists worked there. Or what they did. Evans never tried to bring order to the editorial department’s creative chaos. He simply encouraged journalists to get on with whatever appealed to them. Such freedom was unprecedented and I mourn its passing.”

Where some regarded his anti-method as wasteful and damaging, Harry saw only benefit, citing his promotion of Elaine Potter to work alongside Bruce Page: “She’d not had a great deal of experience in journalism, but she’d acquired an Oxford Ph.D., and, as important, squatter’s rights to a freelancer’s chair in the features department. Some of our most successful recruits were squatters; they were tested by the exigencies of sudden demands for labour and the best, like Elaine, survived with the complicity of editors until I could find a place on staff.”

Potter, commending Harry as “fierce in pursuit of wrongdoing,” and for his stress on “the importance of repetition, of staying with a story if you wanted to make a difference,” says — with much unspoken between the lines — he “surrounded himself with forceful journalists, all of whom wanted to be heard, none of whom would readily give way to the considerable editor of a great newspaper. Undaunted he would do battle with this fierce crew who spent even more time jousting with each other.”

Harry’s support, job-enhancing and moral, could inspire great loyalty. Marjorie Wallace, enlisted at a Highgate tennis club by a figure of “missionary zeal” whom she at first thought “slightly crazy” as he insisted on finding her a child-minder that very afternoon so she could start work, found him “a true crusader with fierce moral purpose who put his head above every parapet.” Well into her stint at the Sunday Times, she expected to lose her job after confessing to her editor that, under family pressures, her copy had long dried up, but instead was told with a smile: “Don’t worry. Every journalist has a fallow period.” Yet she also writes that Harry “could be capricious, frustrating and infuriating. When a promotion came up at the paper, he would offer at least five of us the job before leaving us to sort out who got it between ourselves. It created a highly competitive environment that had its ruthless side.”

Harry thrived as lord of this misrule, all of it kept afloat by the most innocently enlightened of press moguls, Roy Thomson, who had defined “the social mission of every great newspaper” as in part “to provide a home for a large number of salaried eccentrics.” But misfiring appointments and ballooning payrolls did cause strain between Evans and Hamilton. “In a couple of extreme cases I had contracts rescinded, which led to a showdown with [Evans] in which I said that recruitment above a certain salary had to have my permission,” the editor-in-chief recounted.

Such reproval cut no ice with Harry, whose derision for his paymasters was a career motif. He had paid big sums to get inside information on thalidomide and Paris’s DC-10 crash in 1974. His ill-starred year at the Times featured rapid turnover where incomers were better paid than those who left or were let go, both factors triggering staff resentment. Visiting the Northern Echo in 2000, having received an award at the nearby university, he was asked by its newish editor for a word of advice. Harry’s pithy reply, with its show-off expletive, was: “Don’t take any notice of the fucking beancounters.” No editor ever regarded a proprietor’s bounty with as much airy contempt.

The liberated zone

In the many-ringed circus that was the Sunday Times of the 1960s and 70s, the colour magazine — design pioneer, aesthetic blast, sales magnet, radical chic show — went its own way. It too would be embroiled by tensions over cash, authority and personnel during Harry’s time at the paper, its redoubt on Thomson House’s fourth floor becoming, he confided, a “source of enormous frustration.” The awkward dance that ensued between its autonomy and his search for control doesn’t fit easy accounts of his brilliant career, which means it gets no traction there.

Dreamed up in 1961 by Roy Thomson and the marketing department, brought to fruition in February 1962 by Hamilton, the then “section,” or informally “supplement” — the law barring magazine publishing on a Sunday — had withstood gigantic losses in its first year to become an editorial success and lucrative advertising funnel. Hamilton’s strategic confidence plus intrepid marketing had overcome that nervy start. Capping the turnaround was the team’s anniversary “Moscow picnic” in February 1963, when the chirpy Roy Thomson interviewed Khrushchev and offered to buy Pravda.

Under a coterie of independent, exacting spirits — notably artist-editor Mark Boxer and literary editor Francis Wyndham, art director Michael Rand and graphic designer David King — the magazine’s blend of big subjects, top names and bold visuals rivalled Insight in defining the Sunday Times to the public. And its renown was as great, imaginative openness to swirling Sixties currents making it part of the decade’s “revolt into style.” The newspaper’s id to Insight’s super-ego, it might be said.

The magazine was piloted in its first three years by Boxer, another astute Hamilton pick. (“I felt he had the necessary kind of iconoclastic attitude, a chap I’d have to restrain rather than ginger up.”) Mark “lived on the front edge of life,” said his successor Godfrey Smith, himself more a Falstaff, under whom the lotus years took wing, with their epic lunches and staff jaunts, one such, to Sarajevo for the feature “A Day in The Life Of,” spawning no copy at all because Michael Rand judged the photographs too weak to use.

Hamilton’s personal attachment to his baby (“perhaps the most successful innovation in postwar quality journalism,” he called it) was such that he had kept the magazine out of Evans’s hands, ostensibly to allow the new editor to focus on the main paper, though he later elaborated: “I confess that in my heart I was really worried stiff about [Evans’s] at times impulsive approach.” The magazine was granted years of latitude to resist intruders and replenish itself.

The fourth floor had the seductive thrill of a liberated zone. For those outside, it was a problem child: “frivolous, self-absorbed, anarchic, [prone to] self-indulgence and money-wasting” were the vibes picked up by a young James Fox as he went to work alongside Wyndham and “hard-working, hard-typing” fashion editor Meriel McCooey, their office the magazine’s “subversive cultural centre and magnet for visitors.” That the latter included depraved gangsters with contrarian appeal, from the Kray twins to the predatory far-left guru Gerry Healy, whose acolytes included the Redgrave theatrical family, had a taste of self-styled vanguards paying court to each other.

Evans recoiled more from the magazine’s distinct angle on news stories, as for example when the texts accompanying Don McCullin’s photographs of Nigeria’s civil war had greater sympathy for the Biafran side than the paper’s reporting. He “would want to pull out articles — usually on grounds of taste — when they were already on the cylinder, at the cost of thousands of pounds,” wrote Fox. A chance to bridle the magazine came in 1972 when Godfrey Smith’s move to associate editor at the paper freed Evans to deploy the versatile Magnus Linklater behind enemy lines. (“Go in and sort that lot out,” was the brief.)

The new broom soon warranted the choice by unearthing £70,000 worth in paid-for commissions lying idle. But the magazine’s uncommon ethos and “brilliant people” inveigled Linklater, whose expensive advance to Patagonia-bound Bruce Chatwin convinced Evans that the magazine was “self-indulgent, mired in triviality, out of touch.” Linklater rode accusations of “going native” for two years before Harry abruptly replaced him with the breezy populariser Hunter Davies, a pal from Durham and Manchester days, whose stab at curbing the renegade took a year to fail. The struggle for control, in Fox’s words, was “eventually settled by Murdoch.”

Linklater’s farewell party, within hours of returning from lunch to be told of his transfer to assistant news editor (no one was ever pushed out of the old Sunday Times), had combined mutiny and wake. Harry dared to come, Meriel McCooey, his very antithesis, yelling at his ashen face: “You! I mean you! William fucking Randolph Hearst! Do you know what you’ve done?” In the silence, Michael Rand’s remark to art assistant Roger Law rippled across the room and sank deep: “The party’s over, boys.”

The twilight

Fleet Street’s teeming warrens, marinated in alcohol and trade gossip, rarely spilled their own guild secrets further than Private Eye’s “Street of Shame” column. Newspapers’ domestic life was off limits, as the playwright Arnold Wesker found in 1971 when Evans gave him permission to “wander freely through the offices of the Sunday Times to gather material,” only to find that his dramatic theme — journalists’ corrosive desire to cut everyone down to their size — made his work unwelcome. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Wesker’s 1972 play, The Journalists, based on his eight weeks at the paper, was scuttled when the actors refused to perform it. Between artistic defects and the tug of Healy’s cult, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, there was a lot of blame to go round.

A whiff of the power games and raw emotions at the Sunday Times did filter into intellectual journalism’s periodic overviews of the news machine. Two liberal observers were notably alert to the paper’s internal fissures and shrewd about Evans’s capacity to handle them. Anthony Sampson, in the third, 1972, edition of his Anatomy of Britain, sketched a publication “driven on a loose rein” by Evans, who is “pulled in several directions” by journalists “competing fiercely with each other for exposures and scoops.” The Sunday Times “likes to give something for everyone: it has left-wing politics and right-wing politics, exposures and court circulars, and it has romped ahead on this formula. But its corporate character, partly as a result, is uncertain.”

In a similar vein, an anonymous New Statesman profile in 1975, bearing the stamp of the magazine’s editor Anthony Howard, used W.T. Stead’s demise aboard the Titanic to propose that Evans’s “unwieldy vessel” needed its pilot “to set a course”:

“The major decisions he takes; the more mundane ones he puts off. The result is a paper where no one quite knows what is happening, where the wrong men are left in the wrong jobs, and an almost accidental ‘policy’ of divide-and-rule causes some unhappiness and irritation. The man who did not like taking unpleasant decisions on the Northern Echo still fears unpopularity. If Harold Evans realised how much actual authority, and professional respect, as well as affection, he commands among his staff, he might (as one of his executives put it) ‘calm down and organise a better newspaper.’ But his combination of talents is also his weakness: intelligent, charming, a brilliant journalist, he still has to prove it, still has to be seen to be good.”

These judicious appraisals of the upper deck skirted the iceberg below: the unremitting war between management and print unions, with journalists caught in the middle. Newspaper production was at the mercy of “chapels,” or union branches, each led by a “father” who acted as a spiky guardian of shop floor customs and his extended family’s interests. There were fifty-six chapels at Thomson House alone. A stoppage by one, on the flimsiest of grounds, would halt the paper. In the mid 1970s, the Sunday Times was losing millions of copies a year. (“Industrial anarchy,” Harry called it.) “The management lived in fear of strikes, and we were all obliged never to offend a printer,” wrote Claire Tomalin in A Life of My Own.

The Sunday Times’s revenues were badly hit, its ambition to grow sales to two million long busted, though it stayed profitable. The Times, less secure in the tough weekday market, was in dire trouble, draining each year £2 million from Thomson’s coffers, fortunately swelled by his agile investments in television, travel and North Sea oil. William Rees-Mogg, the paper’s editor, likened the beleaguered Times to “a man at the end of a windswept pier in some cold and out-of-season resort.” Tim Austin, its long-serving style guru, voiced despair in more prosaic terms: “You didn’t know if the paper was going to come out at night. You would work for it for ten hours and then [the unions] would pull the plug and you had wasted ten hours of your life.”

To his last breath, Roy Thomson implored Denis Hamilton to introduce modern typesetting, already operating across his American stable. The proprietor, comically frugal in his own life, lavish with his cherished papers (“Spend what you want, Denis, but never tell me the amount!”) died in 1976, ownership passing to his less engaged son, Kenneth. After two more years of attrition, a frazzled TNL board stopped the presses in hope of forcing a quick agreement to introduce new technology in phases, along with pay and staff reforms. Instead, most TNL workers took jobs at the papers’ rivals, who eagerly boosted output to draw homeless readers.

The Gray’s Inn Road hiatus lasted through most of 1979, that hinge year, a mammoth £40 million loss, and a silo of resentments primed to burst. And all for nothing: when the presses again rolled, war instantly resumed. In 1980, the journalists — who had been paid through the lockdown — joined the fray, striking for a second big increase in months. For Hamilton, “it was the last straw. Without the journalists’ loyalty we had nothing left to fight for.” Kenneth, the new Lord Thomson, tired of the hassle, put the group on the market.

While the Sunday Times was still a going concern, the Times faced the abyss, as Rees-Mogg’s leader (“How to Kill a Newspaper”) had grasped on their restart. A disentangling of ownership would doom the establishment flagship; a joint purchase might see it unloaded anyway after a decent interval. Any new proprietor needed tools to deal with that implacable iceberg. The papers were back on the streets, at the behest of the chapels. This time, the party really was over.

The seachange

It took until March 1981 for Rupert Murdoch to clinch the title deeds to Thomson House. His News International Ltd, the British arm of his group, was the last viable bid once Lord Rothermere’s Mail stable, which coveted only the Sunday Times, was discounted, and Evans’s fundraising for a buyout of his paper by management, senior editors and advisers had got nowhere (those damned beancounters). “Harold Evans, though he made a great show of leading a cavalry charge intent on buying out the owners, soon threw his hat in with Murdoch’s camp,” recalled Hamilton, while Linklater said Evans was “open to the charge of bad faith [as he] switched sides.”

It was an endorsement Evans spent the rest of his days wriggling away from. In January, following their first conversation, he had described Murdoch as “robust and refreshing. I liked him hugely. There is no doubt he loves newspapers,” and — having consulted staff who he said were of similar mind — confirmed his “preference” in a private note to the Thomson executive Gordon Brunton (“between Murdoch and Rothermere I myself would choose Murdoch for a variety of reasons [though as you know I believe systematic safeguards are required]”).

Harry, like most of those involved, had come to believe that News International was the least worst outcome in business terms. But the deal’s mesh of personality, politics and law made it an enduring source of dispute. It had been smoothed by Murdoch’s courting of Margaret Thatcher, prime minister since May 1979 (when Harry was among a chunk of London’s liberal-left dignitaries to vote for her), and by her trade minister John Biffen’s non-referral of the Murdoch company’s bid to an oversight commission that might have barred it on grounds of excessive market share. These episodes were later invested with ever more tortuous conspiratorial significance, Harry still swinging the lead pitchfork long after the crowd had melted away.

The larger truth is that there were no good options. TNL’s woeful stalemate crystallised that of British society in the period. In each case, years of dislocation were unavoidable, though its precise form was full of contingencies. In the shorter term, the Times could well have gone under without a quick resolution. For his part, Evans ever regretted accepting Murdoch’s invite to edit it (“my ambition got the better of my judgement”) and leaving the Sunday Times (“my power-base as a defender of press freedom”). But had he stayed, it would be under a more vigilant owner and exacting financial regimen. For things to stay the same in his fiefdom, they were bound to change.

In the event, he did go over to the Times, clutching Murdoch’s non-interference guarantees, which were to prove worthless once Rupert’s henchmen Richard Searby and managing editor Gerald Long started turning the screws. The editorial floor was uneasy too. Did Harry metamorphose in the crossing? Not at all, he was ever his ebullient self. This hardened the disfavour of senior Times staff, who (the newspaper’s official historian wrote), “looked upon Evans and the smart and cocky journalists he brought with him from the Sunday Times as aliens from the planet Lower Class. The foot soldiers too went into shock. Here was an editor who rewrote their copy and their headlines, redesigned pages and didn’t go home until he had conducted a post-mortem of the day’s work.”

Yes, good old Harry. One who saw it coming was Denis Hamilton, who added to this litany the editor’s “taking over the duties of his leader-writers, leaving them unemployed” and “constantly (as he had done with me) overspending, or temporarily disguising expenditure.” Hamilton, who as TNL’s chair was key in endorsing Murdoch (“not a perfect purchaser” but “the best available”), had warned him against the choice of “my own protégé from the Sunday Times” (an equally rare note): “I told Murdoch it would turn out disastrously, and it did.” Evans’s appointment was “Murdoch’s fault, from start to finish, a great error of proprietorial judgment,” and not the only one, for he “was a poor picker of men.” In deprecating Evans’s and now Murdoch’s calibre as recruiters, Hamilton does not reflect on his own; but the undertow of regret over Evans in his memoirs (not Murdoch, it was far too late in the day for that) is tangible if unadmitted.

Evans’s tenure began in March 1981 amid a morass on the home front that offered news riches: Thatcher vulnerable, an economy sunk in recession, urban riots, IRA hunger strikes, Labour’s Bennite left on the up, a breakaway to the party’s right, much talk of political “realignment.” For six months, he wrote of the company’s new boss, “Murdoch was an electric presence, vivid and amusing, direct and fast in his decisions, and a good ally against the old guard… I did find his buccaneering, can-do style very refreshing.” Soon those same qualities ended the romance, hitched as they were to overt editorial interference in the paper’s coverage of Mrs Thatcher’s economic travails.

Without Murdoch’s support Harry was exposed, even more so as he lacked aides with a reliable political compass. At the Sunday Times, olympian political editor Hugo Young had been Harry’s lodestar. A belated bid to entice Hugo to the Times culminated on 2 March 1982 with a desperate memo in third-person style, filed in Young’s outstanding archive: “his editor would be utterly committed to him,” vowed Harry, even suggesting Hugo might “be well placed as an insider to succeed to the chair.” The pleading bullishness was all too forlorn, as was soon confirmed by Young’s diplomatic reply (“I feel I can pursue my journalistic interests, and help maintain our shared interests, here for the moment,” was its gist), the last clause presaging his move to the Guardian in 1984 when Murdoch denied him the Sunday Times editorship.

The fin de siècle air of this bleak exchange was appropriate: a week later, Murdoch told Evans to step down, which he did after six histrionic days. An always unwise and often strained cohabitation — both men having arrived at the Times as brash interlopers with differing ambitions — had met its foretold end, leaving rival accounts to pick over the carcass for decades. In this context, Andrew Knight’s coda to the Times’s own obituary of Evans is apt. Knight, a long-term News International affiliate and chair of Times Newspapers since 2012, recalls that Harry’s early choice of Bernard Donoughue as leader-writer and “opinion guru” introduced a “personality ingredient” that “signalled to me his likely demise at the Times.”

Knight observes that the “undogmatically centrist” Harry’s “lack of nous” in hiring Donoughue — who had advised Labour prime minister James Callaghan before working for Knight at the Economist — “caused loss of sympathy inside the paper” and “gave extra ammunition” to a Times staff “who did not enjoy Harry the way his tight-knit Sunday legion had done.” It still surprises, he writes, that Harry, “though a man of action and warmth rather than strong politics, did not divine the likely office politics of his new daily newspaper when it played so effectively to Murdoch’s ‘clear-water’ world view. Murdoch’s was a post-Seventies view already in course of being borne out by events. I was not there but I suspect it was not was not a hard decision, knowing the staff turmoil on The Times, for the independent national directors of Times Newspapers to agree to replace Harry with [his deputy] Charles Douglas-Home.”

In principle, Donoughue was well placed to grasp the politics of his own arrival at Gray’s Inn Road, for he had noted (and in doing so would make famous) a quiet, back-seat remark made by the avuncular Callaghan during the 1979 election campaign. Bernard had said that “with a little luck, and a few policy initiatives here and there, we [Labour] might just squeeze through.” The PM replied: “I should not be too sure. You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now a sea-change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Callaghan’s intuition proved sound, though a bodyguard of auxiliaries would be needed to bend history in the right direction. Murdoch’s rout of the print unions in 1985–86, enabling the newspaper industry’s makeover, added oil. By that mid decade, the world of Harry Evans in his pomp on the Gray’s Inn Road was becoming as remote as the Ashton-under-Lyne Weekly Reporter. But a casualty of progress, a music-hall remnant in the film-star age? Far from it. With trademark élan, Harry reached the other side having pulled off a rare midlife combo: Atlantic crossing, new career footing, revamped private life. If that too would link Murdoch and Evans, deeper still was the reciprocity of their casting: menacing dark versus radiant light, with nothing in between.

The second life

This second life had a long gestation. Donoughue’s diary on 27 October 1976, in the midst of a British financial crisis, records: “I went to see Harry Evans in the flat of his lovely new girlfriend — Tina Brown. He told me that the Sunday Times had got its story that the IMF would insist on a sterling parity at $1.50 from Washington… Harry is still angling for the Director Generalship of the BBC.” The two men were players at the game of power: Donoughue had ambitions of his own to run the Bank of England. But over the private life of “one of my closest friends,” he was well behind the curve.

Tina, at twenty-two, was a kinetic Oxford graduate whose pen, vim and allure had by then felled an eclectic swathe of London’s male glitterati. It was three years since Harry, given Tina’s New Statesman clippings by the agent Pat Kavanagh, had asked Sunday Times features editor Ian Jack to commission her, sponsored her stay as a New York freelance, and lined up a staff contract (blocked by the journalists’ union chapel as Tina hadn’t served time on a local paper, to Harry’s fury at Jack’s expense). From late 1974, wrote Harry, “[we] corresponded about her work, and then about newspapers and literature and life, and so our relationship began. I fell in love by post.” Private Eye, already taunting Harry’s new motor-bike-and-black-leather look, was soon noting events where “[the] Dame was accompanied by his beautiful and talented young discovery Tina Brown.”

Enid Evans, wife of Harry for twenty-five years until their 1978 divorce, and mother of their three children, continued to teach, work as a magistrate, and support educational initiatives in the family’s Highgate, north London home patch until her death in 2013. “We preserved an affectionate friendship that has endured to this day,” wrote Harry in 2009, describing their union as “serene.” (Harry’s gestures at self-inquiry work to deflect it: “I told myself it was a typical mid-life crisis”; “Hamilton was a master delegator. I was a meddler. He was reticent. I wasn’t.”)

Harry and Tina married in August 1981 at the East Hampton, Long Island retreat of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, who had “made a second marriage with his paper’s intrepid and glamorous young Style writer, Sally Quinn.” (In fact a third.) “After champagne and cake, we drove into Manhattan for a honeymoon, all of one night at the Algonquin.” Work called: Tina back to London as editor of the high-society Tatler, Harry “to meet Henry Kissinger at the Rockefeller family estate in the Pocantino hills of New York State where I was editing a second volume of his White House years.”

The event stands as a fitting entrée to luxuriant decades of professional and social whirl, the British duo’s super-networked celebrity at once status marker and career enhancer. While Tina edited Vanity Fair (1984–92), the New Yorker (1992–98) and the Daily Beast (2008–13), in between blowing upwards of $50 million on her Miramax-funded Talk magazine (1999–2002), Harry spent a protracted New York apprenticeship editing US News & World Report, perennial third to Time and Newsweek, then a sleek travel monthly with an ethical tinge (“The Harry Evans called back and said: Malcolm Forbes and some other billionaires are taking their yachts up the Amazon. Would you be interested in covering that for our first issue?”) before reaching the big league in 1990 as editorial director of Random House, where over seven years his penchant for star names, vast advances and hyperactive marketing swelled then near burst his own repute.

Through a frenetic period, Tina and Harry gained extra cachet as A-list, paparazzi-buzzed Manhattan party hosts to grandee celebrities (think Bill Clinton, Nora Ephron, Bianca Jagger, Henry Kissinger, Madonna, Salman Rushdie, Simon Schama), each gathering signalled by their triplex apartment’s furniture being consigned to a giant truck which would trundle around Manhattan for the duration. A book might be its pretext, the author its prime guest, “social butterfly” Harry doing a turn at the microphone — which, as Jacob Bernstein says in a neat portrait of these vanished times, “Mr Evans did not have to be an expert on a subject to monopolise.”

The apogee of their power coupledom, and perhaps of a brief age of liberal swank tout court, lay in Harry’s fundraising for Tony Blair before the 1997 election, when New Labour’s made men would fly in to parley with wealthy influencers such as investment banker and New York Review of Books contributor Felix Rohatyn. The journalist and Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal hosted a Washington party where Tony’s speech had its obligatory self-deprecating jest, his “I remember Tina well. We went to Oxford together. She gave the most fabulous parties to which she never invited me” the cue for Tina to complete the double act with “We’ll soon put that right!”

Such jaunty mateship provoked transatlantic chatter that Tina or Harry might take a big job in a Blair administration: envoy in Washington for her, arts minister for him? In turn, their London media slots, charity hooplas, or honours (Brown’s CBE in 2000, Evans’s knighthood in 2004) gave plugged-in locals a vicarious taste of their Manhattan aura. But distance mainly kept apart the two segments of the Tina-and-Harry show and of their individual careers. In London, Harry was journalism’s departed knight, the local head boy made vaguely good across the pond; in New York, he was Tina’s consort — dubbed “Mr Harold Brown” by the gossip queen Liz Smith — then, via an opportune vault, her co-star. The prescribed terms had no room for seeing Harry’s story as one, noting its recurrences, or considering that his American trajectory might cast retrospective light on his British one.

Most snippets that did reach London matched the frame, as when Evans’s sponsoring of disgraced Clinton aide Dick Morris’s memoir unleashed a “wave of indignation” in New York; so “shaken” was he by the furore, reported the Independent’s John Carlin, that “were [Evans] to receive a flattering offer back in Britain, he might be tempted to return. After all, back home he is regarded by his peers as a rock of journalistic integrity. In America, whose culture he has manifestly understood but cannot wholeheartedly embrace, he has come to be regarded as an unprincipled opportunist — in much the same way, in other words, that he regards his nemesis, Rupert Murdoch.”

The souring mood led to investigative auditing of strains in the couple’s media dominion. Suzanna Andrews’s “The Trouble with Harry,” a formidable New York magazine cover profile in July 1997, sparked by the “amalgam of theatrics, money and controversy” that Evans had “gleefully detonated” in promoting Morris’s work, went on to track how “the marketing champ of the book business,” noted for his “eager courting of the famous and powerful,” had become “the poster boy for the publishing crisis.” A Random House shuffle that raised Ann Godoff to editor-in-chief and marginalised Evans, plus evidence of colleagues’ dislike of his way of operating (variously “cynical,” “tasteless,” “downmarket and shameless”), gave the investigation further topicality.

Evans was moved to a top-floor office — piquantly, days after Blair entered Downing Street — for what became a six-month sojourn before his departure. In an echo of his unhappy Times finale, the backdrop to Harry’s ousting from the Random House frontline was a divided staff. Again, most insiders were relieved. Robert Kolker’s “Waiting for Godoff,” published in March 2001, quoted one that “Evans’s event-planning department came from Hollywood, and his mammoth book advances sometimes seemed to come from there too,” while a “long-established star” said of Godoff: “Harry thought he was a character playing a publisher. She’s the real deal.” Marlon Brando (a $5 million advance on another fiasco) was out; Arundhati Roy, Susan Orlean and Zadie Smith in. Ruth Reichl, food writer and memoirist, describing Godoff as “probably the anti-Harry,” illustrated the point by distinguishing “people who constantly try to remind you of how important they are, and people who constantly try to make you forget it.”

Another sign that New Yorkers were cooling on the Tina–Harry show was a book-length dissection of the hot couple’s Manhattan years. Judy Bachrach’s Tina and Harry Come to America, an acrid if thorough account of the couple’s “uses of power” in the city’s circuits of wealth, glamour and literary commerce, proved ill-starred in its release date, July 2001, and its racy tone. Yet Bachrach’s argument, and Andrews provides more discreet back-up in Evans’s case, has a kernel: that Tina–Harry’s forte was to be the advance guard in American upper-end publishing’s move from seriousness (if also sluggishness) to vaudeville.

The patronage of two moguls was central to the couple’s ascendancy: S.I. Newhouse Jr. (owner of Condé Nast, the New Yorker from 1985, and Random House 1980–98), Mort Zuckerman (owner of US News and World Report and several papers, plus Atlantic Monthly Press 1980–99). A third, broadcasting magnate Barry Diller, was a key Tina patron. An ad hoc part of the deal was Si and Mort’s resort to expediency in handling their charges. When Harry was catapulted to Random House, the “whole editorial wing — Bob Loomis, Jason Epstein — was against him,” and staff were “openly defiant,” an editor there told Suzanna Andrews. “Everybody was sure that Harry had gotten the job because Si wanted to keep Tina happy.”

But Si, “the Howard Hughes of the media world,” in Nicholas Latimer’s term, and Mort, the mercurial real-estate tycoon and “ultimate parvenu,” also godparent to one of the couple’s two children, found Tina and Harry equally adept in the uses of expediency, which in their case lay on a spectrum from tawdry via crafty to creepy. At the former end was a light pre-publication mugging of William Shawcross’s Evans-sceptical biography of Murdoch, carried in Tina’s second issue of the New Yorker, which sparked the wrath of Shawcross’s friend, novelist John Le Carré.

The pincer at work on the New Yorker’s Daniel Menaker struck him on the way to meet Harry following an out-of-the-blue call, as described in his wry memoir The Mistake. “Where are you going at this time of day?,” a colleague asked. “‘To see Harry Evans,’ I say. ‘Oh, no!’ she says. And at this point, with a cold, sick feeling, I realise what’s going on: Tina now wants me out of the magazine and has persuaded her husband to offer me a job.”

Menaker would flourish as a book editor, starting with Primary Colors (his title too). But still. “In work,” Harry wrote in My Paper Chase, “Tina and I remained the mutual support team we’d always been in editing and writing at all levels.” This opus, par for the course, had no mention of Menaker, nor of Dick Morris, nor Wyndham or McCooey, nor Wesker, to name just these. Donoghue pops up once, unavoidably, for his diary is quoted: a cabinet minister is daunted by Harry’s “granite” toughness on open government. Mort Zuckerman, a mainstay for fifteen years — one of those “capricious billionaires” to whom Evans was a “courtier,” wrote media analyst Michael Wolff — gets two condescending references (“I told my boss Zuckerman he’d completed his apprenticeship as an owner in record time,” goes one).

The creepiness quotient soared when Harry’s $2.5 million advance for Morris’s dud provoked the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd to imagine Evans entreating J.D. Salinger (“Look, Jerry, fiction is in big trouble. This is the age of the memoir. I got Colin [Powell] $6 million. I got Dick $2.5 million, I got Christopher Reeve $3 million… I’m an expensive hustler… Join the party, Jerry… Tina will serialise it”). Brown’s New Yorker — whose advertisers she had hosted at an event promoting Morris’s book, with the author as star guest — got further into the mire by disparaging Dowd in its pages, again without mention of its editor’s interest. Evans, in his often brittle interview with Andrews, referred to Dowd as “that silly woman in Washington.”

Evans’s gaucherie towards some women, hinted at in Andrews’s coy reference to his “famously flirtatious manner,” is pursued with relish in Judy Bachrach’s book. Elsewhere, a Manchester pal and later Sunday Times colleague, Peter Dunn, says that “in truth, there was always a puppyish innocence to [Harry’s] games.” That aside, his intolerance of criticism — or even alarm at its prospect — could go much farther than being “magnificently aggrieved” (Andrews again) when interviewers proved other than fawning. Evans sent frequent hassling letters to Bachrach and her publishers as she researched her work, then used Britain’s litigant-friendly defamation laws to thwart its release in the country. Bachrach says she was “bent out of shape” by Evans’s sheaf of “ominous” preemptive complaints, including an enigmatic warning that the author “would see [the couple’s] whitened bones as you walk through the desert.”

Tina and Harry’s brazenness was a motif of their two New York decades of “ghastly chic” (Dunn’s label, in a New Statesman review of Bachrach’s proscribed book, dated 10 September 2001). Harry’s writs blitz on Private Eye continued, securing one win, Donoughue on that occasion his joint plaintiff. “There is something to be said for British libel law because it encourages better journalism,” he would say as he went on to intimidate the gadfly Toby Young, then half Evans’s seventy years, whose latest piece had teased that Evans, given a post-Random House berth by Mort Zuckerman at the tabloid New York Daily News (to its staff’s dismay), might be running out of friends. Evans — who had the nerve to tag Young a “journalistic stalker” — demanded via London’s courts an apology, legal fees, damages and that he “desist forthwith from further defaming, denigrating and ridiculing Mr Evans and his wife.”

Evans would then upset even Mort, to whom he was “the decathlon champion of print,” by gratuitously puffing Tina’s buzzy new venture, Talk, on the Daily News’s front page. In the wake of Talk’s hyped-to-the-Miramax launch party at the Statue of Liberty, costing half a million dollars — “a decadent fin-de-siècle bash for Hollywood stars, supermodels and assorted cultural and business titans” — it now had Harry’s “outer-borough, lean and mean tabloid machine” rooting for it.

There is enough material here for an entire conference, as the psychiatrist says in Fawlty Towers. The point is underlined when Bernard (now Lord) Donoughue’s diaries — at their worst a cloying inventory of Labour and establishment cronyism across five decades — reach May 1996, twenty years on from that night at Tina’s, and a lunch with Harry at the Garrick club:

“Harry was in great form. We discussed all our past deeds and misdeeds. He was delighted I had defeated Murdoch on the Broadcasting Bill, sharing the sense of revenge for Murdoch’s appalling treatment of us on the Times. We both agreed we made a mistake in 1982 in not joining Melvyn Bragg in taking over Tyne-Tees television. We would all now be multimillionaires (Melvyn is anyway)… He and his wife Tina Brown have done very well in America, an astonishing success story… Today he still refers to lovely Enid as ‘the wife’ and Tina as Tina. Nobody can help loving Harry and he gets forgiven for everything. At lunch we discussed friendship and loyalty. He said there are no true friends in New York… once you have failed at something no one wants to know you. Drinks in the evening with Melvyn Bragg, another true friend. He is very keen to take over the Arts Council when we’re in government.”

The Murdoch motor

Tina and Harry adjusted to a less flamboyant epoch with several gear changes. Brown launched her Women in the World network in 2009, a year after the Daily Beast, and added The Vanity Fair Diaries to The Diana Chronicles; Evans’s long, late phase as oracle wended through Guardian columns, BBC radio talks, editorship-at-large with Thomson Reuters from 2011, chairing the European Press Awards jury, the hagiographical 2016 documentary Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime, and his last book, 2017’s Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters, whose didactic spirit was in character if out of fashion. Through it all, one thing that never receded was Harry’s obsession with Rupert Murdoch.

Invariant as this was, its substance could veer from unremitting rancour. Four years after the Times bust-up, Wapping’s newspaper revolution — anticipated by Eddy Shah’s short-lived Today and crowned by Andreas Whittam-Smith & co’s Independent — eventually led Harry, long averse to the print unions’ militant arm, to stand with his enemy’s enemy. “Rupert Murdoch did a great service to the British press when he defeated real gangsters in the press unions who were killing newspaper after newspaper. He beat them by ruthlessness and cunning,” he told the Indian author Seema Chishti in 2007, depicting Rupert almost as the star of one of those newspaper films of old.

My Paper Chase, as honeyed as his 1983 memoir was jaundiced — retrofitting his life’s every episode into an uplifting yarn — struck a yet more effusive note: “Wapping was brave in concept and brilliant in execution… a redemptive blow for the freedom of the press… [Murdoch] proved positively heroic.” He went further: “Today [2009] I have no residual hostility towards him. On the contrary, I have found many things to admire: his managerial effectiveness, his long love affair with newspapers, his courage in challenging the big three television networks in the US with a fourth, and altogether in pitting his nerve and vision against timid conventional wisdom.”

That tone reverted to outright loathing with the 2011–12 Leveson inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics” of Britain’s press, when Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid News of the World was one of the titles arraigned for a decade’s accessing of messages on the cell phones of royals, celebrities, and people in the news — an intrusion that unravelled when the desperate family of a missing thirteen-year-old was given false hope by the deletion of voice messages from her phone.

The Guardian’s front-page lead blaming the tabloid turned out to be false (a phone setting was the cause); but the News of the World, for once target rather than instigator of a media frenzy, was closed down by Murdoch in July 2011. Murdoch prefaced his testimony to a Commons’ committee days later with “This is the most humble day of my life,” and later told the Leveson panel that the practice “was totally wrong, I regret it and it’s going to be a blot on my reputation for the rest of my life.”

Evans, at eighty-three Murdoch’s elder by three years, seized the occasion as one of supreme personal vindication. Both witness to the furore and pundit, long treated by a reverent media claque as the voice of history itself, he used Leveson’s capacious terms of reference to squeeze every press violation in modern Britain into the bottle of Murdoch’s purchase of Times Newspapers: “[The] seminal event was thirty years ago,” he instructed Brian (Lord Justice) Leveson, the inquiry chair: “All flowed from the excessive concentration of power in a single media corporation.”

With Leveson as fortuitous lubricant of the attention he craved, Harry was again in his natural zone as the anti-Rupert made flesh (so snug that he dared to tell Leveson without fear of rebuttal: “It’s not nice to see Britain become the tourist libel capital of the world”). As well as delivering his own testimony on the 1981–82 imbroglio, he scorned Murdoch’s in (where else?) Tina’s Daily Beast, then retrieved Good Times, Bad Times from the memory hole with a score-settling new preface excoriating his adversary. Brian Leveson’s weary references to “who said what to whom in 1981,” after having endured Evans’s punctilious monologues, well conveys the hallmark of all three.

“I’m a radical again now, you know, Peter,” he had told Dunn while writing his Times memoir, an oddly revealing admission of pliability. Three decades on, Leveson’s providential summons to the unfinished battle supplied another warrant for self-radicalisation. Reheated epithets sold as fresh propelled him to the headlines, from 1994’s “Murdoch is the stiletto, a man of method, a cold-eyed manipulator” to his 1982 vent, preserved by Hugo Young: “evil incarnate, the very personification of it,” a man who “had his heart removed long ago, together with all his moral faculties.” And the new preface, drawing on Ian Kershaw’s notion of “working towards the Führer,” even invoked Hitler to explain Murdoch — though a day after the Observer published it, Evans’s own Reuters cut the reference from its otherwise identical version.

If Murdoch’s shame justified Evans’s return to venomous attack mode, it also revealed the grip of a fixation that had gnawed away at him since 1981–82. (And had bitten others too, as David Elstein shows in a remedial essay.) Losing to his enemy-rival had been a visceral offence to Harry’s winner-takes-all spirit. Now, towards the end as at the start of his career, fate and chance had given his exceptional will and ability an opening. Leveson’s inquiry was the culmination of his overwrought, one-sided combat. With his nemesis on the run, life once more had risen to the level of myth.

The truth shift

Leveson’s spectacle fortified Evans’s media platform as righteous scourge of past abuses by the wrong sort of newspaper and, increasingly, of new threats to media freedom. Award events cascaded with fellow senior editors’ pious declarations of “love” and “worship” of the great man. These would continue to attend Harry on his next years’ tireless round of high-grade conferences and festivals, summits and interviews. There was also an acclamatory tour to promote Do I Make Myself Clear?, whose skeletal biography described Good Times, Bad Times, the only book cited, as “the story of political intrigue in a dispute with Mr Rupert Murdoch over the integrity of the political coverage by the Times.” To the end, Harry remained an avid curator of his brand (and updater, as he would gild oft-told anecdotes with fresh details, none ever picked up).

In 2018, Tina oversaw Harry’s ninetieth birthday party at Cliveden House, a sumptuous aristocratic pile southwest of London whose “rich and decadent past [is] speckled with intrigue.” As his British chums paid tribute on a “cloudless summer evening,” Robert Harris “didn’t so much interview Harry about his working life as press ‘play.’” That covers just about every such encounter over his last two decades, though Decca Aitkenhead’s approach in 2005 was a rare pearl in an ocean of treacle; had it been allowed to set the standard, it might even have done him, and certainly reportage of him, more credit.

That said, each late contribution had its moment of seasoned advice: “The most important thing a journalist can do is to ask questions,” “It’s more important to find out than to sound off,” “I was much more interested in truth than I was in campaigning,” and (quoting “Mr Bannon’s” comment, “the press is the opposition”) “Do not regard that as a compliment. That is a disaster, because you lose the defence of ‘we’re only telling the truth.’”

Evans’s death from congenital heart failure last September released an avalanche of tributes, their core of affection perhaps best expressed by two American colleagues: Klara Glowczewska, a Condé Nast Traveler editor (“what I cherish most were those two years with Harry: the pleasure and privilege of being in close proximity to the delightful ferment of such a creative, kind, driven, and enthusiastic mind”) and Roger Friedman, publicity director at Atlantic Monthly Press (“Harry’s vital enthusiasm for life, his electric energy, how he communicated that there was nothing you couldn’t do — and let’s do it now — changed my life. Thirty five years have passed and there isn’t a day I don’t think about him at least for a second”).

Harry’s own posthumous reward was that many obituaries and accolades were brimful of versions of events that he had helped inculcate. Around these, other elements gathered: a proper De mortuis nihil nisi bonum instinct, misty nostalgia for his galvanic editorial years, his allies’ custodian and partisan impulses, the coercive sanctimony of twittified media.

A few panegyrics hit every target: “The long life of Sir Harold Evans — Harry to those of us lucky enough to be among his friends — was an epic of decency, courage and moral determination… At a time when the press is fighting back defensively against the caricatures of populist ranting — that print and news media are just the echo chamber of the liberal elite — Evans’s own career is a supreme reminder of the indispensability of fearless journalism to democracy grounded in truth.”

Such effluvium, with its stifling pomposity of language, worked well enough for its main aim, to hail Evans’s entry to the pantheon. (Typical of the eulogies, it is also strewn with crass errors of a kind that made Harry lunge for his pencil.) Harry’s memorial there was assured long before the Leveson year’s wave of adulation, and reinforced by the post-Leveson decade’s media turmoil — truth wars, trust deficits, tribal rifts. Now it was time formally to anoint him. Who better than Harold Evans to symbolise all that is noble about journalism, especially of the newspaper and investigative kind?

In that turmoil, however, lay a catch. Through the twenty-tens, a new psychic dispensation was being quickened by stark geopolitics, hectic social media, and the chill political economy of newsprint. With truth under assault, from Moscow and Damascus to Washington and London, and its enemies in plain sight, its defenders were upholding a universally virtuous cause. The catch — which struck the more zealous rather as temptation, then opportunity — was to feel and speak and act as if they were not just standing for truth but in possession of and wielding it. Truth was acquiring an extra register as password to associate membership of a newly anxious clerisy, if still with great institutional power and cultural capital. Again, who better than Harold Evans, foremost champion of truth-seeking as journalism’s foundational value, to help finesse the shift?

Together, those encomiums and this lexical nudge are a foretaste of Evans’s afterlife as accessory of the truth-owners. No doubt, his own emphasis on “how hard it is to get to the truth” rested on the bedrock of principle that underlay a free society’s journalism, one that guarded its practitioners even as they might chafe against it. To slide from truth-as-ethic (the “raw integrity of truth,” in his term) to truth-as-instrument (“my/our truth” masquerading as ecumenical) was unthinkable. Yet in performing to the max his headline role as journalistic icon, Evans ever indulged his friends’ sycophancy and their own infractions of media codes. Each side’s bad faith was permissive of the other, and in its way — each forgiven for everything — also restraining. That equilibrium over, the Evans brand is now in the hands of its trustees, and at least as important, of the times.

Could it be otherwise? In principle, this attempt to see Evans “as he really was,” protean gifts and grating flaws together, might open his whole career to more rounded scrutiny. There are stiff barriers to any such opening, however. The incurious reverence is calcified, and for the romancers of journalism self-servingly useful. Just to get to the starting point — recognising that the self-inflating bubble of adulation benefits neither history, nor journalism, nor truth — would require a mental spin.

The perverse effect of that adulation is to reduce what it exalts. Once and forever mythicised, Harold Evans is trapped — and so is the history he was part of. Release holds the chance to see both in their fullness, of which the sense of life as fable is itself an ingredient. In truth there is nothing to fear. Evans will retain an elemental lustre. He did climb Everest from Eccles, after all. He got the job, the story, the place, the glory and the girl. He etched an indelible imprint, recast every tale in his image, and left the world trusting in his myth. Always with a newspaper to hand and a deadline in mind. Avē atque valē, Harry. •

The post Harold Evans, an editor in his time appeared first on Inside Story.

And then there was an office in Crown Street, Surry Hills, directly above trendy Bill’s cafe. Once it was home to MCM Entertainment, for a time one of the biggest players in Australian radio syndication and a promising innovator in video-streaming technology. And for five brief months it would house a team of nearly fifty people secretly working out a plan to save two of Australia’s most important newspapers.

Those who cared about newspapers were becoming resigned to the fact that Australia was about to lose the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. The drumbeat that only the weekend editions would stay in print was getting louder. Yet there were no prominent examples of when a move by a newspaper to a digital product had been anything other than a last, failed throw of the dice. Beloved pets go to a farm, failing newspapers go digital-only. Tackily, bookmakers William Hill issued a press release in May 2016 headed “The Newspaper Death Sentence” offering odds on which Australian paper would close first. The Age was favourite at $2.60, while the Sydney Morning Herald wasn’t far behind on $3.20.

If journalism was to be saved, there were no playbooks to be found overseas. In the United States, many city newspapers had already closed. Two-paper towns had become one-paper towns, and one-paper towns were being left without a paper at all. In part that was newspaper economics, although it was also exacerbated by the fact that many US papers were owned by debt-laden companies. The only US papers that seemed to be healthy were the Washington Post, which was bought in 2013 by wealthy Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, News Corp’s Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, which was cementing its position as the global newspaper of record in digital subscriptions.

In Britain, the national market had been retreating. In 1995 News Corp’s Today newspaper had been the first national daily to drop out of the market in a generation. The Independent had kicked off the trend of switching from broadsheet to compact in 2003, but was now on its last legs, with the final printed edition soon to follow, prior to an afterlife as a clickbaity website. Fairfax would have to figure out the problem for itself.

The 2012 cuts had won the company a little more time. The purchase of Antony Catalano’s real estate offering, the Weekly Review, was helping Domain take on the News Corp–aligned REA Group. And there were early signs that the investment in Stan, which had launched in 2015, was working.

Greg Hywood took an approach that had never been attempted before. He recruited Chris Janz to lead what he labelled “the blue business.” Allen Williams, managing director of the Australian Publishing Media division, was in charge of “the white business.” The blue team was about the future. The white team needed to help the company survive long enough to get there.

Janz was ideally qualified. He was a former journalist who had worked across both newspapers and online, he had some coding skills and he’d run a business. He was also temperamentally suited — clever, likeable, and with a background that gave him credibility with both journalists and commercial people. He’d become interested in the web at high school, which led to him starting an IT and business degree before switching over to journalism at the University of Queensland. He’d worked on the “Australian IT,” a Tuesday section of the Australian in the dotcom boom times, when more than a hundred pages of job ads was not unusual. By 2002 he’d been one of the original editors of News Limited’s News.com.au.

After leaving News in 2006, he had been online manager of TV production company Southern Star. And in 2007 he had shown his entrepreneurial side, launching Allure Media, which was backed by tech investment company Netus. Allure had a relatively unusual franchise model for Australia — offering localised versions of big overseas pop culture sites including Defamer, Business Insider, Pop Sugar and Lifehacker. After Netus was bought by Fairfax, Janz had consulted for a year before becoming CEO of HuffPost Australia, the joint venture between Fairfax and Huffington Post’s US owner AOL.

Hywood’s brief to Janz was something few organisations had cracked: to come up with a workable business model that would allow quality journalism to survive. It was assumed that the project would focus on how to rapidly grow the company’s sluggish online subscriptions ahead of the death of print.

Janz slipped away from HuffPo without much of a ripple. Little was said about what he would get up to in his new role as Fairfax’s director of publishing innovation. Needing a more creative atmosphere, independent of the day-to-day distractions of the Pyrmont offices, he began to build the leadership of the blue team at the shadow Fairfax office on Crown Street.

Normally there would have been industry press releases to announce hires of the calibre of Janz’s growing team. Most of the people who would run the new Fairfax were new to the company. Jess Ross, who’d run subscription marketing for the British consumer organisation Which, came on board as chief product officer. Damian Cronan, who had just led the technical build of streaming service Stan and before then had led technology at NineMSN and real estate startup Myhome, came on board as chief technology officer. Matt Rowley, who’d launched the content marketing division of Australia’s biggest B2B (business-to-business) publisher Cirrus Media, was to be chief revenue officer. David Eisman, already working at Fairfax in a strategy role, became Janz’s right-hand man, and would later become director of subscriptions and growth.

This wasn’t just some sort of glorified strategic consultancy. It was a startup. The blue team would have to build the technology needed to replace the existing platforms, and execute the plan at breakneck speed.

When the blue business took charge, the newspaper websites would move across onto brand-new digital platforms better suited to driving online subscriptions. “It was a bit like trying to change engines on a plane in midair,” Hywood recalls. “It was incredibly stressful and difficult. We had to hold everyone’s morale together to make this work. It was important that there was no politics, and that everybody involved in the white business knew they would be looked after once the changes were made.” Janz puts it similarly: “You’re trying to keep the plane flying while you’re renovating it.”

As the weeks turned into months, the blue business eventually grew to nearly fifty people, all of whom knew that one day soon they would need to walk into Fairfax’s headquarters in Pyrmont and take control of the plane. The blue team was based in an open-plan office. There was a room for holding focus groups at one end. And there was a balcony where the staff would hold Friday afternoon barbecues after growing to the point where they could no longer fit in any of the local burger joints.

At a standing meeting at 9.15am every Monday, everybody talked about what they were working on. “We needed a completely open and transparent culture,” says Janz. “There were no meetings-before-the-meetings to agree the outcome, and very little happened behind closed doors.” And on Fridays at 3.30pm the teams would share with the group the progress they had been making.

In Pyrmont, Allen Williams was kept up to date about the work being done by the people who would replace him. “Allen’s part was to keep things going until we were ready,” says Janz. “He knew exactly what was going on, and we knew that we’d be taking over the business, and we had to be ready.”

Just a few months before the blue business started work in August 2016, Hywood had told the Macquarie investment conference that it was inevitable that weekday printing would soon end. Says Janz, “The original brief was to build a digital business. We were supposed to be out of print, Monday to Friday, in 2017.” The weekend papers, which sold better and attracted more ads, would survive longer.

But as the blue team worked through likely scenarios, something else became clear — it made more sense to keep the metro newspapers than to close them. Janz says the conclusion was gradual, rather than coming in a single lightbulb moment. Closing the papers might save a lot of money but it would also cost a lot of reader and advertiser revenue that wouldn’t come across to digital. There would also be a huge loss of relevance.

“It became evident very early on that the newspapers had such scale and influence that we needed to find a way to keep them,” says Janz. “Newspapers were still such a powerful piece of people’s lives. One of the keys to the rebirth was reminding the audience that this is the thing they value, and it has such a powerful role in how they start their day. It was about taking a step back and looking at the business with fresh eyes. The exit from print was not six months away — it was a decade or more away.”

Keeping the metro papers in print would only work if yet more costs could be taken out, and the blue team needed to plan for that.

If the existence of the blue team had leaked early, particularly the fact that there would be more job cuts, it would have been a disaster for the already demoralised company. In March 2016 staff had walked out in protest at a round of 120 job cuts. Somehow, in the leakiest of industries, no gossip escaped from the blue team. “I knew it wouldn’t,” says Janz. “I trusted everyone in the group. We shared a common purpose. They wanted to do this because they were proud of the journalism and they cared about the newspapers and they did not accept their demise as a given.”

By the end of 2016 it became clear that Fairfax’s revenues were crumbling even faster than expected. Revenues had dropped from $2.47 billion in the 2011 financial year to $2.3 billion in 2012, to $2.03 billion in 2013, to $1.87 billion in 2014, to $1.84 billion in 2015. There’d been a moment when the drop seemed to be easing, with revenues almost flattening to $1.83 billion in the 2016 financial year. But over the next six months the rate of fall got worse again. By December 2016 revenues at the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian Financial Review were down another 8.2 per cent.

What wasn’t helping was that the media agencies had heard so much about the end of print that they were turning their backs on the printed medium. Year-on-year, advertising spend on newspapers by media agencies had fallen by 25 per cent, monitoring service Standard Media Index revealed.

So the launch date was moved up to 14 February 2017, the day that the blue business would become the white business. On Valentine’s Day, the blue team walked into the offices at Pyrmont and took charge. Janz was announced as the managing director across Fairfax’s metro publishing division covering the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review.

Williams was given the new title of director of publishing transition. He’d be looking after the community papers. The community papers were not in Fairfax’s long-term future plan.

In a memo to staff, which was intentionally leaked to the outside world, Hywood wrote: “Chris has been overseeing the impressive product and technology development work that will be the centrepiece of Metro’s next generation publishing model. While we have considered many options, the model we have developed involves continuing to print our publications daily for some years yet.”

A week later Hywood went even further on the message that print extinction was cancelled. Not quite conceding it was a U-turn, he told investors: “We have looked at all options and while Monday to Friday can’t ever be off the table because it may well be the right thing for shareholders down the track, our view is that for some years yet, six- and seven-day publishing is the best commercial outcome for shareholders.”

Initially, the arrival of the blue team seemed like just another round of bad news to the staff. To make the plan viable, more jobs would need to go from the newsrooms to save another $30 million. Announcing the cuts on 5 April, Janz said, “With the proposed changes to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, Brisbane Times and WA Today newsrooms announced today, we will have completed the major structural editorial changes required to secure our metropolitan mastheads. The primary focus of Fairfax Media over recent years has been to lay the groundwork for the creation of a sustainable publishing model. We are now within reach of that goal.”

Unsurprisingly, when Janz talked to the newsroom, he was met with hostility. It looked like just one more round of cuts. “I told them that if nothing changes, we would be making redundancies every six months,” says Janz. “But what we were doing would be the last one that’s ever going to take place. I stood up and they were hurling abuse. The gut reaction was that they’d heard it all before.”

When the detail of the cuts — which would include another 125 job losses — was revealed at the beginning of May, most of the journalists in Sydney and Melbourne voted to go on strike for a week, wiping out most of the company’s coverage of the federal budget. By relying on wire copy and covering the news themselves, management still got the papers out.

During the strike, Hywood spoke again at the Macquarie investment conference, a year on from suggesting that weekday printing was coming to an end. “We respect our staff for the passion they have for independent, high-quality journalism,” said Hywood. “We share it — but we know what it takes to make our kind of journalism sustainable. Passion alone won’t cut it.” For the rest of the decade, Janz kept his promise. It was the last of the redundancy rounds. •

This is an edited extract from Media Unmade: Australian Media’s Most Disruptive Decade by Tim Burrowes, published by Hardie Grant ($34.99).

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The team behind the paper says that a circulation of about 15,000 will make the Northern Rivers Times a viable business. The early signs are good: when they first announced the new paper, they reported receiving more than 16,000 messages of encouragement, and on the day the first issue appeared nearly 900 emails arrived from businesses, the community and politicians — not only from the northern rivers area but from all over the state. The first three issues have covered a diverse range of topics, including local council news, community events, education, health and sport, and each edition includes a TV guide, classifieds and a community billboard. The paper’s aim is to meet audiences wherever they are and whatever they want, and not just online.

Almost since the first European settlers arrived, regional and community newspapers have been at the heart of Australian life. But last summer’s bushfires and this year’s pandemic have accelerated the collapse of local papers that had already been shrinking in the face of digital disruption.

In April, with sales and advertising down during the first wave of Covid-19, Australian Community Media, which owns 160 regional newspapers including the Canberra Times, the Newcastle Herald, the Border Mail and the Bendigo Advertiser, temporarily suspended its non-daily print editions and shut down four printing sites. News Corp, which has the largest network of local papers, stopped the print editions of more than a hundred community newspapers and converted most of its titles to digital-only.

All told, according to the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, more than 200 news outlets have been suspended or closed since January 2019, 80 per cent of them during the pandemic. This has left a critical gap in local news provision.

But the trend isn’t all one way. News Corp announced last month that it will launch fifteen new digital-only mastheads in major centres of regional Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia this year, with a plan to establish up to fifty digital titles across Australia over the next three years. News Corp also foreshadowed the return of the print versions of three local papers in Sydney — the Wentworth Courier, the Mosman Daily and the North Shore Times.

Meanwhile, community-backed papers have emerged in a range of regional towns where existing print editions had been suspended. The new papers include the Yass Valley Times, the Southern Highlands Express, the News in Naracoorte, South Burnett Today, the West Queensland Echo, Wet Tropic Times, the Ararat Advocate, the Hunter River Times and the Braidwood Changing Times, with more in the pipeline.

This flurry of activity has a clear message: local news is essential for regional communities. These communities want their stories told. But while these new ventures are a cause for optimism, not all towns will benefit. Other measures are needed to preserve and expand the strengths of local news-gathering.

When we surveyed 2038 news consumers in regional areas across Australia in November and December last year, we found that a majority of them (88 per cent) — and especially those with lower socioeconomic backgrounds — access local news sources regularly. One in five reported having been affected by the closure or merger of a news service in their area in the past five years. If we conducted the survey again today, the affected number would likely be much higher.

Not only did one in five respondents say they had lost a local news service, one in four said they had no local TV news service or newspaper. One in three said there was no local commercial radio servicing their community, and more than half (55 per cent) told us ABC local radio doesn’t have a presence in their area.

Instead, almost a quarter were accessing local social media sites to get local news. The use of these sites is growing: almost half of the respondents said they have joined a social media group, such as Facebook Groups or group chats on WhatsApp, to get local news. These hyperlocal sites are now the fourth-most-used source of local news among regional news consumers.

Our study reveals that people who live in areas that have lost a local newspaper or TV news service believe the loss of local information has reduced their sense of belonging. According to these consumers, the remaining news offerings in their area are not meeting their needs.

This lack of satisfaction is serious, because people in regional Australia rely more heavily on local news services than do their counterparts in cities. The Digital News Report: Australia 2020 shows that more than twice as many regional news consumers access local newspapers (24 per cent) compared with city consumers (11 per cent).

It is the desire for community connection that drives the need for local news in regional areas. Respondents told us they access local news to know what is going on in their local area (87 per cent) and to understand how things may affect them (86 per cent).

In a separate study of regional journalists we found that many of the reporters working for local news outlets, particularly independent newspapers, live locally, which gives them a deeper local knowledge and a sense of commitment to the community they are reporting on. This may be one reason why regional audiences have greater trust in local news (63 per cent) than news generally (48 per cent). Regional Australians who regularly consume local news also say they are satisfied with the relevance (84 per cent) and accuracy (81 per cent) of local reporting.

Where gaps exist, regional audiences are keen for new offerings. About a third of those who don’t currently have access to traditional local news media are willing to financially support a new online grassroots news service. People who live in areas that have lost news outlets, and those who get their news from community newsletters, bulletin boards, local social media groups, websites or other local residents are particularly interested in supporting additional local news options. So are younger people and those with higher levels of education and income.

Yet the amount people are willing to pay for an extra local news service is still quite low. Fewer than half (46 per cent) are willing to pay up to $5 per month for a monthly subscription, regardless of whether that is for just one news brand or a bundle of titles.

These modest amounts highlight the dilemma facing the news industry as it struggles to replace lost advertising dollars with payments by readers. While the culture of paying for online news is slowly gaining traction among Australian news consumers, only 14 per cent are currently willing to pay. According to the Digital News Report: Australia 2020 only 8 per cent of Australian news consumers have an ongoing news subscription. The majority may never pay.

The financial struggle facing the Australian news industry is worse in many regional areas, particularly with Covid-19 having affected local businesses and advertising sales. In response, some short-term relief has been offered from a range of sources. For instance, the Australian government created a relief package in April, including a $50 million public interest news-gathering program. The Australian Communications and Media Authority announced that forty-one small and regional publishers will share $5 million in innovation funding. As part of a $2 million investment, seventeen newsrooms across Australia will receive funds from the Facebook Journalism Project Relief Fund. And Google announced emergency funding for local newsrooms.

Longer term, the federal government is pushing ahead with its code of conduct for negotiations between news outlets and the major technology platforms. Administered by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the code will require the major platforms to share advertising revenue with news organisations. Its precise impact on different media outlets is yet to become clear.

Meanwhile, the search for additional revenue continues. News Corp’s digital-only experiment in local publishing will be interesting to watch. Behind a paywall, it will offer hyperlocal news content written by journalists living and working in the community, the kind of news local audiences say they want. But the current business model means local journalists face low pay, long hours and isolation, particularly when they work in single-person newsrooms.

Overseas, various models for local news are being tested, four of which are particularly noteworthy. Berkeleyside is a direct public offering funded by more than 300 readers. Devil Strip is a cooperative model under which members of the local community become shareholders in “a publication owned and operated by the people of Akron for the benefit of the people of Akron.” The Colorado Media Project is a philanthropically funded statewide local news initiative providing funding, training, technology and other opportunities.

The most ambitious is the English-language version of the Correspondent, which has been crowdfunded by more than 50,000 founding members from 130 countries to produce ad-free journalism. Rather than a set rate, subscribers are asked to pay what they can afford. This model is based on the success of Holland’s De Correspondent, which has been providing daily news since 2013.

The common thread is that these experimental outlets engage and interact with their supporters not only as readers but also as contributors of their knowledge to stories and participants in the business itself. The aim is to maintain meaningful and long-term relationships between media outlets and their audiences.

Whether it’s online or offline, local news certainly seems to be in demand both from readers and from advertisers. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution: each local media outlet will need to tap into its unique market with multiple revenue streams, multi-platform delivery, and tailored offerings to stop the decline of local journalism. •

The post Here is the news (good and bad) for local readers appeared first on Inside Story.

The latest Digital News Report: Australia, the sixth annual study of national news consumption trends, provides further evidence that Australians still rely on the news media — directly or indirectly — regardless of its financial difficulties. Drawing on a survey of 2131 people in late January and early February, the report finds that compared with last year’s report, the proportion of respondents who qualified as “heavy” news consumers increased from 52 per cent to 70 per cent; the number of Australians who accessed news more than once a day rose by 4 per cent during the 2020 bushfires and by another 14 per cent in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The study finds that more than two-thirds (69 per cent) of Australian news consumers shared or interacted with news sharing on social media by talking in person with others, talking online, and sharing on messaging apps. This is a 6 per cent increase in the past year.

Two categories of consumer — those who don’t trust news and those with a high level of political interest — tend to share more. Among the first group, this may reflect a feeling that information needs to be “fact-checked” by discussing it with other people. The latter groups are more interested in news generally and therefore their sharing of news reflects their higher overall engagement.

The proportion of consumers who find their news via social media has gradually increased since our first survey in 2015, and jumped six per cent over the past twelve months to 52 per cent. Older news consumers are catching up with their younger counterparts, with a 6 per cent increase in news-seeking via social media among baby boomers and a 5 per cent increase by those aged seventy-four-plus.

News consumers are also diversifying their sources of news and information. On climate change, our survey shows people mainly receiving information via TV news, with around 15 per cent seeking more detailed information from specialist blogs and websites. According to a supplementary News and Media Research Centre survey during the Covid-19 pandemic, Australians have also sought information about the coronavirus from non-news sources. About a third of respondents went directly to the Department of Health website, for instance, at least partly because of concern about the reliability of other sources. These trends reflect the breadth of online information sources available and the shift in the public’s perceptions of what constitutes “news.”

During the bushfires, overall trust in news was down to 38 per cent, 6 per cent lower than last year and in line with the global trend. Regional news consumers generally have less trust in news, and their distrust is deeper than among city consumers. This year’s survey recorded a steep decline in trust among print news readers, while radio news listeners maintained a level of trust similar to last year’s. But trust in news about Covid-19 during the pandemic was a much higher 53 per cent.

There are several likely reasons for this “trust bump.” First, when people are asked to think about “most news,” much of what they call to mind may not be relevant to their lives — an obvious contrast with news about the coronavirus. In response, groups normally not interested in news are consuming more of it. In contrast to a news update on a sports match or what happened in parliament, tuning into news about the coronavirus is central to everyone’s health and wellbeing.

Second, the news media has treated informing the public about the pandemic as a social responsibility. While the traditional emphasis on conflict and sensationalism has featured in the coverage, many news outlets have focused on providing constructive information from authoritative sources rather than generating clickbait and fuelling dissent. These results reflect how contextual factors can influence perceptions about trust. The challenge will be for news organisations to try to extend this extra trust in reporting on the coronavirus to news coverage more broadly.

The data also highlight that local news still matters in a crisis. Almost half of news consumers (45 per cent) say they are “very” or “extremely interested” in local news, and local newspapers and their websites were cited as the top source of local news (41 per cent). But almost a quarter of news consumers are seeking information about their community from local social media groups and other alternative news sources as well as traditional news. This suggests traditional news media are not fully meeting consumers’ needs, and especially the needs of younger consumers.

When asked if they would miss their local news services if they were to close, 81 per cent of respondents — especially those on low incomes and in regional areas — reported that they would miss local radio the most. Three-quarters would miss local newspapers (76 per cent) and nearly four out of five (79 per cent) would miss local TV. Given this survey was conducted during the bushfires, this likely reflects the particular importance of local radio in keeping communities up-to-date and safe during emergencies.

But who is prepared to pay for this sought-after local news? A persistently low 14 per cent of Australians are paying for online news. Given the choice between paying for Netflix and paying for news, Australians show an overwhelming preference for a videostreaming service. But consumer behaviour might be changing. Subscription to online news is the fastest-growing and most common method of online news payment. The number of respondents subscribing to online news has doubled from 4 per cent in 2016 to 8 per cent in 2020. Interestingly, younger respondents were more likely to pay — and especially generation Y, 20 per cent of whom were news subscribers.

Still, news subscriptions alone cannot cover anywhere near the full costs of producing news. To be fair, though, consumers have never fully covered the costs of producing news: traditionally, subscribers to print newspapers contributed around 20 per cent of revenue, with advertisers covering most or all of the balance. Free-to-air television has always been entirely reliant on advertising, and even pay TV is rarely based on a full fee-paying model. The real problem is not that audiences aren’t paying; it’s that online advertising has shifted away from journalistic content.

With Australia introducing strict social distancing in March, major news platforms saw a surge in their audiences. Advertising income, on the other hand, plunged as media buyers withdrew their spending and sport events were cancelled. The local news media landscape consequently shrank at a time when the public needed it the most. More than one hundred News Corp local newspapers have closed or suspended their print editions because of the rapid decline in advertising, and Australian Community Media suspended many of its local print editions as well. Regional broadcasters are planning to stop their local news bulletins as advertising dollars dip by 50 per cent.

News businesses, digital platforms and the government will need to reconsider how to maintain a healthy news ecosystem and keep citizens informed. Paying attention to what news consumers are telling us would be a good starting point.

Our survey confirmed that social media and search are now the two major pathways to online news, with a growing number of people accessing news through mobile alerts, newsletters and aggregator apps. News consumers are trying to find efficient ways to curate and organise the vast amount of news available to them. Rather than go directly to the news-brand websites themselves, audiences are increasingly relying on Google and Facebook to find what they want.

The decline in print and traditional broadcasting will most likely shift consumers, particularly in the regions, towards social media. While social media provides a fast and diverse range of information, we also know that news found on social media is trusted less and consumers are concerned about encountering misinformation there. Not everyone has the skills or energy to navigate through this vast range of information, and the media industry and government need to respond more effectively to this reality. The ACCC’s digital platforms inquiry recommended the government invest in media literacy for children and the wider community. With the growing use of misinformation in politics and elections, it is important that action is taken on this front.

In many ways, the bushfires and Covid-19 have acted as a circuit-breaker. They have reversed some of the downward trends in news consumption and the negativity revealed in the previous five years of the Digital News Report: Australia survey. Interest in news was up during the survey period, people were consuming news more, and the slide in trust had been reversed — all of this in response to relevant and generally high-quality reporting of the global pandemic.

Public interest journalism undoubtedly plays a major role in democratic societies and everyone — even those who don’t consume the news — benefits from news that calls governments and organisations to account. But we know news media businesses are struggling to adapt to the digital environment, and we know they haven’t yet found a sustainable means of surviving. •

The survey behind Digital News Report: Australia 2020 was conducted by YouGov using an online questionnaire between 17 January and 8 February 2020. The sample is drawn from an online panel of 89,850 Australians and is reflective of the population that has access to the internet. Respondents must have consumed news in the past month, which meant that 7 per cent of the initial survey respondents were excluded. The data were weighted to targets based on age, gender, region and education level to represent the total population based on Australian Bureau of Statistics census data.

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AAP’s closure had been announced before the coronavirus turned the world upside down (and there’s now a chance the service will be taken over rather than shuttered), and the newspapers that finally fell victim to the pandemic — like the Sunraysia Daily in Mildura, currently celebrating its centenary, and the Yarram Standard in Gippsland, in operation since 1875 — had already been weakened by years of attrition.

But it was the immediate crisis that propelled the Morrison government into action, as it has in so many other parts of the economy. By rebadging and revamping its stalled Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund as the Public Interest News Gathering Program, it will make $50 million in support available to regional publishers and broadcasters in financial year 2020–21.

But what about the long-term rot eating away at the whole industry: the migration of advertising to the big technology platforms? When News Corp Australasia’s executive chair, Michael Miller, announced the closure of sixty community titles across four states at the beginning of April, he called on the Morrison government “to make 2020 the year digital platforms start paying publishers to use their content.”

Three weeks later, treasurer Josh Frydenberg and communications minister Paul Fletcher announced that the government was directing the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, or ACCC, to develop a code requiring Google and Facebook to pay when they link to news publishers’ sites. Echoing Miller’s words, Frydenberg declared that “it’s time the tech titans were held to account and… we get payment for original journalistic content.” Communications minister Paul Fletcher doubled down: “One set of businesses [are] acquiring content from another without the opportunity for a fair discussion about what they pay for it.” Responding to the announcement, the Australian proclaimed that the “policy will end the plunder and save mainstream news,” with editor-at-large Paul Kelly arguing that the announced proposal will “check one of the greatest scams in history.”

If this looks a lot like government by News Corp, it’s important to remember that the proposed code governing dealings between the digital platforms and the news media was recommended by the ACCC itself. And the government’s move brings together two sentiments with wider appeal: first, that we need to do something to save the journalism that forms the fabric of our society and the basis of our democracy; and second, that Google and Facebook need to be cut down to size. Labor’s only criticism was that it had already called for the fast-tracking of the mandatory code. “It’s beyond time to put the blowtorch on Big Tech and make them pay for content they’ve been taking for free,” said the Greens’ media spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young.

But will the proposed link levy really “save the news”? Or might the pandemic-driven impetus be squandered and Australian journalism continue its decline?

The government’s case rests on four apparently straightforward propositions: search and social platforms take content created by journalists; the platforms derive billions of dollars of advertising revenue from that content; publishers are therefore entitled to a share of the platforms’ profits; and making this happen will provide a tangible solution to the dire predicament facing the news business. These might be widely shared beliefs, but none of them stand up to scrutiny. Let’s take them one at a time.

To begin with, Google, Facebook and other digital platforms don’t republish articles from news outlets — they publish what are known as “snippets,” one or two algorithmically generated sentences from a news story, possibly with a photo, to accompany the headlines and links in our search results, helping us decide if we want to click on them. Snippets don’t infringe copyright, and if publishers want to stop them appearing, they easily can. It’s just a matter of inserting “nosnippets” tags in their code, as last year’s report from the ACCC’s digital platforms inquiry helpfully explained.

Snippets stand to news stories as previews and reviews stand to movies; the sample helps us decide what we want. By publishing them, the ACCC found, search and social platforms help increase publishers’ audience just as trailers and reviews help a film. And contrary to some submissions to its inquiry, the competition watchdog found that the appetite for news is not sated by the snippets themselves. Which explains why Rupert Murdoch never followed through on his 2009 threat to prevent Google from indexing News Corp stories, though he could have, and why News and other publishers continue to permit the publication of snippets.

The platforms don’t steal content, and nor do their profits derive from audiences that have been built with other people’s journalism. Ever since the internet unbundled the newspaper in the noughties, journalism has simply not been a necessary ingredient in the business of aggregating and selling readers’ attention. This first became apparent with the emergence of businesses like Craigslist, realestate.com.au and carsales.com.au. The billions of dollars of advertising revenue that flow to Google and Facebook do not rely on journalism any more than do the millions that have moved to classified ad sites.

As Joshua Benton from Harvard’s Nieman Lab puts it, Google “makes money when you search ‘dry cleaner south boston’ or ‘what’s a good toaster oven,’ not so much ‘was that a gunshot i just heard south boston.’” Google has found a way to create an audience and sell it to toaster manufacturers without journalism having anything to do with it. It doesn’t steal news stories on Syria, or the attention they attract: indeed, Google doesn’t serve ads alongside links to news articles (in either Search or News).

Because the platforms don’t siphon off revenue that belongs to the content creators, the attempt to recover these supposedly ill-gotten gains will inevitably fail. We know this because that’s what has happened wherever similar laws have been introduced. When France introduced a link levy late last year, Google simply changed its default settings, meaning French publishers now have to opt in to allow snippets to appear (in which case Google doesn’t have to pay). In terms of how things might work out here, France represents the relatively benign scenario. When Spain introduced a link tax in 2014, Google closed down Google News there. Not only did the laws fail to deliver additional revenue to publishers, overall news consumption shrank by between 5 and 10 per cent.

The government would have us believe that these failures are evidence of the purity of its own purpose. “In France and in Spain and in other countries where they have tried to bring these tech titans to the table to pay for content they haven’t been successful,” Josh Frydenberg acknowledged when he announced he was going to attempt to do just that. “But we believe this is a battle worth fighting.”

But, as Crikey’s Bernard Keane points out, Spain’s link tax hit smaller, newer and less well-known sites the hardest. Without Google, the cost of searching for news increased, and so audiences were more likely to fall back on the sites they knew best, a development that overwhelmingly favoured large, long-established newspapers with strong brand awareness. While the well-known sites experienced a 5 per cent fall in visitors, traffic to small publications shrank by 13 per cent. The latter included sites like El Diario, a digital startup with a focus on sustaining serious journalism with a membership model. So Spain’s law ended up hurting exactly those sites it should have been helping.

Even if it worked, the proposed levy would be redolent of the worst kind of protectionism that, in a vain attempt to recreate a world that has disappeared, at best serves the short-term interests of entrenched players. Reacting to the government’s announcement, Paul Kelly said that “the size of this revenue share will be pivotal for news publishers. Unless this is meaningful, the project falters.” But it is highly unlikely that the digital platforms will agree to paying anything. Being required to pay to link to a website is as bizarre, and unreasonable, as it sounds. As much as the government’s foes are mighty, its endeavour will likely fail because its argument is weak.

In the improbable event that a face-saving agreement is forged, the payments will likely amount to little. Payments for snippets can’t and won’t compensate the news industry for the fact that it is no longer essential to the business of selling advertising: mandatory payments won’t bring back the advertising lost to search and social any more than to classified sites, and they won’t restore the exorbitant prices media companies could once charge for advertising when they had a monopoly over our attention.

Former South Australian senator Nick Xenophon wrote last month that his biggest regret in politics was not getting a better deal for Australian journalism when he negotiated the Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund and the ACCC inquiry in exchange for supporting the government’s media ownership laws. Xenophon believes he did what he could but it was not enough. Now, he says, we have to get it right. “And my abiding fear is that if we blow this opportunity, it will be too late, and the damage to our democracy incalculable.”

With Labor and the Greens in lock step with the government’s strategy, there seems little hope that effective support for journalism will be forthcoming any time soon. More newspapers will close, more journalists will lose their jobs, and the desertification of Australia’s news landscape will continue apace. But there is an alternative. Instead of imitating international policy failures, we could instead take inspiration from successful examples of support for the press.

Britain, Norway, Korea and other countries provide news publishers with a complete exemption on their value-added taxes (akin to our GST), and other places, like Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, give a partial reduction. The zero-rating of VAT on newspapers in Britain amounts to an indirect subsidy of A$610 million annually, and was extended to digital news publications in March. Sweden provides direct payments that amount to 15 to 20 per cent of revenue for the second and third newspapers in a market, which are the scheme’s main beneficiary. With a population of ten million people, it has seventy-three daily newspapers and sixty-nine weeklies, and, in contrast to the dangerous levels of ownership concentration in Australia, eight large newspaper groups share 82 per cent of the market.

The case for public support for journalism is founded on a recognition of the basic economic realities of the digital era. Advertising will no longer cross-subsidise journalism to any substantial degree. News media can only stand on its own feet by maximising subscriptions, donations and other payments from readers. But the market will significantly underproduce public interest journalism because even freeloaders can enjoy the benefits of a functioning democracy, accountable government and relatively low levels of corruption and corporate malfeasance.

If we want to revive public interest journalism, including newspapers that have served local communities since the nineteenth century, we need to squarely face this fact. Only a well-designed system of public subsidies can ensure that we stem the tide of newspaper closures, restore jobs in journalism, and continue to sustain journalism that is integral to the health and vitality of our society.

This isn’t a fringe view. Public Funding of High-Quality Journalism, a report commissioned by the ACCC as part of its digital platforms inquiry, concludes that “experience from the countries we have surveyed provides some confidence that useful schemes can be designed, which can deliver effective outcomes, value for money, accountability and independence from government.”

The Public Interest Journalism Initiative, or PIJI, headed up by former ACCC chair Allan Fels, advocates the introduction of tax concessions, which can be set at a rate that provides a 100 per cent or more reduction in taxable income for specified types of expenditure. Tax concessions are already used to stimulate industrial research and development across OECD countries, including Australia, and Fels’s group contends they could similarly work to promote public interest journalism. Research commissioned by PIJI on the costs and benefits of such a scheme concluded that it would warrant concessions worth between $380 million and $740 million annually. “This research is extremely robust,” Fels says. “It shows that tax concessions are a legitimate avenue for the support of public interest journalism, which is declining rapidly and is a critical foundation for our democracy.”

After researching the theoretical and empirical basis for media subsidies, Norwegian economists Jarle Møen and Hans Jarle Kind concluded that “there was empirical evidence suggesting that at least some of the subsidies to the news industry have the desired effect.” Of all the possible forms of government intervention, Møen and Kind found that tax concessions are the most powerful tool for promoting public interest journalism.

“In principle a subsidy that targets public interest journalism is exactly the right tool,” Jarle Møen tells me via email. “Tax credits or other indirect subsidy schemes that directly reduce the marginal cost of investing in journalism are the most efficient scheme to increase the quality and quantity of journalism and stimulate investigative journalism.” Tax concessions, Møen explains, “will make it profitable to hire more journalists because the value of what an extra journalist produces stays the same while the cost is lowered.” He adds that “a crucial question is to what extent the government succeeds in increasing journalism that creates additional value for society rather than gossip columns and pure entertainment.”

PIJI contends that Australia’s R&D tax incentive offers a useful model in this respect. The Tax Act distils a widely accepted definition of the targeted activity to precisely delimit the expenditure that receives preferential tax treatment, detailed guidance is provided to help businesses interpret the tax code, and monitoring and compliance occurs through the tax system.

In the same manner, PIJI argues, a definition of the kind of journalism that supports the democratic process, informs about matters of public concern, exposes wrongdoing, and provides analysis that makes public events intelligible can be operationalised in the tax code, ensuring that the subsidy achieves its intended goal. An analysis by the Centre for International Economics indicates that every dollar of tax revenue foregone under such a scheme is likely to lead publishers to invest one extra dollar in public interest journalism.

The five countries that topped the Reporters Without Borders 2020 World Press Freedom Index — Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands — all provide direct or indirect subsidies to their newspapers. So news organisations can be publicly funded without compromising their independence, just as we already finance political parties without bias or interference from the government of the day, and subsidise research and development without commercial favouritism. And one of the virtues of the tax concessions proposed by PIJI is that any and every news organisation that invests in public interest journalism, as defined in the Tax Act, would benefit.

As Jarle Møen points out, though, “large media organisations have time and again proven themselves to be effective lobbyists, and their self-interest is often not aligned with what we consider well-designed policies. Political parties also tend to intervene in favour of news outlets that they consider supportive.” There could hardly be a more apt description of the Morrison government’s present efforts, heedless of the evidence and distorted by lobbying.

No doubt the government, in very uncomfortable fiscal territory already, also wants to believe that no serious spending is necessary — that a touch of competition policy can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. But other research commissioned by PIJI, which asked over 1000 Australians the extent to which they’d support paying more tax to increase public interest journalism, indicates that the community would be willing to pay between $380 and $740 million per year to support the news industry. Given Google and Facebook earn more than $5 billion in Australia annually but pay only $40 million in tax, another good way to fund subsidies would be to make them pay a fair share of tax. But this is a confrontation that the government doesn’t appear to have an appetite for.

The Coalition’s reluctance to intervene in the economy and provide substantial public support for journalism (outside regional Australia) is unsurprising enough. After all, it has stripped $783 million from the ABC over the last decade. But if the point of an opposition is to offer alternative policies that will better serve the nation, and the purpose of left-of-centre parties is to articulate the role that government can play to create a better society, then Labor and the Greens should be taking Professor Fels’s proposals off the shelf and making them famous. Instead of endorsing the government’s quixotic attempt to make Google and Facebook pay to link to news sites, they should be articulating the case for a serious subsidy scheme to support public interest journalism.

To the credit of both parties, they have demonstrated more initiative when it comes to the ACCC’s recommendation that subscriptions to non-profit media outlets be made tax-deductible. “The ACCC has made recommendations around tax settings to encourage philanthropic support for journalism which the government does not support,” says shadow communications minister Michelle Rowland. “Labor will hold the government to account for this decision.” That’s a good thing, but if changed tax settings only apply to non-profit news outlets, the significance for the industry as a whole will be limited. “The Greens support extending tax-deductible status to news media subscriptions, donations and purchases to all Australians,” says Sarah Hanson-Young. Such a move has significant potential to help news organisations adapt to a world in which the lion’s share of their revenue comes from readers.

The idea that government has a role in supporting public interest journalism, once unthinkable in Australia, has slowly but surely entered the political mainstream. The 2017 Senate inquiry into public interest journalism; the government’s subsequent deal with Nick Xenophon; and its response to the acute problems in regional news brought on by the Covid-19 crisis, however limited and inadequate — all these mark a growing recognition that, without concerted action, the devastation of the news industry will continue unabated. The crisis represents an opportunity to address chronic issues.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Nick Xenophon. “Conventional political wisdom, conventional ideologies have been turned on their head. Now is the time to say this makes sense for our democracy.” But no matter how urgent, necessary or accepted they might be, good policies need proponents in parliament. Our politicians must recognise that advertising will no longer fund the journalism we need, and that means government should act. •

This article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post When the market for news fails appeared first on Inside Story.

From prehistoric times to the nineteenth century, messages of substance could travel no faster than a man or horse could run, a pigeon could fly, or a boat could sail… The most spectacular leap in communications came when message transmission was separated from transportation. The telegraph, sending messages with the speed of light, had a social, economic, and cultural impact comparable to that of television a century later.

The amazing new technology spread rapidly, and by 1866 the first permanent telegraph cable had been laid across the Atlantic. Telegraphic communication had a huge impact on journalism, increasing the thirst for news from distant places and making its supply much faster. But the telegraph brought its own problems: sending a message was more expensive than posting a letter or paying for pigeon feed, lifting the cost of producing foreign news and forcing correspondents to keep their dispatches brief.

The growing interest in news from a variety of places meant newspapers had to match not only the speed but also the breadth of coverage offered by their competitors. But supporting the necessary network of correspondents was prohibitively expensive for individual newspapers — which is where Reuters and other news agencies came in. They provided a newsgathering operation beyond the capability of most publishers, and especially out of reach of smaller papers.

Rising urbanisation and the growth of the railways were already making distribution of newspapers easier and faster. With their potential audiences growing as literacy spread, circulations increased dramatically. Political developments also helped the press barons: Britain’s tax on publishers, levied per printed page, was abolished and the vote extended to a larger portion of the population, adding to interest in political reporting. News was more plentiful, and more profitable, than ever before.

The agencies soon decided it was more comfortable to co-exist than compete. As early as 1870, the leaders — Reuters (Britain), Havas (France) and Wolff (Germany) — had divided the world between them. By allowing each other a monopoly in certain markets they avoided the possibility of price-cutting competition, and by pooling news they cut their newsgathering expenses. The cartel gave Reuters exclusive access to the British Empire countries, including Australia, and the “Far East.” The United States was off limits because the Associated Press had already established itself there.

With its clear benefits for the agencies, the cartel lasted almost half a century. But it ended abruptly with the onset of the first world war: neither Germany nor the Allies wanted to receive information that showed the other in a favourable light, and both (correctly) accused the other side’s agencies of disseminating propaganda. Wolff disappeared with the defeat of imperial Germany in 1918.

The other original member of the European cartel, Havas, disappeared at the end of the second world war, discredited by its forced collaboration with the Vichy government in France. Even before the war, it had been widely criticised as corrupt and unreliable. Its dual business — selling advertising and providing a news service — was not always good for its journalism, and the French preference for commentary over mere reporting meant it had less status than its peers elsewhere. With Gaullist France unwilling to cede the supply of international news to Anglo-Saxon agencies, a new French-language service, Agence France-Presse, stepped into the breach. For the first several decades at least, it was heavily subsidised by the French government.

The market logic that sustains news agencies is best seen in the United States. For decades, the American media were big enough, prosperous enough and sufficiently dispersed to support two large American news agencies, Associated Press and United Press International. In the 1970s, perhaps the zenith of the American media’s fortunes, 1750 daily newspapers were being published across the country and 7586 radio and television stations were broadcasting. More than eight in every ten American newspapers had a circulation of less than 50,000, with just over half selling fewer than 25,000 copies. These papers could not afford their own national — let alone international — newsgathering operations; a subscription to an agency was the ideal way for them to cover the outside world.

News agencies came to play a strategic but largely invisible role in the flow of news. They are the wholesalers of news, while the retailers — the individual newspapers or broadcasters — are what the public sees.

The Australian media market shared only some of the features that allowed the agencies to flourish. It was much smaller, of course, but its ownership was also more concentrated and became even more so. Nearly all metropolitan and provincial newspapers subscribed to the local agency, Australian Associated Press, and commercial radio stations became reliant on its “rip and read” news stories. AAP soon became a large and profitable operation.

When it was founded in 1935, AAP’s main aim was to help newspapers share the costs of a good international news service. For that material the agency relied on Reuters, of which both AAP and its NZ counterpart, the New Zealand Press Association, became constituent members. As a result, AAP’s international coverage was overwhelmingly Anglocentric — as indeed was Australian foreign policy at the time. Given the vast distances between cities, Australian newspapers also wanted a news agency to cover interstate and rural news.

The driving force behind AAP’s creation was Keith Murdoch, managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times group, which owned newspapers in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and regional areas, and radio stations in Melbourne and rural Victoria. Murdoch’s pioneering role in creating his own company’s internal syndication arrangements significantly limited AAP’s scope for expansion over the ensuing decades.

In many subtle ways the agencies had a homogenising effect on journalistic practices and formats. Their reporters’ copy needed to be short and sufficiently striking to pique the interest of their subscribers’ gatekeepers — the “copy tasters” and other editorial staff — so their journalists were urged to write short, punchy pieces. Given the variety of editorial outlooks among the agencies’ clients, and given the importance of retaining their trust, Reuters and its rivals focused on verifying spot news as quickly as possible, to the relative neglect of longer, analytical features and commentary.

Many features of news reporting that we take for granted — the summary lead, the inverted pyramid structure, the tightly packed facts, the hard sourcing — were pioneered by the agencies. Simple, concise, arresting copy was their speciality, though those qualities could become formulaic. As the distinguished journalist Jonathan Fenby warned, “each event easily becomes a ‘turning point,’ each detachment of soldiers a ‘crack unit,’ and each decision ‘critical.’”

Although the agencies’ journalism was generally less controversial than that of other news media, the frictions generated by their rise go to the heart of journalistic enterprise. The London Times led the early opposition to Reuters’s growth, at least partly on commercial grounds: in the late nineteenth century it was selling for three pence a copy, compared to the popular papers’ halfpenny; any move that further standardised content — as the rise of the news agencies was already doing — was a threat to the Times’s status and sales.

The Times also feared that Reuters’s deepening monopoly of overseas coverage could be used to extort higher costs — a theme that has recurred in the years since then. When Rupert Murdoch launched the Australian in 1964, for example, his dispute with AAP over subscription fees resulted in his refusal for many years to subscribe to the agency.

More subtly, the Times feared that the existence of the agencies gave news sources more leverage, and indeed this soon proved to be the case. Key sources might discriminate in favour of Reuters by saying that they were thus treating all papers the same — a particularly good weapon against troublesome and critical reporters from individual papers.

Three later controversies reveal the stresses in the relationship between agencies and their clients. For a long time, the Australian Journalists Association was suspicious of AAP because it believed that newspaper proprietors would use the availability of agency copy to justify employing fewer journalists. Various rules developed over the years, especially in relation to “home town” coverage: the West Australian, for example, agreed to use exclusively its own reporters, rather than AAP copy, to cover news in Perth.

During the McCarthyist era in the United States, the performance of the news agencies became professionally contentious. Senator Joseph McCarthy dominated American politics in the early 1950s with his allegations that communists had infiltrated government, and especially the State Department. McCarthy’s reckless charges against hundreds of individuals were eventually shown to be all but baseless. The agencies, however, dutifully reported his statements, eliciting criticism that their commitment to objectivity had turned into irresponsible passivity. The dilemma wasn’t new, and has become especially acute in today’s America: is accurately reporting what prominent people say sufficient, or should journalists also test the accuracy of what has been said?

The noisiest and most public controversy came in the 1970s. In the generation after the second world war, the winning of independence by most Third World countries fundamentally changed the dynamics of international relations. A conference of information ministers from the “non-aligned” countries, held in New Delhi in July 1976, concluded that the work of the Western news agencies “perpetuates the colonial era of dependence and domination.” They joined the call for a New International Information Order, and for the existing news agencies to be supplanted by a Third World news pool.

After a few years of rhetorical fireworks, the proposal fell victim to its inherent difficulties and largely disappeared. Part of the problem was that its two major proponents were Yugoslavia and India. Although Yugoslavia was a cut above the other Russian bloc countries, Josip Tito’s socialist government was hardly a beacon of free speech. And Indira Gandhi’s Indian government had recently declared a nationwide emergency and was suppressing internal dissent. “We want to hear Africans on events in Africa,” Gandhi declared at a time when her government was limiting which Indian voices Indians could hear.

After the failure of the news pool, the international news flow continues to be lopsided, although the news agencies with their resident correspondents and variety of national markets are arguably among the least ethnocentric of Western media.

Like much of the legacy media, news agencies have fallen on hard times. The New Zealand Press Association closed in 2011 and the formerly huge United Press International has been transformed into a lean niche service, a bare shadow of its former self. And now AAP is closing.

AAP seems to have been a victim of a media oligopoly as much as of digital technology. With its two biggest shareholders — News Corp and Nine — holding almost 90 per cent of its shares, its fate was essentially in the hands of a duopoly.

Yet the financial pressures seem not to have come to a head yet, and the agency was maintaining an impressive output. Senior editorial manager Tony Gillies says that AAP was putting out 350 stories a day. Although its client numbers had fallen, it was still making a modest profit on its costs of $65 million last year.

But AAP’s existence no longer suited the commercial purposes of its two dominant shareholders. New outlets, such as the New Daily, the Australian editions of the Daily Mail and the Guardian, and the newly independent Australian Community Media group all subscribed. Were the oligopolists seeking to deprive competitors of access to copy, further reducing diversity in Australian journalism?

The internet has brought a flowering of opinion — which is broadly good for democracy — but there is not the institutional solidity needed to support large-scale, concentrated reporting. As Margaret Simons observed in the Guardian, “AAP has reported every single hearing day of every national royal commission in recent years, including those into child abuse, banking and disability.” Labour-intensive reporting of events and institutions is already in decline, and journalism startups are unlikely to fill the gap.

The internet’s impact on news is often pictured as if it is all of a piece, but in fact it will affect different areas of reporting differently. The media will always scrutinise federal government and parliament, and probably also the biggest companies. It is less likely that state governments will be subjected to similar scrutiny, especially in the smaller states, and much less likely that local governments will be. The most spectacular court cases will be reported by the media; the more mundane cases much less so.

This week the possibility emerged that AAP, or parts of it, will be taken over by a new owner, though whether its core business will be preserved won’t become clear for some time. This uncertainty adds to the strong public-interest case for government subsidies, though how this should be done isn’t straightforward. The key public policy principle is that journalism should be assisted in a way that is politically independent and commercially neutral. In other words, governments shouldn’t play favourites. Good journalism is often embarrassing to governments and other vested interests, so it is important to construct funding mechanisms that don’t interfere with editorial independence.

One promising option is for the government to fund, or partially fund, a non-profit wholesaler of news, which will provide its subscribers with a product they can reproduce and build on as they wish — in other words, a news agency. It could build on the shell of AAP, or it could be an extended service assigned to the ABC, or it could be a whole new organisation.

The agency would not aim to produce spectacular or investigative reporting. Rather, it would produce the routine but essential journalism, free of commercial pressures, that aids accountability and can be built on by other journalists.

Reuters and other news agencies were born and thrived thanks to the telegraph and the growing news market. Will the rise of the internet and the shrinking revenue of legacy news media signal their end? If so, it would be a huge loss to democracy. Former US president Barack Obama once observed that the new media ecosystem “means everything is true and nothing is true.” In democratic debates in the past, he added, “there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that.” It seems unlikely that market forces will by themselves ever fulfil the unspectacular but essential role of supplying a strong bedrock of reporting and routine disclosure that will aid and discipline democratic debate. •

The post The age of the news agency needn’t be over appeared first on Inside Story.

As an unseen source of content for the Australian media, AAP has provided the Australian public with a significant portion of its news since the agency was created in 1935. Although it is little-known among many readers and viewers — it doesn’t have the profile of our prominent mastheads and broadcasters — the agency is highly valued by people working in the industry.

Indeed, any journalist working on daily news will tell you that copy “off the wire” — usually from AAP — is generally seen as trustworthy, having already been through selection and editorial processes.

When my colleague Jane Johnston and I researched AAP in 2009, we found that journalists in the mainstream news media were struggling to fact-check public relations material and political speeches. Once they had AAP copy in their hands, though, they felt confident that the necessary legwork had (usually) been put into producing a straight, reliable piece of news.

“The basis of AAP is their brand — their credibility is in their brand and so you don’t necessarily question their copy,” one daily newspaper reporter told us in 2009. In a landscape of 24/7 coverage, AAP was out there covering the less glamorous press conferences, the local issues and the other stories the mainstream outlets couldn’t hope to cover.

We called AAP the “silent partner” of news organisations because it was the unseen source of news that journalists relied on, particularly in the relentless online environment. One Fairfax online journalist described the way AAP copy was often reproduced — sometimes carrying the AAP byline, other times with a journalist’s byline despite only the smallest of changes. “You know the term churnalism? Well that’s what churnalism is, getting the AAP story and just turning it around.”

As trainee journalists in the 1990s, we were warned against the “rip and read” culture of newsrooms — a reference to the tendency in radio newsrooms to rip stories straight off the wire and read them out on air. This was indeed poor journalism, but it had developed because of the trust radio journalists — and others — placed in any copy coming from the agency.

Established by Rupert Murdoch’s father Keith Murdoch, managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times, AAP’s original remit was to provide international news to fourteen Australian newspapers that had invested in the new “independent” news service. Its model was the US agency Associated Press, and its charter was to supply “the most accurate and most searching information of all the world’s activities and thought without any tendency toward or opportunity for the exercise of political partisanship or bias.”

In its first financial year AAP transmitted 1.1 million words, covering major world events like the Berlin Olympics, the Spanish civil war and the Davis Cup. But later analysis revealed its unhealthy reliance on British cable services, whose perspective coloured the news the Australian mastheads delivered to audiences.

In its early years, according to historian Prue Torney-Parlicki, about 85 per cent of AAP’s content emanated from London, 12 per cent from New York and 3 per cent from the rest of the world. Throughout the second world war, AAP content accounted for between a third and half of war coverage in Australian newspapers.

Following the war, and on the back of further widespread use and relevance of the wire service during the Vietnam war, the growth of regional media meant a rapid expansion for AAP, with a fivefold increase in staffing numbers between the mid 1970s and the mid 1990s. Despite the expansion, though, financial pressures meant that the agency needed to diversify beyond providing straight news content to paying subscribers among the mainstream media.

In the 1980s, AAP established MediaNet, which distributed press releases to journalists via a dedicated public relations wire. In 2002, AAP acquired Bruce Davidson’s Pagemasters service, a subediting and layout business that provided a full outsourcing option to newspapers. Newspaper companies began abolishing their own subeditors’ desks and sending copy to Pagemasters for final checking and production.

Fairfax embraced the opportunity, making redundant eighty editorial production staff across the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, the Age and the Sunday Age. For a time, AAP looked to be one of the winners in a new environment constrained by online competition. News businesses were expanding and diversifying, struggling to provide enough content to fill their online sites.

AAP was their answer. A near-endless stream of wire copy could fill the news sites even after most of the journalists had gone home. On an average day, the Guardian reports, the agency was providing more than 500 news stories, 750 images, and twenty videos to 200 subscribers, which included newspapers, radio, television and online news sites.

So, what went wrong for AAP?

In 2010, when the agency released its seventy-fifth anniversary book, On the Wire, longstanding editor-in-chief Tony Vermeer was optimistic about the new online environment. “People have often seen the web as an alternative news source,” said the man who was steering AAP through the early challenging years of the growth of the internet, “but in fact it is an alternative market for agency copy.”

Eight years later, AAP cut 10 per cent of its journalistic workforce in a move designed to ensure longer-term viability. Google and Facebook were blamed for having “cannibalised” the agency’s content.

The AAP executives who this week announced the agency’s closure — chief executive Bruce Davidson and editor-in-chief Tony Gillies — said that Google and Facebook played a major role in AAP’s demise, just as they have in the breakdown of the traditional financial model for news media. The availability of free news content and the dominance of the two giants in the online advertising market have undermined news organisations to the point that they are not only laying off journalists but can no longer afford a wire service subscription fee.

The closure of AAP has been hurried along by the merger between Nine Entertainment and Fairfax, which drove a quest for savings. But information from AAP insiders, reported by the Guardian, suggests that the agency’s biggest shareholders, Nine and News Corp, who together own close to 90 per cent of the wire service, were partly motivated by their sense that they are subsidising rival media companies more heavily reliant on AAP services.

“The New Daily and its associated titles, the ex-Fairfax regional papers controlled by Antony Catalano and the Australian branch of the UK Daily Mail all subscribe to AAP and make heavy use of articles it supplies,” reported the Guardian. “Guardian Australia is also a subscriber and is particularly reliant on AAP’s photographic archive.”

To fill part of the gap left by AAP’s closure — and to re-employ some of the redundant AAP journalists — an estimated twenty to thirty jobs appear likely to be created at Nine and News Corp. But this will go nowhere near replacing the jobs of around 180 journalists, 100 photographers, and another 300 employees handling sports results, finance, administration and human resources.

Among these staff, importantly, are five journalists fact-checking Facebook content on behalf of the technology giant’s Australia operation — a job it shares with fellow news agency Agence France-Presse. This service is expected to be sold.

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the representative body for journalists and media workers, has criticised Nine and News Corp for the decision to close. But it lays most of the blame on government policymakers for failing to tackle the dominance of Google and Facebook.

The closure is undoubtedly bad news for media diversity and the health of Australian democracy. More than a quarter — in fact, closer to a third — of Australia’s journalistic workforce has been lost to redundancies and closures since 2012. When the lights go off for the last time in AAP offices around the country, it will be just the latest in a string of cuts — a thousand cuts — to Australian journalism. •

The post Off the wire appeared first on Inside Story.

This response — criticised for essentially kicking the can down the road — says a lot about the complicated politics surrounding the ACCC’s forthright assessment of the digital environment.

The ACCC inquiry emerged from the horse-trading in the lead-up to the relaxation of Australia’s media ownership laws in 2017. The context meant that many industry participants assumed the ACCC would focus on the regulatory and commercial imbalances between news publishers and multinational platforms.

Industry events during the inquiry tended to reflect that view. ACCC chair Rod Sims and deputy chair Delia Rickard made frequent speeches critiquing the business practices of the digital platforms and their reluctance to embrace regulation. Encouraged by these public statements, the media industry expected substantive recommendations supporting their commercial interests.

But from the beginning there were signs that the ACCC interpreted its role more broadly. As Sims explained in a November 2017 speech, the commission mainly intended to investigate the state of competition in online media markets and assess whether online consumers were protected from an over-concentration of operators.

This difference in approach can partly be explained by the ACCC’s statutory focus on competition and consumer issues and partly by the breadth of the inquiry’s terms of reference, which didn’t so much ask “How can we save journalism?” as “How is money made through digital media and who benefits?” So, while the inquiry continued to commission studies on news media, the ACCC had less and less to say about journalism as it went on.

The final report makes it clear that the ACCC will not save journalism. Few of its recommendations offer direct panaceas, with the most practical one requiring digital platforms and news publishers to establish a voluntary code of conduct. The government accepted this recommendation and has asked the ACCC to begin negotiations with the major players. And the implementation process has teeth, with government stating that a mandatory code will be imposed on parties if a voluntary code can’t be finalised by October 2020.

The other recommendations targeting journalism are not substantially innovative, essentially asking the government to keep funding public broadcasting and maintain its grants package supporting small and regional publishers. The future of commercial news media looks like it will be decided by market forces and private ordering through a co-regulatory approach.

With the future of public interest journalism at stake, this limited intervention could be viewed as a worrying sign. But Australia already has important measures in place. Faced with the economic collapse of digital journalism and the emergence of regional news deserts, media industry commentators in the United States have been calling for the creation of national public service media organisations. Here, governments created the ABC and SBS many decades ago.

It is also important to note that the state of the news media might be a sign of transformation rather than death. New entrants include the Saturday Paper, and Crikey launched a team of investigative journalists (Crikey Inq) last year. Social news outlets such as Junkee have matured, and international organisations like the Guardian and the New York Times are investing significant resources in local editions.

This is not to play down the fact that the Australian media market faces major challenges. But these new outlets are positive signs of market innovation and transformation. Newer entrants are no longer attempting to copy the mass media format of the past, instead providing niche news offerings that target specific demographics. They are also lightly staffed. Junkee has about sixty employees and the Guardian Australia around fifty. The news media may become a smaller business but one that is more focused on the core role of public interest journalism.

So, while the ACCC’s final report criticises digital platforms extensively, its recommendations represent only small wins for news organisations. The ACCC has largely focused on the risks associated with digital platforms — concentrated online markets, a lack of competition in online advertising, and privacy concerns — and proposes a range of reforms in response, encompassing proposed wholesale reforms of media policy and privacy law and amendments relating to copyright enforcement and mergers.

This is an incredibly important outcome for the public, but the ACCC’s focus means that no stakeholders are wildly enthusiastic. Indeed, the submissions to Treasury as part of the final consultation process reveal that both the platforms and the publishers are trying to apply some brakes to the policy process. The platforms have continued their push against the threat of regulatory burdens, and the publishers now realise that the ACCC was never completely in their corner.

An ongoing review of media regulation means that newspapers must once again justify the self-regulation of the press in an age of convergent media. Publishers have never been strong supporters of privacy law reforms and are especially hostile to the oft-raised proposal to introduce a statutory right to privacy.

Although various ministers have said that Australia won’t be afraid to regulate the platforms as required, the ACCC has given the federal government a difficult hand to play by sketching out major reforms across multiple domains. The government has taken bold steps in some areas, asking the ACCC to launch a further inquiry into the ad-tech sector, which Google dominates, and ensuring that a code of conduct between publishers and platforms is implemented. But action on most recommendations has been delayed subject to further consultation.

This policy détente is perhaps no surprise. The media and content industries have never been afraid to criticise ministers and policymakers when reforms to privacy, copyright or media regulation have been canvassed, and technology companies are learning to become formidable lobbyists outside Washington, D.C. During the debate about whether they should be forced to reveal the contents of encrypted messages, tech companies appeared uncertain about how to navigate Australian politics, but that seemed to change, with the Saturday Paper reporting that that senior executives from the United States were present in Canberra during the final lobbying push.

Australia can’t avoid reforms in the way it regulates these technologies. But the Coalition can buy itself time while it takes stock of the changing landscape. The extension of the original inquiry for a further five years forms part of this broader strategy.

The reaction to some of the ACCC’s key recommendations also points to one of the stranger outcomes of the inquiry. Platforms and publishers are largely opposing parties and will continue to clash over any proposed amendments to copyright and merger laws. But their interests may converge around privacy law and media regulation. Privacy reforms would be seen as a threat to the data-based business models of platforms and the investigatory capacities of the news media and both parties would push back strongly against media reforms that increase their regulatory burdens. But change in both of these areas is needed, with Australians now stuck with complicated and increasingly dated regulatory frameworks.

With both groups of commercial stakeholders starting to resist reform in certain areas, it is understandable that new legislation hasn’t been forthcoming. Australia had a chance to lead the world in the implementation of major policy frameworks responding to the new digital environment. Instead, the government has taken a gradual approach. This should allow it to carefully navigate the concerns of commercial actors, stay informed through the ongoing ACCC reviews and follow international regulatory trends. At a certain point, though, it will have to abandon its caution and take a stance. Consultation can only take the government so far, and at certain points the intersecting agendas of platforms and publishers may work directly against the prospect of much-needed regulatory reform. •

The post Publishers, platforms and policy détente appeared first on Inside Story.

It was early 1969 and I was looking for a job as a cadet journalist. Most cadets came straight from school, but a couple each year were let in from university. The personnel manager thought I’d want to work on the women’s page, “Accent,” but that was exactly what I didn’t want. It had a lively column by Nancy Dexter but mostly focused on weddings and social events, fashion and recipes.

“You won’t like journalism,” he said. “You’ll have to work 2pm to 11pm and on Sundays. A young girl like you wants to go out to parties at night, don’t you? You can’t have a social life with this kind of job.”

I assured him that the hours weren’t a problem, but he said there were no vacancies. A few weeks later, though, one of the female cadets left to take up a job in television, and I was hired at a salary of $52 a week. My surname (Hack) was an unfortunate one for a journalist, but my colleagues were kind and didn’t make fun of it. Not in front of me, anyway.

The Age was then at 239 Collins Street, with a statue of Mercury above the portico. The training was informal and on-the-job, a kind of apprenticeship in which you started with simple reporting jobs and someone corrected your copy. As a cadet, you also did a number of menial tasks each day, such as collecting the weather report, monitoring the news bulletins and writing up the shipping news. I soon realised these tasks were a kind of initiation process, a test of accuracy and good humour.

As a graduate cadet, I had a shorter training period than those who’d come straight from school. There were only three or four women in general reporting, among them Sue Preston, a third-year cadet, who told me she’d worked on the magistrates’ courts, on the paper’s television “Green Guide” and on police rounds, where the male reporters took her to the morgue and showed her a corpse to toughen her up.

One of her jobs was to write up weddings, which were published in “Accent” on Mondays. She had to assemble the details during the week (“the bride carried a bouquet of lily of the valley”) and then phone the reception centre on Saturday to check the details and make sure the wedding had gone ahead. Women were supposed to be referred to by their husband’s name (Mrs John Smith, not Mrs Mary Smith), although this rule was breaking down.

The newsroom had a large grid of desks for reporters, and at the top was the “subs’ desk,” a horseshoe-shaped table for the executives and subeditors, all men. Beyond the subs’ desk were the offices of the editor and executives. I never outgrew my fear of the subs’ desk. Most of the men who worked on it were kind and decent, but there were one or two who saw a young, unattached woman as fair game, and I was too shy to handle their jokey, flirtatious comments. For years I had to summon up my courage to approach their desk and hand over my copy.

My first reporting job came a few days after I started. Some parents at an outer-suburban school were threatening to keep their children home unless they got a new classroom. I interviewed them by phone, wrote it up, and the chief of staff corrected it, explaining how a news story should be structured as an inverted pyramid. The most important piece of information had to be in the first paragraph, the second most important in the next par and so on. The story also had to answer the basic questions of who, what, why, when and how. The idea was that the subs could cut the story from the bottom to fit the space available and it would still make sense.

The typewriters were heavy and ancient, with keys that stuck together. We had to type each par on a small piece of paper, with several carbon copies underneath. When the story was finished, we separated the copies and gave them to the chief of staff, news editor and the “copy taster” at the subs’ desk. After my first assignment, I rushed to open the paper the next morning, and there was my story. I proudly cut it out and pasted it into the large scrapbook they’d given me. I was hooked. Three weeks later I got my first by-line, misspelt as Lola but thrilling just the same.

I rented a flat with my sister and concentrated on learning my new job. I felt shy, working in an office with so many men, but most of them were friendly and helpful. Sometimes a group of reporters would go to the pub late at night after work and invite me to join them. I was grateful, and ordered a beer to be “one of the boys.” In some respects it was an advantage being female; I could have a drink and leave quietly, without the social pressure of having to stay for endless rounds.

Later that year, the Age moved to a new office on the corner of Spencer and Lonsdale streets. We worked in an enormous open space, against the clatter of typewriters, phone conversations and shouts across the room. It was exhilarating, especially one memorable night when I had to type my story in ten minutes for a deadline while the chief of staff snatched each sentence from the typewriter as I finished it.

I loved everything about journalism and learned new things every day. I loved interviewing people and having a licence to ask nosy questions. I loved the camaraderie of my colleagues, who were clever, curious, irreverent and jokey. I loved the buzz of the newsroom and the build-up of adrenaline as we rushed to meet a deadline.

This was the “golden age” of journalism at the Age, under the brilliant editor Graham Perkin, whom everyone admired. Perkin was an imposing figure with large, penetrating eyes. Idealistic, driven and humane, he was transforming the Age into one of the world’s best newspapers. I was in awe of him. In those days, the Age was a broadsheet, fattened like a goose with display advertisements and classifieds. There were plenty of pages to fill with news and features, and a large number of journalists and photographers on staff. I was incredibly lucky to have been there at that time.

Two months after I started at the Age, I got a really big break. A by-election was called in the federal seat of Bendigo, and the Age decided to send one of its “Insight” teams to cover it in depth. In a sense, it was a straw poll for the forthcoming federal election. The conservative Coalition parties had been in power for twenty years, but now Labor, with its impressive leader Gough Whitlam, was in a position to challenge.

The project was the brainchild of assistant editor Creighton Burns, who had taught politics at Melbourne University. The team consisted of three journalists, Roger Aldridge, John Jost and Ian Baker, with contributions from Allan Barnes, the chief political correspondent in Canberra. I’d known John slightly at university, and when he asked me to join them, I was dazzled.

For the next month, we spent most of our time in the country town of Bendigo, staying at a motel and fanning out during the day for interviews or voter surveys. I drove up and down to Bendigo with Roger, John or Ian, and we were soon good friends. In the evenings after dinner, they would yawn and stretch and say they had to get an early night or finish an article, so I’d go to my motel room to read or write letters. Years later they told me the truth: as soon as I was out of the way, they headed out to explore whatever nightlife they could find in Bendigo.

The Age gave us a full page for days. My job included interviewing the two independent candidates and the wives of the main candidates. I was shocked when the wife of the Liberal Party candidate said, “I couldn’t talk to you about anything political, that’s a man’s job.” When I asked if her husband discussed political or local problems with her, she said, “Oh no, he has had enough of work when he comes home.”

On election day, David Kennedy won the seat for Labor. This was seen as a good sign for Whitlam, and at the federal election later that year Labor almost won, with a massive swing of 7 per cent. The Coalition under John Gorton was returned, but Labor was now very close.

At around that time a young Finnish woman named Eila Ahvenainen, who was married to fellow reporter Vince Basile and was working on “Accent,” was keen to become a subeditor. “Certainly not,” was the reply, despite the fact she’d trained as a subeditor overseas. The subs’ desk was thought too rough for a woman: there was a lot of swearing and, later in the evening, drinking.

Eila didn’t give up, however, and one night when the subs’ desk was extremely shorthanded, they gave her a chance. She was a quiet, dignified woman who simply put her head down and did her job, without appearing to notice the swearing and drinking. The next night she was still there, and soon they forgot about the ban on female subs.

Another woman who broke down barriers was Michelle Grattan, who joined the paper in 1970 after tutoring in politics at Monash University. She asked if she could report on Trades Hall, where the unions were based, but was refused. Trades Hall was full of men who drank and swore, and Michelle drank only lemonade while at work. But she was tenacious, and she got her chance one day when they were short of reporters at Trades Hall. She drank tea with the union officials, got several good stories, and was in.

Michelle and I started having dinner each night with some of the editorial and feature writers, including Cameron Forbes, Claude Forell and Geoff Barker. Sometimes Colin Bennett, the film critic, joined us, along with Geoff Hutton, the drama critic, and his wife Nan Hutton, who now wrote a column for “Accent.” We went to a pub nearby, the Great Western. Before we left the office, Michelle would fossick desperately for her wallet under the mountain of papers around her typewriter. One of her jobs was to write up Age Poll, and her desk was piled up with printouts of data, books, reports and articles.

The chaos on Michelle’s desk contrasted with her sharp mind and fascination with politics. Les Carlyon, our news editor, encouraged her, and the following year she went to Canberra to join the press gallery, challenging the male monopoly there. By 1976 she was the chief political correspondent, a job she held for seventeen years before she was appointed editor of the Canberra Times, the first woman to edit a national daily.

At the end of 1969, I was assigned to cover the Supreme Court and the County Court. I took over from Rosemary Calder, the first woman in the job, and worked out of a little room in the Supreme Court. On my first day, Columb Brennan, the court reporter for the Melbourne Herald, paid me a visit. An older man with ginger hair, he’d been around the courts for years. “I play golf on Wednesdays,” he said, “so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t file anything on that day.” I thought this was very odd, but said nothing. We were in competition, because the Herald was an afternoon paper and I had to send stories to our new afternoon paper, Newsday, as well as the Age, and reports throughout the day to our radio station 3XY.

The only way to get a story each day was to read the law list and walk from court to court, listening in for an interesting case. Lawyers were not allowed to advertise, but one barrister used to phone up like Deep Throat and say “go to court twelve,” then hang up. This was to his advantage, because at the bottom of each article we used to put the name of the barristers appearing and the solicitors who briefed them.

A few weeks later I had an urgent call from Newsday, saying Col had a dramatic front-page story in the Herald, and would I follow it up immediately. Cursing Col, I ran around to the relevant court and begged a transcript from the judge’s associate. The following Wednesday, when Col was playing golf, I filed the best story I could find for Newsday. From then on, all gentlemanly agreements were off.

A great variety of cases came before the courts — criminal cases, civil cases, libel, accident compensation and corporate disputes. But the most fun were the censorship cases, common at the time under the conservative Victorian government of Sir Henry Bolte and his chief secretary, Sir Arthur Rylah. It was not just women who were second-class citizens in the late 1960s. Discrimination against gay people and people of colour was also common. This was the stuffy and conservative Australia that Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert Hughes had fled a few years earlier.

One of my first censorship cases involved the ban on Barry Humphries’s book, The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie. It was originally a comic strip published in the London magazine Private Eye about a crude Australian living in London. Later it was turned into a film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972). The Victorian Council for Civil Liberties ran a test case on censorship, using Barry McKenzie and Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, a novel about life in the slums of New York. To test the law, a Monash academic sued Federal Customs for confiscating the books.

The case was before Judge Mitchell in the County Court. He read the books over his summer vacation and made it clear he wasn’t impressed. Barry McKenzie dealt with sexual matters and vulgarity, he said, citing examples from the book such as “girls going to slip it across,” “pointing Percy at the porcelain” and a song called “Chundering in the Old Pacific Sea.”

The barrister for the prosecution showed a section of the comic strip, which was a drawing of a lavatory. He said there was obscene writing on the wall, though it could not be seen with the naked eye, and handed up a magnifying glass. After peering at the drawing for some minutes, the judge said he still could not make out the words. I glanced around the all-male courtroom and stifled a laugh.

Turning to Last Exit to Brooklyn, the judge asked for a dictionary to translate the words “hip queer,” “fairy” and “queen.” He was told that most of the words referred to homosexual people. The judge said any family reading this book around the breakfast table would be disgusted. He ruled that both books should remain banned in Victoria.

The Age loved these court cases and published editorials calling for a relaxation of censorship. Around this time, the Victorian government stopped the play Oh! Calcutta! from being presented at the Lido Theatre in Melbourne. Written by the British drama critic Kenneth Tynan, it contained several nude scenes. The title was a pun on “O quel cul t’as!” — French for “Oh, what an arse you have!” In the Supreme Court, Justice Little described the script as “filth” and “an excursion into depravity” and banned it from being performed.

In January 1970 I switched to reporting on the Kaye inquiry into abortion, which was hugely important for women. Up until then, abortions had been illegal and the doctors who did perform them were protected by corrupt police, to whom they paid bribes. But after a doctor who had performed an abortion was charged in 1969 and tried in the Supreme Court, Justice Clifford Menhennitt ruled that abortion was legal if it was performed to protect the woman’s mental or physical health.

The “Menhennitt ruling” was a breakthrough, but it related to one case only and was not enshrined in legislation. The link between abortions and police corruption continued, until a crusading doctor named Bert Wainer, helped by the Abortion Law Reform Association, forced the state government to set up a judicial inquiry.

The hearings were sensational, involving crooked detectives, underworld figures and the story of the death of an MP’s daughter at the hands of a backyard abortionist. I covered the inquiry with a reporter named Dick Shepherd. We took turns to take down everything in the court and dictate it over the phone to copy typists. When I arrived back in the office each evening, the rolls of typed paper would be all over the subs’ desk. I remember one of the subs, Richard Beckett, calling out, “Hack, why do you keep sending me all this toilet paper?!”

The inquiry brought out Graham Perkin’s crusading spirit. Suddenly our by-lines were in large type on the front page. When the courts resumed after the summer break, I went back to covering the court round and other reporters took over the inquiry, which continued until May.

Ian Baker, who’d been part of the team reporting from Bendigo, was the Age’s first education reporter, and in 1970 I became the first woman in the role. Ian took me aside and told me it was all about Masons versus Catholics and advised me not to write about what was going on in the classroom because nobody was interested. I decided to do it my own way.

Having a “round” like this meant you could become a specialist in your area and write news stories as well as feature articles. You developed a wide range of contacts who fed you information and ideas. An obsession with accuracy, drummed into me by my father, helped enormously. I made a habit of reading back quotes to people I interviewed, to check if my notes were correct. Most reporters thought it was crazy, because interviewees might retract something they’d said. I found very few people wanted to change anything. In fact, they were extremely grateful and often provided valuable information afterwards.

It was a wonderful time to write about education, because much of it was in turmoil. It was the time of student demonstrations in Victoria’s three universities — Melbourne, Monash and La Trobe — against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, and demanding more say in university affairs.

At each university, students occupied buildings, stopped council meetings and insulted staff. At Melbourne, the vice-chancellor and 200 staff were barricaded in the administration building for five hours. None of the three vice-chancellors knew how to react: at first they came on tough, charging and suspending students, but when this led to bigger demonstrations, they backed down.

The government schools were also in turmoil, with militant unions leading rolling strikes, especially in secondary and technical schools. There were strikes over the Teachers’ Tribunal (which set wages), class sizes, teaching hours and qualifications. Teachers were in short supply, and plane loads were flown in from Britain, the United States and Canada.

Government schools were old and crowded, and some parents withdrew their children because of a shortage of accommodation. The inner-city schools were particularly bad, overcrowded with immigrant children and insufficiently resourced to provide the English language lessons and remedial teaching they needed.

Education was a key political issue in the lead-up to the federal election of 1972. The state governments were starved of funds from the federal government; Catholic schools were even worse off, with old buildings and hugely crowded classrooms. The federal government under Robert Menzies had supplied money for science blocks since 1963, but it went mainly to private schools. Gough Whitlam promised a massive increase in federal funds for all schools — Catholic, independent and government — on the basis of need and also promised free tertiary education.

I was like a pig among truffles, sniffing out stories everywhere, sometimes publishing three or four a day. In February 1971, on the first day of school, Graham Perkin launched a series called “Pupils in Poverty,” with an “Insight” team made up of Roger Aldridge, Ben Hills and me. It started with a front-page editorial calling for more federal funding and a report that over 1000 pupils were kept home from school because they had no classroom. Each day we reported on derelict schools and teachers working in corridors or tents.

Perkin believed it was our job to fight for justice, to hold governments to account, and to shed light in dark corners. In July that year, he launched a new section of the paper, “Education Age,” headed by Barry Hill, an Australian who’d been working for the Times Education Supplement in London. Barry created a wide-ranging forum on education that strongly supported Whitlam’s policies, and we worked closely together. I contributed feature articles as well as pieces for “Buttonhole,” a newsy column. One day I showed Barry some cartoons in a teachers’ journal and suggested we ask the artist to do some work for us. Barry agreed. This was the brilliant Ron Tandberg, who was soon on the front pages of the Age and stayed there for forty-five years.

The Victorian education minister, Lindsay Thompson, must have dreaded opening the Age each day because of our relentless exposure of problems. He had to face the media, explaining patiently that the state government spent nearly 40 per cent of its budget on education, and had greatly improved teacher–pupil ratios. I admired his capacity for hard work and his courtesy under pressure, but I didn’t think it was my job to do the government’s public relations. I was a crusading journalist and felt I was helping to make a difference. •

This is an edited extract from Winning for Women: A Personal Story, by Iola Mathews, published by Monash University Publishing.

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There is the campaign you see via the mainstream media: on radio news and talkback; on television, still dominated by free-to-air channels; and in “legacy” newspapers, now commonly consulted via the web unless you’re taking a flight and have picked up a freebie. Through this lens, the campaign is a familiar-enough beast: indeed, in outward appearance, it hasn’t changed all that much in recent decades.

The candidates, along with a kind of mobile press gallery, travel here and there on buses and planes. Press conferences are held, high-vis vests are donned, streets are walked, hospitals, schools, pubs and shopping malls are visited. The selfies are a gesture to modern times, but the essential rituals would be recognisable to, say, a party leader from the 1970s. Having come back from a desert island, they might wonder what happened to Kerry Packer and the Bulletin, but the outlines would be more or less recognisable.

The second vantage point intersects with the mainstream media in all kinds of ways, but it also has a more or less independent existence. This is the campaign on social media. I don’t mean the formal campaigning that parties and other groups run via Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. Rather, I mean the more informal exchanges between journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens. I am thinking especially of Twitter.

Twitter is both a democratic and a hierarchical medium of exchange. It is more democratic than old media in its lack of filters. Within the laws of defamation and the rules of Twitter itself, you can say whatever you like. It is a cross between the letters page of a newspaper and a toilet wall, with many features of the latter because no editors are selecting, editing and curating contributions. And sometimes neither the spelling nor the grammar are all that great.

But Twitter is also deeply hierarchical. Those with large numbers of followers have much more clout and status. Celebrity types will chat amiably with one another in public while ignoring the great unwashed. The medium has its “influencers,” those who, through their prestige and reach, are considered capable of shaping the tastes, opinions or behaviour of tens of thousands while the rest of us struggle to influence our kids to put down their mobile devices for a while and read a book.

Journalists themselves have a liminal status in this world. Most of them have much more capacity than the rest of us to attract followers. This is a fascinating and under-recognised way for the legacy media — especially the newspapers — to continue to exercise a wider influence over politics and culture. Here, even journalists of the third or fourth rank can have many thousands of Twitter followers, while those who have achieved a genuine celebrity status might have 100,000 or more.

A few examples will suffice. Leigh Sales, who presents the ABC’s 7.30, has 367,000 followers; 7.30 itself has just 162,000. Laura Tingle, also of 7.30, has 115,000 followers. Barrie Cassidy’s 130,000 is more than double that of the program he hosts, the ABC’s Insiders. Annabel Crabb, another ABC television personality, has a remarkable 480,000 followers; interestingly, her stock-in-trade is presenting the more civil and human side of our politicians. Leading Radio National presenters Fran Kelly (76,000), Patricia Karvelas (51,000) and Phillip Adams (35,000) are also popular Twitter identities.

At the commercials, the picture is pretty similar. Chris Uhlmann, formerly of the ABC and now political editor of Nine News, has 151,000 followers, David Speers at Sky 113,000 and Phillip Coorey at the Australian Financial Review 106,000. Nor do you have to work for a large media company if you have the profile, prestige and respect built up over the decades to help you along. Michelle Grattan (the Conversation) and Paul Bongiorno (the Saturday Paper) have well over 100,000 followers each.

In Murdochland, Chris Kenny of the Australian and Sky, who pops up frequently on Twitter if only to criticise it, is approaching 40,000. Miranda Devine of the tabloid Daily Telegraph has over 60,000 followers, and Sharri Markson, of the same paper, about half that number. But lower-profile journalists for publications such as the Australian, the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age — those who would not normally be recognised in the street — will pick up 8000 to 16,000 followers if they are active on the platform. Old hands, such as Paul Kelly, can afford to stay off it entirely.

What does all of this mean? First, a number of journalists have been able to leverage a celebrity status of sorts in a way available to few others — with the notable exception of the politicians themselves. There was a time when very few journalists achieved anything like this kind of profile: think Alan Reid, Alan Ramsey, Paul Kelly, Michelle Grattan and Laurie Oakes.

Individual journalists have their own brand that is connected with, but also independent of, the media company for which they work. A good illustration of the phenomenon is Mike Carlton, who has not for some time worked for a major media company, and yet has 122,000 followers (and a very active account). When journalists cease to work for a big concern, they take their followers with them. Samantha Maiden, formerly of the Daily Telegraph and Sky, has over 100,000 followers, surely an asset for the smaller online outfit, the New Daily, that now employs her.

This is the upside for your average journalist. You can use the platform to build up individual profile, draw attention to your own stories, disseminate opinion, promote a book, and bond with or abuse other members of your craft. Journalists also sometimes draw on Twitter for material and sources. But there is a downside, too.

Best known is the abuse and trolling. Journalists are not the only targets, of course, but they are vulnerable to it, especially if they are also female. There’s a lot of hate out there in the age of Trump. This abuse can be vicious and frightening.

But Twitter also discomforts journalists in other ways. It allows their readers to provide a running commentary on their performance. And it is easy enough to see why this might be so frustrating.

This is an industry in what now seems to be a permanent state of crisis. It is struggling to evolve a business model that will preserve what’s most important in journalism while also turning a profit. The elite might be well paid and secure, but life is harder for others, some of whom are churning out thousands of words a week while shouty op-ed columnists, who don’t have to chase stories or even get basic facts right, attract the fame and the money.

Journalists were on the receiving end of a Twitter pile-on during the Barnaby Joyce affair of 2018, when many tweeters came round to the view that mainstream reporters had conspired to keep the matter under wraps. Certainly, some aspects of the matter had done the rounds on Twitter and on some small independent news sites well before the Daily Telegraph’s front-page story announced open season. But this pattern was not unusual even before the age of the internet and social media. Britain’s Profumo affair of 1963 — the most famous political sex scandal of them all — came to light in a low-circulation Westminster newsletter before it made its way into the headlines of newspapers around the world.

The present election campaign is generating similar complaints. The recent focus has been on “Watergate,” a controversy about the sale of water to the government by a company registered in the Cayman Islands with which energy minister Angus Taylor has had a previous association. Taylor’s evasive answers to questioning about the matter have not helped his or the government’s case that there is nothing to see here. The frequent complaint on Twitter is that mainstream media have shown insufficient interest in the matter. This is part of a more general complaint that Scott Morrison is getting an easy run from the media than Bill Shorten is, and that the media concerns itself with campaign trivia rather than policy substance.

Such complaints are sometimes misplaced. Individual journalists receive criticism for what is seen as a wider failing of the media as a whole. Critics can have precious little understanding of defamation law, the code of ethics, the need for careful corroboration, or the constraints of time and resources. Journalists on the prime minister’s campaign bus have been condemned for being co-opted, rather as journalists in the press gallery are often seen to be too close to politicians and their staffers — as if it were not the very function of the gallery to facilitate such contact. Patricia Karvelas was even criticised for receiving a text message from Barnaby Joyce while she was on Insiders, as if there was something sinister about a politician having the mobile number of a journalist and vice versa.

All the same, it is absurd for journalists to take the substantial benefits from a platform like Twitter while making too much of the brickbats. There is nothing more ridiculous than a high-profile figure with thousands of followers using Twitter to ridicule Twitter — for instance, as unrepresentative of wider bodies of opinion, or as notably lacking in consistency or self-awareness (failings not unknown in politics and journalism).

I’m not sure, either, why anyone should expect a toning down of partisanship on social media, least of all in an election campaign. We might all like more civility, as well as a greater willingness to see the strengths in one another’s arguments. But we also need to be realistic about how much of this we are going to get. There is already too little civility in public discourse more generally, as well as a declining respect for either evidence or expertise, including among some who call themselves journalists.

Appearances matter. Media defensiveness can come across as condescending and elitist. The ordinary camaraderie among fellow members of a profession can, to an outsider, look masonic. (We academics understand this only too well — journalists have even been known to resort to intemperate abuse of dwellers in the ivory tower.) Ordinary human feeling between journalists, politicians and staffers who share a workplace can look like an exclusive and insular club, especially when accompanied by the use of matey nicknames.

But if you are going to accept the celebrity status, however minor, and the pleasures and benefits that come with it — the show on which many of them appear is called Insiders, for God’s sake — best be aware that you might be seen by those outside the tent as a little too cosily placed within it. And the reality is that some journalists are indeed too cosy in there. A few are essentially players rather than analysts, enjoying their role in factional power plays and making their reputations by publishing the titbits provided by their “contacts” who then deploy their stories as guided missiles in party warfare.

Public suspicion is hardly surprising at a time when research tells us that people’s trust in politics and politicians is at a very low ebb. The state of the media as a whole — quite apart from the actions of any individual journalist — has given ordinary voters good reason to be suspicious. The Nine–Fairfax merger brings a former federal Coalition treasurer to the chairmanship of the board of the combined company. News Corp no longer even feigns fairness or balance and is campaigning aggressively for the Coalition. Stories circulate about the role of media magnates in the overthrow of Malcolm Turnbull. And the ABC has been subjected to a bitter and unrelenting campaign of intimidation by the government, supported by the ever-helpful Murdoch press. Ordinary citizens can be forgiven for thinking that there is now more minding of p’s and q’s than is healthy in a public broadcaster.

Twitter has changed the landscape for political reporting, and this is something that journalists have to suck up, whether they like it or not. That — or stay off the platform entirely, an option very few have so far shown any inclination to take up. If journalists want the profile that Twitter both delivers and measures, they have to deal with the reality that they will not always be showered with empathy or understanding, let alone the bouquets of an adoring public. Democracy has many virtues — including its premium on freedom of expression — but no one has ever claimed that it is always fair. •

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The book’s overwhelming thesis is that while the public may have believed that the press and, later, radio were free and independent, they were generally secretly owned and controlled by “the money power.” Perhaps Young has underestimated the amount of genuine idealism that motivated many early proprietors and journalists, but that is her call.

The first section of Paper Emperors deals innocently enough with the origins of a commercial press in the 1820s, when Edward Smith Hall in Sydney and Andrew Bent in Hobart fought against dictatorial colonial governors for freedom to publish outspoken editorials. It’s true, as Young points out, that Hall was a major shareholder in the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac) and Bent was a convict printer who became the creature of Hobart businessmen. But both men also suffered imprisonment as a result of their promotion of press freedom.

After the gold-backed boom of the 1850s, often-radical new publications emerged, only for the most successful to evolve into sedate purveyors of Victorian-age morality. Usually this evolution happened because they had secured a vast increase in advertising revenue, which enabled their selling price to be kept to a penny or so per copy, well below the cost of production.

The Sydney Morning Herald, which constantly opposed measures like universal male suffrage, was able to see off any number of radical would-be competitors. In Melbourne, the formerly radical Argus deteriorated into what its frustrated part-owner Edward Wilson called “old-womanish Toryism,” and attracted a large middle-class following. Only the gold-rush-era Age maintained a modified radicalism that confirmed its popularity among the working class.

The tragic economic depression of the 1890s demolished most of the weaker newspapers, the Age surviving only by rigid economies and its support for business-oriented protectionism. But the hard times and technological advances also enabled the first real press monopolies to emerge.

The Melbourne Herald faltered, then fell into the hands of two prominent land boomers, W.L. Baillieu and Theodore Fink. These two men had kept control of their Herald shares by not disclosing their value to the insolvency authorities. Once free of the law, Baillieu in particular was able to develop his mining interests into the colossus known as the Collins House group, which was to secretly control most of the Australian press during the first half of the twentieth century.

Even by the time of the first world war, the day of the independent newspaper publisher was almost done. The costs of running a newspaper had risen enormously, with ample capital investment needed in huge web-fed rotary printing presses, banks of linotypes for mechanised typesetting, and substantial buildings to accommodate it all.

A new type of journalist was also needed to cater for the mass audience. These men (very few were women) had often worked overseas, where Lord Northcliffe in Britain and William Randolph Hearst in the United States were making fortunes by purveying a mix of political sensations, crime, war, sport and discreetly implied sex.

In Australia, Sydney led the way with John Norton’s raucous weekly, Truth. The formula was also applied, in modified form, by morning and afternoon papers designed to catch commuters on their way to and from home by public transport.

The main Sydney press proprietor in the prewar period was (Sir) Hugh Denison, a successful tobacco manufacturer, racehorse owner and radio pioneer. Scenting even larger profits to be made from the media, Denison bought the ailing Australian Star in 1910 and engaged the Sydney Morning Herald subeditor Montague Grover to convert it into a popular broadsheet simply called the Sun. (I should mention that Grover was my grandfather, and I can report that none of his descendants displayed the same talent for the “popular touch” in newspaper work.)

Sally Young pays tribute to Grover as “a brilliant and original journalist” who put “human interest” news and photographs on the front page, along with stimulating headlines and tightly written text. He also expanded the Sun’s interstate and overseas coverage. As the Sun’s Melbourne correspondent, he hired a young Age reporter named Keith Murdoch.

In 1922, Denison decided to move into the Melbourne market, planning an opposition afternoon paper to the now highly successful Herald, which by this stage was managed by Murdoch. When Denison was reminded of a secret agreement not to compete with the Herald, he asked Grover to design a new morning paper instead. The result was the tabloid Sun News-Pictorial (today’s Herald Sun).

Denison’s success was ruined two years later when he foolishly decided to tackle Murdoch head-on by starting a second paper, the Evening Sun. The new paper accumulated such huge losses that the whole show had to be sold to the Herald. Now Murdoch had an evening monopoly again, and the group as a whole, the Herald and Weekly Times, prospered anew. When Northcliffe visited Australia, he was astounded by the Herald’s monopoly power: “One paper for 800,000 people!” he exclaimed.

What happened next is one of the most drama-filled yet secretive episodes in Australian business and communications history, and Sally Young tells the story beautifully.

By 1921 the thirty-six-year-old Keith Murdoch had returned from his tutelage in London under Northcliffe to be appointed as editor and then managing editor of the Herald empire by Theodore Fink. Seven years later he extended his growing personal power by purchasing a share in the Brisbane Daily Mail from the owner, the notorious Melbourne businessman John Wren. When this pair won control of the competing Courier, they amalgamated the two papers into today’s Courier Mail.

Earlier, during the economic boom of the 1920s, newspaper circulations and profits had soared on the back of lavish advertising. But the depression began to cut the ground from underneath them. By 1933 only twenty daily newspapers survived, and of these the Herald group and Associated Newspapers of Sydney owned half. The only large city that still had competitive dailies was Adelaide.

It has always been assumed that Keith Murdoch, while still chief of the Herald group, privately bought the Adelaide News to safeguard the interests of his son Rupert. Now, for the first time to my knowledge, Young tells the full story.

The experienced but alcoholic Jim Davidson had been editor-in-chief of the Herald, but resigned because of editorial interference by Theodore Fink. From 1921, the forty-nine-year-old Davidson and journalist Gerald Mussen planned a new afternoon paper called the Adelaide News, allegedly to be owned by a company called News Ltd.

According to his friend Monty Grover, Davidson “always told the truth, no matter how unpleasant.” But, according to Young, he never admitted that the true owner of News Ltd was Baillieu’s mining group, Collins House. Davidson and Mussen were each permitted to buy a number of shares in the new company, but even these purchases were secretly financed by Collins House.

The Herald quietly donated two spare Goss rotary presses and seconded its works manager to supervise their assembly in Adelaide. Also using Collins House money, Davidson was able to buy Adelaide’s two existing afternoon newspapers and close them down, clearing the way for the News to begin publication without competition. At the time, Rupert Murdoch was about a year old. The new paper promoted Baillieu’s mining companies at every opportunity. In 1924 it was able to expand into Tasmania; in 1926 it entered Perth with the purchase of the West Australian.

When Murdoch had proved his brilliance at managing the Herald interests, Baillieu (who regarded Murdoch as “a virtual son”) allowed him to hold 2700 shares in the News. The share capital was vastly increased in 1929, Jim Davidson was pushed out of his faux control, and the following year he was found dead in his hotel room. His death was recorded as having been caused by pneumonia.

That same year, a combination of the Herald and Weekly Times, Baillieu, Fink and Murdoch managed to take over the venerable and profitable Adelaide Advertiser, forcing out the Bonython family who had run it for half a century. The Adelaide monopoly was complete.

Two years later, Baillieu agreed to sell Keith Murdoch his 31,000 shares in News Ltd at a bargain price. Whenever more parcels of News Ltd shares became available over the years, Murdoch bought them, even if it meant going into debt. His son’s inheritance was looking better all the time.

Meanwhile, Monty Grover had left his rather dull job as head of the Herald and Weekly Times’s stable of magazines and moved back to Sydney. Like many journalists, he was a lifelong socialist, and was still refusing to recognise what was happening in Soviet Russia under Stalin’s brutal regime. Canny newspaper proprietors were happy to employ men like Grover, recognising that creative people usually produce more interesting stories and publications with fresh perspectives.

In Sydney, the Australian Workers’ Union had long wished to establish its own daily newspaper to counter the influence of the “capitalist press.” It appointed Grover as founding editor, and soon the World was rolling off its own presses, finding a large working-class audience. Unfortunately the union instructed Grover to include turgid front-page editorials written by a soviet of AWU officials. Grover and most of his talented staff walked out, and the paper collapsed.

The World’s modern presses lay idle for some months. Then Robert Clyde Packer, a Denison editor, made an audacious deal to take over the plant in conjunction with E.G. Theodore, formerly treasurer in the Scullin Labor government. George Warnecke, a brilliant English journalist, suggested they use the World’s production facilities to produce a paper designed specifically for women, to be called the Australian Women’s Weekly. It proved a spectacular success and, along with the later purchase of the Daily Telegraph, became the foundation of the Consolidated Press empire.

The final sections of Paper Emperors deal with Keith Murdoch’s interference in federal politics during the 1930s; the rise of commercial radio stations; the press proprietors’ battles with the ABC; the establishment of a local newsprint industry; the creation of the AAP cable service; the rise, fall and rise of (Sir) Robert Menzies (with Collins House backing); the wartime censorship powers temporarily held by Murdoch; and the trajectories of the main Australian dailies up to the 1950s. It is a massive research and writing effort, perhaps a trifle “leftish” but masterfully achieved.

Books like this are the most convincing argument for continued university funding of socially important subjects, and their publication by university presses. This massive tome, thank goodness, contains copious notes and a detailed index, which alone are worth the price of admission. •

The post Who owned the owners? appeared first on Inside Story.

At around the sixteen-minute mark of the briefing to investors yesterday, Nine CEO Hugh Marks made it clear that non-metropolitan newspapers probably have no future within the new company. Asked about the future of Fairfax’s regional and New Zealand publications, he said that it should be “no surprise” that the company’s focus would be on high-growth components of the business, and “strategically we want to ensure the management team has the ability to focus on those high-growth areas.”

What this means, he added, is that “those other businesses that may not fit that high-growth model may be better off serviced by being part of some other environment.” Remove the awful business-speak and it’s pretty clear. The local papers are likely to be up for sale.

This should bother the current government, if its rhetoric is to be taken seriously. It claims to care about the quality of news in local communities in the wake of media mergers. Indeed, one of the few sops it gave when it changed the media ownership regulations last year was a $60 million fund mainly for supporting local journalism — a small recognition that it is here that the worst of the hollowing out of news media has occurred.

The other big rural player, News Corp, also seems to be contemplating getting out. In what looks like an effort to fatten up local media for possible sale, the company has introduced a premium subscription for its local publications. My intelligence from inside News is that the move is going well financially. But for readers it means that if you want to read a suburban story in Adelaide or Townsville, you have to sign up to a whole year’s subscription.

News’s chief operating officer, Damian Eales, told Mumbrella recently, “We are finding that people are increasingly willing to pay for a subscription that includes exclusive content about their local council, their local business community, local development applications, local personalities and much more… The learning for us is that the more scarce the content, the more valuable it is.”

That shouldn’t be a surprise. In the new media world it is easier to find out what Donald Trump had for dinner last night than what is happening at your local school or why the pothole in the road hasn’t been fixed.

Research here and in the United States signals that it is the democratic health of local communities that suffers first from declines in journalistic capacity. Local organisations — councils and police stations — step up by running web pages and Facebook pages, but they can’t replace boots-on-the-ground journalism — reporters sitting in court, attending local council meetings and asking tough questions.

The former editor of the Burnie Advocate, Des Ryan, tells me that the paper has immense reader loyalty. They call it the Aggravate, but they buy it. Ryan used to watch people buying the masthead with their weekly supermarket shop, and it seemed that the Burnie Advocate would be the last newspaper in the world to close down. That was more than ten years ago, but in a community like Burnie things change relatively slowly.

Fairfax and News don’t break out their profit-and-loss figures by masthead, so it is hard to judge, but back then the Advocate was a tidy little business. This is what Fairfax regional mastheads depend on for their future — whether they are profitable. If they are tidy little businesses, they may be bought individually by interested local proprietors.

Or someone may buy large numbers of these mastheads from Fairfax and News and create a regional publishing oligopoly or even monopoly. That has its own dangers, of course. But if News Corp is right about its premium subscription model for local news, then Marks may be wrong about their not being growth businesses, although obviously they are not as sexy as a subscription television business like Stan or the real estate advertising in Domain.

What does it mean for the journalism? Not necessarily anything good. Marks’s casual remarks about local papers are just one of the many signs that this merger is not good news for public interest journalism. The new proprietors don’t understand it, and they don’t care much about it.

More worrying, the fact that neither side of politics is talking about this is one more marker of the dearth of intelligent, in-touch thinking behind media policy on both sides of politics.

Bill Shorten was tweeting his concern for Fairfax yesterday. Spare us the sentiment; give us some policy worth having.

There is a regional office of the ABC in Burnie. Perhaps the journalists there will have an opportunity today to ask the candidates about media policy. I hope so. ●

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“One may smile and smile and be a villain,” as Hamlet says of his smooth-talking uncle, Claudius, who has engineered a successful power grab in the kingdom of Denmark. The secret of political villainy, as distinct from the kind of villainy that fuels crime dramas, is the capacity to maintain a certain kind of ease. One of Cheney’s key attributes, according to Vice, was his ability to make an outrageous suggestion in a totally relaxed way.

The central character in Press is Duncan Allen, editor of a leading tabloid. Played by Ben Chaplin, he is in many ways Cheney’s antithesis: lean, agile, flamboyant, seductive and flippant. His behaviour as he flounces around in the designer-themed offices of the Post is one step away from stand-up comedy. If David Brent of The Office were reborn in his dream identity, he’d be Duncan Allen.

Allen thinks at lightning speed and never misses a trick. In the opening episode, we see him just back from New York, ascending a glass elevator in the Post building. As he walks through the open-plan office, he’s approached by a succession of people with urgent matters to impart. One hands him a phone on which a government minister is waiting. Allen is about to ruin her career, a matter that takes up most of the episode and establishes him as a thoroughly ruthless and devious operator. Later we see him in a meeting room at 10 Downing Street, vying with the prime minister over who really calls the shots.

Since the Leveson inquiry of 2011–12, we’ve all known that editors of the Murdoch tabloids had their own backdoor to Downing Street and did indeed expect to call the shots, not just on how the government’s public image was to be managed but also on matters of policy.

The policy aspect doesn’t get much attention in this series, which explores the dynamics of the rivalry between the Post and the Herald, modelled respectively on the Sun and the Guardian. The two papers are essentially chasing the same stories: the suicide of a young footballer, a hit-and-run incident involving a police car, sexual harassment allegations against a high-profile celebrity, and a scandal surrounding Carla Mason, secretary for work and pensions and government spokesperson on women’s affairs.

It’s all spin, scandal and social issues. Later, the stakes are raised with a story from an MI5 whistleblower (with obvious echoes of the Snowden affair), but the series curiously avoids portraying regular political reportage. While it shows real nerve in taking on some of the most vindictive and destructive operators in British politics, what goes on in government is not part of the story.

Press aims to dramatise journalism in the contemporary world, but this is a world that moves fast, and the attempt to portray it gets tangled in anachronism. The Leveson inquiry, evoked in a very effective scene early on, took place seven years ago. Carla Mason might be a minister in a late-term Blair–Brown government or the early years of David Cameron, but since Jeremy Corbyn took over as Labour leader in 2015 the political dynamic in Britain has changed beyond all recognition. Against the fallout from Brexit, most of the stories so earnestly chased by the rival newspapers in Press are of minor concern in the larger scheme of things. The political climate is now very much more fraught than it was five years ago, and the media are if anything more intensively involved than ever before.

Perhaps this is why the BBC has (apparently) stalled on plans for a second season. That’s a shame. Press has strong appeal as television drama. Mike Bartlett’s script is crisp and stylish, alternating passages of fast-paced, edgy dialogue with exchanges in which the key players size each other up, holding their fire as they figure out a new angle of attack.

Bartlett establishes a strong dramatic structure, playing with the assumed bipolarity of tabloid and “quality” journalism in ways that blur their boundaries. The Post, with its vibrant red logo, and the Herald, badged in faded blue, occupy buildings diagonally opposite each other. Both are losing money, but the Post, bankrolled by media mogul George Emmerson (David Suchet), has a spanking new office fit-out, while staff at the Herald have to fuss with broken water coolers and mouse traps.

In compensation for its position as the underdog in the commercial hierarchy, the Herald occupies the ethical high ground. That, at least, is the equation assumed by its editor Amina Chaudury (Priyanga Burford) and her team of serious-minded and dedicated journalists, headed by Holly Evans (Charlotte Riley) and James Edwards (Al Weaver).

While Chaudury, seeing the imminent demise of her newspaper, sets out to transform the business model, Allen, under instructions from Emmerson to engage in some “real journalism,” sets out to poach Evans. The battle between the two camps is deepened by cleverly woven tension lines. At times it is like a peak chess game, with Evans and Allen making ingenious moves in a sophisticated play for the upper hand.

The critical dialogues take place in St Bride’s Church, a fine Christopher Wren building in Fleet Street known as “the journalists’ church.” Heritage and the professional traditions of journalism are at the thematic heart of the series. The buildings occupied by the two newspapers are on the edge of the Clerkenwell precinct, with its paved alleyways and sixteenth-century arches, and the characters weave between the older and newer worlds of London as they go about their assignments.

Allen emerges as by far the most fascinating character in the drama, a moral shape-shifter whose motivations are much less easily defined than they seem. He even strategically outclasses Emmerson, the Murdoch figure. Is he a villain? He’s a master of betrayal, deception and manipulation. He’s also shrewdly cynical, taking the scalpel to other people’s self-delusions and indulging in none of his own.

In the first episode, after a teenage football star commits suicide, he sends a young reporter to get the family’s reaction to evidence that the boy was gay and afraid to come out. That might be news to them, objects the reporter, and I don’t want to be the one to break it. “If it’s news,” Allen quips with toneless sarcasm, “that’s our remit.”

Forms of villainy that involve ruining lives rather than killing people have a special kind of fascination. Those who are especially skilled in this way are often adept at staying on the right side of the law. Dick Cheney is a real-life version of the type. It includes many of the great characters in literature and drama: Shakespeare’s Iago, Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, Dickens’s Uriah Heep. What they all have in common is that they are creatures of their times, exploiting and so exposing the pathologies of the social and political worlds they inhabit. •

The post Smiling villainy appeared first on Inside Story.

Matt Golding, Fairfax syndicated, 28 August 2018

Twenty-eighteen was certainly a bumper year for public idiocy and political self-harm, a bit like Alexander Pope’s 1738, when “Vice with such giant strides comes on amain, / Invention strives to be before in vain; / Feign what I will, and paint it e’er so strong, / Some rising genius sins up to my song.” Would we seriously have believed a satirist who prophesied the mayhem of the High Court’s rulings on parliamentarians’ citizenship? Or the incompetent Brexit negotiations? Or the exposure of posthumous bank charges? Or Barnaby’s love life? Or the Dutton challenge on Turnbull that failed on so many levels except the basic one of removing a PM?

Pope’s conceit was that he had to write satirical exaggeration fast because the rising geniuses of real life were reaching his satirical standards so quickly. A hold-up at the printers could too easily turn something intended as political satire into political history. This must also have seemed true to the cartoonists this year, even before that Magic Pudding of satire, Donald Trump, got counted in.

Jon Kudelka, Australian, 11 June 2018

So make yourself a good strong cup of tea (alcohol may be too dangerously depressive) and wander through Radcliffe’s book or MoAD’s exhibition to relive the lows and lows of 2018. The brilliance of the cartoonists will make the experience a perverse pleasure. Readers will all have their favourites (who has been better than Cathy Wilcox in recent years, I ask rhetorically) and should enjoy them as simply and sadly as possible.

In the lines that remain I want to ring the changes these compilations expose in Australia’s powerful tradition of what used to be known as black-and-white art.

For starters, almost nothing is in black and white anymore; cartoonists are now working naturally and well in colour. For a long time after colour hit newspapers late last century, it was more of a distraction than an improvement, especially given the drab reproduction on newsprint. Warren Brown in the Daily Telegraph was, for mine, the trailblazer, and now colour is integral to the pathos and meaning of many cartoons, like this from Peter Broelman, which reminds viewers so economically of the same-sex marriage debate and the implacable logic of a shift in public morality:

Peter Broelman, Syndicated, 6 December 2017

Better colour is, perhaps, the only obvious benefit to cartooning from the rapid retreat from newsprint. In the online versions of the papers, they seem to be hidden away, and are stripped of context if you have the stamina to track them down. Cartoons are just as powerful as ever they were, but they are losing their prominence in an industry that can hardly afford to burn such talent.

And the talent has also undergone a sea change. The cartoons in these two collections include almost nothing by the great generation led by Petty and Spooner (retired), or Tandberg and Leak (deceased), or Leunig (largely departed from topical cartooning). The major voices are Cathy Wilcox, Alan Moir, David Pope, Mark Knight, First Dog on the Moon, Warren Brown, Matt Golding and Jon Kudelka, with David Rowe in his own strange Goyaesque vortex of caricature at the Fin Review.

So we have a new generation of cartoonists speaking more directly to the concerns of a new millennium in its much more fractured mediascape. Curiously, there are no more women than in the 1980s, fewer even in percentage terms than female parliamentarians in the Nationals’ party room. Five out of seventy-five cartoonists on MoAD’s website is a risibly low proportion in the era of #MeToo, and not just a problem for Barnaby Joyce:

Cathy Wilcox, Fairfax Media, 6 March 2018

So why, despite substantial turnover in the ever-reducing number of regular jobs, are there still so few female cartoonists? That remains a question even if (or especially because) the ideological complexion of the cartooning tribe is such that Peter Dutton can anathematise “crazy lefties” who “draw mean cartoons about me”: “They don’t know how completely dead they are to me.” If you read carefully, the minister is not attacking all cartoonists, who present a somewhat broader spectrum of political views than this suggests. But the point that they are generally of the left is fair enough. Unlike journalism, satire cannot aspire to be balanced, and satirical animus in Australia has tilted left for at least half a century.

Mind you, if the Coalition keeps committing such baroque self-harm as it achieved in 2018, it will be a while before the scales of ridicule have much cause to swing back. Perhaps if you change the government, you change the cartoonists (to mangle Paul Keating). The 2019 collections will almost certainly let us test that hypothesis.

Finally, far and away the most notorious Australian cartoon of 2018, Mark Knight’s internationally incendiary image of Serena Williams at the US Open, appears neither in Radcliffe’s book nor MoAD’s exhibition. I doubt that anyone involved wanted to reheat that debate so soon, and I certainly don’t blame them. But in the long run this will look like a notable omission. The fact that Knight’s controversial image bestrid the world in hours indicates how something fundamental has changed about the place of cartoons in media. No longer do they belong primarily on newsprint in a defined area (a city, state or nation). They can be taken anywhere through social media, and J.K. Rowling in Edinburgh can criticise Knight without becoming much of a Herald Sun reader.

This is real change, and has to be worked around rather than bemoaned. Many cartoonists use Twitter and other platforms to test ideas and images, for example. But it is a significant revision of the rules of the game for satirists, for whom context is a defining feature of what they can say and how it will be received. Add to this the ease of outrage provided by online communication, and it seems to me that twenty-first-century cartoonists will need a thicker skin or a softer pen than their forebears in the age of mass media. When your work can fall into a tiny niche or almost planet-wide notoriety without much warning, making us laugh over our morning coffee is becoming a very risky business. •

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It is unlikely many shareholders will be worried — as Margaret Simons was in Inside Story last week — by ACCC head Rod Sims’s finding that competition in the Australian news market will be reduced, though not substantially reduced, if the merger proceeds. As Simons argued, the ACCC’s decision accorded with its legislation, but the legislation is inadequate and outdated, and fails to tackle the news and information needs of people as citizens rather than as consumers.

Whether shareholders worry about such issues is their prerogative. But the supply of what is sometimes called public interest journalism, and what Fairfax Media’s chief executive Greg Hywood calls “quality journalism,” is vital to the nation’s democratic health, and for many decades Fairfax’s news outlets have been a core contributor. So the fate of Fairfax’s journalism is an issue for us all.

Can Fairfax’s journalistic culture survive, let alone thrive, once it is merged with Nine, which is in the business, as its title makes explicit, of entertainment?

Fairfax Media, along with almost every other media company in the world, has been struggling to find a new business model to replace the one from which it handsomely profited in the pre-internet age. A benign view of Hywood’s tenure is that by the time he took over as chief executive, in late 2010, the digital horse had well and truly bolted. Previous chief executives, whether through arrogance or incompetence, were defeated by what was a wicked problem for mainstream media.

Virtually no one foresaw that the strategy of expanding readership online while sloughing off print production costs would be derailed by the rise of global behemoths Facebook and Google, who between them have garnered most of the advertising revenues of newspaper companies’ around the Western world.

Unlike his predecessors, Hywood brought to the role of chief executive a strong background as a journalist, editor and corporate executive. He made difficult decisions to slash costs and to build new digital businesses that would profit from the company’s large online audiences.

Two key questions arise about the current state of Fairfax. How seriously have the seemingly endless rounds of voluntary redundancies weakened the company’s quality journalism? And how has Hywood, as the company’s public face, gone about communicating his strategy, both externally and internally?

The first question goes to the relationship between tangible matters like cost and intangible matters like reputation and influence. Whatever else may be happening in the rapidly changing digital media landscape, journalism that is interesting to the public (such as the travails of the Kardashian family) is in plentiful, profitable supply while journalism that is in the public interest (why so many institutions protected themselves rather than the children they were duty-bound to look after) is expensive to produce and doesn’t necessarily appeal to a mass audience, let alone advertisers. The latter is critical, though, to the credibility of a company’s journalism.

It is notoriously difficult to assess changes in the quality of journalism, for several reasons. The sheer proliferation of journalism makes it susceptible to a variation of the boiling frog principle: it looks much the same from day to day, so you need to look back a decade or more to discern significant change, and who has the time, let alone the inclination, for that? Second, the quality of the journalism that wins awards — and Greg Hywood loves to point to the number of awards won by Fairfax Media journalists — may be as good, if not better, than in the past, but the broad mass of journalism is more variable in quality and more susceptible to reductions in the number of available journalists.

Each day’s output may reassure readers of the company’s continued existence, but what stories haven’t been covered — or uncovered — because of a lack of resources? How many sources did the journalist talk to before writing his or her piece, and how much fact-checking was done? How much of the journalistic memory once supplied by subeditors has been brought to bear?

The second question, of how Hywood communicates, goes to the relationship a media company wants to create with its audience. Here there is an interesting contrast between the open dialogue that the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Katharine Viner, encourages with readers and the lugubrious, voice-of-God style that Hywood adopts.

To look back through Hywood’s public comments — in annual reports, presentations to market analysts, speeches and interviews — is to be told that Fairfax Media’s journalism has never been in better shape. Several themes emerge from his pronouncements.

First, “quality journalism” that wins awards and is “independent” became central to Fairfax Media’s business model after he took over in a way that it hadn’t been before. As he said in the A.N. Smith lecture in November 2011:

In “the good old days” when newspapers were a licence to print money the journalism was an added extra delivered by the proprietors to leverage political and social influence and in some cases a dollop of public good. The business in those days was the classifieds. They made the money, they drove the business. Not anymore.

This is only half true. Yes, advertising comprised the bulk of revenue earned by the company for much of its life, but a dispassionate reading of Gavin Souter’s two-volume history of the company, Company of Heralds (1981) and Heralds and Angels (1992), shows that these remarks about the company’s editorial goals cynically undervalue the journalistic culture that grew under the Fairfax family’s proprietorship.

Second, Hywood has extolled “quality journalism” as the focus of Fairfax’s rapidly changing business model while overseeing round after round of cuts to the very people who produce the “quality journalism,” namely the journalists.

It is hard to estimate the exact number of journalists who have taken redundancy packages in the past decade — figures are not always made public — but it does appear that the redundancy round in mid 2012, which saw close to 20 per cent of editorial staff depart, was the biggest in the company’s history. Redundancy rounds, albeit smaller, have continued in most years since.

To put it another way, a decade ago the Age and the Sunday Age had around 500 editorial staff. After the last major round of cuts at Fairfax, in 2017, marginally more than that number of journalists were spread across the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, including their Sunday editions, and the Australian Financial Review.

Third, Hywood muddies the concept of quality journalism by arguing that the quality of the journalism is not tied to the quantity of the journalists. In an opinion piece for the Financial Review in March 2016 he recalled that when he began with the newspaper, in 1976, it had twenty-five staff:

Still, the Financial Review was then, as it is now, with more than five times the number of reporters, the pre-eminent business publication in the country. Under the leadership of Max Walsh it defined the national economic debate and shaped the general political discourse. The business community got the news and analysis it needed and was held to account where necessary.

So when the cry goes up about Fairfax Media giving up on quality journalism because we are reducing staff numbers I am incredulous. Since when has quantity got to do with quality?

You might argue that one Max Walsh was worth several ordinary reporters, but it strains credulity to believe that a significant reduction in the number of journalists employed by a company won’t have an impact on quality, especially as some of the most talented and experienced journalists of their generation are among those who decided to leave.

Indeed, one of them, the late Michael Gordon, is being honoured by the Melbourne Press Club this Friday with the announcement of a fellowship in his name. In the language of the sport he loved: if Hawthorn was asked to field a team of twelve instead of eighteen each week, what would be its prospects for winning a premiership?

Fourth, Hywood deploys figures disingenuously. In the example above, he writes that the Financial Review had five times as many journalists in 2016 as it had in 1976 and that the Sydney Morning Herald had about seventy-five journalists in 1968 during the “time of the legendary ‘rivers of gold’” when the Herald had a virtual monopoly over classified advertising in Sydney. But this is to vault over a key reason for the large expansion of staff numbers during the 1980s and 1990s: the introduction of a range of weekday supplements and the Good Weekend magazine.

Occasionally, Hywood does acknowledge the impact of cost-cutting on the business. Perhaps not surprisingly, this admission was wrung from him in May 2017 by senators questioning him for a parliamentary inquiry into the Future of Public Interest Journalism:

What we did say in these lay-offs is that we want this to be the last big structural redundancy round, because we have been working for years to get our metro publishing businesses to the point where they can be sustainable in this market environment, and it has taken us quite a number of very difficult decisions, very confronting decisions.

Fifth, the invocation of “quality journalism” tends to be surrounded with business-speak. As he said in the company’s 2017 annual report:

Fairfax will continue to thrive as a high-value, broadly based, digital-rich business of powerful information brands, marketplaces and entertainment assets… We remain focused on our strategy to grow shareholder value by leveraging our award-winning journalism and content to engage audiences, communities and businesses.

So everything is fine at Fairfax Media, and there is no relationship between the quantity of journalists and the quality of the company’s journalism. Or if there is, then way more journalists are working there now than in the so-called golden days. Or, okay, we had to take difficult cost-cutting decisions, but don’t worry because we’re transitioning into the world of information brands.

These different strands of rhetoric may be aimed at presenting a strong sales pitch to shareholders and institutional investors, but they are frankly baffling to everyone else.

The contradiction between the corporate spiel emanating from Fairfax headquarters and the spirit of fearless truth-telling that underpins quality journalism is glaring. And it could well be weakening the close ties that readers have long had with Fairfax’s newspapers.

That may not trouble Nine Entertainment, for whom other parts of Fairfax, such as the online streaming service, Stan, and the online house advertising site, Domain, are more financially attractive than the struggling mastheads, but it is worrying for anyone with a commitment to public interest journalism.

And it is interesting, inspiring even, that this week Katharine Viner announced that her company’s recent strategy of appealing for support for their investigative journalism, which remains free online, has so far yielded voluntary contributions from more than a million readers around the world. •

The post A broken record of quality journalism appeared first on Inside Story.

Hardly anyone was surprised by this result, but that doesn’t mean we should pass lightly on. There are things about the inquiry worth noting, and the outcomes underline the shortcomings of our current system of media regulation.

The ACCC took an unusual tack in this inquiry. It is a market regulator; its legislation is focused on markets and competition. Asking it to address the non-commercial interests of citizens as media users is always going to be a stretch — like using a spanner to hammer a nail.

Nevertheless, the envelope was pushed a bit. In previous media merger inquiries, the ACCC and its predecessor, the Trade Practices Commission, looked mostly at the markets for advertising. News and information came a poor second. No matter how much those concerned with concentration of media ownership wailed about concepts such as the market for ideas, it didn’t cut it with the competition regulator.

This time round, things were a bit different. The ACCC’s report, its issues paper and its media release dealt largely with a new concept: the market for news and information. This, to my knowledge, is a first. The reason the merger went ahead is that the ACCC concluded that it would not substantially reduce competition in this or any other market, which is the test under its legislation.

The ACCC also found that the issues it considered were complex, and I agree. And I suspect that a better understanding of how journalism works might lead to a different conclusion. Journalism is not one thing, but many. It includes investigation, but also the less glamorous but vitally important work of routine coverage of the courts, local government and affairs of the community.

Part of the reason for the ACCC’s decision was that new entrants in online news media — such as the Guardian Australia and the Daily Mail — provide what the ACCC claimed was a substitute for the services of the merged Nine/Fairfax. But this is to misunderstand the role of journalism. One service is not necessarily substitutable for another — or not once you understand the audiences as citizens rather than consumers.

The geographical area given most attention in the ACCC’s report was the Hunter region, centred on Newcastle, with its Gold Walkley Award–winning newspaper, the Newcastle Herald, famous for the journalism that sparked the royal commission into institutional sex abuse.

Here, the merged Nine–Fairfax will be the main provider of regional news and information. Clearly, none of the online start-ups is a substitute for what these local newsrooms do. They do not have reporters sitting in local council meetings, or reporting local courts, or asking hard questions of local authorities.

Nor do they have reporters, like the Newcastle Herald’s Joanne McCarthy, spending months and wearing out shoe leather to develop sources and hold the local authorities to account for sex abuse in Catholic institutions.

It is a truism of newsrooms that all stories are local. Local issues, aggregated, make up the concerns of the nation. National issues play out in local streets, schools and hospitals. If we imagine a reduced newsroom for the combined Nine–Fairfax entity, then it will be the local stories that are reduced and the community will know itself less well as a result. By extension, we all suffer.

I am not arguing that the ACCC’s decision was wrong under its legislation — rather that the legislation is inadequate, and the knowledge base for decisions also not what it needs to be.

For example, it has long been the case that the competition regulator has understood newspapers and television to be operating in separate markets, with only insignificant competition between them. This was part of the reason for cross-media ownership laws, to prevent one owner dominating all platforms.

The fact that increasing numbers of people access news online changes that. The platforms converge. The ACCC referred to this fact, but clearly didn’t think it altered the fundamental perception that Nine and Fairfax are in separate markets for news and information. Said Sims: “Nine’s news and current affairs programs target a mass market audience while Fairfax’s print and online publications tend to provide more in-depth coverage, targeting the demographic of its subscription audience.”

Another factor was that the ACCC thinks that if the Fairfax mastheads were sold off to new players — perhaps the Newcastle Herald or the Age to a local buyer — they would have a commercially viable future as standalone entities.

But given the difficulty of monetising journalism online, as Sims acknowledged, “It is hard to predict the future landscape with any certainty.” This, of course, is particularly acute in regional areas, where the size of the audience makes monetising journalism even more difficult. And, as Sims also acknowledged, there were questions about how much someone would pay for such businesses if they were sold off.

One of the oldest chestnuts in competition law in Australia has been whether media mergers should be subject to a specific public-interest test, as well as the market considerations that are the ACCC’s natural home territory. Such a test — which exists in some other countries — would be difficult to define and difficult to apply. As well, competition law is not necessarily the best home for addressing the needs of Australians conceived as citizens, rather than as consumers.

But the ACCC decision — an acknowledgement that Australians are ill-served by this merger, but there is nothing the ACCC feels it can do about it — once again highlights the fact that successive governments have failed to give us a modern, fit-for-the-times system of media regulation.

Instead, they have focused on removing admittedly outdated regulations conceived in terms of different platforms, without offering any more fit-for-purpose replacements.

Australia is at least ten years overdue for a new-broom approach, guided by research on how the “market” for news and information actually operates in the modern media world. •

Declaration: Margaret Simons was among the people consulted by the ACCC inquiry into the Nine–Fairfax merger. She participated in one teleconference and provided the inquiry with published and unpublished research.

The post How Nine and Fairfax sat the wrong test appeared first on Inside Story.

Newman subsequently defended the “skit” along these lines: Winmar is black, I was impersonating a black man, therefore I wore black make-up. It wasn’t racist.

This week Herald Sun cartoonist Mark Knight, whose drawing of tennis player Serena Williams at the US Open final has rapidly gained infamy around the planet, explained himself in similar vein. “I drew her as an African-American woman,” he has been quoted as saying. “She’s powerfully built. She wears these outrageous costumes when she plays tennis. She’s interesting to draw. I drew her as she is, as an African-American woman.”

To him it’s like John Howard’s big lower lip, Bob Hawke’s hair or Tony Abbott’s red speedos. Cartoonists, particularly Australian ones, take no prisoners when roasting public figures, and why should an African American woman get special treatment?

Many have pointed out the context: a history of demeaning representations of African Americans, and indeed of Indigenous Australians. It has been noted in the United States that Knight’s drawing of Williams is “Sambo-like.” But the world is not America. Let’s give Knight the benefit of the doubt when he insists he was unaware his work sat inside that odious genre.

There’s something else about his cartoon. Caricatures are supposed to draw on physical features of a person to elaborate on something in the personality or public persona. Hawke’s hair and his vanity, Paul Keating the undertaker with that ghostly pallor, Malcolm Turnbull, hooded eyes in top hat, the out-of-touch toff, Abbott in red speedos, all clumsy testosterone, boyish and out of control.

But if your “caricature” of a black person is simply an exaggerated account of their blackness — the stereotypical big lips, flat nose and frizzy hair — then you’re not trying very hard. Knight says he finds her “interesting to draw,” but that’s hard to believe because the cartoon doesn’t really look like her. Instead, as he indicated (twice), it was “an African-American woman.” And his previous renderings of African gang members in Melbourne, which have also caused controversy, have had no facial features at all.

They say people have trouble distinguishing between people of another race. It seems Knight does. I’ll draw her big and black, that’ll do, they’ll know who I mean.

You don’t expect elegant wit or finesse from tabloid newspaper cartoons; what you see is generally what you get. But even by those standards Knight’s is a drawing devoid of anything resembling humour or insight, or any reflection on what happened on the court last weekend. Just a caricature of a big black woman throwing a tantrum.

News Corp never backs down, let alone apologises (unless legally obliged). Instead, they’ve characteristically doubled down, with today’s Hun front page showing yesterday’s effort — along with other unkind Knight depictions of a variety of white male figures, as well as Pauline Hanson and Kim Jong Un — and screeching about political correctness. But all of the others are instantly recognisable. None, not even Kim, is a lazy trope.

Newman, who repeatedly finds himself having to insist he’s not racist, went on a decade later to compare Serena Williams to a monkey.

Knight is no Newman, and he’s probably not alone among white cartoonists in having trouble with people of other races. But his black people are just black, nothing else. Is that how his bosses like it? ●

The post What you see is what you get appeared first on Inside Story.

Woodward’s near contemporary, Seymour Hersh, has unearthed more scoops, of sharper bite, than his celebrity counterpart. In the best-known of these stories, he exposed the war crimes committed by American soldiers at My Lai during the Vietnam war, unearthed misdeeds of the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1970s, and exposed the roots of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American prison guards at Abu Ghraib in 2004.

Why is Hersh less well known or lauded than Woodward? It’s a fascinating question. The two men may be in the twilight of their careers — Hersh is eighty-one, Woodward seventy-five — but their approach to journalism differs in crucial ways. And, in Donald Trump’s America, there is a strong argument that what is needed is more Hershes and fewer Woodwards.

This is not to say that Hersh’s journalism is without flaws. His reliance on confidential sources, for instance, has long attracted criticism. But his recently published memoir, Reporter, gives us an opportunity to recall, or find out, just how many major disclosures he has been responsible for over the past fifty years.

Reporter also highlights how much has changed in American political life, and how much hasn’t, and sets some of the febrile reporting of the Trump presidency in a cooler historical context. And it gives us Hersh’s own perspective on the value and the limits of his prodigious journalistic labours.

Born in 1931 one of the twin sons of Jewish immigrants, Hersh grew up on the south side of Chicago. From his early teens he was expected to help his father in the family’s dry cleaning business after school and on weekends. Isadore Hersh’s idea of a fun Sunday was to take Seymour (usually known as Sy) and brother Alan to the store to mop the floors and then to a Russian bathhouse on the West Side where the boys themselves would be scrubbed down with rough birch branches. The pay-off was fresh herring and root beer for lunch.

Hersh learnt only recently that in 1941 the entire Jewish population of his father’s birthplace, the village of Šeduva in Lithuania, had been executed by a German commando unit aided by Lithuanian collaborators. His father never discussed the war or the Nazis. “In his own way, Isadore Hersh was a Holocaust survivor as well as a Holocaust denier.”

It is a blunt declarative statement that Hersh, rather like his father, doesn’t take any further. Indeed, his family background and childhood occupies only the first four pages of this memoir. Then he is out in the world, finding his way.

A keen reader of literature and history from an early age, he graduated with a degree from the University of Chicago before moving on to law school, hating its dryness and moving out. Looking for work in 1959, he stumbled on to the City News Bureau, or CNB, a local agency that supplied stories, mostly about crime, to Chicago’s newspapers. There, he learnt the virtues of speed, accuracy and scepticism: as a senior editor used to tell reporters, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

The CNB had been the model for the play (and, later, film) The Front Page, and a biographer of Hersh, Robert Miraldi, writes that it was not uncommon for CNB reporters to impersonate a city official to induce people to provide information. Hersh used similar methods when he was tracking down Lieutenant William Calley, who had been charged over war crimes committed at My Lai in Vietnam.

Journalists should use subterfuge only as a last resort, not as an opening gambit, and only on stories genuinely in the public interest. Judging by his memoir, and checking it against Miraldi’s 2013 biography, Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist, it is clear Hersh has deployed dubious news-gathering methods during his career. Sometimes — but not always — these methods are justified by the importance of the stories (the My Lai massacre clearly qualifies here) and the degree of difficulty Hersh faces in nailing them down.

Almost as important, Hersh learnt in his time at CNB about self-censorship and racism in the media. One night he overheard a police officer say to a fellow officer that he had shot and killed an unarmed robbery suspect in the back. Asked if the suspect had tried to run away, the officer said, “Naw. I told the nigger to beat it and then plugged him.”

Hersh took the story to his editor, who dissuaded him from writing it even after he obtained the coroner’s report showing the suspect had indeed been shot in the back. Hersh backed down, “full of despair at my weakness and at the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship.”

It’s fair to say that since then Hersh has hardly ever backed off from a story or been accused of self-censorship. He is notorious for browbeating sources to provoke a reaction, and he wears out editors in a similar way — even those lauded for their tough-mindedness, like Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times or David Remnick at the New Yorker. Editors tire of his belligerent advocacy for his stories — Hersh is an old-school newsroom typewriter-thrower and expletive-utterer — as well as his reliance on confidential sources for stories accusing those in power of lying, corruption or worse.

Equally, Hersh has earned a reputation for being a ferociously competitive, hard-working investigative journalist who is feared and intensely disliked by those he targets, from former secretary of state in the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger, to Richard Perle, a powerful business figure connected to the Bush administration, who once said, “Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly.”

Hersh became internationally famous in 1969 when he broke the My Lai massacre story. American soldiers had killed up to 504 Vietnamese civilians; of them, 182 were women (seventeen of them pregnant), 173 were children and sixty were men over the age of sixty. Historian Kendrick Oliver describes it as a pivotal event not only in the Vietnam war but in American history.

Before My Lai, war crimes by American troops had rarely, if ever, been disclosed in the news media. A massacre of between 250 and 300 civilians, mostly women and children, had taken place during the Korean war, for instance, but was not disclosed until nearly half a century later by an Associated Press investigative team.

The atrocities at My Lai had taken place in March 1968, but they were not revealed until late the following year and not by the mainstream news media. Hersh, freelancing in Washington, followed up a public interest lawyer’s tip with a tenacity and resourcefulness that rivals Wilfred Burchett’s trip to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb in 1945, which I’ve written about for Inside Story. Hersh’s revelations about the events at My Lai were initially turned down by outlets such as Life magazine and the New York Times. Eventually, a small, independent, anti-war news agency run by a friend of Hersh managed to sell it to newspapers around the country, not including the New York Times.

On the same day as this initial, muted response to what were shocking revelations, President Nixon sent his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, out to deliver a speech criticising the “liberal eastern establishment” media’s coverage of the war. “The day when the network commentators and even the gentlemen of the New York Times enjoyed a diplomatic immunity from comment and criticism is over!” Agnew declared. His speech and its reception — it drew a standing ovation — are a marker of the hostility towards the press that has only intensified under President Trump’s relentless stoking.

The big television networks ignored the My Lai revelations until Hersh found a soldier in Calley’s company who could be persuaded to be interviewed by Mike Wallace on CBS. Paul Meadlo then admitted on national television that he had killed women and children. “It sent a shudder through the nation,” recalled Hersh’s publisher friend, David Obst.

The shudder became a seismic shift three years later, in 1972, when Woodward and his colleague at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein, began reporting on the implications of the break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Watergate hotel-office complex. The Watergate story, which begins with dirty tricks by low-level Republican Party political operatives and ends with president Richard Nixon’s forced resignation in August 1974, is well known; what is less well known is the role Seymour Hersh played in it.

By 1972, having won a Pulitzer Prize for his My Lai disclosures, Hersh was in the Washington bureau of the country’s most prestigious newspaper, the New York Times, covering national security issues. The Times, “a cathedral of quiet dignity,” according to Gay Talese’s history, The Kingdom and the Power, was slow to respond to Watergate. The problem, as one of its then editors, Bill Kovach, pithily put it, was that the Times “hated to be beaten but didn’t really want to be first” on stories that genuinely challenged power and authority. Spiro Agnew hated the newspaper for being liberal and eastern, but the third word of his description — establishment — is crucial: the Times was part of the establishment.

After numerous Woodward and Bernstein disclosures, the newspaper’s hatred of being beaten outweighed its reticence about being first, and managing editor Abe Rosenthal instructed Hersh to begin covering the story. Most of the key sources were already dealing with Woodward and Bernstein, including the most famous anonymous source in media history, “Deep Throat” (revealed three decades later to be deputy FBI director Mark Felt).

Even so, beginning in early 1973, Hersh broke several important stories about Watergate, including the key disclosure that those on trial for the Watergate break-in were being paid “hush money,” allegedly by the Committee to Re-elect the President. Woodward and Bernstein hated being scooped, but they liked seeing Hersh verify and amplify their revelations in the nation’s most powerful newspaper.

The three journalists competed as fiercely as they respected each other’s work ethic. The difference was that the Washington Post duo wrote a book about their Watergate coverage, All the President’s Men, that sold 2.7 million copies on its release in 1974 and was turned into an Oscar-winning Hollywood film starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. No newspaper journalists had ever been as famous or glamorous.

Hersh has only good things to say in his memoir about Woodward (they played tennis on Sundays for many years, and occasionally shared notes about sources), but Miraldi documents Hersh’s envy of his better-known counterpart. “It’s a very crass materialistic thing to say, but it’s a fact,” Hersh once said drily. “I wouldn’t mind making a million dollars on a book. Having Robert Redford play me would not bother me at all.”

That mattered less than the extraordinary series of stories Hersh unearthed about national security during this period, including his revelation that the United States had illegally and secretly bombed neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam war. Just before Christmas 1974, Hersh revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency, in violation of its charter, had “conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed government sources.”

The CIA story prompted Congress to set up a commission of inquiry, headed by Senator Frank Church, to investigate the legality of the CIA’s covert operations, drug-smuggling activities in the Golden Triangle, and attempts to interfere in other countries’ politics. The Church Commission’s work paved the way for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

If Hersh’s influence and reputation reached a peak in the mid 1970s, they fluctuated over the next three decades as he alternated between producing revelations (about Panamanian leader General Manuel Noriega’s corruption, for instance, and his dubious relationship with the American military and intelligence agencies) and becoming mired in controversy (as he was after he took a deep dive into the details of JFK’s extramarital affairs while he was president, in The Dark Side of Camelot).

Sometimes he experienced both at once, as when he alleged that duplicity was central to Henry Kissinger’s career, in his 1983 book The Price of Power, for which he interviewed more than 1000 people and spent a year on background reading. If, despite unremitting ferreting, Hersh failed to find the smoking gun that would have destroyed Kissinger’s career, the book has held up to scrutiny over time, and Kissinger’s reputation has been tarnished.

The combination of working with David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks prompted a series of significant stories, epitomised by Hersh’s reporting of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The CBS television program 60 Minutes II broke the story just before the New Yorker, but Hersh obtained a fifty-three-page internal army report on the events by Major-General Antonio Taguba, which enabled him to demolish the trope on conservative radio talk shows that Abu Ghraib was simply about a “few guys going nuts on the night-shift.”

Instead, Hersh wrote, the roots of Abu Ghraib could be found in defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to expand a highly secret program of interrogating Iraqi prisoners. The operation “embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.”

Hersh’s reporting after 9/11 culminated in his ninth book, Chain of Command, which won numerous awards but sold nowhere near as well as even one of Woodward’s quartet of books about George W. Bush’s presidency, Bush at War, Plan of Attack, State of Denial and The War Within.

If the lack of attention chafed Hersh, a comparison of these works shows Hersh hewing more closely to the promise of public interest journalism. “Bob has become the diarist of sitting administrations,” says Bill Kovach, a former editor at the New York Times, “and Sy has continued to be the muckraker. Sy continues his outrage.”

Or, as Mark Danner, himself a respected American investigative journalist, puts it, where Woodward relies for his disclosures on officials at the highest level of government, Hersh’s sources come from lower levels of the government and intelligence bureaucracy. Where Woodward provides the “deeper” version of what is, essentially, “the official story,” Hersh uncovers a version of events that “the government does not want public — which is to say, a version that contradicts the official story of what went on.”

Most of Woodward’s books, then, stay close to the moment’s conventional wisdom about any given administration. His first two Bush books, published in 2003 and 2004, show the president as commanding and decisive. It was only in late 2006, after State of Denial was released and it was apparent to even the least interested citizen that the war on terror had been poorly conceived and was being poorly executed, that Woodward began meting out criticism. As Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote, the state of denial applied as much to Woodward as it did to the Bush administration. For his part, within weeks of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Hersh was reporting in the New Yorker that the CIA and the FBI were ill-prepared to deal with al Qaeda and were riven by intra-agency rivalry and mistrust.

Over his long career Hersh has undoubtedly made errors. And some of his predictions have proved to be wrong. But he has acknowledged at least some of these lapses in his memoir — not something that comes easily to journalists, let alone investigative journalists.

As Steve Weinberg, a former director of Investigative Reporters and Editors in the United States, writes, “Any journalist who does that many high-stakes stories and has to depend on so many sources, whose truthfulness cannot always be determined, may be misled some of the time.” Hersh himself told his biographer, “I am a mouthpiece for people on the inside. You get a sense I am a vehicle for a certain form of dissent.”

That’s not what you get from Woodward, who says he persuades political leaders to talk because “essentially I write self-portraits.” Whether or not he has persuaded Donald Trump to speak on the record, it seems unlikely that Fear: Trump in the White House will provide a “vehicle for a certain form of dissent.”

Does Hersh have in him another searing exposé, or is his memoir a swan song? You’d hope the former, but it feels like the latter. He is still promising a book about former vice-president Dick Cheney, but Cheney hasn’t been in that job since 2009 and Barton Gellman thoroughly documented his malign influence on American politics a decade ago in Angler: The Shadow Presidency of Dick Cheney.

And as Alan Rusbridger, former long-time editor of the Guardian, notes, Hersh’s reliance on anonymous sources is being overtaken, or at the least offset, by new approaches to journalism that draw on myriad communication technologies to forensically investigate events and issues.

Regardless, Hersh has already given us a lifetime’s worth of disclosures in the public interest that even at the distance of several decades are as important to read as they are disturbing. •

The post Seymour Hersh, reporter appeared first on Inside Story.

British coverage of Canberra’s latest spill motions — a term at last entering the lexicon here — has on the surface been impressively straight. The Liberals’ power games are well reported, energy and immigration policy cited, and the underlying political problems listed, though the Queensland dimension and the Labor opposition barely feature. There’s no trace of the schadenfreude that has accompanied tabloid reporting of Angela Merkel’s year of troubles. Clearly, sporting rivalries don’t transfer to politics. At the same time, there’s a perceptible motif of bemusement, tinged with the relief of being temporarily off the hook. And the sterling work of reporters on the ground has surely firmed up London editors’ grasp of Canberrology.

At the shakier end was an editorial on 25 August in the tabloid-sized Times, part of Rupert Murdoch’s stable, which is currently on an investigative roll. “Democracy Down (Under)” veers from lurid (“ritual bloodletting… frenzied public humiliation… a spectacle of back-stabbing and indeed front-stabbing… leaders are roasted alive if they show signs of losing support in the heartlands”) to arch (“Friends have the duty to say: mate, your system is dysfunctional”), before settling on trite (“Mr Morrison will put the brakes on Mr Turnbull’s shift to the left but will still need to work hard to differentiate his party more clearly from Labor”).

A day earlier, as the drama was climaxing, the Financial Times’s front page had signalled its own view with that alluring reference to “Italian-style political instability.” Inside, a scorching editorial attributed Turnbull’s impending fall to a toxic fusion of culture and energy wars:

The troubles stem from dysfunction in political institutions, a shock-jock right-wing media and a shift to a US Tea Party-style populism within the ruling Liberal party… [Peter Dutton’s proposals] risk consigning Australia to another decade of energy insecurity, rising prices and failure to meet its obligations on carbon emissions… [Business support for a bipartisan approach] makes the Liberal–National coalition’s latest decision to press the self-destruct button over energy policy especially ill-timed.

The weekly Economist, going to press on Thursday, had its customary headline pun fun (“Poison spill,” “Spill will”) before getting serious. “Australians are frustrated by stagnant wages, but they have never rallied behind right-wing populists,” its reporter said. Dutton is “one of his party’s most reactionary figures.” However, “the fad for spill motions” makes the country’s politics look “alarmingly volatile.”

These three publications, while distinct in character, are each at heart centre-right, pro-business, culturally liberal and international. All are dismayed by Britain’s own populist temptations. It’s striking then that their commentaries nowhere mention Brexit, and in this respect they are typical of wider coverage. Could it come to matter that Australia’s leadership tussle is, refreshingly, not being seen through a solipsistic Brexit lens, as has almost every major overseas news story for two years?

The latter was true of the federal election in 2016, held just nine days after the UK vote to leave the European Union. And since then, London’s interest in Australia — security agencies apart — has been defined nearly exclusively by the prospects for a free-trade deal. Alexander Downer’s former status as high commissioner in London made him a fixture on the BBC, while his breezy optimism won favour in the anti-EU press: a rare double. More recently, the farmers’ plight and China tensions have had a good airing. But reaction to Australia’s latest drama, coinciding with fevered divination of Britain’s post-Brexit fate, invites a glimpse of a less inward future.

Dream on? Probably. That Scott Morrison’s early calls were to Donald Trump, Joko Widodo and Jacinda Ardern probably gives Fleet Street’s terrible twins  — the Daily Mail and Guardian  — material for default lament of Britain’s collapse into irrelevance. The Mirror, a robotic left-wing tabloid long eclipsed by Murdoch’s Sun, is already on the case, reading Trump’s empty boasts of friendship with Australia as a “swipe” at Theresa May and a “slap-down of the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the Britain [sic] and America.” Whereas the Telegraph’s Jonathan Pearlman, writing in the paper’s Sunday edition, stays on topic in an overview of “this bizarre Australian phenomenon [of] revolving-door leadership.” Of the new prime minister’s first press conference, he says, Morrison “was unable to answer the question the nation, and the world, wish to know: why did his party remove another elected leader?”

Such reports are a reminder of the all-round value of the informed, connected foreign correspondent. Jamie Smyth’s reports for the Financial Times during the crisis, weaving the views of experts such as ANU’s Ian McAllister, Melbourne’s Sarah Maddison, and Griffith’s Paul Williams into a concise daily narrative, are a good complement to Inside Story’s roster. His latest, on the cabinet reshuffle, is just out. That Italian sucker punch, sourced to Kevin Rudd’s former political strategist Bruce Hawker, came from Smyth’s story on the Turnbull–Dutton bout. On the eve, he wrote a long, absorbing piece on the “African gangs” tale, focused on the Australian Rules player Aliir Aliir.

There is of course much more, not least on broadcast and social media. On BBC radio, the ABC’s Geraldine Doogue voiced embarrassment that Australia had become “the coup capital of the world in the democratic sense.” Vox pops with disarmingly contemptuous Sydney citizens provided one highlight, the scabrous politesse of Tonightly clips another. Some British viewers were rhapsodic: “Leave it to the Aussies to cut through the bullshit in the most coarse way and make it sound like you just shared a joke,” wrote one. In face of “the dog-eat-dog antics of their political class” (Roger Maynard in the Sunday Times, another Murdoch outlet), the Australian branch of the international fed-up citizens’ union, acronym optional, is evidently kicking free. ●

The post British eyes on Canberra’s mess appeared first on Inside Story.

I had been introduced to primary sources in a second-year Australian history course by Frank Clarke, who had encouraged me to read “old newspapers.” This was the analogue era, well before Trove and digitised newspapers, and so I went in search of political cartoons  using the microfilms in the bowels of the old Macquarie University Library. I spent a good deal more time there in my 1992 honours year, as well as in the newspaper section of the State Library of New South Wales, researching how the press had portrayed former Labor leader Dr H.V. Evatt.

During my honours year I had encountered Company of Heralds, Gavin Souter’s superb 1981 history of the Fairfax media corporation, which he followed up a decade later with Company of Heralds: The House of Fairfax 1841–1992. I was struck by the fact that there was no equivalent history of the other big Sydney publisher, Australian Consolidated Press, and the only biography of its founder, Frank Packer (1906–74), was a hagiography written while he was still alive.

And so my honours and PhD supervisor, Duncan Waterson, suggested that I talk to a retired colleague, then the finest historian of the New South Wales press, about my interest in writing a biography of Sir Frank or a history of ACP. The telephone conversation was dispiriting — with the best of intentions, the historian expressed concern that there was no ACP archive (as there was for Fairfax) and no known Packer family papers. The fearsome reputation of the intensely private Kerry Packer (Sir Frank’s son and heir, and the richest person in Australia at the time) may also have been mentioned.

By early 1993, following a polite “no” from Kerry Packer’s office, I was increasingly concerned about how I would research aspects of his father’s private life. But Sir Frank’s public career, and his business, still seemed to have potential. At the very least, I could probe ACP’s own magazines and newspapers — led by the Australian Women’s Weekly, the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, and the Bulletin.

As I began wading through oceans of microfilm, I convinced myself that a company history would be possible, with additional material available in the form of journalists’ and editors’ manuscript collections (some of them in the State Library of New South Wales); the records of journalist and printers’ unions (principally in the Noel Butlin Archives Centre in Canberra); regulatory material, ranging from the Department of Information to the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (in the National Archives of Australia); and oral history interviews.

By mid 1993, having mined Gavin Souter’s first volume and talked to him about my project, it was clear to me that relevant material was held in the Fairfax archive. It was hard to know how much, given I was in the early stages of working on the history of a rival company. But for me (and, I dare say, Gavin), the stories of the knights of the Sydney press — the Fairfaxes and the Packers — have always been imbricated and inseparable.

In July 1993 I wrote my first letter to Fairfax’s chief legal counsel and company secretary, Gail Hambly, requesting access to the collection. Within weeks, I was walking from Central Station to Mountain Street, Ultimo, where the archive was housed, not far from Fairfax headquarters in Jones Street. The company’s first archivist, Eileen Dwyer, had recently retired, leaving her successor, Louise Preston, to continue attempting to compile detailed listings of the collection’s 1400 boxes. I occupied one of the two desks in the archive, making notes in pencil, while Louise occupied the other.

It became increasingly clear that the archive would be pivotal to my PhD thesis. Last weekend I retrieved from my own archive the folders of pencilled notes I took as I researched first a company history and then a biography of Sir Frank. In the book based on my thesis, The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire (1999), I acknowledged the debt I owed to the Fairfax archive. Some of the material I found there also helped to flesh out the biography of Sir Frank. The NSW working party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography had decided to take a punt on a young historian by inviting me to write the major Packer entry, and this undertaking, leading as it did to research on ancestry, schooling, sport, marriages and children, helped to convince me that a full-scale biography, encompassing the personal as well as the public, was viable. Both were published in 2000.

Dipping into my folders, I thought I might pull out some examples of the sorts of Fairfax material that helped to inform my Packer books. It’s important to note that the archive contains the records of many companies and outlets acquired by Fairfax.

Of particular value to me were the records of Associated Newspapers Ltd, which Peter Arfanis from the State Library of New South Wales wrote about in a blog about the Fairfax archive late last year. This corporate octopus was created by Sir Hugh Denison in 1929, when he merged the Sun, the Sunday Sun, the Daily Telegraph Pictorial, the Sunday Pictorial, the Newcastle Sun, World’s News and Wireless Weekly with the holdings of S. Bennett Ltd — the Evening News, the Sunday News, Woman’s Budget and Sporting and Dramatic News.

The Sydney Morning Herald building on the corner of Pitt and Hunter streets, c 1920s. Fairfax Media Business Archive, State Library of New South Wales

Through the chairman’s correspondence, the board’s minute books, and legal agreements — all held in the archive — we can trace the machinations behind the chain’s purchase of the Daily and Sunday Guardians in 1930; the slide in the share price as the company published titles that competed with each other during the Great Depression; and the closure and mergers of several titles.

I found concrete evidence of Robert Clyde Packer’s attempt to protect his shareholding by moving from Smith’s Newspapers to become managing editor of Associated Newspapers’ remaining papers, and his fight against NSW premier Jack Lang’s legislation designed to bankrupt Packer and his son, Frank. The archive contains rich details of Packer senior’s authorising of Associated Newspapers to pay Packer junior and E.G. Theodore £86,500 not to publish an afternoon newspaper for three years. This extraordinary 1932 deal seeded the creation of the Australian Women’s Weekly, and the formation of the Packer media empire.

Minutes of staff conferences from mid 1933 onwards show John Fairfax and Sons, as well as Associated Newspapers, monitoring the circulation and interstate launches of the Women’s Weekly, a new and virile competitor for Woman’s Budget. The Telegraph’s editor, Thomas Dunbabin, also observed that the Women’s Weekly’s effect “on the Women’s Sections of our Dailies should be closely watched, and… a careful note made of what it demonstrated in respect of what women want.” The success of the Weekly, he went on, “shows a tremendous demand for certain things on the part of women.”

The Fairfax archive documents the negotiations that led to Frank Packer’s company, Sydney Newspapers Ltd, joining with Associated Newspapers in 1935 to form a new company, Consolidated Press Ltd, and relaunch the morning Telegraph as the Daily Telegraph the following year. The intricacies of calculating the value of their respective titles are recorded, including notes of phone calls to Packer, and discussions about what should (and shouldn’t) be revealed to shareholders. The files include agreements to contain competition in order to protect the jewels in the respective companies’ crowns: the Women’s Weekly on one side, and the afternoon Sun and the Sunday Sun on the other.

Thanks to the State Library team headed by Peter Arfanis, I now know that the Fairfax archive also contains files on competitors throughout the decades, including ACP and the Daily Telegraph in Sydney; the Herald and Weekly Times, headed by Sir Keith Murdoch; and News Limited, headed by Murdoch’s son Rupert. I’m intrigued to look at a file entitled “Daily Telegraph — Misdemeanours, 1957–1962,” which apparently contains “memos and newspaper clippings of lifting of stories etc.” Back in the 1990s, I found in the records of successive Fairfax general managers particularly valuable accounts of the competition, and intermittent collaborations, between Fairfax, ACP and their mastheads.

The big publishing companies in Australia realised that it was indeed sometimes beneficial to work with each other. In 1932 Warwick Fairfax (later Sir Warwick) and Keith Murdoch formed a company in Tasmania with the aim of producing Australian newsprint. The result, six years later, was a new business, Australian Newsprint Mills, owned by eight publishing companies. Well over a dozen boxes in the Fairfax archive document the operations of this endeavour, in which the two Herald groups were the dominant, if not always harmonious, partners, as they battled to deal with restrictions on their lifeblood during the war and postwar periods.

Meanwhile, Australian Associated Press was created in 1935 out of an amalgamation of the Australian Press Association, run by Fairfax and the Melbourne Argus, and the Sun Herald Cable Service. Numerous boxes in the Fairfax archive show the operations of the Australian Press Association and AAP, as well as negotiations with Reuters in London.

From the mid 1920s the Australian Newspapers Conference also considered matters of mutual interest, such as cover prices, advertising rates and industrial negotiations. Following a dispute involving the 1941 launch of a new afternoon paper, the Daily Mirror, during acute newsprint rationing, the ANC was disbanded and replaced by the Australian Newspaper Proprietors Association. The Fairfax archive contains substantial records of the ANPA, especially concerning the operation of its newsprint pool during the second world war, with periodical eruptions from the volatile Packer, and delegations to Canberra. Likewise, the archive documents the operations of the reconstituted Australian Newspapers Conference that was formed in 1955. I look forward to ordering up the files containing annual reports of the ANC’s “Joint Committee on Disparaging Copy,” which seemed to run until the 1980s.

Through the archive we can trace the April 1944 dispute that saw the Curtin Labor government censor, before publication, the articles of several Sydney newspapers; Packer’s subsequent decision to print the Sunday Telegraph with blank spaces; and a High Court challenge.

I went back to the Fairfax archive to research my third book, Party Games: Australian Politicians and the Media from War to Dismissal (2003), as well as my Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Sir Warwick Fairfax. By now the archive had moved to Alexandria, where the City to Surf organisers were headquartered.

One particularly rich file I identified with the help of Fairfax library staff was called “Herald & Weekly Times Ltd from Jan. ’33 onwards.” Running until the death of Keith Murdoch (“Lord Southcliffe,” as he was sometimes called) in 1952, it provided insights into his health battles; the newspaper companies’ hostility to the prospect of an independent news service being run by the ABC; the regulation of commercial radio broadcasting; and discussions with politicians and party officials. Here is Murdoch in 1935 corresponding with Sir John Butters, chairman of Associated Newspapers, about the ABC:

Thank you for your confidential letter… I am so glad that you are moving in this matter. It is high time that we took serious notice of it. The A.B.C. is regarding even its legal agreements with us as trifling. It is spreading itself into many areas of news…

I think our movement should be a quiet one. We should put our views confidentially to the Prime Minister, and also to one or two other Ministers, particularly McLachlan, Parkhill, and Menzies.

Shades of the current inquiry into the competitive neutrality of the ABC and SBS…

Likewise, a 1954–67 file about Sir Warwick Fairfax yielded a rich seam of gold, with observations such as this from 1957: “I heard [Harold] Holt speak in the Foreign Affairs debate and he was dull, pompous, boring and irrelevant to the last degree. I completely fail to see him as a possible Prime Minister.”

The fourth chapter of Party Games, entitled “The Labor Ward: The Fairfax Dynasty and the 1961 Election,” dealt with the company turning against the Robert Menzies’s Coalition government over its deflationary measures, and working closely with the Labor leader, Arthur Calwell, on his campaign. Few Australian historians could fail to be intrigued by some of the titles of files in the archive Gavin and later I worked on, including “Liberal Party 1944–1969” and “Labor Party 1950–1969.” These contained details of private discussions, donations, internal company debates, election coverage and political broadcasts. Thanks to the work of Peter and his team, I now have a better sense of just how much material there is in the archive concerning federal and state politics and elections, including this file covering 1940 to 1984: “Correspondence Prime Ministers and Departments.”

Since my research in the Fairfax archive in the 1990s, I have been intrigued by the evolution and fate of Associated Newspapers, a company and a name that few may remember. I chose to write the entry on the company for my edited collection, A Companion to the Australian Media, drawing on the research that Gavin and I had undertaken for our company histories. We had each traced the offers of Fairfax and Consolidated Press to buy the ordinary shares in Associated Newspapers in 1953, motivated by the desire to be in a position to use idle printing capacity by publishing an afternoon newspaper (the Sun) as well as their existing morning paper (the Sydney Morning Herald or the Daily Telegraph). In other words, to borrow the words of Greg Hywood and Hugh Marks, they wanted “scale.” The board of Associated Newspapers, remembering how two generations of the Packer family had exploited their fears about competition in the 1930s, accepted the Fairfax offer.

Tiles from the Sun Newspapers Ltd building, Sydney, c 1929, depicting Phoebus Apollo driving a seven-horse chariot out of the rising sun. Fairfax Media Business Archive, State Library of New South Wales

Frank Packer spent three years unsuccessfully challenging the validity of the merger. Amid the documentation in the archive is humour, such as in an exchange of several sly telegrams between Rupert Henderson and Packer in the Spring of 1953. The last one from Packer, addressed to Henderson at “ASSASSINATED NEWSPAPERS LTD,” read, “CONGRATULATIONS ROUND ONE STOP BY THE WAY DID YOU PLAY WITH THE JUDGE OVER THE WEEKEND.”

As I recently wrote in the Conversation, competition may seem an obvious — perhaps the obvious — feature of the Australian media landscape, but it has gone hand in hand with pragmatic cooperation. Even if the Fairfaxes, and Keith Murdoch in Melbourne, failed to regard the pugnacious Frank Packer as a gentleman, there was a kind of gentlemanly code of honour, and understanding, between the knights of the Australian media. If the early relationships between the three groups focused on daily and Sunday newspapers, and magazines, their ancillary, and expanding, media interests led to cooperative agreements. In Souter’s work on Fairfax, and my work on Packer, we were able to draw on the Fairfax archive to help trace how the media groups obtained television licences from 1956 onwards.

Before the Australian Broadcasting Control Board’s 1958 hearings for applications for licences in Brisbane and Adelaide, the main Sydney and Melbourne television proprietors — Packer, “Rags” Henderson from Fairfax, and Sir John Williams from the Herald and Weekly Times — met at Fairfax headquarters to “carve up the empire.” The archive helps to demonstrate how they reached an agreement to combine their interests to ensure an equitable program-sharing arrangement if there should only be one licence awarded in each city.

In 1960 Murdoch’s only son, Rupert, entered Sydney through the back door by buying the suburban newspaper chain Cumberland Newspapers Pty Ltd for £1 million. Vowing not to let this invasion go unchallenged, Fairfax and Packer contributed equal capital to form a new joint company, Suburban Publications Pty Ltd, whose records are held in the Fairfax archive. The vigorous, at times farcical, competition between the two suburban chains did not last; as Souter deftly noted, “war was being waged in the suburbs, but it was limited war.” In 1961 Cumberland Newspapers and Suburban Publications concluded a “Brisbane Line” non-compete agreement that would not have been permitted under the Trade Practices Act that became law in 1974.

The Fairfax archive also documents aspects of the history of Australian radio and television. It holds the paper records of the powerful Macquarie Broadcasting Network and ATN-7, which was one of Sydney’s two original television stations. (Frank Packer’s TCN-9 was the other.)

So I was back in the archive to research my fourth book, Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio, which was published in 2009. Having progressed to a laptop, I made 283 pages of single-spaced notes ranging across the Herald’s supply of news to the Macquarie News Service; the appointment of commercial radio’s first cadet journalist, Brian White; arrangements for sports, finance and election coverage; the pre-election blackout; hours of transmission; the spread of midnight-to-dawn programs; the emergence of Top 40, talkback and FM radio; advertising; and ratings.

Station strategies and overhauls are documented in candid (at times amusing) detail. In mid 1981 Mike Carlton and Nigel Milan, 2GB’s young and ambitious general manager, outlined the problems they perceived. The “We Know What You Want” slogan smacked of arrogance, inviting the retort “Oh no you don’t,” they wrote. The station’s programming policy and image were “fuddy-duddy” and a “mish-mash.” Ancient, unreliable equipment caused technical problems, including the dreaded “dead air.” Accurate clocks were scarce. Morale was low. A typical employee arrived at 9.15am to find that the lift wasn’t working.

The archive also shows the role of big personalities in Sydney’s commercial radio, as evidenced by the “saga” of million-dollar contract negotiations with one John Laws. Even if personnel records may be restricted, the volume and range of other material in the archive help to illuminate the careers of Laws and fellow inductees into the newly national Australian Media Hall of Fame, including John Fairfax, Eric Baume, J.D. Pringle, Rags Henderson, Brian White, Margaret Jones, Max Suich and Vic Carroll.

I have done rather less work on television records in the Fairfax archive, which the State Library’s work shows cover the 1953 royal commission that examined the introduction of TV; the allocation of metropolitan and regional licences; the purchase of equipment; profits and losses; market research; overseas study tours; program-buying deals; the emergence of the Seven Network; and relationships with, and inquiries by, successive regulators. A box covers Bruce Gyngell’s term as managing director of the Seven network after he quit Frank Packer’s Nine network in 1969. In what was dubbed the “Seven Revolution,” Gyngell went on a buying spree and masterminded an aggressive publicity campaign that catapulted Seven to ratings supremacy.

This major Australian business and media archive will enrich so many studies of the media and beyond. There are files on Sydney Morning Herald literary competitions to delight the literary historian; in-house publications, and files on the Herald chapel, cadet training, award negotiations and strikes, for historians of labour and even of women; files on typefaces, and the move from hot metal to cold type and from typewriters to VDUs, for historians of technology; files on libel and defamation for legal historians; files on overseas offices and foreign correspondents, for international and war historians; and files on the Pitt Street Congregational Church for religious historians.

The archive will also enable new work on seriously neglected aspects of the history of the Australian media, including David Syme & Co., newsagents, suburban newspapers, popular magazines, local government reporting, printing, and news and journalism. It has unparalleled riches for the Australian press historian, with Fairfax publishing, at various times, the Sydney Mail, Pix, Woman’s Day, the Australian Financial Review, the Canberra Times, the National Times, Business Review Weekly, the Illawarra Mercury, the Newcastle Herald — and of course, by increments between the 1960s and the 1980s, the Age. Individual nuggets leap out in the catalogue, including memos about the resignation of David Marr as the editor of the National Times in 1982, and File 11 in Box 1284, entitled “Goanna (Mr Kerry Packer) and The National Times Apology, 1983–1984.”

Of course, other substantial collections complement the holdings of the Fairfax archive. These include the papers (around 160 boxes) of Caroline Simpson, Sir Warwick Fairfax’s eldest child, held at the State Library of New South Wales. The National Film and Sound Archive holds the 127-box collection of Frederick W. Daniell, an executive with Associated Newspapers and Macquarie Broadcasting. The National Library of Australia is home to the papers of Gavin Souter, as well as of Angus McLachlan, a long-time general manager and managing director of Fairfax, and in 2012 obtained an archive of around 18,000 glass plate negatives of Fairfax photos. The ACP magazines archive, which came to the State Library of New South Wales in 2008, is substantially made up of photonegatives and prints from Pix which, following its establishment in 1938, moved from the control of Associated Newspapers to Fairfax and finally to ACP.

How has Fairfax’s history been memorialised by the company itself? In 1991, the archive records, the staff of John Fairfax and Sons signed and presented James Reading Fairfax with a leather-bound illuminated address to mark his proposed departure from the colony for “a visit to the old world.” In 1912, the staffs of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Mail presented a diamond jubilee illuminated address to Fairfax — now Sir James — to mark his sixty years of service to the company. The address, which included photographs of Sir James and his family, as well as photos of staff members arranged by department, recorded:

The gift is intended not only for an expression of our esteem for you as Senior Proprietor of the Journals… It serves also to mark our personal regard for you as an employer whose kindly consideration has always been at the disposal of those engaged in your service, and… a sense of the value to Australia of your long and eminent service to the community.

Five years later, the staff presented Sir James with another illuminated address, this time marking his sixty years of marriage to his wife Lucy.

In 1929 the company published The Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Mail: The Two Greatest Papers in Australia, compiled by Percy S. Allen, who had been placed in charge of the office library two years earlier. For the next two years the influential librarian worked with S. Elliott Napier, a Herald leader writer, to compile A Century of Journalism: The Sydney Morning Herald and its Record of Australian Life 1831–1931, published by the company under the editorship of Warwick Fairfax.

In 1936 a dinner was held, and a booklet was produced, to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Herald chapel, which had been formed in 1836 for the printers, type-setters, composers and other staff who worked in production. The centenary of the Fairfax proprietary of the Herald in 1941 was marked by the publication of The Story of John Fairfax, written by his great-grandson, John Fitzgerald Fairfax, as well as the establishment of a staff superannuation fund.

A special edition of the Sydney Morning Herald marking its 140th anniversary appeared in April 1971. In 1977 a long-service retirement fund was established to commemorate the centenary of the death of the original John Fairfax and was open to all members who had completed fifteen years’ service. The archive also documents the company’s involvement in 1978 the 150th anniversary of the Leamington Spa Courier, founded by John Fairfax in Warwickshire in 1828, a decade before he arrived in Sydney.

Fairfax’s biggest celebrations were reserved for the sesquicentenary of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1981, with Souter rightly noting that sesquicentenaries were rare for a settlement that was not yet 200 years old. Around three years before the anniversary, a special committee was formed under the direction of Ross Campbell Jones, the company’s marketing manager. Several archive boxes contain correspondence between management and executives, and with various companies and personalities who would be involved in the celebrations, and also document the various functions to be held and donations that would be made by the company to mark the occasion.

Among the ideas considered were a time capsule and a limited edition commemorative plate and placemats; a vinyl gramophone recording, Australian Musical Heritage, beginning with Lieutenant G.D. Callen’s “The Sydney Morning Herald Polka” from 1863; a church service, an Australian production of the opera Otello starring Joan Sutherland, a Rugby Union team, and a rodeo at the SCG; commissioning a painting by Lloyd Rees, and a television documentary by John Pilger; arranging a greeting from the Prince of Wales; and a trans-Australian hot air balloon flight. Ideas for employees’ celebrations included a function at Taronga Zoo or a staff picnic, and the purchase of holiday units for the use of retired employees. A bumper supplement appeared on 18 April 1981, and a dinner was held at the Hilton Hotel, with speeches by the governor-general, Sir Zelman Cowen, and James Fairfax captured on cassette tape in the archive.

Sculptor Stephen Walker was also commissioned “to create an association of water and bronze” in a landscaped area to be known as Herald Square, on the corner of George and Alfred Streets near Circular Quay, in 1981. Walker connected the fountain to the Tank Stream, the European settlement’s first water supply, highlighting a union between the Herald and Sydney’s European history. Correspondence, sketches and photographs document how the fountain came to feature a series of figurative and non-figurative forms made in bronze and connected by separate, linked pools. From the central cascading fountain, four columns in bronze rise out of the pool. An array of Australian flora and fauna, including frogs, snakes, goannas, echidnas, crabs, birds and tortoises appear to be playing in the pools.

The company also donated more than $100,000 towards the construction of a clifftop Fairfax walkway and lookout on Sydney’s North Head. Fairfax also, of course, commissioned Souter to write Company of Heralds, a wonderfully enduring legacy that also led to the creation of the Fairfax archive. And the Herald’s assistant editor, Lou Kepert, edited History as it Happened, based on 150 years of reporting in the paper.

Other milestones have been celebrated, such as 175 years of news in the Herald (2006), a century of Herald photography (2008), the 20th anniversary of the Herald and Age websites (2015), and the Herald’s 185th anniversary (2016), as well as anniversaries of other Fairfax titles.

In a message from the editor in the weekend Herald on 4–5 September, Lisa Davies remarked:

Many have bemoaned the looming loss of the Fairfax name from Australian publishing as the regrettable end of an era, but such nostalgia should not be exaggerated …

Readers don’t identify with a Fairfax story — it’s the mastheads like the Herald that simultaneously give consumers the story and the history, strength and power of those publishing it.

I beg to differ. It is the “Fairfax” archive that has been given to the State Library. The anniversary commemorations I’ve outlined in the last few minutes show the close relationship between the Fairfax family and their staff, and the way in which both publishing and family milestones have been marked for more than a century. Since at least the 1930s the company was connecting its own story with the story of Australia, and it’s a story that we must not forget. While the rupture caused by young Warwick Fairfax’s disastrous privatisation attempt has been much commentated on and lamented, and the death of Fairfax has been foretold in books with titles including Killing Fairfax and Stop the Presses!, it is up to us to keep the story and the history alive. A sequel, or a prequel, to the Power Games: The Packer-Murdoch Story mini-series, perhaps? ●

The post Keeping company: encountering the Fairfax Media archive appeared first on Inside Story.

Palmer’s key strength, and the reason she was so loved by her readers, was an ability to listen for the future in her fine critical writing. She relied on the early modernist impulse to strip to the essence and find hope, inviting her readers to think about how to take responsibility for the issues under discussion.

She wrote about the profound and the seemingly trivial, the newsworthy and the ancient, from Indigenous languages to comics, from Thomas Hardy to C.J. Dennis, and from Rebecca West to Katharine Susannah Prichard. Palmer’s significance in Australian letters has been framed by academics who emphasise her importance as a shaper of Australian literature and its canon, but she was a writer who also worked as a freelance journalist with an extremely broad range.

Janet Gertrude Higgins, born in 1885 and educated at the advanced Presbyterian Ladies’ College, was of the second generation of women in her family to attend the University of Melbourne — even before white women, let alone Indigenous women, had the vote. She was reared with high expectations of economic independence, steeped in Victoria’s colonial liberalism and feminism.

She wrote her first book as a child: The Story of My Life, Mingled with Others. While completing a Master of Arts in classics, she was influenced by the poet Bernard O’Dowd’s vision of an Australia transforming the sins of the old world. In 1910 she completed an International Diploma of Phonetics in Berlin, London and Paris, and then taught modern languages at her former school and wrote for the socialist press. In 1914 she married Vance Palmer, fellow writer and journalist, in London. With militarism stalking journalism and the labour press nearing collapse, they were forced to return to Victoria in 1915.

For nearly a decade living in the Dandenongs, east of Melbourne, Palmer edited the poetry magazine Birth, then wrote for the Herald, Stead’s Review, Spinner and the Bulletin. When the Palmers moved to Queensland, and with her daughters at school, Palmer got into her stride. From 1925 to 1935 she wrote three to four 1500-word articles each week — including a weekly column for the Illustrated Tasmanian News, often weekly pieces for the Courier and the Telegraph and unsigned Saturday leaders. She wrote regularly for the Bulletin’s Red Page, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Mail, and occasionally for the Argus, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the London Times and the West Australian. She also wrote for many of the new commercial periodicals, including contributing a column to All About Books, and for the women’s press, most frequently for the Australian Woman’s Mirror.

The Bulletin editor thought hers was the best critical work he published. Firmin McKinnon, the editor of the Courier, asserted that he printed anything she wrote without looking at it. And she made use of her considerable freedom. Postcolonial in the broadest sense, and long before A.A. Phillips framed our “cultural cringe,” she challenged her “colonial provincial” readers about Australian philistinism and allegiance to anything British. She and her family had returned to Melbourne in late 1929.

A 1934 Argus series on the Dandenongs was published in book form. Regional writings on Green Island, the Sunshine Coast and parts of Victoria were a powerful strand of her work. Most of Palmer’s books originated in her journalism; Talking It Over was a selection of essays that were first published in various newspapers. Palmer also took on commissioned work. Her political biography of Henry Bournes Higgins was reviewed across the globe. Her editing of The Centenary Gift Book for Victoria’s centenary included a wonderfully inclusive, rigorous selection of Victorian women’s voices from across the political and class spectrum.

In 1936, caught up in the Spanish conflagration, Palmer published first-hand accounts for the Argus, then returned to Melbourne and wrote for and edited three booklets on the Spanish civil war, warning of the coming dangers. She was the Melbourne editor for Woman Today, had a column for the New Zealand journal Tomorrow, and she was involved increasingly in speaking out against fascism. During this period she also taught English to European refugees.

The later years of her life saw the consolidation of her journalism on Henry Handel Richardson into the first book-length study, and a co-authored biography of Bernard O’Dowd. In 1948 she wrote Fourteen Years: Extracts from a Private Journal 1925–1939, a story of a life among many of the foremost contemporary writers, artists and journalists, both national and international.

Through her ABC radio broadcasting, lecturing for the Commonwealth Literary Fund, and support for Australian writers and for literary journals such as Meanjin, she was a self-professed “public relations office” who saw her task as needing to “watch and listen effectively,” especially at the intersection of foreign languages and literature.

Palmer’s early analysis of housework was an important precursor to the women’s liberation movement, and many of the progressive values she espoused on the environment, multiculturalism and aesthetics sowed seeds for the future. “You are a wise — a very wise woman,” Henry Handel Richardson had told her. “Few have your critical ability.” For four decades, she and her husband were forerunners, preparing the ground for the cultural and social awakening of the 1970s and the halcyon days of publishing in Australia. ●

Nettie Palmer was this week inducted into the Melbourne Press Club’s Australian Media Hall of Fame. This is the text of Deborah Jordan’s profile accompanying the citation.

The post Listening for the future appeared first on Inside Story.

Reminding us that the media is still a place where very different commercial, civic, political and cultural worlds coexist and sometimes collide, the understandings and expectations of key players and observers vary dramatically. Where Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood sees a merger, the Australian sees the death of Fairfax. Journalists and academics see a new challenge to diversity and democracy. Paul Keating sees Nine’s toxic tabloid culture metastasising, while the government tells a story about ensuring the long-term health of Australian media businesses. So far the stock market hasn’t shared the government’s confidence, with Nine shares falling since the deal was announced, reducing the value of the offer.

In recent days these differences over the significance and implications of this moment of change have taken a sharper form. When the deal was announced, the prime minister welcomed the news. He acknowledged that the agreement required the approval of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, but said that the parties expected “no regulatory hurdles.” Market analysts have generally signalled that they expect no major obstacles.

It’s true that the ACCC has a record of approving recent media mergers. But was there an echo in the PM’s remarks of his famous declaration last year that “the High Court will so hold,” with an equal potential for trouble? The media law changes were necessary for the formulation of this merger, but they are not sufficient to guarantee its success. Rod Sims, chairman of the ACCC, has now laid out the regulatory process in plain terms, talking about a vigorous, twelve-week review with the scope to be much more than perfunctory acquiescence. “Of course the merger parties say there are no competition issues. They always do. Every merger I have ever come across, the merger parties said ‘why do you bother us, there are just no competition issues,’” he was reported as saying.

Sims, who is about to enter his last year heading the ACCC, talked about the issues likely to arise for the commission, and signalled some interesting questions, none of which have been addressed by the government, or by the proponents of the deal. The ACCC’s job will be to determine whether the Fairfax acquisition will substantially reduce competition in media markets: on the face of it, a dry exercise in technocratic calculation.

But competition in media industries also raises public-interest issues of diversity, localism and quality that have not been squarely addressed by the government or the two companies. Media businesses often deal not just with one market for their work but with at least two, because both advertisers and viewers are, in different ways, consumers of their products.

So the ACCC must gauge the effects of the acquisition on viewers, advertisers and possibly content providers as well. It will look particularly at where the activities of Fairfax and Nine overlap — those areas, especially news, local information and advertising, where competition might be reduced by the takeover. It can look at evidence not only about the national market but also in relation to specific local and regional markets.

Nine has already raised the question of whether regional media will have a place in the new conglomerate. In Newcastle, for example, the network controls the local NBN TV station and Fairfax owns the Newcastle Herald. Here, measures of competition turn out to be closely linked to questions of concentration and diversity. If competition lessens, the reductions in service that follow may well mean losing different voices. For the same reason, the quality of media services will also be an important consideration.

The market for advertising has been dramatically transformed and expanded by the emergence of Google, Facebook and mobile media, but journalism is another story. The point is often made that readers and viewers now have ready access to more sources of news than ever, but fewer journalists are generating local news. Online-only publications, such as BuzzFeed and Guardian Australia, are important new sources, but they don’t aim to provide the detailed city-based coverage we find in Fairfax’s metropolitan mastheads, and they certainly don’t offer consistent regional reporting.

One organisation that does provide a journalistic alternative, and does cover regional Australia to the degree its reduced budget allows, is the ABC. The ACCC could find that the ABC’s coverage provides an ongoing alternative to Nine/Fairfax news. If that was then a reason for the ACCC not to oppose the merger, Australia’s public broadcaster could find itself underwriting the government’s objectives in the commercial media sector. The position is complicated by the fact that the minister, at the request of One Nation, is conducting his own ad hoc review of the competitive impacts of the ABC, responding to the claims of companies including Fairfax that its online presence undermines commercial media.

The interactions between Mitch Fifield’s inquiry, now due to report, and that of the ACCC will be interesting. The virtue of the ACCC review will be its public process, grounded in well-established institutional, legal and regulatory conventions. These provide some much-needed protection, real and perceived, from immediate political and business imperatives. The ACCC’s processes allow for the consideration of viewers’ and readers’ interests. Like all regulators and policy-makers in this area, though, it faces the difficulty of predicting outcomes in an industry where digital disruption has moved faster and further than in almost any other area, and where the investment in automation and artificial intelligence is intense. Blockchain and other emerging technologies are likely to bring about further changes in journalism and advertising.

Just as we are now making decisions about what we call “legacy” media businesses on the basis of old policy arguments, so our knowledge of the sector is also struggling to answer questions about how we gauge the volume and significance of local, regional or national content on internet platforms. The current moment is demanding bold assumptions from regulators, industry and policy-makers. ●

The post “Of course they say there are no competition issues. They always do” appeared first on Inside Story.

In May, when journalists at Fairfax newspapers wrote a petition to their chairman, Roger Corbett, against plans to cut sub-editing staff, artists and designers, the main point they made was this: “To remove production from these newspapers is to cut the heart from them, removing the history and institutional memory that sets Fairfax newspapers apart from the rest of the media.”

The journalists and their union were objecting to Fairfax Media’s decision to outsource much of the sub-editing of news on their metropolitan dailies to Pagemasters. Staff I’ve talked to at Fairfax’s Melbourne paper, the Age, including house committee members, say that because the move was only implemented in June it’s still too early to tell what impact the changes will have, especially in Melbourne, where far more Fairfax subs took up jobs with Pagemasters. There is a cadre of subs at Pagemasters who still understand the Age’s editorial identity, style and values, and feel a connection with the paper and their former colleagues. At present, the job they do is carefully monitored by the chief sub back at the office, and by page editors.

So, you might say, what’s the worry, especially as Pagemasters’ Brisbane office has been subbing newspaper sections for Fairfax for the past few years, and the sky hasn’t fallen?

Traditionally, “downtable subs” crawled all over news stories, not only tweaking them into well-expressed articles that conformed with their paper’s conventional style, but finding holes if holes existed, clearing up ambiguities, checking facts, and talking to reporters. They were expected to keep themselves up to date with the paper’s coverage, and often knew more about the way their masthead had dealt with an issue over time than a reporter filing the latest instalment. They also knew a lot about the character and the strengths and weaknesses of the reporting staff.

Much is therefore at stake when a subs’ table is physically disconnected from the newsroom it serves, especially if the subs are no longer in the newspaper’s direct employ but working for an altogether separate organisation. I’m told Age journalists are still urged to add their mobile numbers to their copy when they file, and that conversations between subs at Pagemasters and the Age still occur. But one wonders if the quantity and quality of these conversations have changed. As Christopher Warren argued in the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s 2010 report Life in the Clickstream: The Future of Journalism, the centralisation of subbing, whether in internal or outsourced hubs, has “split sub-editing from the masthead, undermined specialisation in subbing and intensified the workload of individual sub-editors.” Ultimately, there’s the worry that as natural attrition occurs among former Age subs at Pagemasters, that sense of connection to the paper, that understanding and trust, will break down and some quality of the Age will be lost.

Some Age staff are also concerned that as Fairfax increasingly focuses on a digital future the newspapers themselves will lose more of their own resources and autonomy. They talk about the process of “Fairfaxisation”: the company has recently grouped its metropolitan dailies in one new Metro division, its strategy being “to optimise print to enable transition of Metro to new platforms.” The editorial leadership of the division is talented and experienced, but the concomitant is greater sharing of resources across papers and across platforms and further cost reductions in the metropolitan business.

Fairfax’s CEO, Greg Hywood, sees the future of the newspaper company as a digital, multi-platform one. In his recent A.N. Smith memorial lecture, he quantified the movement of advertising to the internet, and the ascendancy of a digital readership numbering in the millions, and made it evident that the newsprint edition of the papers is gradually becoming marginal in the company’s revenue model because of its high cost and limited capacity for further readership growth compared with digital interfaces. How long does print have? Hywood answered this question with the words “some time.” He also said that the average age of the company’s print subscriber was forty-five. “What we will deliberately do is make sure we get the paper to the people who want the paper and that we don’t try and pump circulation up to unrealistic levels, because that’s just a way of increasing our costs,” Hywood said. That strategy is a deliberate repudiation of the newspaper industry’s traditional approach of building circulation by any legal means. Draw your own conclusions.

I do not want to offer a neo-Luddite critique of the company’s view that its future is digital. Hywood argues compellingly that Fairfax’s future growth, both in readership and ad revenues, lies in the digital realm. Having said that, the process in which the company is engaged is a perfect example of the tension between “tradition” and “transformation” which Professor Paul Duguid explored in his keynote address to the Australian Media Traditions conference in Melbourne last week. What’s at issue is not the continued survival of the newsprint edition so much as the survival of the identity that has emerged from having a properly staffed paper that is “homegrown” and as much a product of its past identity as of the present. It’s that part of the equation that I want to discuss: what will be left of the Age’s distinctive identity when the day comes that the print edition is no more.

THAT the Age has a very strong editorial identity, and a largely positive one, is without doubt. We can see that in this poll from Essential Media, published on 25 July this year, which shows levels of trust in various newspapers. I would suggest that the fact that the Age clearly tops this poll reflects the fact that its readership knows and understands it. The paper has remained fairly consistent in its temperament and outlook over a very long period. Melburnians “get” its mixture of middle-class social conscience and its cultural concerns.

Trust in newspapers

Q. How much trust do you have in what you read in the following newspapers?

A lot of trust/ Some trust/ Not much trust/ No trust at all/ Don’t know/ Number of responses

The Australian
16% / 53% / 19% / 8% / 5% / 625

The Telegraph (NSW only)
7% / 45% / 25% / 21% / 2% / 548

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW only)
20% / 54% / 19% / 6% / 1% / 529

The Age (Victoria only)
23% / 56% / 15% / 3% / 3% / 499

Herald Sun (Victoria only)
7% / 47% / 32% / 12% / 2% / 526

Courier Mail (Queensland only)
9% / 56% / 22% / 12% / 1% / 431

Note: Percentages based only on respondents who had read each newspaper. Figures have been rounded so may not add up to exactly 100 per cent.

Essential Media is the communications company that conceived the Your Rights at Work campaign. It also carried out the public polling used in the MEAA’s Clickstream report. This question was drawn from its general weekly opinion poll. The company formulates its questions and the polling is conducted online by another research company, Your Source, from a random sample of 7000 or more correspondents, which normally results in about 1000 completed surveys. For my purposes it would have been better if the question above had been asked on more than one occasion, but it has not. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting result.

It shows that the Age has the highest degree of trust with readers, 79 per cent, outpolling the Sydney Morning Herald at 74 per cent, and significantly outpolling the Australian (69 per cent), the Courier Mail (65 per cent), the Herald Sun (54 per cent), and the Telegraph (52 per cent). Moreover, more Age readers trust their paper “a lot.” I would argue that this high level of trust exists because readers know and understand the Age well. They know what it stands for, and there is a reservoir of goodwill towards it. Should newsprint editions of the Age disappear within the next ten to fifteen years (as seems likely to me), a wise management would be keen to carry this reader trust across the digital divide. That’s what needs to be safeguarded in the complex process of outsourcing subbing functions and in grouping the Age and the SMH within a single Metro division.

I recently finished a PhD about the Age’s history in the first half of the twentieth century, and when I heard the Pagemasters announcement and read about the petition that followed it, I was struck by how oddly the episode sat against the Age’s traditions. For much of the paper’s 157-year history, it would have been simply unimaginable for staff journalists and their union to find it necessary to remind the paper’s proprietors of the Age’s editorial traditions and the need to protect them. It was not for nothing that the historian John La Nauze coined the phrase “The Age and its noisy history.” When I read the company’s announcement about Pagemasters, it seemed to me I could hear the grinding and shifting of tectonic plates.

The other momentous development at Fairfax this year has been the departure of John B. Fairfax and his family from the company’s share registry. In his A.N. Smith lecture, Greg Hywood paid homage to John B. and his family for the contribution they had made to independent journalism. But later he went on to discuss proprietors more generally, saying:

In the so-called “good old days,” when newspapers were a licence to print money, the journalism was an added extra, delivered by the proprietors to leverage political and social influence, and, in some cases, a dollop of public good. The business in those days was classified advertising.

That statement is wrong, at least in respect of the Age. Even the recent history of the paper shows us that. Anyone who has an acquaintance with Ranald Macdonald’s era as managing director of David Syme & Co Ltd knows it. Macdonald was the last of the Syme family to run the paper before it was finally sold to Fairfax, and his stewardship of the paper from 1964 to 1983 has been well documented and assessed over the years, so I’m not going to revisit it here.

But as historians of memory will tell you, we imperfect humans often forget people, events or institutions that are inconvenient to us, or puzzling or painful. Wittingly or unwittingly, we extinguish history that challenges us. The media, with its avidity for the new, has perfected the art of forgetting what it once knew. Here’s an example. Cecil Edwards, who was one of Keith Murdoch’s young men who went on to become a Herald and Weekly Times editor, described in his 1972 memoir, The Editor Regrets, his assessment of the Age as it had been in the mid-1920s:

The Age had been the terror of governments and the Bible of the workingman… Living on long dead slogans – a cabinet minister’s trip was always a “junket” and government expenditure was “squandermania,” the Age had lost its youthful boisterousness and some of its circulation.

According to Edwards, the paper had fallen into “mere querulousness” in that period. When I started my research, I found this was pretty much received wisdom. But it was wrong. Querulous the paper certainly was, but merely querulous, no. In state politics it brought down a non-Labor government, and in the federal sphere was a painful thorn in the side of the Bruce–Page government.

During that era, the paper was run by Geoffrey Syme, son of the nineteenth-century proprietor, David Syme. Much of Geoffrey’s tenure as managing editor and chief proprietor was blighted by external difficulties. From the late twenties until his death in 1942, the Age’s viability was under sustained pressure, yet he kept the newspaper going. Ranged against it was the rise of new competitors, notably the revitalised Herald and Weekly Times group; the adverse economic climate in the years 1928 to 1934; and, last but not least, the terms of David Syme’s will, which left little money for reinvestment in printing presses and other assets by dictating that the net profits of the business were to be controlled by the various members of the family trust. As the family grew, some beneficiaries had little interest in the running of the paper.

During the interwar period, classified advertising and pagination slumped, and circulation declined by 33 per cent from a peak of 151,000 in 1919 to below 100,000. Yet, contrary to popular understanding, the paper continued to have a strong, distinctive editorial culture. In an era when the press was modernising, the newspaper kept its old-fashioned look and concentrated on its editorial values and its coverage of the issues of the day. In a way this decision was forced on it by a lack of investment capital. It had few options for boldly diversifying or updating itself. What the paper stood for was its main selling point in that period, perhaps its only one.

Geoffrey Syme jealously cultivated the face the Age showed the world. In this, he was supported by a team of journalists who were also adherents to the paper’s particular code. It has often been remarked that this code was an out-of-date loyalty to David Syme’s nineteenth-century protectionism, but that is not quite right. It was really an adherence to New Protection, the Deakinite philosophy that employers and producers should be rewarded with trade tariffs and industry subsidies for paying their employees a living wage. As a Deakinite newspaper, the Age stood for a form of what we now call “social justice”: equality of opportunity and the improvement of people’s lives. The paper stood for fair wages and work conditions, responsible trade unionism, industrial arbitration, public accountability, the introduction of a system of unemployment and sickness insurance and, somewhat intermittently, the advancement of women’s rights. Being a liberal institution it also believed in profit-making and individualism, and perhaps that duality explains why in later accounts it was accused of indecisiveness.

In early-twentieth-century discourses, when social liberal values were strong, it was widely understood that the fair go and individualism were competing but not necessarily exclusive ideals, and that it was possible to find common ground between them. As politics polarised, some lost faith in this point of view, and others forgot it. The Age did not, and remained strongly identified with Deakinite values and concerns. Old-fashioned as these values were, their persistence was important in terms of the paper’s editorial identity.

I suggest that that perspective – the middle ground where the fair go and individualism both reside – typifies the paper’s outlook even today. Veteran journalists and newspaper historians tend to see the contemporary Age as a product of the Macdonald era, particularly of the years Graham Perkin spent as editor in the sixties and seventies. That period has often been presented as a sort of late efflorescence of the nineteenth-century spirit of David Syme, occurring almost unaccountably after more than half a century of drab papers and increasingly stagnant journalism. In fact, Perkin’s paper was a natural inheritor of the temper and concerns of Geoffrey Syme’s Deakinism.

I am not suggesting that the paper pedantically pursued the same editorial agenda as it had in the interwar period – that would be nonsense. The times were different. (Nor am I forgetting that the Age in the fifties and early sixties was a rather different case.) Nevertheless, I believe there is a demonstrable similarity in the way the Age treated Labor seriously – more seriously than other newspapers tended to – in the interwar years and the Macdonald era, and in how it was unafraid to take on governments and campaign for fairer social conditions, arguing for something other than the reflexive conservatism of much of the mainstream Australian press.

That insight not only leads to a better understanding of the Age’s twentieth-century editorial identity. It also reminds us that the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald are in fact different papers with quite distinctive editorial traditions. The two papers had marked differences in political outlook in the first half of the twentieth century. Some examples:

The Age vigorously resisted and undermined Deakin’s decision to take his liberals into a merger with conservative politicians in 1909, in the marriage of centrist and conservative forces known as Fusion. The Sydney Morning Herald sanguinely supported it.

Twenty years later, the Age was the only major daily in the country to campaign vigorously against the Bruce–Page government’s decision to dismantle the federal arbitration system. It was at this point the paper really became an annoyance to Bruce and his attorney-general, John Latham, who crafted a campaign of counter-arguments for Victorian MPs to deploy against the Age. The Sydney Morning Herald supported the Bruce–Page government’s re-election. The language and style in which the papers expressed their different views is telling:

The Age, 10 October 1929:

The electors may be trusted to announce to the Bruce–Page government on Saturday that, because of its daring and contemptible attempt to wreck the national arbitration system, it is utterly discredited.

Sydney Morning Herald, 11 October 1929:

As we have repeatedly pointed out, the election issue cannot be confined to the one matter of Federal arbitration; it is the whole question of the character of the rule that Australia is to have for the next Parliamentary term. Is that rule to be balanced and sagacious, or irresponsible and subject to all the devilishness that the ingenuity of Moscow can impose upon it?

At the 1931 election, the Sydney Morning Herald, like most other papers, argued for the Scullin government’s eviction from office. The Age actually supported its return, a fact which has been largely forgotten. The paper was convinced that Scullin had taken the right steps to solve the country’s economic problems, and it was prepared to endorse him despite the internal divisions in the federal Labor party. There was an abyss between the papers’ political outlook in this era – and a characteristic contrarian streak in the Age – which casts an interesting sidelight on the family likeness of the papers now, and on the sharing of staff and stories.

Importantly, the Age’s outlook in the interwar period was not just some sort of whim on the part of Geoffrey Syme or his family. The paper was a Deakinite project that involved his staff as much as him. To the extent that it succeeded, it succeeded on the considerable reporting and writing talents of men like Frederick Schuler, Leonard Biggs, Harry Peters, George Cockerill and the young Harold Campbell, and on the subbing of stalwarts like J.S. Stephens. They were not journalists who were simply passing through; they usually spent decades with the paper, and would all be best remembered – if we hadn’t largely forgotten them – as Age men.

WHICH brings me to my second criticism of Greg Hywood’s comment about proprietors. As we all know, it’s wrong to simply equate newspapers with their owners. Newspapers are far more than their proprietorships: they are complex organisms composed of many different people, many different histories, many different news agendas, many different interactions and relationships with their communities. Even if some owners think the job of their paper is just making money, 99 per cent of the paper’s staff will think and act differently. Any newspaper with a history as long as the Age’s has its own distinctive editorial culture and editorial identity that is bigger than one person. The Age’s long history of middle-class small-l liberalism, the specificity of its concerns, both in the past and now, are well understood by its readership. Somehow, this distinctive editorial identity needs to migrate online, along with the readers.

Can Fairfax develop its digital vision without substantially sacrificing the distinctive editorial identities of its morning publications? Or will we wake up one day to find we are reading a version of the Age Online that is virtually interchangeable with smh.com.au and has lost the often-quirky contrariness of the newspaper. In the company’s latest annual report Greg Hywood says that outsourcing of subbing will save the company $10 million annually – this against an underlying operating profit after tax of $273.7 million in the past financial year. The really frightening thing about the Pagemasters announcement in May was the underlying question: just how desperate is Fairfax to placate shareholders and investors that outsourcing of its news production looks like a good option? In terms of maintaining the distinctive culture of the Age, it seems to me a question of whether the Fairfax CEO can steer the media group through the next decade or so without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. •

The post Keeping the Age noisy appeared first on Inside Story.

Not that it is a complete surprise. Ever since last year’s change to media ownership regulations — including the removal of the ban on any entity owning print, television and radio platforms in a single market — something like this has been almost inevitable.

This deal is effectively a Nine buyout of Fairfax. Over the next few months and years, the Fairfax name will disappear. Thus ends a long and mostly honourable period in which the company has been associated with quality journalism and has stood as the main counter to Murdoch’s News Corporation.

This announcement also means a reduction in the diversity of ownership of mainstream journalism outlets in Australia, and that is very bad indeed. Most obviously, Fairfax’s rural, suburban and regional publications, including important local titles such as the Launceston Examiner and the Newcastle Herald, clearly have no future as part of the new entity. In the teleconference for investors and analysts this morning, Nine CEO Hugh Marks was quite clear about that.

The focus of the new entity will be on high-growth digital assets, and the regional Fairfax newspapers would do better “in some other environment,” he said. In other words, they will be dumped. Probably they will close, unless they are bought up by local people who value their content.

Given that the deficits that have emerged in journalism over recent months are mostly about the hollowing out of local journalism, this is devastating to the civic and democratic health of local communities.

What about the flagship Fairfax mastheads — the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review? It is by no means certain that the Age and Sydney Morning Herald have a healthy future either. The new entity will “review the scope and breadth of the combined business to align with its strategic objectives and its digital future.” That statement contains a chilling message for print journalism.

Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood said that the metropolitan publishing business is sound — and more cost efficiencies were announced recently, in the form of shared printing presses with News Corporation. So the mastheads will probably have a diminished future, for a while, but the medium-term implications are dire.

The main value of the mastheads to Australia is, of course, their journalism — not the dollars they earn. Without Fairfax journalism, we would not have a royal commission into the banks, and we wouldn’t have had one into institutional sexual abuse either (with Joanne McCarthy’s Newcastle Herald reporting being key).

But as far as the dollars are concerned, today’s announcement sees the mastheads’ main value to be their role as a vehicle for Domain’s real estate advertising. But this value seems likely to be reduced by the buyout, since the new entity has a much bigger reach through its broadcast assets.

From a business point of view, of course, it’s all gravy. Both Nine and Fairfax have been written off as legacy media businesses going out backwards. From that perspective, this is a bit of a turnaround — and Marks and Hywood were not backward in pointing out their cleverness this morning.

Hywood has stripped costs — reducing the newsrooms to a size he claims is sustainable — while overseeing the growth of valuable businesses including Domain and the subscription television service Stan, already owned in partnership with Nine. The result is a sufficiently tasty morsel for sale.

Marks opened his remarks to investors and analysts this morning by foreshadowing that the new Nine will pioneer highly targeted advertising using data gleaned from across the platforms — including Stan and Fairfax Digital. But if it’s targeted, it comes at you on the web, not necessarily linked to quality journalism. The risk is that the journalism becomes no more than a cost centre, and thus at risk of being further diminished.

In Marks’s teleconference this morning there was the usual rhetoric about journalism being central to the new entity — but the hard facts and figures are all about advertising separated from the mastheads. For its part, Domain might be a success story for now, but it is hardly a sure thing in the medium to long term. The other headlines on Fairfax’s news sites today are about a dip in the real estate market.

The potential for estate agents to start up their own platform hangs as a constant threat over the Domain enterprise, should it ever try to gouge or otherwise annoy them. Domain might well be at its peak right now — which probably drove some component of the timing behind today’s announcement.

But none of this is about the main value of Fairfax to Australian civic life. None of it is about journalism. On this score, it is interesting to note that Nine’s board is chaired by former Liberal treasurer Peter Costello, who led the anti-ABC forces in the Howard government. Costello was also notorious for trying to pressure individual journalists at Fairfax, with some former editors perceived as being too malleable under that pressure.

This is important because the keynote journalism from Fairfax in recent times has often been done in partnership with the ABC, and particularly Four Corners. This has greatly increased its journalism’s reach and impact. It seems unlikely that those kinds of collaborations will be allowed to continue in the new entity.

Fairfax journalists will presumably be expected to collaborate with Nine if they’re seeking cross-platform reach. Nine has a very different journalistic culture from that of the main Fairfax mastheads: it is about commodified mass-market news, with little commitment to investigative journalism.

The ABC has repeatedly tried to poach the leading Fairfax investigative journalists — people like Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker and Adele Ferguson. They have been loyal to Fairfax. Now might be a good time for the ABC to try again, if it can find the dollars after recent budget cuts. Which of course signals the continuing importance of the public broadcasters in a time of media disruption — but that’s a topic for another day.

During this morning’s briefing, Hugh Marks said that the Nine board would have no trouble “adopting the principles” of the Fairfax Charter of Editorial Independence. He stopped short of saying they would sign it. But even if it were signed it doesn’t really mean much. That charter gains its heft from the preparedness of the journalists and their audiences to demand it and act to enforce it.

Fewer journalists competing for fewer job opportunities reduces that likelihood. The charter also places most power in the hands of the editors, and we don’t know who they will be. If the editor is a patsy, the charter is meaningless.

The announcement to the stock exchange from Fairfax and Nine talked about $50 million in costs cuts made possible by this merger. Marks declined to say where they would be drawn from, but obviously mergers of newsrooms, with resulting cuts, are likely to be part of the mix.

Some might see the ghost of Kerry Packer hovering over this deal. The former owner of Nine repeatedly tried to get his hands on Fairfax. But that would be misreading the context. The era of media emperors is over, the ageing Murdoch its last survivor. Today’s Nine is owned by private equity and institutions. Personality of ownership is no longer crucial to media content.

Marks and Hywood claimed they had no concerns that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission would block the deal on the grounds of reduction of competition. They are probably right. But Google’s and Facebook’s power and conduct are currently under investigation by the commission’s Digital Platforms Inquiry, which will doubtless be following today’s announcement closely.

Today’s development is the inevitable result of governments failing to come up with good media policy. The focus has been on removing outdated regulations without thinking about what a modern, fit-for-purpose system of media regulation should look like.

Now more than ever, governments and civic leaders should be grappling with how a healthy future for Australian journalism, and thus for our democracy, can be assured. ●

The post The end of Fairfax as we knew it appeared first on Inside Story.

Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser had barely spoken to each other in the sixteen years following the vice-regal dismissal of Whitlam’s government in November 1975, but now they shared a political platform to oppose this threat of yet further media concentration. Both former PMs signed a protest letter organised by one-time National Party minister Peter Nixon, as did former Nationals leader Doug Anthony and a range of other former senior politicians. Large rallies were held in Melbourne and Sydney.

All Packer’s opponents stressed the negative consequences of the bid for Australian democracy. With Rupert Murdoch already dominant, press ownership was more highly concentrated than anywhere else in the democratic world. But there is no doubt personal antipathy to Packer also played a major part. As his biographer Paul Barry later reported, Packer “appeared to hate journalists, had a record of punching cameramen, and was ever ready to sue reporters who wrote about him.” At times, he had been an interventionist proprietor who enjoyed throwing his corporate weight around, and he had sometimes compromised journalistic professionalism.

Realising that he was losing the public relations war, Packer appeared on his channel’s A Current Affair, where he said that the idea of owning part of Fairfax “amused” him. Members of parliament were less amused. The following afternoon, within a matter of hours, a bipartisan petition gathered 128 signatures of the 224 federal MPs.

Public opinion itself was insufficient to stop the bid, but it was becoming increasingly unpalatable for the government to do nothing. A House of Representatives inquiry was called, with the Labor government holding a majority of positions on the committee. Packer’s appearance at one of its hearings was televised live and immediately entered Australian folklore. Viewed retrospectively, many of his assertions before the committee were at the least questionable, but more than the content it was the commanding tone that impressed. He overwhelmed the MPs’ questioning by both fair means and foul, simply ruling some areas out of bounds, for example, and sometimes treating the elected representatives with contempt.

“Packer was not just frightening, he was frighteningly smart,” writes Paul Barry. “As a public performer he was quite breathtaking.” Indeed, it was such a riveting performance that it was mentioned many times in the paeans of praise following Packer’s death, and surrounding his memorial service. Rarely mentioned, however, was the fact that just three weeks after this apparently wonderful performance, Packer had to abandon his quest for Fairfax.

When the chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, Peter Westerway, appeared before the same committee a few weeks later, he announced an inquiry into the takeover. It would look at whether, as a member of the Tourang syndicate, Packer would be in a position to exercise some control over Fairfax and so be in breach of the cross-media laws. Two days after Westerway’s statement, Packer announced his withdrawal from the bid.

In crucial ways, Packer had mismanaged his attempt. Apart from the issue of media monopoly, and the hostility based on his own record, Packer’s major political problem was the central involvement of two people perceived to be doing his bidding. The Tourang consortium’s designated new chief of Fairfax newspapers was Trevor Kennedy, who had worked for the Packers for almost two decades. Also publicly prominent was Malcolm Turnbull, who had worked many years for Packer before becoming a merchant banker.

Ironically, despite the public perception that these two were Packer stooges, what eventually caused Packer’s failure was the internal pressure on them, and Packer’s failure to support them. The two executives from Tourang’s foreign partners, Brian Powers and Dan Colson, took command of many aspects of the bid, and sought to overturn agreements Packer had earlier reached with Kennedy and Turnbull. Packer conspicuously failed to stand up for them.

The first to go was Kennedy, who unexpectedly resigned in mid October. Publicly, he blamed the “McCarthyist” campaign against Packer, but this hid the tensions inside the camp, which were the real reason for his departure.

Turnbull was involved in the bid as a result of a shrewd tactical move he had made. Sinking under the self-inflicted debt incurred by Warwick Fairfax’s privatisation, Fairfax had sold junk bonds in the United States. Turnbull saw that the bondholders as a key to the future control of the company, and had the entrepreneurial vision and energy to secure control of them. Then he teamed up with an initially reluctant Packer and the other Tourang partners.

Like Packer, Turnbull had been a vocal critic of Fairfax journalists. But the other Tourang partners saw Turnbull as a political and managerial problem. At the parliamentary inquiry, Packer had been insultingly dismissive about Turnbull’s participation, saying there would be no future role for him, despite his desperate desire to be a director of Fairfax.

When the Tourang partners were putting pressure on Turnbull in November, Packer refused even to return his telephone calls. Turnbull later told Four Corners that he no longer considered Packer a friend — that Packer’s behaviour had ended seventeen years of friendship. Eventually Turnbull resigned. Westerway’s appearance in parliament came a few days later; what sealed Packer’s fate was the precision with which he identified the documents the tribunal would subpoena.

Kennedy had made notes at key moments during the enterprise, including a long record straight after his resignation. These notes revealed that he had exactly the opposite understanding of Packer’s planned role from what he (and Packer) had said publicly, including to the parliamentary inquiry. In Kennedy’s notes, Packer did intend to exercise control.

It was clear that Westerway must have had an internal source to know that these documents existed. He has refused to publicly identify this “prominent public figure,” except to say it wasn’t Kennedy. In addition to Paul Barry’s account of these events (The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer), Neil Chenoweth’s book (Packer’s Lunch) adds some graphic detail.

Westerway waited in a parked car in a darkened street in North Sydney on a Sunday night to meet this source, who had said that “he, his wife and his family were all at risk.” In these melodramatic circumstances the key documents were handed over. Having received them unofficially, Westerway was able to demand them officially to use as evidence.

Although not identified by Barry and Chenoweth, the circumstantial evidence clearly points at Malcolm Turnbull, a prominent public figure with inside access, who had resigned the day before. According to Barry, Packer later accused Turnbull and Kennedy of “treason.” But in fact the whole attempt to gain control of Fairfax, and its failure, betrays more of his own born-to-rule arrogance, and his dishonesty.

Three weeks earlier, he had emphatically and repeatedly denied to the parliamentary inquiry that he would exercise any control over Fairfax. You are either going to have to believe me or call me a liar, he said. It was riveting television, silencing his questioners, and spoilt only by the fact that he was lying.

Moreover, just three weeks later, he was effectively caught out. Luckily for him, the extent of his dishonesty never came into public focus. But the tribunal’s demand for the key documents was enough to undo him.

When Packer’s hagiographers talk of his triumph before the parliamentary committee, it should be recalled that it was no coincidence that his quest for Fairfax ended in failure. ●

This article first appeared in the Age in late 2006. Malcolm Turnbull later conceded that he had provided the material about the Tourang bid to Peter Westerway.

The post How Packer slipped on Fairfax, with help from Malcolm Turnbull appeared first on Inside Story.

Such is the reasonable conclusion of Les Hinton, who was Rupert Murdoch’s most faithful employee and admirer through more than half a century of devious manipulations, wild gambles and dazzling achievements.

Now Hinton, in what is presumably his retirement, has decided to tell the “inside story” of his own part in most of the media magnate’s battles to dominate his chosen world. He does it very well, mixing entertaining anecdotes with the often-harsh reality of life in the media.

Hinton was the offspring of a British army family, born in the grim Liverpool suburb of Bootle in 1944. Intelligent and sensitive, he began to escape his working-class background when the family moved on army assignments to many parts of the retreating British empire.

In 1959, together with thousands of others, the family emigrated to South Australia. Here, the legendary editor Rohan Rivett gave him his first job as a copyboy on the Adelaide News, an afternoon newspaper inherited by the twenty-eight-year-old Rupert Murdoch.

By dint of finding news and feature stories in his spare time, he won a rare position as cadet journalist. Like every ambitious young reporter in those days, he then sailed away to London, where he found a night-time job with the agency United Press International.

So far, so typical. But Fleet Street’s mincing machine was already grinding away. The Labour Party’s Daily Herald was going broke, as party-owned publications always do. Its controllers decided to give it a facelift, changing the title to the Sun.

Hinton saw an opportunity and quit UPI (although without following the example of one of his predecessors, who advised his employer in cablese, “Upstick job arsewards”). He landed a plum job at the new paper as show-business reporter, revelling in the sector’s champagne-soaked events and artificially inseminated sensations.

Two years later, the broadsheet Sun was obviously on the way out, with its comparatively small circulation and a bloated newsroom full of alcoholic has-beens. Then along came Rupert Murdoch. Now thirty-eight, the interloper had already outwitted Robert Maxwell (who called him “a moth-eaten kangaroo”) in the battle for control of the huge-selling Sunday scandal sheet the News of the World.

After that, Murdoch had enormous spare capacity on his printing presses. He was able to buy the ailing Sun for almost nothing, clean up the paper’s staff indulgences, change it to tabloid format, sexualise much of its content and steer it towards the Daily Mirror’s four-million circulation, winning himself the title of “the Dirty Digger” along the way.

Hinton recalls being assigned the task of interviewing bald-headed men about their sex lives. One man chased him down the street shouting, “Sex life? I’ll give you sex life. Come back here and I’ll end yours with a bloody big kick in the balls.” And who can ever forget the Sun’s triumphant page-one streamer, “GOTCHA,” when the Argentinian cruiser Belgrano was sunk during the Falklands war?

Yet Murdoch’s Sun also included more serious content. Hinton was sent to Northern Ireland to report on “the Troubles” and was injured physically and mentally when caught in a bomb blast. Then it was off to the war in Cyprus, and dramatic events elsewhere.

After a few years of experiences like these, he was dispatched to New York to help the notorious Steve Dunleavy and other wild young men to produce Murdoch’s latest brainchild, the supertrashy supermarket paper the Star. “We were devoted to The Boss, and in the years to come most of us did pretty well whatever he asked of us,” he notes.

Those years in what he calls “the netherworld of journalism” included many ridiculous stories about UFOs, spoon-bending magicians, and predictions by their own astrologer Jeane Dixon, who had given psychic advice to president Ronald Reagan.

Finally he pleaded for release. Murdoch sent him to revitalise his latest acquisition, the Boston Herald. Within three years he had almost doubled its circulation, though he admits that much of the increase was due to a bingo-like game called Wango. On such foundations are empires built.

Hinton was now on the way to glory. In 1987 he was appointed executive vice-president of the class-dominated Murdoch Magazines, and taught how to dress in a manner befitting his new status. His only drawback in this luxurious milieu was that he suffered from allergic sneezing fits when in contact with strong perfume.

Murdoch was forced to sell most of his magazine interests during the financial squeeze of the early 1990s, which nearly bankrupted his entire empire. But there was still a place for proven loyalists like Les. After a swift recovery, Murdoch was able to take over Fox Television, the home of tabloid TV. Hinton, as the new controller, was once summoned to the White House for a reprimand over Fox’s exposure of the notoriously loose-trousered president Bill Clinton.

After a difficult time as the head of Fox Films in Hollywood, where interlopers are eaten before breakfast, he felt ready to cash in what he called his fantasy “Fuck Off Fund” and leave Murdoch. But when he tried to resign, Rupert had a major surprise ready.

Back in 1981, the Thomson Corporation, owner of the London Times, had been driven to its knees by union featherbedding and other practices. In a historic battle, Rupert was able to win control of the Times and the Sunday Times. He secretly began planning a move to new premises at “Fortress Wapping,” where — thanks to computer typesetting and offset printing technology — no printers’ union members would need to be employed.

Now, in 1996, Les Hinton was offered control of all Murdoch’s British newspaper interests as chief executive officer. How could he refuse? The one-time copyboy would be responsible for a third of all British newspaper production for the next twelve years — and would walk blindly into one of the biggest press scandals of all time.

In July 2011, the Guardian revealed that News of the World reporters were using mobile phone technology to hack into the phone records of a murdered schoolgirl. National outrage erupted. At first it was believed that only one or two reporters were guilty of such despicable conduct. In the end, nine News Corp employees were found guilty of hacking innumerable phones, including those of the royal family. Thirty police and government officials were found guilty of accepting bribes in return for confidential information.

Forced to appear before an official inquiry, Murdoch made the famous admission, “This is the most humble day of my life.”

Hinton himself had offered his resignation as CEO immediately after the Guardian revelations, but was asked to see out the storm. For four years he fought charges that he had lied to parliamentary committees. He was finally cleared in 2016, along with other senior News Corp executives.

In the meantime, the irrepressible Murdoch had continued his policy of searching for takeover targets among weak corporations that owned valuable properties. In 2007 he paid US$5 billion for Dow Jones, the financial giant that owned the coveted Wall Street Journal. He offered the position of CEO to Hinton, but his lieutenant “had had enough.” On Murdoch’s fourth appeal, he gave way, took over 6000 staff around the world, sacked many of them, survived the world financial crash, and finally built the WSJ into America’s largest-selling daily newspaper.

What lies ahead for the seventy-four-year-old author? In Murdochian terms, he is still a lad. Will the phone ring one day, and a new round of blandishments begin? The frankness of his memoir could easily be forgotten by those who look only to the future, so watch this space.

Meanwhile, future historians will curse the fact that this fine book does not have an index. ●

The post The journo who never got away appeared first on Inside Story.

Starr’s jeremiad wasn’t the only one going around. The collision of the cyclical and the structural — the global financial crisis and the exodus of advertisers to search and social — made it clear that the fourth estate was in trouble. But in the dawn of the Obama administration, a new era of corruption was only an abstract idea, invisible and intangible. It had not yet assumed corpulent shape, clothed itself in leathery orange skin and besmirched everything and everyone it encountered. Even Starr was not so bold as to claim that the new era of which he spoke could be upon us so soon. That would have sounded unbalanced, like predicting Donald Trump would be the next president.

Wijnberg and Pfauth no more devised reader engagement or the perennial call to “send us your tips” than they invented comments. What they have done is transform these staples of the digital era from add-ons into core elements of their publication.

Now news publishers in the United States earn less than 40 per cent of the $50 billion they made selling advertising space in 2004, and the inexorable shift of advertising away from journalism has killed 3000 jobs in Australia. Meanwhile, the start-ups that came into being not long before Starr wrote his article in 2009 are struggling against the Google–Facebook duopoly. HuffPost is shedding 560 jobs; BuzzFeed is laying off staff too; and Mashable sold for less than its 2017 revenue after its value plummeted 80 per cent in two years.

All this has been accompanied by a pronounced shift in the political discourse: less civility, more irrationality, more xenophobia, more authoritarianism and — at least in the case of the executive branch of the US government — more corruption. So can we conclude Starr was right? Has it turned out that the decline of a chance arrangement in which advertisers subsidised news consumption (“where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau,” as Clay Shirky once so pithily put it) means that our democracy has been fundamentally, perhaps irretrievably, damaged?

The answer to that question depends on at least two further questions. How deep are we, as readers, prepared to dig into our pockets to make up for the income advertisers have taken elsewhere? And, in turn, how much can journalism change in ways that will increase its value to us, thus making us more likely to pay up?

These are questions that publishers and editors around the globe have inscribed firmly within the urgent and important quadrant. When Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, disclosed in November that her paper now earns more revenue from readers than advertisers, she commented, “We are inviting our readers to be part of a community, whether that means reading and listening to and watching and sharing our work, or responding to it, or by sending us anonymous information or participating in a reporting project.” And she approvingly quoted the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, Ethan Zuckerman, who wrote, “If news organisations can help make citizens feel powerful, like they can make effective civic change, they’ll develop a strength and loyalty they’ve not felt in years.”

The Guardian’s entry into the era of majority reader revenue follows that of the New York Times, which is similarly focused on adapting to the new economics of news. “We are not trying to maximise clicks and sell low-margin advertising against them,” the Times declared in its 2020 Report. “We believe that the more sound business strategy for the Times is to provide journalism so strong that several million people around the world are willing to pay for it.”

There may only be room for one New York Times in the global media environment, but it isn’t only international titles that are pursuing reader revenue to maintain commercial viability. Take the French online investigative journal Mediapart, founded in 2008 by Edwy Plenel, the former editor-in-chief of Le Monde, which now has in excess of 130,000 subscribers; or the just-launched Swiss publication Republik, which has garnered over 15,000 subscribers in its first weeks; or sites like El Diario in Spain, The Wire in Delhi and Civil Beats in Honolulu, all recently profiled by the Guardian; or City Bureau, a community news organisation based in Chicago. All are built around revenue that comes directly from readers, mostly through monthly or annual subscriptions.

But perhaps no publication has embraced the new commercial realities — as though they are an opportunity as much as a crisis — like the Dutch site De Correspondent. Founded in 2013 by two successful young journalists, Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth, De Correspondent bills itself as “the antidote to the daily news grind.” Launched with an eight-day crowdfunding campaign that raised a million euros, it now boasts 60,000 members who pay around US$63 a year and sustain a full-time staff of twenty-one journalists and seventy-five freelancers. On this foundation, it is set to launch an English-language edition, the Correspondent, in the United States. De Correspondent illustrates how journalism is changing as publishers focus on reader revenue with ever-increasing intensity. In fact, it exemplifies how readers are becoming something different — members.

Early last year, De Correspondent’s climate and energy reporter, Jelmer Mommers, revealed how Royal Dutch Shell’s understanding of the reality of climate change extended back decades. As “Climate of Concern,” a video produced by Shell in 1991, explained, “Global warming is not yet certain, but many think that to wait for final proof would be irresponsible. Action now is seen as the only safe insurance.” Mommers’s story asked what it means when one of the world’s most powerful organisations understands its activities are harmful to life as we know it and yet puts its foot on the accelerator.

The scoop began with an email to De Correspondent’s members. Mommers asked, “What’s the one thing you’d most like to ask someone who works for Shell?” After sharing the most thought-provoking responses, Mommers followed up with a call-out via readers: “Dear Shell Employees: Let’s Talk.” As that invitation elicited leads, he shared his emerging findings with members, engendering a process that culminated in a Shell employee’s handing over a cache of documents revealing that the company has long understood what its business is doing to the planet.

The idea of introducing a story to members before it is written is De Correspondent’s most important innovation. As editor-in-chief Rob Wijnberg explained to Radio National’s Phillip Adams, “I tell my correspondents basically 50 per cent of your job is interacting with your readers, having conversations with them and getting them to contribute what they know to your journalism.” To write about refugee experiences in the Netherlands, Dick Wittenberg and Greta Riemersma asked members to conduct monthly interviews with asylum seekers. Three hundred members connected with people who had recently arrived in the Netherlands, and Wittenberg and Riemersma sent out monthly questionnaires and then synthesised responses into ongoing reportage. “By doing this we get better-informed stories because we have more sources from a wider range of people,” says Ernst-Jan Pfauth. “It’s not just opinion-makers or spokespersons, we get people from the floor.”

Even more interesting, perhaps, are the motivations of members who contribute to stories. One member, a Dutch civil servant, says, “I want Maurits [Martijn, the technology and surveillance correspondent] to write accurately and deeply on technology-related subjects. I know that my knowledge is scarce, and that it makes a big difference if he can access it through me.” Another said, “I hate it when my subject, chemistry, is misunderstood by journalists and things are incorrectly explained in a newspaper article.” Yet another revealed, “I used to work as fisheries specialist for the World Bank, and worked in forty-plus countries. That experience is quite rare. De Correspondent published a few articles about fisheries, and I made some comments. [Journalist] Tamar Stelling liked and highlighted my comments, and — one of the nice activities of De Correspondent — actively requested my input for new articles.”

In these cases, belonging to De Correspondent provides members with an avenue through which they can share their expertise and experiences in a meaningful and influential way, contributing to a larger picture that helps inform public understanding. These are people who used to yell at the TV; now they can do something much more constructive with their insights.

Do we need to recalibrate how we think about “paying for news” accordingly? In the instances above, membership did not grant an opportunity to receive knowledge but to share it. “We believe people don’t become members for “access to the content,” Ernst-Jan Pfauth told media analyst Ken Doctor. “They become members because they want to be part of a movement [or] community.” Maybe it’s a case of both/and: payment is surely still motivated by desire for access, but payment also looks a lot like the membership fee for a political party or union: the price of entry to participate in a collective endeavour. The most distinctive Australian example of member-driven journalism may be Michael West’s investigations of multinational tax evasion funded by GetUp! members. In this case, donations appear to be motivated by the desire for corporate offenders to be publicly named and shamed, as much as by access to the content itself. Now, the Guardian is inviting readers to fund its environmental journalism with the appeal, “help us to move these issues up the public agenda and challenge governments to do more.” In a matter of days, it has raised more than $100,000.

In one sense, De Correspondent’s innovations are minor. Wijnberg and Pfauth no more devised reader engagement or the perennial call to “send us your tips” than they invented comments. What they have done is transform these staples of the digital era from add-ons into core elements of their publication. But can a growth in reader revenue motivated by new models of membership like De Correspondent’s and the Guardian’s (or GetUp!’s incursion into journalism) sustain a robust fourth estate — one that can stave off Starr’s new era of corruption?

When Wijnberg and Pfauth revealed that they would launch a US version of their publication, they also announced a venture called the Membership Puzzle Project — a collaboration with New York University journalism professor, Twitter sage and author of the PressThink blog, Jay Rosen. Its aim is to capture and share the current state of knowledge about what it means to be a member of a news site.

On one level, the project can be read as a humble acknowledgement by the Dutchmen of the inevitable challenges they will face on the other side of the Atlantic. For the Correspondent to eventually achieve the same kind of membership levels as its Dutch parent, proportional to its market, it would need to sign up over a million members. That sounds intimidating. But that’s the kind of growth in paying readers that the industry’s bigger players are pursuing. So the Membership Puzzle Project can also be seen as a recognition that De Correspondent’s journey is part of a much larger story of industry-wide transformation. In one way or another, everyone is trying to solve it.

It’s possible that a solution won’t be found, and a debilitated fourth estate will be unable to constrain a new era of corruption and authoritarianism. But in De Correspondent we can also detect the fragrant possibility that journalism, in responding to the new commercial realities, will revitalise itself and the public sphere, thereby enriching democratic life.

Advertising’s diminishing role in financing journalism could even turn out to be a blessing. When Wijnberg and Pfauth resolved not to carry any advertising in De Correspondent it was more than just an acceptance of a fait accompli, it was a matter of principle: “Our business model is selling quality journalism to members, not selling our members out to advertisers.”

To think about the tension between those two activities, consider the resignation in 2015 of Peter Oborne, chief political editor of Britain’s Telegraph. The year before, Oborne had written about the apparently arbitrary decision of Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, to close the accounts of a number of prominent British Muslims. “It’s like having your water cut off,” a victim told Oborne. Disturbed to find his article hadn’t been published, Oborne made inquiries and was told there was a legal problem. But when he attempted to follow this up with the Telegraph’s lawyers it turned out that they were unaware there was any issue. Eventually, an executive confessed to Oborne, “there is a bit of an issue” with HSBC: namely, it was a very large advertiser with the paper. As Oborne dug deeper he discovered that the soft coverage of the bank formed part of a larger pattern, and HSBC wasn’t the only powerful advertiser that had enjoyed a very nice run.

In Advertising and a Democratic Press, Ed Baker showed that “the likelihood of a magazine’s publishing an article about smoking’s ill effects decreased as the proportion of its revenue that came from cigarette advertising increased.” Baker pointed out that the New Republic — the magazine for whom Paul Starr wrote his essay on a new era of corruption — once dropped an article criticising tobacco companies that had already been typeset. The editor candidly explained that the decision reflected “the relative size of the account.” The interests of readers, who might have wanted to learn what the article had to say, had to be balanced against the interests of the advertiser. After all, the readers weren’t the major customer. They were the major product.

Wijnberg and Pfauth have decided to serve only one master. As they told Jay Rosen, at De Correspondent they do “not have to think about target groups or tailor its content to please, for instance, well-heeled readers between the ages of twenty-five and forty.” And because merely capturing (and onselling) attention is not the end goal, there is no longer the same incentive to pump out clickbait or concede that “if it bleeds it leads.” Persuading people to pay a monthly or annual membership fee requires fulfilment of a much longer-term value proposition. So the pursuit of reader revenue is conducive to De Correspondent’s aspiration to elevate the structural over the sensational and to be, as it claims, an “antidote to the daily news grind.”

Wijnberg and Pfauth’s decision to put all their eggs in the membership basket might be an admirable one, but it has also become a lot easier to stick to your principles in this regard. Because there is nowhere near as much advertising money sloshing around, competitors who still enjoy that revenue stream don’t have anything like the price–marketing–quality edge that they once did. And because reader revenue — and therefore reader loyalty and trust — are the name of the game, the compromises involved in turning the audience into a product (going easy on big tobacco or big finance, for example) could be more costly than ever. All of which is to say that De Correspondent is a symptom of a broader structural change; it isn’t a random weather event but a reflection of a changing climate.

But there’s a hitch. The same structural changes could also accelerate media fragmentation. As Ethan Zuckerman observes, “the rise of large-circulation newspapers and broadcast media, which needed to avoid alienating large swaths of the population to maintain fiscal viability, led us into a long age where partisan journalism was less common. Even as cable news made partisan news viable again, broadcast news networks and major newspapers maintained aspirations of fairness and balance, attempting to serve the broader public.” Fairness and balance provide their own justification, but journalistic objectivity also made commercial sense when the news industry was all about selling eyeballs to advertisers. Overtly partisan content risked alienating half your potential audience.

Now, the commercial objective is to offer those who might be willing to pay, the core audience, content they value very highly. If that antagonises casual visitors, so be it. This creates an incentive to tap into the core audience’s deepest values and commitments by portraying the world from a distinct position on the political spectrum.

Paul Starr viewed the balkanisation of the media as regrettable because it exacerbates ideological polarisation. Like his anxiety about a new era of corruption, it’s a concern that seems as pertinent as ever. But, as Zuckerman points out, “it’s important to consider that people seek out ideological[ly] compatible media not just out of intellectual laziness, but out of a sense of efficacy.” For example, Zuckerman writes, “if you are a committed Black Lives Matter supporter working on strategies for citizen review of the police, it’s exhausting to be caught in endless debates over whether racism in America is over.”

In its journalism, De Correspondent aims to advance “solutions — and ways to be part of those solutions.” It sees its mission as not just reflecting society but getting it moving in the right direction. Indeed it is unapologetic about being “explicitly subjective.” Objective journalism, Wijnberg argues, is “a misleading and dangerous illusion.” Misleading and dangerous? It’s helpful to consider a concrete example.

One of the hallmarks of the journalism Wijnberg is criticising is the “he said, she said” format. As Jay Rosen says, “No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story.” As a paradigmatic case of “he said, she said” reporting, Rosen cites a 2009 New York Times article, “Ex-Chairman of AIG Says Bailout Has Failed,”  in which claims (made by former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg) and counter-claims (made by his former company) are presented. The fact of the matter, says Rosen, was that the claimant had zero credibility and his claims were spurious and self-serving. If pertinent information — which in many cases had already been reported elsewhere in the Times — had not been omitted, that would have been clear to readers. Instead, claim and counter-claim were presented as equally plausible, because to adduce the incriminating evidence and offer an adjudication would have amounted to dropping the guise of neutrality. “The Times’s story,” wrote Rosen, offers “no analysis and forces readers — 95 per cent of whom know little or nothing about Greenberg’s tenure at AIG — to try to guess who’s right. Which is why these stories are so frustrating: we’re left helpless by them.”

The “we report, you decide” ethos implies the humble journalist is the mere servant of the reader. But the pose of deference is disingenuous. If the journalist refrains from offering a verdict, who is the reader to be so bold? After all, the journalist typically stands at greater proximity to the events concerned and is likely able to devote more time and expertise to their interpretation. In the result, as Rosen’s example makes clear, we are often implicitly invited to throw our arms up and conclude that they’re all as bad as each other.

If newspaper coverage of financial institutions is not always influenced by advertising revenue in the manner of the Telegraph’s coverage of HSBC, the Times example suggests a more subtle but more pervasive effect. The pursuit of large non-partisan audiences (the kind advertisers tend to want to buy) incentivises false balance.

Consider, by way of contrast, two articles published in De Correspondent. The first, “I’m Changing Banks This Week. How About You?” presents the case for investing ethically, as well as guidance about how to do it. Six thousand De Correspondent members moved their money in response to the report. In a similar vein, the second piece, “This Week, We’re Taking Steps Each Day Towards Better Privacy. Are You In?” set out how readers can protect their online security, and also provides tools to help members spread the word.

This kind of journalism will only persuade intelligent readers if the evidence exists and is handled fairly. But it offers readers something that is absent from “he said, she said” reporting: the benefit of the journalist’s considered judgement. And there is another, deeper difference. In calling us to act, articles in De Correspondent position the audience as potential participants, capable of walking on to the stage where the drama is unfolding. If that’s the result of the new imperative to appeal to paying members, it doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. Especially when the pursuit of large non-partisan audiences can result in journalism that positions us as passive observers of public life. For when we vicariously experience public events through journalists who want to establish that they have “no skin in the game,” we are invited to view public controversies with similar detachment — as though they are ultimately a matter for others, elsewhere.

In lamenting the decline of advertising-funded media, Paul Starr looked back nostalgically to the days when even the politically apathetic couldn’t escape some hard news. “Entertainment-oriented TV viewers… learned about the world because they had no alternative except to sit through the national network news, [and] many people who… bought a paper for the sports, the recipes, the comics, or the crossword puzzle… nonetheless learned something about the wider world because they [were] likely at least to scan the front page.”

This accidental paternalism, in which the apolitical class is forced to consume politics for its own good, is one way to increase civic engagement. Another approach is to provide the means through which people, by acting together, can make a registerable impact on public life (like contributing knowledge to a story, investing ethically en masse, or pooling funds to back journalism that exposes tax cheats and raises environmental awareness). Then the news might be less likely to leave us feeling powerless, and less ready to avert our gaze from things that seem beyond our control.

The Correspondent may fail to prosper in the United States, but in many ways its prospects look good. Its record of accomplishment in Europe, its endorsement by serious players like Jay Rosen, and its success in putting itself at the centre of the conversation about the future of journalism are all important. But the way the platform establishes a creative tension between the correspondent and the crowd, the professional and the amateur, feels like the internet growing up. Above all, De Correspondent looks like it is made for the times, an era in which loyal and committed members will be the key to commercial success. Either way, it has already helped us view the newspaper crisis — and imagine our future — differently. •

The post You are no longer the product appeared first on Inside Story.

A decade later his sublime novel, Towards the End of the Morning, gently skewered Fleet Street’s vanishing customs. The heart of Britain’s newspaper industry, Frayn would write from the vast retrospect of 2005, “was coming towards the end not just of the morning, but of the afternoon as well, and the shades of night were gathering fast.”

Fleet Street has indeed become a place of ghosts. But they turned out to be, if not exactly friendly, then possessed of dark humour. Newspapers survive as print–digital hybrids, the entangling often contrary enough to recall Bob Dylan’s line, “there’s no success like failure.” And in some ineffable way, the tail wags the body of these strange creatures. If it’s still hard to imagine a London newsstand without the Guardian or the Daily Mail — those enemies-in-arms with soaraway website traffic — that’s surely because their singular political and cultural weight is intertwined with their existence as a material artefact.

It was a time of innovation: three years later a move to sleek offices in King’s Place delivered a cool upgrade to match the product.

The experience of the Independent, which went digital-only in 2016, is negative confirmation. No one regards it as a real newspaper any more, as opposed to a news website (itself a kind description). Once gone, there is no way back. Back in 1967, “a few terminal cases were still coughing their last in odd corners,” writes Frayn: the trade-union backed Daily Herald, “being slowly strangled by its [trade union] affiliation,” and “the poor old News Chronicle, the decent Liberal paper that everyone liked but no one read.” In 1947, these publications had sold 2.1 million and 1.6 million copies to the Manchester Guardian’s 126,000.

Today the Guardian is selling only a third above that number. Yet that printed edition can justly pose as indispensable to the brand’s huge digital reach on three continents. The newspaper switches to tabloid on 15 January. In a sense, that might be a “Small Tremor in King’s Cross, Not Many Care” story. But the paper’s online reach amplifies it into a tale of how a regional newspaper went national, got bigger, changed its spots, and is now going for broke by touching base with its roots.

The Guardian’s change of format is only the second in the history of Britain’s main liberal newspaper, founded in 1821 as the Manchester Guardian. In February 1998, under Peter Preston, the broadsheet had a new masthead and contained G2, a new tabloid section. In September 2005, it chose not to emulate the ex-broadsheet Independent and Times and instead adopted the slim Berliner (or midi) size of European papers such as Paris’s Le Monde and Rome’s La Repubblica. That move was soon followed by its reluctant Sunday stablemate the Observer, founded in 1791, which the Guardian had bought in 1993.

The smart Berliner design, coming ten years into Alan Rusbridger’s long editorship, ticked many boxes. It gave new distinction to a newspaper proud of its freestanding ownership and ethos, took printing in-house, and offered a welcome patina of European modernity to its centre-left readership. It was a time of innovation: three years later a move to sleek offices in King’s Place — a ten-minute walk from its home since 1976, a tired sixties block on Farringdon Road — delivered a cool upgrade to match the product.

Troubled transition: the Guardian’s previous editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger. Alastair Grant/AP Photo

By then the Berliner look and clean Egyptian typeface were conjoined to an expanding online presence, with the launch under Georgina Henry of the “Comment Is Free” opinion section and the web-first posting of selected news. In editorial terms, the redesign was an act of strategic optimism amid the whirlwind that the paper had earned new spurs in tracking: globalisation’s peak, post-9/11 wars, London’s 7/7 bombings, Tony Blair’s faltering hegemony. Its print sales on 12 September 2001 were the highest in its history, as were its page views on 7 July 2005.

The newspaper’s early adventures with the worldwide web had given it an edge and a bank of expertise. Led by Ian Katz, its news, sport and jobs websites had fused as Guardian Unlimited in 1999, and grown from three million to ten million unique users by 2005. A decade later, its free-to-read content — now with customised editions in the United States and Australia — was reaching 155 million unique browsers (the term it now prefers) per month. It has 7.7 million Facebook likes and 6.9 million Twitter followers. This Berliner-era Guardian has proved its own editorial mettle, from the financial crisis of 2007–09 via the phone-hacking scandal of 2009–11 to Brexit and Trump. And it became a pioneer of collaborative data journalism in tracking docu-dumps from WikiLeaks/Julian Assange (2010–11), Edward Snowden (2013), and the Panama/Paradise tax havens (2016–17), and many other big stories.

Over the same period, the paper’s mainstay income from display and classified advertising plunged and daily print sales continued to fall. From a historic peak of almost half a million in 1987, and a still strong 428,000 in 1997, they dropped to 337,000 in 2005 but remained above 300,000 as late as 2010. From there the tapering was abrupt: in December 2017 the number was 146,766. People over sixty-five accounted for 28 per cent, those over forty-five for 58.8 per cent. London is the Guardian’s redoubt: 38.6 per cent of its 2016–17 sales were there, against 20.8 per cent in England’s north and only 4.2 per cent in Scotland.

A third of buyers are now subscribers saving on the £2 (A$3.50) weekday price, augmented since 2014 by a new category of members who pay for masterclasses in photography, novel-writing, data visualisation, flirting, and more. Regular paying supporters, including members, now reportedly number 750,000. Such revenue streams, along with grants for specialist coverage — including from the Bill & Melinda Gates, Rockefeller, and Skoll foundations — helped hoist digital income in 2016–17 to £94.1 million (A$164 million). “More people are paying for Guardian journalism than ever before,” says the Guardian Media Group, or GMG, the company that runs the newspaper.

The GMG is now entering the last phase of an ambitious three-year plan, launched in January 2016, to stabilise its finances after a decade of heavy losses. After the financial crash, these ran to £90 million (A$157 million) in 2008–09, fell to £30.9 million (A$53.2 million) in 2012–13, back up to £68.7 million (A$120 million) in 2015–16. The deficits were made bearable only by revenue from Trader Media Group, engine of the GMG’s portfolio. The company sold its majority stake in Trader in 2014, raising £619 million (A$1 billion), creating a huge endowment to safeguard its future. It was a replay of history. The floating of the Reuters news agency in 1984 had been a windfall for its Fleet Street investors, with the Guardian’s share of £28 million (in today’s money, £87 million, or A$151 million) enabling it to settle all its mortgages and debts.

Figures like these make the Guardian a case study in media-wide trends that it pioneered and championed even as they worked against its own interests as a newspaper. The Berliner format was a bravura innovation whose content was made freely available online, making for a print–online hybrid whose proliferating digital branches far outgrew a withered trunk.

The paper’s domestic competitors, the Times and Telegraph especially, were always in the Guardian’s digital slipstream. These two papers, and the Financial Times, experimented with metered payments in the early 2010s, in each case leading to a subscription model with insiderish benefits. The expensive FT, £2.70 (A$4.60) for a weekday paper copy, now has over 700,000 subscribers, its reputation for quality reinforced by critical, in-depth coverage of Brexit. Alongside the Guardian in staying free of cyber-charge was the fellow centre-left Independent, saved from closure by the Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev in 2010 and shunted online after six years as his expensive bauble.

The venerable Times, bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1981 and often aggressively priced, began a paywall in 2010 after its sales, at 508,000, had also entered a long downward curve. A recent bounce to 450,000 (boosted by around 80,000 free bulk copies, a figure-boosting technique the Guardian now disdains) may owe something to footloose ex-buyers of the Independent, which was notionally selling 55,000 a day when it stopped printing in 2016. The Guardian, whose cover price is 30p (50c) more than the Times’s, seems not to have benefited. More germane is that the smart, low-priced tabloid i, an Independent spin-off with 260,000-plus sales since 2012, has quietly cornered the growing market for bite-sized news.

All newspapers had entered the rapids well before 2005, even if their layers of insulation still muffled the sound. What distinguishes the Guardian’s story in the years between its two redesigns is the cunning-of-history element. It saw and reported the dangers but felt itself above them. It sought to become a global contender while neglecting its own roots. Its switch on 15 January is less a wager on the future than a concession to its inevitable diminishment. Britain in a nutshell, it might be said.

Against that fatalistic view is one that stresses agency and opportunity in the context of unavoidably acute financial constraints. At the centre of the GMG plan is the Guardian’s aim to increase reader revenues, expand internationally, and build “a far deeper set of relationships with our audience” — all while reducing the paper’s outgoings by a fifth.

The strategy is co-led by the GMG’s chief executive David Pemsel and editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, who launched the Australian operation and edited the subsequently troubled US one. Viner succeeded Rusbridger in March 2015, after the result of a staff vote was endorsed by the Scott Trust, set up in 1936 to protect the Guardian’s financial and editorial independence. The transition became a rift when Rusbridger was obliged to give up his expected chairmanship of the trust, thus severing connection with the newspaper. He now heads an Oxford college and chairs the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

The fumbled passing of the editorial torch accentuated the sense of a publication in flux. Senior staff left, including two applicants for the top job: chief website editor Janine Gibson (Rusbridger’s favoured successor) for BuzzFeed, and digital-strategy director Wolfgang Blau for Condé Nast. Another applicant, Emily Bell, media editor until 2010 when she moved to Columbia’s Center for Digital Journalism, remains non-executive director of the Scott Trust (which in 2008 had turned itself into a limited company). The final choice was between Viner and Ian Katz, who had left in 2013 to become editor of BBC2’s Newsnight and now heads programming at Channel 4.

New mission: Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner. PA Images/Alamy

With Rusbridger’s departure, strategic options expanded. Among them was a cost-saving return to Manchester, which the paper, having dropped the northwest English city from its masthead in 1959, quit in stages for London in the early 1960s. The end of that association had long been a source of bittersweet lament, without its actual revival ever seeming a realistic possibility.

In the event, the tabloid decision had more business logic than the quasi-nostalgic Berliner one. It enabled sharing of printing facilities owned by Trinity Mirror, publisher of a red-top daily and two Sunday titles. The GMG had sold twenty-two regional titles, including the Manchester Evening News, to Trinity in 2010, raising Ј44.8 million (A$78 million), the great bulk in release from a hefty tabloid print contract. The Berliner-only presses the Guardian had built in Manchester and east London, which cost Ј113 million (A$200 million) in today’s money, will now be scrapped. That adds fifty to the 300-plus redundancies already made.

Almost three years after the regime change, the Guardian is still between eras. Depicting retrenchment as a great leap forward makes the best of a complex situation. The approach also plays to the evangelism that lies at the core of the newspaper’s self-understanding, and which found in the internet a perfect contemporary match. From the start the Guardian’s singular relationship with the web — in the latter’s potent Silicon Valley guise as a liberator with ethics — had a soulmates feel. The traces of that origin continue to inform the Guardian’s editorial thinking, as revealed in Rusbridger’s and Viner’s several public lectures and essays on the future of their newspaper and of journalism. These are well worth reading in full.

“As for digital, I am with the utopians,” Rusbridger told a Sydney audience gathered for the Andrew Olle lecture in 2010. The unowned and barely regulated digital space “brings with it an entirely new idea of what journalism is,” which for the Guardian means “an open and collaborative one.” In his Hugh Cudlipp lecture earlier that year, named after the Daily Mirror editor in its halcyon 1950s, he had argued against paywalls and for a newspaper “open to the rest of the web” and becoming “as influential in Beijing and Washington as in Paris or Delhi.”

Viner’s own A.N. Smith lecture in Melbourne in 2013, as editor-in-chief of the new Guardian Australia, was as emphatic about the potential of the “open web” to be “a huge democratic space,” enabling “a fundamental redrawing of journalists’ relationship with our audience.” But a 2016 essay on “how technology disrupted the truth” observes that social media “has swallowed the news” and supplanted the “old idea of a wide-open web.” And the tone of her ambitious new “mission for journalism in a time of crisis” — published in mid November, two months before the newspaper’s resizing — is one of extreme urgency.

The “utopian mood of the early 2000s did not anticipate all that technology would enable”: surveillance as “the business model of the digital age”; Facebook becoming a wealthy behemoth “by replacing editors with algorithms”; the spoliation of “[our] digital town squares” by bullies, misogynists and racists. All this, part of a wider crisis in public life, requires a journalism that champions the public interest; sees readers as collaborators; listens, understands, diversifies; is trustworthy, rigorous, fair; “uses clarity and imagination to build hope.”

Viner’s evangelising prospectus is remarkable in its sweep. It defines the “relationship with our readers” as “not transactional: it is about sharing a sense of purpose and a commitment to understand and illuminate our times.” Her offer is threefold: “high-quality journalism, rooted in the facts,” “our progressive perspective” and a shared belief “that Guardian journalism should have the biggest possible impact and try to change the world for the better.” In effect, the text positions readers as co-protagonists in a life-or-death campaign.

Yet the business pressures underpinning this joint enterprise go unmentioned in a 6000-word essay. That may seem immaterial: few reading the piece can be unaware of at least the broad outlines of the Guardian’s situation. Central is the fact that readers — whether supporters, members, subscribers, donors, or mere everyday purchasers — are ever more the newspaper’s lifeblood. To survive, it must squeeze them close. Viner avoids the topic. In this respect her stirring vision of the future also serves to displace the internal problems that have led the Guardian to this point, and bear directly on its new course.

As significant, Viner weaves her outline of the newspaper’s expansive goals into its two centuries’ experience. This emphasis on the value and relevance of the Guardian’s past is a striking departure from the preceding reign of technocentric neophilia. With equal rigour, the theme of advancing hope also works carefully to screen the Guardian’s troubles from view.

Every Guardian editor, and Viner is only the eleventh in the newspaper’s 197 years, works in the shadow of C.P. Scott, who held the post from 1872 to 1929. This patrician figure was a conscientious reformer, a Unitarian — or rational dissenter — like the paper’s Manchester founders, an advocate in many just causes who also served for ten years as a Liberal member of parliament. Appointed by his cousin, the owner of the paper, he steered the moderate Whig newspaper along the same course for over a decade before converting it into a voice of progressive social liberalism.

C.P. Scott’s example — on his death, Manchester “paid him a remarkable tribute: on a cold winter morning, huge numbers turned out to offer their last respects in what became an unofficial, unorchestrated, state funeral,” says the University of Adelaide’s Trevor Wilson — imbues his name with an aura of piety. Viner’s salute has the rare distinction of placing him in the context of the newspaper’s larger canvas.

The story is well, if selectively, told: how the St Peter’s Fields cull of protesters by sabre-wielding hussars in 1819 eventually led John Edward Taylor and his colleagues to found the Manchester Guardian as an apostle of “sincere and undeviating attachment to rational liberty,” how the paper was sublimated to the city’s free-trader cotton merchants in the Victorian mid-century, how its true spirit was recovered by Scott and his offspring. While noting its occasional “missteps,” such as its backing the Conservatives in the 1951 election, Viner avows a noble lineage:

Our moral conviction, as exemplified by Taylor and codified by Scott, rests on a faith that people long to understand the world they’re in, and to create a better one. We believe in the value of the public sphere; that there is such a thing as the public interest, and the common good; that we are all of equal worth; that the world should be free and fair.

This programmatic view of the Guardian’s golden thread, geared to the present, is naturally open to question as history. Where Viner rightly credits John Edward Taylor and the London Times, it was James Wroe of the Manchester Observer whose inspired subediting branded the carnage at St Peter’s Fields as the “Peterloo Massacre” (Taylor, less radical, abjured both terms) and it was Wroe whose pamphlet series, with its “faithful narrative of the events,” spread throughout the land. The republican Richard Carlile and others played a role. She dates the paper’s “drift from the political ideals that had inspired its founding” to 1844, but already in the 1820s–30s it was scorned by agitators for insufficient radicalism, such as opposition to strikes. From the very outset, the Manchester Guardian was being outflanked on its left.

Jumping a century, A.P. Wadsworth’s reluctant endorsement of Churchill in 1951 as “the lesser evil” was also a judgement on the Labour minister Aneurin Bevan’s fierce rhetoric, the “hate-gospellers of his entourage,” and the soft pro-Sovietism in his wing of the party. A want of imagination aside, Viner’s retrospective disagreement with Wadsworth’s exercise of editorial freedom has the whiff of a red line that elsewhere she is eager to disown.

Such examples are important not just for their own sake but also because too tight a corralling of the past might cramp judgements in the present. The pincer movement in Viner’s manifesto — on the Guardian’s past and its readers — plants a doubt. Will the impact of her missionary journalism, in the context of a mutualised project, threaten the newspaper’s editorial independence?

That is not to detract from the manifesto’s seriousness, sincerity, even anguish — and refreshingly un-Guardian-like absence of knowing, in-crowd detachment. These merits far outweigh its over-crowdsourced, mustn’t-forget-the-kitchen-sink feel. “What is the meaning and purpose of our work? Who are we, fundamentally?” Viner has the courage to ask. At this odd juncture, however — somewhere between long dark night and new dawn — the Guardian’s divided soul is not yet open to true introspection.

Viner’s piercing self-questions might usefully reach to another in the same spirit: “where do we belong?” Of all newspapers, the Guardian, which would always be marked by the transition from Manchester to London, might at least be expected to consider it. Migration, exile, displacement, cultural borders, identity dilemmas, dual loyalties: these, after all, are the newspaper’s foremost themes. Yet the Guardian has never tried to put its own experience here to “beneficial account,” a phrase that Viner is fond of quoting from its founding, 1821 prospectus.

That document’s appeal to “the friends of freedom in this neighbourhood” is a reminder of how much the nonconformist John Edward Taylor and friends were bonded by ideals and by place. It’s easy to overlook the fact that Peterloo was also an intimately local event, pulsating through Lancashire’s towns and villages. The Manchester Guardian’s national status and international influence were won over decades from a foundation of civic and regional attachments, all capacious enough to accommodate the others.

With the move to London, such layers thinned and were not easily replicated. The new Guardian knuckled down and looked ahead, as it had to. The newspaper’s dislocation attracted the easy jibe, handy in north and south alike, that it was a roots-betraying interloper. From various directions — sentimental northernism, populist anti-Londonism, knockabout anti-leftism — the newspaper was typecast as the house journal of an out-of-touch, we-know-best, anti-patriotic, metropolitan (formerly “Hampstead liberal”) elite.

Such formulaic charges have a low-rent currency that trades as much in abrasive Fleet Street rivalry as social prejudice. Alone, the Guardian’s brilliant journalism and the best of its commentary would make them look ridiculous. Regrettably, the newspaper’s tolerance for the smug, indignant and hectoring gives them credence. That manner is a long way from C.P. Scott’s centenary leader: “The voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard. Comment also is justly subject to a self-imposed restraint.”

The strangeness of this moment is that it’s so hard to tell whether the tabloid Guardian will be entering a new morning or joining those clogmakers. A radical change justified by the sweeping invitation to a bright future, taken with reference to an honoured past, where no one, including the people in charge, knows what will happen. The Guardian is on the same page as Brexit. These really are interesting times. ●

The post The Guardian goes for broke appeared first on Inside Story.

Early reports of the unrest in Russia, a key ally, focused on its implications for the war. But as 1917 wore on, and events moved at an ever-accelerating pace, avid newspaper readers found themselves in the uncertain predicament of Bob Dylan’s Mr Jones: something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you?

On 2 June 1917, the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate told its readers that the unfolding revolution was “the most tremendous event the war has yet produced.” The paper advanced several possible causes, some of which lay deep in the past while others, such as food shortages, were very much in the present. But at the heart of it was the ineffectual leadership of Tsar Nicholas II, “a simple and honest, though weakly obstinate mystic,” who was said to be dominated by his melancholic wife. (The tsar had abdicated earlier in 1917; he and his family would be murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.) The revolution had popular support, said the paper, noting that “this upheaval would have been impossible were not all Russia solid for reform.”

On 9 June, the Catholic Advocate in Melbourne reported on “the general approval expressed by the press of Great Britain of the Russian Revolution” and the hope that a weak autocrat might be replaced by a stable democratic government. It was “certainly satisfactory to find that the Czar has been swept aside by the rising tide of democracy,” but what would happen next, the paper said, was difficult to predict.

The Advocate quoted a Russian émigré commentator’s remarks about a new movement, Slavism, which was the antithesis of the displaced autocracy. Slavism aimed to restore autonomy to all the smaller nations of Europe and, such being the case, “must be opposed to the Pan-German idea of world domination.” But the paper was sceptical:

We would be glad to share this optimistic view of the situation; but when the people who are to carry out this programme are considered, it will be found that there is room for misgiving. Even the optimistic view naturally taken of the position and intentions of the people of a great ally in the war cannot hide the fact that, taken as a whole, Russia contains the most ignorant of all the peoples of Europe.

The danger now, the paper said, was “that an irresponsible mob may get control.”

As for its impact on the war effort, there was still talk of a Russian advance westwards. “It appears that the most that can be expected, before the next winter settles down on Europe,” the Advocate reported, “is that the Russian armies will guard the eastern frontier, leaving the work of forcing the Germans back to the Allies on the other fronts.”

On 30 June, quoting a Sydney man whose brother was on the spot, the Singleton Argus carried a page-one story about German pamphlets being dropped behind Russian lines. The pamphlets warned Russians that they were being deceived, and that the English were to blame for deposing the tsar:

The English have deceived your Czar, and led him into the war in order to conquer the whole world with his help. At first the English went with your Czar — now they have risen against him because he did not agree with their cunning demands. The English have dethroned your Czar, who was given to you by God himself. Why has this happened?

The story was deepening. On 3 July, many Australian newspapers carried a despatch from the Times in London, quoting an English journalist who had reached Russia and, after talking to many people, was convinced that the revolution “was not only against the Czar but against the war.” Those leading the revolution held that capitalism was the root of all wars, and that no distinction existed between the sword-rattling German Kaiser and the pacifist American president, Woodrow Wilson. The correspondent warned that at the end of the conflict “delegates from ravaged States will have to discuss peace with idealists and fanatics, who are determined to put the whole world right.”

That month, as local skirmishes flared all over Russia with the final collapse of the old order, the short-lived provisional government of Alexander Kerensky took office. On 14 July, the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate carried a graphic account of a British nurse in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed after the war broke out) at the time of the February revolution. The nurse, attached to the Red Cross, had travelled from Romania and, having been warned that revolution would break out any day, found herself “right in the heart of the uprising of a whole nation claiming its liberty.”

She described how a maid at the hospital she was visiting called her excitedly to the window to watch a procession:

The soldier patriots in their grey coats, on foot and in motor-lorries and motor-cars, were going down the street in a steady, orderly manner, protecting a crowd of starving men, women, and children, who were walking in the centre of the procession. At their head was a band playing the “Marseillaise” and a large red flag borne aloft…

[Then] there was a sudden outburst of fierce firing from above, and soldiers and women and children fell to the ground, and the street soon became a shambles. The firing was from machine-guns controlled by the police, who were in ambush on the roof of this hotel and who tried to bring about a wholesale slaughter of the people below. It was astonishing how self-possessed the crowd was in the face of this murderous attack. I saw the soldiers who had not fallen immediately enter the hotel and make their way to the roof, where they shot the cowardly police, captured the machine guns, and brought them down to the street and fixed them on the back seats of the motor cars and the lorries.

On 23 July, the Bendigo Independent in Victoria tried to tell its readers a little about this far-off place increasingly in the news, explaining that “the country that is known as Russia occupies rather more than half of Asia.” Seventy times the size of Britain, the country’s population was only four times greater. “Russia, in general, is a country of magnificent distances, sparsely inhabited by nations who widely differ from each other in their origin, language, modes of living, religion, education and intelligence.” The Russian upper and middle classes, the paper graciously conceded, “are almost on an intellectual level with the rest of Europe,” but “the Russian peasantry are far down in the list of civilised nations… Force and superstition were factors that held Russia together as an empire.”

Of the dethroned tsar and his family, who were now interned in the Winter Palace near Petrograd, the Independent opined that:

the dismal political history of Russia for hundreds of years past is repeating itself in the reports by cable that he is endeavouring to destroy himself, and has to be continually watched by attendants… But revolutions within revolutions are evidently pending, and the political future of the great, disorganised country of so many mixed nations and degrees of civilisation is dark indeed.

On 11 August, the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate cautiously welcomed developments, but worried that “the Russian workers, who have just been emancipated from the rule of one of the absolute autocracies in the world, have not yet learnt to use their freedom. They are like prisoners who, after years in dungeons, are suddenly brought out into the sunshine and cannot bear the light.”

The paper urged statesmen and trade union leaders to go to Russia to help. “It is not too late for this proposal to be carried out,” it said, “and we are certain that it would be welcomed by none more heartily than by Russians who love freedom and their country, and who need all the help and guidance that the older democracies can give them.”

A fortnight later, the Sydney Morning Herald carried a review of Russia in Revolution, engineer Stinton Jones’s first-hand account of events in Petrograd. His enthusiasm over certain aspects of the revolution, wrote the reviewer, is “tempered with forebodings.” “In the earlier part of the book,” the review continues:

he is hopeful; later he begins to wonder whether the powers of law and order have the situation in hand; at the end there is a hint that the reformers, with a legitimate programme, may have invited the co-operation of forces that they cannot control; may have unsealed the bottle whence issues a baleful genie with an increasing sphere of malevolence.

In Melbourne, the Age reported on 17 September that a privately screened film about events in Russia, despite having apparently been heavily censored, allowed the “state of unrest” to be gauged “by the immense crowds in the streets.”

It was an accurate observation. The tottering remains of the provisional government were swept away by the Bolsheviks less than two months later. On 12 November, many Australian newspapers carried a widely distributed wire service account that read:

Yesterday’s revolution differed from the last. There was complete apathy amongst the population, who did not know another revolution had commenced until evening. The Ministers have taken refuge in the Winter Palace, where, with a small corps, they are pledged to fight to the last. In the evening the extremists had gained the approaches to the Palace.

Not surprisingly, the Brisbane Worker sided with the revolutionaries against Kerensky’s short-lived government. “From the chaotic accounts of the new revolution in Russia one fact now has become apparent,” reported on 22 November:

It is that the dictatorship of Kerensky is entirely overthrown, and that when calm has been restored government, both civil and military, will be in the hands not of the agents of compromise, but of the representatives of the masses. There has been bloodshed both in Petrograd and Moscow, but a neutral who has lately returned from Russia repudiates the stories of cruelty and atrocity. This man, M. Edstroen, president of the Swedish Electric Company, stated that he saw nothing of the bloody fighting chronicled in foreign newspapers. The military schools certainly were damaged, but he had heard nothing of the reported cruelties to the women’s battalion. On the contrary, the Bolsheviks, who are now in command, maintained excellent order.

By year’s end, commentators were trying to make sense of the tumultuous events. On 29 December, the Echuca and Moama Advertiser and Farmers’ Gazette worried that the world had turned “topsy-turvy” with all the “strange events brought about by the greatest war the world has ever witnessed.”

The anonymous writer feared that the Russian boast that the revolution had been brought about with less bloodshed than that of the French revolution of 1789 was not likely to be realised. “It is possible and probable that when full knowledge is gained of what has happened in Russia,” a tragic story outrivalling that of France might be revealed. “The mass of Russian people indeed seems to have been but little, if any, further advanced in enlightenment than those of France in those far-off days when Paris was a shambles and the whole land stricken to the core with fear and doubts.”

Presciently, the Daily Observer in Tamworth also detected the beginnings of the emergence of the United States as a world power. The year 1917 “has been more eventful than any other of which there is a record,” said the paper. “If only for the remarkable collapse of the great Russian Empire it would have stood by itself. But the Russian revolution is only one event, and not by any means the greatest. The intervention of America in the world struggle” — its entry into the conflict in Europe in 1917 — “will probably be reckoned by historians as the happening of greatest consequence in this war.” ●

The post Reading about a revolution appeared first on Inside Story.

Underscoring this trend is the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, which highlights the situations in Thailand, where the media industry is increasingly muzzled by a military government, and in Cambodia, where defamation laws have been criminalised to silence dissent.

According to Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the index, “The bad news is that media freedom is in the worst state we have ever seen.” Media freedom “has retreated wherever the authoritarian strongman model has triumphed,” says the organisation. “As we have reached the age of post-truth, propaganda, and suppression of freedoms, this 2017 World Press Freedom Index highlights the danger of a tipping point in the state of media freedom.”

Analysts also say that countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, where press freedom had taken root, have also fallen foul of press watchdogs, alongside Myanmar, where an end to more than fifty years of military rule has not resulted in an end to the persecution of journalists. “There are few, if any, press freedom bright spots in Southeast Asia these days,” says Shawn Crispin, senior Southeast Asia representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Some analysts also argue that China’s rise and its sometimes brutal suppression of the media has set an example that is being embraced by its southern neighbours whether democratically elected or not.

“Hopes that the democratic transition in Myanmar would lead to more press freedom have been largely dashed as the elected government and still autonomous military use outdated laws to threaten and jail journalists,” Crispin says.

“It’s not what we expected under an Aung San Suu Kyi–led government and frankly she has been immensely disappointing considering her previous credentials as a pro-democracy icon. The jailing of journalists under Suu Kyi’s watch will leave an indelible stain on her legacy as a democratic reformer.”

He says there are rising concerns that the media curbs that Thailand’s ruling junta initially put in place to secure their coup have been fully consolidated and would be hard to remove even if the country eventually moves back towards elected governance.

“Journalists who have stuck their heads up and criticised military rule have been consistently stomped down, particularly in the broadcast media,” Crispin adds. “It’s a shame considering how far press freedom had progressed in Thailand to see it so easily and quickly reversed.”

According to Keith Loveard, a Jakarta-based analyst with Concord Consulting, reporters in the region too often face life-threatening challenges in exposing wrongdoing and abuse of power, arguably the most important roles of the journalist in any country.

Indonesia improved on the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, up six places from 2016 to 124 out of 180 countries, the best performance for a Southeast Asian country, followed by the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand rounding out the top five, all far ahead of China, which is ranked a lowly 176. But the index noted growing concerns about the harassment of journalists by the security forces.

Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists recorded at least seventy-eight cases of violence against journalists in 2016, compared with forty-two in 2015 and forty in 2014.

Loveard says most of these cases go unpunished and, most of the time, are not even seriously investigated. “Despite the honourable protections offered by the Press Law, in reality reporting on Indonesia remains a potentially dangerous business. These attacks are just a part of the pressure on the freedom of the media that is often far more subtle.”

He says much of the Indonesian media is guilty of being entrapped by deeply embedded patronage systems across Southeast Asian societies. “Envelope journalism” is rife and too many reporters use their jobs for access to powerful figures and the opportunity to create side deals that are far more lucrative than their official roles.

“There remains a strong culture of immunity for the military and the police in particular and many other powerful figures assume that they are immune from investigation,” he says, “so it requires considerable nerve to probe into the darker regions of Indonesian life.”

Elsewhere in the region, communist-governed Vietnam and Laos remain journalistic backwaters. Each was classified a Black Spot by Reporters Without Borders, while Brunei has raised concerns with the institution of Sharia law. Singapore is still stymied by its inability to cope with any form of criticism, highlighted by prime minister Lee Hsien Loong’s recent threat to sue his own siblings for defamation amid a family squabble.

In Malaysia, the scandal-plagued government of prime minister Najib Razak has faced only muted criticism, benefiting enormously from a press establishment that rarely deviates from the wishes of the long-ruling United Malays National Organisation.

Long-time correspondent and former Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong, president Karl Wilson has focused on the Philippines for decades and says corruption there is now endemic at all levels and more journalists have been killed in direct relation to their work there than anywhere apart from Iraq and Syria.

“The election of President Rodrigo Duterte and his anti-drug policy has made the job of journalists more difficult,” he says. “The outspoken former mayor of Davao does not like journalists and has made that fact clear on a number of occasions.”

Wilson says international media organisations like to say that 90 per cent of cases in which journalists have been murdered since the fall of Marcos have been solved. Still, that is hardly comforting and heavily mitigated by the 2009 Maguindanao Massacre, when fifty-eight people, almost half of them provincial journalists, were murdered, allegedly by the Ampatuan family.

“Since then there have been three presidents who have promised swift action but in the end nothing. Witnesses have been murdered and the case against the Ampatuans has hardly moved,” Wilson says. “It shows a judicial system that is in paralysis and the power of families over the political and judicial system. The whole episode has been virtually forgotten, even by us. The whole episode is a disgrace and a blight on our profession.

“It would have been a totally different story if this had happened in Australia, US or Britain. Why should our colleagues in the Philippines be any different?”

Foreign correspondents are also complaining that they are more often being subjected to the same scrutiny and pressures as local reporters. Foreign journalists have rarely been subjected to those restrictions because they have had little impact on local readers and voters, thus remaining off the radar of the authorities.

But this is changing for journalists who report in English. With its overarching influence across the internet, that language is increasingly responsible for shaping public opinion and influencing political thought.

Loveard says responsibility for dealing with these circumstances lies as much with media proprietors as it does with reporters in the field, regardless of the language and market they serve. “There are, of course, many exceptions but there is still a long way to go, not least in the area of training. What is more constraining is the domination of the media industry by powerful business interests who have zero understanding that ownership does not necessarily mean total control of editorial policies and biases.” ●

This article first appeared in the Correspondent, the magazine of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong.

The post Few bright spots for press freedom in Southeast Asia appeared first on Inside Story.

The reason is straightforward enough. Australia has lost between 2500 and 3000 media jobs this decade. That’s a quarter of our total journalistic capacity. Advertisers have left for Google, Facebook and other non-journalistic vendors of eyeballs, and they’re not coming back. Subscriptions to news outlets are growing but even non-subscribers enjoy the benefits of public interest journalism – liberal freedoms, democratic participation and low corruption. That means public interest journalism is unlikely to be privately purchased in the kind of quantities a healthy democracy needs.

And yet, as Matthew Ricketson, professor of communication at Deakin University and key player in the 2012 Finkelstein Review, told me, “I think if you asked the average person in the street, should the government provide money to the media, and put it like that, they’d probably be wary about it. Because they’d be worried about control and editorial interference.”

Ricketson is no doubt right. We don’t even need to accost people on the street. A submission to the Senate inquiry by libertarian researcher Chris Berg articulates exactly this anxiety. Arguing against state support for individual firms and journalists, Berg claims that the “real or perceived political interference, or just funding decisions that favour particular sides of politics, would undermine their democratic function.” Berg imagines an unsustainable conflict of interest in which “government planners would have to support organisations which are specifically dedicated to countering the planners’ interests, and would have to do so in a way that does not affect the political balance of the industry.”

Does a government-fed watchdog lose its bark?

In outlining this case, Berg makes no reference to the experience of any country in the world where subsidies already exist. And for good reason: the international evidence flatly contradicts his position. The five countries that topped the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index in 2017 were Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands. All five provide direct subsidies to their newspapers (typically targeted at publications with weaker market positions). Lest the conjunction of state support and press freedom be dismissed as a Scandinavian curiosity, consider the finding of a 2014 policy brief from the London School of Economics. Of ten countries where governments provide direct assistance to their news industry, only Italy has any issues in relation to press freedom – and it still generally ranks in the top third of press freedom indices.

Senators and observers need only review the very comprehensive appendix to the submission of the Journalism Education & Research Association of Australia (itself an updated version of Annex K in the Finkelstein Report) to see just how widespread subsidy systems are. As well as the Nordic countries, Austria and the Netherlands provide annual direct subsidies. The Dutch government also offers loans and loan guarantees to support new media start-ups. The French employ a suite of measures, including subsidisation of transport, distribution and communications, a digital innovation fund, and tax incentives for journalists and publishers. Newspapers in Britain are exempt from the value added tax, normally levied at a rate of 20 per cent. A dozen other European countries, including Germany, Italy and Ireland, also provide a total exemption or significant reduction in their VAT.

That Berg didn’t feel the need to explore evidence from any of these countries is a symptom of the prevailing assumptions of our political culture. In Australia, we have taken it for granted that there would be something fundamentally dubious about governments handing over cash to newspaper owners. And yet this practice is as accepted in other parts of the world as it seems strange to us.

Internationally, subsidy regimes tend to be around half a century old. They have endured as governments have changed and power has oscillated between left and right, and they generally enjoy broad support across party lines. Josef Trappel, head of Communication Policy and Media Economics at the University of Salzburg, told me that “there is support for these kinds of subsidies almost across the entire political spectrum” in his country. “The strong parties in Austria, which are basically the Social Democrats, the Conservatives, the Freedom Party and the Greens – they are convinced that public subsidies for the press are a good thing.” It’s hardly the kind of consensus that would exist if governments were using subsidies to favour friends and intimidate opponents.

Robert Picard is one of the world’s leading academic experts in the field, dividing his time between the Reuters Institute at Oxford and the Information Society Project at Yale. “What we have been able to show in studies over the last four to five decades now,” he told me, “is it is possible to fashion subsidy mechanisms where the discretion to give the money is taken out of the hands of the existing government.” There are two critical elements in the design of subsidy schemes that protect them from abuse. The first is that subsidies are disbursed by a body that’s at arm’s length from the government of the day. Typically, it’s an independent statutory commission, but in Belgium, for example, the responsibility is delegated to an industry organisation. The second feature is that subsidies are allocated according to explicit and objective criteria, meaning that even the independent body has very little discretion.

It can be done: media researcher Robert Picard. Gabriel Cristóver Pérez/Knight Center

In these respects, press subsidies tend to work in much the same way as the election funding provided through the Australian Electoral Commission, which makes its allocations according to first-preference votes received. As with election funding, we shouldn’t be complacent about the possibility that public assistance to the news industry could be abused. But like election funding, we have every reason to be confident that the risk can be managed satisfactorily. As well as Picard and Trappel, I spoke to media scholars in Denmark, Sweden and Britain. None could think of an example of an allegation of subsidies being used by governments to intimidate or favour news organisations – or the appearance of such.

It turns out that news publishers can accept support from the state without compromising their independence. The freest media in the world are subsidised by the very governments they hold to account. There’s nothing to stop the Public Interest Journalism Senate committee – chaired by Labor’s Sam Dastyari with the Greens’ Scott Ludlam as deputy – from concluding that subsidies don’t harm democracy.

But do they do any good? The answer to this question is more complicated, partly because it raises another: good for what? In the twentieth century, the newspaper industry was swimming in cash. The problem was a tendency towards monopoly – so subsidies worked if they increased diversity and competition. In the twenty-first century, newspaper companies, big and small, are losing revenue and shedding the journalists vital to a healthy democracy. Whether subsidies can do any good in response to this problem is the question everyone is asking.

Do subsidies work? The Swedish case

Sweden is widely regarded as having one of the most successful subsidy schemes in the world. The Swedish Press Subsidies Council oversees subsidies for newspaper distribution and digital development, and what are called operational subsidies – annual payments targeted to the weaker players in news media markets. To qualify for the subsidy – which is funded by a tax on advertising – a print or digital newspaper needs to be published at least once a week, meet a minimum circulation requirement and, critically, have less than 30 per cent market share. The paper also needs to be at least 51 per cent original editorial content (and the more there is, the greater the subsidy). The subsidies constitute only 2–3 per cent of total industry revenue but typically amount to between 15 and 20 per cent of revenue for the weaker titles that are their main beneficiary. For some, the subsidy can amount to as much as a third of total earnings.

Sweden introduced its subsidy system in 1970 after two decades in which a net sixty newspapers had gone out of business. While there were local factors at play, this was an instance of an international phenomenon: the strong tendency towards monopoly in twentieth-century newspaper economics, memorably described by Warren Buffett as “survival of the fattest.” The “fattest” newspaper in a market enjoyed highly advantageous economies of scale and was the most attractive to advertisers. Over time, thinner rivals were driven out of business. In most Western countries, the total number of newspapers, newspaper proprietors and cities where two newspapers competed all sharply declined over the course of the twentieth century.

The Swedish government’s intervention mitigated against this trend by tilting the scales in favour of the second and third newspapers in each regional market. On the eve of the global financial crisis, Sweden – a country with a population of fewer than ten million people – had seventy-eight daily newspapers and the same number of weeklies. There were five geographical markets with separately owned newspapers, and a further ten where there were two competing newspapers owned by the same company. (Recall that the test for receiving the operational subsidy revolves around producing original editorial content, not being independently owned.)

How much credit the subsidies deserve for this happy state of affairs is a matter of scholarly debate. Affluent and highly literate, the Swedes have always had remarkably high rates of newspaper readership. (Historically around 75 per cent of adults reported reading a newspaper each day, almost twice the percentage in countries like Australia and Britain.) The strong tradition of “political parallelism” – close alignment between newspapers and political parties – has probably helped smaller papers stay in business. These factors are important, but few question the role of subsidies in the remarkable diversity and vitality of the Swedish news industry.

Yet it’s also the case that subsidies have not spared the Swedish news industry from the problems associated with collapsing advertising revenue in the digital environment. The Swedish Newspaper Market During the 21st Century, a report delivered to the Swedish government this year, describes how “the newspaper industry is not employing as many people any more, and the number of local editorial offices has decreased.” Total industry revenue has declined to levels not seen since the 1980s, and where five cities had separately owned newspapers a decade ago, now there are none. “What has happened,” Lars Nord from Mid Sweden University told me, “is that second-ranking newspapers have in many cases been bought by the leading newspaper and merged into one newspaper company, sometimes with two different titles and sometimes with one single newspaper.” The last remaining city in Sweden with separately owned newspapers was Karlstad. The city’s two newspapers announced a merger in January.

Perspective is important here, though. The same report describes a level of ownership concentration, nationally, that Australia – with its duopoly controlling 90 per cent of the market – would love to have. “The eight largest newspaper groups,” the report explains, “now control seventy-six out of Sweden’s ninety-three mid- and high-frequency daily newspapers.” That’s right, the eight largest newspaper groups have a combined 82 per cent market share.

The Swedish case makes it clear, if it wasn’t already, that subsidies aren’t a silver bullet. The problem of lost advertising revenue is orders of magnitude greater than any existing subsidy solution. In Sweden, state support amounts to less than 3 per cent of total industry revenue; advertising has traditionally accounted for two-thirds of revenue. So the question Australia should be asking is not whether industry assistance is going to be the solution but whether it can be part of it. Josef Trappel suggests that “the composition of revenue in the future might be a certain kind of mosaic of different elements. And I think one piece in that mosaic can and should be subsidies. It should not be the most important one. It should not be the only one. It should not be the dominant one. But it can help.” He observes that “in those countries where there are subsidies, newspapers are doing better than in others.” Isolating the effect of state support, amid all the variables at play, is as challenging as it is important. But, on the face of it, there are grounds for believing that appropriately designed subsidies make a difference.

The art of the possible

Even if the international evidence buttresses the policy case for state intervention, is such a policy remotely possible in Australia? The Senate committee might recommend in favour (although it’s unlikely that Senator James Paterson – the former Institute of Public Affairs operative and Coalition member of the committee – will be any more persuaded by the international evidence than Chris Berg is). Ultimately, however, the Senate committee is a creature of the Labor Party, the Greens and the Senate crossbench: its findings are unlikely to receive any sympathy from the government. Then there’s the kind of treatment such a proposal would doubtless receive from the right-wing commentariat.

If it’s true that any proposal for a subsidy scheme is likely to face stiff opposition, it’s also the case that the ground is shifting rapidly – something evidenced by the fact of the Senate committee itself. Upon its establishment, Senator Dastyari said that “there is a role for government and policy-makers to create a vibrant, free and independent industry… [and] recent events emphasised the need for better policy settings to ensure quality journalism [is] sustainable into the future.” Who would have imagined, at the start of the century, any mainstream politician – let alone a powerbroker from the right of the NSW Labor Party – saying that in a context where industry assistance is a live issue?

At one level, this proposal simply reflects the extent of the carnage that has occurred in the news industry. At another, it points to why subsidies have hitherto been politically unimaginable. The only reason for government to have intervened in the second half of the twentieth century would have been to increase competition and diversity. But if anything like the Swedish scheme had been applied here – with government support targeted to publications with less than 30 per cent market share – it would almost exclusively have functioned to prop up competition with Murdoch-owned mastheads. Try to think of an Australian politician anywhere near the reins of power during the last half-century who’d be willing to sign up for that.

Now, however, there is a possibility that policy and politics can rhyme – or at least get along. If industry assistance were introduced now, it’s likely to be a general subsidy that benefits all players – News Corp as much as Fairfax, Schwartz Media, HuffPost Australia or Private Media. The Finkelstein Report floated the idea of subsidies “defined as a percentage of the wage bill of dedicated investigative journalism units established by publishers.” Such a subsidy would not be tilted in favour of smaller publishers. The more investigative journalists a company employs, the more help it would get. Although Finkelstein ultimately recommended against subsidies at that time, this model continues to be a lot more politically plausible than a Scandinavian-style scheme.

The case for using subsidies to bolster weaker market players is no longer as strong as it was. The online environment offers an undreamt-of diversity of opinion (even while the much more expensive investigative journalism and public record journalism are under threat). Moreover, all market participants – monopolists, dominant players and otherwise – are suffering from the collapse of advertising revenue and, as a result, are laying off journalists. But subsidies can play a role, and they are receiving fresh consideration in countries that have long had them in place. The Swedish government launched its own inquiry into the future of journalism last year – a process that is still under way. In order to make their scheme platform-neutral, the Danes changed the basis for calculating subsidies in 2014, from circulation to the number of journalists employed.

If sentiment towards subsidies in Australia is primarily shifting because of the very public decline of a highly visible industry, there are also other forces shaping the debate. The inquiry’s terms of reference give fake news plenty of attention. If it’s a term that became a meaningless insult some time ago, it surely also reflects a general anxiety about our information environment. As Corinne Schweizer, the author of Public Funding of Private Media, told me, “I think the fake news debate is helping us out a bit. Even though it’s horrible what’s spread out there, it kind of shows people that journalistic work needs some time, it needs some resources. It needs to be done properly. Many people are now aware, for instance, that fact checking is a thing. So maybe that helps the discussion a bit.”

At least as long as Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election is making headlines, this anxiety will continue to be aggravated, and continue to receive the kind of attention associated with threats to national sovereignty. In the Conversation recently, Ben Eltham persuasively argued that we should levy Facebook and Google to fund journalism. As well as the appeal of taxing two companies that are rolling around in the cash that used to pay for quality journalism, the proposal speaks to a desire to civilise their outsized influence. Whether it’s inspired by fear of Russia or fear of Facebook, concern that news is reliable and trustworthy is an increasingly salient feature of political conversation, in the broadest sense.

Australians have long been strong supporters of government’s presence in broadcasting, just as much as we have assumed its absence from print. Now media convergence stands to challenge our bifurcated political common sense. On the one hand, the ABC provides a precedent for the role of government in the digital media environment. On the other, government support for commercial journalism could help address concerns that the ABC is competing with publishers that are increasingly reliant on subscription revenue. This complaint was aired by Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood at the Senate committee’s hearings in Sydney. Subsidies that support public interest journalism could double as de facto compensation for the reality of competition from the public provider in the digital environment.

Of course, public interest journalism could be strengthened by expanding funding of the ABC (or, at least, by reversing the perversely timed cuts in the 2014, 2015 and 2016 budgets). Why devote public resources to subsidising commercial journalism that could be allocated to the ABC? Partly, to sustain diversity. Partly, it’s possible to do both. A tax on Google and Facebook would provide a fiscal justification for a net expansion of public support for journalism (public and private). But it might even be the case that, politically speaking, subsidising private news media organisations would make it easier to increase funding for the ABC, not harder. Not only would it address the gripe from commercial publishers about competing with the ABC, in the long run spreading taxpayer funding around could help deflate some of the hostility directed at the public provider from the right.

The Senate committee will deliver its report in December. Almost irrespective of what it recommends – or whether its recommendations are adopted – it will represent the remarkable rise to respectability of a political idea. Not so long ago, the notion of publicly subsidising the news media industry was almost unthinkable. It is now receiving serious attention. Some deft political entrepreneurship in response to digital disruption (and other phenomena like fake news and media convergence) has ushered subsidies into the sphere of legitimate debate. As Matthew Ricketson says, “One of the best things about the fact that the Senate has set up this inquiry into public interest journalism is that there’s a recognition that this is a live issue now… There’s a live debate that we as a nation should be having about whether the market has failed to the point that some kind of government intervention is necessary.” •

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A pleasant woman in a call centre somewhere efficiently cancelled both the print edition and the digital replica on my iPad. I waited to see if she would offer me an incentive to keep the digital version. In former times, the sales rep would have produced a list of incentives to continue, but not this time. Near the end of our short conversation, she blandly observed that she would leave it to me to go online and purchase a new digital-only subscription, if I wanted one. And that was that. I felt more like the jilted than the jilter.

No doubt the Age already knew that in 2016 even rusted-on readers could contemplate with equanimity the idea of life without a daily paper. After all, it wasn’t just our household deserting. As the spring selling season rolled on, Facebook revealed old friends and former colleagues bailing out of suburban houses with big front yards and opting for townhouses and apartments. The same thing was happening in our old street. Around the time we put our house on the market, two lots of nearby neighbours also sold up, and the people across the road are about to join the exodus. Subscription departments must be inundated with telephone calls from vendors aged fifty-plus cashing in their housing stakes while Melbourne’s property boom lasts. It’s another nail in the coffin of print editions, at least on weekdays.

Last December rumours were rife among journalists and media academics that Fairfax would cease Monday-to-Friday print publication of its metropolitan dailies this year. Perhaps the 130,000 or so readers of the Age and Sydney Morning Herald still clinging to print-only subscriptions makes this a little less likely to happen very soon, but the prevalence and detail of these rumours (one SMH staffer even told me he knew who would be left in his section when the change finally came) attests to Fairfax’s digital immanence. With both print and digital advertising revenues falling, the company’s management must wish it could shed itself of the burden of producing and distributing the weekday papers for audience segments no larger than a couple of country towns.

Whenever daily delivery ends, it will be an enormous symbolic blow. The suburban home and the newspaper lying on its front lawn are entwined in twentieth-century iconography as the image of middle-class status and sociality. Yet the death of print is now old news, and other changes are having even deeper impacts on the state of newspapers and print media generally: developments in digital publishing, predicted for years, that are now well and truly upon us. They constitute a new paradigm for the media industries, but unlike the newspaper on the front lawn they are largely invisible, which has made them easier to ignore – and harder to understand.

For decades now we have been told that traditional media are push technologies, shoving their messages down our throats, and that the world wide web offers a democratic remedy. In the twenty-five years of the web this idea has thoroughly infiltrated our worldview. In politics, powered-up media consumers doing it for themselves were a key theme in former prime minister John Howard’s justification for loosening the cross-media ownership laws and abolishing the cap on foreign investment in Australian media. In e-commerce, Web entrepreneurs who have prospered through their understanding of market opportunities are everywhere, selling Australian infant formula to Chinese parents and online betting services to Aussie punters who once went down the road to the TAB.

In academia, the development of social network theory has helped instil the idea that every person or organisation that is part of the web starts equal, as a node in a potential network. In the media industries a blogger, a video-maker or a new social networking site have just as much chance of becoming a hub – a major convergence point in a network – as a celebrity journalist or a large media organisation does, perhaps even more. So it hurts the brain now to have to confront the bleeding obvious, that the internet was always potentially the biggest push medium of them all. Savvy observers like Michael Wolff and Tim Dunlop have been telling us this for quite a while but many of us haven’t been listening.

In 2010, in an article for Wired, Wolff observed the changes that venture capitalists were wreaking on the web through strategic investments in social networking sites: “The control the web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the internet, be taken back.” This development, he wrote, was “perhaps the rudest shock possible to the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entry ethos of the Internet Age. After all, this is a battle that seemed fought and won.”

So far, the most visible disruption of the ever-expanding lacy pattern of social networks has arisen from the networks themselves, as Google and Facebook have shaken themselves free of hub shape and taken off in strong vertical trajectories, turning into major pillars of publishing and advertising, as well as important destinations for audiences. Their rise and rise has been assisted by mobile technology, especially smartphones and 4G networks.

Australians increasingly rely on mobile internet for social media and search, with 85 per cent of mobile users using their phones this way. About a quarter of young adults are exclusively mobile in terms of their primary access to telephony and the internet. This trend will only continue given the chronic economic uncertainty since the global financial crisis, which has transformed many of us into more efficient consumers reliant on our smartphones to discover and transact just-enough, just-in-time purchases.

Yet we empowered “social” consumers are also increasingly at the mercy of what our phone’s native apps and our favourite social media channels send us. We rely on social media updates and push notifications to find out what’s going on in the outside world or our own universe. And when we tap on a search engine result, like or share something on Facebook, review an item online, or even scroll to the end of a long article, we’re generating data about our personal preferences that is collected by the platform we’re using. This enables the platform to keep on sending us more of the same, not only articles our friends enjoyed, but also sponsored content and/or ads.

Facebook has led the way here, vigorously filtering what individual users see when they look at their own page or feed. “Our mission with News Feed is to connect people with the stories that matter most to them,” it says. The site ranks stories in our feed by looking at “thousands of factors relative to each person.” (Note the terminology of “News Feed” and “stories,” which aggrandises what for most of us is essentially a stream of posts from family and friends sharing favourite causes, dog or cat gifs, and snaps from last weekend’s barbecue.) Kurt Wagner, a social media expert at Re/code, says of Facebook and its founder, chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “They would never say that they are taking editorial control… they use an algorithm because Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to show you what you see, the algorithm does that.”

Still, Zuckerberg is kidding himself if he thinks that this is not just a twenty-first-century version of a traditional media model. The construction of Facebook’s News Feed has consequences for both our perception of what’s happening in the world and what information is available to us. To me, this sounds just like what old media has always being bashed up for doing – deciding what news we need, while growing rich on advertising. Facebook’s total revenues for 2015 were almost US$18 billion. In the final quarter alone, the company earned more than US$5 billion in advertising revenue, a 57 per cent increase year-on-year. This puts into perspective the continuing decline in digital ad revenue in major newspaper organisations such as Fairfax.

There is a strong correlation between the big increase in smartphone penetration and the surge in Facebook’s revenues. As the most popular social networking service in the world, Facebook reported it had 934 million active daily users on mobile by the end of 2015, an increase of 25 per cent year-on-year. The more we interact with our smartphones as consumers, the more social networking sites like Facebook prosper. As it makes clear in its online information, Facebook targets its ads based on “audience by user.” Facebookers don’t get a choice about whether ads appear in their feed. They can indicate their ad preferences, but that only helps Facebook to build a cleaner profile of them.

The more data an organisation collects about our personal details, tastes and purchases, the more power it has to deliver us ads we didn’t ask for about brands or activities we actually like (“have brand affinity for,” in the lingo). The individual with a smartphone clutched in his or her hand is the destination of the advertisement: the advertiser can dispense with the traditional “channels” that previously broadcast its ads to an undifferentiated mob of consumers. We become consumer-as-channel. If you’ve ever searched for tickets to a show or a holiday destination only to have the related advertising follow you around the rest of the day, you’ll know this is true.

It’s not only Facebook and Google Ads that are involved in this, although they set the pace. “Programmatic” advertising, as it’s known, increasingly dominates the way the advertising industry places ads, serving online ads to consumers. The most sophisticated programmatic exchanges are able to customise ad targeting in real time with a range of datasets, including anonymous user data. As Xaxis, an agency that specialises in programmatic advertising, explains, “The more anonymous data you have about a user, the more efficient you can be in your [ad] buying.”

Programmatic advertising is bad news for print media because it threatens newspaper ad models and also disconnects advertising from the editorial content that it was wrapped around. Some journalists say that content is still king. Some content marketers and search engine optimisation, or SEO, experts say it too. But what they mean is that some content is king. When a team of great journalists from around the globe combine to produce the #PanamaLeaks investigation showing how the rich and powerful use tax havens in South America and the Caribbean, then their stories are guaranteed to be interacted with endlessly and shared on social networking sites. But as journalists all know, while well-resourced investigative journalism is enjoying a field day, the humbler stuff – news we actually need, even if it will never set the world on fire, news that we used to read because it was under the page three or five lead – has been disconnected from the star stories. The traditional corpus of work that formed a newspaper’s identity is being shattered. Content that cannot market itself is dying, and so is the need to employ journalists to write it.

As Alan Kohler recently explained (in a penetrating article that everyone who cares about newspapers should read), the rapid decline in the dollar value of display advertising on news websites since the programmatic takeover has had a devastating impact on the economics of traditional news media. As he writes, “A journalist needs 200,000 clicks per day [on his or her stories] to pay for a salary of $100,000.”

So it’s no surprise that some of the best newspapers in the world are now using Facebook as a platform to build their reach, by publishing via its Instant Articles function and/or paying for ads and sponsored content. Instant Articles creates a direct feed from newspaper content management systems to the Facebook platform, enabling newspapers and magazines to quickly publish some of their best content on Facebook mobile, and saving Facebook users from the wait of several seconds it often takes to load links to newspaper sites. This gives the newspapers access to massive numbers of an increasingly impatient audience that doesn’t subscribe to the paper (and probably would not choose to). It also allows newspapers to feature within their Instant Articles advertising sold by their own sales teams, and then to backfill with Facebook’s own ad content. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian and, in Australia, Fairfax Media were among early adopters. Apple has mounted a similar service via its News app, while Google has rolled out its Accelerated Mobile Pages service.

Will the Instant Articles experiment work for the mainstream press, injecting fresh audiences and increased ad revenue into their collapsed business model? Or is it a Trojan horse? A great risk is that venerable mastheads become glorified news agencies for bigger media players than themselves, while fatally blurring the prestigious editorial identities they have painstakingly built over decades, if not centuries.

Many small publishers who use Facebook for content marketing have been expressing frustration with their treatment for a couple of years now. They complain about Facebook’s opacity in many respects: its algorithms, the time it takes to “action” publisher requests, and what it allows online. Early this year, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, through its associate OnlineCensorship.org, began collecting complaints from social media users who had tried to post content on social networking sites but had been blocked without explanation, even though their content didn’t appear to violate site guidelines. An even greater source of aggravation is the workings of Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, which is just as mysterious, if not more so, than Google’s algorithm for ranking search engine results. Both Google and Facebook tell publishers and advertisers something about the way their algorithm works and why some search results or posts float to the top while others sink, but that news often isn’t positive, and much remains obscure.

In 2014, Facebook announced that its algorithm would down-rank text updates from pages owned by brands and companies, because its users interacted with them less than they did with updates from friends. As the company acknowledged, the change was a “pain point for many businesses” that experienced large decreases in people who saw their posts. Facebook told corporates either to make their posts more interesting to users (by including visual elements, for example) or to buy ads. As it always does, Facebook insisted that it was motivated by showing users the most useful, interesting content possible. But the critics piled onto it, interpreting this as just another sign that Facebook is now more of a publishing business than an online community.

Sam Cooney, publisher of the Lifted Brow, an Australian literary magazine and website with something of a cult following here and overseas, says that since Facebook announced this change it has become more and more difficult to reach the Brow’s existing followers to let them know about new issues and stories, let alone to reach new ones. “Facebook used to provide a service that was ostensibly free – for us, that meant a free conduit to a dedicated group of readers, readers who had ‘liked’ us. No longer.” Not only are fans telling Cooney that they see the Brow’s posts in their News Feed much less than they used to, but he finds that reposting fails to reach them. “If Facebook recognises that you have previously posted the URL of an article or other content, then it seems it won’t let you do it again, no matter how much you improve on the original post.”

Spending time trying to “game” Facebook for free or cheap content marketing is a frustrating exercise with uncertain results for literary magazines, online journals, small publishing houses, self-published authors, think tanks and not-for-profits with limited marketing budgets and loyal communities of readers and supporters they wish to retain. So while legacy media are now leaning towards Facebook, many smaller organisations are leaning away, still using Facebook and other social networking services, but also putting more emphasis on older methods of marketing such as building their own email list.

Traditional news media, imperfect instruments though they may be, are steeped in the ideology of public accountability, and accustomed to (if often disgruntled by) regulatory scrutiny of their editorial and advertising conduct. The record suggests that Facebook, Google and Apple are still coming to terms with the transparency expected from the media that deliver us the news. All of them have been scrutinised and criticised for failing to pay as much tax as they would without funnelling revenue to offshore headquarters. Early this year, Google reached agreement with the British authorities to pay £130 million (A$250 million) in back taxes. Soon after, Facebook agreed to change its tax arrangements in Britain and pay millions more there in future tax. In Australia, Fairfax’s Financial Review broke the story of how since 2002 Apple had paid only $193 million tax on Australian revenues of $27 billion. As the federal government and the Australian Tax Office intensify their efforts to capture lost tax revenue from Apple and other companies, this will continue to be a major news story important to Australia’s economic future. It will be interesting to watch how that coverage unfolds on Instant Articles, Apple News and Google News. •

Postscript: After I cancelled my Age subscription I experimented, trying to glean my news from ABC radio and television, from various news sites, and from whatever newspaper happened to be lying around the local cafe. It didn’t work out, because I lost track of stories I was trying to follow, and completely missed other important ones. In principle, I know I should be able to get all the news I need without paying for it. In practice, if you’re time poor, there’s a lot to be said for starting the day with an edition put together by a news organisation you trust. So now at our place we get the Age online replica on my husband’s iPad, though I wonder if that will disappear as well, once they stop printing the paper? We also schlep down the road to the local shop to buy more weekend newspapers, including Morry Schwartz’s Saturday Paper and News Corp’s Weekend Australian.

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This wasn’t the first phone conversation I’d had with Mitchell. That had been the previous December, after I’d emailed him out of the blue about a Newspoll pitting a hypothetical Kevin Rudd–Julia Gillard Labor leadership team against the incumbents, Kim Beazley and Jenny Macklin. (Why were there no figures on voting intentions, I wanted to know.)

That email had resulted, to my surprise, in an hour-long chat, in which Mitchell schmoozed and flattered and tried to get me to see things his way. He obviously spent a lot of time reading online opinions about his newspaper.

Any dividends from that December charm offensive were short-term, because here we were eight months later. Rudd was leading Labor and rampaging against the Howard government in the polls, and the Oz was still clutching at Newspoll straws. You can read the comments that sparked the call online. (scroll up for subsequent developments.)

That July conversation got quite heated and ended, I think word for word, like this.

Me: “Oh, come on Chris.” (As in, “Don’t be ridiculous.”)

Mitchell: “I’m going to go you so personally!”

Me: “See ya.”

Mitchell: “Bye.”

For the rest of the day my imagination ran wild, conjuring up visions of an investigative unit digging up embarrassments from my distant past. But when the editorial was uploaded early the next morning, the long rant — the social media are parasites; we are the best in the business; we know Newspoll — pulled its punches in its treatment of me. Mitchell explained later that he’d cooled off. There was no photo.

This event, which academic Sally Young calls the “the July 12 incident,” has been described as “indicative of the emerging crisis in professional journalism as the traditional ‘gatekeeping’ prerogatives of large media organisations are challenged in an age of Web 2.0 technologies and internet journalism.”

Maybe. It led, I believe, to the resignation from the paper of blogger Tim Dunlop, after his response was pulled from the Oz’s website.

Since then, editorials like that have become a regular feature of the paper, only these days the target is Twitter.

Correspondence between Mitchell and me continued for several years; my email folders contain sixty-nine emails from him between 2007 and 2010, the large bulk in response to requests I’d sent about Newspoll. Sometimes these elicited phone calls instead (always through the PA). He regularly sent me Newspoll results on the night before publication and allowed me to post them even before the newspaper did. Was I bought off? I did largely stop criticising Dennis Shanahan’s Newspoll coverage.

Fast-forward to budget morning 2010. Chris and I are having breakfast at Canberra’s Hyatt Hotel and he’s hiring me to join the paper as a blogger. Charm setting dialled up, he drops several confidences: that the 2006 leadership Newspoll I’d criticised had come after a request from Rudd, phoning from the Great Wall of China where he was in the company of Simon Crean and Kim Carr (since revealed to the reading public by Mitchell himself); that Rudd, after becoming prime minister, had wanted Shanahan to be his chief of staff (later revealed by Peter van Onselen); that Mitchell had wanted to hire Annabel Crabb but reckoned he couldn’t compete with the ABC’s financial largesse.

I, of course, was much more affordable, and would start in July. Just do what you’ve been doing, he said, write whatever you want, “but don’t bag Dennis.”

I got a floating desk in the Canberra bureau and became, more or less, just another employee several rungs down. Regular email correspondence was no longer appropriate.

But I did retain some special privileges.

At that May breakfast, Mitchell said I should go to him with any work issues that couldn’t be resolved to my satisfaction. In 2011 I took up this offer when a directive arrived from the editor (one rung down from Mitchell) that I should stick to writing about polls and numbers and leave the wider commentary to others. An email from me to the editor-in-chief boss saw the instruction comprehensively and emphatically reversed within hours.

And aside from requests for particular stories for the print edition during the 2010 campaign, and one during Barack Obama’s 2011 trip (about previous Newspoll boosts after presidential visits), I did enjoy carte blanche. Self-censorship, conscious and otherwise, is of course another matter; I certainly didn’t disparage the paper’s reporting of Newspoll (or of anything else, but my self-imposed purview had always been quite limited). Any conflict of interest had greater influence on my words on Twitter, where comments tend to be more wide-ranging. When, for example, Rupert Murdoch started tweeting, I regularly had to bite my tongue.

Anyway, Mitchell retired last December after almost fourteen years as the paper’s editor-in-chief and then wrote a book called Making Headlines, published this month. Most of the interesting gossipy titbits, about his interactions with prime ministers, have already been excerpted or reported. Of course it’s a self-serving tome — why else do people write books about themselves? — but it’s not an especially self-aggrandising entry in the genre. Compared to, say, former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil’s Full Disclosure (1996), Making Headlines is a paragon of modesty.

Unsurprisingly, Mitchell re-argues various controversies, starting with Manning Clark’s alleged Order of Lenin, from his time as editor of the Brisbane Courier Mail. Then there’s the invasion of Iraq, which Mitchell says he personally opposed: it was ”a tricky time to be a newspaper editor. Management ran very tight controls on all the paper’s coverage, but I wanted to make sure that, whatever our position in editorials, the news accounts were accurate and not politically skewed towards George W. Bush.”

This sits inside a general assertion that “avid readers of the Oz would accept that the paper’s news pages are straight down the line, even if the opinion page and editorials are dominated by an economically liberal point of view at odds with left-wing collectivism.”

“Straight down the line” is a jaw-dropping assertion few would agree with; and while the editorials might have been “economically liberal,” that was only part of it, sitting as they often did inside more comprehensive culture-war paraphernalia.

Naturally, there’s much in the book about the Australian’s reporting of climate change, but how do you defend the indefensible? By arguing that rival organisations are captured by progressive orthodoxy, contaminated by social media, estranged from ordinary Australians, and so on. Only the Australian was appropriately inquisitive and enquiring. Apparently, “[t]he latest polling in the northern hemisphere now suggests that more than half of all voters in the United States and Europe are sceptical about the science.” It would be useful to know the source of this surprising finding, but it’s not provided.

As with Mitchell’s columns in the Australian since his retirement, the most interesting parts of Making Headlines deal with media matters. The least interesting are suck-a-lemon-and-let-rip missives fired at “the left” and the progressives in Fairfax and the ABC, who are out of touch with “middle Australia” and captured by Labor and the Greens — you know how it goes.

In Man Bites Murdoch (2010), former News Corp editor Bruce Guthrie made quite a fuss about Rupert Murdoch’s comment that he valued loyalty in an employee above all else. It’s actually an unexceptional sentiment from a business leader, but when that business is the media it can be very tricky. Murdoch has long been accused of aligning his coverage with his business pursuits, and Mitchell’s book contains a no doubt carefully composed acknowledgement of “the possibility that Rupert Murdoch’s commercial interests might at times play out in the journalism of his products. Undoubtedly this is the case for all media proprietors.”

The book drips with great affection for two public figures: Murdoch and ex–prime minister John Howard. The former is understandable, given the long relationship under which Mitchell’s career flourished; the second, given Howard’s long stint in power, provides vindication of Mitchell’s political worldview. It’s the big ideological battles again: cue references to rival journalists underestimating that colossus’s connection with blue-collar workers, and so on.

Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott aren’t fit to lick Howard’s boots, nor Bob Hawke’s or Paul Keating’s for that matter. Malcolm Turnbull just might be, but since the book was written that’s not turning out so well.

Some of the cognitive dissonance jars. Mitchell reckons politicians really must not stray from the aspirations of mainstream Australians — that was Rudd and Gillard’s mistake — yet the leaders he most admired were those prepared to take difficult, unpopular decisions.

It is vital that media players similarly remain in touch with the interests of ordinary people, yet many of the Australian’s battles — Gillian Triggs, the ABC, climate change — were surely a huge yawn to anyone outside the 5 per cent interested in politics, and to many inside.

There’s something-or-other about Pauline Hanson, and now Donald Trump, suggesting that lefties shouldn’t criticise them as it only adds to their appeal — or something — you know how it goes; it doesn’t really make sense. And, needless to say, Howard got it exactly right when he refused to condemn Hanson.

We know that a decade ago Mitchell was getting worked up about blogs; in the final years it was Twitter. Those editorials pummelling a particular segment of society must leave the bulk of the readership scratching their heads.

Still… There have always been idiosyncratic, biased newspapers and always will be. Mitchell’s accusations of progressive groupthink inside the ABC and Fairfax aren’t without foundation, and his diagnosis of the Age and Sydney Morning Herald business plans — so much clickbait fluff and stories based on tweets, driven by traffic numbers and shrinking advertising revenue, behind a highly porous paywall, “reverse published” the following day, all spiralling downwards — is persuasive.

You could make an argument that the Australian’s (and News Corp’s) top-down enforced right-wing skew provides a useful balance to the bottom-up left-wing tendencies of the others.

This online world of ours does contain no shortage of self-ordained media “experts” who, it seems from their writing, believe all media products should (a) reflect their own personal beliefs and (b) be provided free of charge.

Many who know these things say the Oz under Mitchell — the regular vindictiveness and ideological indulgences aside — was supremely well edited. I’m no media expert but to me it remains generally authoritative and hard-edged — and the home page is Kardashian-free. It does investigations, breaks stories and is what Murdoch most desires: influential in the press gallery and among the wider political class.

And he had the good sense to hire me.

In 2014 I was downsized; this time my entreaties to up high came to nought. Mitchell left the building in December 2015 and the following month my marching orders arrived.

That editor I’d had put in his place was now editor-in-chief. •

The post Mitchell, Murdoch and me appeared first on Inside Story.

There was a risk, Beecher ventured, that classified advertising would migrate to the web, drastically cutting into the revenues Fairfax newspapers had enjoyed for decades. The model that made quality print journalism possible could be about to come asunder.

The message, he says, was not heeded. But the catastrophe scenario has now happened. Compounding the damage wrought by the exodus of the classifieds, news publishers are compelled to compete with the Googles and Facebooks that offer advertisers a previously undreamt-of scale of audience, combined with minute segmentation.

At 200 pages, the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald is now half the size it once was. Thousands of employees, including around 500 core editorial staff, have been laid off. Fairfax’s share price stands at about a fifth of what it was when Beecher presented his warning to the board.

Digital advertising revenue will never deliver anything like the profits enjoyed in the days of print. For Beecher, this means that large-scale news publishers face the serious prospect of commercial oblivion. In June he told Media Watch: “They are heading towards the cliff really fast… I think that cliff is, for everybody, within a year or two or less.”

On the same program, respected financial commentator Alan Kohler seconded that prognosis. “What you might call public interest journalism is going to be funded by public interest bodies, such as the government or philanthropists or other people sort of like that. But I think that there’s no commercial future for that at all,” Kohler said.

In 1894 a scribe for the London Times surveyed the seemingly intractable problem of horse manure accumulating in the city’s streets. With 11,000 horse-drawn cabs traversing the city each day, buses requiring 50,000 horses in total, and private horse transport to boot, it was a serious problem. The writer predicted that, if nothing changed, London would be nine feet deep in horse manure by 1950. But then, of course, the mass production of the motor car changed things.

Notwithstanding Beecher’s convincing record of forecasting the woes of the newspaper industry, the prediction of a commercial cliff places a perilously heavy reliance on nothing changing. Specifically, it depends on an assumption that revenue from readers, through digital subscriptions and the like, can’t grow to substantially compensate for the irreversible loss of advertising revenue.

Currently, 10 per cent of Australians pay for online news. That places Australia somewhere in the middle internationally, with Norway having the highest rate of digital news purchasers (27 per cent) and Britain having the lowest (7 per cent). A quarter of Australians who don’t presently pay for online news tell researchers they are likely to do so in the future. The question is whether news publishers will succeed in convincing that group to actually cough up (and convincing the avowed freeloaders to change their minds).

It is hard to foretell how technology will change the landscape. The soon-to-be-launched Flattr Plus will enable users to load up an account with a monthly contribution for content creators. The pitch is: “You set your budget for great web content. Our smart algorithm automatically distributes the right amounts to the right sites. You don’t have to worry about a thing.” The sheer ease of the concept – and the backing of Adblock Plus, software downloaded over 500 million times – may nudge readers towards paying more for the great journalism they enjoy.

Australian aggregator Inkl is aiming to be for news what Spotify is for music. Users access content from a plethora of publishers, including the Herald and Crikey, for ten or fifteen cents per article, or a monthly subscription. Inkl’s Dutch equivalent, Blendle, has over 600,000 customers in Europe and launched in the United States in March.

Services like Blendle, Inkl and Flattr Plus might make an incremental difference to the revenues publishers can squeeze out of readers. They likely won’t be game changers, but they do serve as useful reminders that there is a lot we don’t know about the future.

But the argument that publishers can adapt to new commercial incentives does not ultimately rest on the potential magic of technological innovation. The best reason to hope that readers will pay for news is that they once did. Throughout the nineteenth century, a world of newspapers mostly funded by readers flourished. As late as 1879 in the United States, advertising made up only 44 per cent of total newspaper revenue. Only as the age of mass consumption dawned did advertising revenue increase to the point that it outstripped reader subscriptions. By 1929, advertising as a proportion of total newspaper revenue in the United States had grown to 74 per cent.

Globally, the period between 1900 and 2015 was an era in which news publishers gained most of their revenue from advertisers. The size of the majority varied from country to country. While advertising tended to constitute as much as 80 per cent of the total revenue of US newspapers, in Europe and Britain the proportion was traditionally lower, ranging from 60 to 75 per cent. However, the primary reliance on advertising revenue was an international phenomenon.

Japan was an anomaly. Japanese newspaper readers were willing to pay an unusually high cover price, an inclination buttressed by an all-encompassing distribution and sales network. As a result, in the period when it dominated in other newspaper industries, advertising revenue in Japan generally didn’t amount to even half of total revenue.

Accordingly, Japanese newspapers have proved more resilient as advertising has migrated online. The country’s leading paper has a circulation of ten million and that of its nearest rival is 7.5 million. While advertising revenue halved between 2000 and 2013, the decline in total revenue has not been nearly as pronounced. Indeed, one analyst believes that the greatest threat facing the industry is complacency: “in a country where print sales and profits are so high… there are precious few incentives to innovate.”

Where the strength of reader revenue in Japan was a global exception, it is now becoming the rule. In May this year, the New York Times reported that 57 per cent of its revenue now comes from reader subscriptions. That’s up from 38 per cent in 2010 (immediately before it launched its digital paywall). The percentage increase is partly attributable to declining advertising revenue, to be sure, but it’s also true that new digital reader revenue is almost making up for lost print revenue.

As media analyst Ken Doctor has observed, we are re-entering an era of majority reader revenue. Some digital publishers may continue to rely on a model in which they mostly focus on high traffic and ad sales, but many will not.

What are the new incentives publishers face in a world in which their primary objective is to convince readers to subscribe? How are these incentives different from the old ones?

Before mass advertising, the nineteenth-century press was much more partisan. Readerships tended to be more clearly defined by their adherence to a particular political worldview. This wasn’t a coincidence. In a world in which most revenue came from readers, it made economic sense.

Imbuing a news product with a political identity sheltered publishers from price competition. For a left-wing reader, a marginal decrease in the conservative newspaper’s price barely made it more attractive, and vice versa.

As long as readers were willing to pay a premium price for a news product that was distinct from its rivals, typically by virtue of its partisan or ideological stance, it was more profitable for publishers to appeal to a market segment than to the mass market. With drastic reductions to its cover price, a conservative newspaper might have attracted left-wing readers. But that price would have been so low that the increase in circulation would have entailed a reduction in total revenue.

As a result, the nineteenth-century era of majority reader revenue was characterised by high competition. There were more newspapers, more proprietors and more towns and cities with at least two newspapers than came to be the norm in the twentieth century.

The huge growth in advertising revenue throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century altered the equation. Whereas readers placed a premium on differentiated content, generally partisan in character, advertisers demanded access to a readership that transcended political allegiances. And they were willing to pay for it.

The natural strategy for publishers, in seeking to gain the largest possible readership to sell to advertisers, was to shed their partisan character. Profitability was to be found in selling the largest possible audience to advertisers. The new tactic was to tack to the centre and adopt a stance of political neutrality that wouldn’t offend partisans of any stripe.

As a corollary, the newspaper industry in the era of majority advertising revenue tended towards monopoly. Publishers joined in pursuit of the same mass audience – with advertising revenue at stake, product differentiation no longer made sense. Given the economies of scale deriving from the high first-copy costs and low marginal costs of producing newspapers, the market leader was best positioned to compete on price and further invest in quality, thus further increasing its readership and catalysing a cycle of monopolistic dominance. This phenomenon in the newspaper industry has been described by investor Warren Buffett as “survival of the fattest.”

Over the same fifty-year period between 1879 and 1929 when advertising became the major source of newspaper revenue, the percentage of American cities with more than one daily newspaper declined from 61 per cent to 21 per cent. In 1910, there were 689 cities in the United States where there were separately owned and operated newspapers. By 1989, there were only twenty-six cities with more than one newspaper.

In Australia in 1903, there were twenty-one daily newspapers, with seventeen different owners. In 2011, there were eleven dailies, owned by only two proprietors. By 2008, New Limited’s market share had reached 67 per cent, with Fairfax claiming another 24 per cent of newspaper readership.

The historical lesson, according to the late media scholar C. Edwin Baker, is that advertising revenue reduced “the economic influence of readers’ desire for differentiated, that is, diverse, newspaper perspectives.” Conversely, it would seem, the new era of majority reader revenue will strongly reward differentiation in news products.

“Basically, in today’s ecosystem, uniqueness is the substitute for geographical monopolies,” says Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of long-form journalism site Talking Points Memo. In July, Marshall revealed to Harvard’s NiemanLab that the site has 11,000 subscribers paying $50 annually, making a substantial contribution to total revenue.

Clearly, in lots of ways, the contemporary era of majority reader revenue is not analogous with the nineteenth century. Information abundance makes it especially tough to persuade readers to pay up. Marshall observed that subscribers to his site are motivated as much by a commitment to the site as by the premium experience: “A big chunk of it is that people want to be connected with and support a publication they love.”

Marshall also commented:

I think it’s possible that we could totally paywall TPM and be a more profitable business by doing exactly what we’re doing right now but not let people read anything unless they’re a member. But we wouldn’t do that, even if it would make a more profitable company, because the whole reason we do this is we want to have our coverage be out there and hitting, in relative terms, a big audience and affecting news cycles.

Putting Marshall’s observations together, it appears that core subscribers are, in part, handing over money to Talking Points Memo so it can continue to propagate a worldview they identify with. It’s easy to think of paying for news as something like paying for books, a matter of information acquisition. But news sites also offer a way of participating in political life and membership of a community. Subscribing may be more akin to donating to GetUp! or Bernie than to conventional news consumption.

In any case, turmoil in the news industry is set to continue for the foreseeable future. It’s less clear that disruption is going to affect all players equally. The publishers that are most reliant on digital advertising are much more exposed to competition from social networks and search engines. That’s not a comfortable place to be. Chances are that it will be these outfits that find themselves falling off the cliff first, thus strengthening the competitive position of sites with strong reader revenue.

We shouldn’t write off the news industry just yet. We are still to see the long-term response to the new set of commercial incentives in play. It may turn out that reader revenue just doesn’t grow enough to significantly substitute for lost advertising revenue. But these are early days. Readers have only just regained their long-lost status as the most economically important consumers of news. •

The post A different kind of news? appeared first on Inside Story.

Sepia photographs of the bodies and the burnt-out hotel were taken by a mix of studio, amateur and freelance photographers, some of them commissioned by the police. But although the gang’s capture was a momentous story for newspapers, no photographs were included in their dramatic reports. It was still technically too difficult for a newspaper to print a photograph on a newsprint page.

If the police surrounded Kelly and his gang at the Glenrowan Inn in 2016, a mixture of freelance and amateur photographers would again be there taking photographs, just as they did in 1880. Many of the amateurs would be bystanders, armed with mobile phones, who had happened to be nearby when the shooting started. They could photograph the live action instead of just capturing the smouldering ruins of the inn and the aftermath of the siege.

In fact, newspapers – and newspaper websites – in 2016 would report the Kelly gang’s capture using photographs from a wide range of sources, including freelancers, amateurs and photo agencies, as well as stills from television coverage and images of the participants plucked from social media. Given the magnitude of the story, staff photographers would still be sent there as quickly as possible, but in 2016 they would not be the exclusive source of pictures, and there would be fewer of them to send than at any time in the past sixty years.

For most of the time between 1880 and 2016 successful newspapers made vast profits and employed large teams of staff photographers. Those photographers provided a unique and valued product, resulting from technical skill and artistry borne of lengthy training and experience. Not many people could do what they did, and press photographers generally enjoyed significant job security.

As longstanding press photographer Clive Hyde says, “Nobody ever left the Herald and Weekly Times” – his employer for many years – “unless you were carried out.” This meant, as Melbourne Herald Sun photographer Jay Town notes, that there were usually “way more old photographers than… old journalists.” Journalists have tended to be more mobile and move between papers, television and radio, says Barry Baker, who spent forty-two years in the industry, but if a newspaper photographer got a job, they “pretty well stayed there for life.”

The nightmare year for press photography in Australia was 2014. In its third cost-cutting announcement in two years, Fairfax Media announced it would be shedding 75 per cent of its photographers. Thirty positions were lost across Fairfax’s metropolitan papers as it moved to outsource much of its photography to picture agency Getty Images. This left only twelve staff photographers spread between Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. To put that into perspective, in 1971, just one of Fairfax’s newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, had thirty-two graded photographers and six cadets.

Fairfax had been internationally renowned for its well-resourced and award-winning photographic teams. The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance labelled the photographic cuts “an assault on the quality journalism that has been the hallmark of the group for more than a century.” Fairfax had already shed 1900 staff in 2012. It was also revealed in 2014 that News Corporation, far more quietly, had shed more than a thousand jobs in 2012, as hundreds of its journalists, photographers and editors were laid off.

A sense of this industrial turmoil, and the vulnerability of photographers, permeates the interviews we conducted for our book, Shooting the Picture: Press Photography in Australia. Several photographers have already faced redundancies or forced retirement, or have moved on from newspapers to work for agencies or as freelancers. One asked, after we’d turned off the tape-recorder, whether we had heard anything more about job cuts at their own organisation. Several lamented the enormous loss of talent within the industry. And some spoke of waiting anxiously for the “tap on the shoulder” to come.

Newspapers’ increasing reliance on agency shots, which can be obtained at lower cost, is not only reducing the number of photographers but is also, according to some of them, affecting the quality and nature of press photography. They point out that Getty’s business is to take the photographs customers will pay for, and argue that agencies are more concerned about the market price of photographs than the art of still photography.

At the Age, Fairfax’s arrangement with Getty means that in 2016 about five Getty photographers are directly linked to the Age, some of whom are ex-staff photographers. They were given jobs through the picture editor of the Age, although Getty also has its own picture editor, who sits at the same desk as the Age picture editor. The Getty photographers do not have a direct link to journalists, which one photographer identifies as a problem because “the relationship you have with the journalist is so vital.” Another repercussion is that the collective and institutional memory of Australian photography will vanish because, like the staff photographers before the late 1980s, the Getty photographers are often not even by-lined.

For many photographers, the uncoupling of photographs from that production process signals the decline of press photography because so much is being lost along with that industrial shift, including the team work, training, mentoring, skill-sharing and creativity that came with job security, knowledge and experience.

“I’m hopeful that it will survive. I fear it won’t in the form that we know it,” says the well-known photographer Mike Bowers. “The days of having a huge department where you could get critical mass and ideas and generate unique content are over and dead. It’s gone. We held onto it here in Australia for a lot longer than we did overseas. But it’s dead and gone.”

Longstanding Age photographer Penny Stephens observes that “Australia is one of the few countries that still has staff photographers, so we’re kind of lucky that we still have staff jobs.” But she understands that it’s “not going to go on forever”: “It wouldn’t surprise me if they went the same way as the papers are going overseas and just hiring freelancers when they need somebody.” Another photographer observes that in London they “put out a word that they need a shot of something… and a whole stack of people turn up and whoever gets the shot that gets published gets paid… Frightening.”

One photographer predicts that “there’ll be a little bit of room” for photographers at Australian newspapers. But another refers to rumours of further cuts to photographic staff at newspapers in 2016, and to the use of freelancers by new players such as Huffington Post and the Daily Mail in Australia, ominously declaring that “the days of staff photographers [are] pretty much over.” Our book has been an attempt to bring some of those photographers, their stories and their work out from behind the lens, and to reflect on the past, present and future of their profession. •

This is an edited extract from Shooting the Picture: Press Photography in Australia, by Fay Anderson and Sally Young (Melbourne University Publishing).

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Sampson secured a contract with the publishers Hodder & Stoughton, where a friend from schooldays, Robin Denniston, was a senior editor. What followed was The Anatomy of Britain, published in 1962, a pioneering study of leading institutions – monarchy, parliament, government, church, judiciary, industry, financiers, business, trade unions, diplomats, universities, scientists, press, gentlemen’s clubs – in which background detail was skilfully interwoven with the experience of those at the helm. Before embarking on the work, Sampson had written to “200 top people” requesting an interview, only three of whom declined, all of them with extravagant apologies. (“Most did not want to be left out: usually the more important the person, the sooner he could see me,” he recalled.) That all the book’s interlocutors were white males tells its own story of Britain in these times.

The Anatomy of Britain was an instant hit, more than fulfilling the author’s resolution of 1959:

On my thirty-third birthday I was still a bachelor journalist, pursuing both news and women. I had a sudden moment of truth: most of the journalists in their mid-life were already in decline as they lost their first curiosity and enthusiasm and were challenged by younger rivals. I made a vow: by the time I was thirty-five I must have an alternative livelihood. I must try and write a bestselling book.

In a constipated society straining for new air, Anatomy’s information was enthralling enough, but its very clarity of form and directness of method was as much a revelation. Sampson’s single-handed charting of a firmament of power – “the institutions, companies and departments of Britain, who runs them, how they work, how they are changing” – itself nurtured a generation of journalists and acted as a handbook for civil servants, overseas diplomats, confused students and bemused citizens alike.

The foreign correspondent Neal Ascherson, an Observer colleague, evoked Sampson’s interviewing style:

Questioner? I never knew such an artist at questioning. Anthony was the most skilful, relentless listener in the world. Sometimes I watched him at it. He hardly seemed to speak himself: just the odd, interrogative mutter. And the subject would grow trusting. And do the talking. “Yerss,” Anthony would murmur, and nod in apparent sympathy. But he always kept that direct gaze trained into the other’s eyes. Irresistible!

Anatomy was part of an explosion in “state of the nation” writing, film and drama that characterised the 1958–64 period. Michael Shanks’s The Stagnant Society, for instance, which blamed class barriers for Britain’s economic weakness, had been published the year before. By contrast, Sampson’s book might itself have looked insiderish, clubbable, top-down. Yet by inviting the reader into those parliamentary chambers, oak-panelled boardrooms, and smoky offices to share his gaze, Sampson did more to demystify power and its hierarchies than any activist with a loudhailer. And the bold intersecting circles on the endpapers – the design of Len Deighton, whose terrific spy novel The IPCRESS File, also curated by Denniston, was just out – had a thrill of their own.

Even as the Penguin Special became the currency of the time, fitting snugly into a jeans’ back pocket, the doorstopper Anatomy inaugurated an equally potent one-man brand. It ran to five more versions over forty years, each rewritten and updated as new or reformed power centres grew while others decayed. The titles mark Sampson’s perception of a darkening public climate and the increasing diffusion of his subject: from the neutral The Anatomy of Britain Today, The New Anatomy of Britain and The Changing Anatomy of Britain (1965–82) to The Essential Anatomy of Britain: Democracy in Crisis, published in 1993, and Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century, published in 2004, the year before Sampson died.

There were some continuities. All, Denniston observed in an affectionate late memoir, had “the same apparently affable but often barbed concentration on the powerful in public life, fleshed out with acute personal observation, homework done, up-to-the-minute, mostly accurate.” A motif of the later volumes is accretions of power by international bodies such as the European Community (later, Union), whose corollary is the need for democratic reinvigoration at home. Peter Hennessy, an erudite chronicler of Britain’s governance and himself no Pollyanna, even describes the series as “becoming ever more preoccupied with the theme of Britain as a latter-day Imperial Spain locked into an irreversible decline, trapped by its ancient institutions.” A more pointed critique contends that Sampson never quite accommodated Britain’s diverse political geographies and their ability to drag, spur or thwart the centre.

Sampson’s move towards a more programmatic register in the Anatomy sequence reflected unwelcome changes in Britain’s political direction. By the 1970s, the shelves were refilling with studies of Britain’s “ungovernability.” Robert Moss’s The Collapse of Democracy was a right hook, Tariq Ali’s The Coming British Revolution a left, Tom Nairn’s The Break-up of Britain a Scots radical’s blow, Samuel Beer’s Britain Against Itself a jab from a centrist American scholar. Margaret Thatcher dissolved that problematic – suddenly there was too bloody much governability – only to create fresh worries over centralisation, lack of accountability, and first-past-the-post. These drove interest in party realignment and constitutional reform, causes that Sampson came to champion more vocally. When the Labour Party split in 1981 over far-left infiltration, he backed the nascent Social Democratic Party, even serving on its national committee.

A singular mix of aptitude, education, connections, initiative and luck – plus the alchemical element of personality – had brought Sampson, who was born on 3 August 1926, to outstanding professional success. Before South Africa, the Oxford graduate was being nudged by his father, chief scientist at the British chemicals giant ICI, along the same path. (His mother, too, had a strong scientific lineage as the daughter of a famous botanist and geologist, Albert Seward.) He was reluctant: “I had no idea where I belonged. I was restless, rebellious, unqualified for any structural career. I did not realise those were in fact ideal qualifications for journalism.” The fortuitous invitation to Drum (originally African Drum) came from Jim Bailey, an older university pal and the magazine’s founder. Bailey, a wartime pilot, was a passionate Africanist from a Randlord family: his own father had known Cecil Rhodes and funded Winston Churchill, his mother was a bravura aviatrix who in 1928 flew solo from London to Cape Town.

This life-embracing magazine, funded by a diamond millionaire, had a compulsive fix of exclusives and scandals, glamour and jazz sounds, fiction and sport, shebeen queens and township gangsters, all injected by a stellar generation of black journalists, with Jürgen Schadeberg’s luminous photographs sprinkling unique style. Drum resonated far beyond its golden era of 1951–58, ever more symbolising the transient free zone of urban optimism it captured. Many books were devoted to it, beginning with Sampson’s Drum: A Venture into the New Africa, in 1956, dedicated to Jim Bailey. It was republished with new material as Drum: The Making of a Magazine, in 2005.

After four years, a homeward hop and Astor’s shambolically inspired patronage – well evoked in Jeremy Lewis’s biography, David Astor: A Life in Print – brought Sampson to the Observer, another cherished outpost of enlightenment, with teeming Fleet Street pubs for shebeens and the inimitable Jane Bown for Schadeberg.

Pendennis, he said, “gave me a precious education: it taught me how to describe people and places succinctly, to make facts readable and difficult subjects comprehensible. I loved the easy access which the paper gave me to all kinds of worlds.” The combined experiences of Johannesburg and London forged his outlook as at once a principled liberal ally of South African freedom and racial equality, an exacting scrutineer of the shifting constellations of power, and a matchless networker who combined urbanity with steeliness of judgement.

Robin Denniston, the outstanding and devout Scottish editor, recorded at the time a vivid impression of his friend:

He lives in a comfortable but terribly untidy flat in Kensington, surrounded with drink bottles, cigarette ends, papers, books, glasses, records and a fairly constant stream of visitors. In the middle of this he seems to be extraordinarily disorganised, but this is only a superficial impression. He uses the floor for his filing system, but in fact, he knows exactly what he wants, where everything is, and he works with a single-minded eye on the final result…

These formative experiences were a constant resource in the decades ahead. The demand for periodic reassessment of Anatomy’s interlocking never faded. His engagement with South Africa included hosting discreet talks between leading members of the African National Congress, or ANC, and senior business, political and legal figures as an opening appeared in the 1980s. A half-century after The Treason Cage: The Opposition on Trial in South Africa appeared in 1958, Sampson was to publish the authorised biography of his great friend Nelson Mandela.

Sampson’s credentials for the task were impeccable. He had attended the ANC conference in 1952, witnessed the destruction of Sophiatown in 1954, and returned to report the treason trial of 1957, the Sharpeville crisis in 1960, and the Rivonia trial in 1964, even having a hand in Mandela’s famous speech from the dock. His biography, which tracks its subject to near the climax of his five-year presidency in 1999, draws on the cooperation of close allies as well as Mandela himself. Sampson observes that “behind all his gregariousness he still maintains an impenetrable reserve, defending his private hinterland, which seems much deeper than that of other politicians.”

Their first encounter in a shebeen was a source of later joshing, though the confessions – Sampson’s “I was probably drunk and don’t remember much” and Mandela’s “I’m no angel” – bespeak a certain mutual reticence. It has been left to the late Stephen Ellis, Irina Filatova, Tom Lodge, Rian Malan and other writers to explore such matters as Mandela’s links with (and indeed membership of) the Communist Party of South Africa, amid wider debate on the complex legacies of the apartheid and liberation years.

Sampson’s hunger was always to examine power up close, to understand it and to see it made accountable. In this sense his work was all of a piece. As Britain’s global footprint continued its retreat in the 1960s–70s, and as intergovernmental bodies and corporations acquired new agency, Sampson pursued the trail. He left the Observer in 1966 to write The New Europeans: A Guide to the Workings, Institutions and Character of Contemporary Western Europe, published in 1968, just after Britain’s attempt to join the then European Economic Community had been rebuffed by France’s Charles de Gaulle for a second time.

He would return to the paper in 1973–74 in the role of chief American correspondent, in time to report the tumultuous Watergate scandal, which climaxed with Richard Nixon’s resignation. “Not the Anthony Sampson,” quipped Henry Kissinger on being introduced. Sampson exerted his own form of influence: recognition. “Who didn’t know him? Everyone knew him,” says Ascherson. In turn he was, as the Observer’s associate editor Robert McCrum says in a fine overview, “the man who knew everyone,” possessed of “a talent for professional intimacy that would define his life’s work.”

His broadening range continued with five searching, often prescient investigations of international business between 1973 and 1984: The Sovereign State: The Secret History of ITT, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Made, The Arms Bazaar: The Companies, the Dealers, the Bribes from Lebanon to Lockheed, The Money Lenders: Bankers in a Dangerous World, and Empires of the Sky: The Politics, Contests and Cartels of World Airlines. A late coda to this series was the social history Company Man: The Rise and Fall of Corporate Life, published in 1995.

Sampson’s desire to bend the world in a more liberal and equitable direction found an appropriately global channel in 1979–80, the first year of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and the dawn of a new economic era whose ideological instincts were far from Sampson’s own. He served then as editorial adviser to the commission on international development notionally headed by West Germany’s former chancellor Willy Brandt. The commission’s report focused on the global north–south wealth divide and how “to shape the world’s future, in peace and welfare, in solidarity and dignity.” Among its members was Thatcher’s adversary Edward Heath, whom she had ousted as Conservative Party leader. Sampson credited him and Commonwealth head Shridath (Sonny) Ramphal with saving the exercise, and later helped complete Heath’s biography.

At the same time, Sampson was giving serious thought to the longstanding idea – broached as long ago as 1959 with Christopher Chancellor, the departing head of Reuters – of founding a new periodical “with an emphasis on intelligent business journalism.” In 1983 he wrote to Katharine (Kay) Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, which had led the exposure of Watergate, who was also a member of the Brandt commission: “What I would most like to see is a more vivid way of trying to put together the world problems, to give overviews and connections, to try to make greater sense of the cross-currents between continents and between money and politics.”

His own efforts in this direction took shape in 1984 as The Sampson Letter, a self-financed fortnightly newsletter on “world politics and finance” aiming to “uncover the real forces and issues behind the news” and “to point to the crucial connections between finance and politics and between different parts of the world.” It lasted for an impressive two years before being incorporated into the newly launching Africa Analysis.

Neal Ascherson well expresses the dual impulses of Sampson’s modus operandi: “If you could find those who mattered and break them down by merciless listening, then you would understand how a nation, industry or world worked and where to apply the pressure for change. If you could connect up good people whose interests converged, you could create world-changing energy.” Sampson was close to the establishment, became a critic, felt an outsider, stayed a radical, was forever absorbed by what he wanted to change. And if there are ambivalences here, they also belong to the country he anatomised.

A prodigious life held much more, from a forgettable attempt to become Observer editor after Astor’s retirement in 1975 to a hard period from 1993–96 as a trustee of the Scott Trust, owner of the Guardian, which had just bought the Observer in a whirlwind of angst and acrimony. (The relevant file is withheld in Sampson’s archive at Oxford’s Bodleian library, under the skilled curation of Chrissie Webb and Catherine Parker.) A longer spell from 1995 on the international advisory board of the Independent, for which he wrote regularly, was less fraught: its owner during those nine years, Tony O’Reilly, described his contributions at board meetings as “crystalline.” His last column for the paper was published on the day he died, 18 December 2004, notes the paper’s then obituaries editor James Fergusson, its subject the wrongs of indefinite detention of terrorist suspects.

Much more happiness came from union in 1965 with Sally Bentlif, a literary agent, and from their two children. That had ended a restless phase marked by psychoanalysis (though not to Astor’s dedicated extent). Sally edited his autobiography, The Anatomist, published in 2008, excising a pre-marriage episode involving the novelist Doris Lessing but allowing a denial that he and another Nobel literature laureate, Nadine Gordimer – whom Sampson described as his “oldest and most valued white South African friend” – had ever been lovers. Toby Hood, the Sampsonite hero of Gordimer’s first novel, A World of Strangers, published in 1958, had evidently set a false trail, as had the chivalrous toast to Sampson (“the runner-up”) offered by the groom Reinhold Cassirer at their wedding in 1954.

Sampson would never complete the novels he began, leaving readers to muse on what might have become of the cinematic Soweto vignette in his autobiography, with its distant flavour of The Quiet American: “One morning I was woken up by a sexy black woman, saying ‘Sampson, can you buy me some beers.’” Or of the Scoop-like memory shared by Neal Ascherson of “just how he could laugh – like on that early morning in Namibia when we were passengers on the only plane I have had to get out of and push.”

But there was a late work with all the compulsion and surprise of a good novel. The Scholar Gypsy: The Quest for a Family Secret, published in 1997, excavates a forgotten archive in the basement of Liverpool University where his Irish-born paternal grandfather, John Sampson, had been professor of philology from 1892 to 1928, venturing from the busy Victorian port city to its mountainous hinterland of north Wales to collect words, songs and stories from a Romany band who made a living among horses, caravans, metal and music.

The recurrent visits, including in the company of fellow exoticists such as the painter Augustus John, earned the professor the honorary title of the “Rai” and offered more than intellectual enticement. John entered a bigamous marriage and fathered a girl who, by the time Anthony was growing up in smoky Billingham, the ICI town in England’s northeast, was the mysterious Aunt Mary, by then a Scots-accented teacher. The book, enriched but not overshadowed by that wonderful, long-neglected cache of documents, is a careful and acute reconstruction of a fascinating social history, as well as a poignant human tale.

I met Anthony Sampson twice, the first time at his Kensington home. When I praised The Scholar Gypsy, he replied: “One has to face these things.” The purpose of the visit was to seek advice about a journalistic project. He gave me a pearl: “Never underestimate the power of a well-chosen fact.” Richard Reeves, writing weeks before Sampson’s death, also notes his “knack for the killer fact, the one which illuminates the broader point,” and makes a contrast with Tony Benn, the left-wing Labour preacher who, inevitably, was at school with Sampson. “While Benn will offer an opinion on almost every subject imaginable, and solutions to most problems, Sampson is ultra-cautious. In this sense, he is indeed an anatomist rather than a doctor. He does not prescribe.”

That difference of vocation is profound, however narrow it can seem from a distance. Anthony Sampson was always an inside-outsider, on the line between journalism and politics, clear where he stood. Even when most engaged, he inhabited a space of freedom. The curiosity, the mischief, the stories, the people, the anger, the fun: he made a life on the side of light. And it shines still. •

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But Australia’s immigration policy did feature strongly, especially when advocates of leaving the European Union embraced a new mantra – “an Australian-style points system” – as a good option for a post-EU Britain where free movement to and from the other twenty-seven member countries would no longer apply. And leading players on Britain’s political right, who champion their antipodean links far more vocally than their counterparts on the left, also invoked Australia as part of their whimsical aim of turning the “Anglosphere” into a geopolitical alliance.

Neither of these registered much beyond slogans, though. Remainers-in-the-EU were quick to point out that such a migrant-selection system already applies to non-EU migrants and, besides, Australia receives more migrants per capita than Britain does from the EU. The argument went into remission as the post-referendum “national nervous breakdown” (Robert Harris’s phrase) took over. Now, the Australian election’s inconclusive result and tense aftermath have at last given the British media a compelling political story that offers respite from our own.

This time, there was no equivalent of Nick Cater–style cheerleading for Tony Abbott, a feature of the Sunday Times’s coverage in the 2013 election. Instead, the News Corp–owned paper’s fine Far East correspondent, Michael Sheridan, notes Malcolm Turnbull’s “slump in support” and election-night speech to a “half-empty ballroom,” quotes Bill Shorten’s immediate reaction (“Mr Turnbull will never be able to claim that the people of Australia have adopted his ideological agenda”), and cites the advances of Nick Xenophon, Pauline Hanson and (a welcome touch) Linda Burney. A reference to mutual insults between James McGrath and Alan Jones provides local colour, illustrating that the “Australian tradition of robust political exchanges remained intact.”

Rod McGuirk of the Associated Press, in a widely syndicated article, writes that the election has continued an “extraordinarily volatile period in the nation’s politics,” with only the third hung parliament since 1940 now possible. He cites the observation of Monash University’s Nick Economou that Turnbull’s ill-timed election had brought several hardline social conservatives and right-wingers into the Senate, with whom he would find it difficult to work if his government survives: “What an amazing amount of political damage Malcolm Turnbull has been able to inflict in a very short period of time as prime minister,” Economou says.

The Telegraph’s Jonathan Pearlman, describing Turnbull’s election-night address as “unusual and slightly shrill,” writes that his “political gamble appears to have spectacularly backfired.” The report, accompanied by a short video showing voters at the London high commission on Friday (“I’m a huge fan of democracy in action!” says one), mentions the Labor leader’s sausage sizzle moment, which is compared here to Ed Miliband’s tussle with a bacon sandwich.

The Mail confirms that a right-wing editorial stance needn’t inflect news reporting, with Peter Devlin quoting Barrie Cassidy’s assessment “early in the night” that a hung parliament was likely (“Good I’ll get the rope,” says a Sydney-based commenter) and characterising the election as “a cynical electorate seemingly not impressed enough with either party to give them the power to govern in their own right.”

Peter Wells of the Financial Times, writing that Australia “has joined a growing list of closely contested political decisions” globally, contrasts the calm market reaction with the Brexit fallout. Most financial analysts are sanguine, though Wells speculates that budget reform problems might put Australia’s triple-A credit rating in jeopardy. For now: “No worries, mate.”

The paper’s Australian correspondent, Jamie Smyth, however, highlights Labor’s plan for an inquiry into an allegedly toxic banking culture and says big business “is likely to be a loser from the election” even if Turnbull remains in the post, as he “is unlikely to be able to deliver on his pledge to cut company tax rates and tackle trade union power.”

Smyth reports Shorten’s charge that Turnbull had “Brexited himself” and become the “David Cameron of the southern hemisphere” by leading “a divided party [to] an inferior and unstable outcome.” Turnbull’s predicament is encapsulated by the scathing judgements of Griffith University’s Duncan McDonnell (“a massive defeat” for the prime minister), ANU’s Ian McAllister (a “far too long” campaign and “messed up” tax policies), and Melbourne University’s Sarah Maddison (in failing to “change course” and “follow a more liberal path” after Abbott, “he didn’t come across as sincere or a conviction politician”).

“The election results suggest Australia is experiencing some of the voter disillusionment seen in other western democracies with the two mainstream political parties receiving their lowest share of first preference votes since at least 1943,” says Smyth, a point illustrated by voters in the “explainer” alongside and debated usefully below the line, by “Aussie Red” and “wise monkey” in particular. Before the booths opened, the Economist had said the campaign “shows how outmoded Australia’s two-party system has grown” when faced with the more complex concerns of a more diverse society.

The titanics of British news and opinion respectively, and for many the first choice on any topic, are the BBC and the Guardian. The BBC’s website covers the show, from the voting tallies through the psychic croc to Laurent Sanguinetti’s “planet of forbidden prime ministers,” while the Guardian adds depth and brilliant data to the BBC’s news concision. Their riches include a quirky feature by the broadcaster on the seat of Durack, and a reflective one by the paper’s Bonnie Malkin on going beyond being “a half-hearted expat.”

There are clearly more rounds in the post-election drama to keep the British media interested. Jon Snow’s Channel 4 news interview with Clive James on 4 July, mostly on literature, death and Europe, touched on the subject. Australian politics is “a real mess,” the omnivore said. “What you’ve got here is nothing like what you’ve got in Australia!”

That was hard to gauge from the snatches of ABC’s live election night broadcast I watched, whose good humoured professionalism was as beguiling as the information was bewildering. A few phrases in, however – “double dissolution,” “two-party-preferred,” “we’re in for a long night” – and I was riveted, not least by Antony Green’s high-speed tightrope walk over each result (“In Richmond, there are a lot of alternative lifestyle communities”… “I suspect these are just reports from one booth – back to the candy bars on this!”… “Lindsay, a bellwether seat” ... “It’s difficult to beat them [Senate figures] into any shape”). And the rare ventures from the studio where Scott Morrison and Penny Wong lightly sparred brought the unfamiliar sight of candidates being interviewed as their supporters formed around them. The one with Linda Burney in Barton (we fought “a good old-fashioned Labor Party campaign”) was downright moving. Democracy in action indeed.

The “death of distance” never seems so real than when leaning in to an election program on the other side of the world – yet also so much what the French call a “false friend,” as any tiny slice of a huge and complex reality must be.

That London continues to see its own reflection is suggested by the Times’s Monday editorial (“Disarray Down Under”), which hears Australian echoes of “Britain’s post-Brexit turmoil”: “Across the country, a growing number of voters in the poorer regions argued, like Brexit supporters outside London, that their interests had been overlooked.”

In the electoral as well as the sociological realm, however, a far closer parallel suggests itself. Many of the ingredients of Australia’s result –a centre-right incumbent who falls short at a time of his choosing and is now stalked by rivals, a challenger who gains both seats and respect, the rise of smaller groups, the continued decline of a historical two-party hegemony, a (likely) hung parliament – were foreshadowed by Ireland’s election on 26 February, under the country’s single transferable vote (Hare-Clark) system.

The comparison will doubtless have occurred to the Irish Times’s Sydney-based correspondent Pádraig Collins, whose despatches are striking for their range and insight. In Ireland, it took seventy days to form a government. However things turn out in Australia, the overlaps between the two states, and lessons to be learned from these elections, are worth exploring. If Britain can tune in, then so much the better, for after Brexit it needs curiosity and engagement with the world more than ever. Just following the great Australian drama is a good start. •

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The stakes are high for both parties. The articles in question allegedly defamed Liu by quoting from documents purporting to show that she’d made corrupt payments to former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon. Liu says these documents are forgeries designed to seriously defame her; she wants to know who is behind them so that she can sue them. She also wants that information because it might give her access to the original documents, which she plans to expose as forgeries.

The journalists and the Age claim that the articles deal with an important matter of public interest. Their case for protecting the source of the documents is one of public policy – to protect the free flow of information from whistle-blowers and other confidential sources. At an earlier stage of the proceedings they argued that they should be protected by the implied constitutional guarantee of freedom of political communication revealed in the High Court’s judgement in the Lange case. This argument failed in an earlier round in the Court of Appeal, however, and the High Court refused special leave to appeal on this point.

The defendants also sought to invoke the principle of the “newspaper rule” as a shield against disclosure. According to this principle, media defendants should not generally be required to disclose confidential sources at an interlocutory stage of proceedings. But the newspaper rule is not an absolute immunity, and only applies where a court considers that it serves the interests of justice.

On the facts of this case, the trial judge and the Court of Appeal have found that the interests of justice favour Liu. Liu successfully argued that if she couldn’t find out who passed the documents she would be hampered in pursuing reputational remedies and, ultimately, in proving them forgeries. The Court of Appeal took a somewhat dim view of the defendants’ decision to relinquish a “qualified privilege” defence, in an attempt to forestall the discovery order, only after the Lange defence failed. The court also appears to have accepted, to some degree, Liu’s criticism of the defendants for relying on copies of documents without seeing the originals. It found that Liu should have the opportunity to claim aggravated damages on this ground.

Liu has yet to enforce the order, and it is not clear what will happen next. Subject to any further appeals, the defendants are faced with the choice of breaching their ethical duties (by revealing their source), or facing contempt proceedings, including fines or jail.

The Liu case has been running for so long that law has changed around it. In recent years, New South Wales, Victoria and some other jurisdictions have enacted specific statutory privileges for journalists in the form of shield laws. These laws don’t provide absolute immunity, but they do provide greater protection than the “newspaper rule” by creating a statutory presumption of source protection. Unfortunately for the defendants in the Liu case, this new shield law came too late.

But the new Victorian shield laws were invoked in a recent interlocutory decision (also involving the Age and journalist Nick McKenzie), Madafferi v the Age. In this case, the defence successfully argued that to identify McKenzie’s source for a story about the plaintiff’s alleged mafia link would jeopardise that person’s physical safety. The court also accepted arguments about the strong public interest in publishing such a story, and the chilling effect on such stories if the order were granted. The court found that the plaintiff would not be unfairly prejudiced in pursuing his action over the story if the source were not revealed.

The Age hailed the decision in the Madafferi case as an important victory for journalism. From an investigative journalist’s perspective, though, the shield laws are still far from satisfactory. They are not uniform across Australia – some states protect bloggers and citizen journalists, others only cover people engaged in the “profession or occupation” of journalism. And a court can still exercise a broad discretion to compel a journalist to reveal a source, depending on the facts of the case.

It’s unclear, for example, whether the new shield laws would have changed the result in the Liu case. In contrast to the Madafferi case, the trial judge in Liu was not convinced that the sources would suffer any adverse consequences, other than defamation action, if their identity were disclosed. In the Liu case also, the identity of the sources was found to be critical to the plaintiff’s case, which was not the view of the court in Madafferi. One final factor weighing against the defendants in the Liu case was that one of their articles included some notes accompanying the documents which, it transpired, the source had requested not be published.

In other words, the broad discretion retained by courts under the new shield laws means that the use of confidential sources remains risky. Journalists and their publishers can still face potentially expensive and gruelling interlocutory proceedings and appeals, and ultimately the risk of contempt of court, should their sources be challenged.

Nor has much improved for litigants under Australia’s Dickensian defamation system. In the Liu case, it was two years after publication before the trial judge made the initial order for discovery. Several more years have passed while the parties have fought over its enforcement. The trial judge and Court of Appeal both remarked on the stress that Helen Liu must have suffered pursuing this order. For his part, Nick McKenzie, veteran of both the Liu and Madafferi cases, recently told the ABC’s Media Watch that fighting to protect sources “absorbs a huge amount of time” and “can be very stressful...” The expense of such proceedings is also debilitating. In Britain, it has been recently estimated that the cost of a defamation trial is now around £700,000 (A$1.3 million). In Australia, defamation costs have been described as “incredible and crippling.”

As the Liu and Madafferi cases demonstrate, the uncertain scope of journalists’ source protection is one contributing factor to our labyrinthine defamation laws. But the bigger problem is that these laws were developed in very different times. They are now increasingly ill-equipped to moderate between reputation and free speech interests in a world of rapid digital publication. As “traditional” media outlets shrink and small publishers and bloggers proliferate, a root and branch review of defamation laws cannot come soon enough. •

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Many English stories have the same mix of elements, with only a quick scene change needed to reveal them. The impending closure of the Independent newspaper is a case in point. Only thirty years old, a stripling by comparison with its quality rivals the Times, Telegraph and Guardian, and yet it’s going, tossed into the crashing foam, its brief but distinguished history turned in an instant from living to archival. And the sweep of reaction is identical to how those intermittent landfalls are greeted: intense concern among those immediately affected, widely reported as a dramatic instance of inexorable retreat, though leavened with historical precedent; for most a spectacle rather than a national injury, its virtual consolations approved. Once the farewell obsequies are done, it’s back to the screen gods.

Yet in a larger perspective, losing the Independent is a major event: a setback for democracy as well as journalism. Created in 1986 as Thatcherism held sway, it brought to the public arena a distinctive and much-needed liberal internationalism. The paper’s limpid design (Neal Ascherson, a prize catch from the Observer, was won by its “beautiful” look) invited expansive, thoughtful, vivid content from a fine journalistic cohort. Above all, the Independent had authority: from the start, it seemed to have existed forever. It felt like the establishment paper of a decent republic.

In these last days, behind a hugely impressive business-as-normal facade, the paper has built up to its au revoir fanfare while issuing upbeat invitations to join its digital future. Among former staff of its sister paper, the Independent on Sunday, who said their own goodbyes on 20 March, the dominant tone is professional pride tinged with melancholy. Sue Matthias, now editor of the Financial Times’s superb weekend magazine, recalls the Independent on Sunday’s launch, four years after the daily paper’s, in January 1990: “We knew we were creating something special that was also – genuinely – independent. It felt like a rare thing then. After today, it will be sadly even rarer.” And Barbara Gunnell, a brilliant subeditor who also went on to work for the New Statesman, reflects on “a sad moment in newspaper history, but it is a triumph for all who worked there to have maintained such quality for twenty-six years.”

Elsewhere in the media, reporting of the closure has been subdued: the decision announced on 12 February by the company of the paper’s owners, the father-and-son Russian oligarchs Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev, had long been regarded as inevitable. The paper’s pioneering and successful early years saw its circulation peak at 423,000 in March 1990, overtaking Rupert Murdoch’s Times, though later it reeled from ill-judged business decisions – including, arguably, the Independent on Sunday (“launched into an overcrowded market at the wrong time,” says Ian Jack, its editor from 1991 to 1995) – and aggressive pricing by the Times and Telegraph. Today, it shifts around 55,000 copies, and perhaps many fewer when bulk distribution is excluded, compared to an equally inflated 180,000 when the Lebedevs bought it in March 2010. It operated a routine £5 million (A$9.4 million) loss in the last financial year.

Little noted amid Independent-related coverage is the announcement by Spain’s El País that it is considering an end to print publication, after that newspaper’s print circulation dropped by 15 per cent in 2015–16. Founded in 1976 after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, it became a symbol of the country’s transition to democracy. Like the Independent, the reputation established by its noble pedigree was never entirely lost in the decades that followed. Their natural affinity even helped to forge a partnership in 1990, when El País, along with Italy’s La Repubblica, became shareholders in the British paper, then still in expansionist mode.

The disappearance of any newspaper is sad, not least one whose first editorial in October 1986 declared that “journalism of the highest standard” cannot easily flourish when impeded by “the political prejudices of the typical newspaper proprietor.” But the near simultaneous implosion of two esteemed European titles, amid a prolonged European crisis and indeed the possible crack-up of Spain and the United Kingdom alike in coming years, cuts even deeper.

At this point there’s a hollering of Hold it right there! from the upper deck, as below, lockers are emptied, bags stuffed, and phone numbers exchanged. This is not closure but an opening, not an end but a beginning, is the message. The Independent may “cease its print edition,” says editor Amol Rajan, but only to “launch its next, digital chapter.” Moreover, “the spirit and quality of [the paper] will endure” after its migration to a “digital only format.” The paper claims annual growth by a third in unique users of its website, to nearly seventy million worldwide, and believes this is where its destiny lies.

The front page on 19 March, the last Saturday edition, gives the message a subtle twist by promoting tablet and mobile access with the slogan, “It’s changing. Are you?” The echo of the Independent’s famous introductory offer in 1986 – “It is. Are you?” – represents a brilliant, if poignant, final throw of the newspaper’s cultural capital.

El País’s editor-in-chief Antonio Caño, explaining to staff the “imminent transformation of the newspaper into a media outlet that is, above all, digital,” makes a similar pledge in a letter to his staff: “We are going to change, but we are not going to reject those values of freedom and independence that have brought us here.”

These executives’ outward confidence belies sobering long-term scrutiny of brand performance and industry trends. In the case of Independent Publishing, the newspaper’s parent company, this has been complicated by the success of the weekday i, a condensed, low-cost version of the main paper with short news items, features and columns. The smart junior, launched in October 2010, proved a hit among commuters, students and the time-poor, soon outpacing its parent with sales of over 200,000, but in turn substantially denting the Independent’s own figures. The papers were at once partners and competitors, the i a life-sustaining parasite. This bittersweet conundrum ended with i’s sale to the regional publisher Johnston Press for £24 million (A$45 million) as part of the company’s digital leap.

That decision taken, making the best of things meant heralding the benefits of what Evgeny Lebedev, in an email to staff, calls “an historic transition” while avoiding any references to the paper closing down. Lebedev is upbeat: “With the spirit of a start-up, and all the authority of our heritage, this transition means the world’s most innovative newsbrand can embark on a sustainable future. As we set about that, I would like to thank everyone for the part they have played in the development of this great institution.”

Many go along. “[This] is the death of a redundant medium and not of a message” is Brian Cathcart’s positive summation of his former paper in the Guardian, a judgement echoed by the Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson: “The Independent hasn’t really died. It has just changed its form.”

There’s a touch of denial here, evocative in a minor key of the Mitscherlichs’ influential polemic The Inability to Mourn, published in 1967. It is not, to use their phrase, an “untouchable taboo” to say that this truly is a closure and an ending. To finesse the fact discounts the past, misreads the present, and hands the future an unmerited free pass.

The case for change is generic as well as particular, its elements familiar from countless articles and conferences on “the future of the media.” Print’s declining numbers and revenues, alongside front-loaded costs and cumbersome delivery systems, equate to a struggle for survival. Advertising is increasingly demographic data crunching (even if online lucre is hard to secure in face of Facebook, Google and adblocking). Integration of mobile technology into work and leisure routines is accelerating, mostly among younger people who never acquired the newspaper habit. Customisation of the service economy, and personalisation of social media, is a new normal that renders newspapers’ social kaleidoscope ever more passé.

Moreover, digital itself (the argument can run) can be a route to more dynamic and connective journalism: deploying graphs, images and video to build a story, and networking the results. It can also replicate and even improve on the print experience. In a longer-term perspective, the process under way is less the death of newspapers than the diversification of news and, not incidentally, turning clicks into dollars.

No part of this nirvana guarantees the digital Independent a saving grace in the form of substantial growth in readers or revenues. It’s more that online is the default wager in the last-chance casino. Jim Rutenberg’s observation in the New York Times on the American media’s complicity in the “Trumpian churn” is sage: “Things are changing so fast that no news organisation knows whether the assessments it is making to secure its future will prove correct.”

The new media ecology is also unforgiving, and questions persist over the online Independent’s character. Pre-transition, clickbait rules. Christina Patterson, sacked in 2013 in one of the paper’s cost-cutting purges, said then that “the Independent website bears no relation to the paper,” and that’s still true. The paper’s originating ethos was “classic with a twist,” a phrase used of the English menswear designer Paul Smith and later associated with Andreas Whittam Smith, the Independent’s principal founder and editor for nine years. Perhaps it might yet have something to offer.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Independent story starts with Rupert Murdoch, for it was his company’s police-assisted defeat of the print unions in 1986 over control of the production cycle that facilitated the entry of new players to the previously forbidding national newspaper market. The brutal atmosphere of that year-long struggle, with journalists on Murdoch’s four papers needing to be driven through picket lines at News International’s new production plant at Wapping in east London, led a minority of employees to refuse and others, once inside the barbed-wire fence, to long for escape.

Over the same months, three employees on the Daily Telegraph – Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds – were raising capital for their quixotic venture: a new quality broadsheet, provisionally called the Nation, that could establish a distinct place alongside the Fleet Street behemoths. An unforeseen reward of their bravura efforts was a windfall of Wapping “refuseniks” who, along with other recruits, gave the project editorial liftoff. The alchemy between the risk-taking insiders who conjured what became the Independent, and the spirited professionals who came to fill its pages, was a rare, possibly unique moment in British journalism.

Whittam Smith’s “classic” was evident in luring Nicholas Garland, heir of Vicky and David Low as the best political cartoonist of Britain’s last half century, from the Telegraph, the “twist” in appointing as obituary editor James Fergusson, whose renovations – signed notices, intriguing subjects, well-chosen illustrations – brought this newspaper morgue to life. (Garland’s Not Many Dead: Journal of a Year in Fleet Street, published in 1990, is a vivid, gossipy and honest diary of his protracted move. He returned to the Telegraph in early 2001.)

It seemed to have existed forever: the first edition of the Independent, 7 October 1986.

In the early years the paper rose mightily to the world’s big stories: Reagan–Gorbachev and the cold war’s defrost, Middle East conflict and apartheid’s retreat, small wars in central America and the end of Pinochet in Chile, Japan’s rise and China’s reforms, Margaret Thatcher’s zenith and fall. It was the Independent’s golden era, though since newspapers are necessarily disputatious, live in an eternal present and are ever judged by tomorrow’s copy, that was appreciated even more in retrospect.

Things fell apart, at least among the founders, in the early 1990s. The paper’s growing ambitions and Sunday extension precipitated severe internal strain, which led to Stephen Glover’s resignation in June 1991. (His Paper Dreams, published in 1993, is an absorbing if naturally partial account of the whole period. Among its morsels are that the celebrated “new tradition” of making royal stories an inside-page news-in-brief started “almost by accident,” and the “supreme importance” of carparking spaces at the paper’s headquarters: “over the years no single issue caused more trouble.”)

The 1991–92 recession hit the company hard, even after substantial cost-cutting. Rupert Murdoch again had an impact: his ambition to see the Times eclipse the Telegraph fuelled a price war of which the Independent became collateral damage. Whittam Smith left the editorship in 1994, and Independent Publishing was restructured by the Irish press tycoon Tony O’Reilly and the owners of the Labour-supporting tabloid, the Mirror, with El País increasing its stake. In 1998, O’Reilly took full ownership. By then, circulation was hovering above 200,000, a nadir, and fewer than a third of the Times it had once surpassed. The 1994–98 years were troubled – four editors, refinancings, makeovers, layoffs, losses – the dreams now more prosaic than before.

Some respite came from a new political cycle. The paper had appeared during a long Conservative ascendancy. Its rationalist outlook was spiced with a missionary streak, elements perfectly aligned with those on both left and right who sought reformed, inclusive governance of the kind Thatcherism couldn’t deliver. Among the Independent’s core readership, a precious bond of loyalty to the paper was sealed.

New Labour’s election in 1997 fulfilled long-buried hopes of change but also released high expectations that quotidian politics was bound to disappoint. A darkening post-9/11 world and Tony Blair’s alliance with George W. Bush over Iraq changed the public atmosphere, and the Independent – since 1998 under Simon Kelner’s editorship – found a role as voice of enraged opposition to the depredations of the “war on terror.” Coinciding with the paper’s phased shift to tabloid (or “compact”) format, the revolt became a style: attacking front pages with glaring headlines and punchy images looking for a daily cause to hurl at the reader.

Circulation improved to 250,000 in 2004–08, and though the hated Blair won a third election victory in 2005, the Independent had succeeded in reinventing itself as a campaigning paper. The move aligned well with emergent social media, securing the brand a distinct cachet among a younger radical generation soon off to create multiple new channels of its own.

The cultural turn was not without problems, most seriously in 2011, when evidence emerged of plagiarism, and covert online harassment of other journalists, by its star columnist Johann Hari. An internal investigation was conducted by Whittam Smith, who in another lifetime – 1986 – told Nicholas Garland “with unexpected intensity” that he was unhappy with an error in the paper: “It is inaccurate and I will not tolerate the Independent being inaccurate.”

The financial crisis of 2008–09 was a major blow. An office move and more debt repackaging were followed by the Lebedevs’ buy-out. The graphs continued to plunge, but the journalism never faltered. Through difficult years, the paper’s coverage of arts and literature, science, environment, technology, business, foreign affairs, fashion, sport, politics and other topics was often outstanding. The Independent, enraging as it could be, was never anything less than a real newspaper.

Decades after Garland’s and Glover’s books – the paper’s co-designer Michael Crozier also published a short, illustrated one in 1988 – a comprehensive, independent history of the newspaper (including the Sunday) would surely be a Fleet Street classic with twists in abundance.

The much predicted, long withdrawing whimper of newspapers may turn out to be an unexpectedly defiant roar. But few doubt that print journalism is living through an epochal transition. How might it look in the perspective of two centuries?

“Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer. One orients one’s attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is.” In miraculously few words, Hegel’s aphorism evokes Europe’s epic journey from ingrained faith to achieved scepticism. For the German philosopher, whose early life spanned a hope-filled revolutionary era and a new century, literate people would no longer situate themselves by pietistic repetition of religious formulae, but through connection to the civic sphere of event and exchange. The newspaper was the nodal tissue of an emergent social order, capturing its flux, coordinating its energies: a medium of Enlightenment reason.

It’s true that, in all Hegel’s work, ideal outruns reality. But the gap between them scarcely matters any longer. Two hundred years on, his map of the future is itself out of time. In this revolutionary era, twilight for print is dawn for digital, and an iPad is very heaven. Hegel needs an update: “Surfing the smartphone is the 24/7 habit of wired humanoids.”

Newspapers of the classic kind are living off their diminishing capital, and with them is going that Enlightenment promise, the “imagined community” capable of turning strangers into fellow citizens of a vernacular nation. Mediated today means also separated, broken down, reduced to bits. We are all algorithms now: atomised putty for advertisers, corporates, governments, titillators. Democracy, as it has been known with all its faults, is the loser – or at the very least, there is no certain improvement to hand. What is certain is that a future without newspapers would be a future without democracy.

The Independent at launch felt like the establishment paper read by modern, equal, internationally minded citizens of a decent republic. But the country it imagined into being didn’t want to exist, not then and not yet. That is more than the Independent’s tragedy. •

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The key reason for the decline in influence is the radically shrinking reach of News Ltd’s newspapers. Last year, the total circulation of all Australian daily papers was a little over 2.1 million, fully one million lower than it was at the turn of the century.

If we factor in the growth of the Australian population, the picture is even more dramatic. Not long after the second world war, in 1947, roughly two copies of a metropolitan daily newspaper were sold for every five people in Australia. By 2014, the figure was one for every fourteen people, reflecting a decline in penetration from 38.6 to 7.2 per cent. And the decline was accelerating: between 1996 and 2014, penetration halved from 14.1 to 7.2. Murdoch papers, with roughly a 60 per cent share of Australian daily circulation, are now bought by about 4 per cent of the Australian population.

Not only do newspapers have a shrinking readership, they also have an ageing readership. Older people, already disproportionately Coalition voters, are more settled in their political preferences and outlooks. The key to a Labor victory will be how the younger age groups, perhaps especially those under forty, will vote, and these groups are not reading Murdoch’s newspapers.

Among regular Murdoch readers, there may not be many more Labor voters left to convert. The papers’ anti-Labor propaganda line has been consistent for quite some time; if their readers were going to switch from Labor the overwhelming likelihood is that they would have done so already. What could these papers do that they haven’t already done to convince continuing Labor voters to change their allegiance?

Not much, probably, because readers of the Murdoch tabloids also seem to regard the papers with a healthy scepticism. In recent years Essential Research has used a series of surveys to find out how much trust Australians have in the paper they regularly read. Among the six papers included, the three “quality” papers – the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian – rank the most highly, all with 60 per cent plus, and the first two sometimes registering over 70 per cent.

The three Murdoch metropolitan tabloids, meanwhile, come in at the bottom. In August 2014, 51 per cent of Daily Telegraph readers said they trusted it; for the Herald Sun the figure was 53 per cent and for the Courier-Mail 54 per cent. In other words, nearly half their readers don’t trust these papers. There’s worse: in three of the five polls, the Telegraph’s level of trust dropped below 50 per cent, and after the 2013 election it dipped to 41 per cent. All this suggests that many people may be attracted to these papers for their sporting coverage or their entertainment value, and take their political coverage with a large grain of salt.

So, in terms of direct consumption, the Murdoch papers are reaching less than 10 per cent of voters (assuming each paper sold is read by just over two people). This is probably about half of their reach when they supported John Howard in the 2001 election. Among this disproportionately elderly tenth of the population, more than half already vote against Labor, and most are probably fairly settled in their political attitudes and largely immune to the papers’ persuasive efforts.

There are two partial qualifications to this general picture of declining political relevance. First, because they often set the agenda for other media, newspapers’ influence extends beyond those who read them. Insofar as the Murdoch press influences the priorities and tone of television news – which still draws a sizeable number of viewers not firmly committed to one major party or the other – it will have some influence.

But the main medium that picks up on the tabloids’ coverage is commercial talkback radio, which then amplifies the papers’ sense of outrage even further. It should be remembered, though, that their elderly listeners are quite similar to the readers of the tabloid newspapers. Together, the two media form a self-aggrandising and self-referential noise machine, and their volume and bluster should not be mistaken for outreach.

The second qualification is that, on the face of it, the radical drop in print sales of newspapers is matched by the rising readership of their websites. Of all the media, though, tabloid newspapers are perhaps the most challenged by the digital revolution. The most successful transition has been made by the British Daily Mail, which has become a global leader among newspapers for web traffic. Interestingly, the content mix of that paper’s website is quite different from its print edition, with far more celebrity news and less sport, crime and politics. The British newspaper is vociferously right-wing and populist in its print pages, but that tone and presentation would look silly on the internet. Online, its right-wing political coverage is more sparse and less strident.

It is true that there is considerable traffic to Australian newspaper websites. But whereas a reader of the print edition of the Daily Telegraph might have spent fifteen minutes a day reading the paper, most visits to the website are much more fleeting, often thirty seconds or less. “Readership” here means something much less than it used to. Not only is it hard to imagine these visits attracting strong advertising revenue, it is also difficult to believe they will have much political impact.

Labor first suffered a Murdoch onslaught in 1975, after the proprietor decided that the Whitlam government had to go. The negative coverage continued through the 1977 and 1980 elections. But Labor’s return to office under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in 1983 led to a rapprochement between Murdoch and the party’s leadership. Murdoch and Packer are the only mates we’ve got, Hawke famously told his cabinet during a deadlocked discussion of media policy reform.

It was during this period that Murdoch, with the help of Labor’s eventual rule changes, acquired the Herald and Weekly Times group. By the end of the party’s reign in 1996, the reach of Murdoch-owned newspapers had increased from just under a quarter of daily circulation to around 60 per cent. Hawke’s short-term pragmatism made Murdoch’s anti-Labor bias a much more serious problem for his successors. At nearly every election since 1993 the weight of coverage in the Murdoch press has been against Labor, sometimes overwhelmingly so, and its large share of circulation meant considerable potential for impact.

The hostility is not surprising. Murdoch’s own political views have been fixed since the mid 1970s, when he embraced the nostrums of the conservative wing of the American Republican Party – more recently embodied in a Tea Party agenda that is quite alien to Australian and British political traditions of a mixed economy with a strong, socially constructive public sector. When it’s been clear that a party of the left would win an election, Murdoch has sometimes been prepared to modify his right-wing instincts, marrying the business incentive to be on side with the incoming government with the journalistic advantages of riding a populist wave.

His Australian newspapers split their editorial support in 2007 when it was clear that Kevin Rudd and Labor would win, but by 2010 and 2013 were fully back behind the Liberals. “Kick This Mob Out” proclaimed the editorial covering the front page of his Daily Telegraph, setting the tone for its coverage of the 2013 campaign.

The eighty-four-year-old Murdoch now seems less ready to bend his views for the sake of political pragmatism. Several of his former editors have said that their first thought about any big story was always “What would Rupert think of this?” The result is an unhealthy level of conformity in the upper editorial levels of the organisation.

As well as a hardening of the political arteries, there is an increasing sense of editorial desperation among the Murdoch papers as their commercial plight worsens. Like a one-trick pony, they try ever-bigger versions of the old sensationalist ploys. Politically, the result is even less willingness to report fairly on parties and views they don’t support. Where there was once a populist touch, now there is just a grinding predictability. Where there was once a profitable balance between sensationalism and credibility, now the confected outrage and the beat-ups rarely hit home.

Labor can expect the full Murdoch treatment at the next federal election. The papers’ stable of largely interchangeable and wholly predictable columnists will pour out their anti-Labor analyses. Embarrassing trivia (such as Kevin Rudd’s not saying much to a make-up artist before a TV debate) will be pursued relentlessly and breathlessly magnified. Photoshop and crude caricatures will be used extensively to demean the party’s leaders. But the more interesting question is not how the Murdoch press will cover the election, but whether it will have much effect.

Two decades ago, political pragmatism dictated that Labor would seek to ingratiate itself with such a large press oligopolist, grateful for any crumbs thrown its way, but that logic is rapidly disintegrating. On top of that, the two Australian policy issues in which Murdoch’s corporate interests have the greatest stake are both ones where public opinion is very much on the other side. First, News Ltd has become the number one target in terms of evading Australian taxation. Second, for decades News has lobbied against the anti-siphoning rules, whereby free-to-air television gets first option for many popular sporting events. Abolishing this rule would please Foxtel but would annoy those who could no longer watch for free events they have been long accustomed to viewing without charge.

The reputation for power often outlives its objective basis. The decay of the news media as a means for reaching the electorate, and its decline as a central forum for political debate, brings its own problems for the quality of our democratic processes. But one of the benefits of the rise of digital media and changing media habits among young adults is that they are breaking down the power of the old gatekeepers. The decline in press circulation has reduced Murdoch’s power to make mischief. •

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In her memoir I Saw Too Much, Stumm recalled that she had “expected the rubble and the devastation,” but had been unprepared for the horror of seeing “the piles of bodies, clearly recognisable.” American reporter Gwen Dew of the Detroit News was also shocked into silence: “Never could you imagine such death, such fearful death… I literally could not speak for days.” The desolate scenes haunted Stumm for decades. In 1989, she told ABC radio producer Sharon Davis:

It was just a vast wilderness with heaps of rubble here and there – absolutely devastated. Dreadful sight… And we just couldn’t believe that one bomb could possibly do so much terrible damage. It was as if you’d just wiped it out with a huge hand – wiped everything out in sight. Shocking thing. When I came back I wrote that it was the most terrible disaster the world had ever faced and who knew what the after-effects would be.

Stumm was the only Australian woman to be given the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon, awarded by US General Douglas MacArthur to war correspondents who had “shared the hardships and dangers of combat with United States troops and whose presence has contributed to the welfare and effectiveness of our troops.” Interestingly, MacArthur’s description did not distinguish between men and women war correspondents. Within Australia, however, women journalists who have reported war, sometimes at great personal risk and long-term cost, are still not celebrated or remembered in the same way as male war correspondents.

The fascination with Australian war correspondents and war photographers such as Damien Parer, Neil Davis, Charles Bean and Alan Moorehead continues to grow with each retelling of their exploits. But it is perhaps hard to see where women fit into the picture of the daring, heroic combat war reporter, who shares all the risks and dangers of the troops alongside him. Can a woman journalist, confined to the margins of the battlefield and engaged predominantly in writing non-combat news, rightly be called a war correspondent, even if she was officially accredited as one?

Australian women correspondents have reported on conflict since 1900, when Sydney nurse and journalist Agnes Macready covered the South African war for the Catholic Press. During the second world war, twenty-one Australasian women worked as war reporters in the southwest Pacific and in Europe. The Australian army accredited sixteen women as war correspondents in 1942 and 1943 for the express purpose of publicising women’s war work on the home front. Two Australian women, Elizabeth Riddell and Anne Matheson, were accredited with the Allied forces in Europe in 1944. Other women reported from overseas without official accreditation but often with the permission of the Australian or New Zealand military or government. At the end of war in the Pacific, a further group of non-accredited women journalists reported from Asia on the cessation of hostilities and the transition to peace.

In both theatres, the military defined a “war correspondent” as a reporter of frontline conflict and a “woman war correspondent” as a reporter of non-combat war news, or what was often referred to as the “woman’s angle.” Arguments about women’s vulnerability, their need for male protection, their inability to understand or cope with war conditions and their lack of understanding of military hardware were used to support the exclusion of women reporters from military areas. Australian military authorities, in particular, categorised women reporters as untrustworthy, shallow “sob sisters” and argued that their visible difference from the troops could jeopardise military operations.

In late 1942, the Australian army’s director of public relations, Brigadier Errol Knox – a former journalist – established a limited accreditation scheme for Australian women war correspondents. The newly minted correspondents were provided with a uniform, green-and-gold War Correspondent shoulder flashes and a war correspondent’s licence stamped Lines of Communication Only, meaning they were not permitted in operational areas. Australian military authorities, along with their counterparts in the European theatre, attempted to control the movements and the writing of women reporters by confining them to the periphery of the military zone, where they were mainly limited to covering stories perceived to be of interest to women, such as the work of women’s auxiliary services. While some women reporters were relatively acquiescent, others openly resisted the military’s rigid definition of their role.

One woman reporter in particular stuck in the craw of the Australian military. Ambitious and competitive, Lorraine Stumm relied on both her femininity and her tenacity in the pursuit of stories. In the mid 1930s, she had proven herself in the man’s world of Fleet Street, chasing hard news stories for the London Daily Mirror. She travelled to Singapore after her husband, RAF wing-commander Harley Stumm, was posted there in 1939, and began working at the Malaya Tribune as a general reporter. In late 1941, she contacted her former employer, the Daily Mirror, and confidently offered to represent them as an accredited British war correspondent in Singapore, a role she performed until she was forced to evacuate ahead of the Japanese advance.

From 1942 to 1943, Stumm was based at MacArthur’s Brisbane headquarters as an accredited war correspondent, again for the London Daily Mirror. She ceaselessly needled the Australian military authorities to be allowed to report from operational areas but was refused every time with the excuse that there were “no facilities,” which meant no women’s lavatories. In October 1943, MacArthur invited Stumm to visit the operational area of New Guinea to cover an aerial attack on Rabaul. While eleven male war correspondents accompanied the Allied air forces on the mission, Stumm was forced to remain behind on the base, interviewing Red Cross workers and other support staff. The Australian army’s new director of public relations, Colonel John Rasmussen, was nonetheless incensed by Stumm’s transgression into the military zone. Within a month, he had abolished the Australian accreditation system for women war correspondents.

At the end of the war, Stumm was working as a general reporter for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. She had returned to Australia in May 1944 from India, where she had been working for the British Ministry of Information until the death of her husband Harley in an aircraft accident in Calcutta. When peace was declared, Stumm saw an opportunity to report another big overseas news story, and again approached the Daily Mirror, which agreed she could represent them in Japan. The Telegraph’s editor, Cyril Pearl, supported Stumm’s trip, partly because she organised her own transport and covered her own expenses.

There was no civilian air transport at the time, so Stumm approached the Royal Air Force Command, who offered her a flight to Tokyo out of respect for her deceased airman husband. Over eight weeks, Stumm visited Okinawa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, Borneo and Darwin, and spent a month in Tokyo. As she walked through Tokyo, Stumm felt “a heady joy” in the part that Australian troops had played in defeating “this nation of fanatics that had been bent on over-running our country.”

In late September, soon after her flight over Hiroshima, Stumm obtained an important scoop: an interview with the first known European survivor of Hiroshima, Jesuit priest Wilhelm Kleinsorge. In her despatch to the Daily Mirror, Stumm reported Kleinsorge’s description of the horrific scenes on the afternoon of the bombing:

People were wandering about with their whole faces one large blister from the searing effect of the bomb. Only forty out of six hundred schoolgirls at the Methodist College survived. Three hundred little girls at the government school were killed instantly. Thousands of young soldiers in training at barracks were slaughtered. I walked for two hours and only saw two hundred people alive.

Stumm’s dispatch is significant because by this time virtually all discussion of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was strictly censored under the Allies’ Press Code, established soon after the publication of Australian Wilfred Burchett’s exposé of the lingering effects of radiation in the London Daily Express. The US authorities in Japan tended to approve only those news reports that focused on the initial blast and the immediate impact on buildings, and that described Hiroshima and Nagasaki as military targets.

Stumm later wrote that observing “the bitter desolation of a once prosperous community” and the scale of the human suffering in Hiroshima gave her no pleasure. Stumm’s daughter Sheridan Stumm, also a long-time journalist, told me that while her mother was in Japan she did not openly discuss her feelings, because she could not afford to be seen as weak by the male reporters. Women journalists often had to suppress their emotions lest they be accused of not being mentally tough enough to cope with war conditions. But towards the end of her mother’s life, Sheridan Stumm said that “as dementia was creeping in, the two traumatic events of the war came flooding back – the death of her husband and the horror of Hiroshima.”

Just like their male colleagues, many women reporters found proximity to danger exciting, and they could be just as fiercely competitive in the pursuit of a scoop. In her memoir, No Woman’s World (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), British war correspondent Iris Carpenter described the precariousness of women reporters’ existence. While women felt pressured to file news other than routine “hospital stories” to keep their jobs, “trying to get anything else meant breaking rules,” which in turn jeopardised their positions.

Elizabeth Riddell, an intrepid and fearless general reporter and accredited war correspondent in Europe for the Sydney Daily Mirror, recalled that women reporters desired more than “the nice little trips” they were offered. Proving that women were prepared to take “just as many risks as anybody else if they wanted to,” Riddell set off without permission from her party of women war correspondents in Brussels and travelled with fellow Australian reporter Sam White to Metz in France, which was still under German fire. Riddell claimed that she felt no concern for her own safety, just “inquisitive and curious and detached.”

This attitude of “intrepid insouciance” is common to both men and women war correspondents, as observed by Anthony Feinstein and Mark Sinyor in their study of the psychology of war journalists. Despite this, ABC’s former Afghanistan correspondent Sally Sara recently shared her experience of post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of bearing witness to scenes that were “not just physically confronting” but “morally wrong.”

Even during the second world war, when Australian women reporters were supposedly excluded from frontline areas, they encountered the devastating human cost of conflict. In Riddell’s case, the realisation that she had been just “a spectator, an observer” of the war eventually disgusted her and she decided to return to Australia before it ended. “When you’re a war correspondent you are, whether you like it or not, part of a great organisation, a machine for war,” she told ABC broadcaster Tim Bowden in 1978.

While the majority of women had little choice but to write non-military stories because they had limited or no access to the frontline, others chose to do so because they recognised their importance for understanding war. Riddell, for example, wrote incisive political stories about the impact of war on French civilians and did not see this as taking the “soft” option. Writing about civilians was at the time considered just a “superficial sidebar” to the main story of war, as American media historian Maurine Beasley explains in the documentary No Job for a Woman.

But this kind of reporting soon became the norm, and twenty-first-century war journalism typically focuses on the human story: the flight of refugees, the plight of child victims, the struggle for daily life in a conflict zone. Most of the contemporary conflict journalists who were interviewed by Howard Tumber and Frank Webster for their book Journalists Under Fire reject the label “war correspondent,” finding it self-important, restrictive and outmoded. They see their role as “telling stories about people’s lives and the effects of government decisions on ordinary folk.” Yet instead of being admired as path-breakers, the Australian women who covered the human side of the second world war have often been disparaged as writers of merely “domestic” articles of limited interest.

Adventurous New Zealand journalist Dorothy Cranstone demonstrated on more than one occasion that she did not regard her sex as a barrier. According to family friends, her independent and defiant nature had been forged in childhood: one recalled that Cranstone was expelled from her private girls’ school after bringing in a stockwhip, which she had learned to crack expertly. In 1937 she agreed to accompany four men on a big-game hunting trip to Central Africa, partly because she knew she would be the first white woman to make the journey, later documented in her memoir Africa Calling 1937.

In January 1942, Cranstone reported from Singapore for New Zealand and Australian newspapers just before the country fell to the Japanese. She then made her way to India, where her husband, Royal New Zealand Air Force fighter pilot Jim Cranstone, was stationed with the RAF, and where she was to report on the war situation for the Australian and Natal press. She was seconded to the RNZAF as a service observer and public relations officer based in Ceylon, where she wrote press releases and news stories about the RNZAF and was entitled to accompany aerial operations, a rare privilege for a woman.

Cranstone self-identified as a war correspondent despite having no official status or accreditation as such. An article in the Wellington Evening Post in November 1945 claimed she participated in “submarine hunts in the Indian ocean, dropped supplies into camps hidden in the heart of Burma, and was flown over Rangoon with supplies for the prisoner-of-war camps there after the capitulation.” After the reconquest of Burma by the British in May 1945, Cranstone was responsible for identifying New Zealand prisoners of war in camps in Calcutta, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore. In Singapore she broadcast news via radio about New Zealand prisoners, took photographs and helped to organise their aerial evacuation.

Cranstone’s lack of bylines, her status as an observer rather than a war correspondent and her postwar career as a farmer (she named her property “Burma”) have all contributed to her virtual obscurity in the historical record, but this pioneering woman journalist deserves to be better known.

During wartime, women reporters were constantly reminded of their difference from the troops and were kept quarantined from them. In the immediate postwar period, Australian women journalists in Asia benefited from a softening of the lines of demarcation between the civilian and military domains, but their gender remained a strong point of focus for authorities and was often foregrounded in their journalism. In late September 1945, Woman journalist Iris Dexter reported from Southeast Asia on the restoration of peace and the circumstances of newly released Australian prisoners of war. In 1942–43, she had been an accredited war correspondent with the Australian army on the home front, but she now referred to herself “apologetically” as a “peace or postwar correspondent.”

Dexter’s ambiguous status – neither part of the military nor completely protected from the perils of war – was soon brought home to her. Holed up in Java for over two weeks because of regional conflict stemming from Indonesia’s nascent independence movement, Dexter found herself “hemmed in by [guns] in the hands of English, Indian, Indonesian and Dutch soldiers.” Dexter’s heightened vulnerability was inextricably tied to her gender and race. “Being the only correspondent in Java with lacquered toenails has disadvantages,” she wryly observed. On the eve of her departure from Batavia (now Jakarta) to Bandoeng (Bandung), where rioting was taking place, local authorities requested she cancel the trip and warned her, “One slight incident there… and as a white woman you’d be a liability.”

Although Australian women had proved they could be “very solid conscientious correspondents” during the war, as Riddell observed, afterwards there was a return to the status quo for some decades. Riddell nonetheless believed that she and other women war reporters had paved the way for later female foreign correspondents such as the celebrated Margaret Jones, who in 1973 became the first Sydney Morning Herald journalist to be based in Beijing since the war’s end.

“That’s a great thing that’s happened to women,” Riddell remarked to Tim Bowden, “that they can be trusted to be sent out, to do the work, go everywhere and run their job properly. So one can only say that if that arose from the war then that’s a good thing. And I think probably it did arise from the war.” The extraordinary New Zealand–born journalist Kate Webb, who covered the Vietnam war from 1967 to 1975 and many subsequent conflicts, was also rightly hailed as a pioneering woman reporter.

I wonder how much Webb and Jones knew about the Australasian women who preceded them as reporters in Asia? The individualistic practice of claiming to be the “first” or “only” reporter to witness an event, which was embraced by Australian women war reporters, did not encourage acknowledgement of those who came before them or who stood alongside them. Women general news reporters such as Cranstone and Stumm are also harder to trace in the historical record than feature writers because they were often denied bylines. The stories they wrote were intended for immediate consumption rather than future study – and then used to wrap fish. And it’s a truism that nobody cares about yesterday’s news.

In 1989, former Melbourne journalist Pat Jarrett was interviewed about her wartime experiences. Jarrett was an accredited war correspondent in Australia for the Herald in 1942–43 and also travelled briefly to the Burma front in January 1945 at the request of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of the South-East Asia Command. She observed that the work of Australian women war correspondents was little known, let alone celebrated. “I’ve never been asked to march in an Anzac Day march. Men war correspondents have marched – but I think they’ve forgotten that there were women.” Jarrett and her colleagues had not been content to observe war only from the sidelines. Seventy years after Stumm reported on the horrors of Hiroshima, it is surely time to take the work of Australian women reporters seriously – not merely as the “woman’s angle” on war, but as part of the main story. •

This essay appears in Griffith Review 48: Enduring Legacies, edited by Julianne Schultz and Peter Cochrane, where a fully referenced version is available.

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In a sensitive, ongoing situation like this one, when TV can be viewed by hostage-takers, it is important that broadcasts avoid detailing planned police operations or inflaming relations between perpetrators and captives. They must also do all they can to preserve the dignity and anonymity of the hostages. The TV channels, and radio presenter Ray Hadley (who was in phone contact with hostages), acceded to police requests not to broadcast statements made under duress by hostages, or to report all they knew about what was going on inside the cafe.

The first exception to this restrained coverage was the Daily Telegraph, whose special afternoon wraparound was headlined “Death cult CBD attack: IS takes 13 hostages in city cafe siege.” Desperate for sales and attention, the ailing tabloid seems to take the view that all publicity is good publicity. In this case, though, in addition to its manifest inaccuracies, the paper’s misplaced sensationalism jarred with the anxious and sombre public mood.

The other jarring intervention was a tweet the following morning from the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch. “AUST gets wake-call with Sydney terror,” announced the American mogul. “Only Daily Telegraph caught the bloody outcome at 2.00 am. Congrats.”

Murdoch saw a terrorist rather than a deranged individual, and on the basis of that hasty appraisal believed that Australia needed to wake up. What’s more, apparently oblivious to all the TV footage of the climax and the live online newspaper coverage (including that of his own paper, the Australian), he thought only his Sydney tabloid had caught the key action.

If a political figure had made these comments – inaccurate, insensitive, alarmist – they would have attracted immediate and sustained criticism, but Murdoch has somehow attained a unique status in Australian public life. His frequently outrageous comments are certainly criticised in social media and on internet news services, but not, of course, by the two-thirds of daily newspapers he controls. The Fairfax papers and the ABC tend to either ignore his comments or treat them with undue respect. And, despite everything we’ve learned in recent years about the behaviour of his companies, it is almost certain that no one from the two major political parties will comment adversely.

American journalism scholar Jay Rosen has criticised what he calls “he said, she said” journalism, a device used by news media to achieve “balance” at the expense of any serious search for the truth. When Rupert Murdoch appears in the Australian media, however, it is more a case of “he said, and he also said.” Perhaps this has been most evident this year, with Murdoch’s high-profile July visit to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Australian.

This was Murdoch in an expansive mood, most notably in an interview on Sky News. He gave his views on climate change, which he thought was overplayed as a problem. “Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here,” he told viewers. The “most alarmist” scenario was that there would be a 3ºC rise in a hundred years. “At the very most, one of those [degrees] will come from man-made [sources].” If the sea level rises six inches, it would be a “big deal, the Maldives might disappear, but we can’t mitigate that… we just have to stop building vast houses on seashores.”

These fanciful propositions seem to come entirely from within his own head. They were picked apart on internet news sites and in social media, but within the metropolitan papers and on ABC TV they were simply reported at face value.

The most striking aspect of Murdoch’s current political views is their extremist content. The billionaire is now a proponent of a US Tea Party–style ideology – especially the view that government is the problem rather than part of the solution – although thankfully he hasn’t adopted that movement’s pro-gun views.

Even when he expresses less extreme views, his grasp of facts can be shaky. Weighing into the debate about Australia’s 457 working visa last year, for example, he advised Australia to follow the United States in welcoming new arrivals. “I’m a big one for encouraging migration,” he told Sky News. “Just look at America.” No media reporting these words pointed out that nearly 28 per cent of Australians were born overseas, but just 13 per cent of Americans.

But the greater impact comes from the way Murdoch expresses these views. Apart from the large number of inaccuracies in his public interviews and tweets, their key characteristic is dogmatism and intolerance. So, during his July visit, he described the NBN as “a ridiculous idea” and deplored investment in “windmills and all that rubbish.” He has been equally scathing of renewable energy investments in Britain, which have, he says, ruined the English countryside with “uneconomic bird killing windmills. Mad.” “Mad” was also his considered verdict on British efforts to contribute to the resolution of the crisis in the eurozone.

His tendency to stereotype and malign those he disagrees with has often caused him trouble, perhaps most notably when he asked, via Twitter, “Why is Jewish-owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?” You’ve got to give Murdoch credit, said American political commentator Peter Beinart. “He’s packed a remarkable amount of idiocy and nastiness into 140 characters.”

Under Labor, Murdoch thought Australia was a “weird place mucking up great future,” and that “Gillard once good education minister, now prisoner of minority greenies. Rudd still delusional, who nobody could work with. Nobody else?” His most constant hostility is towards the Greens: “whatever you do, don’t let the bloody Greens mess it up.”

This style pervades his newspapers. “Kick this mob out,” the Daily Telegraph’s front-page headline on the first day of its 2013 election coverage, embodied not only the proprietor’s view, but also his style. And yet, at the same time as his media organisations are a force debasing the level of public debate, his utterances fail to attract the scrutiny received by those of other public figures. •

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For yours truly, who was inspired to become a journalist by the legendary exploits of Messrs Woodward and Bernstein four decades ago, the idea of reading about the exploits of characters who always appeared larger than life, and in some cases actually were, takes me back to the days when the impossible took just a little bit longer and all wrongs were writable, because that’s what second editions were for.

The opportunity to participate in momentous events, if only on the periphery of them, was another motive for becoming a reporter. Although I cannot claim to have been under attack in Beijing – as was one of the legends, “Chinese” George Morrison of Geelong via London – every time that familiar video sequence of Bob Hawke at the National Tally Room on the evening of 5 March 1983 comes on the screen it’s reassuring to see the younger, long-haired me behind and to the left of his exulting figure, a confirmation that I was there, a front-row observer of history (and taking notes too!).

None of that or much else qualifies this reviewer for legend status, but it is a sobering thought how many of the modern top-flight journalistic practitioners whose lives are explored in these pages I have had the privilege to meet, and in some cases to know well*, not to mention those chosen to pen their potted biographies.

Through that generation just past, we are introduced to those we were too young to know personally, but heard wondrous tales of. Jack Williams, mid-century press baron of the Herald & Weekly Times, is one of those whose reputation long succeeded him. Well-loved Melbourne columnist Keith Dunstan, whose life story is told by veteran columnist Lawrence Money, related Williams’s keen mental picture of the average reader of the Sun News-Pictorial (as was), which had one of the highest circulations per capita of any morning newspaper in the English-speaking world. Williams told his journalists back in the 60s to keep in mind that the typical Sun reader lived “in a triple-fronted brick veneer in Moorabbin, was married with two children – struggling on a mortgage – and had a mental age of fourteen.”

I recall hearing much the same pep talk given at the Herald Sun when I was subediting in the newsroom there in 2006–07, except that by this time the story’s punchline was crediting the reader with a mental age of twelve. (Perhaps they adjust it after every census?)

The story reminded me of another media legend – one who didn’t make the cut here. Clive Malseed was a rakish (as in spare-framed) pipe-smoking production editor at the Age when I joined the paper at the end of the 1970s. Notably for someone whose job was one of the most stressful on the paper, Clive maintained the most remarkable sangfroid while all around were losing theirs. One of his favourite homilies was to remind us young cadets that, whatever we wrote, it had to make sense to “Mavis Stringbag of Maidstone.”

Of course, in a book such as this even the reader with a fair knowledge of “the players” will meet many he or she hasn’t come across before. You don’t have to be a feminist to feel like cheering on May Maxwell, who lived to 101, and had trodden the boards as a soubrette and thespian in her salad days, only to trade the applause for the often thankless career of a journalist in later years. You don’t have to be a feminist to enjoy reading how she took on entrenched arrogance at every turn – but read enough about her and it’s enough to make you one.

For what purports to be – and readers have every right to expect to be – a thoroughly factual record, it is disappointing to come across the odd easily prevented mistake, such as a reference to Ronald Ryan being hanged in 1966 (it was a year later). Sometimes these faults spoil an entire article for the careful reader. When it comes to the inclusion of B.A. Santamaria as a subject in this volume, I fail to see any rationale: he was many things, the éminence grise of the Democratic Labor Party being just one of them; he wasn’t – and I doubt he ever professed to be – a journalist.

But, given that the old shellback’s in the hardback, was it too much to hope that the Labor Split of 1955, which he helped foment, would not appear as “the great ALP split of 1953” (the equivalent of an arithmetic primer instructing us that 3 x 4 = 10) or that he wouldn’t be credited with founding the Catholic Worker Movement in 1957 – making it a trinitarian heresy in toto, given that it was the Catholic Social Studies Movement he had established, a trifling sixteen years earlier.

But such groan-inducing moments are vastly outnumbered by passages of sublime prose. Admire the craft of former Age editor Mike Smith as he weaves a perfect metaphor through this description of investigative reporter Ben Hills’s phone-interviewing technique. Hills would initially disarm his interlocutor with small talk, jokes and flattery. “Then came a series of questions that were the equivalent of slow full tosses on leg stump, luring the victim into playing shots and chancing his arm. Gradually the questions became more relevant, and pointed, including references to facts just conceded… Then came the bouncers, the throat balls and the blood on the pitch. The conversation would end and Ben would curse the corruptness of his prey.”

The schema chosen for deciding where journalists pop up in this work is elegant in its simplicity: the organising principle is the subject’s birth year. The very first entry – with condign justice to the choice, given that he was Melbourne’s first published journalist – is the joint claimant to the title of the city’s founder, John Pascoe Fawkner, born in the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Media Legends, a large-format production of the Melbourne Press Club, comes replete with photographs that add to the atmosphere of every era in which the most talented wordsmiths left their running commentary on the times that shaped them – and, yes, the nation. In an era when the death of newspapers is widely foretold, it is – like former editor of the Times Harry Evans’s My Paper Chase, published five years ago – a glowing tribute to the worldwide empire of newspaperdom which once wrapped its dreams in reality and dropped them on the dewy grass of every front yard in the civilised world six days a week just in time for breakfast.

Like Amazonia, it is a lost world. But books such as this make it easy to go there, wander, linger and return – a round trip encompassing several action-packed lifetimes in the voyage of a single day. Where else could you get such value? •

* Of the book’s twenty-four media subjects still alive, – a former Age reporter and subeditor – was surprised to discover he knows fifteen more or less well. Mr Haley has written this review without fear – but wishes it to be known he wouldn’t be averse to the odd favour.

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Now in her late eighties and with her memory fading, Bown nevertheless retains her eye for the telling detail. Early on in Looking for Light she recalls a visit she made to Paris with a friend when they were both in their mid-twenties. Her friend “wore a green hat,” Bown remembers, “and I wore a red hat.” Later in the film she recalls, with a mixture of stoicism and regret, her youthful presence at her mother’s funeral. Again she retains in her mind the telling detail, and again it is a hat. “I was wearing,” she says, appearing to conjure up the scene in her mind, “a little black beret.”

Hats and hair have always fascinated Bown. “She loved the tops of people’s heads,” says the photography scholar Patricia Holland in one of a number of illuminating comments she makes in the film. Hair, in Bown’s images, whether luxuriant or sparse or somewhere in between, frames and crowns and defines the face underneath, appearing in some cases almost to have a life of its own. Individual strands are discernible, the light bouncing off them to convey texture and substance. For many years Bown used the same Rolleiflex camera, long after that particular model was superseded, for “its remarkable capacity to capture every little detail and texture,” including the detail and the texture of hair. (In 1964 she changed to an Olympus SLR – “I take two cameras and indoors I generally have them set at 1/60th at f/2.8,” she said in 2000, in one of her typically spare comments on the technical details of what she did for a living. She hit it off with Elia Kazan because he knew immediately, by watching the way she prowled the room looking for light, what settings she would use.)

Occasionally, the sitter in a Bown photograph appears wearing headgear of some sort. It may be a fanciful observation, but it often seems that the hatted among Bown’s many subjects – as distinct from the hatless majority – are the truly super-sized personalities, the self-created and the very much larger-than-life, the ones who required something extra to hold them within the frame. Among these are the images of Boy George (1995) in an outsize black hat, decorated with bejewelled horns, or Eartha Kitt in a headband (1970), with her trademark stern yet sultry expression, or Cecil Beaton looking arch and manipulative in an astrakhan (1950), some of them viewable in full-screen mode at the Guardian webpage dedicated to “Jane Bown: A Life in Photography.” Hats can be seen as a component of the personality of the sitter, and Bown clearly saw them that way, but when it comes to what might be called external accessories – chairs, for example, or mirrors – she only rarely introduces them into the frame. She does quite often make use of the subject’s hands, however, in rather the way that she uses hats to position or help to define the head, as in her famous portrait of Björk.

Jane Bown’s portrait of the singer Björk. Hot Property Films

The portrait, which is lingered over in the film and also appears on the cover of Bown’s book Faces: The Creative Process Behind Great Portraits (2000), shows the singer’s head in extreme close-up, with only her eyes, and of course her hair, visible. The remainder of her face is covered by her hands, the freckles on her nose visible between splayed fingers. In Faces, Bown provides a brief paragraph of commentary on this photograph, as she does on each of the 300 or so portraits included in the book; often these comments are rather flat and suspiciously academic-sounding, as though channelling someone else’s analysis of what Bown herself has instinctively just gone ahead and done. The comments on her photograph of Björk, however, do seem to carry her tone of voice, modest with a hint of steeliness, providing an insight into the contradictory – and splendidly productive – nature of her methods.

On the one hand, she says, Björk “did all the work.” This is the kind of phrase that is characteristic of Bown when commenting on her own output – the idea that the photographer is there simply to catch the right moment, that it is in fact the subject who will “produce” the image for the photographer to capture. The journalist Andrew Billen, who often worked with Bown on assignment, recalls in Looking for Light that “her great phrase was ‘ah, yes, there you are,’” as if to say that her methods – calm and patient, exploratory but efficient – would unearth what was already present and make it visible. But even in the brief paragraph of commentary on the Björk photograph in Faces, we get the distinct impression that it was rather more complicated.

“You could take a hundred pictures of her and every one would be different,” she says, going on to describe the singer, with acerbic affection, as “very unusual and theatrical.” Bown sensed, when she took that shot of Björk, that it would be the one. It was “quite obviously the best,” she says in Looking for Light, suggesting that she recognised how going some way towards anonymising her subject was the key to revealing her; by dampening down Björk’s theatricality she would uncover something more natural and unforced, something more real.

As with all great artists who claim that what they do is really very simple, Bown’s simplicity – the unassuming woman who turns up to photograph a celebrity, spends ten minutes on the task, shooting one or two rolls of film at most before leaving as quietly as she arrived – seems less and less simple the more you look at it. “I was self-effacing and apologetic,” she recalls in Looking for Light; “I wasn’t threatening.” Friends and former colleagues speak affectionately of how, particularly when she became something of a celebrity herself, she often had no idea who the famous people were whom she was photographing, or what they were famous for. No doubt this version of Bown is accurate as far as it goes, but there is also a strong impression of a myth being built up and reinforced until it takes on its own life.

Other comments, by Bown and others, suggest an approach that was rather more deliberate, a feigned unworldliness designed to lower the defences of her subjects. “She was good at putting people at their ease,” says the journalist Polly Toynbee, recalling the occasions when she worked in tandem with Jane Bown in the seventies. “She lulled them into a sense of false security,” says Gary Woodhouse, who was picture editor at the Observer during much of Bown’s tenure. But however deliberate she may have been in her strategies, the “sense of security” that Bown instilled in her subjects was not false.

They were right to trust her. Her portraits do not trap people, or trip them up. Neither do they flatter; instead they convey the sense that we the viewers are seeing them truly, whether or not they are looking directly into our eyes. (Only two people, she says, ever objected to her version of them; the novelist and journalist Martha Gellhorn, and Svetlana Stalin, who felt Bown made her look like a frog.)

Though much is made of Bown’s quality of human sympathy, and her ability to connect with her subjects even in the brief time that was frequently allocated to her, it is something of a paradox that some of her best images were obtained when the session did not go at all well. Her most famous portrait, the one that appears at the top of this article, is of Samuel Beckett. Taken in 1976, it shows Beckett full-face, with lips set, his eyes looking not-quite-directly ahead. The picture glows with the multiple tonal variations of Bown’s beloved black-and-white. Beckett’s silver hair seems almost over-lit, giving the impression of some kind of natural geological formation rather than mere hair. The Auden-like creases in his skin make him if anything more rather than less handsome. He was, Bown recalls, deeply uncooperative and ungracious, allowing her time for only three shots – in the end she managed five before her time was up. With one of those shots she hit what she sometimes refers to when discussing her photographic methods as the “jackpot” – the Björk-like moment when she knew at once that she had what she was looking for. It is both her best-known photograph and the photograph that defines Beckett.

As the title of Dodd and Whyte’s film suggests, light was everything to Bown, as perhaps it is for most photographers. But she pursued light with an unusual degree of single-mindedness. Famously, Bown never used a light meter, instead checking the available light by looking at the way it fell on the back of her hand. If she was concerned that it might be getting dark by the time she arrived at her assignment, or that the location might not have access to sufficient natural light, she might take along a 150 watt bulb to fix into an obliging table lamp. Or she would, according to Andrew Billen, sometimes bring along her own Anglepoise lamp, thrust into a shopping bag to be drawn out as required. These stories of the bulbs and the lamps seem to sum up her approach – artisanal and low-tech, responding to the moment.

She would buy her cameras secondhand and keep them for ages, feeling no particular need to upgrade or to try out the newest model. In a way she kept on taking the same sorts of pictures for fifty years or more, eschewing phases or periods or distinct shifts in photographic direction or any tendency to adopt the latest technical breakthrough. Bown stuck to the rails, in the words of photographer Don McCullin, doing what she knew best, resisting any temptation she might have felt to seek out new and radically different kinds of subject matter. The co-director of Looking for Light, Luke Dodd, who has spent recent years helping to collate the vast repository of Bown images as archivist for the Guardian/Observer, recalls in his introduction to a book of her photographs, Exposures (2009), that “she once told me how she thought it impossible to take a bad picture abroad.” Dodd interprets the comment as “acknowledging the easy exoticism of images from other cultures.”

It is also a kind of coded warning on Bown’s part, not to take too literally what she has often said elsewhere, that the subject makes the photograph. Sometimes too much choice – the availability of ever more interesting or unusual subjects to photograph, using ever more inventive methods and techniques – is a constraint on creativity rather than an artistic liberation. It was important to Bown’s success as a photographer that she rarely chose her own subjects – most of the time she was on assignment, photographing what she was told to photograph. This regular but not overly demanding pattern of work – two assignments or so a week, often in people’s homes, or in hotel hospitality rooms that became very familiar to her over the years – seemed to fire her creativity rather than dull it.

She had her methods – her rails, as McCullin calls them – and she stuck to them, sometimes repeating devices or motifs to get what she wanted. Her superb portrait of the actress Diana Dors, for example, taken (or “made,” to use Bown’s preferred term) in 1970, echoes a studio portrait of a “Mrs Gestetner” from twenty years earlier. In each of the portraits (they both appear in Bown’s book Faces) the subject is shown touching the end of a string of pearls she is wearing, as though she is actively participating in the creation of the composition.

The impression of human depth in these photographs of women in pearls comes partly from the combination of artifice and naturalness. Dors has adopted a pose, holding on to those pearls with forefinger and thumb, in a way that conveys deliberateness and forethought. Yet the overall impression is one of naturalness and vulnerability. In photographing celebrities, Bown was engaging with people who knew the rules of the game, people who were difficult to catch “off guard.” It is one of her great strengths as a photographer: the fact that she did not attempt anything so underhanded as to trick her subjects. As Patricia Holland puts it, she does not look for “that crude moment of exposure that some photographers go for.” Rather she is able to draw out, in image after image, the qualities of naturalness and humanity that can be found within the poses that all of us, celebrities or not, instinctively adopt when we know we are being photographed.

In Looking for Light and elsewhere, Jane Bown refers to her career as having come about by accident. The stories, as such stories do, hone themselves by repetition. In recognition of her wartime service in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, she was offered a grant to study for two years in order to gain a professional qualification. Unsure what she wanted to do, she took up the suggestion of a friend to “try photography,” studying under Ifor Thomas who was, along with his wife Joy, an inspiring and influential teacher at the Guildford School of Photography in the postwar period. A picture editor admired Bown’s portfolio, particularly a disconcertingly close-up photograph of a cow’s head, in which an eye dominates the frame rather like the eye in Buñuel’s early surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929). Before long, says Bown with typical self-depreciation, “I found myself working for the Observer.” Her long association with the Observer, and those increasingly regular assignments to photograph famous people that it entailed, has inevitably come to define her work.

But the people Bown photographed during her career were not always famous, and often the photographic subject did not include people at all. “When I first started I used to photograph funny things,” she has said, “like cabbages and snow.” In 2007 the Guardian staged an exhibition of Bown’s lesser-known work entitled, a bit cutely, The Unknown Bown, using images drawn from its Bown archive. In her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Germaine Greer remarks admiringly that “it goes without saying that Bown never uses flash,” the clear implication being that Bown herself is never flash, never one to be seduced by special effects or tricksy lighting – nor, by extension, by the easy lure of celebrity, in herself or in others.

Her early, non-portrait work, much of it dating from the 1950s, is particularly effective at conveying a kind of romantic down-to-earthness, the cabbageness of a cabbage, the leekness of a leek or the snowiness of snow. This quality remained in the portrait photography that, from the early sixties, she was increasingly to concentrate on. “She has no truck,” says Greer, speaking of this later work, “with the generation of glamour images, and hence her portraits seem truer than those of other photographers.” One of Bown’s great strengths is the ability to photograph people – people whose biographies lay claim to some kind of distinction – in such a way as to humanise rather than either glorify or undermine them, to take her subjects, as it were, at face value.

Looking for Light captures Bown’s self-effacing single-mindedness as a photographer, to the extent perhaps of over-emphasising her lone way of operating. In fact, as we learn from snatches of interviews, her early and complex family life – she was “illegitimate,” without knowing for many years who her father was – led her to place a particular value on relationships and particularly on family life, her own and other people’s. One of the reasons she stayed so long at the Observer – her entire career, in fact – was that she regarded it as family.

An aspect of her approach to photography that is not much explored in the film is the effect on her work of the practice of working “in tandem,” the journalist and the photographer sent out together on assignment. Often Bown had to stake out her ten minutes where she could, at the beginning or the end of the interview. (Though as Bown’s own fame grew, people’s attitudes changed; her colleague on the Observer, Nobby Clark, tells a tale of being sent as a last-minute substitute for Jane Bown, only to be greeted with extravagant disappointment by the judge who was the subject of the shoot.) Sometimes, if the journalist and the interviewee were both agreeable, Bown would sit in on the interview and catch her subject in mid-flight. Her portrait from 1977, of Mick Jagger laughing, was obtained in this way. “Shots of people laughing do not often work,” she commented, “but I like this one.”

Among Bown’s professional partners at one stage of her career was John Gale, a former foreign correspondent who was later assigned to duties closer to home, including background features and celebrity profiles. Gale, referred to briefly in Looking for Light as “a big, jokey man,” was, like Jane Bown, someone for whom, despite his wild ways, family was paramount. His account of a half-year-long journey through Africa, Travels with a Son, was published in 1972, only two years before his death by suicide. Travels with a Son – the “a” in the title hints at Gale’s quirky point of view – is a movingly unsentimental depiction both of Africa and of his own relationship to his family.

Earlier, in 1965, Gale had produced an autobiographical volume, Clean Young Englishman, which chronicles among other things his flights of derring-do as a foreign correspondent, and the later onset of madness. It contains, towards the end, a single reference to Jane Bown, with whom he had been sent on an otherwise unexplained assignment to Blackpool. (“You knew,” says Gary Woodhouse in Looking for Light, “that if you sent them out together you’d have got something”):

One sunny afternoon we walked down the pier and watched fishermen catching plaice.

“See that man over there in a baseball cap and glasses?” I said to Jane. “He looks just like Epstein, doesn’t he?”

Jane agreed. She had met Epstein several times.

We walked back from the end of the pier, and by the turnstiles we saw an evening paper hoarding: “Epstein dead.”

The man that looked like Epstein had vanished.

In Jane Bown’s beautiful portrait of Jacob Epstein, taken in 1958, not long before he died, the sculptor is shown in his studio, where he is kept company by a variety of heads in progress. He is wearing a cap, as was his habit. It would be nice to have on record more of the conversations that Bown and Gale engaged in while on assignment together, of likenesses and caps and the art of catching the essence of someone before they vanish. •

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There have been two biographies of Syme. The first, by Ambrose Pratt, was an in-house account, largely dictated by its subject, which appeared in 1908, the year after his death. Edward Sayers, the author of the second, was also an Age journalist. By no means uncritical, Sayers undertook substantial research but his main object was to soften the legend of a grim and harsh despot, a legend that was still current when his book appeared in 1965.

In the following year the Syme family entered into a partnership with their Sydney counterparts, the Fairfaxes. The Fairfax holding increased until, in 1983, they acquired control. Meanwhile Keith Murdoch, who Syme in his final years had employed as a suburban correspondent, had built up the morning Sun and the evening Herald into newspapers that eclipsed the Age, and his son subsequently gathered them up into his media conglomerate. The landmarks of Syme’s supremacy soon vanished. The handsome Collins Street premises of David Syme & Co. were first disfigured and then abandoned; the Melbourne Mansions he had constructed further up Collins Street, along with his family home in Kew, were demolished. The centenary of his death and the sesquicentenary of his principal newspaper both passed largely unrecognised.

Now, for the first time, we have a full biography and a close study of Syme’s business methods, not just as a newspaper proprietor but also as a property developer, landholder and investor, based on assiduous and no doubt painstaking archival research. The Syme family papers are held by the State Library of Victoria, but anyone who has pored over the faint copies of David Syme’s handwriting in the letterbooks that contain his outward correspondence will appreciate the labour involved in working through them. The inward correspondence was not kept and the business records are incomplete. The newspaper editions themselves are not digitised so perforce Elizabeth Morrison has had to read systematically through the Age and other papers Syme produced, though the weekly Illustrated Australian News and its variants are online. (While the National Library’s digitisation of newspapers makes it possible to search those included, it provides only one major daily for each city. That the National Library chose the Argus rather than the Age would have vexed Syme.)

As Morrison’s previous study of Victorian country newspapers, Engines of Influence, made clear, this was initially a trade with few barriers to entry. You could rent premises and acquire type and a flatbed press for a few hundred pounds. Much of the content could be exchanged or recycled, and advertising revenue would support income from sales. (For that reason, circulation figures were habitually padded.) With low capitalisation, growth came through diversification rather than acquisition, and Morrison draws our attention to the variety of titles that Syme launched alongside the Age.

Like other proprietors, he had no training in publishing. He joined forces with his brother Ebenezer, who had acquired the infant Age in 1856 with £2000 borrowed from fellow Scots. Ebenezer was a journalist; David had previously mined for gold in the Californian and Victorian fields, then worked as a contractor for public works, and continued to do so until his brother died in 1860. Thereafter he was responsible for the management, production and editing of three papers.

He added more titles and somehow managed to pay off creditors. Soon he was expanding and by 1872 he purchased the country’s first rotary press. With this and subsequent technological advances, he oversaw the installation of the machinery and solved the production problems. It was the same with the design and layout of the papers, the employment and supervision of the journalists, the determination of the editorial line. Proceeding by trial and error, working impossible hours, it was little wonder that he became such a driving and abrasive figure.

Morrison’s attention to the business of the newspaper is informed and informative. She shows the volatility of revenue and profit. Newspapers were highly susceptible to the fluctuations of a growing but exposed trading economy, and Syme’s championship of closer agricultural settlement and protection of local industry were meant to reduce this vulnerability. She has put together a nearly comprehensive account of the journalists whom Syme employed, and the extent to which he depended on them. She traces the expansion of coverage as Syme engaged interstate and international correspondents, the building up of cable news, the sponsoring of major events to increase the readership. Her judgement, that Syme was a remarkably successful innovator until others passed him by – in part because of his age, in part because of his inability to delegate – is persuasive.

Beyond the newspaper business, Morrison provides new information on Syme’s other enterprises. We see him buying and selling property as soon as he had the means to do so, and investing in mining and other ventures. Morrison enables us to grasp the scale of this activity and also its logic: he was not a speculator, and the holdings were designed as a cushion against the fluctuations in his newspaper business. In later life he took up weekend farming and was able to settle family members on his properties.

There was nothing in Syme’s background that predisposed him to life on the land: his father and brothers lived by words and ideas, instructing others. The father, an austere and strict patriarch who withheld affection, was a schoolmaster in North Berwick, a small town on the Firth of Forth. Syme would recall that his father’s love “seemed entirely overshadowed by his sense of duty, and he asked nothing from us except obedience.” This passage comes from an extended memoir that Syme set down at the end of his life. Pratt reproduced substantial passages in his biography; Morrison points out that it does not tell the whole truth, but it is nevertheless a pity that she did not do the same, for the memoir has a compelling force.

Her treatment of the family’s tribulations suffers from a lack of familiarity with Scottish history, especially its religious history, which leads her to see Syme as marked by a Calvinist austerity. Syme’s father was certainly a strict Calvinist, at odds with the local Church of Scotland minister whose laxity was symptomatic of the established church by this time. Such worldliness would give rise in 1843 to the Disruption and the formation of a more rigorous Free Church, but Syme and his siblings did not follow that path. Theirs was a fundamentally different turn, to the theology of the Evangelical Union, which broke decisively from Calvin’s doctrine of the elect to an insistence on salvation by faith.

David, the youngest of the family, followed his brothers George and Ebenezer to a seminary of the Evangelical Union. The elder brothers subsequently ministered to Baptist and Unitarian churches but could not settle. His intellectual formation was similar: the rationalism of the Scottish Enlightenment and the yearning for spiritual comfort, the rejection of dogma and the desire to believe, the suspicion of authority and the need to impose order. He was the outcast, for he lost his vocation, yet he was also the anointed one. He came first to the promised land, made good and admitted the reassembled family to his patrimony.

To do so, however, he had to wrest his brother Ebenezer’s share of the Age from his widow Jane and her children. Since Ebenezer had died intestate, the partnership with Jane had to be negotiated and renegotiated. She returned to England in 1862, taking with her a half share and the dark secret of a new partner and pregnancy, while David chafed for ownership of the enterprise he was building. Fifteen years later, when he discovered her remarriage, he browbeat her into selling her share but had to concede a quarter-share to her son Joseph, who assumed responsibility for the printing side of the business until the fraught relationship with his uncle broke down and he was bought out for £140,000. Here is a tangled saga of money and morality worthy of Trollope; Morrison provides an authoritative and even-handed account.

Elizabeth Morrison’s declared purpose is to tell the story of the man behind the legend, placing him and his business firmly in the world of newspaper publishing, and she has succeeded admirably. The man of the legend is fully evident – domineering, self-righteous and censorious – and we see too his acts of contrition and personal generosity. Of particular interest is the clear evidence Morrison provides of Syme’s frailties. He was a worrier who often changed his mind, dwelt obsessively on minutiae, and created muddle and confusion with his mistrust and interference. She suggests that he might have developed a paranoid personality disorder, though he would not be the first newspaper tycoon to exhibit that trait.

“Those who come to this book for more insights into the political history of Victoria and Australia,” she warns at the outset, “may be disappointed.” The book deals perfunctorily with the great reform crusades of the Age, and its part in the two constitutional crises of the 1860s and 1870s. There is little on its stance during the great strikes of the 1890s, or on federation. The politicians who worked for him – Charles Pearson, Alfred Deakin and H.B. Higgins – appear, but not Syme’s influence on their political careers. Morrison is dubious of the claims that Syme made and unmade ministries, but she does not investigate further, and her observation that he had “many other matters to preoccupy him” than “attending to policy” is unpersuasive.

In giving us the man behind the legend, Morrison leaves his reign as King David untested. But any future assessment will have to draw on this rich and rewarding biography. •

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A flurry of book-length attempts at explaining the company’s slow-motion implosion has appeared in recent years, the most notable until now being Killing Fairfax, by Australian Financial Review reporter Pamela Williams. That 2013 paperback was subtitled “Packer, Murdoch & the Ultimate Revenge,” in a nod to the complex causes that turned the Age, once regularly referred to as “one of the world’s great newspapers,” into a shrinking compact remnant of its old Leviathan self.

In those glory days, senior executives were proud of the paper’s global reputation for excellence but still able to puncture any pretensions of grandeur with a well-aimed shaft. This reviewer, who worked for the Age at the beginning of the 1980s when its daily circulation exceeded 250,000 – a record unequalled in its 160-year history – recalls ripples of mirth spreading among the staff on hearing that deputy editor Peter Cole-Adams had picked up the phone at the paper’s then lavishly staffed London bureau and satirically intoned, “Good morning. You’ve reached the Age, one of the world’s newspapers.”

Williams’s work treats the humbling of Fairfax as a sort of manslaughter mystery: no one set out to murder the Old Firm but, when it comes to whodunnit, everyone seems to have given Fate a helping nudge.

Hot on its heels comes the latest investigation of this media giant's comeuppance, from the acerbic pen of former Age wunderkind and Sydney Morning Herald super-correspondent Ben Hills, whose warts-and-all portrait of his former boss, legendary Age editor Graham Perkin, appeared in 2010.

Hills, too, resists a simplistic “It was Wokka wot dunnit” explanation, although he does give due emphasis to the reverse-Midas touch of Young Warwick Fairfax in the late eighties. The culprits Hills fingers in the subtitle of his book – “How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) wrecked Fairfax” – are a motley crew. Yet the tale he tells of how they interacted to hasten the hollowing-out process is not only credible but convincing.

Acknowledging “the competition,” Hills promises in his prologue to provide more than a mere historical account of corporate downfall. It is a promise largely redeemed in nearly 400 pages that see the author move from boardroom fly-on-the-wall to social commentator, and even to rural reporter. For it was not just the celebrated mastheads of big-city titles that were lashed by a perfect storm of hostile elements: the smallest, most remote outposts of empire also came tumbling down.

It is Hills’s gift as a reporter capable of adding the human dimension to his description of a powerful institution’s first intimations of mortality that lifts Stop the Presses! above the ruck. His shoe leather can be heard pounding the pavements of Cobar, in northwest New South Wales, as he discovers the damage done by the felling of Fairfax to the least of its far-flung family.

The occasional quirky turn of phrase can be jarring. At one point, Hills writes of “Asia and India” as if the latter weren’t part of the former. Equally occasionally, an omission grates. Robert Whitehead is mentioned as a Fairfax marketing guru but he, too, occupied the editor’s chair at the Sydney Morning Herald, which surely rated a mention.

Far more often, though, Hills’s impish sense of humour provokes a laugh out loud. One of his many sources, former Herald business editor Ian Verrender, recalls trudging into the boss’s office to take his redundancy after half a lifetime with the company. The editor-in-chief, Sean Aylmer, “sprang forward with his hand outstretched and a big smile on his face crying, ‘Congratulations!’ as though he had just won a holiday for two in Bali.”

The more I read, the more I found myself thinking Fairfax is like a patient who doesn’t realise he is dying despite every new day (or at least every financial year) bringing a new and grimmer prognosis. It wasn’t Aylmer alone who failed to comprehend what was happening. From Fred Hilmer, whose appointment as CEO may, unknown to himself, have been a piece of Machiavellian foreplay by one Kerry Packer, to Greg Hywood the downbeat optimist, the Grand Old Publisher increasingly resembles an invalid who has lost the will for yet another bout of “life-saving” surgery.

Inevitably, many of Hills’s sources and dramatis personae also appeared in Williams’s narrative. One by one we meet the various scions of the Fairfax clan and watch it unravel because of shortcomings ranging from internecine jealousy to reckless inattention. There goes Ron Walker, who claims the moral high ground in giving rapacious Gina Rinehart the keys to the kingdom but comes across more like a Trojan horse than a knight in shining armour; here comes Brian McCarthy, whose distaste for bringing in expensive consultants to tell newspaper managers how to manage is a familiar theme, but nonetheless refreshing.

If Fairfax management were reminded of that view once in every book likely to be written on its failure, it would still be worth hearing. Had it been heeded, of course, there would be no market for this offshoot of Australian manufacturing, a growth industry in rough drafts of the history of how the Fairfaxes, who for forty years repeatedly had the winning hand in the hold ’em poker game of quality journalism, ended up losing it all and cashing in their blue chips.

The oft-cited observation “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad” is variously attributed. But, pace Porgy & Bess, it ain’t necessarily so. With apologies to Longfellow (and perhaps Sophocles), Ben Hills’s fine-grained study of this modern-day epic tragedy lends itself to the suspicion that in certain cases the gods prefer to make them far too comfortable, careless and greedy for their own good. •

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I want to put the case for the proprietorial model for newspaper publishing and I have a very simple starting proposition: that without Rupert Murdoch as an old-fashioned proprietor you wouldn’t have had the Australian fifty years ago and you wouldn’t have the Australian today.

It is fashionable around the world these days to speak ill of Rupert Murdoch, but I want to defend him, warts and all. Because without his vision, enterprise, tenacity and, at times, cussedness, Australia would not have had the forum that the Oz has provided for us to debate ourselves, our directions, our legal, moral and commercial frameworks – all of which has for the past fifty years helped shape what we are today.

It is precisely the individual idiosyncrasies, the bees in his bonnet, the shifts, the somersaults, the backflips, the big calls, the wrong calls, the missteps and, yes, the triumphs, of Murdoch’s life and career that bring character and meaning to the Australian.

Rupert Murdoch has shown himself to be a great risk-taker. Not only has he bet his company on several occasions, and won, but every day he encourages risk among his editors and journalists. Risk-taking is part of his DNA and it flows through his company in many ways which I will explain shortly. It is the kind of risk that publishing companies without a strong individual proprietorial hand are largely unwilling to take. I don’t intend to make this address part of the pot-stirring argy-bargy between News Corp and Fairfax but if you look at the relative positions of the two companies, one with a strong proprietor, the other without, it makes, at the very least, a case for strong leadership.

Rupert didn’t invent the role of media mogul. There were earlier models. In the first half of the twentieth century controversy raged in America over the influence for good or evil of William Randolph Hearst, who owned a chain of newspapers across the nation and used them to pursue his political ambitions. Hearst’s papers were accused of inventing the sensational and often salacious formats that became known as the Yellow Press – a derogatory term that may have described their predilection for news from the courts and the underbelly of national life, but not their popularity. Hearst instinctively knew what people wanted and as a publisher he found no fault in giving them what they wanted. Neither has Rupert.

In Britain, the Canadian Max Aitken, who became Lord Beaverbrook, was also a single-minded press baron with extraordinary management skills. He is remembered today for his Daily Express newspaper, propagandist for the British Empire, which during the thirties was the largest-selling English-language paper in the world, with a circulation of more than three million. But Beaverbrook was more than just a press lord – he presided over the manufacture of aircraft for the British war effort and was credited with “winning the war of machines.” He was a fully-fledged political player in Britain – often wrong, but never in doubt. Just like Rupert.

Rupert Murdoch was a boy and a teenager in the era of Hearst and Beaverbrook, and these examples of press power and influence cannot have escaped him. If they did, he saw it on a smaller scale not close to home, but at home. His boyhood was built around accompanying his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, as he built the Herald and Weekly Times group into a dominant force in Australian publishing. He has told stories of sitting at his father’s feet while the old man negotiated this deal or that… how could it not occur to him that he had ahead of him an opportunity to exercise great influence?

Certainly, he absorbed many of his father’s thoughts. Only recently have we learned that the idea for the Australian was not Rupert’s, but his father’s. He explained to Paul Kelly in May that the idea of a national newspaper, able to explore the issues that united the nation, was his father’s dream. It was an impossible dream then, because technologies did not exist to allow daily distribution nationally and even if they had, the preoccupation with war and postwar recovery would have precluded it.

Even when Rupert did decide the time had come for a national paper, he was somewhat reckless. He would never have said it at the time, but I believe the Oz was founded more on a dream and hope than a proper analysis and assessment of prevailing markets. It was a leap of faith, a wild idea, a preposterous concept in so many ways that any self-respecting board would have kyboshed it before it was born. Only a headstrong young proprietor with his own skin in the game would have been reckless or rash enough to say, “Go.”

Compared with today, newspaper publishing in 1964 was a cumbersome and costly process. Reporters take their phones or tablets or laptops into the field today and their stories are captured on the first keystrokes. But in the early sixties as a copy boy I used to go with reporters to events like big sporting occasions and the reporter would type his copy; I would read it to a copy-taker in the office for the second set of keystrokes; the story would be subbed, then a linotype operator would apply a third set of keystrokes – and eventually it would appear in print, having gone through the compositors, the stereotype machines and the press crew. Today those first keystrokes can be manipulated on screen and produced as printing plates thousands of kilometres away.

In 1964 Rupert was convinced he could cobble together a national distribution system for one reason – that Maxwell Newton was already doing it on the Financial Review. Rupert reasoned if Fairfax could do it, he could do it too. He hired Max, then put his plan to his board. There was immediate pushback from the old-guard directors who regarded their job as keeping a steadying hand on the impulsive young man’s shoulders. They were the pillars of Adelaide’s conservative establishment – Sir Stanley Murray, Sir Ewen Waterman, Sir Edgar Bean – and their byword was prudence. They didn’t buy Rupert’s vision or adventurism… their job was to contain his boyish intemperance. But Rupert pushed hard and won approval – on the condition that this project didn’t put the whole company into loss. It very nearly did just that – the News Ltd profits in the year of the launch were $1.4 million on turnover of $21 million. The Oz lost $1.4 million in its first year – but it generated an extra $15 million turnover for the group. And, by the by, I have calculated that if you inflation-adjust all the Australian’s losses for the first twenty years they amount to more than $250 million, while the profitable years from 1985 to 2007 contributed around $300 million. The post–global financial crisis years, coupled with the double whammy of the online digital revolution, have led to renewed losses but overall the entire exercise has for all intents and purposes broken even. That’s in dollars – in influence, you’d have to do a whole set of different calculations.

But back to the start: Rupert’s project was conceived and developed in total secrecy, but typically, it was Rupert who let the cat out of the bag. He had decided, with Max Newton, that the new paper had to be based in Canberra, the nation’s capital. It would report Canberra to the nation, and the nation to Canberra. Its primary market would be Canberra and national distribution was almost an afterthought – something to be developed in time.

Rupert joked that he would run the Canberra Times out of town, but he was gazumped by the wily old Rupert Henderson, managing director of Fairfax, who took over and bulked up the Times. By the time Rupert Murdoch’s teams began canvassing the suburbs of Canberra for potential subscribers they found the Times deeply entrenched. They recognised that to succeed, the Australian would need a bigger market than Canberra could provide, both for circulation sales and advertising.

At an all-night planning session in Melbourne in March 1964 a plan was developed to edit and make up the paper in Canberra and fly the mattes – the cardboard impressions of the made-up type page – to Sydney and Melbourne for printing. Brisbane and Adelaide would be supplied by air. It was cumbersome and it was a great leap of faith that all the elements that could go wrong would not go wrong. They frequently did – especially in winter when fogs shut the Canberra airport regularly, provoking the need for madcap and dangerous drives rushing the mattes to Sydney along the goat track of the old Hume Highway, or to Cooma airport which was above the fogs. It was such a clunky system that the amazing thing is that it was tried at all.

The launch of the Australian was set for September. But costs mounted and mounted and one day in early July 1964 Rupert marched through the newsroom, clutching a bill for 7000 quid and declared he could take it no longer… he needed some revenue, so the launch would be brought forward. After just one full dummy run, the Australian would be born on 15 July, a Wednesday.

Can you imagine a board of crusty old conservative directors doing that? They wouldn’t have had the wit, the balls or the capacity to do it. Only a headstrong proprietor, helped along by the likes of Max Newton with all his enthusiasm and willingness to give it a go, could have called that shot and had the audacity to carry it through. Rupert had to fight his own directors and as the months passed, as the initial curiosity passed, and the costs rose and the losses mounted he had to continually ignore advice to give it all away. His senior editors on papers like the News in Adelaide begged him to stop the losses. Resentment around the company was built on the belief that Rupert was throwing away the fruits of their hard labours on this crazy project. He knew he had jumped prematurely into a space but he was determined to hold on to it at all costs.

The fact is that the Australian was launched at the wrong time in the wrong city. Two years later the distribution problems were largely overcome by the introduction of facsimile systems and the move to Sydney. Fax technology had been around since the twenties and was used extensively by the press to distribute wire photos, but it was never good enough to faithfully reproduce small type at the receiving end. The problem was overcome by the British Muirhead company when it developed a square light reader to replace the traditional round light reader, thus eliminating distortion.

Fax technology was hideously expensive to buy in those days but it delivered certainty for production schedules. But it wasn’t plain sailing – costs still far outweighed revenues and there was no end in sight for the bleeding. Circulations hovered around the 60,000-a-day level – far below theoretical break-even of 80,000 – but even when Adrian Deamer was able to get sales above 100,000 the costs of getting them there still left a big red hole in the accounts. I have no doubt that, but for one thing, the Australian would have died in the early seventies. It was sucking the life blood out of News Ltd’s finances and not only was the board worried – Rupert’s bankers were, too.

What saved the Oz in my view was Rupert’s audacious takeover of the News of the World in London. He saw an opportunity and he grabbed it. He convinced the Carr family, which held a majority shareholding in the venerable old muck-raker, with its predilection for stories about vicars in fishnet stockings, and its consequent sales of seven million a week – that he was a better ownership prospect than that terrible old bouncing Czech, Robert Maxwell. The Carrs received a stake in News Ltd and Rupert invaded Fleet Street, very quickly adding the Sun so his presses would have a seven-day operation. The Sun converted from a boring, unloved, union broadsheet into a rambunctious, cheeky tabloid and sales went through the roof. Soon, News International was throwing off millions of dollars a week – enough to support not only the Australian but, in due course, the Times as well. Those operations bankrolled Rupert’s great worldwide expansion into film, television – both free-to-air and subscription satellites services – books, inserts and online digital services.

This amazing story is well-known. Rupert Murdoch established himself a truly global media mogul and he became the most successful businessman Australia has ever produced. It is my contention that the amazing rise and rise of News Corp happened only because of the drive, the audacity, the cunning, the risk-taking and the skill of its proprietor. Can you imagine any board, preoccupied with weighing risk and protecting shareholders’ funds, going for this? Can you imagine the risk-averse Fred Hilmer [former CEO of Fairfax] ratcheting up the borrowings, betting the company on start-ups like the Australian, or BSkyB in Britain, or Fox News in the United States? Could you imagine Roger Corbett doing it at Fairfax? No. It was Rupert who drove his boards; it is he who created the culture of competition and winning that led to his greatest triumphs – and his greatest failures.

Perhaps I make it sound as if Rupert did it all himself. Not by any means. He hired smart people in the hope they would share his vision, but not all of them were resounding successes. Max Newton was a flamboyant and, it turned out, a deeply flawed individual whose brilliance was central to the early days of the Oz. But in those days Max was a warrior for free markets and Rupert was in the thrall of deputy prime minister John McEwen, the high priest of protectionism. The fact that the proprietor and the editor had diametrically opposing views meant it was inevitable there would be tears.

Rupert had learned the hard way that there could only be one boss. In 1960, he sacked his friend and mentor Rohan Rivett as editor of the News because Rivett wanted to go where Rupert didn’t. Newton left the Oz in less than a year. Walter Kommer brought stability, but not vigour and verve. Adrian Deamer unleashed new talents, new writers and new thinkers through his beautifully crafted pages, but while Rupert had originally positioned the Australian as a small-l liberal publication, he was changing his thinking in Britain. Beset by union problems – he fixed them later at Wapping – and growing in support of free-market policies, he thought Deamer wasn’t being tough enough in his calls for economic and workplace reforms. According to Deamer, Rupert told him he wasn’t producing the kind of paper he wanted. Deamer, reflecting the difficulties in understanding what his proprietor wanted when his views appeared to be in such a state of flux, said, “I don’t think you know what kind of paper you want,” to which Rupert replied, “That might be so, but I don’t want you editing it.” I think he came later to regret that because he once nominated Deamer as one of his best editors.

In those early years the Oz had a procession of editors – seventeen in the first twenty-five years. Rupert had the habit of briefing his new appointments about the kind of paper he wanted: he laid out the parameters and the policies and then, very largely, left them to get on with it. He has a reputation of being interfering – but that was not so, on a day-to-day basis. He was a visiting proprietor – the tension would ratchet up a notch or three when he came to town and he used to deliver critiques of the paper, which were often quite terrifying events. He would go through the paper, page after page, commenting on headlines, stories, pictures, placement, and he would invariably tear it – and us – apart. He would be ruthless in his criticisms and capable of leaving editors who thought they were tough as shaking wrecks. I’ve been through it more often than I care to remember, but I was always aware at the end of the process that he knew more about newspapers and journalism than I did. I wonder if that could be said about Fairfax’s chairman, Roger Corbett?

It was this hands-on approach that developed in his senior journalists the unique News culture. Put simply it is: Don’t be afraid. Don’t worry about playing it safe – playing it safe is the most dangerous place to be because it puts you in the middle and the middle is bland. The middle is death. You’ve got to be on the edge; to be competitive, you’ve got to stand out; you have to stand for something, be remembered for something, make people come back to you because they remember the stand you took on this issue or that.

There are risks in this, of course. There are risks that you can get it wrong. There are risks that some folk will be offended, and sometimes the offended ones are in a position to hurt you – by withdrawing advertising, or rewriting political rules or regulations to curb you. A board of directors would quiver at these risks, but not a proprietor like Rupert.

This approach may have had something to do with Rupert’s acknowledgement of his own fallibility. I have talked of Rupert’s successes but there were also failures. He once launched a business magazine that lasted, I think, three weeks. He launched a takeover of the Herald and Weekly Times in 1979 and was beaten off – at a handy profit, by the way. His overpriced purchases of US properties such as the TV Guide business led to the accumulation of far too much debt and he failed to ensure that it matured in a timely fashion, so when too much of it had to be repaid, he was not able to meet his obligations. That near-death experience, where the future of News Corp hung on the decision of a loans manager in an obscure Pittsburg bank owed a mere $10 million of the borrowed billions, clipped Rupert’s wings for a few years in the nineties while the underlying strength of his assets were brought to bear to bring a return to financial capacity. Then he was off again, expanding, expanding, expanding.

And then there was the phone hacking. No matter what glittering epitaph is proposed for Rupert Murdoch, it will inevitably be tarnished by the phone-hacking saga. No matter how his admirers spin his achievements, there will always be this great black cloud hanging over them.

I have mentioned the News Corp culture of risk-taking and competitiveness. No market in the world, with the possible exception of the old Sydney afternoon paper war between the Mirror and the Sun, is or was as intensely competitive as Fleet Street, or the British national press. I have no doubt that this drive to beat the opposition spawned the practice of phone hacking. Did Rupert know about it? In a way that is immaterial because he accepts – he has always accepted – that the buck stops with him. As a human being, you can understand the discomfort he has felt by being labelled the Dirty Digger and worse, or as he once said about the abuse and invective thrown at him during the takeover of the Wall Street Journal – “You’d think I was a genocidal tyrant” – but he has never complained. If the successes are his, the failures are his. It goes with the territory. He may not have hacked phones, but he led a company that did.

All this plays into the chapter of Rupert Murdoch’s life and career yet to be written. How will he be remembered when he is gone? What was his contribution, or otherwise, to the world? Was it positive or negative? Did he promote good or evil? When people look at his newspapers, will they see vicars in fishnet stockings or topless Page 3 girls, or will they see positives contributed by the Australian, the Times or the Wall Street Journal? Will they see The Simpsons or The X Files, or Titanic, or Avatar – and what will they make of that?

In my view Rupert Murdoch’s contribution to society has been both positive and immense. There are those that will say his products have pandered to the lowest common denominator – in other words, they have been popular. He learned very early that there was little profit in producing products that consumers did not want to buy. But he also balanced popular products, like the Mirror, or the Telegraph, or the London Sun, or the New York Post, with the serious and influential, like the Australian, the Times or the Journal. He demonstrated that he could walk and chew gum at the same time and along the way has provided a career for thousands of journalists, film and television producers, authors, scriptwriters and managers. There are Australians around the world in senior management positions inside and outside Rupert’s companies who would not have been able to make their marks without getting a start with News. It goes beyond just jobs – his family’s support for the arts, for medical research, for children’s health, has been legendary. Rupert used to say he made it so his mother could give it away.

I recognise that others will have a different view. If there has to be a reckoning between good and evil, I will say good and some of you will say evil. I’ll leave that question hanging for the simple reason that we are all entitled to our view and there is no definitive answer yet, but I return to my original point: the Australian exists in this fiftieth-anniversary week because Rupert was and is an old-fashioned proprietor, not afraid to follow his instincts and not afraid to take risks, and not afraid to fail. I don’t believe we will ever see that from the collective decisions of modern boards – just as I don’t believe we’ll see the likes of Keith Rupert Murdoch again. •

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Worldwide, tobacco consumption is still the largest preventable cause of premature mortality, accounting for an estimated six million deaths each year. Yet it continues to be vigorously promoted by a large, wealthy and well-connected lobby that opposes all regulatory measures. Despite the evidence, sections of the media still lend their support.

The power of the tobacco lobby makes Australia’s success in reducing tobacco consumption all the more remarkable. In 1970, around 37 per cent of people aged fifteen and over smoked cigarettes daily; despite tobacco’s addictive properties, that figure has fallen to around 16 per cent. The fall in per-capita tobacco consumption has been even more dramatic, and is now around a third of the 1970 level.

Achieving this reduction has involved three strands: public education, including anti-smoking advertisements, warning labels and public health programs; increases in cigarette prices via steady rises in tobacco excise; and legislation restricting advertising and limiting where tobacco products can be consumed. The advertising bans have been extended from the broadcast media to print advertising, and then to event sponsorship.

The latest measure – a world first – came when the Labor government, led by health minister Nicola Roxon, mandated that cigarettes could only be sold in uniform plain packaging, a move aimed at discouraging young people from taking up smoking. Introduced in December 2012, it was accompanied by a further increase in tobacco excise, new restrictions on online advertising, and an extra $27.8 million for anti-smoking campaigns. (Tim Wilson of the Institute of Public Affairs, which is reported to receive funding from the industry, claimed that taxpayers could spend up to $3 billion defending lawsuits launched by the companies to protect their intellectual property rights over packaging design. The sum at the moment is considerably closer to zero.)

This is where the Australian comes in. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, has always had a curious attachment to the tobacco industry. He was on the board of Philip Morris for a decade, and figures associated with that company have often served on News Corp’s board. Leaked Philip Morris documents have described Murdoch as sympathetic to the company’s position and labelled his newspapers, which rarely publish anti-smoking articles, “our natural allies.”

On 6 June this year, the front page of Murdoch’s local flagship, the Australian, was dominated by an “exclusive” report headlined, “Evidence ‘World’s Toughest Anti-Smoking Laws’ Not Working: Labor’s Plain Packaging Fails As Cigarette Sales Rise.” According to the paper’s Christian Kerr, “Labor’s nanny state push to kill off the country’s addiction to cigarettes with plain packaging has backfired, with new sales figures showing tobacco consumption growing during the first full year of the new laws.”

The paper’s editorial writers and columnists contributed their views in this and subsequent editions. “Suck it up nanny,” began that day’s editorial, “plain cigarette packs have not cut smoking.” “The nannies are panicking,” wrote columnist Judith Sloan, with a swipe at “Head Nanny, Nicola Roxon.” In case we’d missed the point, Henry Ergas observed that “not every nanny encourages her charges to take up alcohol and tobacco, but then again not every health minister is like Nicola Roxon.”

The one piece of evidence in Christian Kerr’s article was an Australian survey commissioned by the tobacco industry, which it planned to use in lobbying against the introduction of plain packaging laws in Britain. The provenance of the data is worrying enough, but worse is the fact that only selected snippets of the survey report were made available, making it difficult to judge the overall worth and meaning of its findings. Except for a single-paragraph comment from the Labor shadow minister, Kerr’s entire article pointed in the one direction, that the policy was having no effect. The owner of a convenience store, for example, was quoted, but no public health experts were called on for their views. A later story reported the declaration by a “proud” Brisbane smoker that the policy had had no effect on her.

The newspaper didn’t bother to check its industry figures against any official data, but others soon did. A leading economic analyst, Stephen Koukoulas, challenged the story using Australian Bureau of Statistics national accounts figures that indicated a decline in smoking during the calendar year 2013.

A much bigger reaction followed Paul Barry’s dissection of the Australian’s coverage on ABC TV’s Media Watch on 16 June. Skewered yet again by its arch enemy, the Australian reacted vigorously. It ran five stories on the topic the following Wednesday. Then, over the subsequent week or so, came two editorials, a couple of references in “Cut and Paste,” and several news stories and commentary columns. All this attention clearly reflected bruised editorial egos rather than audience interest, and offered a guide to how the Australian reacts when it’s under pressure.

Everyone else is acting in bad faith. The Australian often attributes unworthy motives to its critics – claiming, in this case, that the ABC was trying “to silence debate on cigarette plain packaging.” Its notorious “Cut and Paste” column is often devoted to finding critics’ past inconsistencies or insinuating impropriety or conflicts of interest.

Legal affairs editor Chris Merritt criticised Media Watch for not disclosing that Stephen Koukoulas had worked on Julia Gillard’s staff for ten months and for quoting Professor Mike Daube, director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, who had been a member of the government panel that recommended plain packaging laws. Daube is an eminent authority on public health – that’s why he was on the panel – and Koukoulas was a senior economist with Treasury for many years. The paper didn’t indicate that two of its own staff working on the story – Christian Kerr and Adam Creighton – had worked for the Liberal Party, and that one of its experts, Sinclair Davidson, has links to the Institute for Public Affairs, which is supported by the tobacco industry.

There is no need to give equal space to competing views. “We will decide who is quoted in this paper and the conditions under which they are quoted” might well be the Australian’s editorial credo. Witness Mike Daube’s experience. According to Mike Seccombe’s account in the Saturday Paper, Daube was amazed that a reporter from the paper came unannounced to his office and demanded he comment on data they refused to show him. In its response to Media Watch, the paper all but called him a Labor apparatchik. Then it refused to run the response he had written – a letter of approximately 400 words – unless he cut it to 150 words.

Data needn’t be presented in a coherent way. The Australian wheeled out its three favourite academics – Judith Sloan, Henry Ergas and Sinclair Davidson – in its defence. All three got the basic facts wrong. “I have no doubt that the consumption of cigarettes has risen since plain packaging was introduced; we just can’t be sure whether it is by existing smokers or new smokers,” Davidson asserted. Sloan repeated the claim. Ergas asserted that “Australian Bureau of Statistics data show tobacco consumption increased by 2.5 per cent in volume terms in the year immediately after the introduction of plain packaging.”

The statistical evidence is fairly clear, and in the other direction. ABS National Accounts data show expenditure on cigarettes declining. According to Media Watch, the industry admits that the number of smokers fell in 2013 by 1.4 per cent and the number of cigarettes smoked per person also fell by 1.4 per cent. Later, Treasury contributed its data to the debate, advising that “tobacco clearances” fell by 3.4 per cent in 2013 compared with 2012. “Clearances,” says Treasury, “are an indicator of tobacco volumes in the Australian market.”

The one exception to this consistent picture of declining consumption – and the one that the newspaper’s commentators have seized on without giving its context – is a spike in the last quarter of 2012. This was almost certainly due to retailers and some customers anticipating the large excise rise scheduled for December. Predictably this short-term increase was followed by a large decrease in the next quarter.

The other figure quoted in several reports indicates a trend towards increased sales at the bottom end of the market. But this is not inconsistent with a decline in aggregate sales. Cheaper cigarettes command a larger share of a shrinking market. Their growth has been more than cancelled out by the decline in the more premium brands, no doubt to the chagrin of the tobacco companies.

So, the Australian’s writers based their commentary on a false reading of the data. Ergas devoted much attention to how “basic economics” showed that the policy could have the perverse consequence of increasing the number of young smokers because of declining prices. Whatever his theory might say, the data says something quite different. Sloan and Ergas imagine that “diehard supporters” are “generating excuses more rapidly than you can say ‘the parrot is resting’” (Ergas) or that, “like kids who haven’t done their homework, the excuses are coming thick and fast” (Sloan). Rather than offering excuses for unwelcome facts, though, the critics were saying the Australian had its facts wrong.

The paper’s commentators also made grander claims. Ergas appreciates the intimate bond between smokers and their cigarette packets: “Consumers are harmed, as the quality of a product they value is forcibly degraded.” Davidson saw a human rights dimension in “the illegitimacy of state-sponsored persecution of that minority who consume tobacco.”

When official figures were mentioned, it was principally to dispute them (“ABS Not the Final Word on Smoking” was one headline). Davidson criticised Koukoulas for a “naive reliance” on ABS statistics, and noted that ABS data are “subject to revision.” There were claims that the official figures are missing a rise in illegal sales and special deals by retailers. The Australian’s attempt to have the final word was symptomatic: “Cigarette-makers Question New Data” quoted two tobacco company officials, and no one else, discussing the Treasury statistics.

The author of that piece, the paper’s economics correspondent Adam Creighton, had begun an unacknowledged and less than satisfying retreat a few days earlier. The ABS data, he wrote, “do not discredit the Australian’s claim the policy might have contributed to rising sales of cigarettes.” But there had been no “might” in headlines like “Plain Fact: More People Smoking” or “Labor’s Plain Packaging Fails As Cigarette Sales Rise.” Creighton still argued that “as of now there is no evidence to refute the industry’s claims of a rise in the number of cigarettes being smoked…”

What would readers relying solely on the Australian know after all this? They would not have a clear idea of what the paper’s critics had been saying, or why they were saying it. They would not know that the Australian Medical Association and the Cancer Council had criticised the paper’s coverage as misleading. They would probably think that tobacco consumption had increased rather than decreased. They would not have had a clear and unvarnished account of the official statistics, or where the weight of the evidence lies.

The Australian celebrates its fiftieth anniversary next week. It’s hard not to think that the paper would have covered the tobacco story more competently in 1964 than it did last month. •

The post Wacky backy appeared first on Inside Story.

David Bowman’s first inkling of the tidal wave about to strike Canberra was a chance encounter at Parliament House in late February 1964. Bowman, editor of the Canberra Times for the past eighteen months, had accompanied the paper’s chairman to a reception in King’s Hall to celebrate the opening of parliament.

“There were six or eight of us in a small group,” he recalls. “Rupert Murdoch was there. Arthur Shakespeare, our chairman, was there. I was there. Silence fell — one of those awkward silences — and Shakespeare turned to Murdoch and said abruptly, ‘What are you going to do with that land in Mort Street?’” Murdoch, Shakespeare knew, had bought a block in the same street as the Canberra Times. “Rupert paused for a moment, and then said, ‘Run you out of business!’” Everybody laughed, says Bowman, but there was no doubt that the comment was double-edged.

Double-edged in more ways than one, as it turned out. Not much more than a year later it was Murdoch’s new paper, the Australian, that came close to going out of business. Just nine months after the first edition, with one editor already dispatched, Murdoch told senior staff that the News Ltd board had decided to close the fledgling daily. The attempt to take over or kill off the Canberra Times had dealt a near-fatal blow to Murdoch’s longer-term strategy.

Arthur Shakespeare had been managing editor of the Canberra Times since his father established the paper in 1926. “A short, trim man in whom there is a mixture of toughness and sentimentality,” in the words of the fortnightly magazine Nation, he ran a tight operation — so tight that one journalist later described the paper’s headquarters as a sweatshop. Ian Mathews, a future editor of the paper, told a National Library interviewer that conditions at the Times in the early 1960s were “incredibly bad, in terms of accommodation and the hours one worked.” But he loved working with David Bowman and quickly grew to enjoy “the enormous difficulties of producing that paper under those conditions.”

In combination with Canberra’s accelerating population growth, Shakespeare’s frugality had boosted the paper’s annual profits to a healthy £80,000 by the late 1950s. Now he feared that the paper’s river of advertising revenue would prove too tempting for the big newspaper proprietors in Sydney and Melbourne. He also worried that the next generation of Shakespeares was too thin on the ground to keep the business going as a family affair. Six Shakespeares had worked on the paper more or less simultaneously over the decades, covering everything from advertising sales to linotyping. Facing a shortage of willing sons and nephews, the chairman laid plans to keep the Canberra Times in friendly hands.

“We have thought that the most desirable course for us to pursue,” he wrote to the managing director of John Fairfax Ltd, Rupert Henderson, in 1958, “would be to reach an understanding which will ensure that in the place of family succession this newspaper would be in hands which would uphold it always as a useful organ of public opinion at the federal capital.” Beneath the letter’s elaborate formality was a clear message: only Fairfax was acceptable as a new owner of the Canberra Times, and if any other proprietor made an offer or threatened to launch a competitor, the publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald would be called in to help.

“Henderson filed this letter away carefully,” writes Gavin Souter in his history of Fairfax, Company of Heralds, “and on more than one subsequent occasion asked his secretary to bring it to him so that he would know it was safe.”

The agreement was extended and formalised in April 1963. Fairfax bought one-eighth of the shares in the Shakespeares’ operating company and took an option to buy the rest in 1967. More importantly, it was agreed that an early takeover would be triggered if a strong competitor entered the market — and Rupert Murdoch, only thirty-two years old but already a force in Adelaide and Sydney, certainly met that criterion.

If Shakespeare’s secret weapon was Fairfax, then Fairfax’s was John Douglas Pringle, the man Henderson sent to Canberra to turn the Canberra Times from a provincial tabloid into a metropolitan broadsheet.

Scottish-born Pringle had edited the Sydney Morning Herald from 1952 to 1957 after being coaxed to Australia from Britain, where he’d worked on the Manchester Guardian and the Times. Back in London and working for the Observer — but missing, he later wrote, “the hot sun, the brilliant light, the crackle and glitter of the Australian bush, the warm, aromatic air and starlit nights” — he’d had another visit from Henderson. Would he be interested in coming back to Australia to edit a national weekly in Sydney or a national daily in Canberra? And, while these projects were being developed, would he host a current affairs program on Fairfax’s Channel 7?

These offers, expressed with Henderson’s usual “immense enthusiasm and personality,” seemed exciting enough to justify a return to Australia. Pringle resigned from the Observer, packed up his family and sailed to Sydney in late 1963. He then spent a frustrating few months hosting Seven Days, an under-resourced rival of the ABC’s Four Corners. (“I discovered, slightly to my surprise, that I was no good on television,” he confesses in his memoir Have Pen: Will Travel.) And then, in early 1964, he was summoned to Henderson’s office and presented with the job of saving the Canberra Times.

“Mr Henderson, who was an ebullient man, several times announced that the Canberra Times was to be a ‘national paper,’” recalled Pringle. “This was not strictly accurate… Our aim was to make the Canberra Times a paper which served the federal capital in the same way that the Washington Post served Washington.” The hope was that the paper would grow with the city “and eventually acquire a national importance.”

In Canberra, David Bowman was surprised to find that he didn’t need to look for a new job. He would still be editor, with Pringle taking Shakespeare’s old title of managing editor. “This was a reflection of Pringle, who was very sensitive about these things,” Bowman says. “He handled people well — he was really a man you could follow.”

The admiration soon became mutual. Bowman was “a journalist of far greater technical skill than I and a young man of extraordinary drive and energy,” wrote Pringle. “He would be sitting at his desk when I arrived at eleven in the morning and would still be there, subbing copy, reading proofs, making up pages, when I left in the bitter frost of a winter’s night at one or two the next morning. Heaven knows when he went home.”

Pringle wasn’t the only new arrival. “For the first time,” writes George Munster in his biography of Rupert Murdoch, A Paper Prince, “the Canberra Times had a news editor, a features editor, a political correspondent, an economics writer and a chief subeditor.” They set about remaking the paper for what might well be a fight to the death.

Rupert Murdoch had already acquired a reputation for audacity, but the Australian was his biggest gamble yet. The launch of the paper was announced in April, a few weeks after he had tried to persuade Shakespeare to sell him the Canberra Times. Murdoch was “not greatly troubled” by Shakespeare’s refusal, Fairfax’s general manager Angus McLachlan recalled, because he believed that “under the active competition of the Australian, the Canberra Times would either go out of business or fall into his hands.”

The publicity machine was already ticking over. A generously illustrated hardcover booklet, circulated to potential advertisers, described the Australian as “the most exciting development in the newspaper world in many years.” More ominously for the Canberra Times, it promised that the new paper would serve Canberra readers “on a scale and at a level of quality never previously attempted in this country.”

The Australian would be edited, assembled and printed in the national capital, with copies sent interstate by truck and plane. Large bureaus in the main capitals would supply state news, with international stories coming mainly from the wire services of major English-language papers around the world. (“At least a quarter of a million words a week of cable matter will flow into the Australian’s Canberra editorial offices,” confided the promotional booklet.) Among its journalists, “the policy and aspirations of the Australian called for the highest collective calibre ever attempted in Australia… a new kind of elite force.” If the reality matched the sales pitch, the Australian would be a triumph.

Reality was moving in a different direction. On 1 May, a few weeks after the booklet began circulating, Shakespeare and Henderson dropped their first front-page bombshell. “The whole of the share capital of the Federal Capital Press of Australia Pty Limited, publishers of the Canberra Times, has been bought by John Fairfax Limited,” said the announcement. “The Canberra Times will be developed as a national newspaper based on Canberra as Australia’s capital… Mr Arthur Shakespeare, a son of the founder of the Canberra Times and the present chairman and managing editor, will remain as chairman.”

Murdoch immediately modified his plans. The Australian would launch far sooner than anticipated, and would now be pitched at the major capital cities rather than primarily being a Canberra paper with a national circulation. It would still be edited in Canberra, but only the local copies would be printed there. Printing matrices would be flown to presses in Sydney and Melbourne by chartered plane, and the content of the largest state editions — and, especially, the Canberra edition — modified when necessary to suit the local market.

The linotype room at 18 Mort Street, where Arthur Shakespeare’s brother Jack would help out in the early 1960s. Canberra Times

The second jolt for the creators of the Australian came on 1 July, when the Canberra Times converted from tabloid to broadsheet. Two stories dominated the spacious new front page — Indonesia’s konfrontasi with Malaysia, and the fast-rising price of land in Canberra. The weather forecast predicted “rather cold” weather with occasional showers.

“Today,” wrote Shakespeare in a letter to readers, “the Canberra Times appears in a new shape and new size. Our readers will want to know why this is necessary and whether it foreshadows other, and more fundamental, changes in its policy and character.” He answered the second question first: “The Canberra Times will remain the same independent, responsible and wholesome newspaper that it has always been, tied to no party or interest, avoiding sensation and scandal, dedicated to the pledge which remains at our ‘masthead’ — To serve the National City and through it the Nation.”

On the first question, Shakespeare observed that any newspaper must adjust its “form and content” to match the times. “New writers, new features, a wider coverage of news, more authoritative comment” almost inevitably called for bigger pages. He concluded with a flourish: “Big or small, tabloid or broadsheet, the Canberra Times will continue to serve the capital city as honestly and faithfully as it has done in its first thirty-eight years.”

Although Nation contributor Ken Inglis initially felt that the early broadsheet editions looked “no more professional than the old paper” (“It was a hell of a rushed job,” says Bowman), by the middle of the month it was, he wrote, “looking a little more comfortable in its broadsheet pages” and its photos were less “muddy.” Angus McLachlan, watching from Sydney, was more impressed. Pringle and Bowman had applied “tremendous zest, working almost unbelievable hours,” to create “an attractive quality newspaper,” he later wrote. Even more impressed, in retrospect at least, was Rupert Murdoch. “It was a remarkable achievement. And a pretty rough welcome for us,” he told biographer William Shawcross a quarter of a century later.

Overnight, the paper’s circulation in Canberra and beyond increased by 2000, to more than 20,000. In a town with fewer than 20,000 households it was a remarkable achievement.

And so, in mid July 1964, the four characters who would play key roles in what Pringle called a “ferocious” newspaper battle were on stage and ready for the drama to begin.

At 18 Mort Street, Pringle and Bowman were working amicably together, backed by a significantly larger staff than the Canberra Times had ever fielded before. Space was so short in the newly renovated building that the two editors were sharing an office, their desks at right angles to one another. Ian Mathews recalls addressing editorial questions to a point midway between the two of them.

At 42 Mort Street, where the Australian’s new premises were still being built while its large local and interstate staff were at work on the first edition, relations between the two leading figures, Murdoch and the man he had chosen as editor, Maxwell Newton, were less harmonious. Newton had joined the new project from Fairfax, where he had been editor of the Australian Financial Review during its transition to a daily, and had brought with him a small group of talented journalists unhappy with Fairfax management.

A “big, thick-haired, gap-toothed, raucous-voiced young man with the kind of vitality that reminded some people of the young Frank Packer,” as Gavin Souter describes him, Newton is among the more puzzling figures in Australian journalism. (His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography is subtitled “journalist, editor, publisher and brothel owner.”) At the Financial Review, first as a weekly, then a biweekly, then a daily paper, he had reshaped business reporting by employing university-educated journalists, linking the coverage of business, economics and politics in new ways, and encouraging direct, vivid language in headlines and reporting. (The brothels came much later, after a series of personal and business failures.)

Although Newton had been meeting secretly with Murdoch for some time, the trigger for his resignation from Fairfax was the intervention of the chairman, Warwick Fairfax, in editorial policy, especially to promote the interests of Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies. (According to Newton, Rupert Henderson responded to the news that Newton was leaving Fairfax with the words, “If I had a heart, you would have broken it.”)

On paper, the relationship between the proprietor and the editor of the Australian seems doomed from the start, especially given Murdoch’s hands-on style. “Newton was a free trader and a supporter of the Vietnam War; Murdoch was then a protectionist who opposed the war and favoured what Newton saw as other ‘Left-Liberal causes,’” writes Murray Goot in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. “Newton wanted a paper that attracted an elite readership and charged high advertising rates; Murdoch, who had not planned for a national paper and was desperate to stem its losses, was more at home with what Newton saw as ‘vulgar journalism.’ Above all, Murdoch ‘constantly interfered editorially.’”

Strangely, Murdoch appeared to have no coherent vision of what kind of paper the Australian would be. As one of his senior journalists, Guy Morrison, told media historian Denis Cryle in 2002, “I didn’t really think he had devoted enough thought, planning and proper examination and discussion with the right people to make it viable from the start.” For a contributor to the quarterly journal Dissent, Alan McConnell, the problem was an attitude of reckless optimism: “The assumption, particularly by Mr Newton and Mr Murdoch, seemed to be that it was quite an easy thing to establish a ‘quality’ paper if only you had youth and enthusiasm.”

The haste isn’t altogether surprising. Murdoch had been forced by the Canberra Times to abandon his plan to establish a monopoly in Canberra before taking on the rest of the country, and to accelerate preparations for the launch. “We never thought of pulling the plug,” he told Shawcross. “We just said, ‘Well, we’ll have to go national right away.’”

On Wednesday 15 July 1964, a fortnight after the Canberra Times went broadsheet, the first edition of the Australian rolled off the presses. It was a cold, gusty day in the national capital, and the reception for this and subsequent editions was mild to warm.

“The Australian is, first of all, a clean and handsome thing to look at,” wrote Ken Inglis in Nation. “Not all the news pages have the ‘elegant appearance’ we had been led to hope for; but compared with those of every other Australian newspaper they are, as promised, ‘uncluttered.’ The double-page carrying editorials, cartoon and features seems to me simply beautiful: a few square feet of black and white fit to place alongside the best-designed newspapers of our language and time — the Guardian, say, or the Observer, or the New York Herald Tribune.

“The prose is less elegant than the layout,” Inglis continued. “Contributions by such writers as Robin Boyd, Jock Marshall, Kenneth Hince and Edgar Waters read as if the layout were designed for them; some other pieces, signed and unsigned, sit there less happily.” Overseas news was given more space than in any of the other main metropolitan papers, and the sports pages were tailored for different states.

George Munster, writing in his 1985 biography of Murdoch, is more acerbic. The first edition was “a hotch-potch,” he writes, and the editorial in the first issue was right to confess that “we are growing up. But we have manifestly not achieved maturity.”

The biggest disappointment was page three, which signalled a failure of nerve on Murdoch’s part. Inglis was appalled to discover a horoscope: “Here, in a newspaper candidly designed for the best-educated part of the population, was a daily dose of the most mindless of superstitions.” And what, he wondered, was the point of the rest of the page, which was billed as the Peter Brennan Page, “the column that goes round the world’s lighter side”? “It appears to be a copy of the ‘William Hickey’ page of the London Daily Express,” said Inglis, “a section of crisp, trivial and often malicious gossip.”

For both Munster and Inglis, the Saturday edition would be where the Australian really shone. The weekend features section, Inglis wrote, “looks better, ranges more widely, and is written with a more even competence, than the comparable section of any other Australian paper.” “Through the rough times ahead,” says Munster, “the Saturday edition would be widely read and would pull up the average sales.”

For the editors and journalists anxiously watching from further up Mort Street, it was the Australian’s eight extra pages of Canberra news that were particularly worrying. Bowman had seen a copy of the first edition of the new paper before he’d gone home the night before. “It was two or three o’clock in the morning, I suppose. When I pored over it to get some measure of it, I felt that we were being outgunned.”

For Inglis, though, the Australian seemed “not quite as efficient” on local matters. The Canberra Times was running many more columns of classified advertisements, “which serve an urban community as a people’s market,” and “printing rather more hard news about the city’s affairs.” The photographs appear to have lost more of their muddiness too.

Pringle’s experience writing editorials on foreign affairs back in Britain soon became an enormous asset for the Canberra paper. “It was absolutely incredible,” recalled Ian Mathews, “to see the way in which Pringle could grasp matters of international and national importance and immediately write a comment which was so apposite that you would find it being quoted back a few days later — whether it was by Australian Associated Press or by other newspapers. He really was, I found, a most incredible operator.”

Nevertheless, the circulation of the Canberra Times fell by thousands of copies, mainly because the Australian was being delivered free to Canberra households for a month. “It was a hell of a drop for us,” says Bowman. “There was reason to wonder about our future.”

At 42 Mort Street, though, there were signs of trouble. “Murdoch, the ubiquitous shirt-sleeved presence, was an evening paper man, hungry for events translatable into headlines,” writes Munster. “Newton was a weekly commentator turned editor of a daily. They had spent months preparing a mix that didn’t blend.”

The differences between the two men weren’t the only problem. “There were nights when the charter planes could not take off at the fog-bound airport, the printing in Sydney and Melbourne accordingly ran late and readers saw their papers at around eleven in the morning,” writes Munster. Adrian Deamer, who became editor in 1966, recalled that Murdoch was reputed “to have come out one night in his pyjamas and his dressing gown, shouting at the pilot, ‘You can take off! You can take off!’ You know, the fog all around over there and Rupert saying… ‘Off you go!’”

For readers, there was plenty of evidence of the paper’s confused identity. “Day after day, in the first months especially,” wrote Alan McConnell, “sensational stories were chosen to lead the paper,” with the aim of making readers change their reading habits. “The trouble was that it was so badly done, with the headlines and introductory paragraphs not supported by the body of the article, or the whole story not worth the prominence it was given.”

The Australian’s circulation dropped after the free copies to Canberra readers stopped, so almost immediately Murdoch added an expanded liftout of local coverage to what it called its Canberra and Southern Edition, “the two papers having taken the skirmishing as far across the plains as Goulburn and as far up the mountains as Cooma.”

That observation is Ken Inglis’s, in a Nation article taking a second look at the paper in December. The Australian, he wrote, “is not, as a prospectus for it said that it would be, ‘one of the world’s great newspapers’; and it was probably wild of Mr Rupert Murdoch or anybody else to think that there could be such a thing in Australia.” He went on:

On Saturdays it seems to me quite clearly the best paper we have. During the week, if I lived in Brisbane or Adelaide or Hobart I would feel a daily surge of gratitude to Mr Murdoch for giving me an alternative to the stifling parochialism and ugly layout of my morning paper… If I lived in Sydney or Melbourne or Perth, my estimate of the Australian would depend on how it happened to be performing on any particular day; for its quality as a provider of news varies much more than its readers were led to expect.

Inglis had encouraging words for the team at 18 Mort Street. “For my fourpence,” he wrote, “the Times still gives the better coverage of local news. In the few cases where I happen to have been able to check reports from my own knowledge, the Times has been on the whole more accurate. The Australian seems to miss more things than the Times.”

Readers, meanwhile, were voting with their pennies, reports Munster. The Australian’s circulation had averaged nearly 74,000 in the first fortnight of publication; by November, after Canberra households stopped receiving free copies, the figure was below 52,000. Murdoch was losing money at an alarming rate, and a pattern of significant losses would persist for much of the next half-century.

The battle was taking its toll on Murdoch, who was living apart from his first wife and their daughter and working long hours. Visiting the city from Sydney six months after the launch, Fairfax’s Angus McLachlan dined with the young proprietor at his home. “He struck me as lonely and depressed,” McLachlan wrote in his diary.

But Fairfax was finding the battle draining too. In another diary entry, McLachlan reports talking to colleagues in Sydney about the “Canberra situation,” which “worries me because while [the] Australian keeps going I see little chance of reducing losses running at about £400 a week.” But the Times, after faltering, was starting to win back its pre-Australian circulation and adding to it.

“To me, those twelve months in Canberra are now a blur of endless labour,” recalled Pringle in Have Pen: Will Travel. Bowman, for his part, was enjoying himself immensely. “I thought there was no better place in heaven or earth than at the Canberra Times,” he told me recently. “Canberra really was a fascinating place in which to edit, or even work for, a newspaper. There was such variety. If you’re going to do it properly you’ve got to work bloody hard, of course, but the variety — parliament, the public service, a big university, the ACT Advisory Council… And all that was going on the Canberra ‘village,’ of course.”

The turning point came — not a minute too soon for Fairfax and the Times — in March, nine months after the battle had begun. Newton, feeling increasingly out of step with his proprietor, had sent Murdoch an ultimatum demanding more power and autonomy. Murdoch rejected it, and Newton was replaced as editor. “I was genuinely sorry to see him go,” wrote Pringle, who had given Newton his first job back at the Sydney Morning Herald in the mid 1950s, “but it was always pleasant to be on the winning side.”

Two weeks after the new editor, Walter Kommer, took over, Murdoch told him that the News Ltd board had decided to close the paper. Munster, who knew Murdoch socially during this period, writes: “Visiting Sydney, Murdoch called one night into a restaurant to catch a friend and, unusually distraught, confided that he might have to sell the Australian to someone like [the Canadian media owner] Roy Thomson, who was on the lookout for new properties.”

The crisis passed, but Murdoch was retrenching for the long haul. “Conflicting reports of Murdoch’s intentions in Canberra,” wrote McLachlan in his diary in June 1965, “but it seems certain he is to drop his Canberra edition of the Australian. Other reports are that the Australian is to become a national Sunday [paper] and that he is to put out a Canberra evening [paper]. I can’t see that would do much to reduce his losses.” McLachlan was planning a trip to Canberra the following day to see firsthand how Pringle and Bowman were faring.

Later that night came the news that Murdoch had dismissed sixteen staff and the Australian’s Canberra edition had been dumped. For McLachlan, there was no reason now to delay his plan — brewing since before he took over as managing director — to bring Pringle back to Sydney to restore the tarnished jewel in the Fairfax crown, the Sydney Morning Herald, which had never recovered from his departure in 1957.

The battle for Canberra came to a definitive end in March 1967. The Canberra Times’s circulation was now 23,000, mainly in the capital and nearby towns. The Australian, distributed across the nation, was selling 46,000 copies all up, far fewer than its launch publicity had anticipated and well short of the Sydney Morning Herald’s 289,000.

Bowman heard the news of Murdoch’s next move from an unexpected source one Saturday afternoon.

“I was busy digging up something or other in our front garden in Deakin,” he recalls. “A car pulled up in the street and Max Newton got out. He said something like, ‘Well, the Oz has gone.’

“I said, ‘What do you mean?’

“And he said, ‘They’re going down to Sydney.’”

Bowman pauses for a moment, then laughs. “I couldn’t have been happier.” •

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RUPERT Murdoch’s Australian newspapers are not going gentle into that good night. Although their lamentable circulation performance suggests that grim days await them, their rage is undiminished. And the Australian has maintains a particular rage against its most enduring target, the ABC.

In recent weeks the paper has published almost twenty stories about the pay packages of prominent ABC broadcasters – packages that pale beside the remuneration rates seen as unremarkable among its commercial competitors. But that was just a prelude to its more intense coverage of the decision by the Guardian and ABC to publish leaked material revealing how Australian intelligence had tapped into the phones of, among others, Indonesia's President Yudhoyono and his wife.

The leaks provoked intense diplomatic tension between Australia and Indonesia, and commentators in the Australian were overwhelmingly of the view that they should not have been published by the ABC. With its usual percussive campaigning, the paper found many ways to hammer its theme of ABC irresponsibility. On Tuesday this week, for instance, the topic took up more than half the paper’s front page, and included a very long article claiming that “some” have claimed that ABC chief executive Mark Scott and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger are involved in a “bromance,” evidenced by the way that they are “praiseworthy of each other” – yes, “praiseworthy” – in private and public.

On Wednesday, the media in general, and the Australian in particular, reported the strong criticism of the ABC and its left-wing bias expressed at Tuesday’s meeting of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party. Among the variety of sanctions proposed was Senator Cory Bernardi’s suggestion that the internet publishing activities of the “taxpayer-funded behemoth” should be terminated.

The echoes of the Howard era are almost deafening. During the 1996 election campaign, the Coalition foreshadowed a public inquiry into commercial television and promised to maintain the ABC’s funding levels. Once elected, it quietly abandoned the inquiry into commercial TV and then, citing the budget deficit, announced a major inquiry into the ABC, with its main term of reference the need for the national broadcaster to adapt to a reduced budget. What the head of the inquiry, Bob Mansfield, discovered was the strength of public affection for the ABC. In the end, he recommended cuts to international broadcasting (which would not offend substantial domestic constituencies) and changes to how the broadcaster managed its properties, a recommendation that was thankfully ignored.

With its public harassment and its appointment to the ABC board of ideologues who lacked any sympathy for the national broadcaster’s mandate, the Howard government inflicted considerable damage. A funding squeeze meant that the ABC’s budgets declined relative to its major commercial competitors. But the strong public regard for the ABC that Mansfield had discovered was its major protection against stronger frontal attacks.

If the contrast between vocal opinion (as represented by conservative Liberals, News Corp newspapers and commercial talk-radio announcers) and public opinion was wide in 1996, it is almost unbridgeable now. To get a sense of how out-of-step the ABC’s loudest critics are, it’s useful to begin by looking at public opinion about the media as a whole.

The Australian Election Survey, conducted after the 2010 election, asked respondents to express their degree of confidence in thirteen different groups and institutions. The armed forces came top, with 91 per cent expressing either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. Perhaps surprisingly, universities came next, at 80 per cent. The two institutions at the bottom were television (23 per cent) and, still lower, the press (17 per cent).

Although opinion polls show great variation depending on the phrasing of survey questions, the general theme is scepticism about the media’s performance. In May 2011, for instance, Essential Media – which now polls regularly on this issue – found that only 35 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that the media usually report the news accurately, while 54 per cent disagreed. On the question of whether the media usually report all sides of a story, the split was an even more unfavourable 21–69. On their capacity to hold politicians accountable, the media did better, almost evenly split 45–43.

Sometimes public regard for the media is even lower than might be imagined. Following the Abbott government’s travel rorts scandals in October, Essential asked respondents to rate ten industries and organisations as either “extremely corrupt,” subject to “some corruption,” or “not at all corrupt.” The media topped the list with a 34 per cent “extremely corrupt” rating, just ahead of government, on 32 per cent, and building and construction, on 25 per cent.

Contrasts in attitudes to individual news organisations are equally interesting. In a 2010 online survey conducted by Polimetrix, which I designed with David Rowe and Paul Jones, respondents were asked to rate ten different groups and organisations on a “feeling thermometer,” with a higher rating indicating more favourable feelings. The ABC rated highest, with a mean of 6.7, and commercial TV coming second, on 6.0, ahead of the two major political parties Labor and Liberal on 5.0. News Limited newspapers rated 4.8 and commercial talkback radio 4.7, both well ahead of the bottom-rating group, asylum seekers, on 3.4.

When Essential asked respondents to rate their trust in sixteen institutions and organisations in March 2013, the High Court rated highest at 74 per cent; the ABC came second, at 70 per cent, ahead of the Reserve Bank (64 per cent) and charitable organisations (52 per cent). The TV news media came in ninth, at 30 per cent, and newspapers were eleventh, at 27 per cent. The same question had been asked two years in a row, and the ABC’s rating has been heading up, while TV news and newspapers remained broadly flat.

In August, Essential posed a more focused question about trust in media coverage of the 2013 election. Contrasting those who had a lot and some trust, with those who had not much trust and no trust at all, ABC TV ranked highest with a 58–17 ratio, while commercial TV had a 29–53 ratio. Among newspapers (according to respondents in the relevant state for each title), the Age had the best ratio (42–34) and the Sydney Morning Herald ranked second (39–37). The Australian split evenly (31–31), while the Murdoch tabloids were well into net negative ratings – the Herald Sun 30–51; Daily Telegraph 25–49 and Courier Mail 23–41.

Essential had carried out a similar survey in July 2011, but had only asked people to rate newspapers they regularly read. All came out on the positive side of the ledger, but there was quite a hierarchy: the Age was at the top (79 per cent of its readers expressing trust; 18 per cent distrust); then the Sydney Morning Herald (74–25); the Australian (69–27); the Courier-Mail (65–34); the Herald Sun (54–44) and last the Daily Telegraph (52–46). Among these respondents, in other words, almost half of its own readers didn’t consider the Telegraph trustworthy.

The generally high regard for the ABC carries over into support on particular policy questions. For example, in our 2010 Polimetrix survey, 80 per cent thought that in the modern world public broadcasting was still important, with only 6 per cent thinking its time had passed. In June 2013, an Essential Poll found a clear majority (57–15) opposing privatisation of the ABC and SBS. In October 2012, Essential reported that 34 per cent thought the ABC should receive more funding, with another 32 per cent considering current levels about right and only 17 per cent believing it should receive less funding.

A consistent – indeed a stark – picture emerges from this polling data, but it is not one you are likely to see highlighted in the Australian. The public has little confidence in the news media as a whole, and the ABC is, overwhelmingly, the most trusted and respected media institution in the country. •

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EXACTLY sixty years ago, at just twenty-two years of age, Rupert Murdoch joined the board of the Adelaide-based newspaper company, News Limited, and set about creating first one powerful media company, and more recently two, in which he continues to play central roles. Murdoch has been in charge of News almost as long as Elizabeth II has been on the throne, and his sixty-year stint as director might well be a world record. With a personal fortune of $11.2 billion, he is now the ninety-first ranked billionaire on the planet.

Murdoch didn’t immediately assume executive power at News Limited, but he quickly began exercising control of the company he’d inherited following the death of his father, Sir Keith. By the end of 1954, according to Sir Norman Young, a News Limited director at the time, his dominance of the board was complete. Five years later, writes Young in his memoirs, Rupert displayed good business ability but also “a touch of arrogance.” He was reluctant to work in committee style, and wanted “good henchmen who would obey his orders on major issues without question.”

From the beginning, Murdoch was intent on expanding. His most important early move beyond Adelaide was to purchase the Sydney Daily Mirror. In fierce competition with Fairfax’s Sun, this racy afternoon paper helped Murdoch hone his tabloid skills and marketing strategies. In 1964 he began the national daily, the Australian, which aimed for the opposite end of the market, immediately lifted the standard of Australian journalism, and yet struggled to make a profit.

Although he continued to expand in Australia, from 1968 Murdoch’s main action was in England. That year, he bought the News of the World, the highest-selling Sunday newspaper in the English-speaking world, and the following year he launched a new tabloid daily, the Sun, whose success was the basis for all his future expansion. Supplemented by clever marketing and television advertising, the Sun beat the other English tabloids at their own sensationalist game. In less than a decade it had become the biggest-selling daily in Britain, a position it has held ever since.

In 1973, aged forty-two, he made his home in New York, which has been his headquarters almost continuously since. His most important acquisition there was the New York Post, which he sought to remodel along the lines of the London Sun, improving its circulation somewhat, arousing more controversy – a “force for evil,” thought the Columbia Journalism Review – but never making a profit.

In 1981, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, he bought the London Times. Until this time he had been mainly concerned with newspapers, and the crude political bias of his newspaper campaigns and the sensationalism of his tabloids had already created more controversy than any other contemporary media mogul. If Murdoch had retired at that point, however, his career would have been considered a great business success.

But his most tumultuous and manic decade, in a business sense, was just beginning. During his fifties the centre of gravity of his business operations moved decisively from Britain and Australia to the United States and from print into television and film. Having become an American citizen in 1985, he started a fourth TV network to challenge the three established American networks, and acquired the Twentieth Century Fox film studios.

But while Murdoch’s moves during this period could be called bold, that boldness several times crossed into recklessness. As the Australian Financial Review’s Neil Chenoweth has documented, in late 1990, just months before Murdoch’s sixtieth birthday, News had to reschedule a breathtaking $7.6 billion in loans from 146 institutions. If an amount of this magnitude had been owed to one bank, it is likely that Murdoch would have gone bust, or at least his empire would have been radically reduced. But the long-term value of his assets and the very complexity of his arrangements saved him. The banks entered into a new settlement that rescued him from this debt crisis.

Murdoch’s greatest successes in the 1990s, when he was in his sixties, were his ventures into subscription and especially satellite television, and particularly BSkyB in Britain and Star TV in Asia. Although he also made bold conquests in established media territories, it was in these new markets that he was a genuine visionary and gained first-mover advantages. He took great risks and reaped great rewards.

Characteristically, these deals were not without controversy. He shamelessly but vainly kowtowed before the Chinese government and traduced journalistic and publishing principles in an attempt to gain direct access to the Chinese market for his satellite services. Despite many missteps in trying to establish a satellite service in the United States, he finally secured DirecTV in 2003 – the culmination, he said, of a long-term effort to secure “the missing link in a global satellite television platform that will span four continents and encompass twenty-three million subscribers.”

Murdoch’s last great win against the odds was the creation of Fox News in 1996, which became a fusion of commercial success and political mission. Fox’s propagandistic approach to journalism has created much criticism and distrust, and produced many instances of what other organisations would consider professional disgrace. But the network has succeeded in attracting a small but sufficiently large audience to make its cheap operation – it invests much less in reporting than does its competitor CNN – extremely profitable, a few years ago earning around a fifth of Murdoch’s global profits.

It was on the fiftieth anniversary of his appointment to the News Limited board, in 2003, that Murdoch should have retired. DirecTV had been bought, Fox News was profitable, many of his film, TV and newspaper ventures were going well, and his business reputation was at a peak.

Since then, his business acumen has suffered a series of blows as a result of bad moves, retreats, and a failure to confront difficult challenges. He was forced to abandon his ambitions to conquer the Chinese market. Like many other media companies, he struggled to retain value in the age of the internet and has made some spectacularly bad moves, most notably buying MySpace for $580 million in 2003 and selling it for just $35 million in 2011. He disposed of DirecTV, so crucial to his aims for so long, principally to get his competitor John Malone to sell out his shares in News Corp, which were potentially blocking his own dynastic ambitions. It proved to be a good deal for Malone and a bad one for News Corp shareholders, as DirecTV has continued to thrive.

In 2007, he made one of the most spectacularly overpriced media acquisitions of all time when he bought the Wall Street Journal for $5.6 billion, only to write down its value by half in less than two years. Several of his newspapers are making record losses – most spectacularly the New York Post, which is said to be losing $100 million a year – with no end in sight.

Nor are these good times for Murdoch professionally and politically. His Australian newspapers are celebrating the election of Tony Abbott, which some of them, notably Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, campaigned for with as much bias as Murdoch’s papers showed when they opposed Gough Whitlam’s government in 1975. But what they displayed more than anything during that campaign was how little sense they have of either a business or professional strategy to meet the challenges of shrinking circulations.

In the United States, the current budget deadlock is very much a result of the Tea Party’s confrontational politics, a stance fostered and abetted by Fox News. This crisis of governance will put both the Tea Party and Fox News under critical scrutiny. While the Democrats are the most obvious casualty of Fox’s jaundiced journalism, moderate Republicans are also its victims, and its simplistic views have helped induce a crisis in American politics just as Murdoch reaches his milestone.

In Britain over the coming months, meanwhile, several former employees of News International will be facing criminal charges for phone hacking and bribery. These scandals have done enormous damage to the Murdoch brand, and could see trusted lieutenants go to jail. They are likely to make Murdoch’s sixty-first year as head of his empire an uncomfortable one, but it is unlikely that any of his senior managers will be telling him that he could best serve the company by retiring. •

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RECENTLY the world of newspapers has come to feel not merely unstable, but topsy-turvy. The fact that Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has bought the Washington Post has upended any faint hopes nostalgics still harboured about the ability of old media to withstand the new. “A digital pioneer is coming to the rescue of an analog institution,” a former CBS correspondent gushed in Forbes magazine. That’s one way of looking at it. The other is that the businessman who has made himself the suffering book industry’s favourite voodoo doll now fashions himself as the proprietor of a masthead that not too long ago represented the epitome of newspaper culture.

The Watergate scandal (1972–74) made the “Wash Post” and its heroic proprietor Katharine Graham exemplars of a core American ideal, capitalist enterprise in the service of democracy. The paper’s profitability and its journalism’s prestige were inextricably linked: revenue grew almost twentyfold during Graham’s stewardship. No wonder the Post became a touchstone for Australians working in the quality broadsheets in the Fairfax stable. In 1973, Graham Perkin, editor of the Melbourne Age, boasted of meeting Graham in Australia: “We had dinner with her again last night in Melbourne, and I have had lunch with her today. She may feel she has seen a little too much of me.” It meant a great deal to his colleagues that when Perkin died suddenly a few years later, the proprietor of the Post and the senior executive who had managed the paper’s Watergate coverage sent their personal condolences.

Now Graham herself is more than a decade dead, and the twentieth century she and Perkin represented is well and truly gone. It has been swept away by the fatal consequences of 11 September 2001; by the paroxysms of unpredictable, uncontrollable markets; and by intense, interrelated waves of technological and social change. We are deep into the era styled by Tim O’Reilly as Web 2.0, in which the internet has become a transparent platform that can deliver almost anything via a secure online financial transaction, and most of us have become little media producers, finally discovering the camera on our phones and more or less enthusiastically launching ourselves into social media space.

Bezos’s online bookstore, Amazon, was a creature of this era, in the space of twenty years turning itself from a much-mocked start-up to a business generating US$61 billion in revenue annually as the world’s largest online retailer. A significant slice of its profit has been made at the expense of traditional publishers and bricks-and-mortar bookshops around the world, thanks to Amazon’s aggressive price-cutting tactics, its development of an e-reader people actually enjoyed using, and, more recently, its successful move into e-publishing.

Bezos is a change agent. Though respectful of the Washington Post’s legacy (he is friends with the Graham family), he has been candid about the need to rethink the paper’s approach, given its sagging revenues in recent years: “The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers…” Forbes magazine speculated that this announcement could mean more e-content; editorial and salesforce salaries linked to page views and readership; and electronic coupons and “buy-it-now” capabilities, a direct connection between editorial and advertising content that would be anathema to traditional journalism’s values.

In short, the epoch-making qualities of Web 2.0 are hard to overstate. The speed and depth of the changes it has wrought – and particularly the public’s lightning embrace of mobile broadband once the third-generation network was introduced to the smartphone – were difficult to fully envisage. In this country alone, almost nine million citizens have acquired smartphones since they came onto the market five years ago; more than seven million use them to access updates that were once the province of newspapers, TV and radio: breaking news, weather forecasts, sport and finance.

IT IS therefore disconcerting, even disappointing, to open up two award-winning journalists’ accounts of the decline of Fairfax only to discover that they are business procedurals narrowly focused on the loss of the company’s “rivers of gold” – the classified advertising in its main titles, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. Neither book does more than gesture towards the fundamental technological and social changes that underpin the collapse of Fairfax’s business model; an approach that demonstrates the sort of tunnel vision of which the authors accuse their subjects. Ordinary newspaper readers are rarely mentioned in either account, unless they transformed themselves into “players.” Nor do rank-and-file journalists get much of a look-in, even though thousands of them were at the coalface during the ascendancy of online news, and are still struggling with the consequences of the most radical change to their work practices since the 1920s.

Colleen Ryan’s Fairfax: The Rise and Fall and Pamela Williams’s Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch and the Ultimate Revenge each set out to describe how Fairfax’s leaders fiddle-faddled while new media competitors stole the company’s most lucrative revenue streams from under its nose. As one of the smartest and first new players, Daniel Petre, told Ryan recently, “Eight billion dollars of market cap is now tied up in REA [realestate.com.au], Carsales and Seek. That has basically come out of Fairfax. And Fairfax is worth $1.3 billion. That is the scale of the tragedy.”

Ryan recounts the tragedy from the inside out, moving from a stock historical account of the Fairfax dynasty’s rise and fall to the boardroom battles of Fairfax in its post-dynastic phase since 1990. Whether a substantial regurgitation of the unhappy tale of an unwise princeling named young Warwick was required at this late date is doubtful, but nevertheless the author provides it.

Similarly, she guides us through yet another account of how a coterie of brilliant journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald, the Financial Review and the National Times managed to alienate powerful politicians and media rivals such as Kerry Packer. None of this will particularly surprise the loyal baby-boomers who have supported the Fairfax papers through thick and thin and who, presumably, are one of the key audiences for this book. Indeed, it may wear rather thin with many of them whose postcode starts with a 3; the Age functions in this narrative mainly as a counterpoint to the SMH, a laggard or, alternatively, a spur to action.

Pamela Williams tells the Fairfax story from the outside in, and from a more recent point of view, through the self-serving perspectives of James Packer, Lachlan Murdoch and a bunch of young, internet-savvy businessmen who had the vision to set up their own internet classifieds businesses early, and kept the faith despite the bursting of the tech stocks bubble in the early 2000s.

Two themes loom large in both books. First, there is the “lost decade” of Fred Hilmer, who was chief executive from 1998 to 2005, the formative years of Web 2.0. Hilmer should have done much more to translate the print classifieds business online, Ryan’s and Williams’s accounts agree, but he was stymied by infighting among his executives and a lack of insight into the news business. He established Fairfax’s digital arm, F2, but failed to – as they say – monetise it, pitching it towards directories. Fairfax did not apprehend how powerful internet search would become, rendering directories less desirable media properties (in that, the company was far from alone).

Crucially, Hilmer also lacked the instinctive grasp of personal contact that has defined generations of successful editors and media executives. (Graham Perkin was a past master of it.) If he wanted skin in the game, Hilmer should have gone himself to woo the young internet mavericks. Instead, he often sent a lieutenant. The team from Seek, who actually got a meeting with him, found Hilmer and his executives to be “very complacent.”

Second, there were the disastrous consequences of John B. Fairfax’s decision in 2006 to return to the fold by merging his own successful company, Rural Press, back into Fairfax. This union ended unhappily four years later, at huge cost to John B.: his family company’s stake, worth $1.16 billion in 2007, was driven down in value to $193 million. The last tycoon from the Fairfax stable emerges from both accounts as a clever but backwards-looking media mogul, driven to extract maximum value from slowly dying print assets.

Both Ryan and Williams have written the story of a company that lost its way partly because, in the vacuum left after the Fairfaxes departed, no single chairman, chief executive or board member had the vision, authority and longevity to meet the challenges of the new century. The stock market impatient and unforgiving, and too many board members had direct or indirect connections with other media interests that complicated their ability to show real leadership at Fairfax.

By contrast, James Packer emerges from Williams’s account as a businessman who knew instinctively that he had to invest in new media, even if he made some breathtaking mistakes along the way. Left a portfolio of assets worth up to $6.5 billion by his father, Kerry, he managed to blow a quarter of its value on bad casino investments in the course of the global financial crisis: “Of the roughly $2.3 billion in Australian dollars that he invested outside Australia,” Williams writes, “James Packer had lost $1.67 billion in less time than it took a new driver to get off P plates.” (Like the P-plater, the young Packer eventually graduated.)

Williams tells a doozy of a story about Packer and Gina Rinehart, who had once been shareholders at the same time in the Ten Network, meeting in early 2012 soon after she had bought a stake in Fairfax:

Over dinner, Rinehart put her cards on the table. She wanted Packer to join her as a shareholder and partner at Fairfax, where she owned almost 15 per cent of the company, and to help drive a huge cost-cutting operation aimed at reducing the staff of 11,000 employees by almost half, to rationalise costs and lift the share price. Rinehart had been watching operations at other media companies, and she believed that Fairfax was way overstaffed and living beyond its means. But Packer was not interested… He was annoyed at the implication that he could be easily dragooned into helping to run Fairfax, a company he loathed and which was rife with problems; he left the dinner abruptly, making it clear to Rinehart that the answer was no.

Both authors raise the question still hanging over Fairfax, thanks to Rinehart’s continuing involvement. The mining tycoon remains the largest single shareholder in Fairfax, and though she has yet to prevail in her campaign to win a seat on the board, her friend Jack Cowin sits on it as an independent director. In the short term, the question is this: if a conservative government is returned at the 7 September federal election, will Rinehart sell up, or does she remain intent on going through Fairfax like a dose of salts?

Whatever she does, expect none of the finely expressed aspirations that Bezos articulated in a personal tribute to the Graham family’s legacy at the Post:

Journalism plays a critical role in a free society, and The Washington Post – as the hometown paper of the capital city of the United States – is especially important. I would highlight two kinds of courage the Grahams have shown as owners that I hope to channel. The first is the courage to say wait, be sure, slow down, get another source. Real people and their reputations, livelihoods and families are at stake. The second is the courage to say follow the story, no matter the cost. While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a wringer, if they do, thanks to Mrs Graham’s example, I’ll be ready.

That is not the way Gina Rinehart thinks or talks. In contrast to the traditional model of enlightened proprietor symbolised by Graham and revered by the Fairfax press, Rinehart represents capitalist enterprise in the service of capitalism. •

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AMONG the papers left by the late Sydney Deamer, who died last October, is a set of the confidential Managing Editor’s Notes which were issued daily to a few senior executives of the Herald and Weekly Times Ltd by the managing director, Keith Murdoch, between March and August of 1929. So far as is known, no other copies of these daily notes are in existence, at least outside the Melbourne Herald’s own archives.

Other newspaper chiefs in other places, though hardly ever in Australia, have adopted the practice of circulating memoranda to the staff containing comments on that day’s production with due mixtures of praise, criticism and exhortation. A special feature of this series of notes by Keith Murdoch was their strictly limited circulation and the curious fact that he had copies printed each day on good quality quarto notepaper. Murdoch’s reason for this was not stated, but it may be possible to guess at it. Besides being printed, the Notes were prepared in crisp, direct language and short, newspaper-like paragraphs, suggesting that Murdoch wished to identify himself with the men he was addressing and set them the more effective an example of the virtues of clarity and precision that he preached. Early each morning, the “Managing Editor’s Notes” (it is significant that he chose that title and had retained it long after he became managing director) were set up in the rather stylish type of the day, and half a dozen copies were struck off for the top executives before they started work on that day’s issue. They were one of the means by which he instructed, challenged and inspired his executives to build for him one of the most remarkable newspaper empires in the world.

Six evenings a week the young chief executive (forty-three at the time) scrutinised line by line the newspaper of which he was most proud, the Herald, and wrote down his penetrating and illuminating comments. (By comparison, the Sun News Pictorial, the morning tabloid, received only passing notice.) In communication with such a small group of his peers, Murdoch felt free on occasions to give expression to his aspirations and his philosophy of journalism, especially evening journalism.

The first issue of the Notes, dated 26 March 1929, began quietly:

The object of these notes is to help our hard-working executive, and their circulation will be restricted to “The Heads.”

Our papers are doing well, but an increasing effort is called for to make them better.

“The Herald” needs more good reading and more space for it, better arrangement of advertising, and more condensation and variety of minor items.

Page 1 last night will be well read. We lose in contrast by publishing two cricketers’ brides in the same page, but have something for everybody…

The headings on the Lloyd George item will rightly anger many thousands of readers. They make us appear to have emphasised the item gleefully in the hope of “dishing” Labor…

I think the heading types are too big…

THE last two themes, headline types and the paper’s tone towards Labor, were to occupy Murdoch’s attention for some time. The modern reader, looking back through the slowly decaying newspaper files of thirty-four years ago on which Murdoch was commenting, might be surprised that these old-fashioned newspapers could ever have influenced anyone. The Herald, then in its ninetieth year, was a big broadsheet of twenty-four to thirty-six pages, with eight wide columns across the page. Headings were all single-column, except for the occasional major sensation, and were set in 18 or 24 point type, which means the letters were about a quarter of an inch deep. Body matter was set solid, so that every column carried some 1500 words of reading matter.

Most news pictures were kept for a regular section on the back page, while the front page might occasionally include a picture as big as two columns wide by six inches deep. Yet even this presentation was condemned as “sensationalism” by many readers who were still used to seeing classified advertisements on Page 1, and Murdoch himself waged a continuous, finally unsuccessful campaign to keep down the size of heading types.

Since type display was comparatively unimportant, newspapers succeeded in those days on the quality of their newsgathering and writing – the two factors which get most attention in Murdoch’s Notes. The reporting staffs were large (about fifty on the “Herald”) and they had what we would regard today as an enormous amount of space to fill, though Murdoch was always worried that the drapers’ advertisements (which in any case were “far too black”) were encroaching on his precious news space.

As for the “gleeful” anti-Labor headings of which he complained on the first day, they ran across one column in 18 point type, and read:

LLOYD GEORGE TO LEAD COALITION
PLAN TO DEFEAT LABOR AT ELECTIONS

The affair was, after all, a considerable distance from Australia. But Murdoch’s concern for the susceptibilities of Labor again found expression in his Notes for the next day: “The disastrous note of ‘Dish Labor’ is again evident in the British election article. The whole article is too general for such a deep but open subject.”

In this case, the London correspondent’s offending article read: “Labor is at a disadvantage, owing to the weakness of its exchequer.” Murdoch returned to the battle on April I:

“…we dropped again into a ‘Dish Labor’ attitude (in report of Queensland election results). It MUST be realised that we are not a Nationalist organ. Scores of thousands of our readers are being encouraged to regard us as biased, and to discount all our political articles.

“The writer of this article bases his undisguised anti-Labor hopes upon Federal elections, ignoring the well known fact that numbers vote Labor in State po1itics who go Nationalist at other times.”

THE year 1929 was, of course, the onset of the great Depression. Whatever Murdoch’s policy may have been in later years, in 1929 he was anxious that the voice of Labor should find full expression in his columns. Some may feel that he did this to win extra circulation. But the further one reads through his Notes and sees how he gave instructions which could only antagonise the powerful and often malignant capitalists of the day, the more the conviction grows that in 1929 at least he was deeply committed to the public welfare. When he asked in his Notes for 23 April, “Are people really starving?” he was not playing the Bourbon (three weeks previously, he had written “We should think out ways of giving big help in the unemployment crisis. Good men are wandering every suburb in almost starving condition”). The question was intended to get his executives thinking about the problem of growing unemployment. That same day the Herald had published an item (“a remarkable story,” commented Murdoch):

THE MAN WHO GOT HIMSELF LOCKED UP

One Walter Robertson, a forty-three-year-old AIF veteran, had shambled into Footscray (Victoria) police station clad in rags, and asked a constable to lock him up. “1 have not been able to get work for twelve months. I have had nothing to eat for three days,” he told the police. When they refused to put him in the cells, he staggered outside, picked up a rock, and smashed the police station window. They locked him up and fed him. “He ate like a wolf,” said the constable.

April Fools’ Day of 1929 had brought Herald readers the news that there were some 20,000 men unemployed in Melbourne. Commenting on plans for municipal relief, the Herald said: “If by some miracle the deserving unemployed could curb their hunger for another nine or ten weeks they could be assured of some relief by this date. This is poor solace to those men urgently wanting work now.”

The result of Murdoch’s request to his executive to “think out ways” of doing something constructive was seen on 16 May, when a long leading article outlined the newspaper’s ideas for a comprehensive system of charity throughout Melbourne “so that no case of want and distress will this winter go unrelieved.” The Herald’s annual Blanket Appeal, still in existence, is an odd survival of that era.

“I feel we miss a lot of the real life of the community and record too much of the trivial and bizarre,” Murdoch wrote as the Depression deepened. “We want constructive news – the facts of employment, factory output, railway running, new works, discussions in city and country – and all this from other States also.”

Late in April 1929, the economist Professor L.F. Giblin had suggested to a Constitutional Club luncheon that, among other things, all pleasure motor cars should be scrapped and employers should wear hair shirts to remind them of their responsibility to provide work. The Managing Editor was interested, and also had a technical point to make to his team:

“Professor Giblin’s address yesterday was of great importance. I wish we had done it thoroughly. We should never put a luncheon address under the last minute news heading. It suggests that our last-minute news is early afternoon.”

THIS sense of time and the place of time in readers’ receptivity is a recurring feature of the Notes, and nowhere else does Keith Murdoch bring out more clearly his conception of the essence of the evening newspaper. On 23 May, for instance, after warmly commending the staff for its follow-up of a story of a desecration of the Sydney Cenotaph that had broken on the previous night, he wrote: “We are naturally apt to miss late night events from other States, because our men think they have been covered by the morning papers.

“This No Man’s Time between morning and evening papers is worth a special study in itself.

“An analogous case tonight is the Master Builders’ statement in ‘Argus’ and ‘Age.’ It is a sensational statement.

“I would have gone into the position fully tonight, because: (1) most readers would miss its import in their hurried reading of the morning papers, and (2) those who did read it would have liked to study it at their leisure.

“Some day the evening paper will take its place as the only journal that is read thoroughly.

“We will get there by finding space for salient facts of all sensational and important morning paper news, treating it in our own fresh way.

“Perhaps, some day we should become a complete newspaper, covering all the news of the 24 hours. Briefly, of course, but adequately.”

The same consciousness of time had made Murdoch say in his very first Note: “I doubt if Monday criticisms of Saturday night music are worthwhile, but they should be at 1east short and decently headed ‘By The Herald Music Critic’.’“ As usual, he was putting his views to his team as a suggestion rather than a command. And, as usual, if he thought the suggestion was not heeded, he would repeat the point more strongly. So we find him underlining and explaining the basis for his view two months later (21 May): “A Saturday concert is emphatically not worth three-quarters col. by Monday evening.

“A similar problem confronts us with first nights at theatres.

“We want critics who will say pungent, distinctive things in brief space. The public does not want repetition of the morning paper style of criticisms. The “Herald” criticisms should be distinctive.

“No other evening paper in the world carries our wordy, morning paper style of criticism.”

On most days, Murdoch’s Notes would begin with a general word of commendation and then settle into particular points of praise and blame. If one trait marked the older generation of newspaper proprietor, it was his fervent interest in and knowledge of every last complex process in newspaper production. No part of the Herald operation was excluded from the sweep of Murdoch’s eye. He took a fastidious interest in the quality of the inking and the paper, and would pick up several copies of the Herald in various suburban points on the way home to carry out spot checks. In his concern about a detail like House Advertisements (fill-up and other advertisements for the company’s other publications), he was in advance of some newspaper managers thirty-four years later. “Why are our House Advertisements the worst in the paper? They discount our advertising columns. One way to improve them would be to charge the journals full rates.” On 16 May, “Pages 4 and 5 good. Do we give Mr Frank Tait too many interviews?” The present Sir Frank Tait, a big advertiser in 1929, had got all of two inches near the bottom of a column to announce Nellie Stewart’s farewell performance in Sweet Nell of Old Drury at the King’s and to say that she would probably appear later in Trilby. And on 11 May, “Are we justified in ascribing Church Notes to Benson?” where the reference is to another surviving Melbourne knight.

Murdoch, a son of the manse, had to wrestle with a moral problem in the high proportion of advertising-to-news space in Thursday editions of the Herald which carried the big retail ads. Thursday after Thursday, the ratio brushed Murdoch’s conscience and he told himself that a return to more prosperous business conditions would permit a redress. On 16 May, he wrote in the Notes: “Tonight’s ‘Herald’ is a fine literary production, but advertisements dominate the news. A leading advertiser called recently to say that our Thursday paper was ‘disgraceful.’ I don’t think our issue today fair to the public.” He had a similar inner problem over the Saturday issues which, because of their sporting cover, were not planned on a similar basis to those of weekday numbers. Thus, on 11 May, “The Saturday paper is a ‘ramp’ on the public. We could not carry on like this for lang.” Today’s newspaper reader would not object to such a “ramp,” consisting of page after page of general news, kick-for-kick sporting reports, special articles on the week’s events, and a general feeling of creativity throughout the paper.

HARDLY less persistent were the moral problems created for Murdoch by the Herald serials, of which readers received a sustaining slab each night. A new serial, “The House of the Green Eyes,” by an Australian writer, Hilda Bridges, was engaging his attention at this time. “We should not advertise every serial as ‘thrilling,’” he wrote. “One of our faults, in many ways expressed, is lack of reserve.” Again: “I fear that the serial write-up cheapens us. It reads like a cheap shocker.” And three weeks later, “The blemish tonight is the dreadful illustration of the serial – crude, revolting and damaging.” (This episode of “The House of Green Eyes” had a tiny single-column drawing of two men finding a skeleton.) A month later Murdoch had reached the opinion that the job of selecting and preparing serials was too much for a busy sub-editor and would have to be treated as specialist work. “Do not unnecessarily cheapen the paper by ‘kiss photographs’,” he wrote on 4 April. “The latter are unprintable outside ‘Beckett’s Budget’ (a scandal sheet of the day).”

His sense of propriety was also pricked by a well-intentioned cartoon of Will Dyson, “The Death of Death – An Easter Vision,” which appeared in the “Herald” on the day before Good Friday: “We had a rule some years ago never to put the crucifixion or even THE cross in a cartoon. It is a debatable rule, but personally I favour the old rule.” Still, Murdoch found it necessary to remind his colleagues on 25 June that “Pretty girls always make better pictures for the Woman’s page than plain ones.” He also advanced an assessment, on behalf of women readers, that “One fashion picture is enough for any one day. Many women don’t like fashion photographs. They prefer line drawings. They want to see how things are made.” And he posed a couple of curly questions for his sub-editors on another household matter: “Should we give such free publicity to the Housewives’ Association vegetable growers? Only if thoroughly satisfied as to quality, value, and the need for the effort. Who gets the profits?”

Such a master of the newspaperman’s craft had little need or desire to draw on examples from other papers in order to beat his own colleagues over the heads. In the quality of photographic reproduction and printing, however, he continually drew attention to the successes of the Argus and with a dry sense of fairness he once observed, on 24 April: “Today’s best pictures are, strange to say, those in the ‘Age’.” On another occasion he confided: “Our advertising people seem to have the ‘Argus’ and ‘Age’ well down today. The Heads in Collins Street and Elizabeth Street have been most tearful at our meetings recently.”

Murdoch equally shunned the Sydney–Melbourne rivalries of his day. “I particularly dislike slurs on Sydney, especially when only half-deserved,” he wrote on 6 April. “We had a very bad one the other day, when we spoke of Sydney’s newspapers as the world’s worst.” (He was no less offended a few days later when the Herald printed a letter from a defender of Sydney who coined the word Smelbourne.) In May of 1929, Murdoch paid a visit to Sydney, and the report he put down in his Managing Editor’s Notes on that occasion, some six years after the final rout of Hugh Denison’s attempt to lead his Associated Newspapers Ltd in an invasion of the Melbourne evening field, is worth quoting in full. It is dated 31 May:

My impressions on coming back from Sydney are:

(l) Melbourne people are as much behind Sydney people as news-givers as Adelaide people (according to Mr Deamer’s experience) are behind Melbourne people.

This is not because there is more activity in Sydney, but because competition makes the reporter and the sub-editor more alert, and more determined to get good matter.

(2) Sydney papers are more sharply pointed, and have less waste of words.

“It is estimated,” “it is expected,” and other bad phrases to be found in the Herald tonight are not in Sydney papers. Competition has brought definiteness and sharpness.

(3) We have something to learn in the make-up of early pages in a thirty-six-page paper. Light streamer heads over the principal item are preferable to a weak display of news endeavouring vainly to stand up against big black advertising.

(4) There is less black advertising, and it is handled better.

(5) Our Leader Page is the best in Australia. Its fault is occasional dullness.

(6) I wish we could have a daily commercial column like that of the [Sydney] Sun. The compression and fullness of the market and company news is also admirable.

The Herald is a fuller newspaper than anything in Sydney, and our Sun is the best tabloid in Australia.

IN THE period covered by the Notes, two industrial disputes were setting the stage for the full horror of the Depression – the timber workers’ strike and the mine owners’ lockout. In both cases Murdoch fought the employers and the Bruce–Page government through his newspapers.

The timber workers’ strike, involving 20,000 men throughout Australia, started after the timber merchants persuaded Judge Lukin, of the Arbitration Court, to increase working hours from forty-four to forty-eight (which meant Saturday work again), and to reduce their average wages by 19 shillings a week. The entire trade union movement and ACTU backed the timber workers’ decision to strike. The union was fined the maximum £1000 by Judge Lukin for taking part in an “illegal strike.” The strike being illegal, the dole was not payable, and there was soon widespread hardship.

Murdoch and his men fought quite bitterly in swinging public support behind the unions. On 6 April, for instance, the following story described a timber striker’s family: “Minnie is a little girl not yet six years old… Daddy is on strike and Mummy hasn’t got any breakfast. So Minnie comes to school hungry, her big, pathetic-looking brown eyes staring out of a white, pinched face.”

Yes, it is the Melbourne Herald talking… not the local Communist sheet! By 1 May the timber strike was in its thirteenth week, and Murdoch wrote:

“Our box on the cause of the strike is not fair to the men. We cannot be too careful in such matters when thousands of men are feeling sore, and suspicious of their critics’ motives.

“People want to know exactly what the Vic. Master Builders’ Association is; who are its members, and why it takes up its attitude. We should not accept official statements.”

And on 18 May: “Could we with more firmness induce interviewed people to give their names? The statements of ‘employers,’ Col. 7, are of doubtful value. They even suggest that we allow employers to use us as their doormat. Anonymity should be fought in all sections of the paper in interviews, statements, and letters.”

One Nationalist rebel who did much to bring down the Bruce–Page government was W.M. Hughes, then member for North Sydney. Hughes had enjoyed passing favour from Murdoch, and was writing an interminable series of polemics in the Herald when Murdoch suddenly lost faith in him. “The whole community is relieved that Mr Hughes is finishing his series,” Murdoch wrote on 28 March. “We should have cut this long ago.” Poor Billy Hughes had only reached his twenty-eighth instalment, each of two columns – some 3000 words – and was just getting warmed up to his theme that British traders were a scurvy lot. “Britain must set her own house in order,” he thundered as Murdoch, on behalf of the whole community, applied the gag.

“We should be careful of W.M. Hughes,” one of Murdoch’s Notes warned in April. “His motives are ugly vindictiveness, jealousy and self-interest. His dominating idea is not to help the country, but to destroy Bruce.

“Our Sydney [newspaper] friends are not in line with us on this, their reports should be discounted 80 per cent. Walker should be instructed accordingly.”

SIMULTANEOUSLY with the political crisis there was breaking what Murdoch soon described as “one of the newspaper stories of the decade.” The Herald and the Sydney Sun had backed Kingsford Smith’s and Ulm’s attempt to fly from Sydney to London.

On 30 March 1929 the Southern Cross left Richmond (NSW) airport for Wyndham en route to London. The departure was a big news event, but straightforward enough. Even a Murdoch could not foresee the sensational and tragic events which were to follow swiftly. His only comment in the day’s Notes was: “We should have announced that we hold with the Sydney Sun the Australasian rights of the Southern Cross flight news.”

NSW premier Bavin went up for a short spin with Smithy. The steadiness of the machine convinced him that interstate air travel would soon become popular. In London, a Herald representative watched an improved version of John Logie Baird’s television machine. The steadiness of the picture convinced him that public television services would soon become a reality.

The weekend of 30-31 March fell at quite the wrong time for the Hera1d-sponsored Smithy flight. No Murdoch paper was published on Sunday 31 March, to announce the dramatic news that the Southern Cross was missing, believed crashed. On the Sunday morning, Smithy had been lost for ten hours in blinding rain. The last radio message, at 12.45 pm, Sunday, said that he was about to attempt to land at a point which he thought was 150 miles west of Wyndham.

But by edition time on Monday 1 April a plane had been chartered by the Herald from Port Hedland and was on its way to the rescue. The printers broke out their 36-point light italic type (about the size of the heading on a Nation leader) to announce “PLANE TO THE RESCUE OF SOUTHERN CROSS.”

“Page 1 excellent,” wrote Murdoch. “Heading type too big.”

It would be fair to say that if it had not been for the Herald’s promptness in chartering search planes, Kingsford Smith and Ulm may never have been found. The RAAF were in the middle of re-equipment and had no planes available in Western Australia. Next day Air Chief Williams was asked why the RAAF had no planes available to assist in the search. He replied: “Kingsford Smith made arrangements to supply certain newspapers with exclusive news, and to supply them he worked on a wavelength we are not working on… Up to the present we have no information on which we can act, and have not the faintest idea where to look.”

Wrote Murdoch tersely: “We should emphatically reply to Air Chief Williams today. He makes a nasty attempt to shift responsibility.”

By 5 April, three planes were searching for the lost fliers, missing now for five days.

“All over Australia people are talking about the flying men,” wrote Murdoch. “Our story is good, and we seem to be well covered for the big news coming.

“It is a pity we called our pilot Woods in one column and Wood in the next. How the public jumps on to these simple, easy mistakes, and how sweepingly they condemn the paper for them.”

Next day the Lord Mayor (Cr H.D. Luxton) opened a search fund and declared “The airmen must be found.” Black trackers and Herald correspondents started combing the bush near Wyndham. On Monday, 8 April, the printers again broke out their 36-point type for a streamer heading on the Tasmanian floods, in which twenty-seven had perished. “I would again say – we may be over-heading Page 1,” wrote Murdoch. “At least, do not increase the type.”

But on Friday 12 April the Southern Cross crew were found alive thirty miles south of Port George by Captain Les Holden and his crew. The Herald used for the first time its 48-point Caslon light italic type to announce the great news – and sold 270,000 copies that day. On 13 April, Murdoch wrote: “We have been living on the Southern Cross and the Tasmanian floods. This week will be difficult for the news staff. It must discover new topics.”

However, a new drama came quickly to hand. Lieutenant Keith Anderson and his mechanic, searching for the Southern Cross, were missing in Central Australia. This time the RAAF was able to help. “We should strike the note that Anderson must be found,” wrote Murdoch, on 15 April. “Two RAAF  planes are miserably inadequate.” On May 2 the Herald reported that Flight-Lieutenant Eaton and his ground party had reached the crashed plane of Anderson and his mechanic and buried their bodies. “We say Eaton’s horses were eighty hours without water,” commented Murdoch. “All other papers have said fifty.”

HOW did Murdoch achieve the results he did, at a time when even his successful company had far less financial resources than today’s newspaper empires? One answer is that even though he was basically a shy man, Murdoch had a rarely equalled facility of inspiring enormous enthusiasm in his staff, and a sense that they were doing something very important in the community. Some journalists finished up hating him but still reluctantly admiring his unique gifts.

Nor did he hesitate, on occasion, to impart his own sense of exhilaration to his senior men. We may leave him on 25 April 1929, when the Herald was almost completely an Anzac Day issue. Murdoch himself was indirectly a hero of Gallipoli, although his action in publishing the truth about the campaign when he reached London, after giving an undertaking not to do so, will always be debated. Anzac Day in 1929, being much closer to the event, was perhaps more deeply felt than today, and on 25 April Murdoch was moved to write:

“Tonight’s ‘Herald’ is a notable production… Such an effort impresses upon even a captious mind the fact that the staff is the greatest and best ever collected into an Australian newspaper office. We will be fortunate if we ever again have as many brilliant men at work for us.

“The organisation of the news shows great thoroughness and a good deal of initiative. Leader Page brilliant – quite beyond the power of any other staff. [It included a Will Dyson cartoon, “The Cenotaph – Midnight,” and a C.J. Dennis poem, “The Army of the West.”]

“The Advertising Department makes a fine show, and we must not forget the special efforts required on such an occasion by printers and publishers. They worked splendidly. The paper tonight does credit to the State, and is a public service of considerable value.”

Murdoch retained his interest in every aspect of newspaper production until he died on 4 October 1952, at the age of sixty-six. By that time, however, the “Murdoch empire” had undergone many mutations and extensions, and was too big for one man to control as intimately as Murdoch had controlled his favourite newspaper in 1929. Times change, and newspapers change, and the changes are not always for the better. •

This article first appeared in the 29 June 1963 edition ofNation. "After publication of this piece," Michael Cannon writes, "Rupert Murdoch sent a request through the editor of Nation Tom Fitzgerald (since Rupert and I were not on speaking terms) that he, Rupert, should be allowed to view the original Keith Murdoch memos.  I gladly agreed, and sent the valuable originals to Tom, fully expecting to get them back after Rupert had seen them.  But they never came back.  My guess is that Rupert regarded them as his property."

The post Shaping the Herald: Sir Keith Murdoch seen through his confidential memoranda appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet most journalists would think of Pringle’s decades working on newspapers in Britain and Australia between 1934 and 1970 as some sort of golden age. There were newspapers aplenty, and jobs, and reporting rounds. I recall the late journalism professor Clem Lloyd once ruminating about why journalists, alone among professions, were invariably described as “working journalists.” Whatever the reason, many are now simply non-working.

Pringle’s Have Pen: Will Travel, published in London in 1973, is a book about… well, it’s not about several things. As we’re told in the foreword, it’s “not an autobiography” because the author is too reserved to write one, and considers himself probably not sufficiently interesting anyway. And it’s not about being a remarkable editor: as Pringle writes in his postscript, “I do not think I was a good editor…” Nor, as we’ll see, is it about Australia.

This diffident tone pervades a book which, ultimately, is about Pringle’s work on five very different broadsheet newspapers: the Manchester Guardian, the Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Canberra Times and the Observer. By now you might not be surprised to learn that he turned to journalism as “a second best.” Born in Hawick, on the Scottish border, Pringle read classics at Lincoln College, Oxford, in the early 1930s “while Western civilisation was collapsing around me.” When neither Oxford nor Edinburgh offered him a job in philosophy, he joined the Guardian, soon after the death of its great editor and proprietor, C.P. Scott. Here Pringle discovered he had “no nose for news.” He tried but failed to learn shorthand, loathed hours spent on the telephone pursuing leads, and lacked the push and drive to get interviews out of pompous businessmen and other newsmakers. What he did have (the reader deduces) was a good education, a sharp intelligence and a lively interest in world affairs. Like any “reasonably intelligent graduate,” he was generally able to “write some sort of leader.” Always at hand was the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Google (or Wikipedia) of its day.

Pringle’s job as leader-writer was a leisurely one, allowing him to spend hours in libraries learning how parliament and the law courts worked. Before he had to write an important leader for the Guardian, with its “intense preoccupation with style,” he would “spend half-an-hour reading one of the great prose writers whom I most admired – the essays of Hazlitt, the prefaces of Bernard Shaw…” Pringle also had time to write his first book: his expertise on the Far East was such that in 1938 Allen Lane asked him to write a book on China for a new publishing firm called Penguin. Time – for research, for crafting and for specialisation – is the key thing that journalists lack in this 24/7 media environment, where they are expected to file continuously throughout the day, for multiple platforms.

Pringle returned to the Guardian after serving as an officer in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers during the second world war – a war which was, for him, as might be expected, “safe” and “inglorious.” As assistant editor, Pringle continued to relish the banter, “intelligent but not serious, witty and well-informed which is, perhaps, the peculiar contribution of the English intellectual.” A good deal of his time was spent with academics from Victoria University of Manchester and other universities, especially historians, including A.J.P. Taylor and (later Sir) Lewis Namier. Not for Pringle the journalistic contempt for “elite” intellectuals and academics. Years later, at the Sydney Morning Herald, he would poach George Molnar from the Daily Telegraph, knowing full well that the cartoonist was also a lecturer in architecture at the University of Sydney.

Have Pen: Will Travel is aptly titled, for one of its threads is Pringle’s chronic restlessness, his “five-year itch.” He left the Guardian in good part because he felt “that since I had only one life, it was ridiculous to spend it in one room in Manchester especially when there were so many marvellous and interesting places to see.” In 1948 he joined the Times as a special writer, chiefly on foreign affairs. Freed from administrative duties, he often had nothing to do, which allowed him to enjoy the varied pleasures of London, including the Tuesday lunch club hosted by assistant editor Donald Tyerman, with guests including Barbara Ward, Isaac Deutscher and Guy Burgess. Pringle learned the importance of table manners, an unspoken selection criterion for Times editors.

There is a sense that Pringle felt an alien even in England, where he had lived since his teens; his Scottish nationalism would result in another book, The Last Shenachie (1973), about the Gaelic language. In 1952 he accepted an offer from Rupert Henderson, the managing director of John Fairfax & Sons, to edit the Sydney Morning Herald. Although Pringle had never seen or read the newspaper, the offer was not so exotic to a mid-twentieth-century Scot: he had an aunt and cousins in New South Wales, and an uncle and aunt in New Zealand. And the Herald was considered by those who knew such things “to be one of the wealthiest and most financially sound papers in the British Commonwealth.” (Here I, too, am becoming nostalgic for a golden age.)

Part of the reason Have Pen: Will Travel is “not about” Australia is that this was the subject of two of his other books, Australian Accent (1958), his best-known, and On Second Thoughts: Australian Essays (1971). But this beautifully written memoir is valuable to Australians for its observations of newspapers, politics, academe, art and speech in the Australia of the 1950s and 1960s. His Australian character sketches are punchy and incisive: of Henderson (“who could not remark on the weather without making you feel that it was a matter of life and death”), R.G. Menzies (“Handsome though fleshy; like one of the better Roman Emperors. His obvious intellectual brilliance makes him outstanding in this country of second-rate minds and also unpopular”), W.M. Hughes (“a tiny, bright old man with a face like a lizard”), and Professor Harry Messel (“quite without grace, in fact uncouth. He does not speak, he shouts. He is clumsy, noisy, brash and very much of the New World”).

During this period, Pringle achieved the only scoop of his career: a series of articles about Catholic Action, the Industrial Groups and the Movement, which he had been researching for some time, published immediately after Dr H.V. Evatt’s explosive statement about “disloyal and subversive” elements within the Labor Party. Pringle’s preoccupation with the role of religion in the British press, and of sectarianism in Australia, might seem anachronistic to most readers of today.

Pringle’s chief difficulty in editing the Herald was not the management (“intelligent if unpredictable”) but the structure. The newspaper had long practised a division of powers, fairly common in the United States and not unknown in Britain, by which the news editor was responsible to the management and not to the editor. In fact, Pringle discovered that the news editor was more important than the editor and controlled considerably more staff, while Pringle himself really only had control of the leader (or editorial) page. In 1957 he accepted the position of deputy editor of the Observer for half the salary he was earning at Fairfax. “An editor’s power,” he wrote, “must always depend, to some extent, on his willingness to resign.” It was not just disillusionment with the Herald that compelled him to return to London; for all the “powerful, mysterious beauty of Australia,” he had found it difficult, as a middle-aged man with a wife and three children, to settle into a new country and feel at home.

On Pringle’s departure from Sydney, a friend, George Baker, summed up the more exciting points of his editorship:

One thing at least – you really can’t complain
Of dullness in your five Australian years.
Apart from foreign and atomic scares
What was the great event? Doc and the Groups?
The Studley-Ruxton case? The groans and whoops
When Fitz and Browne were gaoled for ninety days?
The Petrovs? Or the swelling roar of praise
That met the Queen in every Sydney Street?

Five years later, nostalgic for the “hot sun” and “brilliant light” of Australia, Pringle was back in Australia, with another book (Australian Painting Today, 1963) under his belt. Rupert Henderson had summoned him to a meeting in London to propose that he start a public affairs program on ATN7 and be involved with a weekly paper in Sydney or a national daily in Canberra. Pringle not only worked with inadequate equipment and resources on what became Seven Days (a kind of commercial counterpoint to Four Corners), but also discovered, slightly to his surprise, that he was no good on television.

In 1964–65 Pringle served as managing editor of the Canberra Times, helping to change it from a small country tabloid into a broadsheet with metropolitan standards, as it engaged in a battle for dominance in the federal capital against the new national daily, the Australian. In 1965, he was persuaded to resume editing the Sydney Morning Herald. This time Pringle negotiated his own terms, or so he thought, gaining control over all editorial departments. In a long letter to a Fairfax executive, he declared his intention to devote the rest of his working life to the paper.

The next three years of his working life were his happiest, but they did not last. Pringle was weary, and felt undermined by Sir Warwick Fairfax, now managing director as well as chairman of the board. In theory the two Oxford-educated, don-like figures should have gotten on, but perhaps they were too alike, both believing they were right in any argument. Pringle discovered that the agreement he had reached with Sir Warwick for independence from the board had no legal validity. (So far as I am aware, a later, more famous agreement – the Fairfax Charter of Editorial Independence of 1988 – has not been tested legally.) In 1969 Pringle announced his intention to resign in December 1970, but this was brought forward to April after a disagreement over the Herald leader on Easter Saturday. An agnostic himself, Pringle had attempted to approach Easter in a humanist way, to Fairfax’s dismay.

Following his departure from daily journalism, Pringle wrote book reviews, more books of his own, and for Quadrant. He died in 1999. Reflecting on a career on two continents, his memoir concludes: “I realise that to readers who have never migrated, my swithering and dithering must seem insane or at least wildly irresponsible. My only excuse is that a man who has once left his native country for another is never afterwards quite whole; he is torn in two parts.”

Forty years after the publication of Have Pen: Will Travel, the last newspaper on which the author worked, the Sydney Morning Herald, is struggling to survive financially in print; and his first newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, has become simply the Guardian, with a new online edition, the Guardian Australia, competing for Fairfax eyeballs and revenue. •

The post Torn in two parts appeared first on Inside Story.

Visiting Melboune in October 2008, Rupert Murdoch met with Herald Sun editor-in-chief Bruce Guthrie and other senior News Limited executives. After expressing satisfaction at how his Melbourne tabloid was progressing, he asked, “How is the Age faring these days?” His managers ventured the opinion that Melbourne could be a one-newspaper town in five years. Murdoch “looked determinedly at us,” reports Guthrie in his book Man Bites Murdoch. “That,” he said through gritted teeth, “has to be our goal.”

Murdoch’s goal looks much closer to fruition in June 2012 than it did four years ago. Over the past two weeks, the longstanding sense of foreboding about the future of Australian newspapers has burst into a full-blown atmosphere of crisis. Both major newspaper companies announced plans for their digital future, and both foreshadowed redundancies and other savings, but News won the public relations battle over its competitor.

On 18 June Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood announced the closure of printing plants, the shift of its most prestigious titles to tabloid format next year, and the shedding of 1900 jobs over three years. A week later, in an unprecedented move, three of the organisation’s most senior editors resigned simultaneously.

A few days after Hywood’s announcement, the head of News Limited, Kim Williams, made a similarly anticipated statement about his company’s plans. But instead of documenting the scale of coming cutbacks, he made two announcements about expansion plans – one to acquire an internet business publisher, Business Spectator, the other to bid for James Packer’s quarter share of Foxtel and half share of Fox Sports. He also made some seemingly anodyne announcements about restructuring newspaper divisions, but gave only the vaguest of indications of future job losses.

The gloomy coverage of Fairfax in the other media mused about bowing to unpleasant inevitabilities, criticised past performance and raised doubts about future viability. In contrast, the headlines about News were about expansion and dynamic adaptation, and the trends in its print newspapers and the role of journalists received much less attention.

Even allowing for the degree to which News publications habitually talk up their own prospects, and allowing for the relative sobriety and honesty with which Fairfax generally reports its own activities, the differences in public imagery do reflect some real differences in the situations of the two companies. News, the larger of the two companies and backed by its global strength, can subsidise unprofitable newspapers for an extended period if it wishes; Fairfax, with its share price in a very substantial long-term decline, is in a more difficult position.

Just as worryingly, the main factor propping Fairfax up at the moment is the interest being shown by Gina Rinehart, the richest woman in the world, who sees the Fairfax newspapers not as a commercial investment but as a means of advancing her political views. She has refused to commit to the charter of editorial independence, which was adopted in the early 1990s when Conrad Black became the major shareholder for a period, and which the Fairfax board has maintained ever since. Fairfax sees the credibility of the newspapers as a commercial as well as a professional asset; Rinehart sees things differently.

Given this precarious outlook, once impossible options are now imaginable – an editorially compromised newspaper dominated by an owner with extreme right-wing views, or the disappearance of the print editions and the under-resourcing of the online versions of some of Australia’s most venerable and respected newspapers. It may not come to this, but my own view is that if these newspapers do not survive as a base of vigorous journalism, the consequences will be considerable and wholly negative. Fairfax matters.

Fairfax matters, first, because in terms of contributing to Australian democracy it is second only to the ABC among media organisations. It publishes three of the country’s four quality newspapers, and those newspapers do more than any other media in terms of reportorial effort and in shaping the terms of debate.

Some might not agree with those rankings, but the broader and more important point relates to the cumulative impact of media organisations. The greater the number of good media outlets, the more virtuous the circle of good journalism; the fewer, the harder the job of individual outlets. If the ABC becomes an isolated voice of good reporting, for instance, then it is much harder for it to perform its functions well. The more that commercial media engage in quality journalism, the more this lifts the standards and expectations all around.

Fairfax matters, second, because it combines a large concentration of journalistic talent with a sufficient degree of editorial courage and vision to allow that talent, most of the time, to flower. Such centres of excellence are difficult to build and easy to disperse. At the very least it would be a shame if this is not replenished and built on. Journalism is a craft and the best way to improve craft skills is by working with good fellow practitioners. Again it is a matter of virtuous and vicious circles.

Although many news judgements at Fairfax papers are dubious and the papers are prone to generate their own beat-ups, overall they have a greater editorial integrity than most of the rest of the Australian media. Since the financial crises of the early 1990s, commercial TV news has generally been heading downmarket. Sometimes they treat stories in ways that raise doubts about their competence; at other times they play fast and loose with ethics, especially on their daily current affairs programs.

Third, Fairfax matters because institutions matter. Journalists often get bound up in tales of individual heroes and villains, but what matters in terms of social impact, day-in and day-out, are institutions. The great American journalist Ben Bagdikian once wrote that trying to do good journalism on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion on a ukulele. Consistently good journalism requires institutional solidity; and to have impact it needs institutional credibility and public reach. It needs to be sufficiently big that its reporting can’t be ignored.

Fairfax as a company doesn’t matter to me. If it survives as a seller of online advertising but abandons or drastically shrinks its journalistic functions, Australian democracy will still be the loser. My concern is with the future of Fairfax journalism, and only with the Fairfax share price insofar as it supports that journalism. Of course, this also acknowledges the possibility that Fairfax’s strategy to meet the present challenges may not be one that builds on and further enhances the company’s journalistic traditions.

Finally, Fairfax matters because newspapers matter. Many people are optimistic that the internet, with its profusion of sites, its range of information and its pluralism of opinion, will fill the gap. The proposition that the democratic functions of newspapers at their best – quality journalism with political impact – can thrive on the web remains unproven. The quasi-religious fervour about casting off the extraneous costs of printing and distribution to get to the pure essence of journalistic content, of allowing a hundred flowers to bloom, certainly has some persuasive force. But when edited well, and even when edited in a mediocre but honest way, newspapers still offer the most intense independent surveillance of government and the political environment.

Although there is no shortage of readers for newspapers on the internet, there are intractable problems of turning that traffic into revenue. The saying among newspaper executives about the impact of the internet has been dollars out, dimes in. Historically, Australian newspapers generally gained around 70 per cent of their income from advertising. That advertising – most particularly classified advertising – has migrated to the internet. In the United States, the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism estimated that between 2010 and 2012, newspapers lost $7 in print advertising revenue for every $1 gained in digital ads. But when Alan Mutter, publisher of Reflections of a Newsosaur, took the same calculations back five years to around the peak of advertising income for American newspapers, he found that the trend has been much worse: for every $1 gained in digital advertising over that period the newspapers lost $27 in print advertising.

The other main way that newspapers might gain revenue on the internet is by going behind a paywall. Both major newspaper organisations intend to pursue this option (the News Limited paywall is already up), but at least so far it is entirely unclear whether it will generate sufficient income to support news organisations on anything approaching the scale of journalistic activity that newspapers have sustained until the present.

There is only sometimes and erratically a coincidence between corporate self-interest and a democratic public interest. But in the narrowly controlled Australian media oligopoly, there is a strong public interest in Fairfax continuing and extending its pursuit of quality journalism. It is not only the company but also Australian democracy that is entering uncharted waters. •

The post Why Fairfax matters appeared first on Inside Story.

THE sun is setting on the world of journalism in which I have worked for more than fifty years. Radical changes announced by Fairfax and News Ltd, combined with Gina Rinehart’s push for control of Fairfax, seem certain to reshape Australian journalism.

The industry will employ fewer people; newspapers will shrink in size and possibly be replaced altogether by electronic devices like tablets; a new proprietor will want to influence the Fairfax newspaper policy. Naturally there has been much breast-beating over the future of “quality journalism” and concern over the possibility that Rinehart will “trash the Fairfax brand” by using the newspapers to promote her mining interests.

Certainly there are things to worry about. Will bright young potential journalists of the future be attracted to an industry that is contracting, strapped for cash and offering a future of low pay and limited prospects? Can quality journalism be delivered by substantially fewer and probably less talented and less motivated employees? Will the new Fairfax proprietor trash the brand by turning the newspapers into mining industry gazettes?

There is also cause for concern over contemporary newspaper obsessions with sex, sport and sin at the expense of serious analysis. Oddly, as newspapers become more trivial, they seem to see themselves increasingly as self-righteous arbiters of public taste and opinion, and journalists, especially senior journalists, seem increasingly pompous and opinionated. They would do well to remember that journalism is ultimately a humble, if often privileged, occupation.

Old journalists are notoriously sentimental and self-indulgent and much given to reminiscing about the good old days (and their own achievements). They tend to think that they had the best of a golden age when great editors and tolerant proprietors, enriched by “rivers of gold” classified advertising revenue, presided benignly over earnest journalists working to produce influential journalism that spoke truth to power and struck fear into the hearts of political, commercial and criminal shysters everywhere. That is nonsense.

Certainly newspapers used to be richer; money was almost a free good and journalists had greater opportunities to pursue their interests and the issues of the day. Certainly newspapers attracted and held bright people with a sense of vocation and democratic duty (as well as a goodly number of fools and ratbags). But in my experience there was no golden age, no Arcadian past of smooth, seamless quality journalism. Life on newspapers was never smooth and stable. It was always in flux and being affected by the impact of the economic cycle on the “rivers of gold” revenue. And proprietors were always using newspapers to promote their political and commercial interests. They were wilful, arrogant, conservative, sometimes paranoid, but they were not fools. They knew that “trashing the brand” would be self-defeating. They had to seem to permit a range of views in their publications.

If I am right, editors and journalists have always been embroiled in a sort of arm-wrestle with the owners and money managers of media companies, and they have always had to live with proprietors with, at best, limited regard for the notion of journalistic independence and integrity. In times of plenty, journalistic life was largely unconstrained by pressure from money men and proprietors, but the financial screws were inevitably tightened when times got tougher. After all, profits (“shareholder value”) ultimately matter more to media proprietors and board members than the pursuit of truth. The main difference these days is that the impact of the internet has forced the big companies to pursue new and more urgent strategies for survival.

LET me illustrate this argument with some personal and corporate history. I walked into the offices of the Melbourne Age, then at the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets, in January 1960 to start my life in journalism. It was a Dickensian place, full of Dickensian characters, many of whom smoked and drank too much. I worked for the paper for the best part of forty years, becoming a leader writer, news editor, assistant editor, and European and Washington correspondent. It was never a stable, settled place; it rose and it declined in line with how proprietors, boards, editors and journalists judged events in the world and their relations with each other. Some were good; some were awful. But the place soldiered on. The only Golden Age was the pub around the corner from the new premises built for the Age opposite Spencer Street railway station.

The Dickensian age of the Age was ending when I walked into the old Collins Street building crowned with a statue of Mercury, the winged messenger of the Gods. It was still a grubby and gloomy old warren, crowded with grubby and gloomy old people who had done things their way for years. But there was also a cohort of lively roistering reporters, led by John Sorrell and Chris Forsyth; and Graham Perkin, who was to become the great mid-twentieth-century editor of the paper, was already the assistant news editor and straining under the decent but dreary editorship of Keith Sinclair.

Plans were soon afoot to remodel and renovate the place. The old and cramped reporters’ and sub-editors’ rooms with their wooden benches and trestles would be made over into modern office spaces. Young Ranald Macdonald, a scion of the Syme family, had returned from Cambridge and was soon moving to replace his stepfather, the reactionary buffoon E.H.B. Neill, as chief executive. And lower on the totem pole, under Perkin, new generations of journalists were emerging and displacing the older time-servers – people like Greg Taylor, Claude Forell, Neil Jillett, Creighton Burns and Les Tanner, and my generation, which included Les Carlyon, Michelle Grattan, John Hamilton, Peter Cole-Adams, Ben Hills, and others. These new generations emerged when Macdonald replaced Sinclair with Perkin in 1966 and when Perkin – with the backing of Macdonald, one of the more enlightened newspaper proprietors of his time – set about transforming the whole paper. You can read a splendid account of these times in Ben Hills’s biography of Graham Perkin, Breaking News (Scribe, 2010).

It is tempting for those of my ilk to look back on the Macdonald–Perkin years as the Golden Age. The Age was dramatically transformed. Apart from the new talent he injected into the place, Perkin took on new issues and adopted new policies, starting by reversing Sinclair’s opposition to water fluoridation. The paper won national and international respect, and it occupied the huge brick veneer plant built on the corner of Spencer and La Trobe streets with aggressive confidence.

But the point is that nothing endured for long. After the sudden and untimely death of Perkin in 1975 there was a succession of editors: Les Carlyon, Greg Taylor, Michael Davie, Creighton Burns, Mike Smith and others. Technology was changing too: the old hot-metal typesetting gave way to computer setting long before the internet, portable computers and mobile phones appeared on the horizon. And whenever the economic cycle turned down, even momentarily, there were cost-cutting campaigns, calls for job cuts, and grim predictions about the future of the newspaper. There is little new under the sun in the newspaper business.

Notwithstanding hand-on-heart pledges of editorial independence, proprietorial influence was always an issue. Perkin was able to get away with plenty because of the Age’s commercial success, but he had a keen sense of the limits of his independence. As Ben Hills points out, the paper advocated a vote for Labor in only one of the seven state and federal elections held while Perkin was editor. And his support for Labor in the 1972 federal election had to be limited and grudging, although he won a battle with the board and E.H.B. Neill on the issue. Neill, for his part, would later compromise the independence of the Age by allowing Fairfax to gain control of the company.

SO there is nothing new in proprietorial interventions. David Syme (1827–1908), founder of the Age with his brother Ebenezer, had no qualms about using the newspaper to advocate the protectionist cause ahead of the conventions to draw up the Australian constitution. In 1897 the ten Victorians elected as convention delegates were the ten on the Age’s protectionist ticket organised by Syme. The reputation of the newspaper survived intact.

Sixty-four years later, Warwick Fairfax turned against prime minister Robert Menzies and backed Labor’s Arthur Calwell in the 1961 federal election. Menzies won narrowly (by two seats) but was returned with a strong majority two years later when he called an early election at which, this time, he was backed by Fairfax. So proprietors have always done what they have wanted to do with their newspapers. They support individuals and causes they judge to be favourable to their interests; they use their newspapers to cross-promote their political, sporting and business interests; they settle scores, conduct feuds, pursue enemies and pamper friends. They highlight views that they support and play down those that they oppose.

So what? They understand the commercial value of credibility and the commercial curse of being seen as overwhelmingly and aggressively on one side of social and political issues (although you have to wonder about the Australian on some days). Newspaper proprietors understand it is in their interest to reflect a range of views, to permit and encourage public debate, within quite limited boundaries. But they are conservative men and women and they ensure that editors and managers appointed to run their businesses understand and support their views. It would be surprising if they didn’t.

Much is made of the Fairfax charter of editorial independence. But it is essentially a document of convenience and self-interest. It is not holy writ. It certainly serves the valuable but limited purpose of reminding proprietors and editors – and readers – of their responsibilities to the idea of free and independent journalism. But in fact everybody understands the limits despite the often misty boundaries. Serious clashes are rare. Few editors are willing to die in a ditch and lose well-paying jobs for an editorial principle – unless it is of fundamental importance. And there are few such principles that cannot be negotiated between editors and boards.

Gina Rinehart could safely sign the Fairfax charter knowing that there is little chance of any Fairfax editor campaigning against the mining industry and supporting the minerals tax. Her industry is of national importance and it is not in the nature of newspapers to support new taxes or tax increases that penalise businesses of this significance. Fair (but subordinated) alternative views can be accommodated without risk in Fairfax newspapers.

So I remain reasonably sanguine about the future of journalism. It may be produced by fewer people and increasingly delivered in tabloids or on tablets. It has to find adequate resources to fund good work and to attract good people. But the survival imperative should keep the industry in a healthy if somewhat straitened condition. Sadly there seems no shortage of resources to report the glib, the glossy and the gossipy, the celebrity stalkers, the tattooed apes of the sports arenas, and the gurus of food, fashion and foolishness. It is this descent into populist fatuity that may constitute a bigger threat to journalism than the internet and Gina Rinehart. •

The post The more things change… appeared first on Inside Story.

THESE two entirely different books overlap in a crucial way, and in doing so increase our understanding of the current media and political climate, especially in the United States and to a lesser extent in Australia and Britain. The overlap concerns the rise of a strident, populist, right-wing element in the media. David McKnight describes News Corporation’s contribution to this phenomenon; Jonathan Ladd attempts to explain its part in what he shows to be a decline in the public standing of the media in the United States.

The great strength of McKnight’s book is that it collects and presents evidence of News Corporation’s covert as well as overt political activity, and shows how this politicisation has influenced the company’s news services in the United States, Britain and Australia.

His account proceeds on the basis that in pursuing these activities, the corporation is in many ways indistinguishable from its executive chairman, Rupert Murdoch: that even when he is not directly involved, the activities are undertaken because of a belief about what he wants or does not want.

According to this account, there are also many occasions when he is directly involved: meeting presidents and prime ministers and letting them know his preferences, funding enterprises designed to promote these preferences, putting pressure on editors. At one level, none of this is very different from what critics of Murdoch and News Corporation have been saying for decades. But McKnight’s singular achievement is to marshal evidence in a way that reveals the extent of these activities, and their effect on the Murdoch brand of news. In doing so he also reveals a systematic pattern of suppression, lack of transparency and hypocrisy.

The pattern takes several forms. One is journalistic misrepresentation. McKnight reports that in the lead-up to the 2004 federal election in Australia, for example, the Herald Sun, a News Limited newspaper in Melbourne, published an article headed “Greens back illegal drugs,” which claimed that “ecstasy and other illegal drugs would be supplied over the counter to young users.” The newspaper made other outlandish claims about the Greens, including one saying they would introduce laws to force people to ride bicycles more often and eat less red meat. The Australian Press Council upheld a complaint from the Greens, saying the article was irresponsible and made “a number of false claims.”

Years earlier, Murdoch’s New York newspaper, the Post, published a story about the likelihood that AIDS was spread by kissing, in the face of protests from the reporter that this was mere supposition. His London Sun suggested that only junkies, gays, bisexuals and victims of tainted blood transfusions could contract AIDS, and that anything else was “homosexual propaganda.” This misinformation was published at a time when much less was known about HIV/AIDS than is known now, and when public anxiety about it was high.

News Corporation’s newspapers have often engaged in baseless ad hominem attacks on individuals who have challenged its world view. One such instance recorded by McKnight concerned Clive Hamilton, whom the Australian accused of believing in a “vast corporate conspiracy to stall action on climate change.” Professor Hamilton has written extensively on climate change and climate-change denialism; the Australian has waged a persistent campaign against him and his views.

As late as 2009, the New York Post was editorialising that there was “growing doubt” over climate-change science. This was in the aftermath of the leaking of carelessly worded emails from climate scientists in Britain, who were subsequently cleared of any scientific malpractice. The paper’s Washington correspondent stated baldly that environmentalists wanted to “dismantle capitalism and bleed America dry.”

At the extreme end of the empire is Murdoch’s Fox News cable television service, which professes to present “balanced journalism.” McKnight assembles a substantial body of evidence in the form of memos, interviews and lists of those recruited to the service to demonstrate a deliberate strategy to create a conservative brand of politicised journalism masquerading as “balanced.” For example, the president of Fox News, Joe Peyronnin, described what happened when Murdoch appointed a Republican political strategist, Roger Ailes, to run Fox News. One of Ailes’s first acts, says Peyronnin, was to ask members of the staff whether they were liberal or not: “There was a litmus test. He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.” A system of briefings was instituted, in which the executive in charge of news, John Moody, would issue memos to Fox journalists dictating the political “line” to be followed for the day’s news coverage.

More worrying is Murdoch’s undisclosed funding of political enterprises that promote ideas and policy preferences he shares. In 2003 Murdoch donated $300,000 to an anti–affirmative action campaign in California and later attempted unsuccessfully to prevent the release of this fact through the courts. Also in the United States there was strong circumstantial, if not conclusive, evidence that he helped fund the clandestine activities of Brian Crozier, an anti-communist campaigner with connections to the British and US intelligence services. Crozier had a long history of anti-communist activism, including running a CIA-sponsored operation called Forum World Features, which syndicated right-wing articles to newspapers. In his autobiography, Crozier acknowledged his financial backers, including “Rupert,” subsequently identified as Murdoch by one of Crozier’s associates. In December 1990, the Guardian reported that Crozier’s publishing business, Sherwood Press, was bailed out by News International, Murdoch’s British holding company. News took a half-stake in the business and assumed liability for its debts, then said to total £90,000.

In Britain, Murdoch contributed an initial £150,000, and committed to a further £120,000 over three years, to the covert political activities of one David Hart, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister. One of Hart’s ventures was a newsletter, British Briefing. A statement on its title page asked recipients to refrain from mentioning it or its existence. Edited by a retired British spy, it remained secret until 1989, when a copy was leaked to the Guardian. Hart and Crozier were also engaged as columnists for Murdoch’s Times. During the 1984–85 miners’ strike, Hart used his credentials as a Times correspondent to gain access to mining districts, and used that access to organise dissident miners against the mining unions. During this time, according to McKnight, he was reporting directly to Margaret Thatcher.

The impact of the company culture reached its apogee when it was revealed in July last year that News International journalists had been engaged in industrial-scale hacking of people’s mobile phones, including that of a missing schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, subsequently found murdered. When sprung, the company attempted a commensurately large cover-up.

Allied to this pattern is equally systematic hypocrisy. In Australia, Murdoch’s News Limited has been a driving force behind the Right to Know coalition, a group of twelve Australian media organisations with the stated aim of improving Australia’s “relatively poor world ranking for freedom of speech.” On the evidence presented by McKnight about Murdoch’s covert political activities, the public’s “right to know” does not appear to extend to the activities of Murdoch and News Corporation. Information about their covert funding activities has only been extracted by means of court action, leaks or unguarded statements by beneficiaries.

Moreover, Murdoch and News Corporation are meant to be in the business of journalism, which includes disclosing matters of public interest. The funding by a major newspaper publisher and television news broadcaster of partisan political activity in jurisdictions where they are also reporting on politics is a serious conflict of interest and clearly a matter of public interest. McKnight recounts several instances of Murdoch’s putting pressure on his editors to go easy on his political favourites, in particular Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. During Reagan’s presidency Murdoch told Thomas Kiernan, who was writing a biography of him, “The whole Reagan package needs much more support by the press.” On this view, it is the role of Murdoch’s newspapers to be a cheerleader for government – at least when it suits him. By contrast, when a public figure became persona non grata, as the actor Paul Newman did because of his opposition to the Vietnam war and support of progressive causes, he was simply banned from appearing in the New York Post.

All this would be bad enough if it involved some small-time media operation with limited power. In the case of News Corporation, however, it involves a vast multinational company whose head has had direct access to the White House, No 10 Downing Street, and the Lodge. One side-effect of the phone-hacking scandal has been to reveal the depth and breadth of Murdoch’s relationships with successive British prime ministers, especially Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron. At the heart of these relationships was a set of reciprocating interests, political on the politicians’ side, political and financial on Murdoch’s. McKnight assembles a picture of these relationships which shows how reliant the politicians became, and how Murdoch played upon this in pursuit of policy preferences, especially those that might be financially advantageous to him.

Murdoch’s influence beyond the field of media and communications policy – in which he has a direct financial interest – is more difficult to pin down. He and his newspapers have claimed from time to time that they were responsible for certain election victories. Murdoch claimed to have broken twenty-three years of conservative government in Australia when he backed Gough Whitlam in the 1972 election that brought Labor to office, for example. But, as McKnight says, this was a fantasy. The biggest swing to Labor was in Victoria, where Murdoch owned no newspapers.

Three years later he was partisan in the opposite direction, supporting Malcolm Fraser, leader of the Liberal–National Coalition, after the dismissal of Whitlam by the governor-general in 1975. This time his partisanship went so far that even his own journalists went out on strike in protest. On this occasion – as in 1972 – public opinion polls clearly showed the direction in which the electorate was heading, and for Murdoch to claim the role of kingmaker has the appearance of someone claiming more electoral power than he really has.

But this is not to understate the effect on politicians’ minds of Murdoch’s perceived power. In the lead-up to the 1987 elections in Britain, McKnight reports that Margaret Thatcher said privately, “We depend on him to fight for us.” McKnight argues convincingly that it is this kind of leverage that Murdoch uses to pursue his policy preferences when his financial interests are at stake.

Outside the realm of media and communication policy, however, he seems to be less influential. He opposed US support for South African sanctions to no avail; he campaigned unsuccessfully against a law in New York forbidding discrimination against homosexuals; he campaigned unsuccessfully in favour of mandatory testing of prison inmates for AIDS; he railed unsuccessfully against the response by the US and British governments to the overtures from Mikhail Gorbachev during the period of glasnost that preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union.

McKnight’s book is a compendium of evidence about the methods of Murdoch and News Corporation in exerting influence. Unfortunately, the book is organised in a way that requires the reader to piece together the evidence across chapters. For instance, evidence about covert funding appears in chapters 1, 4, 6 and 8. Given the revelatory quality of this pattern of behaviour, and its importance to a full understanding of the Murdoch method, it would have added greatly to the book’s persuasive power to have it summarised in one place.

This convincing body of evidence makes the case about abuse of power without the need for polemics, which the author nevertheless relies on, not always successfully, as a significant persuasive instrument. In dealing with the issue of bias in Fox News, for instance, he reports that Murdoch infuriates his critics by pointing out that the channel regularly has guests who are Democrats, liberals and critics. The author adds: “The annoying thing is that this is partially true.” It is only annoying from a partisan viewpoint. There is a tendency throughout the book for this kind of partisanship to surface periodically, and it undermines its huge evidentiary strength. It is this strength that makes McKnight’s work stand out from all previous books on Murdoch, and it deserves to be required reading for anyone interested in politics, media and the interactions between the two.

THE development in the United States of a highly polarised media landscape, to which Fox News has made a significant contribution, is said to be a factor in the public’s declining trust in the media as an institution. In Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters, Jonathan Ladd examines this question from a political science perspective.

His line of argument goes broadly like this:

The existence of an independent, powerful, widely respected, professionalised news media establishment of the kind that reached its apogee in the United States during the middle of the twentieth century is an historical anomaly: it did not exist prior to the twentieth century and is now breaking down under a number of pressures.

These pressures include self-interested attempts by increasingly polarised politicians to undermine public trust in media that do not serve their interests, market demand for more partisan or entertaining styles of news, and increased competition arising from an internet-driven fragmentation of the media industry.

In response, the media has become more partisan itself and more given to sensationalism, which in turn is also undermining public trust.

Declining public trust causes further polarisation in the public as people fall back on their own ideological default positions. Here they are more resistant to new information from the media which might tend to make them moderate their positions, and increasingly seek out partisan news sources that confirm their pre-existing views.

In this way there is a self-perpetuating cycle in which distrust breeds polarisation which breeds more distrust.

To make this argument, he first subdivides the media into two groups: “institutional” and “alternative.” Into the first of these rather artificial categories, he assigns the main newspapers and the large television networks that have been the dominant sources of news for Americans for the past half-century. Into the second he assigns newer media outlets of different kinds: cable television, talkback radio and online platforms.

Ladd argues that from the 1960s onward, the political parties became more polarised and began to aggressively attack the trustworthiness of the “institutional” media. Simultaneously, as more “alternative” media outlets came on the scene, some “institutional” outlets began supplying more “soft” news in order to compete. These two factors led to a dramatic decline in public confidence in the media between the early 1970s and late 1990s. Concurrently, voters were increasingly sorting themselves more intransigently into Democrat or Republican camps.

After the abolition in 1985 of the Federal Communications Commission’s “fairness test,” which had required radio and terrestrial television to provide a balanced coverage of politics, talkback radio boomed. The most successful in this new gloves-off environment were conservative hosts such as Rush Limbaugh.

In cable television, the pioneering CNN, established in 1980, had a journalistic style similar to that of the “institutional” media, according to Ladd – professional, impartial, politically non-aligned news content separated from commentary. Fox News, when it began broadcasting in 1996, brought a more opinionated and conservatively partisan style similar to that of talkback radio. By 2004 its ratings were greater than those of the three other cable news networks combined.

Ladd presents survey data showing that opinionated cable hosts attract polarised audiences. By 2008, one of Fox’s most prominent conservative hosts, Bill O’Reilly, was attracting an audience 66 per cent of whom identified as conservative.

By the 1990s, a staple of conservative rhetoric on talkback and on Fox News was criticism of the “institutional” media as “liberal” – a swear word in the lexicon of the American right. As McKnight noted, “liberals” figure prominently on the list of Murdoch aversions, along with homosexuals, intellectual “elites,” adherents to “orthodoxy” and, above all, communists.

This dog-eat-dog attitude of one category of the media towards the other, combined with the disparaging of the media by elite political opinion and a more downmarket “tabloid” approach to news, are shown by Ladd statistically to be the main causes of the decline in public trust in the media.

This troubles Ladd – as well it might, given the central importance of the media to a healthy democracy – and he grapples with how it might be remedied. He acknowledges that it is impossible to recreate the conditions of the middle twentieth century, and also sees advantages in the newly fragmented and less professionalised media as agents of livelier and more open debate. His solutions, however, verge on the bizarre, especially given the attachment to market forces that partly defines what it is to be American: government subsidies for news organisations; a bigger government propaganda machine – which he gives the job of “directly publicising national conditions” – and the development of more not-for-profit news organisations.

There are some not-for-profit media already in the United States, especially in radio, and they produce some excellent material. But like Radio National in Australia, they serve a niche market and are not likely to be a significant brake on the decline in public trust which is clearly weakening the institutional standing of the American media.

There are significant parallels between these trends in the United States and what is happening in Australia. The rise of a strident, populist, right-wing talkback radio element in the media coupled with the clear pro-conservative political bias of the Murdoch press has polarised public debate and media coverage of politics to a degree not seen since the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975.

There is a large body of survey research showing that when the public perceives bias in the media, it trusts the media less. Therefore it would not be surprising if the patterns reported by Ladd in the United States applied also in Australia. •

The post Rupert and the right to know appeared first on Inside Story.

WHILE Sophie Black, Eric Beecher, various folk at the Australian, Matthew Ricketson, Margaret Simons and others have at various times declared the Australian Financial Review/afr.com business strategy to be “disastrous” (or words more colourful to that effect), I can’t recall any of them asking me about it. I do recall that after one of his more exotic colleagues beat me up on The Drum, Alan Kohler wrote to concede that the afr.com paywall strategy was “vindicated.” (Though I can’t recall that Alan or any of his colleagues has asked me about it either.)

We hear much about the “brand” and audience that is built by going online. By implication, people seem to assume that this is valuable. Generally it’s not. Which is why so many publishers have taken lately to trying paid content models. The reason traffic does not make money? At first, it was because the audience was not what advertisers would pay for. When people talk of millions of page views they’re talking about eyeballs from everywhere, a fraction of whom might want the advertiser’s Ford in Footscray. By itself, that discounted pricing. Publishers used auto refresh and other gimmicks to pump traffic, which ultimately encouraged price pressure too. Inventory was infinite. Then along came Google Adsense and dollars became cents.

When you get stuff for free, you get what you pay for. And that’s why news resources are pressured. The Australian Financial Review’s approach was different for two reasons: first, the business of the AFR had always relied heavily on pricing, including especially cover price revenue. Its niche is small in number, but valuable. The second reason was that our research consistently delivered a clear message: the product and its content were the key to the digital business.

The AFR has been profitable for all of the past fifteen years and in some of those years its profits were record numbers. In that time the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many others have reported losses. Even during the global financial crisis, which has had huge impacts on the reading audience and advertisers, the AFR made profits – while investing heavily in its multimedia. While other newspapers have had regular redundancy rounds, the AFR had none. In fact its editorial staff expanded, with an emphasis on specialised staff.

One of the reasons the AFR is stable is that its audience has always paid a full price for the content. The newspaper is $800 a year. There were no discounts other than to university students.

The AFR measures its audience and engagement using independent analysts. Its engagement level in the target audience was much greater than for the FT in Britain or the WSJ in the United States. This was a consistent result, but the AFR measure rose during the GFC. Internal tracking research over many years indicated that price was not a major factor in the buying decision. The audience is busy (or “time poor”) – it wants relevance and reliability. That same research showed consistently that the web requirement was for more content: specialised content relevant to reader interests. It also showed that readers were wedded to the print product.

AFR advertising is heavily skewed to print because a large part of it relies on print display for brand effects. For that reason, much of the revenue cannot migrate online. AFR advertising rates have been steady or rising in print for more than a decade. This may be unique in the industry. AFR digital advertising carried a heavy premium based on its audience, which might also be a unique characteristic. AFR user traffic has been strong and growing, despite the paywall and the fact that no devices such as auto refresh were ever applied.

Contrary to some popular views, the content on afr.com always included elements that were free. A lot of new content and videos were open for sampling. But the goal was to sell subscriptions, not to promote traffic. From the time that afr.com was launched the surveys showed no sign that price was an issue. Rather it was content value: the readers wanted more, but mainly material that was specialist.

When the AFR installed a full state-of-the-art multimedia production system in 2010, the business became media neutral. From that time the AFR was able to produce to any medium at any time. Through its new efficiencies it was able to ramp up content in all the specialised areas, including video. This coincided with a sharp rise in subscriber numbers. By March 2011 afr.com subscribers had reached more than 7000 and were growing at more than 50 per cent a year – despite the impact of the GFC, which had eroded the print numbers to the mid 70,000s.

While I’m no longer responsible for the AFR or afr.com, I do think it’s in the community’s interests to get some facts into these debates. My point essentially is that people will pay for a news media product that they value. If there are enough of them, you have a viable business. Anything else is tosh.

I think people do place a quite high value on trusted, relevant sources of news about their interests. I’m not sure that many commentators have looked hard at what that means.

Finally, Andy Groves of Intel once said famously that only the paranoid survive. He also said that he who commoditises last, wins. In news media, too few are paranoid and too many have commoditised too readily.

The post How the AFR’s “disastrous” paywall delivered the goods appeared first on Inside Story.

Listen here

Guests

Gordon Crovitz, Co-Founder of Press+

A longer version of the interview with Mr Crovitz is available here

Sophie Black, Editor of Crikey

Jason Wilson, Assistant Professor in Journalism at the University of Canberra

And former CEO of the Financial Review Group, Michael Gill, responds to this discussion for Inside Story

Reading

The Australian’s paywall explained

The New York Times paywall: How it works

September 2011 online subscriber figures for the New York Times

The post Paywalls: the good news and the gamble appeared first on Inside Story.

The publication of Robert Manne’s Bad News, an impassioned 25,000-word critique of the Australian, comes amidst a series of headaches for News Corp, including an acrimonious feud with the Gillard government, the announcement of an inquiry into print media regulation, and, of course, never-ending fallout from the phone-hacking scandal.

It’s no wonder that News is feeling tetchy. Manne’s polemic against the “overbearing character” and “unhealthy influence” of the Australian has generated a counter-attack from the paper’s editors, who laid into the essay with predictable ferocity. The Australian has now declared the discussion closed, but those who missed the war of words can catch up here and here.

Bad News consists of a number of case studies focusing on key issues around which the Australian has campaigned forcefully – either for (the Iraq war, the US alliance, Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History), or against (the emissions trading scheme, the Greens, Media Watch). The essay leaves the reader in little doubt as to the Australian’s consistent prosecution of a partisan political agenda. Stephen Conroy has recently described the Murdoch press as being in the business of “regime change” rather than reportage. Bad News provides ample evidence for this claim.

Manne’s essay also demonstrates the personal and vindictive way in which the Australian carries out its campaigns. In recent years we have seen a number of public figures – including David Marr and Simon Overland – become victims of sustained attacks from the paper’s journalists. The systematic character assassination of Sydney academic Larissa Behrendt at the hands of Patricia Karvelas – an episode Manne recounts in some detail – is one recent example.

I found much to admire in this detailed critique of the Australian and its lurch to the right. The essay marshals an array of evidence to substantiate the claim that the paper, under editor Chris Mitchell, has mutated into a “national enforcer” of neoliberal/market-fundamentalist values. As anyone who regularly reads the Australian knows, the paper has long since abandoned any attempt to weigh both sides when it comes to certain pet issues, and now operates more as what Manne describes as “a remorseless campaigning paper.”

Yet I can’t help feeling that Manne’s analysis, while reaching the right conclusions, has failed to ask the right questions. Part of this has to do with the fact that Manne appears to be more interested in discrediting the Australian than understanding how it works. As a result, Bad News is heavy on polemic and light on analysis and information. Beyond a few juicy details about the relationship between Mitchell and Kevin Rudd, there is relatively little new information on offer here.

Most of Manne’s essay is devoted to telling us, in a variety of ways, what we already know – that the Oz is a bastion of right-wing values, that it adheres closely to Rupert Murdoch’s own beliefs, and that it is a mouthpiece for mining companies, employer groups and conservative think tanks. This is a valuable critique, to be sure, but not an original one. And it leaves a lot of interesting questions unanswered.

For example, Manne does not attempt to explain why the paper continues to prosecute a hard anti–emissions trading scheme line even though Murdoch himself has apparently recanted on his climate change scepticism. Nor does Manne explain how the entire editorial staff of the paper – which includes some of the most intelligent journalists working in Australia today – can be so effectively corralled into toeing the party line day in and day out. After reading Bad News I am still at a loss to understand how this works in practice.

Most serious studies of newspapers would spend more time thinking about such things. But Manne is not really interested in these questions, preferring instead to wage war with the Oz on moral grounds (he even offers a four-page argument for why climate change science is correct – as if such a defence were needed). Perhaps this focus is understandable given Manne’s background. He is, after all, a specialist in Australian politics rather than the political economy of the media – a point made in Tad Tietze’s review of Bad News. Certainly, previous articles about Mitchell’s editorship have covered these questions in greater detail. But eliding the industrial contexts through which the Australian is produced works only to reduce the complexity and depth of the argument and, ultimately, the power of the intervention.

Nor do we get much of a sense of how, exactly, the Australian shapes our public culture and policy. Yes, we know the paper is full of partisan coverage (interspersed with first-rate journalism from the likes of George Megalogenis and Paul Kelly). Yes, we know that “the political class” reads it. But that isn’t to say that they take its campaigning seriously. There is no question that the paper plays a major role in setting the news agenda for the country, but the relationship between the Australian’s content and its impact is not as straightforward as Manne’s essay suggests.

This brings me to what is perhaps a deeper problem. Manne is so focused on the Australian’s role in reproducing right-wing ideology that he all but loses sight of the paper, which becomes a stand-in for the Australian right in general. This means that, all too frequently, Manne is not writing about the Australian; he is writing about the right, and how he feels about the right. Hence, the force of his argument stems from moral and political concerns rather than from the insights that his own analysis might generate.

While the aims behind Bad News are honourable, the essay displays a lack of imagination in terms of how a critique of the right-wing media can be carried out and to whom such a critique might potentially speak. Bad News serves ultimately to lock the conversation about media bias into an old left/right face-off which entrenches these positions as the only possible alternatives. It serves as an effective call-to-arms for Robert Manne’s regular readers to rally against the horrors of the Murdoch press, but it does less to advance our understanding of the problem or how it might be addressed. •

The post The good, the bad, the ugly appeared first on Inside Story.

BEWARE those who claim a monopoly on wisdom, truth and virtue.

“We are the only organisation that really takes it up to the government,” News Limited CEO John Hartigan told the ABC’s 7.30 late last week as he moved to fend off criticism of the Murdoch empire’s Australian publications in the wake of the crisis engulfing its British and American publications. The Australian, Hartigan added, was the only newspaper that “properly” covered national politics; the ABC and Fairfax newspapers, meanwhile, enjoy preferred federal government treatment because they are more supportive of its policies.

Hartigan’s claims were at once remarkable and revealing. They suggested that News Limited sees itself as the lone fearless crusader for effective government in a nation populated by an otherwise politically compliant media. They showed that the organisation sees its Australian publications as islands of virtuous concern in a sea of complacent apathy.

It is a self-interested, self-flattering and deluded assessment that says more about Hartigan and News Limited than it does about the character of the Australian media. Anyone who consumes Australia media with even casual interest can only wonder at Hartigan’s words.

To suggest that only News Limited newspapers offer straight-from-the-shoulder assessments of national affairs is absurd. National life is complex and it is conflicted. There are cross-cutting pressures. Honest, expert observers and interpreters can and do differ. Hartigan’s grandiose suggestion that there is only one truth – the News Limited truth – reveals an extremely narrow vision.

Yet Hartigan’s ABC appearance formed a key part of News Limited’s defence of its Australian activities as crises in Britain and the United States forced Murdoch and his senior editors onto the defensive while politicians and law enforcement authorities moved to examine ethical and possibly legal breaches. At the same time, News Limited newspapers reported that the ABC and Fairfax newspapers had engaged in questionable lobbying and dodgy activities. The subtext seemed to be that the organisation’s competitors are hyprocrites wallowing in schadenfreude.

It is true that Fairfax papers have reported the News Limited crisis with great glee and in great detail, just as News Limited has often reported difficulties within Fairfax. That is standard operating procedure in the newspaper game. But dodgy activities by the ABC and Fairfax papers in Australia neither excuse nor ameliorate the phone hacking and other activities being exposed in Britain. The fact that others might have similarly dirty hands does not excuse the excesses of the Murdoch press.

There is, of course, no evidence that News Limited’s Australian publications have engaged in the sort of practices that have forced Rupert Murdoch to issue humiliating public apologies, to cut loose some of his most senior executives, and to give evidence before a parliamentary committee.

Criticism of Murdoch’s Australian publications is focused on what is seen as their relentless pursuit of a political agenda overwhelmingly hostile to the federal Labor government and its key initiatives, including the carbon tax, national broadband network and asylum-seeker strategies. News Limited’s unremitting hostility to the Greens and independents who support the minority Labor government is also seen as combining malice, mockery and misrepresentation.

Hartigan told the ABC that News Limited newspapers had “implicit values” and were concerned by a leadership vacuum created by the current minority government. But he insisted that the company was not pursuing an agenda of “regime change” in Australia. It was a brave denial given the consistently negative News Limited coverage of the Gillard government.

Here, three things need to be said. First, News Limited newspapers are doing nothing wrong in pursuing their agenda. This is still a broadly liberal democracy with a mostly free press, and Gillard and her government have, at times, erred spectacularly. Their dismal position in opinion polls reflects public unease which News Limited seeks to reflect and to magnify.

Secondly, News Limited newspapers do some things very well indeed. Their coverage of big stories at home and abroad is at times superior to and more comprehensive than the coverage of their competitors. (This is not, of course, true of the coverage of the News Limited crisis.)

Thirdly, contrary to Hartigan’s view, no newspaper has a monopoly on virtue or on vice, on competence or foolishness. All newspapers make good and bad judgements. All try to balance political and commercial agendas to maximise their power, popularity and shareholder returns. They are complex organisms populated by complex individuals and their content reflects that complexity for better and for worse.

What particularly distinguishes News Limited newspapers is their consistently selective writing and display of material crafted to further the company’s anti-government agenda, and the overwhelmingly similar supporting opinions expressed by its commentators and analysts. It would be naive to think there was no controlling intelligence overseeing, coordinating and directing this effort to demonise the Gillard government and to promote the Abbott opposition.

While News Limited has an undoubted right to pursue an agenda that reflects its values and boosts its newspaper circulations, it cannot at the same time credibly assert that it is primarily interested in fair, balanced and open-minded political journalism and commentary. Sometimes it is. Often, however, it is manifestly more interested in advancing the corporate agenda, and News Limited journalism shades into strident political propaganda.

Contrary to Hartigan’s view, political reporting and analysis cannot be reduced to the full-blooded and proper News Limited approach versus dodgy pro-government ABC and Fairfax approaches. Moreover, the more News Limited political reporting resembles propaganda, the less it is likely to be trusted by readers who see through its transparent spin.

It is probably futile to hope that Murdoch’s problems in Britain and the United States might produce a more moderate, reflective and tolerant mindset in News Limited journalism in Australia. But a dash of reflective modesty would certainly make Mr Hartigan a more credible front-man for the company. •

The post Is this News Limited’s defence? appeared first on Inside Story.

In the classic political scandal, Rodney Tiffen writes in Scandals: Media, Politics and Corruption in Contemporary Australia, the media and the political opposition work in tandem. A newspaper or broadcaster unearths scandalous behaviour and, if it’s embarrassing for the government, the opposition pursues the issue under the protection of parliamentary privilege. The media reports the parliamentary debates and keeps digging; the opposition uses new revelations to ratchet up the pressure.

But what happens when a newspaper unearths what seems like a scandal – bribery by a company half-owned by the Reserve Bank, for example – and the rest of the media largely ignores it? Combine that with a reluctance to pursue the issue on both sides of parliament and you’re left with a scandal that isn’t. Or at least not until this week, when Four Corners covered the story of Securency, the company that markets Australia’s polymer banknotes, in a report presented by the Age’s Nick McKenzie.

Over the past twelve months McKenzie and his colleague in the Age’s investigative team, Richard Baker, have published a series of articles detailing serious allegations of bribery by people acting on behalf of Securency, which is owned jointly by the Reserve Bank and the British company Innovia. The allegations were first published in a feature-length article in the Age (with a shorter version in the Sydney Morning Herald) on 23 May last year. Securency staff were alleged to have paid “multimillion-dollar commissions to shady middle-men” in a campaign to win banknote printing contracts from foreign governments. (A fully owned Reserve Bank company, Note Printing Australia, is also alleged to have been involved in paying foreign “commissions” in the past.)

The reaction of the other media was puzzling. The Australian covered the main points of that first Age story in a short piece published on the same day, crediting Fairfax papers as the source. As the coverage continued over the next few days in the Age and the SMH, the Australian published two more short pieces, and then fell silent. Despite new and significant information in over a dozen articles by Baker and McKenzie based on research in Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia, despite the launch of an investigation by the federal police in June, and despite the suspension of two senior Securency executives in November 2009 and their departure in March this year (the Reserve Bank wouldn’t say whether they resigned or were sacked), the Australian published no coverage whatsoever until this week, almost a year later.

Even more perplexingly, the Australian Financial Review, stablemate of the Age and the SMH, showed no more interest than its News Ltd rival. The AFR published a single paragraph on 25 May 2009, not a word until 23 November, nothing more until 31 March this year, and then a longer news article on the morning after the story was taken up this week by Four Corners.

ABC radio current affairs programs meanwhile covered the story intermittently through the year, as did Australian Associated Press (though most of its reports don’t seem to have been published by its subscribers). The West Australian and the Perth Sunday Times published one or two short pieces each during the year. Crikey gave the story a couple of brief mentions.

As the anniversary of the first article approached, the Age resorted to stretching the truth a little by mentioning the matter in its Saturday section, “The top ten: What everyone was talking about this week,” on 3 April. Summarising the state of play, the paper’s Warwick McFadyen wrote: “An independent audit of Securency, which makes polymer bank notes, found the Reserve Bank subsidiary had paid almost $50 million in commissions worldwide to agents with political connections from 2003 to January 2009. KPMG, which conducted the audit, was scathing of Securency’s work practices.” Federal police were continuing their investigation of the company’s alleged bribery of officials in Nigeria, Malaysia and Vietnam.

David Chaikin, a specialist in financial crime at the University of Sydney, sees McKenzie and Baker’s findings as important and very worrying. “Their significance arises from the identity of the players,” he told me. “We mightn’t be too surprised by an energy company bribing officials in a corrupt country, but for our Reserve Bank to be associated in any way with this sort of activity is remarkable.”

The revelations highlight – and might also reflect – Australia’s very poor record of enforcing laws that prohibit Australian companies from bribing officials in foreign countries in order to further their businesses. The federal government has had opportunities to adopt a more aggressive approach, but despite being a signatory to the OECD convention prohibiting these practices it has fallen behind its major counterparts overseas. The United States, by contrast, “puts huge resources into investigating allegations of bribery by American companies,” says Dr Chaikin.

According to a progress report on the implementation of the OECD convention published in June last year by Transparency International, Australia is one of twenty-one countries in which there was “little or no enforcement” of anti-bribery laws. Only four countries – Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the United States – were “actively enforcing,” and another eleven were carrying out “moderate enforcement.”

Shady middlemen, foreign governments, large quantities of cash, a previously unimpeachable public institution: the Securency story has all the essential characteristics of a scandal that could run across all media. But for a year the Age’s revelations gained almost no public recognition outside the Fairfax papers in Melbourne and Sydney.

To help explain the lack of political traction all you need to know are the dates over which the alleged bribes were paid: from sometime in 2003 to January 2009 – the late Howard years and the first fourteen months of the Rudd government. Both the Coalition and the current Labor government have no particular interest in stirring up controversy about bribes that were being paid while Peter Costello and then Wayne Swan were treasurers and ultimately responsible for the Reserve Bank. And so, when the leader of the Greens, Senator Bob Brown, tried to set up a parliamentary inquiry into the affair last October, it’s no surprise that he was rebuffed by the government and the opposition.

The behaviour of the media is equally worrying. Newspapers, in particular, have generally been reluctant to take up a rival’s scoop unless the issue is pursued in parliament, and countless Four Corners stories have been ignored by its competitors. In this case, this means that readers outside Victoria and New South Wales, and anyone who doesn’t read the Age or the Sydney Morning Herald, would have seen glimpses, at best, of this unfolding story, and no analysis of how it fits into a broader failure by Australian governments to enforce its obligations under the OECD convention and other international agreements. •

• Listen to Peter Clarke talking to Age investigative journalists Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie about their work on the Securency story.

The post The scandal that almost wasn’t appeared first on Inside Story.

A few weeks ago ABC chairman Maurice Newman suggested that the national broadcaster displayed “groupthink” in its treatment of global warming issues. A chorus of commentators in the Australian immediately agreed with him.

The story was irresistible for the Australian, because it simultaneously tapped into two of the paper’s obsessions – the sins of the ABC and the alleged weaknesses of climate science. But when the words climate change, groupthink and the Australian appear in close conjunction, another phrase – the one about glass houses – immediately comes to mind.

As one small test of the paper’s coverage of global warming, I tracked every article referring to glaciers published in the paper so far this year. Glaciers were in the news for several reasons but most spectacularly, in mid January, following much coverage of a false claim in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 Report that the glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035. This was one paragraph in a 3000-page report, and only one of dozens of findings and predictions about glaciers, let alone surface ice more generally. Nevertheless it was an important error, and it deservedly focused critical attention on the IPCC and its processes.

Glaciers have been the subject of systematic study for a long time, and the historical record since the last Ice Age has fairly reliably been traced. In its 2005 survey of 442 glaciers the World Glacier Monitoring Service found not only that 90 per cent were retreating, but also that the rate of loss between 1996 and 2005 was double the loss during the previous decade and over four times the rate of loss during the decade before that. The cumulative loss of ice from 200 glaciers studied systematically from 1945 to 2005 was, by my calculation, equivalent to between one fifth and one ninth of the current ice mass of those glaciers.

The WGMS noted that 1998 was a record year for mass loss in glaciers, but since then that record has been exceeded three times. The 2006 figures, the latest published, show the biggest loss ever.

In the six weeks after the revelation of the false claim in the IPCC report the Australian published forty-two stories that made some mention of glaciers. All of the articles referred to the IPCC’s error in relation to Himalayan glaciers. In thirty-eight of the forty-two stories the only reference to glaciers was the false finding; the other four articles mentioned both the error and some other findings about glacier movements.

When the error was first identified, the Australian ran three articles within two days, headlined respectively “UN’s blunder on glaciers exposed,” “UN’s glacier blunder a 300 year mix-up,” and “Climate science on thin ice.” The Sydney Morning Herald’s report on the error, by contrast, appeared under the headline “Climate report reliable despite untested glacier claim: author,” quoting IPCC report co-author and Melbourne University geologist David Karoly.

Around this time, a new scientific report was released highlighting the accelerating rate at which glaciers are melting – a finding that other newspapers found newsworthy. The Guardian, for example, attended to both in separate stories on 20 January. The first was headlined “Claims Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 were false, says UN scientist,” and the second, around two-thirds the length of the first, was “World’s glaciers melting at accelerated pace, leading scientists say.”

The Australian buried the second story inside the first. Cameron Stewart’s forty-paragraph article contained just four paragraphs, in the second half, referring to the report discussed in the Guardian’s second article; three of those four paragraphs included a word or phrase indicating uncertainty or qualification.

Amid the litany of conformity in the Australian there were two pieces of distinguished journalism. The first was a column by Mike Steketee showing that the error in no way qualified the main picture we have of global warming, which is supported by a mass of evidence. The other was a hard-hitting report by the paper’s European correspondent, Peter Wilson, about how the error occurred and how some officials sought to deny it rather than acknowledge the criticisms. Wilson’s story was based principally on an interview with the Canadian scientist, Graham Cogley, who had exposed the error, and who presciently said that it would be blown out of proportion by global warming sceptics to try to cast doubt on the whole IPCC report. Later newspaper reports – in the Australian and elsewhere – tended to overlook the fact that it was a climate scientist, and one who accepted the overwhelming bulk of the IPCC report, who had exposed the error in the interests of factual accuracy.

Apart from the Australian’s lack of interest in other evidence about glaciers, the newspaper also often framed the error, which it sometimes called “glaciergate” or “icegate,” as if it were part of a common or dominant pattern. So the newspaper’s stories had headlines such as: “Scientists say IPCC should be overhauled or scrapped,” “More flaws emerge in climate alarms,” “UN caught out again on climate claims,” “Climategate is the tip of the iceberg” and “Don’t trust the weatherman’s forecasts.”

The treatment of the glaciers is part of a long-term pattern in the Australian. Its reporting of climate change is marked by an unquenchable thirst for stories criticising those who say anthropogenic climate change is a problem and a studied lack of interest in reporting the great bulk of research that says it is. On the most important long-term issue facing the nation, its news priorities are marked by a stifling internal conformity which trivialises and distorts coverage. •

The post Group thoughts appeared first on Inside Story.

SOME YEARS AGO, when I was editing the Australian Financial Review, the Canadian–British citizen Conrad Black called me into his temporary digs in Fairfax’s old Broadway headquarters for a cosy chat. The would-be media baron was deputy chair of Fairfax and the AFR had just published an unflattering portrait of him and his dealings. Black decided he’d vent his spleen on the editor.

The latter-day Citizen Kane and I had what the diplomats call a full and frank discussion (probably because there were so many “f’s” uttered during it) and agreed to disagree about whether the content and tone of the material was apt for a paper owned by a company, Fairfax, in which his own company held a 15 per cent stake.

Not long after this encounter I was dismissed as editor and moved off for some years into other pursuits. Black also moved off into other pursuits, ultimately to his present accommodation in a Florida prison after being convicted of ripping off funds from a public company he was supposed to be running for all shareholders.

It was a bracing time to be shown the door. There was a recession on, the house was being renovated, the mortgage needed to be paid… It has since, of course, become a sort of badge of honour to have been dumped for publishing things about the unorthodox corporate practices of such a colourful character.

I no longer work at the company, but I’ve spent most of my thirty years in journalism at the AFR and the Sydney Morning Herald, having left the SMH a year ago. Recently, I was so astonished to see the outbreak of petty bickering among senior members of the Fairfax board that I decided I would stand for one of two board vacancies at the 10 November annual general meeting of the company.

Fairfax Media owns three of the most influential newspapers in Australia – the SMH, the AFR and the Melbourne Age. That simple fact makes Fairfax a singularly important entity in the nation’s media world – and also Australia’s cultural, social and political fabric. Because newspapers still play a key role in reporting and analysing what is called news and current affairs, it still matters whether the Fairfax papers, and their linked websites, get it right.

Too important, certainly, to allow the petulance that has been a feature of Fairfax boardroom relations in recent months to chew up valuable thinking time and energy when newspapers, and the way they are funded and operate, are under unprecedented threat. In my view, their survival is at stake over the next five years. This week the New York Times announced 100 editorial layoffs in its newsroom, approximately eight per cent of the paper’s total editorial staff. It’s the second time the venerable institution has cut editorial numbers in the past eighteen months. The US media is doing it hardest – the latest circulation figures show that more than 60 per cent of the twenty-five largest newspapers experienced circulation falls of more than 10 per cent in the past year – but newspapers in other countries aren’t all that far behind in facing the internet music. Fairfax, for instance, has culled editorial numbers at the Sydney Morning Herald four times over the past seven years.

I know enough about corporate law and the way boards work to know that there will be no genuine vacancies on the Fairfax board in November. This is because the board itself – like the boards of virtually all the top 200 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange – likes to select its own and maintain a tight-knit club. In this case, the two board members up for re-election were the Fairfax chair, Ron Walker, and the likely chair-in-waiting, Roger Corbett. Whoever chairs the meeting will be able to cast proxy votes on behalf of many smaller shareholders, who give the chair the right to use their votes whichever way he or she chooses. In this way, the chair can normally control the process of assembling the board.

The current row on the Fairfax board is too complex and silly to go into here. Suffice to say that in the past couple of weeks, Walker decided to step down, Corbett was given the nod to be the new chair after the annual general meeting, and the largest single shareholder – John B. Fairfax – reluctantly agreed to the compromise after the various parties had aired their tantrums in public. News Ltd newspapers loved the spat.

With Corbett re-nominating and Ron Walker no longer standing that leaves only one spot vacant. But the board decided to make a point of telling shareholders in the notice of meeting that it recommended against the election of any of the three other candidates who have nominated – myself and the experienced Melbourne journalists Stephen Mayne (who is also a prominent shareholder activist) and Steve Harris (a former Age editor and experienced publisher).

The experience of all three nominees quickly became an issue for a simple reason: one of the striking things about the Fairfax board is that none of its members has any editorial experience. Yet it was prepared to tell its shareholders that, although it recognises there is a yawning gap in its skill set, it is so obsessed with protecting its own clubhouse that it will recommend against any newcomers.

For the past twenty years, there has not been one person with an editorial background, and few with any media company experience, accepted into the Fairfax club. I don’t argue it is the only skill needed on a board – wisdom and commonsense rank high, in my view – but the governing body of a company that “sells” high-quality editorial as its primary product should surely nurture and promote such skills at the highest level, as part of the mix of personnel on the board.

Journalists, photographers, artists and creative web denizens may be maddeningly difficult to deal with, and an unruly lot to manage and lead, but they’re what make a media company tick. In the current turmoil facing media companies around the world, such experience is vital if the company is not to stray even further towards the rocks which are lying in wait for newspaper-oriented companies trying to adapt to a digital, paper-less, ethereal information environment.

Even Conrad Black was a sometime columnist and a prolific, if florid, writer. (His autobiography, penned before he went to jail, was entitled A Life in Progress and while doing time he’s written a controversial biography of disgraced US President Richard Nixon.)

If by chance I became a board member, my primary aim would be to enhance shareholder value in the company and seek to bring much-needed corporate governance discipline to the Fairfax board and its warring factions, while bringing an intimate knowledge of what goes into the creation of the high-end journalism on which the company’s reputation is based.

Unlike what Conrad Black thought, I’m not simply a campaigning journalist out to get scalps. Even an experienced journalist like me can look, and even be, respectable. I’m the chair of the industry super fund Media Super, which had $6 million in funds when I first joined as chair eighteen years ago. We’ve negotiated three mergers and now look after $2.5 billion in members’ retirement assets. As I’ve said elsewhere, to achieve that has needed tact, negotiating skills, business acumen and toughness of purpose. At Media Super, I have been delighted to see so many board members who’ve put aside petty squabbles and differences in approach and brought common sense to the board table.

At the risk of this sounding like a job application, I’m also on the boards of the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees and the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors – two organisations that have corporate governance and shareholder interests front and centre.

So how likely is it that the door to the clubhouse can be prised open? With a block of votes (J.B. Fairfax’s 9.5 per cent and perhaps another few per cent from other board members) already committed to a vote against all three external candidates, any outsider will need to counteract that weight somehow. A candidate gets up if they can poll more votes in their favour than against at the annual general meeting. It’s certainly possible, but it needs considerable effort as most shareholders don’t exercise their right to vote.

I’m an optimist and a realist: optimist enough to be determined to encourage management to harness the vast pool of talent within Fairfax Media to navigate the changing media environment ahead; realist enough to know that unless the company gets it right in short-order time, it will founder.

Last week, the managing director of the ABC, Mark Scott (who, just two years ago, was the editorial director of Fairfax’s newspaper and magazine division), used the A.N. Smith lecture to take Rupert Murdoch to task, offering a critique of Murdoch for his inconsistency in dealing with new media. Scott offered some sobering warnings from recent (and ancient) history about how easily major organisations have simply slipped from sight when they have failed to appreciate the nature of the changes going on around them. Predictably, Murdoch and his lieutenants responded in what I thought was a puny, if characteristically caustic, defence.

This is a vitally important debate, because the ABC is one of the key players in the new media landscape and Fairfax (just as much as News Ltd) needs to deal with the national broadcaster as an agile, well-resourced, thoughtful and de-facto competitor.

But where was Fairfax, or its chairman, or its senior management, in this debate? Regrettably pretty well silent, presumably still licking their wounds over the recent board squabbling.

That can’t remain the state of affairs any longer. Fairfax matters too much to be a sideline player in the great transformations that are taking place in the media. •

The post Why the Fairfax board needs media experience appeared first on Inside Story.