media
29 Aug 2008
The Fairfax Walkout
Recent Fairfax job cuts are the latest installment in the gripping decline and fall of the traditional media in Australia
With in the space of a few years, two of the bastions of Australian media - Publishing and Broadcasting Limited and Fairfax Media - have been humbled by the vicissitudes of corporate fate. Both companies once dominated their industries. Both have now been gutted by swingeing cuts from desperate managers.The fate of Fairfax and PBL is symptomatic of broader trends in the cultural industries. Changing technology is profoundly transforming the economic landscape of the media. In a nutshell, advertising is increasingly migrating online, and so the revenue streams of newspapers and television networks are slowly declining. Further, the mass markets these companies once claimed have splintered. New leisure pursuits have arrived to interest consumers. Websites have delivered a better product for classifieds. Media convergence has circumvented old ways of selling content.
The problem is not so much the balance sheet - both companies still make a profit - as the inexorable direction of the consumption trend. The slow death of old media is a worldwide trend that cuts across languages and economies. It's a slow-moving train wreck that has transfixed its own industry, with everyone from Slate's Jack Shafer to Margaret Simons to the Columbia Journalism Review lamenting the coming apocalypse of newspapers, news and Serious Journalism.
It's instructive to remember how far media technology has come in just a few short years. Most people didn't get their first email address until the late 1990s. Shawn Fanning essentially invented online music with Napster only in 1999, and mobile phone uptake in Australia grew from 1 per cent in 1990 to 72 per cent in 2002. YouTube seems like a part of the online furniture these days, yet it's easy to forget the site is only three years old.
This "long emergency" of creative destruction has transformed the cultural industries. The recorded music industry ate itself in an increasingly frenzied round of mergers as consumers swapped their $30 CDs for free MP3 downloads. Householders selling second hand goods swapped newspaper classifieds for eBay and Craigs List. Many younger people never took up the habit of reading newspapers in the first place.
The newspaper industry has done itself no favours with its typical response to declining circulations and migrating ad revenues. Cutting costs ultimately damages the product. Worse, it erodes the strongest point of difference newspapers still enjoy in comparison to their online cousins: quality, in-depth journalism.
Of course, many will say The Age and Sydney Morning Herald of recent times have had precious little of that, and has instead been drowning in a sea of Lindsey Lohan stories. Even so, it's notable that the much maligned Andrew Jaspan (The Age's recently sacked chief editor) still managed to hold or even slightly increase circulations in the past three years, on the back of some clever sponsorships and enhanced engagement with the Melbourne community. The Age has been one of the very few newspapers anywhere in the western world to achieve that.
Where does that leave us? As Eric Beecher noted in an interview with The Australian, sacking hundreds of journalists will leave a gap the online media can't fill. This will have a material effect on the standards of journalism across the country (which were already in a fairly parlous state).
On the blogging side, online self-publishers will no doubt feel at least an element of schadenfreude at the fate of the pilloried Mainstream Media, or "MSM". They shouldn't, because a declining fourth estate is a recipe for a sickening democracy. Journalists who get paid to cover a beat full-time have a luxury to research and network in a subject area that many bloggers rightly envy.
Journalism will continue. But there will be fewer jobs for full-time, salaried journalists. This will undoubtedly affect the quality of the national debate. But new opportunities for independent media in new platforms will also emerge. The article you're reading is one of these.
The positive side of media transformations is greater than it's often portrayed. Bloggers and online journals like the one you're reading now have garnered new audiences and even new advertising markets. More importantly, the blogosphere is collectively a vastly more diverse source of information, comment and analysis than was available to the serious newspaper reader a decade ago.
Blogs have created a new intellectual freedom and openness in the way news is consumed and communicated. They have burst into the comfortable club that saw senior journalists and senior bureaucrats and politicians enmeshed in a cosy power relationship, to the detriment of ordinary citizens.
They just haven't - yet - achieved too many high profile successes in investigative journalism. But even that is not impossible to conceive of in the long term.
Sydney Morning Herald staff are holding a barbecue at the picket line at 5:00pm today. Latest casualty, columnist Mike Carlton, will be there to address the crowd. The public is encouraged to come along to the One Darling Island offices in Pyrmont and support the call: "Fair go, Fairfax - Don't discount quality journalism".
More information on the Fairfax strike can be found here.
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I sent a letter to the SMH in support of the walk out. It was blank.
We just had a call from a fairfax journalist who is asking that anyone who can get down to the SMH offices in Pyrmont at 5pm today to support the cause. Mike Carlton, who was sacked for refusing to file his column this weekend, will be there to address the crowd.
I bought the Herald this morning, not thinking about the lack of journalists to write it. When I sat down to read the News Review I started as usual with the back page, keen to read Mike Carlton’s take on the week.
Staring back at me was the frightening visage of Miranda Devine. For a brief moment I felt dizzy, like I had been transported into an alternate universe where the Germans won the war.
I guess Miranda Devine’s face was probably an accurate summation of Mike Carlton’s take on the week.
It goes to show that even our media is not immune from the capitalist economic system and it even claims the scalps of some of the right wing loonies like Miranda Devine who worship it.
Schadenfreude.
Too right Ben, very funny.
Young Ben,
Once again you dont fail to deliver… Great piece!
http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/
Monday, September 01, 2008
PILGER’S FRIENDLY FIRE
Melbourne Writers Festival ends…
by Sasha Uzunov
copyright 2008
I spent thirty minutes waiting for the scheduled start of controversial journalist John Pilger’s talk on the "silence of the media" at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Saturday 23 August after organisers had botched the seating plan. But the wait was worth it.
Friendly fire is a military term meaning shooting or bombing your own side, so it came as a great surprise when Pilger turned his guns on fellow travellers Michael Gawenda, former The Age editor, and Professor Robert Manne.
What is remarkable is that the Age is also the sponsor of the Writer’s Festival and made no mention of this very public spat. A clear case of "silence of the media."
It was like a Pearl Harbour job, completely unexpected and out of the blue. We are all accustomed to Pilger venting his spleen about American foreign policy. On the night he did not disappoint, calling every western political leader, including our own Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a liar on the war on terror and even taking a pot shot at US Presidential candidate Barak Obama over his support for the "good war" in Afghanistan.
To say Pilger was furious would be an understatement. He was livid that Gawenda had taken a swipe at English journalist Nick Davies, also a speaker at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and angered by Professor Manne, self proclaimed public intellectual.
Watching Pilger in action was like watching boxing great Muhammed Ali in action. The verbal punches, jabs, uppercuts, hooks, incredible stuff! I don’t think Gawenda or Manne would’ve have been able to get up from the verbal knock-down.
If you pardon the salty barracks language but I think Pilger tried to tear Gawenda and Manne a second behind. The genteel crowd would’ve been choking on their soya lattes.
So what had angered the great man to open up such a barrage, where terms such as character assassination, hatchet job, smear campaign, gatekeepers controlling flow of information were rolling off his tongue?
As the Andrew Landeryou blog, www.vexnews.com, revealed in more detail, Gawenda had fired a salvo at Nick Davies in a book review of Davies’ Flat Earth News, in the Age (Saturday 23 August 2008) Gawenda’s gripe related to an incident in 1995 when the British journalist was on exchange with The Age:
"Davies had a big scoop. He had managed to get hold of a letter signed by seven doctors who said they favoured voluntary euthanasia…The letter was cleverly constructed so that none of the doctors individually admitted to having helped patients die…
"Oh, by the way, that scoop that Davies came up with shortly after he arrived at The Age…Well, Davies actually drafted that letter and took it to the doctors who signed it. Is there something wrong with that, the journalist as participant in a story? You decide."
What is Gawenda implying by this? Moreover, if he had his suspicions about the story then why didn’t he do something about it in 1995? It’s a bit unfair to hit someone over the head with an allegation after they have become a famous book author? Perhaps there might be a case of professional envy showing?
Pilger also attacked in equal ferocity Professor Manne, who is notorious for changing ideological sides. The good professor launched a critique of leftist reporter Wilfred Burchett, an Australian who was accused of working for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
"These gatekeepers haven’t recovered from the cold war," he said.
In an extraordinary move Pilger then directed the audience to check Professor Manne’s article on the web. (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7594&page=0)
They do not seem to be a group of happy campers down at The Age and the Writer’s Festival. But because of the "silence of the media" you did not hear about it in the Fairfax press!
(end)
Years ago I used to love to read the papers and get the facts. As the reporting gradually became more sensational and the facts became opinions and the opinions became entertainment I gave up.
ü Reduce, replace, reuse, recycle - the environment is everybody’s business
Apart from young people not knowing what a newspaper is, and apart from the world wide decline in printed media, plus the loss of the last pretense of democracy which the printed media offered us, (until Rupert Murdoch seized the world news market) I feel the Age was, for the past 5 years, not sure of what its real market is.
The Herald Sun, revoltingly, knows precisely its own market. People who move their lips when they read. People whose entire rationale is sport. And for the terminally weak witted there are the pages of raging sanity and deadly accurate research, and precision, produced by the piercingly superior Andrew Bolt. (choke, choke) But, by trying first one thing, then another, the Age has not, in recent times, come across with much conviction as to their political stance. And when sport made it’s way onto the front pages; only a fool wouldn’t have known the trouble it was in. Perhaps because it had to answer to shareholders, combined with its having stuffed up its on-line section, made the whole thing unworkable.
To me, and I am far from being unique, the things that really matter are news, news analysis, a single cartoon is enough, hang onto the crossword section (lots of people I know but the Age solely for the crossword section; and politics, and political analysis. Does anyone here remember the wonderful Nation Review? There was a paper which knew its audience!
If I was in charge, big lovely daydream, I would cover news, news analysis, politics and political analysis, I would hang onto the crosswords, AND I would delete comments for women. After visiting Huff Post’s womens’ section yesterday to see the reactions to the god awful Palin woman. I was horrified to find in their ‘Off the bus’ section, pages of letters from women talking about their children versus Palin’s children. Raving right wing feminists making comments about themselves, etc. If this is all most women are good for, then sod them. Leave them to the tender mercies of The Oz or the H/Sun.
I’d train, hire and encourage female writers like Michelle Grattan, and Anne Davis. But I’d fire, without remorse, women who wrote for women. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER would I allow those effing ‘human interest’ stories to see the light of day -something the Age recently has permitted. I’d delete the meandering obituaries, written by terminally senile old medical professors, and would put women’s fashion in the WPB, or in a separate section (lift out). Fashion is churned out by tonne in the fashion mags. It’s just a waste of trees.
As we are all tied to our computers, I’d encourage articles on subjects that featured the outdoors_NOT THE FARMERS!-articles like ‘How Pat survived two months in the Sarhara without water but with sex.(ads by the travel industry) Or ‘How it is possible to blow the guts out of Cubbie Station’ author anon. (ads from gun mags, farm machinery, and the airline business) ‘Why Ron Walker is a menace to Melbourne’ (ads by the car trade)
The on-line section would have to be brought up to par (ads by the .com inds.) And I would have no hesitation about facing the world ‘square on’ and saying. "My publication is for the left wing brigade. The people who know the right way to run the country, (ads by the fire brigade industry). End of dream.
Just to put things into perspective a little, there are many states where The Age and the SMH are not widely read - I know this comes as a terrible shock to superior people in NSW and Victoria, but it’s actually true ! So frankly, almost everything of the above is beyond the knowledge - and the interest - of many NM readers. I’m deeply sorry.
Frankly, when I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to dip into the Age, I found it incredibly Melbourne-centred, more sport (so it seemed) than The Australian (which mercifully puts Sport in a completely separate and disposable section) and more poncy Lifestyle crap than anything The Australian ever dishes out. What you might call, well and truly up itself.
As for the SMH, I spent my childhood in Sydney and have many very fond memories of it, of Column 8 and Grannie’s, and fantastic cartoonists like Mercier (I still use his sign on a post joke often: ‘Please do not lean bicycles against this post’ whenver i see a post) and Molnar. And it always seemed to have good world news coverage, essential for a growing boy. So I don’t think that any criticism of it whatsoever is at all warranted, no matter who writes for it.
I can’t recall our house ever getting any other Sydney paper, and certainly not any Melbourne paper - even then, we thought of the Age as stodgy and pretentious. To us, the SMH was a bit like the ABC, somewhere up there with 2FC.
Joe
Joe: Yes, the Age is parochial, but it is Melbourne’s link with history (and the State of Victoria) which has always held my attention. Do you, in SA-or any other state-have a newspaper that started up in such a crucial era as The Gold Rush? A period of exploding entrepreneurism. Miners finding the wealth which really kick-started the economy and rationale of the whole of Australia. It was an era which has always enthralled me; when I pick up my copy of the Age I feel a tangible, (albeit temporary ) twinge of my country’s history. Also it recorded the ‘when Australia lived off the sheep’s back’ era) It is the squandering of inherent goodwill by the Age’s editorial people who are dictated to by the Fairfax board of directors, and its shareholders, which depresses me. Yes it is Melbourne-centric, parochial, appeals, in your opinion, to the ‘up itself’ syndrome, and has an unforgivable (in my, and your’s opinion) devotion to sport. I concede these points. However, it must know its market better than I thought. Because there are a lot of people who believe it is worth fighting to retain. Yes, it is worth pointing out to their powers that be how bad their internet section is. Yes, it is worth the readers blood sweat and tears. Tell me Joe, are their any newspapers in SA which bring about such emotion?
Hi Venise,
Yes, over here we envy the sheer honest labour with which Victorian battlers built their state in the nineteenth century - hard-working pioneers like W. L. Baillieu, who, according to Michael Cannon in his very entertaining ‘Land Boomers’, ‘pulled himself up by his bootstraps from poverty to sudden wealth.’ (p. 4) That just about sums up what we have suspected about all Victorians ever since.
No, I’m sorry, I’m just a spectator in this agonising over the trials and tribulations of the Fairfax Press, and wish all loyal readers the best of luck. [That’s my Sydney boy coming out :) ] No, the local paper here is the most unbelievable crap, written for eight-year-old remedial readers, and every bit as parochial and ‘cat up a tree’ and ‘local council votes for more parking meters’ stuff as The Age. Maybe populations get the newspapers they deserve, but that is too cruel.
Joe
The UTS Australian Centre for Independent Journalism has an upcoming forum on 19 September.
Does investigative journalism have a future in Australia?
Hear the views of investigative journalists, Gerard Ryle (SMH) and Ross Coulthart (fomerly of the Sunday program), and Paul Whittaker (Editor, The Australian) with Mark Bannerman at the George Munster forum on Friday 19 September. All welcome.
Time: Drinks from 6pm, forum 6.30 - 8pm
Venue: University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Guthrie Theatre, 702-730 Harris Street, Level 3, Ultimo
RSVP: For catering only, Jan McClelland or 9514 2295
Free public event - free drinks and refreshments
The forum will be broadcast on the ABC Radio National Big Ideas program on 28 September at 5pm (tbc).
This event is hosted by the UTS Australian Centre for Independent Journalism.
Managing Editor
newmatilda.com