Quality journalism to go down a black hole in Australia

MEDIA & MARKETING:This is a mantra for all the newspaper companies now – we will maintain quality journalism while we cut our staff in half. How are they going to do that?

THE AUSTRALIAN winter has not been kind to the nation’s print journalists, with first Fairfax Media revealing plans to axe 1,900 jobs and then News Corp signalling that it will shed an unspecified number of positions from its newspaper units, even as it ramps up its pay-TV interests.

“Inevitable” was one word common to this week’s reports of both moves.

Of course, Fairfax didn’t use such a defeatist term in its announcement, which was glossily titled Fairfax of the Future and instead talked about the “evolution” of metropolitan broadsheets the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s the Age to compact formats – media groups don’t like that word “tabloid” – and how introducing paywalls for these mastheads would be “landmark events” for Fairfax (though not necessarily for readers, it would appear).

“Our investment in quality journalism and our editorial standards will not be compromised and will continue to underpin our success,” chief executive Greg Hywood signed off rosily, failing to mention that the Fairfax of the future is also likely to be the not-for-profit plaything of mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, who has built up an 18.7 per cent stake in the company and would quite like a seat or three on the board for her trouble.

Rinehart is said to want to shift the editorial leanings of Fairfax’s broadsheets as far right as they can possibly go without reducing the titles’ natural reader constituency to, say, the cabal of bankers currently squeezing the final few dollars out of the Australian property bubble. As a result, communications minister Stephen Conroy has an alternative outlook on the Fairfax of the future, envisioning it as a “mining gazette” business, and warning Rinehart not to “trash the brand”.

Rinehart, who like most media investors is herself media-shy, is keen for the profits of the privately-owned iron ore business she inherited from her father to grow unhindered by anything as inconvenient as tax, and whether this view is propagated by broadsheets or tabloids, before or behind a paywall, is presumably a moot point.

Fairfax editors – who Rinehart wants to be able to hire and fire, the Sydney Morning Herald reported – probably shouldn’t expect her to pump too many of her billions into the company’s newsrooms.

Rinehart’s eldest son John complained in February that his mother was so tight with the family cash that there was really no point in kidnappers targeting his children, as Rinehart would be unlikely to pay up. “If you think you are going to get anything from my mother, good luck,” he advised would-be extortionists.

Who would fancy the chances of an editor begging for old-fashioned human resources in that situation?

Even without the shadow cast by Rinehart’s politically motivated stake-building, the future for Fairfax seems pretty bleak both to financial analysts and to people who care about journalism. It’s fair to say that Michael Gawenda, editor of the Age from 1997 to 2004 and now a director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism at Melbourne University, didn’t sound too convinced by all the company’s “quality journalism” talk when he discussed the matter on ABC News.

“This is a mantra for all the newspaper companies now – we will maintain quality journalism while we cut our staff in half. How are they going to do that? What is quality journalism? What do they mean when they say they remain committed to quality journalism? It’s a meaningless mantra unless you explain how you’re going to do it – and maybe it can be done – with half the staff, or approaching half the staff that you had before.”

Gawenda offered ABC a gloomy no-way-out verdict on the retrenchment of his former employer. “There’s no good news for people who love newspapers in these announcements, that’s true. In fact, I don’t think there’s great news for journalism in these announcements.”

Within three years, Monday to Friday print versions of Fairfax’s newspapers “will simply cease to exist”, he predicted, adding that he had “no great faith” that paywalls would preserve journalism online, based on the fatalistic conclusion that readers won’t pay.

“The question is who can cover things like state politics, the justice system, the police force, let alone do investigative journalism. I don’t have an answer to that. But these newspapers won’t be doing that.”

Whether Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, via its News Ltd subsidiary – which owns 120 newspapers across Australia and controls 70 per cent of the market – will be doing it either is doubtful, though for employees of its Australian title, the only national broadsheet, and of the country’s biggest-selling daily, Melbourne tabloid Herald Sun, it may be a case of better the media mogul you know, than the mining magnate you don’t. Both papers already have online paywalls in place, reflecting Murdoch’s relative nimbleness compared to his rivals, even if it’s just a matter of trying and failing faster.

As for Fairfax, its executives are only now conceding that “readers’ behaviours have changed and will not change back”. Ominously, the one detail that surprised Gawenda about the media group’s plan was that it was bothering to put its broadsheets through a tabloid phase at all.

“I think it’s much too late to do that,” he told Australia’s public service broadcaster. “Nothing like that will save print.”