Misha Ketchell writes:

Just as things were settling down in the Spencer Street bunker, Age
editor Andrew Jaspan has popped up at a newspaper industry conference
in Brisbane with some off-the-cuff observations that, if he had his
time again, he might want to slightly rephrase.

A tipper tells us
Jaspan was trying to explain to a PANPA (Pacific Area Newspapers
Publishers Association) conference why a rift sometimes emerges between
marketing types and the hard-boiled journos who put out newspapers when
he came up the observation that “editorial and marketing people don’t
get on because marketing people tend to be childless young women.”

“Brilliant, ageist and sexist in one sentence,” our tipper observed, but Jaspan put quite a different spin on the comments.

Crikey emailed Jaspan for his response, and he replied with these points:

I started my talk pointing out that I had worked
on a number of papers in the UK and my comments observations were all
drawn from my time there, NOT from Australia.

I started by explaining how things worked well between editorial and
marketing on the best UK newspapers. I did say however that one reason
why things sometimes didn’t work out was because there was a
demographic and lifestyle clash on certain papers in the UK, between
more senior editorial executives (men and women usually with children)
and younger marketing executives, usually women at different life
stages.

I only gave one example from The Age and that was to show how
editorial and marketing worked well together in Melbourne.The example
was how we had together taken Sport from broadsheet to tabloid. I gave
examples and showed how retail/casual sales were up as a result.

CRIKEY: In fact, Jaspan probably has a point – marketing staff are
skewed toward the young and female end of the demographic and you
wouldn’t want a much older demographic than you’ll find in the Spencer
Street newsroom. It’s not for no reason that rival hacks at the Herald Sun sometimes call the paper The Aged.