One of Fairfax’s most distinguished journalists let a rather ominous cat out of a rather small bag on Saturday. Jack Waterford, the highly regarded editor-at-large of the Canberra Times, revealed the likely shape and direction of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age as they enter a downsized world of fewer journalists and reduced editorial investment.
The model for the dismantlement of the two Fairfax flagships, suggests Waterford, is the Canberra Times itself — which runs on one-third of the editorial staff of either The Age or SMH, yet still carries 80% of their volume of content and is seen by Fairfax management, in Waterford’s words, as “a model of how efficiency could be improved without affecting quality”.
Those newspapers, wrote Waterford, will “lose some of their ‘middle’, retaining, perhaps indulging, a relatively few top-name writers while employing on average more young journalists”.
Rural Press, which has owned the Canberra Times for the past 11 years, is the largest shareholder in Fairfax and its managers are now demonstrably in charge of affairs at Fairfax.
Under Rural Press, the Canberra Times has been through “a strict regimen of management efficiency drives over the past decade”, according to Waterford, which is believed to have made it more profitable than ever before, achieved in part by purging most of the older, experienced journalists with corporate memory and replacing them with younger (and much cheaper) journalists, through attrition.
The SMH and The Age have 300+ editorial staff because, until last week, they regarded themselves as important platforms for Australia’s “public trust” journalism. If and when their resources shrink to the size of the Canberra Times they will still publish hundreds of thousands of words every day to fill the space around the ads. And then they will be as important to Australian democracy as the Canberra Times.
I’ve said it before: any publisher who pays Miranda Devine for her rot is not a serious publisher.
With Rural Press at the helm the likely final result of the SMH & Age is more likely to be the Wentworth Courier-little copy, heaps of adverts and largely unread although locals in the Eastern Suburbs find it does make a handy doorstop.
Having read the Canberra Times and the SMH every morning for longer than I care to remember, I feel that both are much weaker than they were a decade ago. The Times, like other Rural Press papers, emphasises the local, which in this case includes some good coverage of national politics and the excellent monthly Public Service Informant, but its reportage of the world and of state politics is minimal. As for columnists, Waterford is superb and there are occasional good analyses from the ANU, though it’s an underused resource. The website is abysmal and doesn’t include Waterford’s columns. As for the SMH. like The Age it’s become more parochial in recent years, especially in investigative reporting. With occasional major exceptions like the articles of David Marr, it breaks few national stories. Its cultural pages are excellent. Internationally it’s been good on Indonesia and recently on China, but I can’t recall much of interest on the rest of the region. There’s little on the rest of the world that isn’t readily available elsewhere, usually with greater depth. I have no liking for The Australian and its troglodyte columnists, but its national and international coverage have been better than that of Fairfax in recent years.
To err is Devine, to forgive, human
Before Canberra, I lived in a few other capital cities, like Washington, London, and even Oslo. They had real newspapers. Given how embarrassing the Canberra Times is, it is pretty scary to think that it might become some sort of model for Australia’s remaining broadsheets. When I questioned him on this about a year ago, Waterford told me that investigative journalism is just too expensive and potentially litigenous.