The former editor of the West Australian, Paul Armstrong, was not answering his mobile phone this morning, so we don’t know how he is feeling about his ousting. Surely surprise cannot be among the emotions.
For those of us on the outside looking in, the surprise in Armstrong’s removal is that it took a whole month from when Kerry Stokes gained control of West Australian Newspapers. Stokes had made his view on the editor, and the direction of the paper, abundantly clear.
By the end of his time, Armstrong had few friends among his staff, readers or the elite of Perth. Comments on the rival West Australian Today blog give some of the flavour. This article by Tony Barass in The Australian late last year details the background.
So why did it take a whole month for Armstrong to go? Observers are speculating that it is because he hung on hard, and had to be prised loose. Others speculate that there was a feeling among senior executives that his position might just be savable, once the steady hand of Bob Cronin was in place as editor in chief. But all this is mere gossip.
Cronin, now acting editor, was referring all calls to the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Chris Warton, who did not return our call before deadline.
This leaves us to reflect on editors in general, as well as the position of the West Australian in particular.
The last twelve months has seen a massive movement of deckchairs aboard the vessels that are the nation’s metropolitan daily newspapers. There have been changes of editor at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Canberra Times, the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph and now the West Australian.
We await the announcement of the new editor for the Canberra Times — about which more in my blog later today.
It all raises the question of what a modern newspaper editor needs to be. Years ago journalists used to talk wistfully about “great editors” — the sort of people who kindled fire in the bellies of their staff, and who helped set the agenda of a city or a nation. They were big personalities. Being editor of a daily newspaper was the most a good journalist could aspire to. It was an end in itself.
Those days have gone. Newspaper editors aren’t like that any more. They don’t get a chance to be. They are managers at best.
These days it is as likely to be a stepping stone on the way to other management jobs — and that is if you succeed in navigating fickle management, circulation figures and readers. Old editors used to be revered, put out to pasture to write op ed columns. Now when their time is done, they are as likely to find themselves scrapping with their former bosses and even fighting in the courts for their payouts.
Armstrong’s assets were always said to be energy and a take-no-prisoners approach. Well, that wasn’t enough, particularly when it was mixed with bias, a stream of inaccuracies and the inability to admit error gracefully. But what does the editor of The West Australian need to be? What does any editor need to be in the current age?
David Penberthy, who was editor of the Daily Telegraph, also had energy and incisiveness. Yet his circulation dipped, and he was gone, albeit after a longish run, and to new opportunities within News Ltd.
Bruce Guthrie at the Herald Sun — well, that is mired in legal action, which we have reported on before.
Andrew Jaspan at The Age was not so much an editor as a marketing man. His circulation held up when all around were sinking. But he lost the confidence both of his staff and his bosses. He became a figure of fun. So he has gone.
Alan Oakley at the Sydney Morning Herald appeared to take the paper downmarket, annoying traditional readers without picking up new ones.
Peter Fray at the Canberra Times was hardly there long enough to allow definitive pronouncements — and he has been promoted, despite a slump in circulation. Fray is one of the few who can feel happy about his move. He was liked by the younger reporters he hired, but the view among some of his more senior staff — several of whom left during his time — was that he didn’t understand Canberra. Canberra is a country town where the main industry is public service and the main reason for buying the morning newspaper is to gain insight into what is happening there.
All these men had their strengths and weaknesses, no editor is perfect. All pursued strategies that seemed reasonable enough to them and their bosses at the time. Yet the record of the last twelve months is merciless. Only Fray and Penberthy have any reason to feel comfortable about the manner of their departures, and even then circulation figures tell a sad story.
All these editors were constrained by various toxic mixtures of budget cuts, and factionalised and/or clueless management. It is a truism in the industry that the present editor is always a bastard, while his predecessor looks nowhere near as bad in retrospect.
Yet who can doubt, as we see editors moved like spak-filler around the nation, that the era of GREAT newspaper editors is over. We now live in a different age.
Disappearing editors and deck-chair shuffling is about newspapers boxing the trifecta in a media meltdown. Radio and television fell apart years ago after boning themselves on de-regulation, industry divestment and a networked cross-media package of simplified info from a diet of skills and resources. Now all three suffer an identity crisis and we’re minus a credible communications platform with an impending education revolution and nothing to fire minds and imaginations. All of which makes this internet censorship debate appear a political stunt set to divert from the real crisis of a nation deprived of credible communications. Any time now they’ll launch one of those consumer-friendly program (Media Watch??) to tip us off on where to get the best info and entertainment available.
Well, yes, a midly interesting story to a non-journalist, non-Western-Australian like me – but when the Crikey email’s title lead with “Armstong knifed” I assued that Lance had received some Adelaide hospitality.
Hey, Margaret you did not mention The Australian. What about its editors? And what it is about our national broadsheet and its editors that has seen increases in circulation and readership – both in its weekly editions and Saturday – in recent years. They must be doing something to appeal to readers, when its content if freely available online. While, the Weekend Magazine is not as engaging as it used to be (IMO), the Saturday Review section often has some excellent stuff, and then there is the monthly Literary Review insert.
Also, a great editor at the Australian Financial Review, for its Friday Review section. Robert Bolton gave me lengthy and detailed feedback on an article I submitted, even though he said if I revised it, it still would not suit the AFR. With a few revisions, it found a home elsewhere.
So, there are still some GREAT editors, inspite of all the movement among the deckchairs.
I was also interested to read somewhere on Crikey, that even though the Overland magazine is now available online, readers still want print copies. I think the same applies to some of our print newspapers. Not for breaking news, but for detailed opinion pieces that one wants to think about, mull over, scribble notes on perhaps. Can’t do that with the online version.
William Powers, media critic for the National Journal, believes paper isn’t just ‘an old habit, but rather an advanced technology that is nearly impossible to improve upon’. See his article Long Live Paper http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/05/23/03. Powers is also the author of the extraordinarily popular online article Hamlet’s Blackberry (75 pages long!)
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/papers/discussion_papers/D39.pdf
Surely Armstrong like most editors became functions of HMV, that is ex PM John Howard. As he went so the flock went – I mean in general terms, no one in particular.
In Armstrong’s case it would have been extra dose with Ruddish quite a technocrat who would see mistakes as potentially worse than bias in an outlet, ie not worth turning, or capturing to his own ends, as tainting the collection as it were!
A similar effect is with the US ambassador bailing asap not even waiting for his recall because he was branded.
As to big character editors I always thought Alan Ramsey was in effect running an editorial on his acreage copying up and annotating the ‘important stuff’. He’d so obviously outgrown his reportage role probaby decades ago.
And as for blogging – my lifestyle reflects a sort of editor without a newspaper attitude which is ironic given editors in big media WITH a real newspaper who are actually only managers. It’s almost enough to start a call for bring back ‘the biff’, but not quite.
Interesting concept that – who are the big characters these days? Mayne? Simons? Beecher? Jamie Packer – not. Certainly ‘Little’ Kerry Stokes has got heft and saw a problem and ‘fixed it’. But who throws a cricket ball at full speed in the confines of an office like Big Kerry? As John Lee Hooker would say … them days are gone.
whilst it might be charitable to Armstrong to imagine that he is the victim of corporate politics, it should not be forgotten that his tenure at the West was marked out by a series of blunders, cock-ups and embarassments, the majority caused by low standards of journalism and poor sub-editing.
the last few weeks alone have seen the following howlers, which may or may not have hastened Armstrong’s departure:
1. a series of articles critical of a State MP for providing a reference for the CEO of the Shire of Shark Bay which had to be retracted when it came to light that the West had gots its facts wrong.
2. the West’s campaign in support of school league tables derailed by a simple sub-editing typo in their crusading headline (as posted in Crikey)
3. a news item this week containing the phrase ‘spanked like a red-headed step-child’, requiring a retraction and apology to all redheads.
4. the use of a new masthead tagline “giving a voice to the silent majority” that was hastily pulled after three days (as posted in Crikey)
5. a commentary by their economics editor on the global financial meltdown suggesting that the crisis might discredit the economic theories of Milton Keynes. (Crikey again)
add these recent crackers to more famous ones like HMAS Sydney and the ‘granny in a hospital corridor’ beat-up, plus a series of stoushes with staff (Nappy Alley) and politicians (McGinty and Carpenter), and it is difficult to argue that Armstrong has anyone to blame for his demise but himself.