In his speech to the National Press Club last week, News Ltd CEO John Hartigan began with: “Thank you and good afternoon. My name is Pollyanna.” It was the last bit of reality he spoke.
The speech was an aggressive defence of newspapers and the “very good journalism — at times great journalism” contained in them.
Laura Tingle in the Financial Review last Friday and Jonathan Holmes on Media Watch on Monday have called him on the hypocrisy of the speech — citing News Ltd’s second-rate and deceptive reporting of the OzCar affair and its over-the-top, inaccurate reporting of the death of Michael Jackson.
So I won’t deal here with the chasm between Hartigan’s words and his company’s actions. My focus is that Hartigan’s speech is a classic example of the delusional thinking and misguided corporate strategy that is destroying the traditional media industry.
To a large extent the speech was a pep talk aimed at journalists. If I had a Power Point presentation I could summarise this whole speech with two points on one slide.
- If you want to attract readers, break stories people want to read.
- Give them something they can’t get anywhere else, make it relevant and useful and let them get involved.
He also, absurdly, complained about aggregation websites like Crikey, Newser and the Huffington Post, quoting Robert Thomson of the Wall Street Journal that they are “editorial echo chambers” cynically exploiting the traditional media.
Actually, they are promoting them — sending traffic to newspaper websites. I don’t think there’s any long-term business model in doing that, but it’s certainly not harming traditional media.
In my view the trouble that newspapers now find themselves in (apart from Australian newspapers of course, according to Mr Hartigan, which have no trouble at all) is due entirely to a colossal failure of management and leadership over two decades — since 1987.
Or rather it was malign neglect, brought on by a combination of too much debt and too much ambition.
What the excuse of the American newspaper owners is, I’m not sure, but I suspect it is something similar — with a healthy serve of Yankee doodling as well.
That newspapers are in deep trouble everywhere in the world is undeniable, despite John Hartigan’s denials about Australia. We are lagging the US because of the lack of competition here, but only by a bit: newsrooms are shrinking rapidly as classified advertising and consumers of news and opinion move quickly to the internet.
As I have written before, the question of whether newspapers survive is irrelevant. Journalism will be delivered in whatever form its customers want, and publishers won’t be able to change that.
The problem is that the essential product — journalism — has been losing its heart for two decades and is now being swamped because technology has lowered the barriers to entry to zero.
The fact that journalism is now not clearly enough defined to resist being dissolved in a sea of blogging, tweeting and “citizen journalism” is entirely due to the failure of its leaders over two decades.
The leadership of Australian newspaper journalism is conducted entirely by Rupert Murdoch and the Fairfax company, and has been since 1972, when Sir Frank Packer sold the Sydney Daily Telegraph to Murdoch.
In 1987 Murdoch got control of the Herald and Weekly Times and Warwick Fairfax got control of John Fairfax Ltd. Fairfax then collapsed under the debt that was needed for the acquisition, and Murdoch almost collapsed under his debt.
And that was the beginning of the end of ‘quality’ journalism in Australia.
Fairfax was plundered by a succession of receivers and banks, then by Conrad Black and the carpetbaggers he brought with him, and then by a series of public company boards and executives who were, and still are, thoroughly, frighteningly inept.
Having bought his father’s company and fulfilled some sort of dynastic destiny, Murdoch left town. He had already become an American citizen so he could own a US TV network (Fox) and in 1990 managed to clean up his balance sheet, largely by merging Sky Television with British Satellite Broadcasting.
During the following 15 years, Rupert Murdoch concentrated on American broadcasting while successive directors and executives of Fairfax concentrated first on survival and then on the share price.
In each case this involved milking the Australian newspapers and forgetting about long term strategy.
Murdoch, in yet another life-cycle of his apparent immortality, has now rediscovered newspapers, and paid too much for the Wall Street Journal. Fairfax has rediscovered tabloid journalism while trying to shrink itself to success. Both are scrambling to find a new business model for journalism.
But the time to prepare journalism for the new world was during the 1990s — but both Murdoch and Fairfax had their minds elsewhere.
It was clear from about 1993 that classified advertising would eventually move online, and that daily news would also proliferate on the web. Blogging and aggregation had its beginnings in the 90s.
But there was no attempt to respond to that by systematically trying to improve the general standard of journalism. No amount of assertion by John Hartigan or the executives at Fairfax that their journalism is “very good, even great” can disguise the fact that it is not, and hasn’t been for a long time.
As the News Ltd tabloids and the lowbrow current affairs TV programmes remind us most days, virtually anything can pass as journalism.
There is no minimum standard, no hurdle that someone’s output has to get over before being called journalism. Journalists don’t have to be qualified, either at journalism or anything else, and there are nothing more than vague, unenforced ethical requirements.
The time to establish a core idea of what journalism is, and why it is different to the ocean of words and pictures that now wash around the internet every day, was during the 1990s — when it was obvious what was coming.
Instead, all newspapers except the financial and business ones simply put their content online for free and hoped something would turn up. It didn’t.
John Hartigan’s solution now is “less of the negative stuff and more content that inspires, surprises and delights readers, more humour, more escapism”, delivered via a “package of print and electronic content”.
He finished on a realistic note: “Every conversation we have about changing what we do doesn’t start with a discussion about cutting costs, it starts with a discussion about better journalism. And the most important person in that conversation is not the editor or the journalist but the reader.”
Quite so. But while the essential characteristics of good journalism have not changed, the reader has.
The reader’s view of the world has become fractured, increasingly made up of disjointed information – including the images, snippets and tweets of social media. These are grist to the journalistic mill, no doubt, but they are not in themselves quality journalism.
Further, while this fractured diet of information provides plenty of escapism, the alarming truth is that the institutions of power are not fracturing – ‘speaking truth to power’ is still important, whether to a corrupt government, failing regulators or a duplicitous board of directors.
If readers don’t want journalism on paper any more, so be it. But that is not say the reader does not want, or need, the quality journalism traditionally found in print.
And whatever the medium, ‘quality’ journalism is not escapism. Quite the opposite, in fact.
the fifth series of the wire puts the case that papers are run for prizes to put on the ceos shelf. I have noted elsewhere that the indian student violence story did not even have a comparison with attacks on other races anywhere. Why report the news when you can call people racist and splash the headline. If stories were well reported and researched then readers would put more value in them.
Why dont newspapers stop lodging stories on the web if they cant make money from it? Then anybody putting copyright material on the web would be liable, no?
I found Hartigan’s argument that the reader was the ‘most important person in the conversation’ a bit strange. My knowledge of what’s happening in my city, country, the world is dependent on journalism (or whatever is passing for it on any particular day). I would have thought juornalists should be bringing us the stories we NEED to hear, that we SHOULD hear, not the ones we think we WANT to hear. If I was in control of a newspaper, it might only publish stories about baby pandas and how good looking the cast of “Lost” is. And the sudoku puzzle. So clearly, I should not be put in charge of a newspaper.
If I DO want to escape, I will read a novel instead of the news.
Asking readers about our preferred delivery method does make sense though. I feel bad throwing out two thirds of The Age immediately every Saturday, but some bits I like to be able to read at the kitchen table or on the couch.
AS an old Fairfax person I couldn’t agree more. The efforts of Fred Hilmer and his useful idiot Mark Scott finished off the company although John B Fairfax seems to think he is still in the game.
Fred was criminally negligent in running Fairfax into the ground. There was a senior management bloke at Fairfax who around the time Fred arrived wrote a paper ‘Imagine Fairfax without the classifieds”. It was scary but it showed the challenges ahead. That bloke’s reward was to be asked to leave the company.
All attempts to engage Mark Scott in the problems of merging internet and newspapers and deciding which bits go where were ignored. Instead he and Fred waged war on the journalists.
To paraphrase Martin Bormann whenever I hear newspaper men saying “all we have to do is break stories” I reach for my gun. Newspapers can’t break stories any more and they should stop thinking they can.
But they can interpret and value add to a story . Paul McGeough’s coverage of the intervention has been first class as has his stuff from the middle east.
Hartigan’s speech was aimed at his board and his hapless foot soldiers no-one else would swallow that guff.
to the point as always, mr kohler.
i suggest however that the colossal failure of corporate and editorial management had its origins in the late seventies and was a runaway train by the mid-eighties – and some of those editorial knuckleheads with the initials john hartigan are still around.
fairfax management was a basket case long before Wokka entered the fray, and it still is. there is only one national newspaper worth the name left – the financial review – and i don’t fancy its chances in the new fairfax.
durriticolumn is also spot on: the hilmer years were just extraordinary.
mark scott is something else.
i didn’t think management at the abc could get any worse, but scott is undoubtedly champion of champions.
the thing that genuinely alarms me in today’s debate and in posts elsewhere is the extent to which scott and large secions of the abc pander to the murdoch empire.
the scandalous madonna king arrangements are just one example.
in my view the situation at abc news and current affairs is now beyond redemption in that the unit now no longer even tries to pretend that it is not murdoch lite.
it is not an independent, objective alternative news service and the abc ought to be defunded to the extent of the capital and operating requirements of news and current affairs.
the 7pm television news where i live often seems to be scripted by pulp novelists rather than supposedly serious journalists.