You’re going to hear the words “quality journalism” a lot over the coming weeks.
This is the euphemism the executives and directors at Fairfax Media and Nine Entertainment will use, frequently, as the elegant camouflage to dress up a merger deal that has nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with money.
This is a deal — a takeover, not a merger — that is predicated on these propositions:
- Fairfax Media had nowhere to go as a public company. After offloading Domain, its only substantive asset, late last year, Fairfax became primarily a printed newspaper company, and printed newspapers are all but dead as a financial construct.
- The executives and directors of both companies are doing this deal to boost their share prices, deliver themselves rich bonuses, cash out a lot of high priced share options, and make windfall profits for their shareholders.
- To do this, they will combine their revenues, merge their news operations and significantly cut their costs. They are touting cost savings (i.e. staff redundancies, mainly in their newsrooms) of $50 million over two years. A more realistic estimate is $75 million to $100 million a year (they are playing a game called Expectations Management).
- The idea that the traditional journalism of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Financial Review has any qualitative similarity to the journalism produced by the Nine Network is like saying that a fillet of Wagu beef is qualitatively the same as a Big Mac.
The only thing “quality journalism” has to do with this deal is that it is the collateral damage.
You bet your little cotton picking fingers. Journalism to churnalism in one last move, enough they have been whit-anted for the fall to the IPA LNP drongos, but no more on my subs.
The Guardian (yesterday) ran a piece on the IPA-Turnbull Government attacks on the ABC, saying Eric Beecher also chimed in. There seems to be a contradiction in what Beecher has said above about Fairfax, if this is correct. The loss of a diversity of views in the public sphere is exactly what far right governments want, whether communist, fascist or oligarchic. No doubt Peter Costello et al are delighted at this tragedy.
Beecher has been consistent for a long time, if I recall correctly, on both topics: that the changes to cross-media ownership laws desired by News and Fairfax (and finally delivered by Turnbull) would be bad for journalism, and that the ABC cuts the lunch of commercial media providers.
In both cases Beecher’s position is solidly where self-interest would indicate it would be: the big boys getting bigger and more powerful is bad for Crikey, so he opposes that. The ABC genuinely provides competition for readership online to Crikey (especially amongst readers who hate News Corp).
Now the ABC & SBS become more vital & valuable for Australia.
The big players can merge or takeover as much media as they can afford but the taxpayers own Australia’s public broadcasters & we will never sell out.
If they haven’t already, legacy journalists need to grasp something: simply producing ‘content’ for a ‘newspaper’ doesn’t make you a ‘quality journalist’. The only ‘quality journalism’ done now at Fairfax is the occasional hard digdigdig&report-driven stuff of the Kate McClymont brand. The rest – the Op Eds, the lifestyle pap, the real estate spruiking, the endless hipster churn, the Gallery onanism, the paper-boy-esque cut n’ paste n’ delivery of daily tonnes of Flak Spam, the BYLINE NARCISSISM AND CAREERISM…that, is ‘doing a newspaper’, not ‘doing journalism’. That’s just ticking the medium’s box; feeding the format. Conversely, Michael West’s ‘quality journalism’ didn’t skip a beat when Fair-‘quality journalism’-fax fucking sacked the fucking fuck out of him, at corporate behest. It’s better ‘quality journalism’ than ever, now. He’s no doubt financially more precarious…but welcome to the gig economy.
We should rejoice at this merger. Rejoice. Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out. These old, financially untenable business models, which have merely rote-masqueraded as their proclaimed vocations for decades now, NEED to collapse, to reveal just how hollowed-out they’ve become. (Does anyone remotely think NewsCorps ‘does journalism’ any more than Fairfax? It of course would go, too, without Rupes’ entertainment pockets).
We can feel deeply sad for the Kate McClymonts, even as we say: well, let’s see how serious your sense of vocation really is then, Kate. Presumably you’ll be picking up the phone to Beecher soon, or maybe starting a blogsite of your own…like Westy? Or even that silly old nutter Margo Kingston, who you all snickered at so patronisingly a few decades ago. Or…is ‘quality journalism’ a bit too scary for even gutsy you, without the comforting, easily-self-affirming, ‘respectable’ institutional dressage? The Walkleys, the x-meeja cameos, the gallery is en scene and Press Club fraternity…all the anaesthetising trappings of the ‘grown up main game professional’? (Really just a…corporate monkey with a typewriter, now.)
Fairfax is dead. HOORAY! Newspapers are dead. HOORAY! Teh Stupid Box blows Stupid-Box chunks. YAH-BOO! The formulaic-tyranny of the lying Legacy Meeja’s ‘quality journalism’ is cactus, gone, fukt.
YIIPPPPEEEE!
Long live journalism. Never a better time to be a vocationally serious reporter. Just…look at all the glorious goddamned space there is lying about, here in Teh Infinite InterWebz, for starters!
What are you all waiting for?
10+
The death of the meretricious meeja is meet. And welcome.
They stayed too long at the B/S Masque, cavorting with the one wot brung ’em, to notice that midnight has struck and that tall, dark skinny chap with the penchant for agricultural implements doesn’t seem to have removed his mask.
From the AFR’s piece in September last year: https://www.afr.com/business/media-and-marketing/it-was-a-close-run-thing-how-media-reform-finally-got-done-20170922-gymo6d
“Xenophon tells AFR Weekend he was quickly convinced by chief executives that if media companies were not allowed to consolidate there would be “strife” in the industry. Fairfax’s Hywood and Nick Falloon lobbied Xenophon in South Australia and Canberra, assuring him the changes would be good for journalism.”
Good job Nick!
Mr X could always be relied upon to talk tough and then cave in as soon as the government/big business gave him some obvious sob story about what terrible things would happen if he didn’t support the legislation. It happened time and time again.
He was a complete failure as a politician, as can be seen by the fact that 20 years after being elected as a “No Pokies” member of the SA parliament there has been no reduction in pokie numbers.