The fight for a journalism that serves its local communities has spilled into metropolitan mastheads with the revitalised call by The Age journalists for the masthead’s independence, together with last week’s announcement by News Corp that reporting in its metro tabloids would be “done once … and shared across the company”.
A letter to Nine management signed by about 70 The Age journalists revealed deep internal concerns about “politicisation” of the masthead, a failure to reflect the diversity of Melbourne and complaints about the paper becoming a Sydney subsidiary.
The letter, revealed over the weekend in competing “exclusives” from The Guardian and The Australian, is the most serious revolt by the company’s journalists over editorial independence since the Nine takeover last year.
Nine is chaired by former Liberal Party treasurer Peter Costello. Its CEO Hugh Marks hosted Morrison at a $10,000 a head Liberal Party fund-raiser on company premises last year. The executive editor of the Sydney and Melbourne mastheads, James Chessell, is a former staffer of another former Liberal treasurer and current Sky News contributor, Joe Hockey.
At a surface level, The Age letter is the Australian equivalent of the ongoing US newsroom revolt over how to report systemic racism. It bounces off an Age editorial that claimed, “Australia does not have a legacy of slavery”, published in the days before the similar Morrison gaffe. The editorial was only corrected after the staff letter was received.
The immediate trigger was an unsubstantiated June 5 front page headed, “Activists ‘planning trouble’ at protest”, which relied on a single unidentified source to claim activists were threatening to spit on police in that weekend’s planned march. It was corrected with an apology to march organisers online later that day.
The Age has been concerned about being run from Sydney — about becoming the SMAge — since the-then Fairfax bought 50% of the company in 1966. It sustained its separate management and newsrooms until Fairfax bought out the remaining half in 1983.
Under full ownership, the two papers started sharing copy and resources and year by year, the sharing and editorial control grew. After family control imploded in 1990, the new publicly-traded Fairfax Media ratcheted up the integration of editorial, and around 2000, created a shared editorial management structure which has been further tightened under Nine ownership.
Step by step, this was resisted by journalists at both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, resulting in internal balances such as separate bureaus in the Canberra gallery and an agreement to turn-about foreign postings between the two mastheads.
But the collapse of advertising since the 2008 economic crisis has seen the pressure increase.
Since 1988, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have been protected in part through charters of editorial independence which empowered editors to make editorial decisions free from corporate pressures. These depend on the editor being prepared to stand up and, over their three decades, the principles of the charter have relied on the journalists for protection — including with strike action.
Similar trends have shaped News Corp’s metropolitan tabloids since the company took over the Melbourne-based Herald & Weekly Times in 1987. Papers once as varied as The Adelaide Advertiser and The Daily Telegraph were increasingly pushed into a common tabloid format and layout with shared copy. Ad-heavy inserts were centralised, with masthead branding often the only difference.
Last week’s announcement by News Corp to shed jobs across the tabloids and centralise all copy marks the final stage in turning separate mastheads into city-based franchises of a corporate template.
But both the history and the concern about reporting Indigenous disadvantage conceal a deeper economic truth: while newspaper chains like Fairfax and News Corp may have strengthened newspapers in the ad-rich capital-intensive days of print, they weaken all mastheads in the more agile digital age.
All the current evidence — from The Boston Globe to the Broken Hill Barrier Daily Truth — shows that independent mastheads rooted in their communities have a stronger business model for survival than the old chains.
Readers don’t buy mastheads to contribute to corporate EBITDA. They buy for the journalism values — including local values. Nine management recognised this when it recently sold its New Zealand mastheads to local management who wanted to invest in journalism. Maybe it’s time to do the same with The Age.
Could local ownership save newspapers? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey‘s Your Say column.
this is why i cancelled my subscription to the SMH today and have recently subscribed to Crikey and the Guardian.
I am not paying for LNP propaganda from the Nine news stable
I am, barely hanging in as, an Age subscriber. The cavalcade of right wing opinionistas is unpleasant.
The sheer inaccuracies and out and out rubbish masquerading as “news” does my head in. Prior to the last fed election, was the state election. All the Age reporting prior to that had it as a close run potential liberal victory. I live in a sandbelt seat that the Age had down as a probable loss, because of skyrail. We know what happened.
Other stories are just unquestioning rephrases of self promoting press releases, either government or private business. These have got to the point where I’ll see an article on education (I’m a teacher) and might think it a bit controversial. Delving further, I’ll find that it’s been written by an IPA staffer OR totally based on a one off uncritical interview with an “expert” – one who owns a consultancy business who is tendering for government education work.
Then there are the spectaculars – the protesters planning to spit on police one was a disgrace; that sat there all day. The big story behind that, as in which government or senior police source was responsible for coming up with and spreading those lies, was a piece of journalism that the Age chose not to touch.
I want to support local, but I’m getting to the point where it’s not possible.
Why not simply state the obvious? The journos’ claim of ‘politicisation’ can only mean that The Age, and I presume the SMH, is now nothing more than another unofficial organ of the Liberal party, completing the double with Murdoch. One can see it every day, in the incessant bagging of the Andrews government, the absence of any coverage of Albo versus the continuous polishing of the Morrison image. The bunch of commentators is as stimulating as a wet biscuit, never deviating from a pro-Liberal orthodoxy, while the ‘Letters’ page is surely there as nothing more than a kind of ‘safety valve’ and echo chamber for the faithful and loyal middle-class, centre-lefty readers who can’t let go. You don’t see the letters on the website as one has to search for them; but the ‘commentators’ are all over the page. The online readers’ comments are a joke; comments won’t appear for hours, even if they’re lucky enough to get past the moderators.
An example of a ‘reader’s comment’ that hit the cutting room floor, today, Chilly.
Under their main ‘branch stacking’ piece, I found someone lauding their journalism, and barking about all the ‘criticism of politicisation’ he’d been hearing being a beat up, this expose proving that to be so. So;
“Oh no it doesn’t!
Why would 70 odd Age journalists write to ‘management’ with those exact concerns, if there’s nothing to what you’ve been ‘hearing constantly’?
theguardiandotcom/media/2020/jun/14/journalists-at-the-age-express-alarm-over-increasing-politicisation-and-loss-of-independence
“Journalists at the Age express alarm over increasing politicisation and loss of independence”
“Exclusive: in a letter to Nine executives, close to 70 journalists say pressure is being put on reporters to ‘produce certain angles’ and masthead is in danger”
I always knew it would be a non-starter. But, as I say to the cohort, the therapy’s in the composition, not the publication.
I also sent a ‘letter to the Editor’, on Friday. It was a rather ‘expansive’ letter, which bounced off them publishing a piece about a chap from Hong Kong seeking asylum in the UK, based on having been ‘tortured’ by the Chinamen, by them depriving him of sleep for ‘a little over a fortnight’.
The article then referenced the outrage from local China hawks (Hastie, Kitching and some bloke named ‘Raff’, an ALP Senator who seems to be a ‘late joiner’), and mentioned the Limey FM, Raab, demanding the UN ‘Torture, Cruel and Inhumane Treatment’ folks get busy and do their jobs, by holding the Chinamen to account.
(You know where this is going, right?)
I began the letter to said Ed with; ‘I DARE Dominic Raab to take that case to the UN!’, and went on to mention Assange, Belmarsh, Nils Melzer – and his ‘findings’ i.e. ‘never seen treatment like it’, ‘a little over 2 weeks? PFFT!!,’ etc, etc, then got busy with some reflections, like some here, today, on where I might find some value in my subscription amongst all this Tory inspired stenography. Added a few bits of personal history with a couple of their Walkley winners, over Ozzie mercenaries in the UAE, and their involvement with AQAP in the slaughter in Yemen, and how the Walkleys had dropped off after I’d presented them with a rock solid case for prosecution at the ICC……….it was a long letter to said Ed.
I knew they’d never publish it, and they didn’t.
But, at 10.30 Saturday morning, the letters to said Ed…editor, did leave a message on the house phone, asking me to give him a call.
Was going to return the call this morning, but things got just a little busy. So, he can wait.
Cancelled my subscription after the fundraiser. Renewed it after the apology from The Age over the fundraiser. Cancelled it again several weeks ago. Its a Murdoch clone now. So sad. So much history thrown into the cess pit of LNP media control.
As with PC, I am barely hanging in as a subscriber. In fact the only thing that makes me open it (on my iPad) these days, is the letters page. While I think that it is healthy to read a range of opinions, and not to live in a “left wing” (i.e. centre) bubble, I have been somewhat underwhelmed by The Age lately. I still subscribe, but only just. I sympathise with the journalists – keep up the good work guys and we’ll keep forking out our $25 a month – which continues because we need “balance” against the overwhelming weight of the Murdoch Press – but is it????