Requiem for quality journalism

22 June 2012

I still wince at the memory of the morning after my first day on the Sydney Morning Herald. I had been appointed a leader writer and my initial editorial was about to hit the streets.

So I got out of bed at 5 am and paced the house until the corner shop opened an hour later. Then I slipped through the door of the shop, bought a paper and read four times the sage advice on an Argentine political crisis that I had assigned to the country’s oldest and and most respected newspaper before it finally sunk in that I’d become one of its journalists.

It was a totally inconsequential piece to get so excited about. And yet, over the next twenty years as a Fairfax journalist and columnist, I never quite lost the excitement born of the responsibility I felt toward the public, the thrill of seeing my words in print, and the satisfaction of knowing that, in however small a way, I was helping to shape the thoughts of people across the city every day.

The corner shop is gone now, unable to compete with the shopping complex that was built down the road. The Sydney Morning Herald is heading the same way – and for much the same reason.

From next year, together with The Age, the Herald will cease to be published as a broadsheet and appear in ‘compact’ (read tabloid) form. For how long is anyone’s guess. Fairfax management isn’t hiding the fact that the package of measures it announced on Monday is designed to move the company into a digital future. And the decision to close the printing plants in Chullora and Tullamarine in 2014 doesn’t bode well for the future of hardcopy newspapers in any form at all.

We all know what prompted these decisions: changes in reader and advertiser habits brought on by the digital revolution. Not all of us, however, fully appreciate the impact of those changes.

One way to look at it is that 65 percent of Herald and Age readers access the newspapers’ content not in hardcopy form but online. Another way is to consider that for every dollar of revenue from hardcopy advertising, the online equivalent is a about 10 cents.

On May 30, journalists at Fairfax went on strike for nearly two days to protest a decision to shift 66 sub-editing jobs off-shore. The industrial action was unprotected but management baulked at challenging the strike.

MEDIA

Requiem for quality journalism

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