Is Fairfax accelerating the end of quality press in Australia?

12Oct08

I have never been a participant in the traditional versus new media debate, resisting the rabid us or them sentiment sometimes present in the blogosphere (and amongst some journalists at media events). As an obsessive reader of newspapers, I have maintained that there is room for traditional press in a digital world.

However the recent actions of Fairfax management many be playing into the hands of new media advocates. The wholesale cutback of editorial staff at Fairfax have been described by ex-editor Michael Gawenda as “chilling”.

Mr Gawenda was editor of the Fairfax-owned The Age broadsheet for seven years from 1997. In his last few years, he said, the internet loomed as a threat but “Fairfax lost its classified monopoly and it failed to come up with a business model that took advantage of its long-time grip on classifieds”.

The long-held argument of journalists has been that bloggers and web models would never replace traditional press because of the need for the greater objectivity, quality and research supposedly reserved for broadsheet journalism.

However, less than two months after the announcement that 550 jobs would go across Fairfax’s Australian and New Zealand operations under a “business improvement plan”, Gawenda described “the confusion and lack of confidence at Fairfax about newspapers” in a recent speech at the ANSmith lecture at the University of Melbourne.

The slashing of jobs and applications for redundancy by many of Fairfax’s top writers, including leading sports columnist Roy Masters, Walkley Award-winning sports journalist Jacqueline Magnay, flagship colour writer Tony Stephens, soccer writer Michael Cockerill, executive editor Sam North, sports managing editor Rod Allen and 35-year Herald science reporter Richard Macey, indicates the end of quality reporting at Fairfax may be near.

Fairfax management have indicated they will “outsource” half of its Sydney Morning Herald sections to production company Pagemasters. Under this arrangement, external sub-editors and designers are expected to produce weekly sections of the SMH.

This comes less than a month after another leading Fairfax journalist questioned traditional media’s position, when Paul Sheehan highlighted the battle traditional media faces to remain relevant in the Internet age.

Titled Floundering in a sea of change and using the Sarah Palin (US Republican Vice Presidential hopeful) story as an example, Sheehan noted how he immediately referred to YouTube for news on the nominee rather than traditional media sources. He points out that by the time he started researching Palin, 6 hours after the announcement, the Internet was in it’s fourth phase of the news cycle.

Sheehan concluded with references to both the New York Times and Fairfax’s recent slashing of jobs and other issues:

When even the most famous brand in journalism is slashing staff, losing market value and attracting widespread criticism for bias, it underlines the reality that the cost structures and privileges of the old media are being swept away.

You don’t have to look far. Organisations like the (Sydney Morning) Herald are not merely in a battle for market share. They are in a battle for survival.

And its difficult not to agree. Whilst I have been a loyal newspaper reader since my teens, I am increasingly questioning the value of the papers I have delivered to my doorstep each day. I now skim though them in record time due to the staleness of the news being presented, most of which I have already picked up a day earlier online though my various newsfeeds and iGoogle News.

Each night I can then view informed detail and debate on the days events via quality television news and current affairs on ABC and SBS. So by the time my newspaper is delivered I am sitting down to read very old news, with a decreasing amount of quality opinion pieces.

Meanwhile, my biggest source of breaking news these days is Twitter. Being connected to hundreds of people around the world on Twitter provides lightening fast news, links, opinions and as-it-happens commentary. By comparison my daily newspaper is becoming as quaint and dated as snail-mail.

Surely the road to survival for the traditional press is to offer more quality commentary and incisive investigations and decrease reliance upon the daily news-cycle. Instead, the culling of jobs and leading journalists indicates organisations such as Fairfax will take the low road that could well accelerate their demise.

No wonder such an experienced and respected ex-Fairfax editor is saying that these “newspapers have about them an air of doom, as if their death is fast approaching.”

Update: 15 Oct – FAIRFAX Media chief executive David Kirk has hit back at critics of the company’s restructure while saying growing competition meant their papers no longer aimed to deliver the news first, but to deliver it the best. Read full story here.

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