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August 27, 2008
I see that Fairfax is trimming jobs---550 employees, including about 120 Australian journalists. Presumably the policy, one of tight cost control in response to declining revenues, will reduce reporting capacity to produce ever-higher profits. As mark Day in The Australian says:
Fairfax, like many US publishers caught in a squeeze as classified rivers of gold flow towards the internet, has chosen to cut its cloth to fit its new revenue realities, rather than seek to invest in its mastheads, grow circulation and grow advertising revenues.This is the third time in the past four years that Fairfax has instituted a major editorial slim-down.
Fairfax, as The Australian notes, has increasingly turned to lifestyle journalism as the revenue stream became depleted:
As that revenue stream became depleted by the internet, the company's titles strayed in their editorial focus to lifestyle journalism.Increasingly, the sparse newsbreaking of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age has been wrapped around pre-printed, stapled supplements, with nothing to do with news but everything to do with the minutiae of home decoration, gardening, style, entertainment, food and gadgets. Such supplements are labour-intensive, drawing staff away from politics, business, sport and general news. They are far more expensive to preprint and insert than traditional newspapers are to produce.
The Australian's argument is that the core business of a newspaper in tough times is to break news that interests their readers. In so doing, they set national, state or local agendas on politics, business, social issues and sport, attracting readers and advertising clients day after day, year after year.
Update: 28 August
So where does that leave the media as watchdogs for democracy now that the commercial media (including free -to-air television)--is increasingly unwilling to support the democratic role? There is not equivalent print version of the ABC. Should there be?
Eric Beecher, the publisher of Crikey, thinks so. It is need to cover parliament business, investigative journalism and the courts. Fairfax's decision to sack staff at its flagship broadsheet newspapers would blow a hole in this country's traditional quality media that all of the new media's bloggers and websites would not be able to fill. This included the online publications he was involved in, such as Crikey and Business Spectator.
What's at risk here is the role of well researched, serious journalism to act as a check and balance in the system of democracy.Online media can replace part of it. The four websites I'm involved in employ 30 or 40 full-time journalists, which is quite a lot in independent media terms, but compared with 300 or 400 journalists on big daily newspapers it is fairly small. We can cherrypick. We can do the commentary and a little bit of investigative journalism and that kind of thing, but I can't see a business model for independent journalism funding hundreds of journalists to do the bigger things that you have to do to fulfil the democratic mission.
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I used to read The Age for its commentary. But that part has declined. A lot of it is now uninteresting in its coverage of food, television and lifestyle. The Age is becoming a more regional paper focused on Victoria. Most of the stuff on water is about the politics of water in Victoria. It is no longer a Melbourne-based national newspaper.
It used to be a good newspaper but it has declined in the last year or so. It has gone lite. It has become mid -market and more youth market in its competition with the tabloid Herald Sun.
The only national newspapers we have are The Australian and the Australian Financial Review. The latter is not online.