SMH technology page – 100% wire copy and six days old at that
I just popped over the road to record a voiceover for the next episode of The Mumbo Report. Strolling back, I decided to catch up on a podcast. It was Media Talk, from Media Guardian in the UK, uploaded last Friday.
(It’s always a good listen, by the way – I recommend it.)
The topic of discussion was Rupert Murdoch’s comments about how the Apple iPad “may well be the saving of the newspaper industry”.
Then I got back to the office and settled down for lunch with the Sydney Morning Herald’s Icon page in its Business Day section.
And what should I find but an article about the speech? The speech that The Guardian was able to not only cover, but record an audio programme about last week.
I was so perplexed, that I checked the date on the paper in case I’d picked up the old one.
But no, it was the right day, and indeed it was the Guardian’s own report, via its wire service. The story was actually posted on the morning of April 7. Today is the 13th – it took them six days to merely reprint the story
And what else was on the Icon page (which by the way, the SMH describes as its guide to “digital living”)?
A wire article from Bloomberg about a teardown of the Apple tablet. It was first published on April 7 as well.
And the third item? An article, also from The Guardian wire service, about Bebo’s woes. And guess what? That was also datelined April 7.
It does strike me that of all the reader groups likely to have already caught those stories on the web, those interested in digital might just be among them.
And it seems ironic that such an offering would include another discussion about what’s needed to save newspapers.
But this is what we seem to have come to. All that Australia’s newspaper of the year is able to offer for its weekly digital page is a trio of six-day-old wire stories.
Remind me again why we’re worrying about the health of our newspapers?
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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In the distant past Icon was a must-read as part of the Saturday paper, full of gadgets, mac vs pc warfare and even tech help. Then it was combined with the Monday TV Guide where it was given grudging amounts of space. Now this sad end…
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Tim, as I’ve said in another post, technology such as the iPad isn’t going to save newspapers if they don’t change the way they work. One newspaper that’s improving is The West Australian (no, I don’t have any ties) – the new ‘Agenda’ items are articles where the journo’s are given more space to express an opinion or give more info on a story than ‘normal’. The Drum on ABC is another example. Until this type of expanded reporting migrates to the mainstream media, forget it.
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Fer fuck’s sake… let ’em die. Seriously. Waste of bloody trees.
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A lot of journalists (beyond the online sphere, or beyond the specific tech beat) are weirdly tech-phobic. The older and higher up the line you get the more this applies. It is mystifying, given journalists’ reliance on all kinds of technology. But you will find people who despite being quite highly trained and experienced on a particular newsroom system or software package are quite proud of their general tech ignorance.
This has the result that senior editors may often pass over a deserving news story as “a tech story” and either marginalise it to a tech section, or not cover it at all.
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This isn’t really reflective of the decline in quality of newspapers, more reflective of a decline in quality of the tech section of the SMH/AGE — it has not had a proper IT editor for many years.
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Ken Burgin is on the money. When Icon launched in late 90s it was a tabloid liftout in Saturday’s SMH and it was fantastic. Really useful plain language tech-for-the-rest-of-us stuff, a top read for the weekend.
Rolling into Monday’s TV Guide was a bad enough move, it got smaller and smaller.
But but now this allegedly ‘consumer’ ‘digital living’ page is buried the SMH’s Business liftout (WTF?) and doesn’t even have a dedicated editor. The same bloke who edits Icon and its business tech counterpart Next also runs the Friday Drive section.
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This is about ‘online’ rather than ‘print’, but who knows, might be relevent…
(Quoting from ItJourno.com…)
“SMH.com.au’s tech section is set to advertise for a national online deputy technology/digital life editor in the coming weeks, while freelance journalist Lia Timson is temporarily jumping on board to lend a hand in production.”
PS: +1 Ken/Jack… I used to hang out for Icon in the Saturday SMH.
But there was no way I was going to start buying the Monday paper, just to get a cut down version, 10% of the size. Morons.
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Mumbo, you don’t know the half of how bad things are fairfax. There was serious discussion down here of scrapping the The Age third edition to save money. What, a paper with no late footy results in Melbourne.! Surely you jest, Mssrs Churchill, McCarthy and Corbett?
No, apparently not, because the lovely new office space is thinly populated as the gaps in a toddler’s teeth. Empty desks everywhere. Why hire journalists when the bean counters can just keep squeezing margins?
And you know what, if they got rid of some of the lazy buggers pulling six figure salaries and hired some more people willing to work, there might be no need to run week old wire copy.
One last thing to show how insane Fairfax management has become.
The rival Herald Sun gets more dreadful by the week. The Age could be doing them real damage if only there were people with the brains to recognise an opportunity. Instead its just more cost cuting and margin squeezing.
There are times I wish I had finished my law degree. God help us.
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From a freelancers PoV – The Age’s Green Guide tech section was my bread and butter. It didn’t so much decline as completely vanish. There’s hardly any tech in The Age or SMH now – it’s a massive shame and obliterated a load of freelancers work. It’s not like there’s no money in tech advertising is there?
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Seriously, journalism in this country is at an all time low. Lack of integrity, lack of true journalists not grounded in sensationalism as a focus, and in general just crap. I’ve stopped buying the papers ages ago, will only flip through them if they’re free at a cafe, and buy the weekly Guardian on Thursdays. Even then, I’m still weeks ahead of what is printed here!
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Having moved to Australia a few years ago from the UK I love so much about this country and rarely get homesick except for the weekends when I deeply miss the UK weekend papers with their fantastic supplements, content and up to date news, come on Australia, surely we can do better!
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On our sports opinion site, http://www.theroar.com.au we run over 200 fan written articles (which we edit first) each month.
We also run professional columnist pieces and a handful of wires content (for breadth of coverage).
We’ve graphed which content is most read. The answer? Fan articles. By a mile. Peoppe love to read what others are saying.
Then it’s the columnists (who occasionally spike above fan articles when they nail a story).
Coming in last by a country mile on readership is wires content. It’s a commodity and is written in a way that simply doesn’t resonate with most readers.
Catch up Tim! The editor of Icon has moved on and the site has just hired a temp editor.
That doesn’t change the fact Fairfax has buried its tech section, without so much as a pixel of promotion on the cover of the biz section.
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@Bec I have thought the same Bec. Now, I am not one to whinge about Australia, it is now my home and I love it here and will stay forever. The weekend papers are awful. I also miss buying a few tabloids and broadsheets and spending a few hours reading and browsing the decent copy and well laid out supplements, full of interesting stuff.
I asked a few colleagues if they would buy, say The Times, The Guardian, The News Of The World, if it were printed here in Oz; they said YES!!! Some of these colleagues do not buy Aussie papers…
Oiy Murdoch! You reading this? Perhaps you could re kindle some money here from British Expats? Likewise I am sure that Aussies in London would but Aussie papers, in print, at weekends…
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“buy Aussie papers”…
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I may come as something of a shock to some that most Australian newspapers basically exist as a supplement to the real estate liftout.
Although, to be fair, the SMH is still worlds better than the tripe dished out by the other publications owned by Rupert Murdoch’s festering empire of faeces.
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