A modern tragedy: Nine Fairfax merger a disaster for quality media
On this historic day for Australia's media industry, the University of Melbourne's Denis Muller describes a tale of loss in this crossposting from The Conversation.
All deaths are sudden, even if long expected.
Appropriately enough, this is the opening sentence of a book called Journalism in a Culture of Grief.
And if ever there was a time of grief for journalism in Australia, it is today, with the announcement that Nine Entertainment is taking over Fairfax Media.
It means the death of Fairfax and is the most consequential change in Australian media ownership in 31 years.
It also means that three of Australia’s best and biggest newspapers – The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review – are now subsumed into a media conglomerate whose editorial culture is characterised by mediocre journalism.
Nine’s news bulletins consist largely of police stories with a tincture of politics, and highlights of colourful or violent events overseas.
Its current affairs program, A Current Affair, is a formulaic procession of stories about consumer rorts and personal tragedies, enlivened occasionally by such misadventures as the attempted kidnapping of two children in Beirut.
So there is a huge question mark over the future editorial quality of the newspapers.
A particularly pressing question is: what will happen to The Age’s investigative unit?
It is led by two of the best investigative reporters Australia has produced, Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker.
In addition to breaking an extraordinary range of major stories on subjects like organised crime and scandals in the banking industry, they have developed a highly successful collaboration with the ABC’s Four Corners team.
It seems very unlikely Nine would allow this collaboration to continue, since it involves a rival television channel.
There is also a question about editorial independence.
Fairfax has a charter of editorial independence, which all owners since 1990 have signed up to. Will Nine sign up to it? Will the charter have any meaning when the newspapers are owned by a company whose chairman, Peter Costello, was treasurer in the Liberal-National Coalition government of former Prime Minister John Howard?
The answers to these questions will not be known for some time. They will depend largely on who is given editorial control of the combined operation. Since the Nine CEO, Hugh Marks, is to be CEO of the combined operation, it seems more likely than not that it will be a Nine executive who calls the editorial shots, too.
The takeover also means a further loss of diversity in an already highly concentrated media-ownership landscape. The big players are now down to four: News Corp, Nine, Seven West Media and the ABC.
And it is almost certain to mean the loss of yet more journalists’ jobs.
Since 2012, more than 3,000 jobs have been lost across Australian journalism. Yet, if the takeover is really going to represent “compelling value” for shareholders, as Fairfax chairman Nick Falloon says, then newsroom “synergies” – to borrow the corporate jargon – are likely to be essential.
The Fairfax company’s death throes have been painful and prolonged.
They began in 1987, when the younger son of Sir Warwick Fairfax, “young Warwick”, privatised it. That meant buying out all the public shareholders, for which purpose “young Warwick” borrowed AU$1.6 billion from the National Australia Bank.
Even with the revenue from the “rivers of gold” then flowing in from the classified ads of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, “young Warwick” could not meet his debts to the bank, which promptly sold him up.
In a highly politicised auction, during which Paul Keating and the then-Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, sought assurances from prospective buyers concerning political outlook, the company fell into the hands of a London-based Canadian, Conrad Black.
There followed a procession of ownership changes, board reshuffles and short-lived chief executives that left the company rudderless and vulnerable.
Shortly after the turn of the millennium, when the digital revolution began to engulf the media, a weakened and incompetently managed Fairfax was ill-equipped to respond.
A series of disastrous mistakes by successive boards resulted in Fairfax missing out on opportunities to buy into the new online advertising platforms in cars, jobs and real estate.
Hubris and arrogance led incumbent board members to believe that these markets could not function without the mountains of classified advertisements carried by The Age and Herald on Saturdays.
By 2005, the shift in revenue to online platforms was discernible, and the trend has been accelerating ever since.
As a result, the company was increasingly unable to meet the demands of the share market for profit growth, and so became the object of sustained takeover speculation.
When the federal government changed the laws in September last year to allow once again cross-media ownership between newspapers, radio, television and online, speculation about a merger between Nine and Fairfax grew stronger.
Today that speculation became a reality.
The Fairfax story has all the elements of Greek tragedy: heroism in the creation of the company, then a combination of comedy, pride, stupidity, greed, arrogance and hubris to bring it down.
Denis Muller, senior research fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
“Will the charter have any meaning when the newspapers are owned by a company whose chairman, Peter Costello, was treasurer in the Liberal-National Coalition government of former Prime Minister John Howard?”
Would this pinko be making this comment if Wayne Swan was the chairman of this company? How is this relevant to the overall picture?
It’s this sort of left wing garbage that most Australians are sick of and makes them not give a toss about who owns Fairfax and whether or not it will continue to espouse outdated and irrelevant propaganda.
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Bleak and true.
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It is not the death of quality journalism, it is the death of unpopular journalism. Here are the circulation figures 2017 for some of Australia’s major newspapers and their fall since 2002.
88634-SMH -61% 15298-Canberra Times -60% 83229-Age -58% 44635-AFR -50% 221641-Telegraph -45% 303140-Herald-Sun -45% 133774-West Australian -36% 94448-Australian -28%
Gerald Henderson often wrote how the Fairfax papers chose to sneer, preach and criticise what was their core readership. The result was that the four biggest declines were their four main mastheads whilst papers like the West Australian and the Australian have experienced relatively small drops.
I don’t accept the journalistic integrity argument. I am pretty sure the circulation would have fallen less if the SMH had simply replaced its daily click-bait real estate story (intended to support the float of Domain) with a more popular sports story or covered more on economics and international relations and less on identity politics issues, the situation at the paper would not be what it is.
If only Fairfax had someone with deep pockets willing to support its independence through the difficult times but they rejected those offers. If you don’t allow the wealthy and successful into management, the result is failure.
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Don’t you just love a cogent unbiased riposte based on the word “if”.
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This was not the death of quality journalism.
…That happened a few decades ago.
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“Fairfax has a charter of editorial independence, which all owners since 1990 have signed up to. Will Nine sign up to it?
The answers to these questions will not be known for some time.”
They already have signed it, so there goes that question.
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completely concur
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Agree
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The notion that the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age have been “quality media” has been laughable for some time. It once was true but that ship has long since sailed. The current Fairfax deserves to be absorbed by Nine and will be better for it.
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In 30 years of media relations dealing with pesky journalists, I and all my colleagues have noted a steeo decline in quality at The Age over the last few years. Like a really dumb undergraduate level of reporting. Laughable at how easy it is to spin an Age journalist. All the good people left ages ago
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