After the Nine-Fairfax deal, who will shape Melbourne like The Age once did?
Thursday saw Nine Entertainment Co announce a takeover of Fairfax Media, including its newspapers. In this crosspost from The Conversation, former Fairfax journalist Jo Chandler recalls previous battles to protect The Age’s independence
Stored somewhere behind the imposing glass edifice of The Age Spencer Street headquarters – keeping up appearances even as the newsroom it trumpets is progressively hacked away – is a cardboard box containing hundreds of envelopes addressed by hand to The Age Independence Committee. Tucked in with them are piles of yellowing forms clipped out of newspapers, with signatures, names and addresses – Doveton and South Yarra, Edithvale and Wheelers Hill, Castlemaine and Korumburra.
Cracking open this modest reliquary might provide some insight into the grief – albeit largely from a certain demographic – flowing from yesterday’s announcement of the passing of the House of Fairfax.
As a young reporter, I handled a good swag of the letters in this box back in 1991 at my desk in the tiny, smoky office of The Age’s storied Insight investigations unit, which in this period moonlighted as the headquarters of The Age Independence Committee. Then The Age was situated a couple of blocks north of its present building. It occupied a brutalist chocolate-brick box in what the columnist John Lahey described as the Siberian quarter of the city, a neighbourhood of “unloved warehouses and 7am sandwich shops”, whipped by a wicked wind off what would become Docklands.
Under the editorship of the venerated Graham Perkin (1966-75), The Age had been famously recognised as one of the world’s dozen great newspapers, acquiring a circulation of over 220,000. The legacy of that had endured the fraught transition of control from Melbourne’s Syme family to the Sydney-based Fairfax stable, and shaped my understanding of journalism. But by the time I gained a long-coveted desk in the ugly building in 1989 I’d missed the best of it, I was assured by old hands and readers.
Who killed Fairfax?
Greg Hywood.
As one of the people who lucked in on the remarkable period at The Age under Davie, I have to say that this piece understates the case. The Age was, at its best, a truly great reflection of the city and asset of its community. Sadly the best of that group were lost when Davie was pushed out and a somewhat resentful regime followed. But it was a truly remarkable journal.
Err how about the herald sun
The Herald Sun is great for lining the bottom of my bird cage. That is a bout it. The only thing I would believe in this paper is the price and date.
Readership in free-fall. Dwindling advertising revenue. Incompetent management. Compounded by dull reporting. Interesting concise stories, however, might have kept the Age alive.
Pretty obvious, the journalists destroyed the readership which then destroyed the revenues. The Charter of Editorial independence allowed Murdoch to get all the Right to himself, leaving The Age and the other FXJ newspapers fighting all the left wing and Free ABC/SBS not for profit output. How stupid could the journalists be? It’s they who reduced the FXJ circulations more than the NEWS corp. publications did and now they have ended up at Liberal Party run Channel Nine. Appropriate and deserving. –but FXJ might then make more money, head to the centre, and afford the resources necessary to compete against News.
The article uses the phrase “whiggish” to describe the Age’s political opinion, and I think that’s fair.
Whigs are not communists, but more wet Liberals and ALP supporters. The Age has never been the Green Left Weekly. It’s generally even avoided being the turn-of-the-millennium version of The Melbourne Times.
If you look at Melbourne electoral results, you can easily see the strong ALP vote. The wet Liberal vote is harder to see, but it’s there as well. There is room for commercial left-of-centre news in Melbourne.
You could argue that the Herald Sun should fail because 3AW and Sky News exist (let alone commercial TV news).
The Age is failing because a) the rivers of gold are largely gone (Domain excepted) b) the people who want to read it’s articles largely do so for free (and return little in ad dollars) and c) competition for it’s constituency has increased dramatically. It also doesn’t help that Fairfax is often prioritising SMH versions of Age originated stories to Victorian readers in web searches.
I think the best path for the continued existence of something like the current Age is developing the subscription culture. Like RRR and (Melbourne’s) PBS have always done. There should a tier of Age subscription that a certain sort of Melbournian considers to be like the council rates – necessary for good public order.
I would argue The Age hasn’t shaped Melbourne for the past 2 decades