Fairfax appoints HuffPost’s Tory Maguire as national editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age

I am barely able to find an actual news story in either Fairfax masthead. Yet they can afford to have this bloke Chessell being executive editor or whatever. And now a supposed editor overseer as his underling. In my (long) experience these jobs usually don’t involve any editing. Nor any journalism. Much meeting. Lunching. Researching and strategising. The interesting thing is that neither of these people has a career background in management or in any substantial journalism.
Fairfax is being slowly suffocated by the weight of wallets sitting on top of the people left doing the work. Says much about the leadership, or lack of it.

As I left journLism in 2010i noticed the rise of the shiny people. All fun, privilege and soooo Smart about the new media. I have watched from a safe distance (private equity!) as the shiny people have flimmed and flammed while once important social institutions become horrible corruptions of their purpose.
In Australia Fairfax was the important bulwark against manipulative and greedy media. It’s gone, nutted by the the shiniest bunch of execs and board members I’ve ever witnessed.

Two very prophetic comments here. They elucidate what I see as valid cause and effect predictions for the future. I wonder how they think they will deal with the outcome of today’s hedonistic world view. viz The Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire. They don’t think it can happen again? Add to that the ultra nutters we see around the world today, and western civilisation as we know it could be headed for a very dark time indeed. That is if the planet survives. And if ‘journalism’ can’t call it like it is, we don’t have much to fall back on, do we? [The Fourth Estate?] Mmmmmmmmmmmm