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Stop the Press!

Chris Flynn August 16

The writing may have been on the Facebook wall for some time, but it seems Australian newspapers are finally in some deep doo-doo. Fairfax Media, the owners of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald recently announced 1900 job cuts, meanwhile Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd is undergoing some serious rejigging as well, with a rumoured 1000 further jobs to go there. Not only that but Mr. Burns, sorry, I mean Mr. Murdoch has split his company down the middle, separating the entertainment and news divisions. Which means a lot of his flagship newspapers will no longer be able to cross subsidize with profit monsters like 20th Century Fox and have to stand on their own two feet instead. The Australian supposedly made a loss of $25 million last year. Given Uncle Rupe has said, “I don’t believe that newspapers or any business should exist if they are not viable,” there is cause for considerable alarm.

Meanwhile over at Fairfax HQ, Lord Rinehart has fought for seats on the board (can’t she just mount her giant glowing eye on the roof?) and refused to sign a guarantee of editorial independence. If she wants to run a newspaper filled with pro-mining articles and climate change debunkers, wouldn’t it be better just to start her own for pete’s sake? Let’s call it The Mordor Times or, I don’t know, The Herald Sun maybe.

Much as it pains most decent people to say it, newspapers were in trouble the minute Steve Jobs invented the Internet. You can’t have readers hooked on free celebrity news for fifteen years and then snatch it away without expecting to lose a few fingers. Despite this, on June 24th The Age forlornly reported that German daily newspaper Bild was about to give away 41 million copies to celebrate their 60th anniversary. Stacked on top of each other, the free copies would be 150km high, apparently. Bild sells—get this—three million copies a day, and has a readership four times that. It costs about 90 cents and is tootling merrily along without a care in the world, Interwebs be damned.

So what’s Bild doing right that our Aussie newspapers are doing wrong? Answers on a postcard please, to Meanjin etc. I know, right? Who sends postcards when you have email? Has anyone paused to consider the poor old postcard industry? Ah, the halcyon days of writing a dozen identical postcards to friends and relatives have been cc’d out of existence, and my wrist doesn’t miss ‘em.

Even if The Australian stays afloat and the Fairfax board manages to cast Gina’s ring into the fires of Mount Doom, people are still going to lose their jobs and the institutions we know and love/hate are going to change dramatically. I wouldn’t be surprised if Arts coverage is one of the first to be savaged, since that sort of cultural pillaging seems to be in the air at the moment. If the books pages are severely rationalized, it won’t just be the journos working in those departments who suffer—hundreds of freelance writers depend on the review pages as income streams, and publishers will have to dramatically rethink their marketing strategies. The Age runs an annual short story and book of the year competition, not to mention being one of the main partners of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. The Sydney Morning Herald sponsors the Sydney Writer’s Festival. The Australian sponsors the Brisbane Writer’s Festival and the Vogel Award. That’s an awful lot of dominoes teetering in the breeze.


 

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