When I was still doing my job, I noticed I had begun to explain myself. ‘I’m literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald … I run our coverage of books: commission book reviews, interview authors, report on the publishing industry.’ My title didn’t always draw blank looks from people I met outside the book world, but I was unconsciously taking pre-emptive action to avoid embarrassment. Strangers frequently told me they were keen readers of the Saturday books pages and envied my job, which they imagined as being paid to read books. I still played an important and beloved role in our culture, but I could also see that I was endangered, like newspapers themselves. As my colleagues increasingly had ‘digital’ and ‘social media’, ‘engagement’ and ‘audience’ in their job descriptions, literary editor—the title and the role—had begun to sound anachronistic.

I was the Herald’s literary editor for 12 of the past 22 years, from 1996 to 1999 and again from 2008 until early 2017. The job had my passionate devotion during the most volatile period in living memory for newspapers and for book publishing. Like all journalists, I have experienced the internet-led revolution in the media and, for those of us trained in the old world of print journalism, a tsunami of negative effects. As my employers at Fairfax Media accepted in the past decade that the old business model was doomed, they panicked. With revenues from advertising and subscriptions on a steep slide, they put their faith in the proliferating digital forms of publishing, and began to shed journalists and photographers in the belief that technology could replace human intelligence, judgement and creativity.