Culture

Why I’m Not Reading Fairfax Papers This Weekend

#FairGoFairfax isn't just about one company, it's about what we want from Australian journalism.

by Mel Campbell  19 March 2016

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

[Update May 5, 2017]: Here we are again. Journalists across Fairfax Media are currently on strike for a full week in response to a new round of proposed job cuts. Management have put forward a plan to cut $30 million from the company’s budget with 125 editorial jobs getting axed.

Staff at The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Financial Review made the decision to strike this Wednesday, meaning the papers would be without staff for the federal budget on Tuesday May 9.

This piece, in response to previous cuts at Fairfax and the journalists’ ensuing 24-hour strike, seems as relevant as it did last year:

–

Journalists at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, along with colleagues at The Australian Financial Review are currently on strike in protest at Fairfax’s decision, announced this week, to cut the equivalent of 120 editorial jobs. Importantly for freelancers like me, this also includes slashing contributor budgets and work opportunities.

I stand with my colleagues at Fairfax and I will not be reading any Fairfax stories or clicking on any links to their websites during the strike.

What makes this decision so dismaying and infuriating is that Fairfax is making the wrong kind of cuts from the wrong end of its business. The latest round of job losses comes on the heels of similar staff purges in recent years, the largest of which swept out 1,900 staff from across the business four years ago. Fairfax’s shortsighted fixation on reducing staff numbers is sabotaging its own ability to produce its key products.

So, how will the papers continue to be published “as usual” this weekend, and under the proposed skeleton staff? Lots of stories from wire services, for a start, and fewer of them. The weekday papers are already more like pamphlets, but Guardian Australia’s Amanda Meade also reports that after the cuts, Fairfax will publish fewer stories, going from 9,000 stories a month to 6,000.

Back in February, The Australian even sighted Fairfax internal re-modelling from 2013, which suggested that, of the 503 employees currently considered “core” to production, 205 could be sacked if Fairfax stopped printing the mastheads and went digital-only. “If the papers were published [only] on Saturday and Sunday, there would be 122 staff cuts, or $17 million saved and $36 million in total,” reported The Oz’s Jake Mitchell. Well… look out for that announcement soon.

Taking these stats at face value, this modelling assumes an average salary cost of $140,000 a year. I CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT AN ABSURDLY VAST SUM THIS IS. I chip away in the online salt mines for $100-$200 per article. I make less than $20,000 a year. Whose salaries are blowing out Fairfax’s costs? How much are Fairfax’s cosseted stars — like disgraced fabulist Paul Sheehan — being paid? How much are CEO Greg Hywood and editorial director Sean Aylmer paid?

As Jacob Silverman writes at The Baffler, “there is money in journalism; it’s just woefully misallocated, doled out according to a stars-and-scrubs model that rewards brand-name journalists no one’s ever heard of outside of New York”. “Meanwhile, a mass of freelancers — whose work is necessary to the functioning of many publications — cadge whatever assignments they can and don’t complain when the checks take six months to arrive. A great deal more cash is wasted on outside consultants, events, quixotic reporting trips, redesigns, and other ventures that may please advertisers or middle managers but do little for readers.”

Striking journos are pointing to an imminent loss of ‘quality journalism’. We see this rhetoric every time jobs are threatened, and when we talk about ‘quality journalism’ we tend to talk about fourth-estate stuff: holding institutions to account, exposing injustice, upholding democracy. It’s the kind of investigative heroism celebrated in the film Spotlight; indeed, The Age’s excellent investigative unit is one of the areas of editorial that will probably be safest from the cuts, and rumour has it that Age journos have been scrambling to be assigned there.

As Gay Alcorn beautifully outlined recently at Guardian Australia, Fairfax’s corporate processes of restructuring and consolidation are erasing the distinctive local character of Fairfax’s mastheads. But I really do feel strongly that these same local flavours are instead precisely Fairfax’s greatest strength. For better or worse, Rupert Murdoch gets it — his mastheads understand their audience and vigorously pander to them. As a company, Fairfax has no sense of what it stands for anymore — only a hazy memory of its own former gravitas. And it’s about to get rid of the only people who do know what these mastheads stand for: the damn journalists!

Last week when I was interviewed by Aphra Magazine about the future of journalism, I said, “there’s a massive hunger for local content — people care more about issues that directly involve them”. It’s so shortsighted of media organisations to think that to ‘keep’ their audience they have to pander to what they see people consuming: it’s that whole ‘if people want Kardashian news and hot takes, we want them to get them from us’ thing. All that creates is stale, repetitive, rehashed Kardashian news and hot takes. Instead, we should be pouring our ‘serious’ or ‘quality’ journalism resources into exploring the people, places, issues, culture and ideas that matter only to Australians and that no international outlet can cover with the expertise and resources of a local outlet.

But management don’t even really care about whether they can continue to make a quality product that people want to keep buying, because they are answerable only to shareholders, who care only about profit. You would think there’d be a direct link between people hating the quality of the paper and stopping buying it, but one of the most intensely frustrating aspects of Fairfax’s current strategy is that the company is coasting on its reputation for ‘quality’. It has a vestigial place in the lives of its former key readership of socially progressive, educated and affluent readers in Melbourne and Sydney. Meanwhile, it’s pursuing with increasing aggression a raft of strategies that those same readers find tabloidist and distasteful. People will probably still read and click out of the longtime habit that Fairfax doesn’t even understand enough to turn into its key offering.

Habit will keep those readers there for a while longer, but as the unique voices and purviews of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are progressively eroded, and readers everywhere receive increasingly bland, samey journalism, soon enough they’ll drift away to many of the other mastheads I’ve linked to in this article. Maybe they’ll move away from mastheads altogether, getting their news from social media, where it’s getting increasingly harder for media organisations to make money. Perhaps only then, Fairfax will realise that newspapers aren’t some Magic Pudding that will regenerate after being repeatedly cut.

–

Feature image via CFMEU/Twitter.

–

Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets at @incrediblemelk.