Fairfax sacks its editors

The latest salvo in the Fairfax saga was the sacking of three senior members of the editorial team today. In Melbourne, Age editor Paul Ramadge .html “announced his intention to stand down” while at the Sydney Morning Herald publisher and editor-in-chief Peter Fray and editor Amanda Wilson announced “they are leaving the company”. The decisions coming so close together and so close after CEO Greg Hyland’s watershed restructure announced last week can only mean the trio have been sacked. Fray gives it away when he said he said it was an exciting opportunity for him to see what more he could achieve in the profession he loved but “he didn’t have another job to go to” while Ramadge spoke of “divided feelings”.

Their departure clears the way for Fairfax to move to a new management structure. In Hyland’s memo to all staff last Monday entitled “Fairfax of the Future”, he announced the three objectives of his cull of 1900 staff: Move to a digital-only platform, reduce costs and make profits. Hyland said his “Metro Media Business” (the Age and SMH) has grown 30% audience in the last five years. Online visitors now outnumber print by over three to one. But the business costs are predominately in the legacy space. To fix this, they will move to regional printing plants, charge for digital access from next month, reduce the size of their papers and sell a stake in NZ auction site Trade Me.

Hyland said they were committed to a multi-platform strategy. Fairfax Media will become a “digital news media and transactions” company with horizontal media convergence across four platforms: legacy (print/radio), online, mobiles and tablets, and IPTV. Audiences would be “monetised through the day” through a mixture of subscriptions, advertising, digital transactions and events. There is no clear role for an editor-in-chief in this model, hence the departures of Ramadge, Frey and Wilson. The Australian thinks instead there will be five geographical editors-in-chief in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Canberra -- and a handful of "national news editors". The Australian believes there will be 19 "topic" editors, replacing the rounds system. “Some topics will be national, such as federal politics, some local, such as crime, and some hybrid,” they said. “There will also be five ‘platform’ editors: one each for print, social media, tablet, mobile and computer.”

Meade and Jackson also note the massive restructure in their own organisation News Ltd with job losses also expected to exceed 1000. Its 19 divisions will be reduced to five publishing houses in a “one city one newsroom” strategy similar to Fairfax. News is also closing two divisions: News Digital Media, founded in 2006, and News Corp's internal wire service Newscore formed three years ago.

While Australia’s two biggest media companies haemorrhage staff, The Guardian is worried more about losing a plurality of voices. It notes Gina Rinehart is circling Fairfax looking for a board seat and editorial influence. Maybe Rinehart is just smart and figures now is a good time to buy into their stock or maybe she wants more than that. Either way, based on what Hyland is saying, the Guardian’s comment she would “hamper Australia's once-vibrant journalistic culture” is a bit Pollyanna-ish about the our media. Right-winger Gerard Henderson calls the Age the Guardian-on-the-Yarra but the Australian paper is nowhere near as good as its British counterpart.

Whether it will be a choice “between Murdoch and Murdoch on steroid,” as the Guardian claims, the fact is Fairfax were never independent of their owners regardless of their “Charter of Editorial Independence”. Even in the glory days of Graham Perkin, he was rapped over the knuckles for supporting Gough Whitlam in 1972 and had to backtrack in 1974 when the board vetoed his decision to give Labor another chance. Rineharts’s refusal to sign it will have little bearing on the content the new entity provides.

The real danger is elsewhere. This threat is not about political interference but business. The new arrangements will further hasten the collapse of the walls between editorial and commercial departments. Terry Flew notes the big question for Fairfax is what online content to put out. Flew said their websites are “a confusing blancmange of investigative stories, fashion photos, sex tips, celebrity gossip, local news, opinion pieces, sports results, and updates on reality TV shows". These sites challenge Fairfax’s claim to deliver quality journalism and most of it is readily available elsewhere. Flew said Fairfax priorities for its online sites must be“uncluttering its content pages and deciding what it won’t be reporting on, and identifying more clearly who its paying readership are likely to be and what they are uniquely seeking from Fairfax sites.”

Blood letting at Fairfax begins: Age editor sacked

Andrew Jaspan, the editor of The Age, appears to be the first victim of the 550 job cuts announced by Fairfax yesterday. The company’s Victorian chief Don Churchill announced Jaspan’s departure to shocked staff of the Melbourne broadsheet this morning. In the staff memo, Churchill said Jaspan had “delivered great papers and has done a magnificent job in reinvigorating The Age”. However he said Fairfax had decided that for “this next critical stage of The Age we would have fresh editorial and executive leadership.” Jaspan’s departure follows that of The Age’s marketing manager Antony Catalano who Churchill also sacked yesterday.

While Jaspan didn’t endear himself to Age journalists over his decisions to allow commercial partnerships to compromise editorial independence, his departure is a concern as it does not appear to be made for journalistic or editorial reasons. Newspaper quality is certain to suffer as journalists follow Jaspan out the door. Fairfax CEO David Kirk hopes to save $50 million with the cuts and the redundancies amount to five percent of the company’s total staff. Crikey editor Jonathan Green believes the two departures confirm the impression that the future business plan for the newspaper is about controlling costs rather than going for growth.

The redundancies news was delivered by the company’s senior brass, CEO David Kirk and deputy CEO Brian McCarthy. Kirk and McCarthy painted the move as a “major restructure of corporate and group services” designed to improve productivity and performance. The job losses were spread across many areas of the business with three in ten redundancies affecting editorial staff in Australia and New Zealand. Fairfax will outsource production of the sections and special reports that are inserted into its papers. The two Sydney newspapers, the Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald, will be merged under a seven-day roster while Melbourne would suffer a “deferral of wage reviews for senior management, a review of our marketing spend, reduction of discretionary spending and a review of our distribution framework.”

Caroline Overington at Murdoch’s The Australian quotes Sydney reporters who say Fairfax is abandoning quality journalism at its flagship newspapers. She said Sydney staff passed a motion after they heard the news saying they had "lost confidence in the Fairfax board and its ability to manage the company through these challenging financial times when its only strategy is to cut editorial staff again and again". Sydney Morning Herald journalist Gerard Noonan called management "gutless" and said they were using "the worst of the Work Choices legislation" to make deep cuts to journalism. "This is a panicked response," he said. "Management is clearly struggling to deal with how to handle the complex demands of high-end, quality journalism."

Another Murdoch media analyst, Mark Day, says the announcement has deputy CEO Brian McCarthy’s fingerprints “all over it”. McCarthy was the former head of John B. Fairfax’s Rural Press, which merged with Fairfax Media 15 months ago in a $9 billion deal. McCarthy’s model at Rural Press was based on small editorial and sales teams using centralised printing facilities to produce more than 100 mastheads. He was notorious for cost-cutting and hated by journalists who claimed reporting capacity was sacrificed for profits. But Day says the model won’t work for the city broadsheets. “The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age need to be agenda-setting and relevant to consumer interests to have an influential role in modern societies,” he said. “This cannot be achieved by filling the gap between the ads with the kind of cheap-as-chips copy-sharing and PR-supplied bumf that McCarthy’s regional weeklies have been able to get away with."

Chris Warren from the Journalists’ union MEAA (Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance) believes the sackings show the newspaper industry is in crisis. He was unimpressed by Kirk and McCarthy’s mantra that "media companies fit for the modern media world need to be lean and agile". Warren told the ABC PM program yesterday he had “absolutely no idea” what the company actually meant by that statement. “You can't produce this sort of quality product that are so essential in this day and age by cutting costs,” he said. Professor of Journalism Wendy Bacon agrees with Warren and she told the same program that quality impact was inevitable. “Now, I know of no research that's accurately measured this, but certainly anecdotally, already errors have been cropping up where you wouldn't have previously seen them,” she said.

These errors are sure to increase given that 120 journalists are among the jobs slashed. More worrying is the likelihood that the cuts will see further erosion in the commitment to quality journalism. While quality is a difficult characteristic to determine, journalism academics such as David Conley have used the measure of at least one journalist per one thousand circulation. The Fairfax broadsheets fall well short on this measure. And with salaries and expenses frozen and no new cadets to be taken on this year, it is unlikely we will be seeing too many investigative scoops or damning exposes of dubious doings of those in high office. A further “dumbing down” of news is the most likely outcome.

Only the markets were happy with Fairfax’s slash and burn exercise. The share price closed last night at $2.98 up 14c and a rise of five percent for the day. ABN Amro media analyst Fraser McLeish saw the cuts as positive because “they’re aligning the costs with the revenues, which is what you want to see.” While McLeish sympathised with those working for Fairfax, he said it was in line what was happening to the newspaper business elsewhere. “You just have to look overseas to what's happening there,” he said. “Five per cent of the workforce is a lot less than what some of the big US newspapers are announcing."

The Age of Nefarious

Fairfax senior management has come down on the side of The Age’s editor Andrew Jaspan in a serious argument with his journalist staff over his decisions to allow commercial partnerships to compromise editorial independence. In a letter to the Melbourne broadsheet’s journalist representative Greg Baum yesterday, Fairfax chief executive and publisher Don Churchill said he was "completely satisfied" that Jaspan had not contravened the "fundamental values of independent journalism". And in a warning sure to infuriate Age journalists further, he warned commercial partnership deals were here to stay.

Crikey broke the story last week after Age editor Andrew Jaspan held a “clear the air” meeting at the paper attended by 235 journalists. At the meeting, the journalists voted unanimously for a motion accusing Jaspan of “degrading their ability to produce independent journalism.” The meeting produced many displays of anger with Jaspan openly accused of lying. The frank exchange was captured on tape which was subsequently leaked to Crikey.

The meeting produced a motion (pdf) which was unanimously agreed to by all journalists present. The motion expressed alarm at “recent developments” that showed that the church and state separation between the paper’s commercial and editorial departments had been undermined by pressure to favour organisations with which the newspaper has struck commercial and sponsorship arrangements. The motion condemned these developments and said they contravene the MEAA code of ethics and the Age’s own code of conduct.

The journalists released a statement of support which outlined six recent examples of where they say The Age transgressed the commercial / editorial boundary. The first of these was Earth Hour (partially owned by Fairfax). Support for the event meant that the corporate partnership not editorial judgement dictated news coverage. Reporters were pressurised not to write negative stories and instead “to promote a campaign being waged by external interests, and write stories that had self-interest rather than news values at their heart”. Last week’s Media Watch also reported that story suggestions from Earth Hour’s Melbourne Project Manager were including in the paper without criticism.

The other five issues raised were a) sport coverage compromised by increasing commercial emphasis on special relationships and partnerships, b) the decision of Jaspan and his deputy editor to attend the 2020 Summit, c) the “R Walker” letter in the Age (that did not identify the writer as Fairfax chairman Ron Walker), d) special treatment given in coverage of the Melbourne Grand Prix (where Walker is also chairman), and e) the issue of bay dredging in which journalists say Jaspan “has pursued an undeclared campaign” which has been “aggressively directed to reflect the view that the dredging is a mistake”.

After the details of the spat between The Age and its journalists were revealed by Crikey and ABC’s Media Watch, Sydney-based Fairfax CEO wrote the letter to Age staff referred to at the start of this article. In it he reaffirmed his support for Age Managing Director Don Churchill. Kirk said he was “disturbed” some staff members had taped editor Jaspan’s remarks to the meeting and distributed them to other media. Kirk said these “discourteous actions hurt the paper and I think they also do the staff no favours”.

Kirk then went on to attack what he called Crikey’s “unremitting criticism” of Fairfax Media. Kirk was referring to Margaret Simons' piece in Friday’s Crikey in which she sheeted home blame for the problems not only to Jaspan but to his superiors: Churchill, Kirk and the Fairfax Board. In a scathing article, Simons said there were two issues which have damaged The Age. Firstly there is the blurring of the line between commercial and editorial, which she acknowledges is a problem at all media organisations. Secondly, is the fact senior management have knowingly allowed someone to remain as editor who is incapable of getting the respect or confidence of his staff.

The Age independence committee said today in its response to Churchill, that there is an urgent need to address the documented instances of infringements on editorial independence. The committee’s mission is to protect the integrity, independence and quality of the newspapers. The committee endorses The Age Charter of Editorial Independence which was conceived in 1988 as a campaign to prevent Robert Maxwell taking over the newspaper after Warwick Fairfax's financially disastrous purchase of the Fairfax group in 1987.

The committee has since been active in 1990 (when Fairfax went into receivership), 1997 (during the aborted Packer takeover bid) and 2005 (when the Howard government brought in its new media laws). Now it faces its most serious fight yet as the editorial management team has changed sides and fights with the commercial arm. The stakes are high. Victory for Jaspan, Churchill and Kirk will consign the quaint notion of editorial independence to a twentieth century media museum.