I still wince at the memory of the morning after my first day on the Sydney Morning Herald. I had been appointed a leader writer and my initial editorial was about to hit the streets.
So I got out of bed at 5 am and paced the house until the corner shop opened an hour later. Then I slipped through the door of the shop, bought a paper and read four times the sage advice on an Argentine political crisis that I had assigned to the country’s oldest and and most respected newspaper before it finally sunk in that I’d become one of its journalists.
It was a totally inconsequential piece to get so excited about. And yet, over the next twenty years as a Fairfax journalist and columnist, I never quite lost the excitement born of the responsibility I felt toward the public, the thrill of seeing my words in print, and the satisfaction of knowing that, in however small a way, I was helping to shape the thoughts of people across the city every day.
The corner shop is gone now, unable to compete with the shopping complex that was built down the road. The Sydney Morning Herald is heading the same way – and for much the same reason.
From next year, together with The Age, the Herald will cease to be published as a broadsheet and appear in ‘compact’ (read tabloid) form. For how long is anyone’s guess. Fairfax management isn’t hiding the fact that the package of measures it announced on Monday is designed to move the company into a digital future. And the decision to close the printing plants in Chullora and Tullamarine in 2014 doesn’t bode well for the future of hardcopy newspapers in any form at all.
We all know what prompted these decisions: changes in reader and advertiser habits brought on by the digital revolution. Not all of us, however, fully appreciate the impact of those changes.
One way to look at it is that 65 percent of Herald and Age readers access the newspapers’ content not in hardcopy form but online. Another way is to consider that for every dollar of revenue from hardcopy advertising, the online equivalent is a about 10 cents.
On May 30, journalists at Fairfax went on strike for nearly two days to protest a decision to shift 66 sub-editing jobs off-shore. The industrial action was unprotected but management baulked at challenging the strike. The reason, according to reliable insiders, is that the company was saving far more money each day workers were out than it would have made if they were on the job.
Late last year the Centre for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California released the findings of a ten-year study into the impact of internet technology on US media. Among the report’s findings was a prediction that most American newspapers will be out of business within five years.
‘We believe that the only newspapers in America that will survive in print form will be at the extremes of the medium – the largest and the smallest',’ said centre director Jeffrey Cole. ‘It’s likely that only four major daily newspapers with global reach will continue in print: The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. At the other extreme, local weekly newspapers may still survive, as well as the Sunday print editions of metropolitan newspapers that otherwise may exist only in online editions."
'The impending death of the American print newspaper continues to raise many questions', Cole added. “Will media organisations survive and thrive when they move exclusively to online availability? How will the changing delivery of content affect the quality and depth of journalism?'
Fairfax is now confronting the first of these questions as it jettisons cost-heavy production platforms like a pilot tossing out everything he can to get more lift across the next mountain. Others will be watching Fairfax’s fortunes closely: not just newspaper companies like News Limited – which has announced its own restructuring in the slipstream of the Fairfax announcement but with as yet far less detil about what it will mean for jobs, formats and newsroom output. But also magazine producers and television broadcasters – all of which are hurtling toward the same cliff face.
And as for quality and depth? There’s no doubt both will suffer not just from job cuts but also due to the cultural shift from a world of lasting tangible hardcopy that rouses you at 5 am to fleeting virtual postings that can keep you awake all night.
But let’s hope Fairfax management remembers that in a crowded digital environment, quality and depth are the only things that can continue to distinguish its brands.
Chris McGillion was a writer, section editor and religion columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald from 1984 to 2004. He now teaches journalism at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst.