THERE is no god-given right for The Newcastle Herald, the Illawarra Mercury, or indeed The Canberra Times, to come out every day. Running a newspaper has to be a business, albeit a public-spirited one, not a charity.
Like all newspaper publishers, Fairfax is facing a difficult time with competition from the internet for both news and advertising.
Like any company facing competition it has to become more efficient; ensure that it does not jeopardise the things it does well; and diversify if it can.
But Fairfax is not any sort of company. It is a media company. It does not matter so much if a butter factory goes under because of the onslaught of margarine, or a VCR producer goes under in the face of the DVD.
Fairfax, on the other hand, is the repository of a wealth of journalistic skill. Those journalists inform society, and democracy relies on an informed electorate to function properly. The job should not be left to state-owned media – admirable as the ABC and SBS are.
So this week Fairfax announced it would send much of the sub-editing and production function of the Newcastle Herald and the Illawarra Mercury to New Zealand. Presumably, it will make some savings. It needs to, in the face of a falling share price and lower advertising revenues from print. Of all the places to make savings, the sub-editing and production functions is probably the best.
The sub-editing function is crucial. Sub-editors do a lot of things. They at least do the following: check for legality (especially defamation and contempt); check for taste (obscenity, community values, racial and other slurs and so on); check for fairness; check for cohesion and logicality in the a story; check spelling, grammar and punctuation; write headlines; lay-out pages; pick up patent errors (like a person’s name spelt two different ways or the percentages of a break up not adding up to 100 and so on); tighten the writing by eliminating duplication and waffle; clarify the writing by using simpler words and breaking up unnecessarily long sentences; and checking meaning with the author.
These days, all these things can be done as easily from New Zealand as anywhere else.
Sub-editors also do two other things that cannot be done as easily or as well from New Zealand: select articles for placement and to pick up latent errors.
The first of these is obviously not going to New Zealand. Local editors will select what goes where. That is not a labour-intensive task but it requires local knowledge and judgment.
The second – picking up latent errors – is where a sub-editor from their personal knowledge corrects a reporter’s error which is not obvious (or patent). A locally based sub-editor might know that a local worthy spells his name Jon not John, or a suburb’s name is Weetangera not Wheatangerra. A New Zealand-based sub-editor would not, though Google might help somewhat.
It seems to me a fair trade-off. First, the local reporter should have got it right in the first place and in future will have to be more careful in an off-shore regime. Secondly, it is better to pay that sort of minimal price than for Fairfax than to cut into the reporting talent.
The sub-editing function, however, remains crucial and provides a lot of the difference between journalism and merely blogging, tweeting or facebooking – a crucial difference in the new publishing world where anyone can publish to the world very cheaply. The sub-editing function helps a publisher, like Fairfax, say its publications meet standards and are worth paying for and advertising with.
Controlling costs will be essential as newspapers find a business model that can work over the internet. That task is crucial for Fairfax and Fairfax’s success in achieving it is crucial to Australian democracy. If Fairfax, heaven forbid, fails in the task, the information, analysis and opinion in print which Australian democracy needs to thrive will be under the almost total control of News Ltd.
New Ltd publications run an agenda that permeates the whole publication — the emphasis given within stories and the placement of stories within the publication. Those things, in News Ltd papers, are not driven by objective news values.
Fairfax is a necessary bulwark against News Ltd. There is no other.
In this inevitable transmogrification to the internet, Fairfax’s ability to deliver quality journalism needs to be preserved and expanded.
The internet can provide Fairfax with a greater presence in the cities where it does not publish a newspaper: Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin and a lot of regional places.
In the longer term I would like to see some sort of general Fairfax internet subscription in which the user selects a geographic region. The app (informed by an editor in each region) would then sort the news accordingly.
The Victorian Budget would be the main story for Victorian subscribers and maybe No 20 for other subscribers. On another day, Greece leaving the Eurozone might be the main story irrespective of what region you subscribe from and, say, a new building at ANU might be No 2 for Canberra subscribers and not appear at all on the homepage for others.
The whole lot would be searchable, including the archives. It may be that some local identity is lost – no more specific Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Age and so on – but local coverage would be improved across Australia. The thing becomes more saleable than asking subscribers to pay $15 to $20 a month for each publication.
The trick is to get the subscriptions rolling in an environment where so much is free.
In addition to geographic selection, subscribers could select special interests: law, architecture etc, so that stories involving them can be headlined in a sidebar.
Yes, the moving of some sub-editorial functions to a centralised place will hurt the individuals involved, but it is better to see Fairfax shoring up is key journalistic asset than continuing with the present unsustainable model of news publication.
DOT DOT DOT
COULD you imagine the down-and-out people on welfare getting the expensive legal advice necessary to tweak their benefits beyond what was intended?
No, but the wealthy people on welfare can. Are there any wealthy people on welfare? Too right – all those rich people pocketing the health insurance rebate unjustly given to them by the Howard Government and now being rightly taken away by Julia Gillard.
So letters have been going out this week from some health insurance funds directed at singles with an income over $84,000 and couples with an income over $168,000. The letter urges them to pay their premiums for the whole of the 2012-13 year before 27 June.
Apparently there is a loophole in the legislation which means that the rebate will apply to any premiums paid before 27 June, even if they are premiums for the following financial year – the year in which the Government intended the rebate to be phased out for high-income earners.
And, of course, the loophole will apply only to those people wealthy enough to pay a full year’s health premium on very short notice. Their $2000-$3000 investment will earn them a tidy 30 per cent interest.
The scam may threaten the surplus and time is running out to close the loophole.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 16 June 2012.