The Canberra Times is looking for a new editor. The previous editor, Michael Stevens, resigned after nearly five years in the job. He said that five years was enough. That is very understandable. It is a gruelling task, especially on a seven-days-a-week publication.
Most people imagine that the editor is the boss of a newspaper. Whatever the editor says goes. Not quite.
As an editor of The Times, London, once said to a British Prime Minister who complained about a journalist: “Being editor of a newspaper is like being head of a circus. You can hire the animals, but you cannot make them perform.”
I have some understanding of how both those editors felt. I was editor of The Canberra Times from 1985 to 1992 under three owners: Fairfax, Kerry Packer and Kerry Stokes.
Aside from the occasional uncontrolability of journalists, newspapers have a chief executive who is in charge of the whole show: advertising, finance, printing and production and editorial. The chief executive is answerable to the board of directors who in turn is answerable to the shareholders or owners.
But there is an unwritten understanding that the chief executive usually does not direct the content of the paper. This is what is meant by editorial independence. It is desirable commercially because readers trust a newspaper which they see as editorially independent. The theory is that the newspaper with editorial independence acts in the public interest, not the owner’s interest.
Some owners do not see it that way. They use their papers to push their commercial interests or their pet political line. It is their right. They own the paper. Why shouldn’t they use what they own in whatever lawful way they want. Readers and journalists who don’t like it can go elsewhere.
Other owners (and you can put The Canberra Times in this basket) respect editorial independence out of public interest and the fact that it often works commercially. But there are limits. The owner should not have to sit by while an editor and team of journalists take the paper in a direction that would cause commercial and reputational damage. For example, no owner would put up with an editor who took the paper away from the community it is supposed to serve.
So the editor is not the boss. The editor has to heed the requirements of the owner.
The other pressure from that direction is financial. The editor has a budget. Accountants track it every month in fine detail: wages, travel, furniture, phones, computers, contributors, wire services and so on. So the editor has to be an accountant of sorts.
That pressure is combined with the unremitting pressure of ensuring the press starts on time every night.
For all the talk about content, political slant, news values and design, an editor who does not meet budget and does not get the press to start on time is doomed.
The pressure of time and money inevitably affects content. You have to build the product from the ground up every day, unlike a margarine or toothpaste manufacturer. Lots can go wrong. Many tastes can be offended.
The readership wants you to be all things to all people, but space is finite. More football and racing means less world news. More local news means less national news. You send Smith to cover the Australian Open Tennis so you cannot send Jones to the South Australian election.
Interested parties want favourable coverage and are quick to allege bias. The Canberra Times is at once accused of being a “Zionist mouthpiece” and a sympathiser of Palestinian “terrorists”; an apologist for private schools and a supporter of trendy teachers in public education; a Howard hater and a capitalist warmonger; a developers’ mouthpiece and a platform for residential nimbys.
These parties get even more offended if you say, “We are not on anyone’s side. We don’t much care who wins the debate, as long as there is a debate.”
You expected to embrace their cause. Everyone wants the ear of the editor. No-one else will do. Often the editor sits between a person adversely affected by a story and the journalist who wrote it.
The editor has to have good news sense, so has to be widely read. It means forcing yourself if necessary to take an interest in football and pop bands. You have to be across what is happening in business, the arts, architecture, local government, medicine, science, law, the lot.
Most dailies have a journalistic staff of between 10 and 200. The editor has to be an employer-manager with knowledge of industrial relations and human management. Each staff member wants more pay, more space, less shift work. Unlike most businesses, there is no “after-work” social time for all staff. Work starts at 8am and ends at 1am. No editor can be there all the time, so you have to be a good delegator, putting the right task into the right hands.
Production demands mean an editor has to have reasonable computer skills and an understanding of how the press works. Knowledge of typography and design is essential. Otherwise production and IT departments will fill the vacuum and determine how the paper looks.
The dangers of defamation and contempt require the editor to be a lawyer of sorts. Pressure of time and money mean you cannot seek legal advice for everything you publish.
In an place like Canberra, organisations and the public in general like the editor to speak at formal gatherings. It is important for the success of the paper to be reasonable good at it. As well as speaking you have to be able to write and edit well.
An editor can always insist a certain story run or not run, or run in a certain place. The editor can insert or delete parts of a story. In that respect it is a powerful position. But no single person can make those decisions about every story. However, the editor is responsible for all of them. And the lot is scrutinised by the public every day.
Squeezed between proprietor, public, staff, production manager, advertising manager, pressure groups, politicians and lawyers, yet being able to largely determine what is read and what is not, the editor’s chair is a seat of power and powerlessness like no other.
Yet it is immensely exhilarating and rewarding. You see the unique product of your work every morning. Your work is about the things everybody is talking about and interested in.
There is nothing like a big breaking story. Indeed, the editor’s job is not really work.
Whoever takes it will find it joyful, frustrating, exhausting, fun, painful, educational, fruitful and remorseless. But never boring. The task is so full that I think Michael Stevens was right: five years is a good time.