As we’re going to press, a tumultuous week in which the local newspaper industry didn’t always display its best side. A headline in the Sydney Daily Telegraph in which the Murdoch tabloid laid out its election position with ‘Kick this mob out’ was questionable judgement: Notice to readers, in effect, that anything they saw in the paper in the cmoning weeks would lack balance.
I took greater objection to the ‘Plonker’ headline in the Courier-Mail soon after, especially in the ‘one voice’ town that Brisbane is: An issue targetted at schoolchildren under the Headstart readership programme was not one I would want in a house with young children... or at all for that matter.
The end of the same week saw the sudden departure of Kim Williams as News Corp Australia’s chief executive. OK, so Rupert made a wrong appointment – it’s been known before – but the rubbishing of Williams in the media section of The Australian on the following Monday was not a pretty sight. Usually it’s Fairfax’s dirty washing they hang out in those columns, not their own.
On the other side of News Corp’s world, a minor landmark with the announcement that the troops are leaving London’s Docklands for trendy southbank. More wiping of the slate, as the industry moves forward (?). Printing left for the Broxbourne superplant with the second plant upgrade since the original (already elderly) Goss letterpress kit at Wapping fired up – the second was with the 1987 order for manroloand Newsman presses which also took Australia into the colour newspaper era – and journos moved to nearby Thomas More Square a couple of years back.
The former Wapping print site, sold last year for £150 million ($250 million), is to have 1800 homes and 18,000 m2 of shops and offices there. Perhaps there will be space for a living museum on the site: An unused Linotype from Wapping’s ‘new technology’ collection; a letterpress plate from one of the Goss presses, and even one of the buses in which members of the electricians union ran the gauntlet of pickets. Oh, and squeeze in a printed newspaper.
What do you do when the print deadline is looming, and the story hasn’t broken yet? Newspaper editors faced a recurring problem with the birth of Prince George, the much-anticipated third in line to the English throne.
Australian tabloids responded by filling ‘special’ pages with feature content without regard to whether the birth (or appearance, or naming) had taken place. Weekly mag New Idea even resorted to augmented reality to present the front page they would have run, when the young man was actually born. Maybe it’s a trend we shall see more of as newspaper plants get further from their population centres and deadlines, as a result, get earlier.
The departure of colleagues at media outlets is also something we can expect to see more of as the industry changes. Errol Simper – who may be holding on for a super cheque – notes in The Australian that “we’re sleepwalking towards something”… but isn’t clear about what.
But journalists have always been ready to move on, originally to freelance or PR and these days to blogs and outsourcing businesses. And witness the rise and rise of Mia Freedman, who had been a freelance as well as a top magazine editor before launching her mamamia.com.au website in 2007. A continuing role as a print columnist is helping propel her to fame which may one day rival that of Arianna Huffington.
But little hope that the reduction of numbers in journalism may lead to better pay for those that remain; not while it’s so much fun, at least!
Proof that there is life after journalism comes in many forms. Alan Whicker, who has died aged 87, is better known for his travel shows than for the journalistic colour pieces I recall. His was the first big name I was to encounter as Fleet Street descended on the Parkhurst high security prison when the Great Train Robbers (or was it the Kray twins?) were being moved there… and I was the greenest of cadets at The News’ nearby Newport office.
Technology has also moved on from the days when it was necessary to block the nearest phone box in order that it would be available for a colleague to file copy.
I wasn’t much help to Whicker, into whom I bumped – almost literally – as he was adjusting his dress before leaving the public toilet: “Hell-oo, what do you knooow”, was both the greeting and immediate farewell.
