JOURNALISM

MEDIA CUTBACK, 2009

This comment piece was commissioned and published by literary journal, ‘Meanjin’.

By the time this is published, some 50 journalists at Melbourne’s broadsheet The Age, along with significant others within the Fairfax Media Group across its Australian and New Zealand mastheads, will have lost or given up their jobs, in cutbacks totalling more than ten per cent of its editorial workforce.

Troops, those who serve print journalism in some old-fashioned belief that reporting the truth-as-you-know-it, and in the case of investigative journalism – the highest of its arts – uncover it, often at the cost of great personal effort and stress, is meaningful and important, have been lost.

What will be the consequence of that?

The clamp of profit – which is driving these cutbacks - is a censorship at root.  For the human-driven endeavour of this kind of admirable journalism, and one for which The Age has been known since its formation in the 1850s, requires an energetic, motivated force.

Those who are left, resources bared within the newsroom, must necessarily grow exhausted by the extra demands on them. Stretched to their limits, demoralised (a potent effect of the climate of mass retrenchments), each will have to pull to their guts and re-commit, responding with even more discipline and enthusiasm to maintain the principles of a free press, to power that into newsprint.

At this time, the inhumane effect of the profit motive is hunting down the entire world. Today, Wall Street crashes again like a giant wounded beast, multi-tentacled, dragging down into its depths the ship of human dross – those without financial reserve, those who can’t make it to the lifeboat of an executive payout or profit from the golden pail-out of Congress.

Those initially impacted by the American sub-prime crisis lost their homes and now live in gated carparks, in cars and trailer-homes; others, facing sheriffs at their door invoking premature foreclosure, chose to suicide in their bedrooms in some terrible insistence on dignity.

Yet executives continue to receive, even in the face of this human disaster, and its unfolding collapse, extravagant bonuses, while on our own city’s streets, billboards declaim that it only costs 4 cents a day to keep alive an HIV orphan. Who will report on that immoral gulf?

So, in an atmosphere of journalistic fatigue, important leads to difficult stories aren’t followed up. The delinquent need for ever-breaking news on the digital front compresses the vision of media executives who want it all fast, brief and scintillating – the website format – at the cost of time-consuming and challenging reports and analysis.

In this breach, between the print tradition of quality journalism and the apparently inevitable shift of reader habits to the digital page, the humanity of journalism is at risk.

There seems to be a critical breakdown in Australian journalism in the adaptation of the quality print form into the digital – a failing of courage by decision-makers before the imperative to pioneer innovative digital formats that yet embed the hallmarks of the traditional quality press: these composed by the significance of genuine news-breaking and insightful comment.

By-lines are a strange and fraught link between a reporter and their reader. While so much is to be applauded in the content at The Economist, it can be argued that its veiling of its writers in anonymity – no bylines - subsumes them into an institutional fabric. This threat is alive and growing with the rise of the use of the news-agency and wire, upon which current digital web-based sites rely. ‘But who is telling us this?’ The source of a story’s ideas and prejudices – in the realm of reviewing, it should go without saying – needs be owned.

The effect otherwise is one of isolation between a story and its reader. The alternative, of a story whose correspondent is revealed, is of an experience of human to human: the reporter and the recipient. The story is shared openly, though often necessarily, with an argumentative mind brought by the reader to bear and examine the facts.

It is time for shareholders in quality media – print, digital - to consider their investments to have an ethical status, one whose shareholder returns are essentially examined and qualified by the pursuit of justice, of values which are noble and humane.

The Guardian, as an extreme example, that warehouse of fine reportage across the wounds of the world, and its reviewing of great art, literature, entertainment and culture, is protected by a trust company structure. It is also a superb example of how print and digital siblings have been brought together, yet differentiated – the print edition filled with links to its webpage for other content. Both formats remain robust, independent yet interlinked, an intelligent, evolving response by that press’ decision-makers. (Yet how comforting always to hold that press’s paper-printed edition in one’s very hands, that palpable physical experience of artefact to reader: will that experience ever be replaced?)

How significant also it is to have indentured correspondents placed at the critical posts of the world. The viability of these foreign postings too continue to be placed under immense pressure by the profit motive of media companies, including Fairfax. A reliable and independent correspondent brings their humanity, fraught and all, to the perception of an entire region and its humanity.

This is not a time for cynicism. The media adventure is terribly fraught. Readers are right to consider closely their misgivings of empires whose reportage is disfigured by alliances with government and business, whose executives continue to make decisions based on contract bonuses and stake-holder dividend reports. But within each masthead – whether of ether or paper - there are good men and women who continue to punch out, whose resistance bears down on every word. In whose self-driven trust to report stories at the highest levels available to them, the reader can rely. This resistance has never been more important.