Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Old School vs New School
I wonder if the journalists from Epicure and their colleagues from other lifestyle sections in The Age newspaper, spluttered into their lattes this morning as they read the words of Michael Gawenda, their former editor-in-chief.
He described the decision by Fairfax Media, owner of The Age, to cut between 45 and 55 editorial staff as "chilling" and "a failure of imagination."
So how does Gawenda imagine the future?
How about, "smaller circulations and fewer readers, a premium cover price, no lifestyle sections and no special circulation deals, which basically involve giving the paper away." Lifestyle sections such as Epicure wouldn't disappear, they would be moved online.
The Age's current editor-in-chief, Paul Ramadge, responded, "My reaction is that Michael is being provocative rather than deeply reflective and analytical..." Which is a journalist's way of saying Gawenda is being silly.
I wonder if Ramadge has ever wandered into a newsagents first thing in the morning and looked at the pile of The Age newspapers next to the pile of its rival, the Herald Sun -- it would be about 1 tenth the size and the only thing that has kept it going is its advertising revenue, which is now in sharp decline. Epicure already has an online competitor, I eat I drink I work, who is nibbling away at its advertising revenue, not to mention, under siege from the Herald Sun's revamped lifestyle section, extrafood.
Is Gawenda being silly, or is Ramadge living on past glories with his head firmly stuck in the sand? Tellingly, savvy online people refer to newspapers as the dead tree media; has the new online world ringbarked The Age into a slow death, dying from its branches and reaching into the trunk?
He described the decision by Fairfax Media, owner of The Age, to cut between 45 and 55 editorial staff as "chilling" and "a failure of imagination."
So how does Gawenda imagine the future?
How about, "smaller circulations and fewer readers, a premium cover price, no lifestyle sections and no special circulation deals, which basically involve giving the paper away." Lifestyle sections such as Epicure wouldn't disappear, they would be moved online.
The Age's current editor-in-chief, Paul Ramadge, responded, "My reaction is that Michael is being provocative rather than deeply reflective and analytical..." Which is a journalist's way of saying Gawenda is being silly.
I wonder if Ramadge has ever wandered into a newsagents first thing in the morning and looked at the pile of The Age newspapers next to the pile of its rival, the Herald Sun -- it would be about 1 tenth the size and the only thing that has kept it going is its advertising revenue, which is now in sharp decline. Epicure already has an online competitor, I eat I drink I work, who is nibbling away at its advertising revenue, not to mention, under siege from the Herald Sun's revamped lifestyle section, extrafood.
Is Gawenda being silly, or is Ramadge living on past glories with his head firmly stuck in the sand? Tellingly, savvy online people refer to newspapers as the dead tree media; has the new online world ringbarked The Age into a slow death, dying from its branches and reaching into the trunk?
6 Comments:
It was surprising to see Gawenda's speech reported in the papers he was criticising. Crikey.com has a slightly more detailed version with comments here.
I had a good giggle over the suggested fate of the Fairfax lifestyle sections, but Schadenfreude notwithstanding, I love paper publications and it would be sad to lose the physical sensation of turning pages.
Hi duncan, interesting read, especially of the parts The Age didn't print...
It would give no pleasure to see a once mighty paper brought to its knees. One would hope there is a person of vision out there somewhere. I like the paper stuff too.
Here's what Alan kohler said today in Crikey!:
"As someone who has managed both a journalism website and newspapers, I can tell you that the former is by far the best way to distribute journalism, apart from the portability thing perhaps, although my thin laptop is as portable as any newspaper. Websites contain more stuff, they are instant, they don’t require fossil fuels to deliver them (or not much anyway) and they’re cheap to produce.
That cheapness means that the production of journalism has been hugely democratised: no longer do you need a lot of capital to go into business producing and disseminating journalism. In fact there are thousands of single-person "newspapers" now, called blogs, and huge variety of other sizes.
The big problem is the mass business model. Newspaper proprietors over the years have used the protection of high barriers to entry to gouge super profits from their customers and build even more capital with which to defend their turf.
This has paid for some pretty good journalism, mixed in with a lot of rubbish designed to further the vested interests of advertisers and proprietors, or simply to fill up the space between the ads with PR material. Overall, the "rivers of gold" allowed newspapers companies to employ more journalists than they needed -- and still need.
Now a new business model for delivering journalism to customers needs to be found."
Hi ed, well, that's two former editors of The Age who are saying similar things; wonder if Ramadge, the current editor, is listening or is too busy putting his fingers into the dyke?
Interesting lecture. The Australian printed more of it. It read to me like a dig at his successor as well as at management.
The current financial crisis might do more to change the direction of so-called AB newspapers than any editor. Lifestyle sections are heavily dependent on discretionary spending and I can see a lot of these being folded back into the paper, whence they came.
The whole free magazine thing that spawned 'lifestyle sections' was just an eighties oneupmanship thing anyway and writers ran out of good stories years ago. The Australian is currently cannibalising twenty years of its Weekend Magazine to create content for the last several issues.
Kitchenhand, I'm not sure the lifestyle supplement thing was about one upmanship. When Murdoch defeated the print unions who were overpaid and rorting the system and stopping the introduction of new technology it changed the economics of newspapers and made them possible even if many - as i understand there are at Fairfax but possibly News Ltd to - not making a huge profit, if any. Undoubtably the current financial crisis will hit bring more cuts and smaller sections but it is simply bringing on the inevitable a little sooner - especially those that have run out of stories.
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