Doug PollardThe Age of low quality
September 3rd 2008 03:50
A bunch of tabloid reporters
News is a strange profession. What makes news, and who decides, is even stranger. This musing is prompted by developments at my favourite Australian newspaper, The Age, which is in strife over the slashing of journalists jobs by the bean counters.
Much has been said about the decline in standards that will probably result, less quality work, more junior journos, loss of corporate memory etc. etc.
However it seems to me that the decline was already well under way. Since Andrew Jaspan – now, ironically, a casualty of the bean-counters himself - took over in 2004, news frequently vanished from the front page, to be replaced by stories about trashy celebs and sports ‘personalities’, excessively large vapid full-colour photos of politicians standing/walking/waving, huge graphics belabouring the obvious statistical point and so forth.
In-depth reporting was crowded to the margins by admittedly entertaining but largely fact-free opinion and lifestyle writing. Politically the paper moved neither right nor left – just down.
Jaspan has a record of ‘reinventing newspapers, favouring flashy design, funky typefaces, lots of colour, but he also has a record of moving on after a short reign, leaving others to unwind his changes.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t see the need to ‘reinvent’ the quality press, especially when, as with the Age, the usual effect is to lower the quality.
If this is to be a further reinvention, lord help us. Quite how anyone else will manage to take this lively but serious broadsheet any further in the direction of a tabloid comic without destroying it is hard to imagine, but given the lack of journalistic nous on the Fairfax board, I suspect they’ll manage.
The Age has also developed a culture of ‘not invented here’, which means that if the Herald Sun runs a story, the Age won’t pick it up with ten-foot tongs and a peg on its nose. The Herald Sun has always had this snotty attitude, but it’s a shame to see the Age responding in kind. If it’s meant to be ‘quality’, it ought to be above that sort of thing.
That leaves The Australian alone in attempting ‘quality’ journalism, and in terms of coverage it does a better job. However, it has such a strident saloon-bar right-wing tone that it becomes quite exhausting to read, since it is necessary to apply a translation filter to every line in order extract the embedded fact from the surrounding prejudice. There are times when articles in the Aussie remind me of those tanked-up blokes in pubs who are determined to provoke you into a fight.
That’s not to say the Age is or ever was ‘unbiased’ – in my view a complete impossibility for any person, be they a judge or a journalist – but its leftward tilt is milder and its tone far less combative.
The long slow death of the Age is not, contrary to suggestions, the death of quality journalism, just the gradual loss of one of the few places to make a good salary practicing it. If journalists are serious about their craft – and a surprising number of them are – then they will continue to do good work. They just won’t get the fat salary and expense account to do it with. For more and more the job itself will have to be its own reward.
Which will be good for journalists souls, if not their bank balances.
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