Will those precious little flowers at Fairfax never learn? Gina Reinhart's billions are the only things standing between The Age and oblivion. No one else is going to put money into a stock that is falling like a rock. All she wants is a say in how the SMH and The Age are run. Is that unreasonable? I don't think so. The so called 'Editorial Charter,' is a ruse perpetrated in 1988 to deter somebody else the staff didn't like, namely the late Robert Maxwell a.k.a the Bouncing Czech, from taking over the company.
Anyone who knows anything about newspapers will tell you The Age is a very poor paper. It's layout is shocking, with all those crazy spills jumping all over the place with no logic at all. Laying out a tabloid like the Herald Sun, which from a technical point of view is a far superior paper, is much harder. Circulation figures show the Herald Sun is holding up quite well, while The Age continues to plummet. Why? It's a crap paper.
I am quite confident Gina Reinhart doesn't really care about surefire money losers like The Age's booklet on the best 100 coffee shops, which no one outside of the inner city gives a stuff about. What she does want is a say in how views and news are presented. She's not likely to rush into the newsroom at deadline time yelling 'Hold the front page!' after a particularly stimulating dinner party, as Frank Packer is said to have done more than once at Sydney's Daily Telegraph. As for Rupert Murdoch not having a say in producing what is, after all, his product, the idea is laughable. Proprietors like printers. They don't rabbit on about editorial independence. They may be greedy and foul mouthed, but give them enough money and they would print Mein Kampf. Journalists were once poorly educated craftsmen who learnt on the job. The idea that journalism is a calling for highly principled literateurs is a modern invention
I have not always been so critical of The Age. During the Khemlani loans affair and in the months leading up to John Kerr's dismissal of the Whitlam government, I paid to have The Age air freighted from Melbourne to Perth -- now you just log on. It was an expensive undertaking, but The Age was breaking just about every important story in Australia. For that we had to thank two men -- Ranald Macdonald, scion of the founding Syme family, and editor Graham Perkin. Ranald Macdonald was known as 'Australia's most successful failure'. He did the money from his Age stake cold when he invested in several fitness centres which went bust. One industry figure said 'he should have been cleaning the toilets, not making speeches.' But he went on to carve out a highly successful career as a journalism educator in the US. Ranald Macdonald wasn't much of a businessman, but he was very, very earnest, which always goes down well in America. Graham Perkin died young of cancer, a great loss to journalism.
The Age, the SMH and rest of the Fairfax group have to relearn an old lesson -- 'today's front page splash, tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper.' No matter whether it's The Age, the Ford Falcon or any other crap product, no matter how mightily you boost it, if the customers won't buy it, you're out of business. Which is where Fairfax is going to be without Gina Rinehart.
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