Back to the future with Facebook

Are Facebook, Google and Apple as different from the old news media as they claim to be? Downsizers must be a problem for the embattled newspaper industry. Late last year my husband and I sold our family house and bought a small apartment on the edge of the city, closer to my job. But if I imagined that I’d have more time to pore over the morning papers before rushing out the door, no such luck: it proved totally impractical to have the newspaper delivered to our apartment building. So with a Proustian pang for the roll of crisp newsprint that used to wake me at 5.30 am as it hit the pot plants in the front yard, I rang and cancelled the Age subscription I had held for twenty-five years, since the days when I first worked for the paper. A pleasant woman in a call centre somewhere efficiently cancelled both the print edition and the digital replica on my iPad. I waited to see if she would offer me an incentive to keep the digital version. In former times, the sales rep would have produced with a ta-da a list of incentives to continue, but not this time. Near the end of our short conversation, she blandly observed that she would leave it to me to go online to purchase a new digital-only subscription, if I wanted one. And that was that. I felt more like the jilted than the jilter… Read the full articl

The Age and the young Menzies: a chapter in Victorian liberalism

© 2010 Dr. Sybil Dorothy NolanThe Melbourne Age was Robert Menzies' favourite newspaper. This thesis investigates the early years of Menzies' political career, when his relationship with The Age and its senior personnel was established. It is a comparative study of two liberalisms: that of the principal creator of the Liberal Party of Australia, and of a newspaper famous for its liberal affiliations. The Age had been closely identified with the Liberal politician Alfred Deakin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After Geoffrey Syme became its proprietor in 1908, The Age pursued a programmatic agenda based in the dominant liberal ideology of the day, social liberalism, which stood for responsible citizenship and State intervention. The paper was influenced by both Deakinism and its New Liberal equivalent in Britain, whose political representatives were Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George. When Menzies emerged on the Victorian political stage in the mid-twenties, The Age still stood for ideals and institutions which had been influential in the first decade of nationhood: New Protection, the conciliation and arbitration system, responsible trade unionism, accountable government, and social meliorism. The early chapters of the thesis explore the paper's political outlook, focusing on its vigorous campaign against the conservative ascendancy in non-Labor politics. That the newspaper remained a coherent exemplar of New Liberal orthodoxy from 1908 until the outbreak of the Second World War is one of the study's main findings. To Syme, the young Menzies represented a talented new generation of Liberal reformer. The Age vigorously supported his election to the Victorian Legislative Council in 1928, and his subsequent move to the Assembly. Despite the paper's hopes for him, Menzies' liberal-conservative tendencies were soon strongly to the fore. During the Depression, he aggressively opposed the introduction of unemployment insurance. When Menzies joined economists and primary producers in attacking the regime of tariff protection that was central to The Age's Deakinite identity, the relationship between the newspaper and the politician reached a low watermark. These episodes are explored in detail. The second half of the thesis focuses on Menzies's ideological make-up. It identifies him as a post-Deakinite whose personal politics were a contradictory mixture of older and newer streams of liberalism, and whose personal style was a mixture of pragmatism tinged with a consciousness of the legacy of Deakinite idealism. The phrase 'blended liberalism' usefully describes Menzies' political makeup by the late thirties. Three major influences on his political ideology are identified: the Victorian Liberal tradition; the Law, which was his first and, he said, best loved calling; and his family's Presbyterian faith. The thesis also explores Menzies' friendship with the British Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, a devout Anglican whose constructive social vision influenced Menzies. The final chapter of the thesis is a case study of the National Health and Pensions Insurance Act (1938), a regime of compulsory contributory social insurance which was based on the British model and included elements of Lloyd George's original bill and of Baldwin's extended scheme. Both Menzies and The Age supported the Australian measure. The thesis discusses how their shared campaign for national insurance brought them back into close relationship, yet how their ideological rationales for national insurance were significantly different

Keeping the Age noisy

The Age’s history shows why Fairfax’s strategy is putting the paper’s identity at risk, writes Sybil Nolan for Inside Story. . In May, when journalists at Fairfax newspapers wrote a petition to their chairman, Roger Corbett, against plans to cut sub-editing staff, artists and designers, the main point they made was this: “To remove production from these newspapers is to cut the heart from them, removing the history and institutional memory that sets Fairfax newspapers apart from the rest of the media.” The journalists and their union were objecting to Fairfax Media’s decision to outsource much of the sub-editing of news on their metropolitan dailies to Pagemasters. Staff I’ve talked to at Fairfax’s Melbourne paper, the Age, including house committee members, say that because the move was only implemented in June it’s still too early to tell what impact the changes will have, especially in Melbourne, where far more Fairfax subs took up jobs with Pagemasters. There is a cadre of subs at Pagemasters who still understand the Age’s editorial identity, style and values, and feel a connection with the paper and their former colleagues. At present, the job they do is carefully monitored by the chief sub back at the office, and by page editors. Read in full Image: Flickr / Dr. Keat

Journalism\u27s long cosmopolitan turn

The figure of the journalist as a ‘citizen of the world’ is deeply inscribed on journalism culture, yet in recent years new media scholars have appropriated the concept of cosmopolitanism for citizen and networked journalism. Using scholarship on cosmopolitanism, and profiles of several journalists well known in public discourse, this paper explores the meaning of cosmopolitanism in journalism. We argue that histories by Rantanen, Stephens and others demonstrate the historical basis of cosmopolitanism in journalism culture and practice. We analyse the inherent qualities of journalism that mark it as cosmopolitan, exploring these in archetypal examples drawn from celebrated journalists’ work. We advance the hypothesis that cosmopolitanism has long been an aspiration in journalism generally, and argue that recognition of this matters to the future of journalism. We also explain how this hypothesis will be explored in future cases involving the work of less well known journalists