Media

Bettina Jordan-Barber will soon face trial for receiving around £100,000 over nine years from the Sun newspaper for supplying information while she was an official in the Ministry of Defence. Both the prosecution and the defence during the recent UK ‘phone hacking’ trial accepted that the payments had been made, and that Rebekah Brooks, while she was editor of the Sun from 2003 to 2006, authorised eleven of them totalling £38,000. According to Brooks, it never occurred to her that the person her reporter, who will also soon face trial, referred to in his emails as his ‘number one military contact’ and ‘ace military source’ might be someone in the military. The jury accepted this profession of ignorance, so Brooks was found not guilty of ‘conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office’.

Fairfax Media, which has churned out millions of words since its beginnings in Sydney in the 1830s, has itself inspired hundreds of thousands of words in the last year or so. First came Colleen Ryan’s Fairfax: The Rise and Fall (June 2013), followed by Pamela Williams’ Killing Fairfax (July 2013). Now comes Stop the Presses! by Ben Hills, a veteran investigative journalist who would no doubt self-identify as a ‘Fairfax lifer’, like many characters in his book. Just in case the theme of these tomes isn’t clear, we have Hills’s subtitle: How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax.

David Syme made his name and his fortune in newspapers – specifically The Age – and his life’s course might be compared with the workings of a gigantic web offset press.

I have watched such machines at work. They start off slow; the rolls of naked newsprint snake by gently, round and round. When the presses roar to life the noise is astonishing; the paper is stretched like the thinnest of skins as it flashes, smooth and furious, through the machine, soaking up words and pictures. If the paper breaks, the whole thing unravels and the run must be reset. So it was with Syme, the brilliant but perplexing man who owned and ran The Age from 1860 until his death in 1908. At its peak in the 1880s, only the London dailies had higher circulations. One in ten people in Melbourne bought a copy.

1984 is back. George Orwell’s nightmare vision of governmental surveillance, secrecy, and deception clearly resonates with the revelations first leaked to the Guardian by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Indeed, it is practically impossible to find an account of the Snowden affair without at least one ‘Orwellian’ adjective dropped into the mix. Sometimes it comes qualified: Justice Richard J. Leon, District Court Judge for the District of Columbia ruling in December 2013 that the bulk collection of US mobile phone records was probably unconstitutional, called the NSA program ‘almost Orwellian’. This decision is currently under appeal.

Gideon Haigh reviews a major new study of the failure of investigative journalism during the 2008 GFC. He argues that journalists became invested in the economic boom, to their cost.

With James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch grinning smugly on its cover, Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch and the Ultimate Revenge projects a strong message that they are indeed the company’s smiling assassins. Pamela Williams mounts a case that these scions of Australia’s traditional media families ...

Ten years ago, if you moved in certain journalistic circles, calling yourself a blogger was about as popular as leprosy. Few in the industry had respect for the platform, and fewer still would have read your work. Print journalists seemed divided on whether blogging was a joke or a threat. Either way, it was a sure-fire way to end a conversation fast. But the digitisation of the media and its attendant upheaval of the newspaper business model changed everything. The occupational clichés of ink-stained fingers and the printing press were swiftly replaced with scrolling RSS feeds and the ubiquity of smartphones, constantly aglow. Circulation figures – and the dubious methods used to calculate them – were deemed irrelevant. Page views and time-stamps became the new metrics of an article’s (or an author’s) worth.

Ten years ago, if you moved in certain journalistic circles, calling yourself a blogger was about as popular as leprosy. Few in the industry had respect for the platform, and fewer still would have read your work. Print journalists seemed divided on whether blogging was a joke or a threat ...