A senior Australian newsman has serious misgivings over this week's announcement of job cuts by the Fairfax media organisation.
Alarm bells are ringing over the state of quality journalism in Australia, and the future of newspapers and magazines lies with celebrity-driven pap, an industry leader says.
Eric Beecher, former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and publisher of crikey.com.au and the Business Spectator, said plans by Fairfax Media to axe 550 jobs, a third of them editorial staff, were a firm sign that the company was turning its back on quality journalism.
The newspaper, radio and internet group announced on Tuesday it would cut 5% of its workforce under a new business improvement programme, affecting staff in Australia and New Zealand.
The move is expected to cut between 8% and 10% of journalists on the company's two largest mastheads, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, in Melbourne.
The Age's editor-in-chief, Andrew Jaspan, yesterday became the first high-profile casualty of the Fairfax plan, after he was sacked from the position.
Mr Beecher said the job cuts announcement was "incredibly alarming".
"I think the most important outcome . . . was that Fairfax for the first time have said, 'We're no longer taking responsibility for quality journalism'," he told ABC Radio.
"They didn't use those words and of course they'll deny that, but by removing that number of journalists - and this isn't the first time they've done it and they've more or less indicated it won't be the last - what they're saying is our duty is to shareholders, our duty is not to maintaining quality journalism."
Mr Beecher said Fairfax's announcement meant the role of well-resourced, serious journalism acting as a check and balance within a democratic system was under threat.
While the lifespan of newspapers and journalism was still reasonably long, he said, the issue was what kind of newspapers we would have in the future.
Asked if "celebrity-driven pap" was the future of Australian newspapers and magazines, Mr Beecher said he believed it was, and advertisers were mainly to blame.
"I think that is the future of newspapers and magazines," he said.
"[Advertisers have] been withdrawing their displayed and classified advertising from big newspapers, and the newspapers are being forced to make these cuts.
"Advertisers . . . and I'm being in no way critical of them . . . are moving to the Internet, to much more targeted media and much less mass media."
Because commercial funding for mass media was drying up, Mr Beecher said, it was important for politicians and governments to support the notion of the importance of journalism in the system.
However, he said he had no specific remedy in mind.
"They need to look at it now and think: If we don't do anything, then in a decade's time the idea of well-resourced, quality journalism - with hundreds of journalists covering parliament and business and investigative journalism and the courts - will be gone."
