Australian Newspaper Cross-Platform Audience Numbers for the 12 months to December 2019 are not good news for News Corp

This Roy Morgan survey of Cross-Platform Audiences covers the number of Australians who have read or accessed individual newspaper content via print, web or app from December 2018 to December 2019.

Print is calculated as net readership in an average 7 days and digital as net website visitation and app usage in an average 7 days. 

Of the 14 prominent mastheads in this cross-platform survey all had experienced readership decline in the 12 months to December 2019, with the exception of the Financial Review (up 14.1%), The Sydney Morning Herald (up 4.1%) and The Age (up 1.2%).

The worst decline in audience numbers occured in the News Corp mastheads.

Percentage Change In Cross-Platform Audience

Adelaide Advertiser  -4.4%
Canberra Times  -14.1% 
Courier-Mail  -1.4% 
Daily Telegraph  -15.5% 
Financial Review  14.1% 
Herald Sun  -7.7% 
Mercury  -3.5% 
Newcastle Herald  -5.3% 
Sunday Times  -4.0% 
Sydney Morning Herald  4.1% 
The Age  1.2% 
The Australian  -4.3%
The Saturday Paper  -7.6% 
West Australian  -6.6%

In the period December 2018 to December 2019 the print versions of all 14 mastheads experienced a degree of readership decline.

News Corp has reported a decline in global revenue and profits in the last quarter ending 31 December 2019, with revenue falling by 5.6% to $2.8 billion. 

According to Mumbrella, advertising revenue was down 5% across the business, with News Corp putting the blame largely on a “weakness in the print advertising market, primarily in Australia”.

"USING 150 INTERVIEWS ON THREE CONTINENTS, THE [NEW YORK] TIMES DESCRIBES THE MURDOCH FAMILY’S ROLE IN DESTABILIZING DEMOCRACY IN NORTH AMERICA, EUROPE AND AUSTRALIA"

With Murdoch’s News Corp mastheads dominating the local newspaper landscape in the NSW Northern Rivers region this should interest readers…….

The New York Times, 3 April 2019:

Rupert Murdoch, the founder of a global media empire that includes Fox News, has said he “never asked a prime minister for anything.”

But that empire has given him influence over world affairs in a way few private citizens ever have, granting the Murdoch family enormous sway over not just the United States, but English-speaking countries around the world.

A six-month investigation by The New York Times covering three continents and including more than 150 interviews has described how Mr. Murdoch and his feuding sons turned their media outlets into right-wing political influence machines that have destabilized democracy in North America, Europe and Australia.

Here are some key takeaways from The Times’s investigation into the Murdoch family and its role in the illiberal, right-wing political wave sweeping the globe.

THE MURDOCH FAMILY SITS AT THE CENTER OF GLOBAL UPHEAVAL.

Fox News has long exerted a gravitational pull on the Republican Party in the United States, where it most recently amplified the nativist revolt that has fueled the rise of the far right and the election of President Trump.

Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun spent years demonizing the European Union to its readers in Britain, where it helped lead the Brexit campaign that persuaded a slim majority of voters in a 2016 referendum to endorse pulling out of the bloc. Political havoc has reigned in Britain ever since.

[Read the complete investigation into the Murdoch family.]

And in Australia, where his hold over the media is most extensive, Mr. Murdoch’s outlets pushed for the repeal of the country’s carbon tax and helped topple a series of prime ministers whose agenda he disliked, including Malcolm Turnbull last year.

At the center of this upheaval sits the Murdoch family, a clan whose dysfunction has both shaped and mirrored the global tumult of recent years.

The Times explored those family dynamics and their impact on the Murdoch empire, which is on the cusp of succession as its 88-year-old patriarch prepares to hand power to the son whose politics most resemble his own: Lachlan Murdoch.

A key step in that succession has paradoxically been the partial dismemberment of the empire, which significantly shrunk last month when Mr. Murdoch sold one of his companies, the film studio 21st Century Fox, to the Walt Disney Company for $71.3 billion.

The deal turned Mr. Murdoch’s children into billionaires and left Lachlan in control of a powerful political weapon: a streamlined company, the Fox Corporation, whose most potent asset is Fox News…..

The Murdoch empire has also boldly flexed its muscles in Australia, which was for many years Lachlan’s domain.

In Australia, Lachlan expressed disdain for efforts to fight climate change and once rebuked the staff at one of his family’s newspapers, The Australian, for an editorial in support of same-sex marriage (He says through a representative that he is in favor of same-sex marriage). He also became close to the politician Tony Abbott, whose 2013 election as prime minister was given an assist by Murdoch newspapers.

The Murdoch family changed Australian politics in 2016 when it took control of Sky News Australia and imported the Fox News model. They quickly introduced a slate of right-wing opinion shows that often focused on race, immigration and climate change. The programming became known as Sky After Dark.

Last year, Mr. Turnbull and his staff accused Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch of using their media outlets to help foment the intraparty coup that thrust him from office in August. Mr. Turnbull, a moderate and longtime nemesis of his friend Mr. Abbott, was replaced by the right-wing nationalist Scott Morrison.

The Murdochs have denied any role in Mr. Turnbull’s downfall.....

The night after his arrival, Lachlan invited a small group of Sky employees and managers to his $16 million mansion in Sydney for drinks. With its new prime-time lineup of hard-right opinion hosts, Sky had become a force in Australian politics. Its audience was still small by American standards, but it was the network of choice in the capital, Canberra, and it was finalizing a deal to expand its reach into the Australian Outback — demographically speaking, the equivalent of Trump country.

It was a mirror of Fox News, with its fixation on race, identity and climate-change denial. Night after night, Sky’s hosts and their guests stirred anger over the perceived liberal bias of the media, “suicidal self-hatred” of Western civilization and the Australian equivalent of the Central American “caravans” that were dividing the United States: asylum seekers coming to the country by boat from Indonesia and Malaysia, many of them Muslim. Days before Lachlan’s arrival, a national neo-Nazi leader, Blair Cottrell — who had recently been fined for “inciting contempt for Muslims” — appeared on one of the network’s shows. Cottrell had been interviewed on Australian TV before, but his deferential treatment by Sky caused a national outcry. Under gentle questioning, he called on his countrymen to “reclaim our traditional identity as Australians” and advocated limiting immigration to those “who are not too culturally dissimilar from us,” such as white South African farmers. (Sky apologized and suspended the program.)

Inside Lachlan’s living room, the talk turned to national politics. “Do you think Malcolm is going to survive?” Lachlan asked his staff. Malcolm was Malcolm Turnbull, the relatively moderate Australian prime minister who took office a few years earlier. Inside the government, a small right-wing uprising had been brewing over his plans to bring Australia into compliance with the Paris climate accord. It is well established among those who have worked for the Murdochs that the family rarely, if ever, issues specific directives. They convey their desires indirectly, maybe with a tweet — as Murdoch did in the spring of 2016 when he decided to back Trump — or a question, the subtleties of which are rarely lost on their like-minded news executives.

In the days that followed, Sky Australia’s hosts and the Murdoch papers — the newspaper editors had their own drinks session at Lachlan’s mansion — set about trying to throw Turnbull out of office. Alan Jones, a Sky host and conservative radio star, called for a party “rebellion” against him on his program. Days later, the Murdochs’ major paper in Sydney, The Daily Telegraph, broke the news that a leadership challenge was in the works. Cheering on the challenge, Andrew Bolt, the Murdoch columnist who was once convicted of violating the country’s Racial Discrimination Act, told his Sky viewers that Turnbull’s “credibility is shot, his authority is gone.” Peta Credlin, the commentator who was Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, chewed out a member of Parliament for the chaos inside Turnbull’s administration. The Australian, the Murdochs’ national newspaper, was soon declaring Turnbull a “dead man walking.”......

It was always difficult to separate the personal from the financial and the ideological with the Murdochs. All appeared to be in evidence in their decision to turn against Turnbull. To begin with, he took office a few years earlier by ousting Lachlan’s friend Tony Abbott, and it was Abbott who helped lead the Turnbull uprising. Turnbull’s policies were also not perfectly aligned with the Murdochs’ interests. For instance, he had expedited the construction of the country’s national broadband network, which directly threatened the family’s highly profitable cable business by giving Netflix a government-subsidized pipeline into Australian homes.

The small number of Australian media outlets that the Murdochs did not own portrayed Turnbull’s ouster as a Murdoch-led “coup.” Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister whom the family had helped push out of office years earlier, described Murdoch in an op-ed in The Sydney Morning Herald as “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

Turnbull was replaced by the right-wing nationalist Scott Morrison, who quickly aligned himself with Trump. The two met in person for the first time in late 2018 at the G-20 summit meeting in Buenos Aires. “I think it’s going to be a great relationship,” Trump said afterward. With a national election scheduled for May 2019, Morrison quickly staked his party’s prospects on the polarizing issue of immigration, promising a new hard-line approach. It dovetailed with Sky’s regular prime-time programming. Andrew Bolt, who previously warned of a “foreign invasion,” said in one segment, “We also risk importing ethnic and religious strife, even terrorism,” as the screen flashed an image of Australia’s potential future: rows of Muslims on a city street, bowing toward Mecca. When the opposing Labor Party managed to muscle through legislation that would allow doctors to transfer severely sick migrants in detention centers on the Australian islands of Nauru and Manus into hospitals on the mainland, Sky Australia’s prime-time hosts went on the offensive.

Read the full article here.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's political moves reviewed in mainstream media

Murdoch-News Corp newspaper front pages may be shouting support for all things Scott Morrison on most days. However a little subversion loiters within.......

Weekend Australian, 19 January 2019, p.20:

Here are 10 missteps in the short time Morrison has been in the job that could have been avoided if only he had adopted the Costanza approach and done the opposite of his political instincts.

1. It started just days before taking over from Malcolm Turnbull. Standing in the prime ministerial courtyard, asked whether he had any ambitions to lead the Liberal Party, Morrison threw his arm around Turnbull and declared he was ambitious for his boss. Presumably the journalist asking the question had heard the same things I had: that Morrison and his lieutenants had been canvassing with colleagues whether he could come through the middle as a ­viable third candidate. It wasn’t a good look in retrospect.

2. Very early on as Prime Minister, Morrison decided it might be a good idea to start a debate about moving the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The storm of controversy that followed — international condemnation and threats from Indonesia to scuttle free trade talks — distracted voters in the days before voters in Wentworth went to the polls. The Liberals lost the seat, and Morrison was left to patch up a mess of his own making.

3. Speaking of Wentworth, the Prime Minister decided to weigh in on the party preselection and call for a woman to represent the Liberal Party. Only he did so after nominations had closed, and he didn’t do it publicly, which meant his support wasn’t able to attract better candidates. And a man won preselection anyway, leaving Morrison to pose for the cameras rather awkwardly with someone he’d effectively tried to prevent from winning the preselection.

4. Social media can be dangerous for all of us, but a religiously conservative prime minister probably shouldn’t post rap music by Fatman Scoop to play over video of his parliamentary team without first contemplating where the rap lyrics might go. Into obscene territory was the answer, which is why the video was removed and an apology was issued.

5. When calibrating his frontbench, Morrison decided to return close mate and political ally Stuart Robert. But, shortly after, the returned minister (who previously had been forced to resign) was again immersed in controv­ersy, including having to pay back an internet bill in the tens of thousands. If Morrison had done the opposite he would have been able to accommodate new talent and avoided an unnecessary controversy distracting the government.

6. Deciding not to speak out early during the religious freedom debate and defend children and teachers from discrimination left Morrison looking out of touch. It also offended many of his moderate colleagues, weakening him internally. It played into Labor criticisms that the new PM was too busy placating the hard Right in his party to appeal to the political mainstream.

7. Speaking of which, Morrison intervened to save maverick backbencher Craig Kelly from a pre­selection threat and in the process (to make it look as if he weren’t intervening specifically to save Kelly) he ensured that all sitting MPs in NSW were renominated. The same thing had happened in Victoria. However, it’s pretty hard to then claim you are taking serious steps to address the problem of so few female MPs when a prime minister intervenes to ensure all those blokes get automatically preselected without a democratic process.

8. Turnbull made the mistake of dumping the national energy guarantee, but when Morrison had the chance to bring it back he squibbed it, and in effect he now will go into the election campaign without a serious policy for addressing carbon emissions. Not reviving the NEG also put a wedge between Morrison and his new party deputy, Josh Frydenberg, who as environment and energy minister had crafted the policy.

9. Refusing to engage with questions from Labor as to why Morrison was Prime Minister and why Turnbull was gone kept the issue alive. Labor exploited the non-answers, continuing to ask the question, and it didn’t take long before journalists started doing the same. Morrison should have done the opposite and provided a detailed explanation early to avoid the wound continuing to bleed.

10. Finally, we all know that Morrison created a hard-man image for himself as immigration minister stopping the boats, which raises the question: why did he feel the need to suddenly shift from that to goofy Aussie bloke, putting an upturned empty beer glass on his head after a skol? It’s all part of his attempt to look like an ordinary knockabout bloke. As one of his colleagues told me: “I’m not looking for a new friend, certainly not in my PM. I just want a competent leader.” The ex-marketing man should have known better.

We haven’t traversed all the missteps since August last year, and we don’t want to be unfair and blame Morrison for things he has blamed his department for, such as the Photoshopped white sneakers on his Christmas card photo.

Equally, missteps such as the appointment of his former chief of staff to the independent position of Treasury secretary or opposing the banking royal commission for so long aren’t mistakes made during his time as Prime Minister.

The remarkable thing about the list above is the short time ­frame in which it has accumulated. Morrison hasn’t even been Prime Minister for five months. If he loses in May he will be one of the country’s shortest serving prime ministers,…… [my yellow highlighting]

One old man to rule them all and in the darkness bind them?

Octogenarian U.S. citizen, international media mogul and papal knight since1998  Rupert Keith Murdoch is a living example of the perils of concentrated media ownership.

For many in America, the United Kingdom and Australia his name is filed under 'arrogant' 'avaricious' and 'ruthless'.

Media mogul Rupert Keith Murdoch : Google Images

The Guardian, 20 September 2018:

In his farewell speech as prime minister last month, Malcolm Turnbull pointed to “an insurgency” in his own party and “outside forces in the media” as the architects of his demise.

If there was any doubt at all who the media forces Turnbull was referring to during those final minutes in the prime mister’s courtyard in Canberra, there is, after the events of the past 24 hours, none now.

Rupert Murdoch is the name firmly in the frame along with his ubiquitous News Corp empire – an organisation which is accused of playing a major role in orchestrating the removal from office of not just Turnbull but also Labor’s Kevin Rudd.

In the case of Turnbull he believed his Liberal colleagues had been gripped by “a form of madness” so the only way they could see to end the unrelenting internal turmoil and negative coverage in the media was to cave into it and replace him as leader…..

But the details that have emerged over the past 48 hours of the role the US-based Murdoch played during last month’s visit to his Australian assets raise serious questions about how Australian politics can be swayed by a concentrated media industry where News Corp dominates.

Turnbull certainly believes he was the target of a News Corp campaign. When he narrowly fended off Peter Dutton in a party room spill on Tuesday 21 August, Turnbull phoned Murdoch to ask him why he was trying to replace him with the home affairs minister.

Rupert Murdoch intends to transform Australia into a conservative nation and he wants to put it on the Trump road

Associate Professor David McKnight

Turnbull had watched horrified as shortly after Murdoch’s arrival in Australia, News Corp, the most powerful media organisation in the land, turned on him. The Daily Telegraph warned of “a toxic brawl” over energy policy and that Dutton was preparing to challenge him. On Sky the night-time commentators Peta Credlin and Andrew Bolt ramped up their negative coverage of the national energy guarantee and Turnbull’s performance.

 “There was no doubt there was a marked shift in the tone and content of the News Corp publications once Rupert arrived,” one of Turnbull’s former staff told Guardian Australia. “And there was no doubt in our minds that News was backing Dutton.”

The prime minister had another reason to believe the octogenarian media mogul was driving the negative coverage – Turnbull had been warned by another media mogul that Rupert wanted him replaced.

According to both the Australian Financial Review and the ABC, Murdoch had told fellow media billionaire Kerry Stokes, owner of the Seven Network, a few days before that Turnbull should be replaced. Guardian Australia also reported that Turnbull was warned in a phone call from Stokes that Murdoch and his media company News Corp were intent on removing him from power.

Stokes is said to have replied that the likely result of such a campaign would be to deliver government to Labor and Bill Shorten. But Murdoch is reported to have brushed aside such concerns, saying it would only be for three years and he made money under Labor in the past.

By that week’s end the deed was done. Turnbull was out as prime minister, replaced by Scott Morrison after Dutton’s much hyped candidacy failed to get the numbers....

Read the full article here.

Peter Chapman's stint as editor of The Queensland Times is catching up with him

Peter Chapman first swam into public view as a Channel 10 sports editor, commentator and presenter in the late 1980s.

He left after ten years to work for Canberra Raiders NRL Club and the New Zealand Breakers basketball team.

He re-entered journalism in 2006 and stayed with APN News and Media for ten and a half years as editor first of The Daily Examiner, then the Fraser Coast Chronicle and finally The Queensland Times.

He quietly slipped out of journalism again in November 2016 when he went to work for Leda Holdings, a property development and investment company, as its Marketing and Media Manager. Presumably the new owner of APN's regional newspapers, News Corp, or Peter himself thought they would not be a good match.

Unfortunately for Peter his abrasive style as an editor meant that his journalistic 'sins' rarely go unnoticed and, on 28 May 2018 ABC TV "Media Watch" program finally featured his time covering Ipswich politics in Queensland. With the program's presenter discussing the latest revelations of corruption in Queensland, and how a huge local story mysteriously went missing in the media.

As the Clarence Valley, home to The Daily Examiner, was never enamoured with his divisive, sometimes biased reporting, locals were quick to point out that "Media Watch" was doing a third segment on Peter.

Who could forget the first two, Peter as the the leaker in 1999 or as the sporting chauvanist in 2009? 

These are some of the program snapshots that were sent to me with the comment - "It was classic Chapman"!

How a journalist working with him at the time assesed the situation.

On Wednesday 2 May 2018 the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) charged Ipswich Mayor Antoniolli, former mayor Paul Pisasale, two council CEOs and eight other council staff with sixty-six charges of corruption.

Peter Chapman is probably still wiping the egg off his face.

No need to worry about the possibility that a Liberal-Nationals Federal Government will impose censorship on the free press in Australia

The time to fret over the possibility of government censorship of the media is over because in February 2018 it ceased being a distant possibility and became fact.

This is what the Australian Press Council stated about the News Corp online article….

Australian Press Council (APC):   

Adjudication 1732: Complainant/news.com.au (February 2018)

The Press Council has considered whether its Standards of Practice were breached by an article published in news.com.au on 31 May 2017, headed “Islamic State [IS] terror guide encourages luring victims via Gumtree, eBay”.

The opening paragraph read: “ISLAMIC State has released a step-by-step guide on how to murder nonbelievers, which includes how to lure targets via fake ads on Gumtree and eBay”. The article proceeded to relay in detail how an article in “[t]he latest edition of the terror group’s English-language propaganda magazine … encourages would-be terrorists to advertise products on second-hand selling sites … to lure victims and assassinate them”. The article mostly comprised extracts from the source material describing the steps necessary to perform such acts.

The Council considered that the article did publish much of the source material from IS verbatim, with limited accompanying analysis or context, such as comments from experts and websites such as Gumtree. The Council accepted there was no intention to encourage or support terrorism, but considered that republishing content from terrorist entities in this manner can perpetuate the purpose of such propaganda and give publicity to its ideas and practices.

However, the Council accepted the public interest in alerting readers to potential risks to their safety. It considered that on balance, the public interest in alerting readers to the dangerous content of the terrorist propaganda and its instructional detail was greater than the risk to their safety posed by the effective republication of terrorist propaganda content. Given this, the Council concluded that the public interest justified publication of the article. Accordingly, the publication did not breach General Principle 6.

The Council noted that great care needs to be exercised by publications when reporting on terrorist propaganda to ensure that public safety is not compromised. In particular, effectively republishing source material comprising instructional detail in how to carry out particular terrorist acts could pose a risk to public safety, and reasonable steps should be taken to prevent such an outcome.

This is what the Turnbull Government did…….

News.com.au, 28 February 2018:

…the article titled “Islamic State terror guide encourages luring victims via Gumtree, eBay” no longer exists.

A week after it was published on May 31, 2017, the Attorney-General’s office contacted news.com.au to demand it be taken down, saying the Classification Board had ruled it should be refused classification as it “directly or indirectly” advocated terrorist acts.

It appears to be the first time section 9A of the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995 has been used to censor a news report, since it was first added in 2007.

The action has alarmed the publisher of news.com.au as Australian media in general were not informed the Classification Board had the power to ban news stories or that the eSafety Commissioner had the power to instigate investigations into news articles.

“The first news.com.au knew of this matter was when contacted by the Attorney-General’s Department and advised of the Classification Board decision,” news.com.au argued as part of a separate Press Council investigation into the article.

“The department, board and the eSafety Commissioner did not contact news.com.au beforehand to advise of the investigation. Consequently, news.com.au was not given the right to make submissions or a defence in regard to the article.”

News.com.au removed the article as it was facing legal penalties from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) if it refused, including fines or even civil or criminal legal action.

In justifying its decision, the Classification Board noted the article contained “detailed references and lengthy quotations from Rumiyah (Islamic State’s propaganda magazine)” with limited author text to provide context.

News.com.au asked the board why there was no opportunity for news organisations to defend the article based on public interest grounds but a response provided by a spokesman for the eSafety Commissioner did not directly address this.

The spokesman said the board did consider whether the material could “reasonably be considered to be done merely as part of public discussion or debate, or as entertainment or satire” before making its decision.

He also acknowledged this may have been the first time a news article had been censored using this section.

However, as a government which to a man fails to grasp how the Internet works their well-laid plans seldom go off without a hitch and, the article that Turnbull & Co wish to erase from memory remains on national and international news sites as I write.

Crikey takes aim at The Guvmin Gazette

Crikey.com.au, 19 October 2017:

"Australian journalism’s freak show: how a serious newspaper deals with its enemies

Journalism is in crisis, we’re told constantly.

But there’s another journalism crisis that has been disrupting and polluting the Australian media for more than a decade, a crisis that has nothing to do with broken business models, Facebook or the rise of so-called fake news.

This is the crisis of how a serious national newspaper has, for at least a decade, waged vicious, personal, biased editorial Holy Wars against its ideological, political and commercial enemies in the name of “news”, “journalism” and “professional reporting”.

And not just once or occasionally, but often and serially.

Of course the technique of journalism Holy Wars — as we’re calling it in a 13-part series that starts today in Crikey — is as old as journalism itself. It was the red meat of William Randolph Hearst’s media empire that was captured so viscerally in the movie Citizen Kane, and it’s a device that has been practised with ruthless amorality by British tabloids for a century and by Fox News for two decades.

But the crucial difference between other global attack-dog media and The Australian is that it purports to be a quality newspaper — one described by then-prime minister Tony Abbott at its 50th birthday dinner in 2014 as “one of the world’s very best newspapers … no think-tank, no institution, no university has so consistently and so successfully captured and refined the way we think about ourselves”.

The Australian Holy Wars may appear to some people like an internecine media attack by one publication taking cheap ideological potshots at another. We beg to disagree.

Over the next two weeks, Crikey will catalogue one of the ugliest and most insidious features of Australian public life: the permanent spectacle of one of the country’s handful of serious daily news operations abusing its power to conduct personalised vindictive editorial warfare dressed up as objective reporting.

The behaviour of the “national broadsheet” towards its enemies is no dirty little secret. Almost all the players in politics, government, academia, science, media and policy know how it works. And every month or two they see it unfold, embarrassed, like watching a public flogging where you turn your head away. “Like a true narcissist, it lets its own interests, agendas and catfights affect the quality of the journalism in its pages,” says journalism professor Mark Pearson, who worked for the paper as a young journalist in the 1980s.

But there’s a reason insiders rarely comment or complain about Australian journalism’s most distasteful freak show. They know that any of us could be next. Everyone in the Australian public space is on notice: if you cross us, or our proprietor, his family, our worldview or our business interests, you could become the next victim of an Australian Holy War."

Out of the frying pan and into the fire for NSW & Qld regional newspapers?

In June 2016 when APN News & Media announced that it was selling its faltering Australian regional newspaper operations to News Corp, staffing levels at APN east coast regional newspapers had long ago been pared to the bone.

Now News Corp is also embarking on yet another round of staff reductions and work practice changes across its mastheads.

The Guardian, 11 April 2017:

Rupert Murdoch’s Australian tabloids are making the majority of their photographers and subeditors redundant in a radical cost-cutting move designed to keep the ailing newspaper business afloat.

The director of editorial management, Campbell Reid, said the restructure of the traditional newsroom was needed to “preserve in print and excel in digital”.

The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and the Courier-Mail are set to lose dozens of staff each – the Queensland masthead alone will cut 45 – although the company is not revealing the total number of job losses.

The announcement follows a cost-cutting drive in December which saw 42 journalists, artists and photographers made redundant in a bid to slash $40m from News Corp.

Last week the Gold Coast Bulletin was told it had to lose 10 jobs, and sources said dozens of people had been quietly made redundant already this year across all the mastheads.

News Corp said the old model of staff photographers would be retired for a “hybrid model, consisting of a core team of photographic specialists, complemented by freelance and agency talent”.

At a meeting at Sydney’s Holt Street headquarters, the Daily Telegraph editor, Chris Dore, told staff the photographers would lose their permanent status but may be hired back as casuals and freelancers.

Staff at the Herald Sun were told News Corp “is in a fight for its life”.

There was no mention at the meeting of the company’s financial losses which are behind the move. In February News Corp posted a second-quarter loss of $287m and cited impairments in the Australian newspaper business as a key factor. The Australian editors were summoned to the US for a meeting about making substantial cuts to operations.

News described the changes as a modernisation of the newsroom which would “simplify in-house production and maximise the use of available print technology for print edition production”.

“Like every other business today, we have to identify opportunities to improve and modernise the way we work to become more efficient,” Reid said.

According to Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, 11 April 2017:

Management also flagged significant changes to work practices with earlier deadlines, greater copy sharing across cities and mastheads, and journalists taking up more responsibility for production elements and proofing their own work, which has journalists concerned about already stretched news gathering resources and maintaining the editorial standards of their mastheads.

                                                                              

'The Biggest Typo Ever' on The Washington Post front page

The Washington Post front page on 6 January 2016…..

How it should have looked…..

We made a big mistake on our cover illustration this morning and we’re very embarrassed about it. We erroneously used a male symbol instead of a female symbol. This is how the cover should have looked. We apologize for the mistake.

* Images from Twitter

So where did you say your news was coming from?

An interesting snippet from Australian Newspaper History Group, Newsletter, No 90, December 2016, pp.

90.1.3 China (1): Supplement to SMH and Age

On 23 September both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age carried an eight-page supplement entitled China Watch, which contained China news and views.

The supplement clearly indicated that it had been prepared by the China Daily and that there had been no editorial involvement by the Sydney Morning Herald and Age.

This follows a precedent where in recent years the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age have regularly carried similar sponsored supplements containing news and views of Russia.

90.1.4 China (2): Australian media

Yan Xia, the editor of Vision China Times, a Chinese-language newspaper published in Australia, says a Beijing-based immigration agency was forced to pull an advertisement from his paper because it was regarded as an “anti-China” paper (Australian, 10 October 2016). The Ministry of State Security, the agency in charge of counter-intelligence and political security, had allegedly harassed the agent.

Yan Xia said, “Our lost client illustrates but one of the mounting pressures faced by independent Chinese media in Australia. Tensions have heightened over recent months, with Australia’s Chinese media under pressure to support President Xi Jinping and Beijing’s foreign policy. That pressure is part of China’s exercise in ‘soft power’. Broadly speaking, there are three types of Chinese-language media in Australia.

“The first consists of those that rely on the Chinese government and Chinese commercial ties for revenue. These outlets tend to echo and take their cues from state-run mouthpieces. The second group consists of media directed by religious groups aiming to expose China’s political, educational and socio-economic situation while promoting human rights and religious freedom. And the third is independent of political and religious influence. Its reporting is largely in line with the ideals of Western mainstream media and generally gives holistic views of Canberra’s policies and sentiments.

“Our outfit fits this last category. While independent media outlets are standard in the West, a one-party state cannot accept that media outlets “do not follow directives” and, by its reckoning, do damage to ‘national interests’. In China, national interests are synonyms for ‘the party’s interests’.

“In recent months it appears the Chinese government’s influence in Australia has become more open and, thus, more easily observed. For Chinese media platforms whose goal is to serve as the bridge between the Chinese community and the Australian mainstream, the challenge lies in reporting fairly and accurately on matters of conflict between the two countries. We choose to remain unyielding in our approach, reporting according to Western journalistic ideals. This has been tested during recent times, which have seen a deluge of articles examining issues that Beijing considers unpalatable.”