With the Age picking up the tab, I wandered the streets of Paris and Los Angeles and New York and Washington for weeks at a time looking for stories. I sailed a yacht on the Adriatic Sea. I went to the Birdsville Races. I took Paul Keating to the famous Pellegrini’s café at the top of Bourke Street so that he could tell me that he was about to launch a second, this time successful, challenge against Bob Hawke for the prime ministership.



I had two lunches with Gough Whitlam who even in his final years was an irresistible presence. I spent several lunchtimes with John Howard who, unlike just about every other major politician I’ve met, was full of questions rather than statements. He was always gathering intelligence.

Because I worked on the Age, I interviewed Elvis Costello twice, and the comic actor Rowan Atkinson, who was painfully shy and spoke with a stutter that vanished when he gathered himself together for his performances. He insisted that he was an actor, not a comedian, and told me that the trick to being funny was to rehearse so comprehensively that there was no prospect of making a mistake.

As I left the interview, the photographer who’d accompanied me to the job said: “That was weird watching you two talk. You seem a lot alike”.

Although my chief professional preoccupation was politics, the biggest thrill I’ve ever had in my work was meeting and interviewing Ray Davies, the lead singer of The Kinks and the man who wrote one of the great postwar pop songs Waterloo Sunset, a piece of art that will live on well beyond any policy created by any of the politicians I’ve met. And all of my journalism. None of these experiences are extraordinary; a lot of people travel in their work and meet interesting people. But this was the life I had wanted and it rolled out pretty much as I had expected when I set my cap for it as a kid. That’s the bit that still shocks me.

I travelled to the United Kingdom to cover the 1997 election that swept the Labour Party under Tony Blair into power – all because a few months out from the election it looked like it would be a good story and I casually suggested to deputy editor Paul Austin one day that I was interested. The next day, Bruce Guthrie walked over to my desk and started telling me all the plans he had for the way I’d cover the campaign, right down to his idea for the stories to carry a headshot of me against the backdrop of a London bus alongside the legend “Carney in the UK” (which happened). This was at a time when the paper shared a full-time London correspondent with the Sydney Morning Herald. But that didn’t matter. That’s what working there could be like – back then, at least, when the internet was new and the papers still made a lot of money and were holding on to readers.

The way we looked at the internet in the mid-1990s was as a terrific and fascinating opportunity, a new platform – although we did not yet use that word – with which to pick up readers. Even better, it gave us access, through such long-lost search engines as Dogpile, Lycos and Infoseek, to journalism from all over the world. All for free.

Not enough of us, including me, understood what that meant. If we could get someone else’s stuff for free, everyone could get ours for free too. In a stroke, the commercial value of what we did was reduced dramatically and, as it turned out, irrevocably.

The possibility of this wonderful innovation – which we were given access to on our desktop PCs by the company – rendering our business marginal, ultimately killing our paper and putting many of us out of our jobs was beyond our comprehension. And the creation of email accounts put us directly in touch with our readers, which was seen as a boon. In 1998, the paper adopted a policy of appending journalists’ work email addresses to as many stories and columns as possible. We were instructed to reply to every email. Again, we did not know what we were doing and did not foresee the implications of this approach. We did not insist on knowing the identities of the people emailing us, which was quite different to the paper’s policy on correspondence from readers for the letters page.

Because the letters were for publication, a full name and address was required. This would be checked and confirmed before a letter was placed in the paper. Similarly, it was agreed that if reporters were sent anonymous letters, unless they contained a threat they should be thrown out. It was not obligatory to reply to letters from readers who included a name and address but I generally did. Now, we had to write back to everyone who emailed, and even from the earliest days of email, those writing to us often took little care with spelling, grammar and maintaining a civil tone.

Before email, about three-quarters of the readers’ letters I received were either complimentary or were respectful attempts at putting a different point of view. After the advent of email and the near death of correspondence by mail, the proportions reversed. And we were obliged to be polite in return. It soon became clear that it did not pay to reply in any detailed way because it only attracted more abuse. Fortunately, after a few years, the policy of mandatory replying quietly faded away.

Before that, I’d already embarked on my own way of dealing with it by very politely thanking the most abusive anonymous emailers for offering such strong support. Presumably convinced that I was off my rocker, they generally didn’t write back. But it still seemed the polite thing to do to acknowledge most emails, whether they were friendly or not, and I tried to do that, although on occasions it took up quite a bit of time.

Another early development in the internet presentation of, first, comment pieces, and eventually news stories, was the attachment of reader comments. There appeared to be two reasons for doing this. One was because the technology allowed it. The other was that it encouraged interactivity, seen as one of the great early benefits of web-based technologies. Theoretically, it seemed like a good idea. It offered feedback and put journalists in touch with the thoughts of readers. In practice, that’s not what happened. Comments were supposedly moderated but in reality they were subject to the most rudimentary, passing scan for legally actionable material, were never checked for their grammar, spelling or punctuation and then plonked on the website, right under the paper’s own articles.

Worse, in my view, there was no requirement for people posting comments to give their names, which gave rise to comments from Wisepantswearer from Planet Earth or truthteller from The Other Side. Most weren’t like that, of course. But very few commenters ever give their real names. At first I used to read the comments attached to my pieces but gave up within a few years. From what I can see, that’s standard practice for columnists and reporters now, unless they’re masochists.

Once we went down the “free” path, giving our content away for zip, and then encouraged anyone to have their say, unmediated, unedited and unaccountable, the horse had, as far as I could see, bolted. The signal to our readers, who were also customers, was this: not only is what we produce not worth anything, we regard the contributions of people writing under pseudonyms, who often want to decry our work, as having equal weight to our own journalism. What other business did that? Did restaurants allow anyone to just come in to their kitchens to abuse the chef within earshot of the diners?

You could feel things getting shaky but I still thought we could find a way through. Eventually, Fairfax and News Corp, like most other media companies around the world, established paywalls and this slowed the revenue losses. But the idea of getting news and comment for free had taken hold, as it had with music and movies and TV shows.

Technological developments – chiefly through social media applications such as Facebook – keep coming along to undermine legacy media’s attempts to slow or even arrest the financial decline. And the free-for-all nature of digital communications – sometimes I feel as if watching commenters turn on one individual in a comments thread is just like watching a gruesome nature documentary when a family of lions feast on an antelope – is here with us for good.

Press Escape by Shaun Carney

Meanwhile, things just seemed to slide slowly downhill at the Age as the first decade of the twenty-first century reached its midpoint. Fairfax tried defensive measures such as buying up more newspaper titles in Australia and New Zealand. But everything was tightening. There were freezes on hiring, the stream of outside talent coming in to revitalise the place and generate internal competition was no longer constant. Travel was cut. A lot of the analysis of Fairfax’s decline has been wise after the event, as if the bad choices made by its managers were obviously seen as bad choices at the time.

The fact is that the entire newspaper industry has been mugged repeatedly by the internet although some companies have suffered worse muggings than others, and Fairfax probably fits that category. I still liked my job. I didn’t know what was going to happen but I just put my head down and tried to keep working.

This is an edited extract of Press Escape by Shaun Carney (MUP, $29.99, eBook $13.99).