At my farewell lunch at the Age three and a half years ago, I rambled on about many things I would miss after 20 years working for a masthead I still think of as the longest and most intense love affair of my life. The people, of course. I made lifelong friends there. The opportunities to be challenged in work that, occasionally, mattered. The culture of a newsroom that at its best put its responsibilities to finding the truth first, even ahead of its employer’s commercial interests.



And I mentioned one thing I would not miss about leaving the Age: Sydney. I meant it lightheartedly, but I was exhausted with what I saw as the chipping away of the Age’s authority to make its own decisions about how best to serve its own readers. Melbourne, like any city, has its own feel. It is quirky, progressive, earnest, cultural, snobbish and political.

As the digital revolution took hold, and the need to drastically cut costs and share resources became unavoidable, I feared that the loser would inevitably be Melbourne, and Melburnians. Melbourne is the fastest growing city in the country, by the way, and if trends continue, will be the biggest city by the middle of the century.

These fears have largely been realised, in my opinion, and so when the Age’s editor in chief, Andrew Holden, last week abruptly announced he would be leaving his job after three and a half years, on the same day yet another restructure was unveiled, the nervousness in Melbourne was understandable.

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The rumour went round that the Age would no longer even have an editor in chief, that it would be formalised that Melbourne was a branch office answering to Sydney masters not just commercially, but editorially.

That rumour was wrong, but that it was believed by so many in Melbourne tells you something. Would anyone have taken in the least seriously the idea that the Sydney Morning Herald wouldn’t have its own editor in chief, that its most senior on-the-floor editorial role would be based in Melbourne?

Another little humiliation: when the ABC’s Jon Faine tried to find someone to explain the departure of Holden, and whether this new structure was stripping yet more authority from Melbourne, there was no one in Melbourne to talk to.

Faine pointed that out before he interviewed editorial director Sean Aylmer on the phone from Sydney. This is a small thing, I know, yet if the Sydney Morning Herald had lost its editor, can you imagine that nobody in Sydney would be available to discuss it, that you had to wheel in a suit from Melbourne?

To give this some context, and to explain why it’s not just about inter-city journalistic rivalry of little interest to anyone outside the company, you need a little (ancient) history. When Fairfax was awash with its “rivers of gold” classifieds before the digital revolution, the Age was routinely named one of the finest newspapers in the world.

It was making so much money in the late 1980s, when I joined, that having nominal Sydney masters really didn’t matter. The unspoken deal was that the Age would shovel money up to Sydney, and would be left alone to run its own editorial show. Oh, the innocence of those days.

I am not nostalgic for those days. They are history, and all traditional media have lost authority

The Sydney Morning Herald was an excellent paper too – lively, aggressive, and vibrant – but the Age was unique. It had this incredible relationship with its readers, something I have never seen before or since. It was as though they thought they owned the paper, that it was theirs, they trusted it. They got angry at it, regularly tore strips off us. They kind of loved it. A generation ago, surveys named the Age the most powerful institution in the city.

Most of its current staff wouldn’t know this now, but it was bolshie Age staff who led the push for the country’s first editorial charter of independence – how quaint it seems now – that enshrined the principle of editorial control in the hands of editors, independent from proprietors and commercial interests.

That campaign began in the late 1980s as a response to concerns that then British media tycoon Robert Maxwell would take over the paper and use it for his own political and commercial interests. Incredibly – I can’t imagine it now – the campaign was embraced by the city, and rusted-on readers sent in thousands of small monetary donations to help.

The campaign culminated in what remains a remarkable event – former political enemies Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam appearing together at rally in Treasury Gardens to “Save the Age” in October 1991, then from a takeover by a consortium led by Canadian Conrad Black and Kerry Packer. Fraser told that crowd that it would be “a crime against the Australian people” to further concentrate media ownership.

I am not nostalgic for those days. They are history, and all traditional media have lost authority as new players have entered, and the old business models have collapsed. But the history lesson does show that, in this era of falling trust at a time when trust seems more crucial than ever, the Age did have this precious thing once. It was, to use the vernacular, pissed against the wall.

We all know the story. The internet happened, and while the digital world we’re in does pose real dangers for the future of accountability journalism – it’s expensive and takes time and resources – it swept away a kind of arrogance that the Age and many other papers suffered from, an assumption that journalists knew best. It opened up this wild, exciting and unpredictable era of audience power and audience pushback.

The reality was – and it is still the reality – that the huge revenues that the newspapers had made collapsed and the digital revenues have not come near to replacing them. Again, that is not unique to Fairfax, although it was heavily dependent on classified ads, which quickly migrated to the internet. The new media sites that have launched in Australia in recent years struggle, too, with how to make money in the digital age.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Age Editor-in-Chief Andrew Holden Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

Fairfax made many errors that have been well and truly trawled over, but it had no choice but to cut staff numbers and to focus on digital. Most Fairfax staff were frustrated beyond belief that the company took so long to realise the threat that digital posed to its traditional revenues.

It was less than four years ago that the newspaper and their online sites merged – until then, they were run entirely separately, with the focus still on what would be in the newspaper the next morning. A tiny digital crew was left in the cold, scrambling to provide stories when people actually wanted to read them. This was crazy; it eventually changed.

I don’t think that Fairfax has ever fully grasped how different the sensibilities of the cities are

Culturally, the company – and it was not unique here either – was slow to pick up that the digital changes were not just about “platforms” – whether you put the story online, or in the paper, or how you packaged them for mobile or shared them on social media – but about attitude. It was about treating readers with respect, understanding that the new journalism was participatory, a two-way thing.

With all this happening, hundreds of journalists were made redundant. Fairfax is hardly alone in that – News Corp has done the same thing, as has every traditional media organisation across the world.

At Fairfax, the imperative to cut costs meant nationalising, so the “siloes” of Melbourne and Sydney – an indulgence that could only be afforded when revenues flowed freely – had to end. I understood this to a point. It was wasteful to have Sydney journalists coming down to Melbourne to cover the Logies – one journalist could do it for the group.

Similarly, as difficult as it was, it made sense to end separate Canberra bureaux for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. The staff at both mastheads fought against that for years – arguing that would reduce diversity of news and opinion – but it was always going to happen.

The problem was that nationalisation was almost certainly going to mean a take-over by Sydney, or at least a concentration of decision-making and power in Sydney, to the detriment of Melbourne. I don’t think that Fairfax has ever fully grasped how different the sensibilities of the cities are, and that you can’t just hope that nobody will notice as long as Melbourne news appears around the national stuff mostly controlled through Sydney. I think that Melburnians have noticed it, and that the authority of the Age has been eroded, bit by bit.

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Nobody knows the answers to the challenges news organisations face, but Fairfax’s digital strategy, to date, has been to maximise traffic. There is no other strategy. There has been no central editorial or journalistic mission that has complicated that one commercial imperative.

That has meant a noticeable dumbing down of the website, or more pointedly, of a lot of the journalism Fairfax produces. There is excellent journalism there, but often you have to find it amid the social media “outrage” stories, sensational crimes, and celebrity stuff-ups. The mantra is, “what people want to read”. All media is struggling with this – the dull but worthy story, thankfully, is dead – but Fairfax has put traffic as the central mission of its digital sites.

What a pity then that there is now a sense that maximising clicks on websites is not the path to financial health, let alone journalistic health. Indeed, websites are less and less relevant.

What is possible is that a strong sense of your own community – in this case, Melbourne – might actually be commercially critical after all, particularly if you get over yourself and start seriously connecting with other local groups trying to cover your community well, to start conversations and find solutions.

Perhaps deep engagement actually matters even if you sacrifice traffic a little bit. Hence all the talk of news organisations encouraging “memberships”, a kind of loyalty that goes beyond how many stories they click on for a few seconds.

Any organisation is more than its flow chart, of course, but reporting lines do matter. Fairfax’s editorial director – above both the editors in chief of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age – is Aylmer, based in Sydney (although there is nothing new in that). Beloved brands like Epicure, the Age’s food and wine section, which always had a very different feel to that of Sydney’s – more serious, more political – have all but disappeared in favour of national digital brands from Sydney. In fact, all “entertainment” sections like the Green Guide, for instance, or the print Spectrum, or the digital Daily Life report editorially to Sydney. Age editors have no control over them.

The new structure announced last week, which despite denials further concentrates power in Sydney, means that magazines such as Good Weekend and Sunday Life report to the editor in chief of the Sydney Morning Herald, Darren Goodsir. Those flagship magazines appear in the Age, but its editor in chief has no formal say over them.

The big power base is now the head of digital channels, who will not report to the editor in chief of either masthead – and who will be Sydney-based. Melbourne is likely to be given national head of print channels – a declining area by Fairfax’s own admission.

The reverse would be unthinkable.

The new structure in some ways makes sense and is a progression from the structure put into place when the siloes of print and digital were collapsed a few years ago. (Disclosure: I was involved in a project team that that helped make that come about).

Its real aim seems to be to push print further away from where the real focus is – digital, with the editors of the Monday to Friday and Saturday and Sunday papers not even reporting through to the editors in chief, but to the head of print, who reports to the editorial director in Sydney. It seems designed to make the newsrooms absolutely focus on stories, and allow others to worry about distribution, an obvious idea on the face of it.

All the journalists need to be thinking digital, all day, with print coming up behind and putting together the best paper it can from what has been produced. Fairfax boasts that this is a similar model to that at the Wall Street Journal and Daily Telegraph of London, but this is disingenuous. Those mastheads are discrete entities, trying to quickly shift from a print to digital focus. Fairfax’s challenge is hideous and always has been – it has two big mastheads in two big and distinct cities, and it has to impose a national structure over that.

There has been some handwringing about the likelihood that this structure hastens the demise of the newspapers. It may well do, or at least makes that simpler when it does happen, and that’s not a problem in itself. Print is dying and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald cease publishing Monday to Friday this year. For anyone interested in public debate, in the end it’s the journalism that matters, not whether newspapers survive.

The worrying about print has always been a proxy debate about something else at Fairfax. There has been tension for many years about the completely different approaches of the newspapers and their websites, a disconnection that has been much less obvious at other mastheads.

Nobody has ever suggested print and digital should look the same – the web is a different beast and you can see precisely how many people are reading stories and for how long – but the disconnection was so extreme that the Age online and the Age in print bore little relation to each other. There was no common voice. That led to an identity crisis that lingers still, but really has been resolved by default: the digital approach, with traffic as the only goal, has won. The fear is that when the papers do go, what will be left is a mid-market, mass-produced hit factory, with more complex – but less sexy – journalism increasingly sidelined. That’s only partly fair. Fairfax is still producing some excellent journalism, but if the only measure of success is traffic, that’s inevitable.

On the ABC, Faine put it straight to Aylmer: “Your website and digital presence is so trashy it’s confusing the brand I’d submit to you. It’s full of click bait; it’s full of showbiz nonsense. It’s full of reporting what’s happened in other media, and on social media. It’s full of stuff that by and large misunderstands who your readership actually is.”

Aylmer: “I simply disagree with that, and the audience is growing in that area, so the audience disagrees with that, too.”

Faine: “You might be finding an audience for it but you’re sacrificing loyal readers who expect something more upmarket.”

Aylmer: “Jon, I disagree with that.”

Faine: “We’re going to have to agree to disagree, because that’s exactly the cutting edge of this debate. If you people get it right you’ve got a business, if you get it wrong then it goes up in smoke. “

Aylmer: “I agree with that, I definitely agree with that.”

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From what I hear, Age staff members are mostly just trying to get on with it, relieved at least that there are no planned redundancies this time. What they do with what they can control is often still outstanding. The Age’s investigative team is the best in the country – under the new structure, investigations will move to a national model, rather than a local one, and the editor is likely to be in Melbourne. Adele Ferguson is a superstar journalist by any measure, and the Age’s chief football writer, Caroline Wilson, is compulsory reading in Melbourne. The masthead has a group of energetic young reporters, as talented and idealistic as any previous generation.

In Holden’s time, the Age won swag of Walkley and Quill awards, one measure that through all the relentless change, it is still producing work with impact. And, no doubt, there are advantages and disadvantages in working from the branch office – you can get on with things without having to wait for permission.

Yet the company has made it obvious that its commercial, editorial and even emotional heart is in Sydney. If you search for a story through a search engine, the first Fairfax story that pops up will be the Sydney Morning Herald’s. That’s a commercial decision to drive traffic to that masthead. Fair enough, perhaps.

But I have been told by many people at the Age that even if a reader goes specifically to the Age’s website and clicks on a national story, say a Canberra political story or a business story, the “click” will be recorded as traffic for the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s a commercial decision, too – so keen is Fairfax for the Sydney Morning Herald to compete with news.com.au as the country’s most popular news website, it channels Age traffic to it.

Not so long ago, the Age considered itself the best newspaper in the country – independent, serious and devoted to its own readers in its own city and state. Now it shovels, not money, but digital traffic to Sydney. What message does this send? That the Age is what it is – a second masthead, serving a second city.