There was so much money. Fairfax had butlers and dining rooms and fleets of cars. Big houses in the best suburbs of Canberra housed journalists sent south to cover national affairs. London and New York had big offices at big addresses with yet more houses and cars.

A man in livery stood in the foyer of the Fairfax headquarters in Ultimo, Sydney and tugged his forelock – it’s the only time I’ve seen it happen in my life – when members of “the family” took the lift to the executive floor where the walls were hung with superb modern Australian paintings.



So much money and so much bullshit about the long tradition of glorious Fairfax journalism. The Sydney Morning Herald was a cautious Tory paper blind for so long to the squalor of commercial and political life in its city. The thing was: for all its faults the SMH was so much better than its competitors, the Packer rags: the Telegraph in the morning and the Mirror at night.



A brief history of Fairfax: from family paper to plaything for moguls Read more

And the Herald had what no competitor could match: the classified ads. The paper was a market place. If you were buying a house or needed a job, you bought the Herald. No one was truly dead for a century in Sydney unless the Herald’s death notices – for a small fee – confirmed you were.



Protecting that market set the tone of the paper. An appetite for tabloid scandal was indulged (profitably) in the afternoon Sun, but the ruling notion of the empire was that Herald readers were respectable folk – they must not be shocked.



Old Sir Warwick, an elegant ghost in the corridors by the time I turned up at Ultimo in the 1970s, patrolled the boundaries of language with particular vigour. No swearing. Even asterisks were insufficient to protect his readers’ sensibilities. For years he forbade his papers using the new fangled “Ms”.



The papers were decent, even worthy in a way that’s too easy to mock. But they did not have a history of standing above the fray with Olympian detachment. They were on the side of money, business and (most of the time) the Liberal Party. One shameful example: the Fairfax papers joined the Tory pack howling for John Kerr to sack Gough Whitlam.



But a big shift was already underway in the empire’s grey tower in Ultimo. Old Warwick was fading out. Surrounding his heir James was a new generation of executives with big ambitions for Fairfax journalism.



The Herald was revamped. The brakes were taken off. Talented editors exiled for petty crimes against the family were brought back. Little old ladies faded as the core customers of the papers. They were being published from this point for anyone – even Labor voters – who had some money, education and curiosity about the world.



With new masters at the sluice gates, the rivers of cash from classified advertising were diverted into journalism – an odd idea, but it worked. And as the papers were transformed, the rivers of gold grew fatter still. Shares in John Fairfax and Sons were the bluest of blue chip.



Businessmen on the board wouldn’t listen to those who could see catastrophe looming

Early in this revolution, Fairfax began a radical (by Australian standards) weekly with high-end muck racking ambitions called The National Times. Its godfather and (briefly) editor Evan Whitton died the other day at the age of 90 spared the humiliations of this week and honoured for the crusading spirit he brought to his paper. A little rubbed off on all the Fairfax mastheads.



For 15 years the Natty Times pursued corruption, tax evaders, brutal police, John Kerr, stupid wars, ridiculous politicians, high court judges looking after their mates, chief magistrates on the take, premiers collecting brown paper bags of cash and all the “isms” hitherto forbidden to us. Anne Summers wrote about feminism with clarion ferocity. I put in a quiet word for gay rights.



The honorific “Ms” appeared.



For a decade the world lay before Fairfax. These were the years in which John Fairfax and Sons could rightly claim to be a great proprietor in the tradition of US and UK newspapers. In a moment of patrician hubris, Fairfax used a little spare change to pick up the Spectator magazine.



The ownership of Fairfax was never in play. The rules of big, old families are rigid: you cannot sell what gives you power. The Fairfaxes were richer than ever in those prosperous times, but they couldn’t unlock their immense capital – until young Warwick made his harebrained takeover bid in 1987.



They sold. Warwick took control. The place was loaded with debt. What might have saved the show far down the track – the Channel 7 network – had already been flogged off for ready cash. The whole thing tanked in 1990.



What began that year – and ended this week – were a number of dramatic plays for control of the Fairfax carcass. Until well into the new century, there was a lot of meat on those bones. The newspapers were strong, respected and ceaselessly profitable.



John Alexander, a great editor of the Sydney Morning Herald who went on to run Kerry Packer’s gambling empire, told me once that while he was in the chair in the 1990s, the Saturday edition of the paper alone made a profit of a million dollars a week. So, he said, did the Saturday Age.

That Fairfax came back from the dead after the catastrophe of Young Warwick reinforced an old belief we all shared in there that Fairfax was indestructible. The Canadian tycoon – later crook – Conrad Black took Fairfax up town setting up the show on the top floors of a new city building. There were butlers, dining rooms and fleets of cars …



Mind you, economies were attempted. I remember Operation Hercules being announced with a great flourish towards the end of the century. I don’t now have a clue what it was all about. Perhaps brave cuts were made. All I remember was a decision to cease airmailing to Sydney each day the great fat New York Times. We protested and the decision was reversed.



Then came the internet.



Fairfax responded badly. Businessmen on the board wouldn’t listen to those who could see catastrophe looming. What happened was not inevitable. The slow collapse of Fairfax began when it lost control of two of the three rivers of gold. Cars and jobs went to its competitors. Fairfax kept property.



For an organisation that prided itself on plain speech, Fairfax developed a flair for euphemism. Downsizing was a favourite. The papers shifted to Pyrmont. The great newsroom of the Sydney Morning Herald – university, trade school, gossip hub, blood house, stage, sheltered workshop and marriage market – was slashed. A hundred went; then another hundred; and another ...



Each step of the way, the editor of the day would assemble the staff and say with a straight face that Fairfax was as committed as ever to quality. But great newspapers live off their fat. Talent is needed in depth. Being fearless in Australia comes with a price tag. Defamation lawyers aren’t cheap.



Farewells became routine. Those who stayed carried on as much as possible as before. Our commitment to journalism was personal. And in the air was still this notion that Fairfax was indestructible.



To a remarkable degree, quality was maintained. The Fairfax papers lost their edge as they lost their staff, but they spoke sense. As News Limited honed its skills as a political killing machine, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald stayed above the fray. Surveys prove again these are the newspapers Australians most trust.



But as the cash dried up, quality became a contested term. Fairfax online proved hugely successful – alas not hugely profitable – and a schism developed inside the company between those who saw tabloid on line as the way ahead and those who continued to defend Fairfax’s broadsheet ethos.



This contest has been fought all over the world. The New York Times and the Guardian are two media companies that have decided the internet – though it savaged revenues – hasn’t changed what journalism is about. What’s for sale here is information. The product is still good reporting.



Fairfax hedged its bets. The work of its leading journalists remains extraordinarily good. But the company lost faith in its mission. The one river of gold still flowing – indeed gushing in the property boom of the past few years – was fed not to the journalists, editors, photographers, artists and designers that keep great newspapers alive but to the shareholders.



Fairfax compounded its own misery.



Lately media empires have played on the sense of doom hanging over them to drive expansion in ways politicians would once never have permitted. Nearly every step of Rupert Murdoch’s march through the British media has been allowed on the argument – his argument – that without him the Times, or the Sunday Times or the Sun would fail.



That same argument has been gnawing away out here at the historic arrangement Paul Keating imposed: no media mogul could control newspapers and television stations in the same market. That was far from ideal. It still left nearly all Australians in the peculiar position of buying their newspapers from Fairfax or News. But at least the Keating arrangement bricked into public debate half a dozen loud voices.



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Turnbull demolished that arrangement last year. He’s been a journalist in his time writing for the Bulletin but this was one of the moments in his career when the merchant banker in the man triumphed. As Fairfax disappeared into Nine this week, only money applauded.



As every disaster hit Fairfax over the past 20 or 30 years a solemn ritual takes place: the staff emerge from their Melbourne and Sydney headquarters to face the cameras. They’re worried about their jobs. Who wouldn’t be in this turmoil? But they are profoundly concerned, too, about journalism and how it’s to be practiced in this country now.



I caught a familiar note of bleak optimism. It’s very Fairfax. In the face of a humiliating takeover by a network that long ago abandoned its own high ambitions for journalism, the men and women of the Age, the Financial Review, the Sun Herald, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Newcastle Herald etc – the list is long – haven’t given up hope.



That’s admirable. But this time it’s over for Fairfax. No politicians are poised to save it. Readers who rallied to the cause in the past, are powerless this time. After surviving so much, the name now disappears. What happens now, none of us can tell. It’s the end of a long, decent presence in our lives. Those papers shaped this place – and that’s over.

