Culture. Powerful medicine
In this guest post, Peter Miller argues that management upheaval can give newsrooms a common enemy to unite against
In the last couple of weeks I have enjoyed posts by Cathie McGinn on her giddying experience inside Photon, and by Anonymous from inside one of the Fairfax newsrooms, described by the correspondent as ‘toxic’.
These posts conjured up a conversation I recall with a gifted but aggrieved SMH journalist who joined ACP in the early 1990s after the Warwick Fairfax-led Tourang take over and subsequent shambles. She described leaving a great newspaper company that she described as having lost its soul.
To my surprise, only a few short months later she was on her way back to her old job at Fairfax. Over dinner I asked her what on earth had happened, imagining that she had fallen victim to an editorial witch hunt, common at the time and quite probably as common today.
I think you will find, Peter, that the camaraderie has been gone for quite a bit. The bastards these days are upstairs and downstairs.
The Fairfax papers have been struggling for decades. You have to go back into the 1970s before you can discover a time when they were run properly. They lost the plot when they forgot it is reader who buy newspapers and not reporters.