Cost-cutting is already proving pretty costly
Back when live bands played in pubs and people read newspapers, Melbourne street press, Beat, dropped thousands of copies of its latest edition around the city, each emblazoned with what was unmistakably a cartoon penis on its cover.
This wasn’t the intended cover; it quickly transpired that the paper’s long-serving graphic designer was leaving Beat and, being the one tasked with sending the final files to the printer each week, he simply swapped out the cover for a self-portrait farewell, sent the finished paper off, and hopped on a plane to NYC.
It was an undeniably excellent mic-drop. And, despite questionable word choice (this was 2012, when nothing was offensive), and the moral implications of inflicting cartoon nudity onto an unsuspecting pre-9am Melbourne public, nobody was hurt by this prank – aside from UK band Kaiser Chiefs, who were actually meant to be on the cover of Beat that week.
This past Wednesday, the Sydney Morning Herald also published the wrong cover. Oops!
Instead of using a photo of jailed criminal Mike Ibrahim, they instead opted for innocent businessman Michael Ibrahim, who the Herald noted in a midday retraction “had no involvement in any of the illegal activities outlined in the story.”
Again, oops!
Cast your mind back to late April, when noted fast-man Matt Shirvington named the wrong person as the Bondi Junction mass murderer during a live Weekend Sunrise report. Another oops!
Roving reporter Lucy McLeod repeated this same grave mistake during a live cross ten minutes later, confidently confirming that an innocent university student was in fact “the attacker”, “known to police”, and “working on his own”.
Anyway, I won’t name that guy — because it turns out he was just an anonymous university student and not a rampaging maniac — but he hired a defamation lawyer and within two weeks had reached a “confidential settlement with Channel 7”, which means he was given a lot of money due to the risks such careless reportage had on his life.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest Ibrahim (not the one in jail) has already sought legal representation, given how the Herald’s retraction/apology changed on Wednesday.
Here’s the first version that was published, just after midday.
Wednesday’s front page of The Sydney Morning Herald print edition contained the wrong photo of Michael Ibrahim.
The image published was of Sydney businessman Michael Ibrahim, who had no involvement in any of the illegal activities outlined in the story.
The error occurred during the print production process.
The Herald unreservedly apologises to Mr Ibrahim for the error.
Now, let’s leave the fact that “contained the wrong photo of Michael Ibrahim” suggests they ran the wrong pic of the right guy, not a photo of a completely different guy.
Let’s even forget about the annoying vagaries of “during the print production process” as an excuse. Or even the inclusion of an excuse.
Someone with a legal degree clearly said to the Herald, “Nup, try again”, because the apology was updated to the following, which at least suggests a mild acceptance and understanding of the seriousness of what they did to this guy:
Wednesday’s front page of The Sydney Morning Herald print edition made serious allegations of criminality about a number of persons.
That article contained a serious error, being the inclusion of a photograph of businessman Michael Ibrahim.
Businessman Michael Ibrahim, pictured below, had nothing whatsoever to do with the people or allegations in that front page article.
The Herald apologises to Mr Ibrahim and his family for the shock and hurt that this caused.
Then they published a photo of the innocent man. Again.
A little over a fortnight ago, Nine Entertainment, parent company of Sydney Morning Herald (tagline: Independent. Always) finalised 85 redundancies “from our newsrooms, print operations and audience and commercial growth divisions”.
CEO of Nine, Mike Sneesby, announced these job cuts back in June by saying “we are reviewing key parts of our business to identify further potential savings”, calling the mass newsroom cull “something we need to do to continue to build on a successful platform of high-quality journalism”.
Now, within two weeks of finalising these newsroom cuts, Nine’s loudest and proudest paper is making front-cover blunders that will no doubt result in a hefty (and confidential) settlement fee.
The worst part: The dude from Beat acted out of mischief, and could do so because at the time that paper had a handful of full-time staff who worked late into the night on deadline day, fuelled by overpriced Melbourne craft beers and free gig tickets. Sydney Morning Herald is owned by a conglomerate. What’s the Herald’s excuse? Oh yeah, it happened “during the print production process”.
This was a simple lack of proper checks and balances, caused by a diminished workforce. Whoever’s job that once was – well, it’s no longer a job.
This cost cutting is already seeming costly.
Funnily enough, a similar front-page mess-up happened with the WA Anzac Day edition of the Australian Financial Review, also a Nine-owned paper, back in 2014, when a paper went out with mocked-up headlines Arms Buildup, Buys Planes, and World is Fukt, as well as the directive ‘Joe Hockey headline tk here’.
At least that one was only damaging to their own reputation, with editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury telling Mumbrella: “It is an extreme one-off and we are going through our processes to make sure it does not happen again.”
Not for a decade, at least.
I wonder if the executives at Australian Community Media noticed the Herald’s costly gaffe on Wednesday morning?
Truth be told, they were probably occupied with their pending town hall, during which they were to inform staffers of 35 pending redundancies, to be made across their three biggest papers: The Canberra Times, Newcastle Herald, and Illawarra Mercury.
I’m not sure if ABC’s new chair Kim Williams noticed the Herald cover, or the ACM job cuts; he didn’t mention either during his address at the General Sir John Monash Foundation that same day.
Williams has been very public about his wish for an overall return of proper news values, using a late-June address at the State Library of Victoria to note “the flow of advertising revenues to Google, Facebook and others has been relentless and devastating in its consequences: Our newspapers are thinner, our newsrooms sparser, our readers and viewers and listeners fewer, to our own Australian media”.
During this week’s Monash address, he again focused on the dire state of the Australian news industry in 2024, touching on the colliding factors leading to both the ACM regional journalist cuts and the Herald’s lack of editorial oversight without referring to either – he also used the speech to slander a long-dead war general and quoted JD Vance’s book at length, so it wasn’t all on point.
Williams noted newspaper journalists have almost halved between 2011 and 2023, and “the number of regional news outlets is in an even more dire state of decay”.
He pointed to Australia media’s loss of Meta’s $70 million in commercial deals with news organisations, saying the social media giant’s decision not to renew the deal “is accelerating an already rapid diminishment of newsrooms with severe, even savage cuts at Nine, NewsCorp and SevenWest”.
“The axe keeps swinging, and every time it falls, the truth and democracy suffer a blow,” he said.
Now, consider this. The CSIRO-owned Cosmos Magazine received money last year from a Meta Australian News Fund grant – which “supports excellence in journalism” and was administered by the Walkley Foundation – and used it to develop an AI system designed to eliminate the need for journalists from the act of producing journalism!
In July, Cosmos published a half-dozen articles with the pithy byline: “This article was generated by our custom AI service.”
Cosmos explained: “Our service was built to focus on our archive of more than 15,000 factually correct science news stories and features. It also uses Open AI to help create the content. All generated content is fact checked by a trained science communicator and edited by our publishing team.”
In other words, a Walkley grant, paid for by Meta, was used to scrape the work of freelance and payroll journalists to design an AI usurper.
Before Meta pulled its funding from Australian journalists, or as Nine Publishing MD Tory Maguire put it – “the tap turned off” – a handful of Australian media outlets were sharing in around $200 million a year from Google and Meta.
$70 million of that is gone. That money isn’t coming back. And the rest isn’t sticking around for longer. In July, Google only agreed to a one-year renewal of its existing deals with Australian media companies, which is something NBA players do when they need 12 more months to mount a clean exit strategy.
So, what’s the strategy for Australian media companies? Fire more journalists?
It’s going to take a while to fire $200 million worth of journalists – even if you include TV journos who used to run fast.
So, there needs to be a better strategy. One that ensures that when you name a criminal, you check you’ve got the right guy first. Or at least tell ChatGPT to Google it first before you send it to whatever robot is running the printing press these days.
Enjoy your weekend.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Fantastic piece Nathan. And great to see you sticking up for the journos. When I worked as a sub-editor on big publications 20 years ago, I was amazed just how many times each page was proofread and how many times mistakes were identified on the fourth or fifth read. It’s simple, really: journalists are human beings and miss things. The only way to guarantee articles come out clean is with multiple pairs of skilled eyes, and people given the breathing space to do their job. Take that away and things go wrong.
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Thanks Nathan for such a great read here. I really feel for all media involved.
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