Gawenda: Papers must return to core business

One of the great mistakes newspapers have made in recent years is that they have tried to address their weaknesses rather than build on their strengths, says Michael Gawenda, a former editor of The Age, Australia.

In his lecture delivered at the University of Melbourne and published by the Australian, Mr. Gawenda goes back to 1997 when he was appointed editor of the Age daily newspaper and the internet loomed on the horizon.

What happened next?

The senior management at Fairfax [the Age's publisher] and the Fairfax board lost confidence in the company’s newspapers. The implicit – and sometimes explicit – message was that these managers and board members did not really see a future for these papers.

They were often bemused about what it was exactly that journalists did. They were bemused and disconcerted by passion for newspapers from editors and journalists, and even readers.

They were bemused sometimes by the fact that they were running a newspaper company.

The language changed also:

Journalism became content, reporters became content providers, the newspaper became a content platform and editors were invariably referred to as managers.

There were PowerPoint presentations to staff by senior executives at which this sort of language was inadvertently hilarious.

In one memorable instance, journalism was represented as a content egg that could be sliced and diced and made into content suitable for different delivery platforms: curried egg for the internet, scrambled egg for mobile phones, soft-boiled egg for the newspaper. Or hard-boiled, if that’s your preference.

Editors became middle managers or, if you like the content egg metaphor, short-order chefs, with the journalists as kitchen hands, or should that be battery hens?

What were the results?

So we have shorter stories, bigger headlines, more graphics, more bells and whistles, more tricked up, overblown pages, more and more pages that are meant to look visually rich but, in the main, look desperate and garish.

What are the strenghts that newspapers should build on, according to Mr. Gawenda?

Only newspapers can build a community of readers. What builds that community is a shared sense of what the newspaper is about, what it considers important and interesting and entertaining and thought-provoking. A shared sense of the city and the country and even the world. And that’s about telling stories from our courts and our police force, and our local councils and our businesses, and our governments and our hospitals.

Newspapers need to be in the business of news, but they need to report news that only a newspaper can do well.

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