Media
Subless Fairfax is a fast-sinking ship. The strange, misshapen creatures
The Fairfax decision to outsource its sub-editing is more than a cost cut. It’s a fundamental shift in ethos. A change of extraordinary profundity that will leave this country’s major quality newspapers transformed from their very core.
Cards on the table first. I’ve probably spent half my working life as a sub-editor: sports sub then deputy chief sub on the Melbourne Herald, sub and night editor at The Age, blah de blah. Years of it, starting out as a cadet when copy mark-up was a thing done in ink on paper, when pages were drawn with pencil and printer’s rule, finishing in a totally digitised newspaper age when the only thing that stood between a sub-editor and the page rolling from the press was a microwave link for the transmission of that daily data.
So I have both a slightly sentimental interest and an understanding.
Sub-editing is not spell checking, though through the various dimunitions, workload increases, sackings, overloadings and redundancies that have whittled at the craft over the past two decades or so, that’s close to what it has become. Don’t try and understand ’em, just rope and tie and brand ’em. That’s the modern way. It wasn’t always thus.
An anecdote: my first job at The Age was as a junior on the day features desk; an agreeable sunny backwater of teapots and gentle banter. I was hired to do the work of another man terminally incapacitated by alcoholism. So yes, it was a more benevolent time. A time of featherbedding and excess… and all of 20 years ago.
It was also a time in which the dominant culture of the paper was the strict application of style and quality. If it did not make these cuts it did not make the paper. And we knew then, through instinct, long-practice and history, what that paper was. What made it a thing of record and reliability. It was also that strong sense of identity and self that made it an attractive proposition to the reader. A known, reliable quantity, the basis of a daily habit.
The subs’ table – a shorthand for the totality of the detailed newspaper editing process really – was once staffed by senior people. Old hands who had been there and done way more than that. And invested in them and their craft, memory and love of detail and lore, was something close to the soul of the publication. Not so much these days. Attrition. Costs pressures. All the rest. The slow erosion of the sub-desk’s power and authority has been a mirror to the steady decline in newspaper quality.
They had more than simply seniority, experience and an eye for detail. They were also custodians. They held in their daily work – the things they cut, the things they questioned, the things they promoted – something close to the intellectual heart of the publication.
Papers are organic things, they develop their personalities through time, by way of a million choices. Sub-editors held this character and protected it through generations and regimes. A strong editing culture is the very thing that lends a publication its authority and gravitas.
Are these things important these days?
Saga of the Mercury: Read The Fly, HERE
Picture: From New Matilda, HERE
Australian: Sub-editors feel sting of Fairfax move to outsource
James Chessell From: The Australian May 07, 2011 12:00AM
Hywood had organised a long Friday lunch for a handful of journalists he worked with during his first stint at Australia’s oldest media company, which began with a cadetship at The Australian Financial Review in the mid-1970s and ended when he fell out with then chief executive Fred Hilmer in 2003.
His guest list included no fewer than four former AFR editors, John Alexander, Vic Carroll, Tony Maiden and Max Walsh; onetime Fairfax chief executive Chris Anderson; former reporter turned ALP national secretary Geoff Walsh; AFR deputy editor Judith Hoare and senior columnist Brian Toohey. “It was a chance for Greg to catch up with a few old has-beens over a glass of wine or two,” recalls one attendee.
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Just four days later, Hywood fronted angry staff in Sydney and Melbourne to explain plans to cut more than 300 printing and production jobs. Redundancies have become a regular event at Fairfax’s flagship mastheads, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, during the past decade as online upstarts such as Seek have eaten away at classified advertising once described as “rivers of gold”.
But Hywood’s proposal is particularly controversial because he wants to outsource sub-editing to a subsidiary of Australian Associated Press called Pagemasters.
It has proved to be a highly unpopular idea among Fairfax journalists already worried about what the online revolution means for serious reporting.
Sub-editors check raw copy and write headlines. They are quality control for newspapers.
Hywood says a proportion of the $15 million in annual savings generated by the cuts will be spent on new reporters and an expanded graduate trainee program. Yet the journalists’ union argues editorial quality will be threatened by taking “the skills and expertise of sub-editors” out of the newsroom.
“You can’t Jetstar a newspaper without lowering standards,” an SMH reporter told Hywood during a heated meeting on Tuesday.
The Pagemasters dispute is just the latest front in the battle over the future of newspapers.
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THESE are challenging times for the local newspaper industry. Selected editors and journalists at News Limited (Fairfax’s main rival and publisher of The Australian) gather this week at News chairman Rupert Murdoch’s Carmel retreat in California. High on the agenda will be a conversation about paid content through online paywalls as well as mobile and tablet applications. News Digital Media chief executive Richard Freudenstein leaves for the US today to update senior News executives on this newspaper’s plans to charge for premium online content. Meanwhile, select staff at the SMH are being given a preview of its new iPad app.
A theory held by many Fairfax journalists is that an external hub allows management to weaken the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance. This is denied by management, but the sub-editing ranks have traditionally been heavily unionised.
Not that everyone is too upset. “MEAA appears to be led by Neville Chamberlain,” quipped one former SMH sub upon hearing that federal secretary Chris Warren was pushing for Hywood to compromise with an internal Fairfax hub. Even some bitterly opposed to the changes question the wisdom of strike action. “It has never achieved anything in the past,” said one SMH journalist.
Hywood and Warren are not the only two facing scrutiny. There is widespread frustration and anger among staff over SMH editor Amanda Wilson and The Age’s editor-in-chief Paul Ramage’s decision to support the outsourcing.
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It is true that Fairfax and News already outsource some less critical pages (such as share tables) or sections (such as travel) to Pagemasters. However, News settled on centralised “NewsCentral” sub-editing hubs in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne, while some mastheads such as The Australian have kept sub-editors on the editorial floor after calculating they could do it more cheaply.
At the heart of the debate is a trade-off. Outsourcing and internal hubs save money. But errors let through by inexperienced subs with no attachment to a masthead affect a newspaper’s credibility. Low credibility means fewer readers.
Credibility is just as important in the digital world. Hywood told analysts this week he wanted to harness the SMH and The Age’s large online audiences for digital transaction businesses such as dating website RSVP or travel portal Stayz. But he will have a large audience for only as long as readers trust the brands.
Hywood will not say what proportion of the $15m annual savings comes from the outsourcing of 90 sub-editing positions because it is “commercial in confidence”.
It is understood that an internal hub was considered but ultimately rejected, according to a Fairfax management source, because “we had an existing subbing deal with Pagemasters (and) it ultimately made more sense to extend that well-functioning and existing hub”.
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And,
Peter Batt, the last of the Fleet Street hell-raisers
Roy Greenslade
Grauniad
One of the first sports journalists to catch my attention when I joined The Sun in 1969 was Peter Batt. His unreconstructed cockney voice boomed out across the Bouverie Street editorial floor.
Batty was, at turns, pugnacious, funny, irreverent, undisciplined and, when drunk, argumentative. He was always loud, one of those annoying writers who liked to talk while tapping away at his typewriter.
Though unschooled, he never let that worry him. While searching for a description of some footballer’s clever footwork, I recall him shouting across to the paper’s chief sub, Ray Mills:
“Millsy, what’s that thing in ballet, pa de something?”
Mills replied: “Do you mean pas de deux?”
“That’s it,” said Batt. “Pas de fucking deux. Can you spell it?”
After seeing the resulting match report in the first edition, Mills took Batt aside to explain that the term pas de deux describes a duet rather than a solo act.
Batt waved him aside, shouting: “Who gives a fuck?”
MORE:
First published: 2011-05-09 04:01 AM
Sub-humans practise the invisible art of making a newspaper shine
* Seumas Phelan
* From: The Australian
THEY’RE at the centre of the biggest dispute for years in print journalism, with the potential to wreck two of the nation’s top metropolitan broadsheets, and you wouldn’t be reading this newspaper without them — but most people have only a vague idea of what they do.
They are sub-editors, the people who produce print publications — from newspapers to magazines to journals — and I’m proud to be one of them.
Right now, subs are in the eye of the industrial storm. Fairfax Media, one of the nation’s two major newspaper companies (the other is News Limited, publisher of The Australian), wants to outsource the sub-editing operations of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of Melbourne to a cut-rate outfit called Pagemasters, with the loss of up to 300 jobs.
Naturally, the Fairfax journalists are outraged and are fighting the plan, but why should readers be worried?
Because the main aim of what subs do is to give the readers what they want — lively, accurate and informative stories, striking images, punchy headlines and captions, mixed with fun and entertainment, and all wrapped up in attractive eye-catching layouts.
“Subs are the heart and mind of a newspaper, and they hold its collective memory,” Alan Knight, professor of journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney, tells Media.
“The industry does face difficult circumstances, but trying to get the subbing done on the cheap by low-paid, inexperienced staff could be a very false economy.”
What Fairfax is proposing is to keep a small core of page editors at each masthead to decide what stories and pictures will be used and then send them off for subbing at the buy-low Pagemasters operation (dubbed “Slavemasters” in the trade). The Fairfax bosses maintain there will be no loss of quality as a result, “but this is bollocks”, as a mass meeting of their journalists was told.
The management gurus who came up with the outsourcing idea focus on the corporate savings — $15 million a year, they estimate, and they claim the mug punter readers won’t notice the difference. Oh, you bet they will — we get letters about misplaced apostrophes, never mind egregious errors of fact and howlers of misspellings such as someone reportedly dying interstate when the reporter meant intestate.
Outside the business, many people think that all subs do is check the spellings and get pedantic about conjunctions. Insiders know better, but there are still two opposing views. One is that subs are the finest exemplars of the craft — “the compleat journalist”, as the late and great Claud Cockburn of The Times of London used to say.
The other — held by many reporters and feature writers — is that we are a bunch of strange and misshapen creatures who lurk in newspaper offices late at night, intent on butchering their otherwise glittering prose.
The truth …