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Last updated on March 6th, 2018 at 12:30 am
CNN’s Eason Jordan has resigned. In other media news, Stephen Mulholland reflects on his time as CEO of Fairfax, publishers of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald:
My days at Fairfax were akin to pushing a large boulder up a steep hill with one’s nose. It was no fun to deal with debt of close to a billion dollars, a crumbling, “sick’ old building (the company doctor told me the structure was a threat to employee health), clapped out old presses run by thousands of stroppy printers who knew their days were numbered and expressed their frustration in charming gestures such as dropping bolts between the cylinders as they ran.
Then there were the journalists. A more anarchic, spoiled and self-important mob I have not encountered before or since and trust I never will. Pamela Williams talks about resources and numbers of journalists. I was appalled to learn that journalists received six weeks and five days leave a year. This was due, I was told, to the fact that they worked on public holidays.
Absolute balls, I discovered. On public holidays there were skeleton staffs at work and time off was dished out with abandon. Then, of course, there were the dreaded “sickies�?, which you took so you could go for a long run or a workout. To add insult to injury many quite high level journos took leave and didn’t tell anyone so it wasn’t recorded.
Via Adrian the Cabbie. Professor Bunyip currently has a range of posts relating to the anarchic, spoiled and self-important Fairfax crew.
UPDATE. In yet more media news, Gianna has quit blogging. This means the romantic comments thread in which self-handling Christopher Sheil tells of holding tightly to his treasure will remain forever on her front page.
- Hilarious! Don’t miss the second installment.
Pure gold!
Posted by The Mongrel on 02/11 at 09:10 PM • #
- I used to farm and one thing I discovered in that profession is that there is more manure generated in a press room than on a dairy farm. I spent enough time trying to deal with reporters doing farm news when they did not know one end of the cow from another to realize these guys just don’t know what they are talking about half the time. They are woefully uneducated on the issues they cover.
- is gianna off to have another litter of welfare pups? she’ll be missed.Posted by Deo Vindice on 02/11 at 09:28 PM • #
- This is astounding – now the blogs are ahead of the news cycle, in that this story hadn’t yet gotten traction in the MSM. Plenty of readers and viewers are going to see this tomorrow morning and say “Huh? Who? Why’d he quit?”
It’s going to catch a lot of the media’s apologists wrong footed, too. Camera ready pundits with important hair are even now putting the final touch on their “tempest in a teapot, and where’s the evidence anyway?” scoffing commentary, and if they’re lucky, will have a few seconds to pull it and go to dead air before it goes out. If not…
“Look! Cows!”
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 02/11 at 09:34 PM • #
- The media tend to focus on bad news because, says Lomborg, they are “placed in an incentive structure that makes it profitable to focus on negative occurrences.�? The problem for Aussie journos is that there’s not a great deal in your country about which to be negative.
Must drive them mad which might explain why they take themselves so seriously when what they are dealing with, in terms of media’s need for bad news, is really quite trivial.
The major problem of our local media’s “opinion” writers is their misapprehension of what in this world constitutes good and evil.
Failing that, in many instances they don’t even know which side their bread is buttered.
Being a “doom and gloom squad” in an attempt to make sure Iraq repeats Vietnam, is a current favourite.
- As a Fairfax journo who is not anarchic, spoiled or self-important, I’m mystified by Mulholland’s observation that only a skeleton staff ever worked on public holidays. The Sydney Morning Herald is staffed six days a week and on every public holiday. The only “holiday” we all get is December 24, because there’s no Herald on Christmas Day. Mulholland might have been “told” about the Financial Review staff, because that paper isn’t published on national holidays. As far as I know, The Sun-Herald journos also work every holiday.
It’s possible that the highest paid journalists – J9 and above – could take sick leave without leaving a paper trail because (unlike their colleagues on J8 and below) that don’t have to fill out time sheets. But if they “didn’t tell anyone so it wasn’t recorded”, then how would he know? And if he did know of such a case, why didn’t he as CEO do something about it?Posted by Angela Bell on 02/13 at 12:43 AM • #
- Thanks tim. But with it just sitting there permanently on Gianna’s front page, don’t you now go reading it too often, you hear …
- It’s all a conspiracy by management, Angela (with your literals and all).
Meanwhile, the people decide:
‘The Sunday Herald Sun’s sales advantage over the Sunday Age has blown out to more than 410,000 – the greatest margin in Australian publishing history. The Age’s long-term dependence on the tedious routines of dull journalism has cost it dearly,’ (editor Alan Howe) said.
Tedious. Dull.
Indeed.
But wait for his movie: Bowling for Davos…