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Stop Press
The Last Days of Newspapers
By Rachel Buchanan Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Rachel Buchanan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-922072-71-9
CHAPTER 1
Subeditors wanted
It was 2012 and we were living in Wellington when I noticed a display ad in the Saturday newspaper: 'Subeditors wanted.' The advert was branded with the familiar blue moon of Fairfax Media.
I turned the thing over in my mind, rationalising, justifying.
We had left Melbourne for Wellington at my insistence. I wanted to be close to my mother, who had been ill the year before: suspected dementia, suspected stroke, bleeding brain, high blood pressure, bruises that would not heal, chronic shoulder pain, weight loss — quite a package for a woman not yet sixty-six. My partner, Mike, and three daughters were with me. Neither he nor I had work lined up. I had hoped to get some sort of research or writing funding. I had failed. Mike got a job lugging buckets of dirt from the side of the hill behind a millionaire's home on Oriental Parade, helping to construct a $150,000 deck where the man and his wife could drink their gin and tonics. Then he left that for another one that paid $4 an hour more and meant even longer hours. He was now paving the footpaths on one of Wellington's main drags. I was open to whatever, as long as it was part-time and flexible. I had queued up to try out as an extra on The Hobbit and applied to be a Hansard reporter. No joy. I did get some work as a public historian, but the contract was only for a few months. I contacted the local paper, but there was nothing there and the pay for freelancing was woeful. A lead opinion piece, such as the one I foolishly wrote on the high cost of living in Wellington, earned NZ$200, a fee I had to bargain for aggressively because the norm was not to pay for op-eds at all. In Australia the same piece would have paid about A$600, a rate unchanged for the past fifteen years.
It was more than a decade since I'd worked in a newsroom. The time since had been filled with having children and completing a PhD in history. One thing I had decided, rather belatedly, was that I could not manage being a mother and full-time paid work. As well as time with my kids, I wanted to have time with my mum and my several hundred interesting relatives. So, when I saw the ad, I immediately recognised the potential. Subbing was family friendly. It had once been a popular mummy-track gig at The Age. Besides, subbing was the skill that sparked my interest in newspapers in the first place. There were no journalists in my immediate family, but my dad did have a friend, Paul Corrigan, who was a subeditor for The Press in Christchurch. Paul was a controller of words. He used to write to my father. 'Look,' Dad said one day, 'Paul has edited his letter.' Dad unfolded the blue aerogram and there was Paul's letter, typed up, but over the top of this first letter there was another one, the version created by Paul's handmade corrections, the pencil fork driven between two words to make space for another, the snake that transposed two letters, the single line to strike out a wasted word and the two lines above and below it, the cross-hatch at the bottom and the word 'Ends'. Fancy editing your own letter! I did.
So when I saw that ad, I decided to put up my hand, not stopping to consider why Fairfax needed subeditors all of a sudden when the trend since 2007 had been to sack, outsource, or centralise this work.
A few days later, I found out that Fairfax would sack staff in Newcastle and the Illawarra and outsource some production work to New Zealand. These were the jobs that had been advertised. Mexicans wanted. Apply here now.
The exchange rate (at the time of writing, A$1 buys about NZ$1.25) and the deregulated labour market make New Zealand an attractive spot for Australian manufacturers to do business. In 2011 Heinz closed one of its Australian factories, cut staff at two others, and moved the production of canned beetroot, some meals, and some sauces to a factory in Hastings, New Zealand. About 340 Australians lost their jobs. In early 2012, 50 new workers started at Imperial Tobacco's factory in Petone, Wellington. They would help to make four billion cigarettes a year, mostly for export to Australia; before that, the cigarettes had been made in Sydney. In 2013, ANZ announced 70 jobs in Melbourne would be outsourced to a call centre in New Zealand. Tinned food, fags, rags — Kiwi staff could supply Australia with whatever was required. Newspaper manufacturers had noticed these benefits, too. Sixty-six people would lose their jobs in Wollongong and Newcastle, and 40 would be hired in New Zealand. An unfair axe had fallen.
I did the interview and passed the subediting test. I was in. On 11 July 2012, I signed my contract to become a permanent part-time subeditor with Fairfax Editorial Services in Wellington. I asked if I could work on the team that subbed New Zealand newspapers but my request was denied. My knowledge of Australia was valuable. So began my swift adjustment to a new role as a knowledge outworker, a sign of New Zealand's success (or failure, depending on your point of view), one of the anonymous people who plays out the big-picture events depicted in every news story.
But this time the story was us: newspapers. The 'us' of newspapers stretched far beyond reporters, writers, and production journalists to encompass foresters, paper and ink manufacturers, printers, delivery-truck drivers, the people who owned newsagents and dairies, the people who sold advertisements, and the people who placed advertisements. The 'us' included the men who ran media companies that still published newspapers, and the men and women who edited them — a thankless task — and the consultants who advised newspaper owners on how to save, what to shut, who to sack. The 'us' included the millions who read newspapers, the hundreds of thousands who subscribed. We were all participants in the end of something, a once monumental and profitable manufacturing chain, faltering now, splintered and blistering. The transition was quietly brutalising.
In the early 1970s The Sydney Morning Herald had money to burn. Bringing You the News, Alex Ezard's 1971 film about the making of the Herald, said the Saturday paper cost seven cents, but it used 15 cents' worth of newsprint. That didn't matter: the Herald published 250 million lines of classified advertising a year, more than any other newspaper in the world. But advertisers have deserted print for the net. Why pay for a classified or display ad when you can promote your stuff online for free?
With plunging profits, publishers have had to economise. The daily newspaper may look the same — albeit lighter and thinner than in its heyday — but the manufacturing methods are radically new. Call it survival mode. Antipodean newspapers need the news and administrative work of staff or contractors at 2adpro, Fairfax Editorial Services, Velocity Made Good, TeleTech ('a leading provider of customer-relationship management services'), Salmat ('leaders in customer engagement and acquisition solutions'), Pagemasters, and AAP and other wire services, a global workforce backed up by a shrinking remnant local core of reporters, printers, and newsprint-makers. Newspapers in Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand have outsourced production, IT, phone rooms, circulation, advertising, layout and design, and image processing to either Eastern Europe or Asia. Some of the people who make our newspapers live in either India or the Philippines, two of the countries whose low-wage skilled workers now do much of the world's media back-office work.
The revolution has been so swift. In the early 1990s, The Age still employed its own carpenters to make in-trays and desks and shelves. The paper had its own mechanics, engineers, fitters and turners, plumbers, cleaners, and stuffers (to put inserts into the papers). The ground floor was a maze of workshops. A family ran the staff canteen. Secretaries typed up television pages and the law lists. Staff graphic designers and copywriters made up the ads. Ad reps drew up A3 pages by hand. Editors bellowed at them, refusing this ad or that. 'They had the power to say what ad could run,' Alison Wright, a former ad rep who is now business-services manager at the Tullamarine print plant, told me. 'I'd finish the day covered in bits of rubber from rubbing things out.' How quaint that all seems now, an editor with that much power.
The transformation in newspaper production started in 1991, when News Limited merged its two Melbourne newspapers, The Herald and The Sun News-Pictorial, and formed the Herald Sun . Bruce Davidson and Martin Thomas were two of the hundreds laid off. The subeditors took their payouts and set up Pagemasters, a custom publisher that made television listings and puzzle pages for newspapers. 'We did rural papers first,' Davidson said of the early outsourcing work. 'Then it grew like Topsy. It was a commonsense approach. We didn't do any marketing. Newspapers rang us.'
In 2002, AAP bought Pagemasters, and the company continued to grow, quietly. It began to work on Irish-owned publisher APN's regional newspapers in Queensland and New South Wales, 'on world pages, sport, and national news'. In 2006, APN approached Pagemasters about outsourcing some subediting of daily newspapers and magazines, including New Zealand's most widely read paper, The New Zealand Herald .In 2007, APN went public. Some parts of The New Zealand Herald and the Listener, as well as provincial papers such as Bay of Plenty Times and The Northern Advocate, would be subbed and laid out by people in Auckland employed not by APN but by Pagemasters. The plan was radical; no publisher anywhere had ever tried anything like it before. The International Federation of Journalists, a Brussels-based group, warned that this outsourcing 'will only hasten the demise of the traditional press in developed countries'. For the first time, newspapers were sliced apart, into content-makers (the reporters and writers) and production staff (designers, copy subeditors, layout subs, and check subs — the senior staff who are the final readers of all copy), as if one had nothing to do with the other. At least 30 jobs were lost.
In 2008, Fairfax New Zealand, the publisher of two national Sunday newspapers, nine regional dailies, and more than 60 community newspapers, did something similar. The company set up a sub hub in Wellington. In 2009, News Limited followed suit and set up NewsCentral sub hubs across Australia. First outsourcing, now hubbing — the sticking plaster and clag that has kept newspapers going for the past six years was tested in New Zealand and exported around the English-speaking world.
Subediting was once the hidden creative and technical grunt behind a newspaper. Standards were high. In 1993, I worked four or five shifts as a 'downtable' copy sub at The Age before a single one of my headlines was deemed worthy of publication. A story went through many hands before publication. A reporter sent their copy to a news editor. The editor might ask the reporter to fix a few things up or make some more phone calls. Next, senior editors assigned a story to a page. A layout sub would skim the copy and decide how much space it would be allocated, how many decks of headline it would have, and how a photograph might be used. Once the story had been laid out, it went into a subbing queue and a copy sub would then rewrite, cut, and check. Sometimes a sub would get the reporter to clarify a paragraph or rewrite an intro. Finally the story would go into a 'check' queue where a senior subeditor would read it through, fixing up poor headlines and checking for legal issues or style errors. After the page was made up, check subs would read proofs, too. It was a laborious, careful process in which copy was 'dressed' and finessed, made to fit house style. A good subeditor cleaned the words up and made the writer look better. For example, I remember two subs describing the work of a well-known columnist. One expressed admiration. The other said: 'But have you seen him nude?' referring to the copy before it had been subbed. 'It's not pretty.'
These days were over. No longer would subeditors be attached to individual newspapers and communities. Instead, they would be pooled. From these hubs, copy would be processed — pushed through, moved, shovelled, and shifted, just like dirt.
Fewer people would do more work. At Fairfax and News Limited, the outsourcing mathematics are this: take 82 people, sack them, then replace them with 60 people who do the same work but are paid less. You can either shift the work to a place where wages are lower (the New Zealand option), or employ people who cost less (the journalism-graduate option), or do a mix of both. At Fairfax metropolitan newspapers, under the current enterprise bargaining agreement, a grade-ten subeditor earns a base rate of A$2443.72 a week (about $130,000 a year), while a first-year journalist is on A$953.43. At Fairfax Editorial Services, I would be paid NZ$65,000 pro rata. By local standards, it was good pay and good conditions, too. It was proper employment, rather than a contract or casual role. I got my best top (navy-blue silk sprinkled with apricot stars) dry-cleaned, so I'd be ready for the first day.
The seven of us sat around the tables in the bottom of the building on Boulcott Street, Wellington. The room had no windows. It was one of many similar rooms in the dim labyrinth of the basement. Narrow corridors turned hard right and then left, arrested only by security doors marked by a wavy red line that went green with the swipe of the black-and-white button on an elastic string. The place was as baffling and claustrophobic as a dementia ward, and for most of those first few days we got lost in those corridors, circling around and around, opening doors into abandoned offices that had become storerooms for piles of obsolete street furniture: newsstands and newsracks and those metal cages that once held a billboard screaming the front-page lead in a 200-point bold sans-serif font outside milk bars and dairies and newsagents.
The corridors converged on a large dim foyer. New office furniture nestled in the gloom. There were two dozen navy-blue swivel office chairs still in their plastic bags and half-a-dozen grey computer desks and double the number of computer monitors, all wrapped up, too. Further over towards the near-opaque frosted windows that separated the basement from Cafe Ink, there were stacks of old keyboards and monitors and other, even more ancient-looking equipment, such as white fax machines and those special beige printers that used to whiz out wire copy all day, a long white tongue of stories from around the country and the world, which poked out from the machine and then folded itself, one neat lick after another, into a pile on the floor. Cables snaked from holes in the wall and the frayed tassels lay on the puce carpet. Had furniture just been ripped out or was it just about to be put in? The room suggested both: apocalypse and rebuild.
The largest room off the foyer was lit, and inside this room two women sat in front of computers, working quietly. A peace lily was on one desk and a newspaper cartoon had been taped to the bottom of a screen. Grey desks had been arranged in clusters of four, but they had nothing on them yet. All the other rooms that came off the foyer were empty. One had framed things on the wall, old press and community awards won by The Evening Post, the afternoon newspaper that News Limited shut ten years ago almost to the day. In 2002, Rupert Murdoch's right-hand man, Tom Mockridge, walked into the newsroom and said: 'Listen up, everybody. Today is a bad news day for The Evening Post.' The profitable paper was shut and a new one, The Dominion Post, was born. Seven months later, News Limited sold the Independent Newspapers Limited chain to Fairfax. In the decade that followed, the staff had shrunk. Offices that once buzzed with activity were empty.
Our training room was bland. The human-resources manager explained why we were there and gave a brief history of hubbed subbing at Fairfax. At first, each masthead kept a skeleton crew of subeditors, but these jobs had mostly been transferred to the hub. 'Advertising went to India last year and that is working well,' the manager said. He imparted this surprising news in a voice that was soft and calm. He was upfront, uncomplaining. 'New Zealand is a lot more streamlined and Australia is looking at our model. We are very lean. We used to have 800 people working here and now it is two to three hundred. Major change has occurred.'
In an appendix to his New Journalism manifesto, Tom Wolfe called the reporter's notebook 'the beggar's cup'. Head down, I held out my cup. Soon it was full. I wrote down everything the manager said in my mongrel shorthand. If I took notes, I would be a reporter rather than a participant in this sad story. The scribbling was my protection, a promise that I could avoid that moment and return to it later, in private. Then, through my notes, I would figure out what had happened and how I felt about it.
The manager told us there had been ten years of pain and restructuring in New Zealand newspapers, and now Australia was about to go through the same thing. We all knew that. We seven were the beneficiaries of the latest cataclysm. We were the second intake in what would become a team of 40 who would soon produce two daily papers — Newcastle Herald and the Illawarra Mercury — and seven community papers — the Wollongong Advertiser, the Kiama Independent, the Lakes Mail, the Lake Times, the Myall Coast Nota, The Star in Newcastle, and the Port Stephens Examiner.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stop Press by Rachel Buchanan. Copyright © 2013 Rachel Buchanan. Excerpted by permission of Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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