Newspaper bosses put aside their rivalry

Above: Sydney Morning Herald Media
section leads on an interview with
John Hartigan, chairman and chief
executive of News Limited.
Right: Harto returns the favour
as The Australian's Media section
runs with Fairfax boss David Kirk

Has it ever happened before? Usually rivals in Australia's fiercely competitive newspaper market, News Limited chief John Hartigan and Fairfax chief executive David Kird today gave one another the platform spots in their flagship newspapers.

They have stood together before, notably in their campaign for better freedom-of-information laws, but this seems to be the first time they have swapped prominant interviews for their respective papers.

They were saying the same thing, however – reports of the decline of Australian newspapers have been grossly exaggerated.

For Harto, this appeared to contradict his boss, News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch. But he made it clear Murdoch was talking about US newspapers. As the SMH report said:

At a digital conference in California this week, Mr Murdoch said that the financial pressures on US newspapers would see them "deteriorate tremendously" and profit margins would shrink from 30 per cent to 10 per cent. The circulation figures for the March quarter in the US support his
gloomy view.

Circulation of all but two of the top 25 flagship mastheads in the US fell over the quarter, including the Dallas Morning News, down 10.6 per cent, Boston Globe (-8.3 per cent), Los Angeles Times (-5.1 per cent), Chicago tribune (-4.4 per cent) and the New York Times (-3.9 per cent).

Mr Hartigan predicted the Australian sector would not follow suit and said that Australian investment analysts who said otherwise were wrong.

"By and large [US newspapers] are very, very different," he said. "There are some telltale things coming home to roost in that market. One is they have stopped investing in their brands.

"They have chopped their newsrooms to pieces and a lot of the papers are very old-fashioned – they don't have any real personality, depth or empathy with their readers. And they have not invested in plant to be able to do things that show the medium in a modern role."

Both Hartigan and Kirk were speaking about the release of the report Newspapers Today, put out by The Newspaper Works, the peak industry organisation created by Australia's main publishers 15 months ago. The report said people were still engaging with Australian newspapers because they are absorbing, dynamic and reputable.

Read Hartigan's words from the SMH and Kirk's words from The Australian. You might like to check out The Newspaper Works, with its links to the study released today.

Also of interest: In the SMH interview, Hartigan confirmed The Australian would move to a smaller format when it sorted out the problems of co-ordinating its production on News Limited's different presses around the nation.

Really? Is this a photograph our media wouldn't want you to see?

It's a good photo because of the story it tells. The caption reads:

Air Force Chief Master Sgt. John Gebhardt, of the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group at Balad, Iraq, cradles a young girl as they both sleep in the hospital.

The girl's entire family was executed by insurgents; the killers shot her in the head as well.

The girl received treatment at the US military hospital in Balad, but cries and moans often.

According to nurses at the facility, Gebhardt is the only one who can calm down the girl, so he has spent the last several nights holding her while they both sleep in a chair.

The photo and caption are now being passed around the internet – often with comments that say you'd never see the Australian press run something like it.

Indeed, it came to me from a friend who criticises newspapers trenchantly (she never reads them, by the way) and I think she looks forward to the day the internet kills off print altogether.

I think it's her comment on top: “Why doesn't the media print pictures like this one?” Somewhere along the line someone else has written: “Why isn't this all over the news? If he had done something wrong, it surely would be!”

Everybody loves to pin a conspiracy rap on the media.It's almost a national sport.

But do you really believe that Australia's daily newspapers – most of which are owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, a strong supporter of George W. Bush on Iraq – would suppress a pic like this for ideological reasons? Get real!

I have some difficulty in commenting further. Like most people flinging conspiracy theories around the internet, the people who post this material don't see any need to provide documentation.

It's a newspaper clipping, obviously, but what newspaper?

The credit line for the pic is: “Photo courtesy David W. Gilmore Jr./ U.S. Air Force.

I'm only guessing, but the wording of the credit line, the rather amateurish headline and the caption suggest to me the clipping has come from a US military or air force newspaper, possibly produced in Iraq for US forces posted there. Nothing wrong with that.

But we don't know whether that pic, or any like it, were offered to Australian newspapers. In any case, a responsible picture editor in Australia would want to know more of the picture's provenance before publishing it.

Could it have come from a propaganda unit? (Such things do exist, you know.)