When the owner of the The Cairns Post opened a new office for his newspaper in 1908 he aimed high. The entrance was distinguished by a temple front and nine soaring Ionic columns: incongruently grand symbols, a long way from Greece.
Such was the ambition in far north Queensland in the newly federated Australia, that columns topped with scrolls seemed unremarkable. Cairns was driven, the paper thundered, it did not “want a pawnbroking, huckstering policy of the slow-and-go-easy style.”
As each new town was gazetted, a newspaper soon followed – generally owned by ambitious men active in local government, politics and property. More than a century later they now are closing.
Cairns’ visitors and residents are reminded that its paper today started just six years after the town itself, Est 1882 is emblazoned on the cornice above the columns. It was one of the scores of newspapers that recorded life in the often-violent frontier settlements.
Australians were voracious readers interested in politics; the colonies developed a global reputation as land of newspapers.
In the globalised 21st century the pattern has reversed. New thinking is needed.
News outlets, in all mediums – generally owned by distant companies – are closing. Queensland is dotted with what the ACCC calls news deserts. Ten of the 29 local government areas in Australia without a local news publisher are in the state, and nationwide a third of local government areas have fewer news outlets than four years ago.
This decline accelerated during the pandemic. News Corp spent decades hoovering up papers in Queensland but then closed 15, digitised and scaled back 96 others around the nation. Australian Community Newspapers “retired” 36 mastheads, websites and social media sites.
Australia is no longer a land of newspapers, but one where gossip and misinformation flourish.
The early enthusiasm for newspapers was not reflected in the Australian constitution. There was no recognition of freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, commonplace in other framing documents at the time. Indeed, it took the high court eight decades to find an implied right of political communication in the nation’s founding document.
But an emotional attachment to the idea of the press as the fourth estate lives on.
Shifting this ideal to something that is robust and puts the wellbeing of the nation and its citizens first has proved politically impossible, ever since television licences were granted to newspaper owners. Australia has set global records for media ownership concentration.
Almost every prime minister since Robert Menzies has shared his assessment that he was constrained by the self-interest of the proprietors.
Therein lies the gritty truth about Australia’s media tradition. It has always been motivated more by commerce than democracy. Regulators evaluated each new takeover with a greater focus on what it would mean for advertising than for journalism or democracy.
The democratic role of the press was acknowledged in passing, but few owners took their eyes off the real commercial power that owning a newspaper bestows, as Sally Young has documented in her magnificent books, Paper Emperors and Media Monsters.
Journalists became more professional and assertive, and independent public broadcasters pushed back, but it was an unequal battle. It was only in 2019 when the ACCC documented that the overwhelming majority of advertising had left the traditional media for digital platforms that the essential, cross-subsidised, role of public interest journalism was elevated in policy terms.
The tension in this essential truth is again on display as the government wrings its hands about what to do in response to Meta’s unilateral decision to downgrade news and cease paying the $70m a year to media companies under the News Media Bargaining Code. Critics contend that the code was another shake down by the old media businesses with the aid of the government, but much of the money found its way into journalism.
The brutal reality is that the old models don’t work and tinkering at the edges won’t solve the fundamental problem if we really want the news media to be an adjunct of democracy.
Australia needs a wide-ranging public inquiry into the sort of media we need and deserve. An inquiry that is bigger than Murdoch, Meta and the public broadcasters, but includes them all.
It’s unfair to expect the new chair of the ABC, Kim Williams, to fix its many problems, the foundations of the whole sector have fundamentally changed and need to be rebuilt.
Governments need to take the challenge of the moment very seriously, not with a “slow-and-go easy style” or “huckstering, pawn-broking policy”.
A little over a century after The Cairns Post’s columns grew in unlikely soil, News Corp sold the building for $4m. The council did not constrain the sale by supporting its nomination for the Queensland Heritage Register. The temple of another age will soon be incorporated into, and dwarfed by, an eight-story apartment complex, “a poster child for tropical urbanism”, where people will struggle to find the robust information they need, to make sense of the world and imagine the future.
Julianne Schultz AM is the author of Reviving the Fourth Estate: Media, Accountability and Democracy. She has been a member of the board of the ABC and chair of The Conversation.
The brutal reality is that Australia’s media is broken and policy tinkering will not help
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16.03.2024
When the owner of the The Cairns Post opened a new office for his newspaper in 1908 he aimed high. The entrance was distinguished by a temple front and nine soaring Ionic columns: incongruently grand symbols, a long way from Greece.
Such was the ambition in far north Queensland in the newly federated Australia, that columns topped with scrolls seemed unremarkable. Cairns was driven, the paper thundered, it did not “want a pawnbroking, huckstering policy of the slow-and-go-easy style.”
As each new town was gazetted, a newspaper soon followed – generally owned by ambitious men active in local government, politics and property. More than a century later they now are closing.
Cairns’ visitors and residents are reminded that its paper today started just six years after the town itself, Est 1882 is emblazoned on the cornice above the columns. It was one of the scores of newspapers that recorded life in the often-violent frontier settlements.
Australians were voracious readers interested in politics; the colonies developed a global reputation as land of newspapers.
In the globalised 21st century the pattern has reversed. New thinking is needed.
News outlets, in all mediums – generally owned by distant companies – are closing. Queensland is dotted with what the ACCC calls news deserts. Ten of the 29 local government........
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