‘Upheaval: Disrupted Lives in Journalism’ is about what happened to some of the thousands of Australian journalists cast aside in the past decade or so as the digital revolution upended the business model of traditional media companies.

As one of the journalists whose life was disrupted by – albeit in a modest way – the loss of the advertising subsidy of news, I was naturally keen to read this autopsy of what happened, why it occurred and what became of those many journalists on the receiving end of the change.

The book, edited by former journalists Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, originated in an academic project that was set up at the time of major redundancies by Fairfax Media, and later News Corp, in 2012. The resulting volume includes the results of extensive interviews with 57 journalists who lost their jobs from 2012 to 2016 – among them sub-editors, veteran writers, photographers and cartoonists.

Three of those interviewees – and the best parts of the book in my view – are the subject of standalone self-authored profiles, while the rest of the material is a write-around from the interviews, built into chapters such as how the subjects came to journalism, their early careers, big stories and how they exited the trade.

Of course, every individual’s account is interesting in its own way. But one of the first lessons that journalists are taught is that a story must answer the key questions of who, what, when, where and why. It’s the absence of any response to that last ‘w’ word that is so telling here.

Ultimately, ‘Upheaval’ is more a cultural/anthropological study of how journalism was done in Australia’s two big print companies, Fairfax and News Corp, in the 20th century. There is no authorial voice and little reference to broadcast media. And the book is not interested in a wider analysis of how the traditional media got it so wrong when the internet came along and how many those sacked journalists – so wedded to the antiquated industrial processes they worked within – were unable to reinvent themselves post-print.

To be fair to the editors, this is not what they set out to do. This was an Australian Research Council-funded project which appears to have been intended, as The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy observes on the front-cover blurb, to have the journalists “turn the spotlight on themselves” for once. And that’s I think where the problem lies with the resulting book.

Unfortunately, for all their skills as observers of the world, journalists are notoriously unable or unwilling to see how the business that subsidised their story-telling actually worked and the economic forces that destroyed them. So there is a lot of nostalgia here for the sweary romance of the newsroom, the camaraderie of the old industrial processes and the love of telling a “yarn”. That is all fine in itself, but you could take workers displaced by technology from any industry of the past 20 years and generate a book full of similar stories. Everybody thinks their own experience is unique.

The point about journalism, however, is that it plays an important public function beyond the ups and downs of listed commercial media companies and beyond, as important and heart-breaking as they are, the disrupted lives of the denizens who worked within the belly of those beasts.

Yes, it is a fine idea to preserve the stories of those who were made redundant by the dying media companies, what drew them to journalism and the sorrows and joys along the way. But without a bigger view about what journalism is and how it can preserved outside the old business model, this feels more like a museum piece in which visitors are invited to peer at the stuffed exhibits behind the glass.

There is also an assumption throughout the book that these events just ‘happened’ to Fairfax and News Corp and that no-one had any agency. But it is possible to both feel sympathy for those who were ‘disrupted’ and appalled that so many people did not see this coming at least 10 years before.

My own story is that I got out in 2006, having been involved with new media ventures at Fairfax after a career in broadcasting and wires. And it had been clear since the day I arrived six years before that the company was living on borrowed time. Even aside from the wrecking forces of the internet, Fairfax was appallingly managed and riven by petty rivalries among factions. Many senior and very well paid editors were technologically illiterate and looked down their noses at those of us who were trying to do what Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian was attempting – thinking beyond the newspaper. While the editors made noises about innovation, the businesses were hooked on the fat profit margins of print and did not really want to change – a textbook example of the boiling frog syndrome.

The truth is that many journalists’ jobs might have been saved had those managers and senior editors taken more seriously the need to innovate and learned to build leaner, more nimble newsrooms much earlier than they did. By the way, for those who say it couldn’t be done, look at the successes of The New York Times which realised early on that it had to take digital seriously and where digital revenues now outpace print.

‘Upheaval: Disrupted Lives in Journalism’ is a worthy project, but without addressing the ‘why’ question it feels more like a requiem for a certain way of doing journalism than what it could have been – a vision of what journalism can become.


1 Comment

Daniel · August 5, 2021 at 10:02 AM

Firstly – have to say its good to see you posting again and I look forward to more of the same. My background is IT for over 40 years – now a veteran of several generations of disruption. In the 00s I was consulting in Sydney, amongst my clients was – News Limited. I presented the disruption story and how in our industry the world changed and each time the journey was not identical but similar. History didn’t repeat but it sure as hell rhymed. Deaf ears, and some serious insults from a hard core of very angry old men.
The why that you are asking about is the same why that saw so many of the great tech firms of the 80s disappeared off the face of the earth.
Its mostly about groupthink and the reward system built into business models.
I now look back at meetings I had then in the Holt Street office, where I was accused of being an anorak wearer, with a sense of inevitability. They were dinosaurs and they die the way of the dinosaur. Sorry. It was always going to end that way. I know that now but wish I hadn’t been so keen to save them then, maybe I should have just agreed and taken the fee anyway 🙂

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *