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They pushed for women to get the vote in Australia's national elections. They brought down a central bank board member. And they helped convict a state official.
The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), The Age and their sister publications at Fairfax Media have been among the most powerful voices in Australia for more than 150 years, shaping public opinion on politics, exposing shady business practices and targeting vast criminal operations. Once mocked as a "Granny" for its cautious, worldly perspective, The SMH long ago embraced the reputation and the nickname.
But Fairfax's newspapers now face a diminished future, with company executives even discussing whether to stop printing The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on weekdays. If they do, it would signal a new low in the decline of the global newspaper business, the radical retreat of centuries-old, mainstream metropolitan newspapers with national influence.
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The prospect has dismayed many Australians who wonder what it means for civic life and what it says about the country's place in the world. Australians consider themselves a highly informed and highly educated society, despite their geographic isolation. And The SMH and Age, with a history of sending correspondents to far-flung locales like the battlefields of Europe and Southeast Asia, have been central to the discourse.
The weakening of independent voices like The SMH also leaves the Australian market increasingly dominated by the partisan agenda of News Corporation, which owns the country's top three newspapers by weekday circulation. The struggles at Fairfax represent an especially satisfying victory for News Corporation, run by the home-grown billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who turned his family's original asset - a single provincial Australian newspaper - into a global media empire. Although News Corporation has faced its own financial strains, its other successful businesses, like a real estate website, have provided better support for its journalistic operations.
Trouble at Fairfax Media "constitutes a crisis in civic journalism in our country, because the resources will no longer be there," said Eric Beecher, a former top editor at The SMH and at News Corporation who is now the publisher of Crikey, a news website. "The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have always done the heavy lifting of civic journalism and investigative journalism."
The Chief Executive for Fairfax Media, Greg Hywood, said the company had not made a decision whether to halt weekday printing, although it was under review. If printing is halted, he said, the company's journalistic approach would not be affected. "Our readers have never been hungrier for good-quality news reporting," Hywood said.
When SMH opened its state-of-the-art, $260 million presses in 1995, the newspaper's Saturday edition was a hefty 400 pages. The company predicted it would easily grow to 600 pages. After all, SMH and the rest of the Fairfax Media papers had practically cornered the market in Sydney and Melbourne for classified advertising for cars, jobs and real estate. Those so-called rivers of gold helped support a robust reporting operation.
"We wondered how on earth we would print a paper that size," said Hywood, who was once the Washington correspondent for another Fairfax newspaper, The Australian Financial Review. It was also the same year that Fairfax started its first digital news site, in retrospect, roughly the peak for the print business. The Saturday edition has now shrunk to around 200 pages. Fairfax has cut more than 500 jobs at city newspapers over the last five years, including 100 in April, according to Australia's union for journalists. And last year The SMH's cherished printing presses were sold for $34 million.
The headwinds now buffeting The SMH and Age are global, as the internet erodes the protections once afforded by geography. There's the ubiquitous competition from Facebook and Google. Digital native publications like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post each have small Australian newsrooms without the sizable costs of legacy papers like The SMH.
The "rivers of gold" have evaporated. Advertising and subscriptions have particularly wilted on weekdays; weekends now represent two-thirds of the revenues at Fairfax's major newspapers.
In the sign of the depths of the print problems, the company this month wrote off much of its investment in the newspapers. Fairfax's main saving grace has been its fast-growing real estate website, Domain, which has helped offset the losses.
Such industry challenges forced papers in some large American cities to rethink their print presence years ago. The Times-Picayune of New Orleans cut printing to three days a week, while The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is online only. Facing cutthroat competition in the crowded British market, The Independent in London, which started in the 1980s to shake up the media establishment, went digital this year.
Some of The SMH's wounds were self-inflicted.
As the dot-com boom took off and media companies moved online, Fairfax separated its digital operations, in the hope of eventually taking the group public. At The SMH, there were two newsrooms, one for the newspaper and one for the web.
The division created a rift. A younger online staff chased clicks, loading the site up with gossip-fueled content, heavy on sex, celebrity and crime. It rankled more seasoned veterans in the print newsroom, who lamented the shift away from weightier topics like the domestic economy and global politics.
"It was viewed that online there was a lot more Paris Hilton than Paris, France, and that to win online you needed to be a tabloid newspaper," said Mark Scott, a former Fairfax executive who most recently served as chief executive of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "The Herald's strength had always been its great quality, broadsheet traditions."
The newsrooms were eventually merged and the website now takes a somewhat more balanced approach. But stories about Kylie Jenner's Vogue cover and the abs of Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, are still intermingled online with more hard-hitting newspaper articles about the terror links in a child care fraud and the serious flaws in the country's census.
Like many media operations, Fairfax is trying to strike a difficult balance. The meatier topics may play well to the newspaper audience, generally an older crowd. But Hywood, the Fairfax chief, said that online readers, who skew younger, want a broader mix.
In terms of readers, the digital strategy appears to be clicking. The SMH is the nation's leading website, by the number of paying subscribers.
"That can be criticised by people who prefer highbrow content," said Megan Brownlow, an executive director in the Sydney offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the consulting firm. "But when you're in a numbers game like internet advertising, highbrow content is hard to monetise."
Even so, it strikes a nerve within the newsroom, which worries about losing its voice within Australian society.
The ranks of The SMH, like so many newspapers around the world, have been decimated by cuts over the years. Reporters have gone on strike, deriding the rounds of job losses.
Some losses have cut to the core. Four years ago, 70 journalists were laid off within one week. Gone were the urban affairs editor, a senior political correspondent, a specialist feature writer, a senior business reporter, the health editor, arts editor and senior crime reporter.
Hywood denies that reporters are now thin on the ground. Fairfax plans to use the profits from non-news properties, like Domain and a television streaming service, Stan, to promote and support the company's journalism.
But the financial picture at the newspapers continues to deteriorate, forcing Fairfax to contemplate the once-unthinkable. If The SMH drastically cuts its publication schedule, the fear inside and outside the newsroom is that the journalistic endeavours will suffer.
Kate McClymont, 58, has been breaking news at The Sydney Morning Herald for decades. One of the newspaper's marquee journalists, McClymont appears in the paper's ads.
"We have been holding the powerful in this city to account for a long time," McClymont said.
Most recently, she pursued a state government minister, Eddie Obeid, uncovering how his private businesses were improperly benefiting from his public role. Obeid was found guilty in June of misusing his public office. He will soon face a second court case over mining leases he obtained from the state government.
"We have shone a light where crooks would prefer places remained dark," McClymont said. "I hate the idea of people getting away with anything."
"It is bad for democracy," she added, "if this voice is diminished in any way."
Some publications that exist in Digital-only format
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The Independent
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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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Lloyd's List
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Montreal La Presse
- Metro, London
©2016 The New York Times News Service
