The big challenge for any professional journalist, particularly in a city such as Canberra, is that a good proportion of readers probably more than 30 per cent here know more about your subject than you do.
They know the subject because it is their job to know it. That job, perhaps in the public service, or business, or academia, gives them access to a lot of other information, including most of our sources of raw information. If the subject is within their field of interest, they may well have already skimmed the latest information upon it even before they pick up this newspaper, or another one.
This reader is in a very good position to know where a journalist is right or wrong, to guess about the sources of different perspectives or angles introduced into a story, or to decide whether a report adds value to what was already known. One's reputation ultimately depends on this market's assessment of one's reliability. And it is from this ''knowing'' audience that one gets most of one's stories. If it thinks your judgment awry, your appreciation of what is significant silly, or your capacity to assemble the facts or the considerations suspect, they are unlikely to want to read you.
In these senses, one of the edges that older journalists should have over their younger colleagues is a bit of memory and experience, some capacity to fit things into patterns, and some judgment about the relative importance of things. Perhaps even some wisdom, some knowledge of their readers and their communities and some understanding of the way things work. Such things do not come automatically with age, of course, but the older one is the less excuse there is for ignorance of history, the stock of received ideas, or even grammar.
The average reader of a quality newspaper is aged 40 or more, and has a big stock of history and experience in her own head. The younger generation of Australian journalists is fearfully bright, far brighter than my cohort, but has no memory of the Cold War, life before the mobile telephone, the internet or the personal computer, and a host of other things as well. More than half of all the journalists in Canberra indeed were feckless teenagers, not very interested in politics, during the time of the Keating government, and by 2010, if experience of the past 30 years is any guide, fewer than half of the Canberra Press Gallery will have worked in Canberra during the lifetime of the Howard government.
This week, Fairfax, publishers of eastern Australia's most significant serious newspapers, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review and The Canberra Times, announced a program of production economies, including an intention to dispense with about 5 per cent of its journalists. The Canberra Times, which has been through a strict regimen of management efficiency drives over the past decade, is not affected indeed was being held up to other newspapers as a model of how efficiency could be improved without affecting quality. Some journalists, obviously, were not much impressed: Fairfax journalists are on strike in Sydney and Melbourne, and see their strike as a war to protect the ''integrity'' of serious journalism against profit-focused accountants with little appreciation of the priestly nature of our trade. Fewer journalists, they fear, means dumbing down.
Some scornful competitors, such as The Australian, suggest that the real problem is Fairfax's diversion of resources from serious journalism into lifestyle pages and flashy supplements that not enough money is going into real news.
Journalistic ire is particularly directed at new Fairfax management, most of which came from Rural Press, which merged with Fairfax last year. Rural Press, which bought The Canberra Times 11 years ago, brought a host of regional and rural newspapers into the merger, as well as a well-developed reputation for tight cost control. They also have a reputation for steadily increasing group revenues, in spite of a decade or more of recession and drought in regional Australia. By contrast, Fairfax newspapers have been, like major newspapers about the world, in revenue and profit doldrums, slowly losing circulation and with many fearing a disaster from the internet, new communications technology, and the loss of classified advertising revenue. Many, not least the market that sets the share price, fear newspapers are being too slow to adapt to change, and that if they do not, they are likely to disappear.
The Herald and The Age have vastly more resources than The Canberra Times, and, of course, bigger circulations and revenue. Each has at least three times as many editorial staff for perhaps, on an average day, 20 per cent more editorial matter. Each of us, however, has to satisfy much the same sort of audience, although Canberra has more than 2.5 times the proportion of the A-B demographic the professional and managerial classes among its readers than these rivals.
Not only are there extra staff, but the average journalist at these papers is, on average, older and more experienced, probably by at least five years, than the average journalist here. That experience, and staff numbers, should allow more time for reflection, judgment and research on stories, as well as a higher quality of editing and sub-editing. Increasingly, however, managers are being more querulous in questioning whether this extra quality is either apparent or necessary, even justified.
If the management scheme is correct, these newspapers will lose some of their ''middle'', retaining, perhaps indulging, a relatively few top-name writers while employing on average more young journalists.
The real test of it all is not with newspaper bottom lines. It is with circulation and readership, bearing in mind that the core readership is of baby boomer age or of the generation above it. By no means does it follow that younger journalists will have lower standards. Or that the simultaneous renewed focus on ''new media'' means that proprietors have given newspapers away. But if 50-year-olds are not comfortable with being informed, or hectored, by 25-year-olds, it is likely the demise of the newspaper will be quicker.