I’m coming a bit late to the party here, but I suppose something has to be said about Fairfax Media CEO Brian McCarthy’s criticism of the ABC Open initiative, which was announced by Mark Scott late last year at the Media 140 Conference, and  officially launched last week.

For those who are also late catching up, McCarthy claimed that the ABC venture would force newspaper closures in rural Australia.

McCarthy said the ABC Open network ”threatens to undermine the viability of the excellent service commercial media organisations such as Fairfax Media and Rural Press have provided to regional and rural Australia for decades”.

”I do not believe it is the role of the ABC to disrupt the commercial landscape by building empires with public funds.” 

I think this is mostly tosh.

For starters, ABC Open is mainly about providing the services of professional content makers to ordinary people to tell their own stories. There will be a heavy emphasis on training citizens in the use of digital media. All this  is an appropriate role for a public broadcaster.  If it works properly, it will be community led and not the kind of thing that Fairfax Media has ever done, or tried to do, or even looked like doing in rural Australia or anywhere else. 

Secondly, the ABC Open sites will not take advertising. The Rural Press part of Fairfax Media will retain its monopoly or at best duopoly on newspaper advertising in many, many regional towns. 

Thirdly, Rural Press-Fairfax Media looks a bit silly trying to take the moral high ground here. They have had rural Australia on a platter for many years. What is the result? Extremely patchy. In some areas, the journalism is entirely token. There are some good local papers, but many that are laughably poor, lazy and complacent. I wrote about this last year after a trip through the Rural Press heartland of central New South Wales. There are some quotes from that earlier post below.

What would I do if I were McCarthy? Start holding an annual Fairfax editors’ conference to bring city and country together, and generate enthusiasm, coherence, vision and ideas. Network my journalistic effort so that reporters in the capitals were fed with locally relevant questions to put to politicians, and rural editors were routinely provided with the results. Appoint a water correspondent to service all titles. Appoint a Murray-Darling basin correspondent to service all titles. Sic an investigative team on to the relationships between the big supermarkets and primary producers. Get someone to take a good hard look at the way National Parks are managed and maintained, with results to run across the group with local leads. Oh, and so much more.

Fairfax Media/Rural Press is the only media organisation in the country (with the exception of the ABC) with both regional presence and depth of journalistic talent at its disposal. This represents a golden opportunity, that has been largely wasted. 

None of the suggestions above  would cost mega-bucks, but they would make it look like Fairfax Media actually understood and cared about rural Australia – a claim that is so often made, but rarely fulfilled.

Then, perhaps, I wouldn’t have to be so worried about competition and my audience becoming more media-savvy.

If McCarthy has a point, it is not because ABC Open is in competition, but because the audience itself may be more likely to revolt once it is trained in digital media skills.  If I were McCarthy, I would be worried about community run advertising sites springing up in competition to my mastheads, and would be putting in some consistent effort into my own websites – something that is still sadly lacking, even though this was given as one of the reasons for the merger of Rural Press and Fairfax Media many moons ago.

If the ABC contributes to digital literacy in the bush, then the day in which communities decide they are sufficiently dissatisfied with the Fairfax Media effort may well be brought closer.

Here is what I wrote last year about my trip through the Rural Press heartland:

Sometimes you can see the nature of organisations more clearly from the periphery than from the heart  — although, of course, rural NSW is the heart of the old, pre-Fairfax Rural Press.

But at a time when the future of the Fairfax Media group again hangs in the balance, it has been an interesting time to get away from the city mastheads, read the smaller papers and reflect on how the company has dealt with things since the Fairfax/Rural merger in May 2007.

The main conclusion is that there has been little interest, or ability, to unify the various businesses. They are nothing if not various. What energies have been expended have been focused on unifying the advertising, not the quality of the journalism.

Anyone who follows the newspaper business will not be surprised to hear that it is difficult to find a local newspaper out here that is not ultimately owned by Fairfax Media and Rural Press.

But the mastheads have come to the group in many different ways. Albury Wodonga Border Mail, for example, was bought by Fairfax before the Rural Press merger. The vibrant Riverina Media Group was bought by Rural Press just days before the Fairfax merger. That purchase, which brought papers such Griffith’s The Area News and Leeton’s The Irrigator into the stable, caused the competition regulator some angst.

The focus of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s concern was not the journalistic content, but advertising. The Rural, a weekly newspaper inserted into the Riverina Media Group’s various papers, was the main competition to Rural Press’s flagship The Land. In the end the ACCC decided not to oppose the purchase, for reasons spelt out (though hardly in detail or length) here. They amounted to a belief that the risk of new entrants, plus the chance that smaller players might step up to the mark, would discourage Fairfax Media/Rural Press from using its market position to push up advertising rates. That strikes me as an optimistic view, but if the ACCC is right, then I reckon Rural Press could indeed be vulnerable.

The reason is the journalism. What has Fairfax Media done with its unique combination of real regional presence combined with depth of journalistic talent?

The answer is, not very much.

None of the papers, I think it is safe to say, knock your socks off as ground-breaking examples of local journalism. Indeed, the main impression is how badly rural readers are served by their newspapers.

This is the land in which the manager of the Southern Australia Meat and Livestock Australia can get a 16-paragraph running quote on the front page (The Lachlander, in a splash with the racy headline “Merino Education Day”.

Or where a front-page story announcing the re-election (unopposed) of the local mayor for the sixth consecutive year includes not a critical comment or perspective, no suggestion that it might be part of the job of the local paper to critically review the record. (The Observer, Coly Point) and another front-page lead paragraph can read “For 60 years the Murrami CWA has been part of the community.” (well, hold the front page). (The Irrigator, Leeton).

We all know that local newspapers run differently  — that the acerbic and corrosive journalistic style of the big city might not always be welcome or appropriate. And it is all too easy for people such as me to breeze in and critique editors who are under resourced and who doubtless know their communities better than me. The farmers I talked to on this trip regarded their local newspapers as organs of record in a way that has largely ceased to be the case in the city. They clipped reports of the local show or pictures of family members, valuing them for their own sake.

Yet, I firmly believe that news  — real news, in the sense of reporting that tells you things you didn’t know of consequence to your community  — is a fundamental human desire, even need. Too many of these papers are news lite. As individual operators, one could understand their failings. As outlets of Australia’s second largest newspaper publisher, they are sad.

Surely at a time of drought, reduced water allocations to irrigators, political neglect and so on and so forth, there is more to say and room for a sharper edge to rural news reporting? And where is the leveraging of the journalistic strength of Fairfax? The investigative pieces on water allocations, that could run in the cities and across the group? Or the gutsy state political reporting of issues of rural relevance? Or the evidence that Fairfax reporters are primed with tough questions from the regions to throw at state and federal politicians? So much potential, unexploited.

There is news out here, and some of the better mastheads carry it.The Land has real news in it. So, too, some of the former Riverina Media Group publications, which retain a livelier feel than many other Rural Press titles. And the Central Western Daily’s Janice Harris turns in a sharp court report.

But one gets the clear impression that it is hit and miss, dependent on whether or not the newspapers have a gutsy editor or a vigorous junior journalist destined for bigger things. For much of country Australia, courts go unreported. Council meetings are reported only via an anodine post mortem from the mayor. Press releases are run verbatim and advertisers get advertorial run as forward page leads. State MPs may be asked tough questions by their electors, but not, it seems by their local journalists.

There is absolutely no sign of group vision in these newspapers. The main impression one gets is that, for better or worse, Fairfax Media has put hardly any effort at all into bringing their acquisitions together, or in imposing any uniform standards of news reporting.