When News Limited recently announced changes to regional newspapers in Queensland , former Townsville Bulletin reporter , Malcolm Weatherup , was interviewed by Emily Bourke of the ABC, part of which follows :
EMILY BOURKE: Job losses are also hitting News Limited publications, especially across regional Queensland. As part of the media group's restructure, 17 positions will be lost from the Gold Coast Bulletin and Gold Coast Sun, with more jobs to go from the Townsville Bulletin and Townsville Sun, and the Cairns Post and the Cairns Sun. Malcolm Weatherup is a retired journalist and a former reporter with the Townsville Bulletin. He resigned in 2010 in disgust at the new direction of the newspaper. I asked him what the job cuts will mean.
MALCOLM WEATHERUP: It's a disaster. The journalism at the Bulletin has been a disaster for a little while now under a series of editors, because they've trivialised it and they've gone down the tabloid road. Now people in a small community, relatively small, we have a readership area of about 280,000, they're not used to that sort of thing and nor do they want it. These, all these changes are being made from the way we cover news to now the digitalisation of everything, are being made on metropolitan whims and taste.
EMILY BOURKE: Does a relocation of the sub-editing process from the regional town centres to Brisbane really make that much of a difference to the journalistic output?
MALCOLM WEATHERUP: I would think it does because you're robbing a community of its history and its community memory if you take people away from here and the paper is actually sub-edited 1,500 kilometres away.They will have reporters up here. But there's always that thing in newsrooms, which you may or may not know yourself, that somebody will have a thought about something and you chat and you talk and newsrooms were vibrant, interesting places about information.That won't exist anymore and the people who know the local scene just simply will not be here to do it and I also know how the sub-hubs work down there. I know several people who work in them in Melbourne and in Brisbane and it's really the first cab off the rank, you'll be doing a story about the Gold Coast, then you grab the next one, which might be about Toowoomba, and then you might do one about Townsville. Sub-editors' knowledge has been legend in newspapers and we've lost that.
EMILY BOURKE: What do you make of this push, given the growth corridors into Queensland regional areas, I mean, there's still a population base to be catered to?
MALCOLM WEATHERUP: Therein lies, in the facts and figures, therein lies how the disconnect happened, between the community and the paper. When I arrived back here in Townsville in 2002, in the following eight years, the masthead of Saturday, which is the flagship of course, was steady around 41,500. And it remained that way year after year after year, but in that time, we gained 40 or 50,000 people, so in essence, the paper was losing even by standing still.Now, that continued and now they're in a nosedive, as far as the circulation goes. And that, in itself, says what it's about. People are very disparaging about the way the paper's gone in its tabloid area.
EMILY BOURKE: What's the feeling within the community?
MALCOLM WEATHERUP: They're not happy with it, but the dissatisfaction is pretty widespread, especially since it's gone down-market. And this is a wealthy, well-educated town, it's a great place to live as we all know and that's why we're here. But, there is an element that they're trying to wrong-headedly get to buy newspapers, and that is the, sort of, down-market and, what you would call, bogans, I guess. And they try to appeal to that readership and of course they're exactly the people who do not read newspapers.
* Malcolm Weatherup was a news producer at SBS from 1997-2002; at the Townsville Bulletin, among other rounds, he covered courts and wrote a lively weekend piece , The Magpie . Readers will notice that bogans have been getting a lot of attention in the NT News of late. It would be good if the local ABC asked the NT News exactly what the centralised changes mean for the Darwin paper , its pages made up in Adelaide, and under editorial control by one person in the city of (closed down ) churches along with several other papers, including one in WA .Obvious follow ups and questions are not very evident in Darwin reporting circles.
