by Bruce Page
In 1892 Fink was crossing the Atlantic, home-bound westward. On board ship, an American politician gave a bumptious after-dinner speech about the general superiority of his nation’s institutions. Theodore offered his fellow passengers a witty rejoinder saying – he showed much familiarity with the America of the Gilded Age – it would be difficult indeed to rival America’s rogues and speculators. The applause was generous. But Theodore just then was going home to repair his own estate via devices at which Jay Gould and his Wall Street comrades might well have drawn the line.
Fink was a man whose gifts were manifold, but whose self-awareness could be absurdly inadequate. This may be no more than to say he was a representative Australian of his day, a member of a society constructed on the the latest blueprints, but in a location so distant as to make realistic comparison between it and other models an unfamiliar exercise. In Theodore Fink there was a permanent tension between personal opportunism and social idealism. Keith Murdoch, one generation younger, was a rather simpler phenomenon.
Keith Arthur Murdoch, the second son of seven children, was born in 1885, when his father Patrick was minister of the Presbyterian church standing at William and Lonsdale Streets, on the north edge of downtown Melbourne. Patrick was thirty-five, and had been ‘called’ to Australia from his first appointment at Cruden on Scotland’s North Sea coast. Two years later, he moved to Trinity Church in Camberwell, an eastern suburb several social rungs above its London prototype. There he preached for four decades, with a spell as Moderator of the Victorian Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, and then of its Australian Assembly. An important member of Trinity’s congregation was David Syme, proprietor of the Age.
The Scots in Melbourne were fewer than the English and the Irish, but among influential folk – especially conservative ones – they were significant. The two larger communities contained many working-class families, recruited from the urban poor of the south-east of England and of Ireland. But Scottish migrants were often educated professionals, like Patrick Murdoch, an Edinburgh graduate, and his much younger brother Walter, who arrived with him and graduated from Melbourne. Walter, a literary scholar with an uncomplicated style, became the more eminent, and a university now bears his name.
Australia’s conservative elite would have been a feeble thing without the Melbourne Scots – Sir Robert Menzies, its most effective leader, saw them as his personal tribe – and Patrick Murdoch had all of their characteristic connections and attitudes. Though he urged economic self-discipline in the manual classes, he was not the dour type of preacher. As a clubbable man himself, he was probably surprised to find that Keith was painfully shy, with a stammer which could render him incoherent. Keith did not want to follow Walter to the university, and told his parents that he had a ‘calling’ for journalism. They were disconcerted: though Patrick believed sturdily in a free press, the Murdochs probably cared no more than the Finks for its rank-and-file membership, and no sensible parent would advise a shy youth to become a reporter.
But David Syme was a friend, and in 1903 Patrick asked his help. The old Protectionist offered the minister’s son a trial as a suburban correspondent in Malvern, adjacent to Camberwell. On Sir Keith Murdoch’s own account some forty years later, it was not an enlightening professional start. The Age today is the urbane journal of the Melbourne middle class, kin to the Guardian or the Washington Post. It was very different when Keith began his career, and still exhibited many of the dubious qualities Twopeny had seen: ‘The Age is a penny 4pp sheet selling 50,000 daily … Its inventive ability, in which it altogether surpasses the London Daily Telegraph, has brought it the nickname of “Ananias” … It is protectionist to the backbone … and fosters a policy of isolation from the sister colonies.’
Syme’s notions of political economy might seem remote from the experiences of a junior recruit, but that was not quite so. The devotion of the Age to protection had once been something of a radical, populist cause, founded on the argument that Victoria could not develop reliable employment without manufacturing industries, and that New South Wales persisted with free trade out of subservience to the City of London. It was not a wholly perverse argument in an economy which stalled at any dip in the world’s appetite for primary goods. But Syme’s pursuit of it had grown perverse.
Around the turn of the century a tide of nationalist idealism flowed for federation. Australians were often pleased to find this emotion in themselves, but not Syme. He thought free trade close to depravity – suicide and madness were among its consequences – and a nation embracing sinful Sydney was undesirable altogether. Newspapers are often damaged by proprietorial monomania: the Age which the eighteen-year-old Murdoch joined was editorially sclerotic and obsolescent, and was a harsh employer. Formally it wasn’t even his employer – he brought in paragraphs from his allotted territory and got a penny and a half per line printed. This, as he said later, was sweating – a malpractice still common, in a business by then too profitable to need it. To be sure, Australia’s newspaper industry was not a particularly bad example. Indeed, reforms there were moving unusually fast, with papers like the Argus and the Herald in the lead. But they did not affect Keith Murdoch’s formative years at the Age.
While nineteenth-century newspapers still used hand-set type and sheet-fed presses, the lineage system perhaps gave flexibility to a trade dominated by small, fragile organisations. But technology transformed operational speeds and made news the business of substantial industrial firms. A man setting type by hand could not outpace the creator of copy. But Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype – tested at the New York Tribune in 1886, perfected by 1890 – allowed type to be set at 2,000 words an hour, and few people, if any, can produce – as against transcribe – as many sensible words in a day while discovering and checking the facts on which they rest.
Presses which printed from a continuous web – not sheet by sheet also became far more voracious: printing-output speeds went up by something like a hundredfold in the last decade of the nineteenth century. John Walter I, who struggled to install The Times’ steam-driven sheet-fed Koenig & Lomb press in 1820, would have been amazed to stand with Kipling in 1890 watching ‘The Harrild and the Hoe devour / Their league-long paper bale’.
The newspapers these machines produced were not altogether changed from the Port Phillip Herald, so far as the page-image itself went. But, as their content and volume expanded immensely, so did their distribution, raising cash which fed back into further expansion. News, thought John Bigelow of the New York Times (quoted at the head of this chapter), would soon overwhelm every other activity in a newspaper. His note of surprise may itself seem surprising. But, not long before Bigelow’s observation, newspapers filled much of their space with material rather like present-day lifestyle journalism. They still lacked the technical means to collect and distribute a comprehensive account of a city’s diurnal business and its relations with the world. Newspapers, before the continuous-web press with its online folding systems, were like the Internet where high-speed digital transmission isn’t available. They lacked bandwidth.
A history of the Australian Journalists’ Association (AJA) describes the input side of industrialised journalism under a heading ‘Slaves of the Press’. One example describes a Sydney linage reporter sent to find a remotely located US consul at midnight: he had to walk back to town over rough country after filing eighteen lines of copy (the telephone was as elusive as the consul), and his net return on six hours’ duty came – after paying his expenses – to threepence. In 1901 the daily paper in the prosperous Victorian city of Bendigo had eight wide columns, 22 inches long (representing no small bandwith): ‘The chief reporter once covered a farmer’s convention which began at 10 a.m. He finished his report at 3 o’clock next morning and was in a near-coma after having written 7½ columns by hand [something like 8,000 words]. The editor … rebuked him for not having filled the whole of the page allotted to him for the convention report.’ Such a regime virtually demands the inflation
of material. At the same time, it penalises habits of inquiry and verification – in any case difficult ones to acquire.
What Murdoch did for six years as a ‘stringer’ for the Age was comb the streets of Malvern for suburban trivia, working mostly on his own. His sources were in police courts and municipal offices, churches and local businesses. Work often got into proof, only to be squeezed out in the final make-up; if so, he was paid nothing. Shoe-leather work of this kind was and remains a proper part of any reporter’s training. But if it forms the staple element its effect will be destructive, for the journalist’s pay is essentially controlled by people who supply or withhold the news he or she needs. For good papers, it was already outdated when Keith Murdoch began work.
And the twentieth century – though it brought new corruptions – did eliminate the idea that apprenticeship based on linage would produce reliable reporters. Max Frankel’s account of his career on the New York Times is a classic journalistic memoir, and his beginning as the paper’s Columbia University correspondent in the early 1950s states the argument:
The pay was twenty dollars a week, nearly twice the cost of tuition. Unlike most newspapers’ stringers – so called because they were part-timers paid by the measurement of a string, or ruler, at the rate of a dollar or two per inch – I would be earning only about fifty cents an inch, or a penny a word. But the steady income meant I could be trusted not to press for the printing of worthless news and not to pad every item just to enlarge my income.
The worst evil of the Age’s system was not just that it led to poverty – though often it did – but rather the kind of alternative to poverty that it offered. Murdoch could have joined the staff, after a trial period. He did not, because he could earn more as a stringer – something between £4 and £6, then a tolerable weekly wage – though that was a process of chasing volume, inevitably at the expense of other criteria. The money offered an escape route from the employer who so costively produced it. By 1909 Keith Murdoch had saved enough to buy a third-class passage to London and sustain himself during an eighteen-month search for work with more prospect of professional growth. He hoped also to find a therapist to treat his stammer, and had some thought of a degree at the new London School of Economics, which was interested in older students (he was twenty-four).
He was not necessarily looking for a Fleet Street career, but even some record of employment and experience in London might have been tradable on a return to Melbourne, providing a chance of work on one of the leading papers – the Argus or the Herald. In the event, none of his academic or journalistic hopes succeeded. When he returned to Melbourne, the Age kept a promise it had made to re-employ him – but this time as a salaried man, with a 30 per cent wage-cut.
Murdoch never sentimentalised his trainee days. At an AJA dinner just before the Second World War he said they were marked by overwork, underpayment and unhappy professional consequences: ‘Looking back on those days I know that I would have been a better journalist had I not been sweated in my formative years.’ Powerful inhibitions operated against unionising the ‘slaves of the press’. The Age fired anyone suspected of such intentions, and journalists themselves were reluctant to follow a proletarian example.
Australia was not (and is not) a classless society, but class attitudes can be shifted by legislation. Wishing to reduce strikes by shearers and wharflabourers, the new Commonwealth had built a system of industrial courts to try employment issues, and settle them by award. The courts gave registered unions an alternative to physical muscle, and journalists saw that they too could use it, however slight their class-warrior potential. Their requirement was to assemble a sufficient list of members for registration, and this was done on 10 December 1910 at a meeting in a basement café on Flinders Street, advertised only by word of mouth. The list – kept secret at the time – contained 210 signatures, and one of them was Keith Murdoch’s.
In the complex, sometimes bitter arguments of the next few years Murdoch played no open part – pardonably, given the behaviour of the Age. Probably the decisive role in gaining acceptance for the Australian Journalists Association was that of senior executives on the more sophisticated papers – particularly James Edward Davidson, editor of the Herald. They were prepared to confront their fellow directors with the truth that businesses which were exploiting immensely productive technologies needed staff who were trained, educated and adequately paid and that criticising payment by volume was not Red revolution. Davidson, as Murdoch and others agreed later, was a ‘noble’ character.
But an important share of the reformers’ credit must go also to Davidson’s boss Theodore Fink. He had been effectively the chief executive of the Herald business since the turn of the century, supervising its steady investment in powerful American machinery. The reformed speculator was no natural friend of unions, but he was a strong believer in technical education and training (to which he had devoted both academic and political energy).
What came out of initial confrontation and subsequent collaboration between the new union and the more technically advanced employers was an elaborate but pragmatic system for training and grading newspaper employees – a working ethos not lost today (though often imperilled), under which the content of a metropolitan newspaper should chiefly be the first-hand work of its own regular staff. Such an ethos is not uniquely Australian, of course – similarities with America, especially, are strong and obvious. But the legal empowerment of unions, the long background of literacy and of political engagement – plus devotional attitudes to sport and its reporting – made for particular local force.
Effectively, the union’s demand was for human investment: Fink and his directors treated investment in equipment not as an alternative, but as a parallel activity. While negotiating with the new-born AJA, they were bringing three stateof-the-art Goss presses from America, and could reasonably claim that the machines, ‘two octuple and one quadruple [when] set up in the office in 1912 easily surpassed anything of the kind then in Australia and were level with, if not ahead of, any relative equipment then in the world. Running together on a 16-page paper, these three machines print, fold and deliver 100,000 copies an hour …’
At this stage, just before the First World War, press technology began generating the architectural form that journalists have been accustomed to ever since, though a slightly later account of the Herald’s own development records an important difference between practice in London and the southern hemisphere:
Extending well along the Collins-place front is the largest reporters’ room south of the Line. In London and other places where a considerable portion of the local news is supplied by agencies serving all the newspapers, comparatively few reporters are employed. On The Herald there is an exceptionally large staff of them. Although much of their work is done outside, every member of the staff has his own place in the office and may do a good deal of his writing inside.
When Max Frankel started work at the New York Times four decades later, the neophyte campus reporter encountered similar architecture (dating this time from 1903), later describing ‘the vast newsroom that stretched a full city block from Garst’s chair at the City Desk’.
The technology of news has since changed further: the addition of colour, the replacement of letterpress by lithography; the discovery that news isn’t necessarily connected with the printing of paper. But one shift which the big presses brought to news organisations remains with us today. They became teaching institutions – rather as the hospital, another great urban invention, had done earlier. They established the idea that journalism, like medicine, involves skills which must be learnt collectively, under a certain discipline, and to which sufficient years must be devoted.
At the heart of every industrial news system is a problem with no obvious solution – namely, how to make unpredictable events occur at orderly times. This turns into a very practical question, which resounds through the story of News Corporation: how many – or, as Rupert Murdoch has usually asked it, how
few – people are needed to make a news service? The answer requires experience, as Frankel records:
Only slowly did I understand why even the worldly New York Times carried so much provincial campus news. Its large local staff was really needed only at odd moments, when planes crashed into the Empire State Building or New York’s electricity suddenly gave out. Between crises, the locals were sent to cover insipid business lunches, charity dinners, and professional conventions, and their reports were supplemented by yet more trivia from dozens of suburban part-timers …
In relatively trivial – though useful – techniques of presentation, such as streamer headlines and half-tone display, the ‘colonial’ press was generally in advance of Northcliffe’s model before 1914. Part of the Murdoch legend is that after the war Keith Murdoch was a carrier of advanced technique from London to Melbourne, and scepticism should be applied even to that. In the fundamental matter of training and organising news-gatherers, the antipodeans were far in advance.
British journalists were not fools, and plenty of them saw the value of importing the Australian grading system before the First World War. Northcliffe devoted his powerful influence to frustrating every such attempt; it would lead, he said obscurely, to jam-factory journalism’. The skills that Keith Murdoch acquired from Northcliffe during the war had more to do with the management of political intrigue than with the management of newspapers.
The first edition of this book, written before the phone-hacking scandal, contained at Chapter 2 a detailed account of the activities of Rupert Murdoch’s father Keith as a correspondent in the First World War. Entitled ‘The Conspirator as Hero’, this challenged the view, widely circulated in Australia, that Keith was a fiercely independent reporter who ‘got our boys out of Gallipoli’.
