Name: David Anthony Submission: I Worked for the North Queensland
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Name: David Anthony Submission: I worked for the North Queensland Newspaper Company from 1982-2000. In 1982, NQN owned The Townsville Daily Bulletin, Townsville Advertiser, The Northern Miner (Charters Towers), The North Queensland Register, Innisfail Advocate, The Tablelander (Atherton) and various tourist publications and had significant shares in the Lower Burdekin Newspaper Co. (Ayr Advocate and Home Hill Observer). In 1984, Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd took over NQN. It went on to buy the Bowen Independent, the Herbert River Express, the Burdekin papers and at one time established a paper in Tully to challenge the local independent paper. The Tully venture failed. With Murdoch's takeover of the Herald and Weekly Times in 1987, the Cairns Post, the Port Douglas Gazette and the Tablelands Advertiser (Mareeba) were added. In the 18 years I worked for NQN and News Ltd, I enjoyed autonomy and support as the editor of The Northern Miner and the Bowen Independent. I enjoyed working for News Ltd, which then seemed to value its regional newspapers, its editors and the unique nature of the communities these newspapers served. There was a perception in the community that the Townsville Bulletin and the other NQN papers were politically biased. Certainly, the editor pontificated in his editorials, but I found the NQN papers before and after the Murdoch takeover to be fair and balanced. I reluctantly left the Murdoch-owned NQN in 2000 to try my hand at other things. However it was about this time that I noticed the growing imbalance in the political reporting in the Murdoch flagship, the Australian, not so much The Courier-Mail. Unless required to for work-related purposes, I found I no longer read these papers religiously because of the bias creeping into news stories and front page stories instead of being limited to opinion pages or comment pieces. In about 2010, I became aware that the Tablelander and the Tablelands Advertiser became one business with a single editor. I thought this was unusual at the time as I was unaware of the structural changes in NQN and the former Herald and Weekly Times newspapers. They had been combined into a single entity within News Ltd (soon to be rebranded as News Corp) with an overarching general manager responsible for all of Murdoch's North Queensland newspapers. I didn't generally appreciate these changes until I returned to work for Murdoch as the editor of the Tablelander and the Tablelands Advertiser in 2014. Pre-2014 the Cairns Post had a chequered recent history. One editor in the 2000s had received an honorable mention on Media Watch for using the paper to sell his property. https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/cairns-post-realtor-check/9975984 A senior reporter who blew into town in the late 2000s used his column to vilify our then Mayor Val Schier. The Cairns Post ran an extremely biased campaign since Val Schier's election in 2008. Two other reporters joined the aforementioned senior reporter to stitch up Val with a gratuitous attack on her support for a proposed ukulele festival; incorrect accusations that she paid cash for comment on a local radio talkback show; and ridiculed her for her vision for a Cairns Entertainment Precinct. There were sustained attacks on Val until the Cairns Post realised the Ukulele Festival would attract thousands of people to Cairns; the cash-for-comment scandal had been exposed by a local independent blogger as a plot by the then council CEO and the council's head media officer to destabilise Val and they were to resign; and the realisation the $154 million CEP had won federal and state government support and would have been worth hundreds of jobs during construction and provide a multi-purpose cultural and entertainment precinct for the city. The belated support of the Cairns Post for the CEP, sadly, was not enough to prevent its scrapping when the Newman Government and the council changed at the elections in 2012. To be fair, all the journalists and editors involved in this skulduggery are no longer with the Cairns Post, though one of the journalists now works for the Courier-Mail. But these are prime examples of how poor leadership of a dominant newspaper can impact on the local community. Also pre-2014, Murdoch had got rid of all printers and compositors at its sites and all administration staff at regional papers were axed. In 2014 , News Corp rolled out its Methode production system in the Cairns region. It had been rolled out progressively around the country for some years and it had changed the look of Murdoch papers. Methode is a fully integrated system for writing stories, processing photos and laying out and subbing newspapers with the use of pre-prepared templates. Editors and subeditors were required to use these templates with minimal fiddling. This system limited the length of stories and the style of headlines. The daily newspapers had greater scope for layout and headline style, but regional papers could only use bold-face headlines. Most regional papers had a uniform masthead, removing their regional identity. The Advertiser and the Tablelander were spared the house-style masthead because of their proximity to each other. The colourful bright and breezy style of the Port Douglas and Mossman Gazette and the Cairns Sun were completely lost. In fact, after a period since Methode was introduced, the excellent Cairns Sun was canned as its counterpart in Townsville had been a couple of years earlier. The Murdoch business model in North Queensland (Townsville and Cairns regions) was ever-changing since the regions were combined as one business, but moreso after the introduction of Methode in 2014. Every year since then, Murdoch got rid of staff and changed the way it did things at all his papers in North Queensland. Due to the independent Mareeba-based paper, the Express, undercutting News Corp's advertising rates, the Tablelands Advertiser found it hard to compete and in 2017, the masthead was retired. The highly profitable Tablelander, the most profitable paper at least in Far North Queensland, continued as a bigger paper but with fewer staff. As journalists left, they were not replaced. Before Murdoch closed the Tablelander as part of the 2020 closures, editorial staff comprised only an editor and a journalist covering a vast region comprising Tablelands Regional and Mareeba Shire council areas. In 2017/2018 the new business model required regional papers to "Put the Cairns Post First". We were required to be on call to write stories for the Cairns Post while at the same time producing our own newspapers with less staff. On one occasion in 2019 I was asked by Malanda police to put something in the next edition of the Tablelander asking for community support to find a hit-and-run driver. I put the notice on the Tablelander's Facebook page without creating a link with a paywall to the story. I received a very angry phone call from the present editor of the Cairns Post who told me "If you don't change your attitude, David, the Tablelander's doors will close. I cannot be any more blunt than that, the Tablelander's doors will close." I was aware that News Corp was planning to close down the offices and get staff to work from home, but the threat to close the paper altogether shocked me and I regret that I didn't challenge the Cairns Post editor on this. Why would you close down a paper as profitable as the Tablelander and more respected than the poorly produced and poorly managed independent paper? Well, I decided to resign and left the Tablelander in January 2020 and the rest is history. The Tablelands community misses their local paper and have turned to the Mareeba Express which has so failed spectacularly to be the new paper for the whole of the Tablelands. The only remnant of the Tablelander is its Facebook page which only runs liinks to Cairns Post stories where you need to access a paywall, a constant complaint from a community that has enjoyed free newspapers for decades. The Cairns Post runs regional stories in its Saturday edition, but these only comprise 3-7 pages and covers the regions of all the closed newspapers. Until the Mareeba Express steps up, the Tablelands will continue to be poorly served. Not only the journalists had been impacted. Advertising sales support staff were all eventually axed. Only two staff were left at the Tablelander and they constantly under pressure to sell into the Cairns Post over and above the Tablelander. What I ask is why didn't News Corp offer its papers for sale? Why didn't News Corp speak to the communities before making the closures? Why close a highly profitable paper like the Tablelander? Murdoch ownership of local papers has always been a sore point in local communities, and now Murdoch has committed the ultimate betrayal by closing these papers. I have always operated as a fiercely local editor who is responsive to local community needs. News Corp may have once celebrated editors like me and their papers, now it trashes these assets. The ill will to these communities is felt acutely even though people have been accepting the fait accompli. I would like to see a royal commission investigate all these questions in relation to the Tablelander. To the credit of the present editor, the Cairns Post is probably the only Murdoch paper in the country that endeavours to provide fair play to all political parties, but sadly it is a pale shadow of its old self.