How we lost our Voice
- Author:
- Lawrence Gibbons
- Posted:
- Thursday, 15 April 2010
Three years ago Rupert Murdoch bought just about every last independent newspaper in inner Sydney, including the Wentworth Courier, the Inner Western Courier, the Southern Courier, et al. When Murdoch’s News Limited purchased the entire FPC Courier weekly newspaper chain for $180 million, he also bought the Village Voice. The 32 page monthly newspaper was once a proudly parochial local newspaper. Nowadays the Village Voice is the evil empire’s secret weapon in the transnational corporation’s blatant bid to establish an absolute media monopoly in the city’s lucrative inner west. While News Limited charges thousands to advertise in its larger distribution glossy, home delivered weekly papers, the global media corporation engages in predatory practices, selling ads below cost in its monthly Voice edition, in order to keep smaller, local competitors out of the market.
Launched 16 years ago by a local Balmain resident, Kylie Davis chose to name her brand-new micro community newspaper after the largest and once venerable alternative newspaper in New York. Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer launched the real Village Voice with a few friends in the 50’s and Murdoch owned it in the 70s and 80s. Nowadays the New York newsweekly is part of a large national newspaper group of 15 street papers valued at $191 million (roughly the size of the Courier chain in Sydney). The US Village Voice group recently lost a multi million-dollar court case brought against it by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. A California court found the Village Voice group had engaged in anti competitive, predatory practices after it had published the SF Weekly at a $16 million dollar loss for more than a decade. A California court awarded the family-owned, medium sized enterprise $21 million, which the Voice refuses to pay, while it appeals the ruling. Under California law, the SF Weekly is required to post a bond while it appeals the decision, but the Village Voice group has refused to do so prompting the courts to order the SF Weekly to turn over half of all ad receipts to the Guardian. With the Village Voice’s largest creditor the Bank of Montreal now involved in the dispute, the matter is in and out court regularly, with the story filling the pages of North America’s alternative press ad infinitum.
California’s anti trust laws were written during the Great Depression to prevent large businesses from crushing smaller competitors; Australia’s laws are a toothless-tiger by comparison. The market regulator, the ACCC yawned when Murdoch acquired the Courier newspapers, shutting down the Glebe (once an independent weekly), and propping up the Village Voice in order to prevent other small papers from competing in the market. Who would have thought the chardonnay sipping liberal enclave of Balmain would find reason to agree with the economic assessment of the National party conservative Barnaby Joyce, who wrote, “We have laws in Australia that have allowed the greatest centralisation of retail wealth in the world… We lack the political will, on both sides, to have the Teddy Roosevelt fortitude to take on a Rockefeller…We justify the centralisation of media while slowly whittling away their access to information.”
In the inner west, the community must rely almost exclusively on News Limited for local news coverage, allowing the corporation to put its spin on just about everything. Just nine months ago, the Alternative Media Group of Australia, the publishers of the City Hub launched the Inner West Independent, a new monthly newspaper as a counterpoint to News Limited, who will stop at nothing to keep a competitor out of the market. At a recent Leichhardt Council meeting, a report was tabled recommending that Council continue to advertise in the Independent. After less than a year, a Council funded study found that an impressive 20% of all Leichhardt residents read the Independent. One week later, News Limited’s Inner West Courier reported, “The publisher of CIAO magazine has attacked Leichhardt Council for spending more than $50,000 advertising in the Inner West Independent when the council’s own survey on local media revealed four out of five people in the municipality had never read the publication.” In response I sent the following letter to the editor of the Inner West Courier, “What irks the publisher of Ciao (and Murdoch’s hired hacks as well) is that Leichhardt Council might be spending an alleged $50,000 in the Inner West Independent. The year before that, when Leichhardt Council spent over $100,000 with News Limited, Ciao’s publisher Sonia Komaravalli didn’t object. She was too busy running cheap advertorial spreads on behalf of other struggling small businesses to notice local politics. In order to compete with News Limited, who has been selling ads below cost in the Village Voice, poor Sonia has had to sell cheaper and cheaper ads. Each month News Limited sucks millions out of the Inner West marketplace by engaging in predatory pricing practices in the Village Voice on the one hand and while selling expensive ads in your other high end glossy, home littered product, with all profits going off shore to a Delaware based transnational corporation. It’s no wonder you folks at the Courier feel so sorry for poor Sonia. Or that she can’t afford to send a credible journalist to cover community politics.” Unsurprisingly, News Limited did not publish my reply.
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April 16th, 2010 @ 12:34 am
Lawrence,
Thank you for writing this piece! Independant media adds so much value to our culture; papers like City Hub stop it from being controlled by one person
Its more or less the same on the North Shore where murdochs monopoly of our two local papers – northside and north shore – rarely result in unbiased reporting of local politics
You obviously have a lot of guts to post something like this, thank you!
K
April 16th, 2010 @ 11:14 pm
Yes agree, unfortunately I think the Central Mag is also often biased and represents Town Hall more than the residents. I think residents should put signs on their fences saying “no junk mail and no central mag.”
April 19th, 2010 @ 10:14 pm
Here’s an example of the Southern Courier printing City of Sydney propaganda as if it were meaningful news.
The article linked below tries to give the impression that the new Bourke Road Cycleway is being embraced enthusiastically by cyclists when the reverse is true. The total increase of cyclists in the peak period only amounted to about 20 or so cyclists per hour. Looks like even cyclists think it is in the wrong place.
Work it out yourself! If the increase of cyclists on Bourke and Doody street intersection was 26% and is now 41 cyclists per peak hour then that is an increase of only about 10 cyclists an hour!
While the increase on the Bourke & Bowden Street intersection of 36% giving a total of 32 cyclists is also about 11 extra cyclists!
That’s an increase of only about 22 or so cyclists all up as it is very likely the same 73 cyclists were counted at peak hours on the different days as the count was done at the same time of day (i.e. the morning and evening peak hours).
Gee wizz, if Clover and her councillors got rid of their chaffeurs/cars and regularly cycled to work with their secretaries they could double the gain, now that would be significant!
http://southern-courier.whereilive.com.au/news/story/cycleways-growing-in-popularity/
April 20th, 2010 @ 1:42 pm
This is nonsense. I used to work for News (not IW Courier), so take this however you like.
News Ltd in the inner west just “go with the flow” on politics. If people vote green, they will run “green” editorial. No matter what they do, they are assured of picking up most of the low cost inner west advertisers and a great big chunk of those continuing “rivers of gold” real estate ads by simply being there. City Hub is not a platform attractive to real estate agents. Lawrence Gibbons, you are delusional if you think otherwise. News Ltd’s battle is with Fairfax’s Domain (which runs NO editorial), not City Hub or the Independent.
The Inner West “Independent” may have fared better if it had adopted an alternative editorial position to News Ltd. However, on just about avery issue like the light rail etc, it did not. In fact there has been no difference, and the Courier and the Village Voice have “out-greened” the Independent consistently. The Independent simply did not have a voice. And this sad article is just crocodile tears over a publishing failure.
As to why News Ltd should feel any obligation to publish a reply, Why would they? Why would they care two hoots about City Hub or the Independent? Sorry Lawrence, but you are not even on their radar.
“How we lost our voice” represents one of the most astonishing pieces of hubris I have ever read. Just how astonishing remains to be seen. I’ll assess that if I see my comment posted. Though what I expect to find is, “Unsurprisingly, Alternative Media did not publish…” etc etc.
April 20th, 2010 @ 7:24 pm
OK, so I’ll eat my words and not re-name the Hub “City Hubris”. Thanks for posting my comment, and allow me to say that in general I agree with you about the undesirability of press monopoly. Perhaps this may seem strange, but many at News Ltd feel the same way.
But while I’m sympathetic, there are a couple of other points I’d take issue with.
I’m a Balmain “old timer” and ex-journo. I remember both the Glebe and the original Village Voice. The Glebe was purchased by Cumberland (News) in the 80s. It took them more than 20 years to “shut down the free press” in the inner west. Clearly they were either very slow, or that wasn’t what they had in mind.
The Glebe in the 70s and early 80s was indeed “independent.” It was owned and operated by Len Campbell and his wife, both whom had had close ties with right wing Labor Party people in the area. As “lefties” of that era can attest, they were anything but “independent” in their reporting. In fact, I think the present City Hub people would find them far more objectionable than those who now run News Ltd’s Five Dock operation. They had a “feisty, take no prisoners” tabloid approach and leftie greenies were their constant targets. Those on the receiving end of their strident, astringent invective may not have the same nostalgia for those “good old days”.
With his “Bunyip on his beat” column. Campbell attacked his political enemies relentlessly (as does City Hub), but with humour and panache (unlike City Hub). He also sniped at his publishing rivals (again, as does City Hub), particularly at Cumberland, who he eventually sold to. But there was wit about the way he went about it. That’s sorely lacking in your approach to News Ltd and your patronising remarks about the publisher of Ciao. The latter in particular are just snide, unpleasant insults.
The Village Voice under Kylie Davis was “independent” too but largely advertorial and hugely dull. Its star columnist was the very right wing Paddy McGuiness. Our “voice”? Not mine!
And do I miss either of them? No
Would I miss the Independent? Nope, not one bit.
April 20th, 2010 @ 11:54 pm
Hail Harold of Holt Street… Murdoch never gave a rat’s ass about the Glebe, mate. It was only ever a masthead and a market. When News Limited purchased FPC Courier I sent an objection to the ACCC predicting Rupert would shudder the Glebe. It’s what his company does. Buys up papers then shuts down other papers to consolidate his monopoly. You can’t blame him. The government condones his criminal behaviour.
April 22nd, 2010 @ 8:28 am
OK Lawrence, I stand corrected on the motivations of my colleagues and friends at News. Personally, and this is just the journo in me, I’d be careful about throwing around accusations of “criminal behaviour”.
However that big chip on your shoulder does serve a purpose. It excuses failures and apparently some very unpleasant behaviour. Sometimes it wise to step back a bit and look at the effect words can have. I shouldn’t need to tell a publisher that. Presumably others will have read your publications, as I have, and formed a very negative impression of them.
April 24th, 2010 @ 9:34 am
Instead of whingeing and making narky jibes, the publisher of City Hub and the Independent would be better occupied producing something we want to read. I just picked up the “Independent”. I reat the Callan Park whinge from the mayor. I read the Metro whinge. I didn’t read any more.
April 24th, 2010 @ 9:49 am
Publisher’s note: the following correspondence was sent directly to the paper….
Dear Editor
It is without doubt that Sydney, Australia, is a far better place because of the City Hub – my favourite source of honest, courageous information.
In fact it is THE paper I search religiously for each fortnight, and then sigh in relief as I rustle the first page open and drink in the intelligent, outspoken words.
You know most people use the word radical for any view outside the square, but they are quite wrong. What is radical is how the establishment is f…ing with the law, their desires and therefore their version of outcomes, and most importantly, our minds.
Of course this is not just local. I mean the global financial collapse (what a joke) was asking us all to get some wisdom around money, as are the Iceland ashes asking us all to slow down and take a fair dinkum look at our exquisite environment.
But since we are willing to sacrifice everything for money, who really cares as long as we rush around the world, country or city ASAP getting more of it?
So Sydney, count your blessings that there is a strong, forthright voice in amongst the clinical, jargonish waffle that pretends to carry us all to the Nirvana realm of ‘everything wealthy’.
The City Hub is a grand and provocative paper, and I’m so proud of it.
Sincerely
Robyn Catchlove
May 4th, 2010 @ 6:05 pm
City Hub is for angry people everywhere! Love the cover of the current issue… Someone with her arms crossed, looking grumpy and cross with the world. Just like its publisher.
July 8th, 2010 @ 12:54 am
Nice work Lawrence. The City Hub and other truly independent voices in this city deserve the support and respect of the community. Long may you remain a thorn in the side of mega-news barons.
March 31st, 2011 @ 11:21 am
A new web-site seeks to raise issues supported by data How?and Why State land tax is designed to impact rental housing and small business.
http://www.landtaxforum.com.au
When time allows please have a look at open letter.
Regards
Mike Danzey