Everything about The Age totally explained
The Age is a
broadsheet daily
newspaper, which has been published in
Melbourne,
Australia since 1854.
The Age was founded by three Melbourne businessmen, the brothers
John Cooke and
Henry Cooke who had arrived from
New Zealand in the 1840s, and Walter Powell. The first edition appeared on
17 October 1854.
The Age currently has an average weekday circulation of 196,250, increasing to 292,250 on Saturdays (in a city of 3.8 million).
The Sunday Age has a circulation of 194,750.
According to
The Age, the paper currently has a Monday to Friday readership average of 658,000, reaching an average of 1,049,000 on Saturdays.
The Sunday Age attracts an average of 666,000 readers.
The current editor is
Andrew Jaspan.
History
The Symes and The Age
The venture wasn't initially a success, and in June 1856 the Cookes sold the paper to
Ebenezer Syme, a
Scottish-born businessman, and James McEwan, an ironmonger and founder of McEwans & Co, for 2,000 pounds at auction. The first edition under the new owners was on 17 June 1856. From its foundation the paper was self-consciously
liberal in its politics: "aiming at a wide extension of the rights of free citizenship and a full development of representative institutions," and supporting "the removal of all restrictions upon freedom of commerce, freedom of religion and - to the utmost extent that's compatible with
public morality - upon freedom of personal action."
Ebenezer Syme was elected to the
Victorian Legislative Assembly shortly after buying
The Age, and his brother
David Syme soon came to dominate the paper, editorially and managerially. When Ebenezer died in 1860, David became editor-in-chief, a position he retained until his death in 1908, although a succession of editors did the day-to-day editorial work. In 1891 Syme bought out Ebenezer's heirs and McEwan's and became sole proprietor. He built up
The Age into
Victoria's leading newspaper. In circulation it soon overtook its rivals The Herald and
The Argus, and by 1890 it was selling 100,000 copies a day, making it one of the world's most successful newspapers.
Under Syme's control
The Age exercised enormous political power in Victoria. It supported liberal politicians such as
Graham Berry,
George Higinbotham and
George Turner, and other leading liberals such as
Alfred Deakin and
Charles Pearson furthered their careers as
Age journalists. Syme was originally a
free trader, but converted to
protectionism through his belief that Victoria needed to develop its manufacturing industries behind
tariff barriers. In the 1890s
The Age was a leading supporter of
Australian federation and of the
White Australia policy.
After Syme's death the paper remained in the hands of his three sons, with his eldest son
Herbert Syme becoming general manager until his death in 1939. Syme's will prevented the sale of any equity in the paper during his sons' lifetimes, an arrangement designed to protect family control but which had the effect of starving the paper of investment capital for 40 years. Under the management of Sir
Geoffrey Syme (1908-42), and his chosen editors
Gottlieb Schuler and
Harold Campbell,
The Age failed to modernise, and gradually lost market share to
The Argus and to the tabloid
The Sun News-Pictorial, although its classfied advertisement sections kept the paper profitable. By the 1940s the paper's circulation was smaller than it had been in 1900, and its political influence also declined. Although it remained more liberal than the extremely conservative
Argus, it lost much of its distinct political identity.
The historian
Sybil Nolan writes: "Accounts of
The Age in these years generally suggest that the paper was second-rate, outdated in both its outlook and appearance. Walker described a newspaper which had fallen asleep in the embrace of the Liberal Party; "querulous," "doddery" and "turgid" are some of the epithets applied by other journalists. It is inevitably criticised not only for its increasing conservatism, but for its failure to keep pace with innovations in layout and editorial technique so dramatically demonstrated in papers like
The Sun News-Pictorial and
The Herald."
In 1942 David Syme's last surviving son,
Oswald Syme, took over the paper. He modernised the paper's appearance and standards of news coverage (removing classified advertisements from the front page and introducing photographs, long after other papers had done so). In 1948, convinced the paper needed outside capital, he persuaded the courts to overturn his father's will and floated
David Syme and Co. as a public company, selling 400,000 pounds worth of shares, enabling a badly needed technical modernisation of the newspaper's production. A takeover attempt by the
Fairfax family, publishers of the
Sydney Morning Herald, was beaten off. This new lease on life allowed
The Age to recover commercially, and in 1957 it received a great boost when
The Argus ceased publication.
The Modern Age
Oswald Syme retired in 1964, and his grandson
Ranald Macdonald became chairman of the company. He was the first chairman to hand over full control of the paper to a professional editor from outside the Syme family. This was
Graham Perkin, appointed in 1966, who radically changed the paper's format and shifted its editorial line from the rather conservative liberalism of the Symes to a new "left liberalism" characterised by attention to issues such as race, gender and the environment, and opposition to White Australia and the
death penalty. The
Liberal Premier of Victoria,
Henry Bolte, called
The Age "that pinko rag," a view conservatives have maintained ever since. Former editor Michael Gawenda in his book
American Notebook wrote that the "default position of most journalists at The Age was on the political Left.".
Perkin's editorship coincided with
Gough Whitlam's reforms of the
Australian Labor Party, and
The Age became a key supporter of the Whitlam government which came to power in 1972. Contrary to subsequent mythology, however,
The Age wasn't an uncritical supporter of Whitlam, and played a leading role in exposing the
Loans Affair, one of the scandals which contributed to the demise of the Whitlam government.
After Perkins's early death in
1975 The Age returned to a more moderate liberal position. It supported
Malcolm Fraser's Liberal government in its early years, but after 1980 became increasingly critical and was a leading supporter of
Bob Hawke's reforming government after
1983. But from the 1970s the political influence of
The Age, as with other broadsheet newspapers, derived less from what it said in its editorial columns (which relatively few people read) than from the opinions expressed by journalists, cartoonists, feature writers and guest columnists.
The Age has always kept a stable of leading editorial cartoonists, notably
Les Tanner,
Bruce Petty,
Ron Tandberg and
Michael Leunig.
In 1966 Macdonald took the fateful step of allowing the Fairfaxes to acquire a stake in the paper, although an agreement was signed guaranteeing the
editorial independence of
The Age. In 1972 Fairfax bought a majority of David Syme shares, and in 1983 bought out all the remaining shares. David Syme and Co. became a subsidiary of John Fairfax and Co. Macdonald was denounced as a traitor by the remaining members of the Syme family (who nevertheless accepted Fairfax's generous offer for their shares), but he argued that
The Age and the
Sydney Morning Herald were natural partners and that the greater resources of the Fairfax group would enable
The Age to remain competitive. By the 1980s a new competitor had appeared in
Rupert Murdoch's national daily
The Australian. In 1999 David Syme and Co. became The Age Company Ltd as part of John Fairfax Holdings Ltd., finally ending the Syme connection.
The Age was published from offices in Collins St until 1969, when it moved to its current headquarters at 250 Spencer St (hence the nickname "The Spencer Street Soviet" favoured by some critics). Recently
The Age has opened a new printing centre at
Tullamarine.
Currently there are two editions of
The Age printed nightly. The NAA edition, for interstate and country Victorian readers and the MEA edition, for metropolitan areas. These two editions are printed in three separate editions, the earliest for country and interstate readers, the second edition for metropolitan and the final late edition THA, also for metropolitan areas carrying late or breaking stories not covered in the first two editions.
Friday's edition of the newspaper now includes a racing liftout which includes extended form and analysis for Saturday's major race meetings.
Like its stablemate
The Sydney Morning Herald, the
Age announced in early 2007 that it would be moving from a broadsheet format to the smaller
Berliner size, in the footsteps of
The Guardian and
The Courier-Mail.. Both the
Age and the
Herald dumped these plans later in the year without explanation, to the amusement of
The Australian's Chris Mitchell, who called the about-face "a bit embarrassing".
Ownership
Since the 1980s
The Age, despite the loss of its corporate independence, has remained a successful and influential newspaper. Under editors such as
Creighton Burns and
Michael Gawenda, it has attracted a range of high quality contributors. The research efforts of the "Age Insight" team have broken a number of major stories. Its arts and lifestyle content - increasingly important in all newspapers as the leading role in news coverage is lost to
television and the
internet - is generally regarded as comprehensive. Its sports journalism is also extensive, although it doesn't try to compete with
The Herald Sun in volume of sports coverage. Its classified advertising section remains the foundation of its business model.
Nevertheless
The Age is under challenge, as are all major daily newspapers, from new trends in media. Its dependence on classified advertising for a large part of its revenue makes vulnerable to the growth of online classified alternatives such as
Seek,
realestate.com.au and
eBay, plus various offerings from
Telstra subsidiary Sensis such as The Trading Post. The Sydney media magnate
Kerry Packer, now deceased, long considered to be interested in acquiring Fairfax, was reportedly no longer interested because of this and had extensively invested in online competitors of
The Age.
Politics
In 2004 Gawenda was succeeded as editor by
British journalist
Andrew Jaspan. Jaspan aroused controversy by initially not appearing to know that The Age was published in Melbourne, sacking
Gerard Henderson, a prominent conservative columnist, from the paper and by making remarks critical of
Douglas Wood, an Australian who was held hostage and tortured in
Iraq. Jaspan accused Wood on ABC radio of being boorish and coarse for speaking harshly about those who kidnapped and tortured him.
The generally left-wing
Age is frequently compared with Britain's leftist
Guardian newspaper. Former
Age columnist
Gerard Henderson is one of many to describe it as "
The Guardian on the
Yarra"
(External Link
).
Following the appointment of
Andrew Jaspan as editor,
The Age has taken a prominent campaigning role in relation to some issues, for example by launching a campaign
Free David Hicks (a prisoner at
Guantanamo Bay) in February 2007, and in relation to global warming
According to the Guardian newspaper, former Fairfax chief executive Fred Hilmer wrote in his memoirs that "He confessed that he struggled to cope with a left-leaning editorial culture at papers such as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and was surprised that journalists saw themselves as advocates rather than simply reporters." Hilmer said "Fairfax's default position was to turn left and be agenda-driven... Journalists often conducted campaigns where they persisted in covering stories long after readers had lost interest."
Editors of The Age
Under David Syme
George Smith 1860–67
James Harrison 1867–72
Arthur Windsor 1872–1900
Gottlieb Schuler 1900–08
Under Geoffrey Syme
Gottlieb Schuler 1908–26
Len Briggs 1926–39
Harold Campbell 1939–42
Under Oswald Syme
Harold Campbell 1942–59
Keith Sinclair 1959–66
Recent editors
Graham Perkin 1966–75
Les Carlyon 1975–76
Greg Taylor 1976–79
Michael Davie 1979–81
Creighton Burns 1981–89
Mike Smith 1989–92
Alan Kohler 1992–95
Bruce Guthrie 1995–97
Michael Gawenda 1997–2004
Andrew Jaspan 2004–Further Information
Get more info on 'The Age'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://the_age.totallyexplained.com">The Age Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
