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Saturday, 9 August 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
“In the basement of The Australian’s head office in Sydney are kept the giant bound volumes of every edition of the newspaper’s early decades; the daily discussion of a nation’s life. Stocks rise, companies fail, plays are lauded, prime ministers are booted out, footy teams make heroic comebacks, students rebel”, the opening paragraph of the introduction by the editor of the Collectors’ Edition, Petra Rees states.
The material inside demonstrates the effort put in by the editorial staff to give the reader the best. News stories feature strongly in a collection of 50 of the best pictures from the newspaper’s archives. “From bushfires to tsunamis, war and politics, a story is often best told by a searing image. But the mix is leavened by images of beauty and emotion: rain on Uluru; moonlight on Lake Mungo; a triumphant Ian Thorpe. These photographs capture moments never to be forgotten.”
Significant events, both global and local, are presented with relevant write-ups and photographs decade by decade. Each section begins with a synopsis of the highlights of the particular decade. While relating a story each picture is an exciting, absorbing one. The outcome is a fine record of happenings over half a century.
The 50 most influential Australians in the past five decades are presented in another section. Explaining how the selection was made out of hundreds of people, the editor says: “Our choice reflects our judgment of which individuals have most affected the lives of the Australians over the 50 years. You will be surprised by some of those included – or omitted. Just being prime minister is not qualification enough neither riches nor medals are sufficient to make it on this list. But innovation that changes the world, leadership that transforms our nation and success that unites us will earn a place.”
In a lengthy interview in his office in Twentieth Century Fox Studios in Hollywood, Rupert Murdoch says that his motive was to launch a great newspaper. “The idea of Australia as a great independent nation standing on its own feet, we believed that very strongly… The papers hadn’t changed for years. I think what finally motivated me into doing it was frustration with what was happening.”
He was 33 then. “He was both an Australian nationalist and aspiring citizen of the world” is how the interviewer describes him. His father was a journalist and proprietor of an Adelaide-based newspaper business. When the father died he returned from Oxford in his early 20s and took charge of the business. He expanded the business to television which gave him a stronger financial base. When he decided to launch the national paper, he promised a newspaper “of intelligence, of broad outlook, of independent and elegant appearance.”
With ‘The Australian’ he had delivered a lifelong ambition of his late father – to establish a national newspaper.
Murdoch is confident of the future for ‘The Australian’. “The bedrock thinking is faith in brand name with news and opinion transmitted across different platforms…. There may come a time – I am not saying there will – where it may not be economical to print, there’ll just be a digital edition but a big expanded edition. The digital one you can expand a lot, with video, pictures, with everything in them, better than you can expand a newspaper,” he believes.
With young children of his own he is acutely conscious of youth culture and reading habits. “Look at the younger generation today. They are happier reading everything on the tablet. It’s a generation change. The amount of reading that’s going to be in my new smart phone is incredible,” he says.
In the current context, he thinks the new technologies and digital applicationsare really interesting,
The interviewer, Paul Kelly describes Murdoch as “an unusual proprietor”. He is a natural journalist, editor and business entrepreneur. “The industry pumps through his bloodlines and holds his mind’s eye. He was born into newspapers and he has never left it.”
In the concluding paragraphs of the article titled ‘The man who made history’, interviewer Kelly writes: “Murdoch’s media venture has taken him from Adelaide to Melbourne to Britain to the US and to the world. His company encompasses print, television, books, films, entertainment, sport and social media. Yet it originated in newspapers and those origins are still discernible in Rupert Murdoch.
“The past half century is a special age in industrial democracy. It saw mass circulating newspapers shape the actions and policies of political leaders in an extraordinary interaction between media and politics. Murdoch is one of the giants of that age that is now drawing to an end. ‘The Australian’ was a unique product of that era. It is a masthead that intends making the transition to the next age.”
