Also, a great editor at the Australian Financial Review, for its Friday Review section. Robert Bolton gave me lengthy and detailed feedback on an article I submitted, even though he said if I revised it, it still would not suit the AFR. With a few revisions, it found a home elsewhere.

So, there are still some GREAT editors, inspite of all the movement among the deckchairs.

I was also interested to read somewhere on Crikey, that even though the Overland magazine is now available online, readers still want print copies. I think the same applies to some of our print newspapers. Not for breaking news, but for detailed opinion pieces that one wants to think about, mull over, scribble notes on perhaps. Can’t do that with the online version.

William Powers, media critic for the National Journal, believes paper isn’t just ‘an old habit, but rather an advanced technology that is nearly impossible to improve upon’. See his article Long Live Paper http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/05/23/03. Powers is also the author of the extraordinarily popular online article Hamlet’s Blackberry (75 pages long!)
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/papers/discussion_papers/D39.pdf

In Armstrong’s case it would have been extra dose with Ruddish quite a technocrat who would see mistakes as potentially worse than bias in an outlet, ie not worth turning, or capturing to his own ends, as tainting the collection as it were!

A similar effect is with the US ambassador bailing asap not even waiting for his recall because he was branded.

As to big character editors I always thought Alan Ramsey was in effect running an editorial on his acreage copying up and annotating the ‘important stuff’. He’d so obviously outgrown his reportage role probaby decades ago.

And as for blogging - my lifestyle reflects a sort of editor without a newspaper attitude which is ironic given editors in big media WITH a real newspaper who are actually only managers. It’s almost enough to start a call for bring back ‘the biff’, but not quite.

Interesting concept that - who are the big characters these days? Mayne? Simons? Beecher? Jamie Packer - not. Certainly ‘Little’ Kerry Stokes has got heft and saw a problem and ‘fixed it’. But who throws a cricket ball at full speed in the confines of an office like Big Kerry? As John Lee Hooker would say … them days are gone.

the last few weeks alone have seen the following howlers, which may or may not have hastened Armstrong’s departure:

1. a series of articles critical of a State MP for providing a reference for the CEO of the Shire of Shark Bay which had to be retracted when it came to light that the West had gots its facts wrong.

2. the West’s campaign in support of school league tables derailed by a simple sub-editing typo in their crusading headline (as posted in Crikey)

3. a news item this week containing the phrase ‘spanked like a red-headed step-child’, requiring a retraction and apology to all redheads.

4. the use of a new masthead tagline “giving a voice to the silent majority” that was hastily pulled after three days (as posted in Crikey)

5. a commentary by their economics editor on the global financial meltdown suggesting that the crisis might discredit the economic theories of Milton Keynes. (Crikey again)

add these recent crackers to more famous ones like HMAS Sydney and the ‘granny in a hospital corridor’ beat-up, plus a series of stoushes with staff (Nappy Alley) and politicians (McGinty and Carpenter), and it is difficult to argue that Armstrong has anyone to blame for his demise but himself.

Anti-media sentiment is pretty much on a par with anti-politician sentiment and, as I see it, it is largely because people resent being treated like mute, gullible and manipulable sheep that have to be herded either by the political and economic ‘elites’ within the media or those using the media. The ‘media’ has lost a lot of credibility in the last decades but I doubt many readers think the answer lies in going back to the good ol’ days when ‘independent’ journalism meant editors and journos set the political agenda. No thanks, we don’t want any self-appointed, unaccountable political cadre anymore thinking they can tell us what is important (not least because they’ve shown themselves to be so bad at it). Instead I reckon the whole blogging explosion, the decline in readership of traditional media etc is showing that people want to transform the power relation between the media and readers in a way that makes journos (and the PR pundits) more subject to reader-driven issues, views and styles and enables readers to be speakers, writers and dialoguers rather than remaining in frustrated, suspicious and contemptuous silence.