Eighteen months ago the Canberra Times celebrated the 100th birthday of Len Dixon, the resident bridge columnist who has been filing for the paper since 1968 after arriving as a migrant in the national capital in 1962. His family organised for a cake to be decorated with an edible image of his very first column and the “sharp as a tack” Dixon quipped: “I’m going to eat my words.”
Apart from family, the three pillars of Dixon’s life have been the Jewish community, the bridge community and the Canberra Times. With an IQ of 161, Dixon was invited to be an early member of Mensa.
But sadly, all the joy of Dixon’s astounding achievement was taken away when he was dropped by the Canberra Times at the age of 101, one of the victims of a round of drastic cuts which saw all the arts, books and chess contributors cut. Ian Rogers had been doing the chess column for 30 years. Even the poem of the week was dropped.
Dixon’s family scrambled to create a website Bridge Notes with Len Dixon where he can upload his column but it’s not the same as being published in a newspaper. Please subscribe if you’d like to support his work.
John-Paul Moloney, the managing editor of the Canberra Times said: “From time to time we adjust our content mix to suit our changing audiences. We are grateful to all the contributors whose work we have proudly published and continue to publish.”
Presses stop for ACM regional titles
We told you last week about the Canberra Times’ cuts to the books and arts pages and on Saturday we noticed that most of the reviews have been replaced by unbylined snippets that contain publishers’ blurbs with a bit of top and tailing.
The Canberra Times is of course part of Antony Catalano’s Australian Community Media (ACM), which owns around 100 papers across the nation. The company’s cost-cutting is not confined to the Canberra Times. ACM has confirmed the publication of several New South Wales titles – the Camden Haven Courier, Hawkesbury Gazette, Hunter Valley News, Mid Coast Observer and Shoalhaven & Nowra News – will cease at the end of July.
The ACM managing director, Tony Kendall, told Weekly Beast the papers would stop printing but the websites will remain live. “We are currently in discussions around redeployment for affected staff and do not envisage any job losses,” he said.
The closure follows a decision to cease printing several Western Australian titles last year.
Seven’s new hire
Less than a month after Ben Roberts-Smith resigned from Seven West Media where he had been an executive since 2015, his benefactor Kerry Stokes has filled his role.
On Wednesday Stokes appointed Todd Dickinson as managing director Queensland, reporting to CEO James Warburton.
Roberts-Smith resigned on 2 June, a day after a judge found, on the balance of probabilities, he murdered unarmed civilians while serving in the military in Afghanistan.
The billionaire chairman of Seven financed Roberts-Smith’s legal costs in the high-profile trial and backed him publicly, insisting his employee was innocent as recently as last year. On Thursday the federal court heard that Roberts-Smith has agreed to pay the legal costs of media outlets party to his failed defamation action.
Investigative journalist Nick McKenzie’s book about the investigation and defamation trial, Crossing the Line: The Inside Story of Murder, Lies and a Fallen Hero, was released on Thursday.
Big news day with Gladys but permit me a personal tweet. The story I sometimes wished I’d avoided is now in bookstores. I owe it all to the brave truth tellers who stood up: the SAS soldiers/whistleblowers, @SCrompvoets, Afghans, and all the others. My book tells their stories. pic.twitter.com/OcZdq9b1G4
— Nick McKenzie (@Ageinvestigates) June 29, 2023
Stumped
Channel Nine’s Shane Warne biopic was almost universally panned by critics and ridiculed by viewers on social media as “tacky” when it aired on Sunday and Monday nights.
Not to mention that Nine’s decision to dramatise Warne’s life so soon after his untimely death had been labelled “beyond disrespectful” by the cricketer’s own family when it was announced last year.
Guardian Australia reviewer Luke Buckmaster described Warnie as “chaotically incompetent and just plain strange” and gave it one star. The two-parter has “about the same level of dramatic sophistication as the subject’s commercial for Leggo’s chicken cacciatore”, Buckmaster wrote.
TV Tonight editor David Knox grudgingly managed two stars but said it failed to engage a non-cricketing viewer and offered no insight.
The first night had 763,000 viewers nationally but dropped to 611,000 on Monday, but that didn’t stop Nine declaring it on Tuesday “the most-watched new Australian drama of the year”.
Warnie “clearly resonated with viewers across Australia”; and “like the man himself” has been “hugely popular, entertaining and thought-provoking”, Nine said.
“Over 1 million Australians have already watched Warnie episode one, with that figure expected to rise substantially over the coming weeks thanks to the exceptional demand on 9Now,” the network said.
Nine is not the first network to attempt a Warne biopic. When the cricketer was still alive he criticised plans by Seven to produce a show it also called “Warnie” for its 2017 slate. “Shane Warne is a walking tabloid headline,” the Seven blurb said back in 2016. “Women, parties, women, high-life and women.”
The Seven project – by the same producer, Screentime, and the same writer, Matt Ford – was quietly dropped.
ABC investigations shortchanged
ABC political editor Andrew Probyn got all the attention when his job was made redundant, but there are several less well-known journalists on the ABC’s award-winning investigative programs who are also facing the sack.
The ABC’s blueprint for digital transformation includes losing two staff from Four Corners, two from 7.30, four from the investigative reporting team and one from Radio National’s Background Briefing. That is nine fewer staff doing investigative journalism.
These particular cuts prompted the Australia Institute to look at the Four Corners effect, a mechanism by which ABC investigative journalism leads to law changes, royal commissions and social change.
To name just a couple reported by the legendary Chris Masters: in 1983 Four Corners’ program The Big League resulted in the Street royal commission and in 1987 The Moonlight State revealed extensive Queensland police corruption.
ABC Lateline reporting in November 2012 of child sex abuse in the Catholic diocese of Maitland-Newcastle led to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. In 2014 Banking Bad prompted a Senate inquiry that went on to recommend the financial services royal commission.
Then there were two investigations by Caro Meldrum-Hanna in 2015 and 2016: Making a Killing revealed live baiting in the greyhound industry, and Australia’s Shame revealed strip searching, assaults and tear gassing of young offenders at the Don Dale youth detention centre, leading to a royal commission being announced the next day.
In 2018, Scott Morrison announced a royal commission into aged care the day before Four Corners released its two-part series on aged care and in the same year the Law Reform Commission announced it would review New South Wales consent laws following Louise Milligan’s “I am that girl”, a report on Saxon Mullins.
The Australia Institute executive director, Richard Denniss, says the track record shows the integral part Four Corners plays in Australian democracy.
“While restructuring for the digital age is necessary, just because people are consuming information in different forms doesn’t mean the ABC needs to provide them with different information,” he told Beast.
“Whether courageous investigative journalism is delivered via TV or TikTok doesn’t matter, but what does matter is what is delivered. Technological change may change the form of the ABC, but it shouldn’t change the function.”
Big-time gig
For the first time in 11 years the Logies will have a host, and Seven has chosen comedian Sam Pang to join the list of comedians to have undertaken the challenging role over the years including Graham Kennedy, Bert Newton, Don Lane, Andrew Denton and Shaun Micallef.
In another first, Seven has taken the Logies from Nine, which has broadcast it since 1996, and will stage it in NSW for the first time in 34 years. The 63rd Logie awards will be broadcast on Channel Seven and 7plus on 30 July.
