Just like most newspaper owners, fairfax has better journalists than it deserves

In the ongoing saga of the management of Fairfax Media, it’s sometimes easy to miss the obvious. The reason that the future of the company matters is that despite its, at times hopeless,

owners, it still has good products and great journalists. Today’s Sydney Morning Herald is a case in point. Its front page recounts its year-long legal battle to tell its readers about the

activities of the so-called Advanced Medical Institute. ADVERTISEMENT The AMI is the organisation whose billboards and TV ads regularly top the most complained about ads list. And it even

attracted an undercover investigation by Naked Communications’ Adam Ferrier. The SMH’s work is a classic piece of investigative, expensive, campaigning journalism about an important issue of

public concern. The paper’s legal costs were more than $500,000 to get it into the public domain. With the AMI yesterday being placed in administration, it remains to be seen whether the

SMH – PANPA’s newspaper of the year for the second time running – will get that money back. Add to the fact that the second story on the page is yet another Wikileaks exclusive – this time

on Rudd’s rushed proposals to create a new Asia Pacific organisation – and any editor in the world would be proud to have this as a front page, particularly on the dead news week that

usually precedes Christmas. The fact that the scandal of the NSW government’s banana republic tactics of closing Parliament early is only third story says a lot too. (Slightly more grubbily,

I see that the newspaper’s commercial colleagues at Fairfax Digital have placed the AMI story in its small business section of its website where advertisers such as banks and telcos pay a

much higher CPM in the hopes of reaching owners of small businesses.) On every news publication I ever worked on, the best journalism tended to take place despite, rather than because of,

the management. Fortunately, with newspapers, the journalism is the last thing to go, even as other corners are cut. As today’s SMH demonstrates, it’s the journalists that mean newspapers

are still relevant. Tim Burrowes