Free News Zone
One of the most infuriating, and yet enjoyable, side effects of the relentless belt-tightening at our daily newspapers has been the corresponding increase in spelling errors, misprints and outright clangers. I assume that the people whose job it was to spot such things as the recent Age ‘Green Guide’ headline that contained the words ‘the the’, and yet wasn’t referring to the band of that name, have all been sacked. It’s got to the point where, rather than having a crack at the Sudoku, I like to set myself the ‘Five-Minute-We-Were-Wrong Challenge’. It works with all three Melbourne dailies. Here are my three favourites, one from each, of the last week.
In the Weekend Australian ‘Review’ section, Greg Sheridan, having just raved about He’s Just Not That Into You, proceeded to describe Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road – universally acknowledged to be one of the finest novels of the last century – as ‘pretty mediocre.’ No, that’s not the error. Sheridan cites as a ‘glaring difference’ that in the book, Frank and April Wheeler have four children, whereas in the recent movie they have only two. Trouble is, they don’t have four children in the book. They have two, like in the movie, which surely makes it a ‘glaring similarity’.
In the Herald Sun’s ‘Confidential’, in lieu of another item about Miranda Kerr’s arse, a piece ran in which actor John Jarratt was described as having ‘recently appeared as a park ranger in Dark Age’. The fact that the film was released in 1987 suggests a very broad definition of the word ‘recently’. I guess they’ll be talking about his ‘recent’ Wolf Creek in the year 2027.
And I had to feel for Jim Schembri when, in his column’s worth of phoney movies allegedly screening at MIFF, a fairly decent joke about Malcolm Turnbull was winged by the misspelling ‘Turnball’. This despite ‘Turnbull’ being probably the most frequently used word in the Age these days, rivalled only by ‘stimulus’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘Sonya Hartnett’.
Blunders like this are even more rife on the newspapers’ websites, but there we can be more forgiving because, after all, we are not handing over any money. Not yet, anyway. I assume that Fairfax are making some kind of coin from the shit-you-blind car ads that swerve into the path of oncoming articles, and the small, square, sticky pop-ups that adhere, like barnacles, to the underside of your browser. There are fewer of these over at the Herald Sun/Daily Telegraph site, and this may be one of the reasons for Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he intends to start making readers pay to access his papers on-line. While this may be akin to the local racist drunk at your shopping strip announcing that he will henceforth be charging you to hear his foul-mouthed ranting, the decision seems to have sounded the alarm that the days of free news on the Internet may soon be over.
This is assuming that everyone starts charging at the same time. What sane person would pay to read the Herald Sun on-line while the Age is still free? Or the Guardian? Or the New York Times? Or worldofplumpers.com? (Admittedly, the latter’s political coverage is negligible.) The model everyone seems to be pinning their hopes to is Rupert’s Wall Street Journal, which on-line readers seem quite happy to pay for. But come on, the kind of nobs who read the Wall Street Journal would justify it as an investment, and a tax-deductible one at that. Paying for stock tips is one thing, paying to read about Kyle Sandilands is another. What I don’t understand is, why did all these newspapers put their content on-line for free in the first place? Surely they knew what was going to happen. Or was the idea that, like a canny heroin dealer working the towers, once they’d gotten us hooked we’d be putty in their hands? That they could start charging money and we’d be so addicted to, say, Sam de Brito’s quest to fuck younger and younger women, that we’d all fork over the folding like Bubbles from The Wire desperate for a few more ‘caps’? But to stretch this already over-extended analogy even further, once they start charging, won’t we all just go elsewhere in search of another ‘connect’?
Of course it’s easy for unpaid ‘bloggers’, even those somewhat pretentiously dressing up their on-line blather as a ‘column’, to poke fun. Those who actually have to make a living as journalists are slowly starting to feel the effects of this ‘death of a thousand clicks’. Take the example of my favourite magazine of all time, Entertainment Weekly. For seventeen happy years, I was more than willing to spend several hundred dollars to receive a weekly EW airmailed from Tampa, Florida, to my letterbox in Melbourne. I’d stand out at the front gate waiting for the postie, panting in anticipation like a labrador when the fridge is opened. And every year, I’d go through the rigmarole of phoning in my subscription renewal, spelling out my address over and over because the woman at the other end couldn’t understand my accent. One year, following several near-fatal labelling errors (from 1998 to 1999, my EW had arrived addressed to someone called ‘Tahnee Morton’ of ‘Malbin’, Australia), I followed a friend’s road-tested advice and adopted a fake American accent. Unfortunately, the phone at Time-Life subscriptions in Tampa was answered by a woman from Melbourne, Australia, but by the time I realised, I was too far down the track and had to maintain my ridiculous Don Knotts impression for the entire call. She barely understood a word and, for the next year, the magazine arrived addressed to a ‘Mr Muntin’.
Back in the nineties, EW strutted the world’s newsagencies like a colossus. Their end-of-year ‘Best of’ issue was, three times, my nomination for the Booker. Several attempts were made to copy it here but they all failed. They couldn’t get the voice. Even the paper wasn’t the same. But then, a couple of years ago, EW stopped accepting subscriptions from Australia. I tried calling but no one would talk to me. I wrote a long, impassioned letter, citing my nearly two decades of loyalty, and received a callous reply filled with bullshit about ‘repositioning’ and urging me instead to visit their website (kudos to Sophie Lee for lamenting this brutal decision in a column that surely only about three people would have appreciated).
Visit their website? But you can’t fan a selection of websites on your coffee table, or page through one on a crowded tram, or leaf randomly through a 1996 one and wonder what ever happened to The Fugees. And besides, on the Internet, EW is back in the cheap seats. Movie City News does it so much better, as does Hollywood Elsewhere, The AV Club and any number of others. Jeffrey Wells could eat Jim Mullen and his ‘Hot Sheet’ for breakfast.
But you can still get the magazine proper at Borders, if you’re willing to shell out fifteen bucks. I’d been rather sulkily avoiding it for the last couple of years, but was recently drawn to one because…well, all right, because Megan Fox was on the cover. As I lifted it from the shelf, I was shocked to feel how light it had become. The page count is less than half of what it was in my day, and the font appears larger, meaning fewer words per page. The once-overflowing DVD and Books sections feature only three or four reviews each, and Stephen King has long since gone from the back page; what the fuck is ‘Bullseye’? The effect was that of greeting an old friend who has, since you last saw him, contracted some sort of terrible wasting disease. Or visiting a once-bustling fashionable restaurant to find it now manned by only two or three people, each doing triple-duty, serving a threadbare menu but still charging top dollar.
How long before this happens to the Herald Sun? How long before it consists of nothing more than an insane rant by Andrew Bolt, a shot of Miranda Kerr’s arse, and the dam levels? By that time, presumably, we’ll all be on-line. Checking out the plumpers.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Click here to see an extended version of his video shops report from ‘The 7PM Project’.
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