Quicksand

Media owners and enablers, autocrats and charlatans, henchmen and underlings, midshipmen and first mates, hangers-on and frenemies populate this book. The Men Who Killed the News is about media moguls over the past 150 years, with the occasional grand-mogul and even anti-media mogul (see Silvio Berlusconi) thrown in.

Seventy-three-year-old Eric Beecher has been a journalist, editor, and media proprietor. As a reporter on The Age and the youngest-ever editor of its stablemate The Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s, he and his colleagues knew (or know now) that they were charmed participants in a golden age of journalism, underpinned by rivers of classified advertising. By 1990, Beecher had quit the Murdoch payroll, going on to co-found Text Publishing and Private Media Publishers, with titles including Crikey, and receiving a Walkley Award for Industry Leadership.

A few years after delivering the 2000 Andrew Olle Media Lecture on the future of quality journalism in the online environment, Beecher scrutinised the Fairfax business at its board’s request. His thirty-seven-page report, in which he raised the prospect of a doomsday scenario that could wipe out most of the company’s profits as print ads migrated to the internet, famously enraged at least one director and failed to hasten Fairfax in addressing its existential crisis.