In the second of five extracts from her new book The Content Makers, Crikey media commentator Margaret Simons examines the all-pervading, but complexly paradoxical, monolith that is News limited.

News Limited really is intergalactic in its force, multiplicity and lumbering blindness. It’s a tribal thing. They even marry in. They socialise in, they have circles within circles and regard anyone else as The Enemy in a sort of amicably suspicious way. And, of course, because it’s tribal they’re blind to their own deficiencies.

So says a senior journalist who has worked for and observed News Limited over the course of her career.

As the dominant player in newspapers, News Limited incorporates some of the best and worst of Australian journalism. Unlike Fairfax, where gloom pervades the newsrooms and it often seems as though the journalists actually want management to fail, at News Limited people identify with the team. This is helped by the fact that the most senior people in management, including the CEO John Hartigan, are former journalists who understand and protect newsroom cultures. Beneath Hartigan, the most powerful people within News Limited are the editors of the metropolitan daily newspapers. Nothing happens on their patches without their say-so. They answer directly to Hartigan.

One senior News Limited executive told me: ‘The thing about News is that it is really good at devolving power. It finds people that it trusts, and then you basically just get on with it. Then they work you hard and they make you part of everything.’ Control is exercised in the choice of people and in the cultivation of a formidable corporate culture and team spirit, rather than in day-to-day intervention.

News Limited picks talent early, and unlike every other media organisation in the country has a clear plan to develop good people. There is a list of young journalists and executives across the empire who are tagged for advancement. At its best this makes News Limited the most energetic and self-confident of media companies, with journalistic values in better shape than at its rival Fairfax, which has lacked good journalistic leadership for many years. News Limited continues to give priority to good journalism. The Australian has led the fight on issues such as freedom-of-information legislation in recent years. The tabloids hold state governments to account and break more local stories than the Fairfax broadsheets.

Yet the ‘talent development’ can be a mixed blessing. It is also a means of inculcating the company’s favoured people into the corporate culture, meaning News Limited’s weaknesses are reproduced as efficiently as its strengths. At its worst, News Limited is indeed lumbering, arrogant and blind – governed by men who for all their courage and wit are deeply conservative, anti-intellectual and defensive. News Limited can be egotistical, bullying and lacking in self-awareness, dominated by middle-aged white men, with the only women who do well being those who please them.

News Limited editors and senior journalists tend to be of a kind. Eric Beecher, now proprietor of Crikey, was a short-lived News Limited editor. He saw the process of inculcation as a carousel. One was given increasing levels of tests, both of ability and loyalty. He wasn’t prepared to play.

Exceptions to the News Limited type – outstanding and even aberrant individuals – are allowed as part of the tribe’s structure without disrupting the dominant culture. Paul Kelly, once editor of The Australian and now a senior columnist there, is one of the ‘elders’ of the tribe. There are others. As with all empires, there are inconsistencies, lapses in central control, air pockets of diversity, and plenty of mediocrity as well as courage and excellence.

For those in favour, the company is kind. ‘Initiative is prized, guts are prized, balls are prized, those things without a doubt move people up the food chain, not down,’ says one former editor. But for those who fall out, the prospects can be bleak. One resting place for the discarded is ‘special projects’. A News Limited senior executive says, ‘There’s the whole special projects concept in News. If you’re given special projects you know that you’re fucked, because you know that you have nothing to do with anything that’s active.’

People are rehabilitated. Old editors who have served well are ‘placed’, often given a column. ‘They’re always looked after, because what are you going to do about them, an old editor? Fairfax sheds them. We don’t. We give them management jobs.’ But there are some – those who have shown insufficient loyalty – who aren’t allowed such dignity. One senior News Limited executive told me she liked working at News Limited rather than Fairfax because ‘at News Limited they stab you in the front. At Fairfax in the back’. Those who have failed to please can be left scrabbling for basic entitlements, let alone dignity.

The Australian boss, John Hartigan, is made in the mould of the sharp newspapermen who for years have dominated the organisation locally. Even though he is head of the local empire, he says he still gives his occupation as ‘journalist’. He says he is against ‘elitist’ journalism, in which politics and boardroom machinations are reported whether or not they affect the lives of the majority of readers.

The paradox of News Limited is that along with its formidable power comes an extraordinary level of defensiveness – a belief that the rest of the media and the ill-defined ‘elites’ are against them and doing them down. Within the industry, News Limited is both dominant and isolated – a corporate citadel – enormously powerful and enormously defensive above and beyond the normal prickliness of the media.

This is an extract from The Content Makers, by Margaret Simons, Penguin (rrp $35.00), available in bookstores from 3 September 2007.
Tomorrow: Graeme Samuel, the market regulator eyes the media.