In May this year , the Media Alliance and The Walkley Foundation organised a two-day seminar on the future of journalism. Much of the time was spent asking, “Do newspapers have a future?” Clearly, conference-goers, not unaware of the burgeoning influence of the 24-hour online news services, many of them under the mastheads of existing newspapers, saw that traditional media was at a watershed.

Unfortunately, there was no clear answer. The variables currently at play make a firm predication difficult, with the Internet sweeping aside traditional business models.

At times I have been pessimistic about the future of newspapers, a medium in which I spent most of my journalistic career until recently. I loved every minute of it. It was a heady atmosphere and no one ever wondered if it would all end one day.

Some at the seminar foresaw the demise of the mass-market papers, which provide much of the news that is now dispensed more cheaply and quickly on the Net. But there was also a strong view that there  will be a place for quality newspapers in the mix for many years to come.

Their circulations will not be as big as now and their income streams will probably come from different places, as the classified-advertising stream slows to a trickle. Many theories were put forward but an emerging consensus was that survival depended on management holding their nerve on quality.

To be a player in the future you will have to provide a level of reporting and quality that will make your publication a daily or weekly necessity for the high end of the market - the so-called ABs - pursued endlessly by advertisers. Trashing your brand, compromising on quality is, in essence, throwing away your past and your future at the same time.

For the past few years, Fairfax journalists have been locked in a battle with their management, which goes beyond a mere pay dispute. That battle is coming to a head.

It is one of those seminal moments in the history of Fairfax where the company's future is up for grabs. At stake is the hard-fought reputation as a reservoir of journalistic talent and quality journalism. In its drive to make swingeing cuts to the salaries and conditions of its most experienced workers, management has demonstrated that it is clueless about the future of its flagship products.

It is significant that of all the major media companies in Australia, Fairfax was alone in not being a backer of the Future of Journalism Conference. Word filtered back that management was boasting, “We are the future and have nothing to learn.” Such hubris.

Fairfax has long been a benchmark of quality journalism. For many years, the Melbourne Age and The Sydney Morning Herald appeared in the list of the top-20 best newspapers in the world. They were gutsy, informative and authoritative papers, which spent money training, hiring and retaining the best. A string of Walkley Awards, which are coveted by journalists as they are judged by their peers, attests to this.

Even before it became part of the Fairfax stable, The Age had its own proud history. Under the ownership of David Syme, it was a campaigner for self-government, a fairer distribution of land and encouragement of local industries.

Fairfax journalists have always been at the forefront of campaigns for press freedom and, for nearly two decades, have fought for diversity, calling for more, not fewer, voices in the media.

The battle began when the Kerry Packer-led consortium tried to swallow up Fairfax at the beginning of the 1990s.

A new battle is looming and the outcome will determine whether or not Australia has quality newspapers in the future.

All over the world, the rise of the 24-hour news cycle on the Internet and the ubiquitous cable news channels threaten the jobs of many journalists on what is now called “old media” - the big newspaper houses that have substantial commitments to office space and printing presses, and are subject to the vagaries of world newsprint prices.

The job toll makes grim reading for those who have dedicated their lives to quality journalism, and the air of inevitability becomes mesmerising. The Greek chorus accompanying these cuts seems to sing the same song. It comes from a management class which has risen over the past decade to see media companies as nothing more than widget factories, where academic management theories can be applied to make the models work. They are uncomfortable with notions of quality and they are uneasy in the creative process that is the media.

These managements evolved from the big takeover shakeouts of the 1980s and '90s, when media was sexy and there were large profits to be made from under-performing assets. Sadly, the only trick they knew was to slash and burn, to cut into the flesh of the newspapers and slowly, a cut at a time, attack the very things that had allowed quality journalism to flourish.

With some exceptions, the bland, faceless management types who infested the executive hall did not come in to work fired up by the news of the day or the big story unfolding. They wondered why we had to spend so much to get the story. Couldn't we have just picked it up on the wires?

As the devastation of the 2004 Asian Tsunami became apparent, the biggest negotiation on the news floor was whether we could fudge some more pages so that the story could be brought to the readers. For the executives, the tsunami was a disaster for their nice bonuses that relied on cutting costs. A blow-out to allow proper coverage of a news event was not welcome.

The already-tenuous nexus between newspapers and their readers was frayed just that little bit more, and the slow breaking of the strands continues apace. Of course, the managers say that controlling costs is a prudent fiscal requirement and no one can argue with that. But when you talk to them, it is like speaking to someone who is looking out the window, as their answers are not to you but to the shareholders to whom they owe their allegiances.

And they never address the paradox that, for all their talk of increasing shareholder value by slashing and burning, it doesn't correspond in huge jumps in the share price. Even the dopiest analyst has realised there is a limit to cutting and, once you exceed it, you are diminishing the value of your asset.

Journalists do not shy away from the problems confronting news organisations. Internet journalism has created huge cost pressures, as income streams dry up and new sources of income are not readily apparent.

Journalists are frustrated that the debate seems so one-sided. Listen to most newspaper executives and you'll find they have all but given up on newspapers as a medium. They mouth their carefully honed platitudes about being in it for the long haul but ,by their actions and inactions, you can see they don't mean it. If they did, they would be working day and night to protect their brands and see to it that the quality image of their flagships was maintained. That's the only way their newspapers will survive in some form into the future. 

The experience of the Knight-Ridder Group, which until  2006 was America's second biggest publisher with 32 newspapers and 18,000 employees, is a case in point.

Its answer to the rise of the Internet was savage cost cutting  which in the end hollowed out the newspapers and resulted in Knight-Ridder having to sell off all its titles in 2006.

It did this in the face of opposition from its journalists, who said, if you keep cutting, you will kill the company. Sadly, they were right; the operation was a success, but unfortunately the patient died.

In the New York Times  (www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/27/news/ridder.php) Katharine Q Seely wrote that one of the problems for Knight Ridder, and by implication all quality newspapers, was that being beholden to shareholders in a public company made newspapers dysfunctional She wrote: “ Very few in the industry, either on the news side or the business side, seem to believe that public ownership is worth the grief, at least in the current climate.

The article went on: “There's a big lesson in terms of the pressures of public stock ownership,'' said Larry Jinks, who had been a Knight Ridder senior vice president for news and was a top executive at two of its papers. ''Particularly with mature businesses, those pressures can be destructive, and I think they were in the case of Knight Ridder. There's a tendency over time with public ownership for the editorial presence in the corridors of power to decline.''

Mr. Appert of Goldman Sachs said he expected that the Knight Ridder experience might persuade public newspaper companies to take themselves private.

''You'll have these financial pressures forever,'' he said. ''To the extent you want to maintain the same level of quality, maybe you are better off not being subject to the public financial market.''

Lauren Rich Fine, an analyst at Merrill Lynch.  said Knight Ridder ''…was trying to promise shareholders improving margins at the same time it was trying to preserve the culture of quality, and in that sense it couldn't be true to anyone. ……you can't cut the journalism and still put out a good paper.'' 

Ms. Fine recommended to Knight Ridder that it consider other options. ''I said, if you have the conviction that the news business and the online are a win, put up a 'work in progress' sign and say that margins are going to go down'' while the company rebuilds, she said 

The quality brands in the US, such as The New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, are having problems but, while they are cutting costs, they are also keeping a close eye on the quality of their publications..

That is what the battle at Fairfax is all about.

Of course, journalists are entitled to be paid a fair salary for their work and they know an attack on their working conditions when they see one. They view this as a pivotal point in the proud history of Fairfax, which stretches back nearly 180 years.

It is becoming increasingly clear that news 24/7 is the antithesis of being informed. The recent Georgia-Russia conflict brought this into focus. On the news channels, there was plenty of vision of tanks rumbling to and fro across the countryside. We also saw bombed buildings, frightened citizens and angry, posturing politicians.

But most of us watching had no idea what it meant. We had to dig around to find the true meaning of it all - an analysis piece written by someone who knew the area and who understood the issue.

And where did we find it? Not in the 24/7 orgy of vision with no insight. Rather, it was in the quieter havens of quality newspapers.

This is what Fairfax journalists are fighting for. They know that the 24/7 news cycle is more style than substance.

They are seeing an increasingly incompetent management team still paying themselves astonishing salaries, cutting and then cutting again as they pursue a model that is bringing diminishing returns. The one-trick ponies in management cannot see past making savings through retrenchment, non hiring and in their current manic campaign to slash the salaries and conditions of the most experienced staff.

In balance-sheet terms, it may make sense, but balance sheets work to 12-month horizons. In the longer term, and if the experience of overseas news groups which have pursued this policy is anything to go by, it is merely death by a thousand cuts. In the end, you will have a slimmed-down news organisation that has, as Paul Keating would say, “a beautiful set of numbers”.

But the public won't buy it.

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