Former Age editor Michael Gawenda has been sacked as a columnist and occasional feature writer by new Age editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge. "This is a payback," Gawenda said.

The sacking came in a terse email to Gawenda this week, in which Ramadge asserted a new editor’s perogative to "make changes". Gawenda, however, suspects that he lost his monthly opinion page spot thanks to the robust views on Fairfax’s corporate conduct and performance he aired in this year’s A. N. Smith Lecture in journalism at Melbourne University in early October.

Gawenda is a former Age editor, long-standing senior writer and triple Walkley Award winner. He joined the paper in 1970, was editor between 1997 and 2004 and was the Fairfax correspondent in Washington until 2007. He is now director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Advanced Study of Journalism. Read more

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