Fifty years ago, I found my dream job – and I’m not done yet

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When I arrived at The Sydney Morning Herald in 1974, I was the square peg that had fallen into a square hole.

If a genie ever sprang from a bottle and offered me one wish, it would be to have a job as a columnist on the biggest and best newspaper in the country,. If he offered me a second wish, it would be to have my columns also published in the country’s other great newspaper,For the first seven years after I left school, I worked to achieve my dream of becoming a chartered accountant. Not any old accountant, aaccountant.

Because the world gets ever-more complex, I’d try to ensure the young people we hired to write about the economy had some formal education in the topic. Then I’d teach ’em the tricks of the trade. I’ve had the privilege to mentor a couple of dozen of theOver 50 years I’ve written well over 5000 columns, and worked for 16 editors – one of whom lasted for about 24 hours.

You had to beg your bank to lend you less than you really needed to buy a home. Until the Whitlam government’s Trade Practices Act of 1974, it was legal for businesses to collude in setting the prices they charged, or agree to carve up the territory between them, limiting competition. The privatisation of government-owned businesses began under Hawke-Keating, but continued under Howard and state governments of both colours. The outsourcing of government-provided services, a much more debatable “reform”, continues to this day.

Labor gets the credit for introducing our first universal healthcare system, Medicare, and compulsory employee superannuation which, more than 30 years later, ensures most couples will live more comfortably in retirement than they would under just the age pension.can say they lived through at close quarters: the many changes at this august organ.

Since Carroll, my opinion really is my opinion. He was, without doubt, the best of all the editors I’ve worked for. But then we – like every newspaper – discovered that the rise of the internet had taken away most of our advertising revenue. Before the revolution, every big city had a broadsheet newspaper with a virtual monopoly over classified advertising. A monopoly it exploited to the full.

At first, we – and other newspapers around the world – just tried to move the same formula online. We put all our editorial content online and freely available, hoping to attract enough digital advertising. We tried using “clickbait” to get as many people momentarily clicking on our site as we could.It didn’t work. Eventually, we realised that almost all the digital advertising revenue was being scooped up by Google and Facebook.

 

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