“I think the question of how do we fund quality journalism … how do we afford quality journalism … the fact of the matter is we can't afford not to afford quality journalism.”

Campbell Reid at the Alliance’s Future of Journalism Summit, May 2008

Quality matters. Everybody knows this. The only debate now is to what comprises quality journalism and whether it can continue to be delivered in an era of savage job cuts to the very people charged with creating and delivering it.

In his 2002 book, The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer sets out to show a link between quality and revenue and finds: “a positive correlation between quality and business success”.

He believes that as a newspaper’s influence grows, so does its value: “If the model works, an influential newspaper will have readers who trust it, and therefore it will be worth more to advertisers.”

Credibility, authority and an elegant reading experience are key to the continued value of the brand of journalism. This has been hurt over the past few months by some big stories that have turned out to be false: the Pauline Hanson pictures affair and the Godwin Grech email debacle, in which the Daily Telegraph mocked up an email from the PM’s office to public servant Godwin Grech that not only turned out to be fake but had the wrong addressee.

Mistakes such as these impact badly on the public’s perception of journalism. Mistakes like these are almost always exacerbated by an overworked staff not having enough time to check stories properly.

In his study, Meyer also finds the following:

• staff size affects circulation: Over a five-year span, newspapers that added staff held onto more of their circulation than papers that lost staff.

• staff size also affects accuracy:  Each additional staff member per 1,000 circulation reduces the error rate by 4.4 points.

• the number of sub-editors affects the papers’ accuracy and cleanliness, which feeds into enhanced circulation.

As editor of The Sun, before she was made the chief executive of News International, Rebekah Wade delivered the Hugh Cudlipp Lecture, Britain’s highly influential version of the Olle Lecture. She said that only quality journalism would save newspapers.

“The quality of our journalism will make or break our industry, not the recession," she said. “The death knell is already ringing for publishers who have forgotten our reason for being. Cost-cutting in this business only works if the savings are reinvested in journalism.”

Perhaps Campbell Reid should have the last word as well. In a recent forum at the ABC, chaired by Geraldine Doogue and featuring the likes of Wendy Bacon, Eric Beecher, John Hewson and Alan Kohler, Reid was discussing, among other things, the viability of his company’s print mastheads against a backdrop of falling revenue and a gloomy outlook for recovery. 

“As we wrestle with these problems at News Limited, we’ll give up on a lot of things in order to keep our business afloat,” Reid said. “But the last thing we'll give up on is good journalism, because without that, without that bond between the reader and the newspaper, there simply is no newspaper.”