{"id":1185,"date":"2013-02-09T17:39:31","date_gmt":"2013-02-09T06:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/australiansforhonestpolitics.wordpress.com\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2019-04-13T23:24:22","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T13:24:22","slug":"michelles-grattans-best-work-is-yet-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/michelles-grattans-best-work-is-yet-to-come\/","title":{"rendered":"Michelle Grattan’s best work is yet to come"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Michelle

Michelle Grattan – Photo: Jay Cronan Canberra Times<\/p><\/div>\n

By Margo Kingston<\/a>
\nFebruary 9, 2013<\/p>\n

Michelle Grattan. I\u2019ve loved her and hated her over the years. One invariably has a
\ncomplicated relationship with a great person.<\/p>\n

Soon after the 1993 election, under pressure from then editor of The Age<\/em> Alan Kohler to step\u00a0back from day-to-day journalism, she left her spiritual home to become the first female\u00a0editor of a metropolitan newspaper, The Canberra Times<\/em>. Its owner Kerry Stokes made\u00a0her promises he failed to keep, and two years later she resigned rather than accept a huge\u00a0payout to leave quietly.<\/p>\n

I was one of her journos at The Age<\/em> Canberra Bureau when she took that job, and was\u00a0pissed off with her for reasons that are too old to remember. I accepted Kohler\u2019s offer to be chief-of-staff of The Age<\/em> on the promise there\u2019d be more money for editorial and that I could\u00a0pick some good journos to join us. It was a lie – not Kohler\u2019s, his bosses – so I backed out\u00a0and asked Michelle for work. She said yes.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I wrote of the experience in 2002, on Webdiary:<\/p>\n

Today the Herald looks like it’s lost its Canberra bureau chief, Michelle Grattan, to\u00a0The Age. It is a devastating blow. I haven’t felt so upset over the loss of a colleague\u00a0since Michelle left The Age in the early 1990s to become editor of the Canberra\u00a0Times. I left The Age to work for her soon after, and that stint was the highlight of\u00a0my career. She proved a courageous, dynamic and scrupulously ethical editor who\u00a0trusted her reporters and stood by them when the heat was on. I wrote my best\u00a0work under her editorship. Michelle has always been a difficult bureau chief to work\u00a0for, and we have often disagreed, often intensely. She is also the most thorough,\u00a0ethical, intelligent and balanced journalist I have ever met. In short, Michelle Grattan\u00a0is irreplaceable. Web Diary: The quest for trust.<\/a><\/p>\n

To me her latest move, brought on I would guess by depression as her beloved The Age\u00a0<\/em>became a branch office of Sydney, is her second chance at editing a paper. This one is\u00a0online, and this time she is associate editor, politics. Her move, in my opinion, will come to be seen as marking the death of MSM broadsheet style\u00a0print media. It\u2019s that big. Here\u2019s what she said:<\/p>\n

I think The Conversation gives a new emerging voice, a new opportunity, to\u00a0broaden the voices in political coverage. Diversity matters because we need many\u00a0voices, as many as possible, commenting on politics, interpreting politics and I think\u00a0at the moment what we’re seeing is too much concentration of voices. It’s a bit of an\u00a0irony that we’re getting this concentration, especially in the mainstream media,\u00a0while we’re getting the fragmentation of the media in other senses with the internet.\u00a0Canberra Times:\u00a0Press gallery stalwart Grattan joins university\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Today I tweeted Mark Baker\u2019s\u00a0marvellous\u00a0obituary of \u00a0her relationship with The Age\u00a0<\/a>and an interesting twitter conversation ensued. I agree with critics who say her work has declined in quality in recent years. I feel she has\u00a0good excuses – staff cuts, no money, merging of The Age and SMH Canberra coverage,\u00a0the 24 hour news cycle, a Fairfax identity crisis. She was spooked by the hung parliament,\u00a0and has fought for air as old media fights for its very existence.<\/p>\n

She is now free. She is preparing to tackle a project I dreamed of many years ago and\u00a0began to make real with Webdiary, to harness the talent of the people to create citizen\u00a0journalism. In my opinion, the job could not be in better hands.<\/p>\n

I spoke to a depressed Fairfax stalwart today to get Michelle\u2019s number (no answer). Don\u2019t despair, I said, Fairfax values haven\u2019t died they\u2019ve just moved on. \u00a0Look, even\u00a0Kookaburra<\/a>‘s back.<\/p>\n

PS:<\/strong> I can\u2019t find my Sydney Morning Herald piece of Michelle\u2019s time as editor of The\u00a0Canberra Times<\/em>, which ran shortly after her sacking by Stokes. If anyone has a copy, I\u2019d\u00a0be most grateful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Margo Kingston February 9, 2013 Michelle Grattan. I\u2019ve loved her and hated her over the years. One invariably has a complicated relationship with a great person. Soon after the 1993 election, under pressure from then editor of The Age Alan Kohler to step\u00a0back from day-to-day journalism, she left her spiritual home to become the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,65,26,32],"tags":[149,177,2591,244,464],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-j7","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}