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Six
entries in Companion to the Australian Media
Edited
by Bridget Griffen-Foley
Australian
Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2014.
colour in print media Two of the earliest colour
pages in the Australian media appeared as supplements in the Christmas 1883
issue of the Australasian Sketcher.
From the 1860s, chromolithographs by Troedels in Melbourne had demonstrated
that an Australian printer could create the finest-quality publicity posters.
An equivalent standard in books began with the 1915 memorial volume for
J.J. Hilder, which led the Smith and Julius Studios to publish Art in Australia from 1916 and the Home from 1919. Despite such
achievements, quality colour publications remained showpieces for another 50
years.
Until
the installation of web offsets in the 1960s, colour printing in newspapers and
periodicals usually meant one colour in addition to black. When two or more
colours were applied, they almost never overlapped – or even touched – because
positioning the colours exactly (the registration process) was so inaccurate.
The favoured method was known as ‘pick-out’, as in comic strips.
Australians
saw their first local comic book, the Comic
Australian, appear in 1911 (continuing until 1913) with colour on four
pages. In the late 1930s, Smith’s Weekly
sought to reclaim its readership with a coloured comic using a single overlay,
and in 1939, Frank Packer designed the new Sunday
Telegraph around 16 pages of coloured comics shipped from California –
until war forced their replacement with local ‘pick-out’ strips.
Brisbane’s
Courier printed two- or three-colour
supplements from 1903 and the Orange
Advocate (NSW) managed two-colour advertisements in 1927 without special
equipment. In 1926, the Melbourne Argus
installed a web offset capable of printing in four colours, which it used for
art reproductions and coverage of the Melbourne Cup. Additional plant made the Argus printery capable of 9500 sheets per hour in two or three
colours, which it confined itself to using for the Australasian Pictorial Annual from 1933 and advertisements in the Argus Week-End Magazine from 1938.
Colour
in the daily press remained so much a novelty throughout the 1930s that Newspaper News reported its every
appearance – such as when the Melbourne Sun
News-Pictorial used a four-colour process for a pair of display
advertisements in 1934. More typical was the 1931 decision by Sydney’s Sunday Sun to abandon its rotogravure
because of a scarcity of suitable inks. The Sydney
Mail scored ‘a great advance in four-colour letterpress halftone pictorial
reproduction’ in January 1938 to depict the sesquicentenary procession; it did
so by using a special camera and producing copper stereotype blocks in seven
hours, rather than the usual seven days; in another innovation, the pages were
printed flat. Eleven months later, the 78-year-old weekly closed.
After
the war, the proprietors of the Australasian
envisaged re-launching it as the Australasian
Post with ‘All rotogravure. Good splashes of colour’. The British firm that
bought the parent Argus in 1947 spent
a fortune on new equipment, including a pair of colour offset presses during
1950–51, making it the only Australian daily to offer advertisers colour
printing on its news pages. On 28 July 1952, it established a world first by
synchronising offset on one side of the page with letterpress on the other in
perfect register – at least as far as that quality was then accepted. However,
the spoilage rate remained astronomical and the process was extremely costly.
Despite this, the Argus produced news
photographs in full colour during the 1954 Royal visit.
In
1958, advertisers experimented with colour sheets to counter the punch of
black-and- white television. Yet obstacles remained: pre-prints consumed time
and colour pages had to be printed separately. Even using its Giganticolor, the
Melbourne Herald needed more than 40
hours to produce a wrap-around for the 1967 Victorial Football League (VFL)
Grand Final. Nonetheless, between 1967 and 1968 the sheets from John Fairfax
& Sons’ Giganticolor increased from 53 to
90 million.
With
longer production times and smaller runs, magazines took the lead. Kenmure
Press achieved striking colours for Man
Junior covers from 1948. In the inaugural Australian Home and Garden Annual that year, 19 of its 116 pages
used more than one colour. Of the 132 pages in the 1963 edition, 30 carried
colour. The printing quality remained poor, however, as the full-colour front
cover and advertisements provided very little definition of faces or figures,
the tonings looked bleached and most pages with more than one colour were
‘pick-out’. Art and Australia was
among the first glossies to appear, in 1963. Shortly afterwards, colour
printing on quality stock moved from the luxurious to the everyday, aided by
jet freight to Dai Nippon in Hong Kong. Developments in several fields came
together for the launches of POL in
1968 and Dolly in 1970.
As
with all aspects of mass media advertising, the impetus for more colour of a
higher quality came from those who paid the printer. Consumer surveys indicated
that full-page, full-colour advertisements gained the attention of 60 per cent
of magazine readers. Early in 1958, Southdown Press began planning to increase
the colour in New Idea and TV Week by switching from letterpress to
web offset before 1963. In 1964, Woman’s
Day introduced state editions so that firms could publicise products
regionally in colour. The production manager at the Land acknowledged that his weekly had ‘decided to go in for a web
offset plant because of growing enquiries from advertisers for the use of
colour’.
This
commercial imperative came to the dailies late in 1960, with an eight-page
tabloid liftout in the otherwise broadsheet Brisbane Courier-Mail to promote a real estate project on the Sunshine
Coast. The next year, the Melbourne Herald
published the first retail page in full colour for Coles. By July 1965, the Herald could produce 535,000 coloured
sheets for New World Supermarkets with a wastage rate less than 2 per cent.
Although
the Australian Women’s Weekly had
included colour from December 1936, its concern during the 1950s was to hold
readers who might otherwise watch television. The Women’s Weekly also anticipated the competition for revenue from
colour television by colouring its news pages in three regional editions in
1967. However, technical difficulties persisted.
Web
offset presses designed for national magazines were too expensive for most printers,
so manufacturers reduced their size. The Caringbah Shire Pictorial had rolled off from an early example from 1954. Of
the 35 offset plants operating in Australia by early 1966, 23 had been
installed during the previous three years, with a further 14 in operation by
1970. During the 1990s, colour news photographs became the norm in virtually
all dailies.
Olga Tsara, “Troedel
& Co., Master Printers and Lithographers”, LaTrobe Library Journal, 62, Spring 1998, pp. 31-38.
media trade press Trade periodicals have
tracked transformations in the mass media. Changes in printing methods were paralleled the Australasian Typographical Journal from 1870 and the appearance of
the Australian Lithographer in 1964. Wireless Weekly began in 1922 as a
technical guide. Oswald Mingay started Broadcasting
Business in 1934 as an insert in Radio
Retailer, and by 1947 was publishing two trade journals and five annuals. Broadcasting and Television has operated under various mastheads since 1950.
In 1921, D.W. Thorpe initiated the Australian Stationery and Fancy Goods
Journal, which became Ideas for
Stationers, Sporting Goods, Newsagents, Art and Gift Shops, Booksellers and
Libraries in 1934, or Ideas for
short after 1937; it has been Bookseller
and Publisher since 1971. With the growth of local publishing, Ideas spawned a separate title from 1962
as Australian Books in Print, then Australian Serials (Periodicals) in Print
in 1981. In 1988, the resale of D.H. Thorpe Pty Ltd saw its absorption into the
Reed Elsevier group.
The creation of industry bodies such
as the Country Press Associations from 1900 and the Australian Newspapers
Conference (later Council) in 1924 underpinned Newspaper News from 1928; it became Advertising and Newspaper News in 1969.
As advertising agencies went from
selling space to providing a full service of artwork and research, at least 15,
frequently fugitive, periodicals – starting with The Reason Why (1908) – represented the shifting nature of their
business. The Waddy (1919) was ‘for
driving home club facts’; Smith and Miles’ Proof
(est. 1925) built goodwill by selling the advertising firm’s ‘personality’. Advertising Monthly in 1928–30 rose with the boom and sank in the Depression. Rydge’s (est. 1928) always advanced the
ties between commerce, entertainment, finance and publicity. Market researchers
gained a separate voice in 1956 with the stencilled Journal of the Market Research Society of Victoria, which expanded
Australia-wide from 1960. The media journals became explicit about the
packaging of audiences for sale.
By the late 1960s, Newspaper News had 2575 subscribers, Advertising in Australia 2376 and B&T Weekly only 1811. Like the mass
media they serve, the trade publications are squeezed by online advertising. In
addition to its print version, B&T
launched an electronic edition in 2003. It went bi-weekly in 2008.
REF:
J. Nicholson, A Life of Books (2000).
printers’
furnishers A printer’s furnisher’s role was to supply the print
media with machinery, paper, type, inks, varnishes, washes and driers. From
1804, the Sydney Gazette and New South
Wales Advertiser urged readers
to sell it paper. Around the rural and suburban press, shortages recurred into
the 20th century, sometimes because of a lack of capital.
Alexander Thompson set up Australia’s
earliest type-foundry in Sydney in 1843; it was maintained by his widow until
1865. The foundry sold to the Sydney
Morning Herald and other colonies until it was displaced during the gold
rushes by importers such Gordon & Gotch. By 1900, linotype machines had
replaced the work of type foundries, except for larger fonts and attractors. At
the same time, photolithography took over from engraving on stone. However,
colour printing for posters and packages increased the demand for a range of
inks, with Collie & Co. offering 30 different reds. In the mid-1930s,
Australia had 12 ink-makers, while five of the bigger printers made some ink
themselves. Wimbles and Cowans had become the leading houses by 1900.
Frederick Thomas Wimble (1846–1936), the son
of an ink-maker for Cambridge University Press in the United Kingdom, landed in
Melbourne in 1867 with printing materials valued at £150. A tour of the United
States and Britain in 1876 to secure agencies for equipment was followed by a
move to Sydney in 1878. He conducted a type foundry for overseas designs, which
he naturalised as Extended Tasmanian Gothic or Wentworth Bold. From 1895 until
1957, the firm promoted its wares through a quarterly magazine-cum-catalogue, Wimble’s Reminder, which championed process engraving and the colour printing
flaunted in a lavish edition in July 1927. The firm continued under outside
management until 1991.
The Scottish paper-maker Cowan’s sent a
consignment to Melbourne in 1844, operated through agents after 1855 and set up
its first branch office in Sydney in 1868. Alex Cowan and Sons were
manufacturing stationers until the firm was taken over by James Hardie in 1975.
It published Cowans from 1904–30 as a
sampler for company products.
During the early 1960s, Xerox electrical
typewriters with interchangeable golf-balls of different faces, photo-setting,
plastic stereotypes and the web-offset further marginalised the furnishers’
inventories, except for inks and varnishes. Letraset sold at local newsagencies
displaced larger fonts, and the demand had changed to one for photographic
equipment and chemicals. So thorough-going had the changes become by 1970 that
franchises for instant print shops were on offer.
Ref: Humphrey McQueen, ‘Frederick Thomas Wimble’, Australian Dictionary of Biography,
volume , 200??, p.
Rydge’s The name ‘Rydge’s’ evokes
Norman B. Rydge (1900–80), his business-oriented publications and a sprawl of
companies in the leisure trades, including early involvement in the hotel
industry. Ever alert to innovation, Rydge published an article in 1934 on the
impact of television on business. In 1936, he took charge of Greater Union
cinemas, which – in alliance with J. Arthur Rank from 1945 – established a
nationwide chain of drive-ins but stymied local feature production at
Cinesound.
In accord with his maxim that a
‘business without profit is business without honour’, Rydge boosted companies
in which he was a major shareholder, such as Cash Orders (Aust.) Ltd. His
lifelong devotion to tax evasion began with his first manual, Federal Income Tax Law (1921).
From 1928, he edited Rydge’s Business Journal, two years
before Henry Luce’s Fortune but with
less of the American’s enthusiasm for
civilising executives. Rydge’s biggest obstacle had been to convince his
fellows that they needed to read. It began at sixty-four pages in January,
reaching 112 pages by September – with almost a third taken by advertising. The
hundredth issue (1936) wondered how ‘that comparatively insignificant
publication ever bore the name Rydge’s’.
Rydge chased 20,000 direct subscriptions, but from July 1928 had to share the
cover price of a shilling with newsagents and booksellers, though he later
reverted to subscription only. By the 500th edition in 1970, subscriptions were
only just above the initial target.
Rydge understood that marketing went
beyond advertising to include office management, the tricks of a commercial
traveller, window-dressing, packaging and the publicity that he perfected with
fictional testimonials. A name change in 1935 to Rydge’s: The Business Management Monthly emphasised this
integration of skills, though he altered the look more than the content. After
that second subtitle disappeared, the
wording on the covers juggled ‘Business’, ‘Entertainment’, ‘Finance’ and
‘Industry’.
Rydge’s
Memory Course
in 1980 continued the 1920s appeal of the Pelmanism memory system, which had
been part of The Rydge Course: How to
Achieve Success (1955). The company gave away
5000 copies of Self-Made or Never Made
to subscribers in 1933. By 1947, Rydge’s was selling How to Build Personality, claiming it was more effective than Dale
Carnegie’s system.
The eponymous brand appeared on Rydge’s Construction, Civil Engineering and
Mining Review (1967), Rydge’s
Management and Marketing Service (1972), and Rydge’s EDP Manual (1977). The flagship publication, depleted of
its gloss, and beaten by both professional journals and a more active business
press, merged with John Fairfax & Sons’ Business
Review Weekly on 25 September 1987.
REF:
T. O’Brien, The Greater Union Story (1985).
trade
press
When the number of Australian periodicals doubled between 1890 and 1922, trade
and commercial publications provided the bulk of the increase to reach a total
of 139 titles. The 1930s Depression shook out 105, but there were still 260 in
1947 and 464 by 1964.
Trade periodicals exist because
manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers need to inform each other about
innovations, and their availability and prices. The process was exemplified by
the Journal of Commerce, which began
in 1854 as a shipping register. In 1870, the diversity of commodities
encouraged its publisher to print the Australasian
Trade Review and Manufacturers Journal as one of the first periodicals to
service wholesalers, agents and retailers; its advertising content grew to 60
per cent by 1882. During the next 20 years, the arrival of branded products in
the areas of hardware, clothing, food, beverages and medicinals led to the
launch of rival periodicals for each of the trades that advertised in the Review, which by 1903 had shrunk to
20 pages, with only one of advertising; it was absorbed back into the Journal of Commerce.
The inaugural editorial of the Australasian Hairdressers’ Journal and
Tobacco Trade Review in 1900 contended that, ‘In these fast-living days of
ours each particular interest has its “organ” of communication between its own
circle, and those beyond its perimeter.’ Indeed, most journals came out on
behalf of trade associations. Once launched, a publication could strengthen the
parent body. For example, the staff of the Australasian
Bakers and Confectioners Journal organised that trade’s first national
conference in 1904. Starting in 1911 for the Victorian Grocers’ Association,
the Southern Grocer recognised that
‘the trade press is the advance of all organisation movement to-day the world
over’. The core of that organisation was price-fixing, which must ‘always
remain the very first and foremost plank in any fighting platform worthy of the
name, and hang the public!’ Trade journals were also backed by the firms they
serviced, such as when Prouds and Angus & Coote underwrote the Commonwealth Jeweller and Watchmaker
(1915).
Trade journals earned less from subscriptions
than from advertisers, who found it more effective to pay a premium to reach
500 subscribers with proven purchasing power than to access a circulation of
50,000. Firms also took advertisements to support their trade organisation or
to square a chum. However, sales and subscriptions do not necessarily measure
readership, and process engravers were sceptical throughout the 1930s about
promoting their services to rural and suburban printers who did not read the
trade journals.
The proliferation of trade journals in the
late 1920s allowed what Newspaper News
described as ‘The Unscrupulous Publisher’ to profit from a journal that was
‘either “written” with the scissors, or complied by cheap, journalistic hacks’.
Publishers also launched magazines to fill up slack times in their print shops.
Since almost no printer employed a full-time accountant before the 1950s,
costings were woeful; they escaped scrutiny because so few printers were public
companies.
Postal arrangements allowed almost any
British periodical to be delivered in Australia for the penny post paid at
‘Home’. However, despite this ‘dumping’ of UK publication into Australia, the
appeal of the local versions was their summarising of the overseas trade press.
American journals were available only by subscription until the 1920s, when G.
Jervis Manton imported titles on ‘Advertising and Business, Mining and Engineering,
Dress and Fashion, Office System, Factory Organisation’.
Why do trade periodicals appear when they do?
The Industrial Australian and Mining
Standard started in 1888, the year BHP issued shares. Three years later,
the Pastoralists’ Review united the squatters
against the shearers’ insurrection. The London publishers of the Draper of Australasia (1901) hoped to
profit from ‘the change of conditions of business caused by the establishing of
free-trade throughout Australia’. Media periodicals matched new media, printing techniques and mass marketing.
The arrival of plastics transformed all mass products, and added rivals the Australian Plastics Journal (1946) and Practical
Plastics (1950).
The pattern of proprietorship was diverse.
Some houses produced similar journals and economised by carrying the same
editorials and news items in the same typeface and column-widths. J.C. Macartie managed monthlies for
cordial-makers, confectioners and bakers, but also the leather trades. Peter
Guthrie Tait (1880–1953) started with Mining
and Engineering Review in 1908; he later divided it into the monthlies Chemical Engineering and Mining Review
and the Commonwealth Engineer, before
adding a weekly newsletter, Tenders.
In 1924, he began Electrical Engineer and
Merchandiser, and finally Manufacturing
and Management in 1946.
George A. Taylor (1872–1928) founded five
journals in the domain of building, town planning and engineering with his
architect wife, Florence (1869–1969). Their Building Publishing Co. Ltd ran 11
titles, including the Radio Journal of
Australia and Australian Home,
which incorporated Real Estate and Soldier. On George’s death, Florence
closed eight titles but continued to edit Building
(later Building, Lighting and Engineering),
Construction and the Australasian Engineer.
The trade journals provided berths for men of
letters. In 1891, Richard Twopenny co-founded the Australasian Pastoralists’ Review with a literary section to rival
the Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’, while the editor of the Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News,
James Green, was documenting the Sydney art scene.
As well as resisting British imports, local
journals voiced interstate rivalries. Victoria’s electrical trade supported its
own journal from 1924, and in 1936 the Queensland
Electrical and Radio World appeared as ‘yet another outcome of the recent
moves from Sydney’ to treat the rest of Australia as its outer suburbs. United
Press in Perth had the west sewn up in the 1920s by publishing for farmers,
grocers, motorists and Masonic Lodges. New Zealand had to be content with
‘Australasian’ in the title of assorted trade journals.
Newspaper
News
observed that trade journals, ‘to be of any real use’, must be ‘written by men
who not only understand trade conditions, but who also have some grasp of
economics, industrial organisation, banking, currency, national finance, and so
on’. In 1889, one had scorned ‘grandmotherly legislation’ for pure food. The
founder of a chain edited the People’s
Weekly for the colliery-owners during the 1923 NSW lockout. Many campaigned
for ‘sane optimism’ to counter ‘Depression propaganda’, or linked Bolshevism to
racial pollution. Hence the middle classes were not as forgotten as (Sir)
Robert Menzies declared when marshaling anti-Labor forces in 1942.
The
Tailors’ Art Journal and Cutters’ Review closed in 1913, with
moans against the ‘cringing, scorpulated mind’ in the trade against advertising
itself. However, the Tailor appeared
later that year with a third of its pages taken by advertisements before seeing
the advertising share of the journal grow to 45 per cent with promotions of
food and alcohol. Because trade journals could not produce full-colour
advertisements, clothiers distributed tear-sheets from the Australian Women’s Weekly.
Few circulation figures are reliable before
the 1960s, when readership of Australian
Fashion News increased from 3750 to 5540, while that of Tailor and Men’s Wear plummeted from
over 5000 to below 2000. Retail Week
fluctuated around 20,000 – the largest subscriber base – followed by Building and Decorating Materials at
10,000 and Australasian Hardware Retailer
– which had been redesigned in response to an ABC television program for
handymen – at 8000.
Trade journals today are brighter in
appearance, breezier in content and accessible online. Analysis and technical
advice have mostly disappeared, with some going to academic journals. Hard
copies look like printed web pages, with snippets in place of the ocean of
expertise that confronted readers before the 1970s.
WikiLeaks Julian Paul Assange (b. Townsville,
1971) began hacking in 1987 as ‘Mendax’ (Latin for ‘untruthful’), leading to a
conviction in 1995. He registered WikiLeaks.org on 4 October 2006 as ‘an
uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking’. It operated with 10
full-time staff, 1,200 volunteers and an annual budget below €1m.
An early post exposed corruption and
murder in Kenya, earning the Amnesty International Reporting Award. Mainstream
outlets paid more attention from November 2007 to the Guantanamo manuals on how
to lie to the Red Cross, and even more in April 2008 to the ‘Collateral Murder’ video of US helicopter attacks on
civilians.
The 28 November 2010 release from
260,000 US State Department ‘Confidential’ cables made WikiLeaks as
recognisable as Google; saw credit-card
corporates block donations; the Pentagon set up a war room; and the Department
of Justice initiate a secret grand jury. Australian
Federal Police concluded that he had committed ‘no crime’ after prime minister
Gillard’s allegation on radio that he had broken the law. The US military
sentenced WikiLeaks source Chelsea (Bradley) Manning to 35 years on 30 July
2013. While US voices called for Assange’s assassination as the ‘most dangerous
man in the world’, he was readers’ choice for Time’s Person of the Year (2010).
WikiLeaks unsettled the profession of
journalism as much as did the new media. Was Assange an editor, investigative
journalist, leaker or ‘newsman’? This uncertainty surfaced in 2011 when
WikiLeaks won a Walkley Award for journalistic leadership.
On 30 May 2012, Assange’s lawyers lost
their fight against his extradition to Sweden on sexual molestation allegations
but he was granted diplomatic asylum in London’s Embassy
of Ecuador on 18 August 2012. His life turned into a television soap,
with more media investigation into his private affairs than into the crimes
that WikiLeaks documents. Journalists and academics have not followed through
on cables regarding Rudd’s advocacy of force against China, Shorten’s pitch for
political advancement to the US Consul in Melbourne, or ex-Senator Abhbib’s
conduit from the ALP to the US Embassy. WikiLeaks is the prime source of
information about the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty with its implications
for local content.
Hence, WikiLeaks is significant for
what it indicates about the new and the old media as well as for the crimes and
lies it reveals. ‘The Internet,’ Assange writes,
‘by itself does not give you freedom. The Internet is simply a way to make
publishing cheap’. He expected his leaks to ‘bubble up’ as if from a blog but
soon learnt that ‘publishing in the computer age therefore becomes about
performing the task that the systems allow and facing down the ingrained,
self-protecting habits of the old publishing way’. Seeking ‘the widest possible
circulation’, WikiLeaks in 2010 dealt with five liberal press outlets,
primarily the London Guardian, and in
Australia through Fairfax
WikiLeaks is emblematic of a ‘Sunshine
Journalism’ which shines light on crimes. Attracting support across the political
spectrum from those opposed to limits on the web, it broke into a social order
shaken by the GFC to hit prominence in step with
the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring. A WikiLeaks Party, registered in July
2013, fielded impressive Senate candidates in three States before imploding
over allocation of preferences to right-wingers, leaving Assange with 1.24
percent of the Victorian vote.
Although attention has shifted to
Edward Snowden and his NSA downloads, Assange is
Rupert Murdoch’s only Australian-born rival for influence over the global
mediascape.
References
Suelette Dreyfus and Julian Assange, Underground, William Heinemann Australia, North Sydney, 2011
edition.
Andrew Fowler, The Most Dangerous
Man in the World, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2011.
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