A new cool Age.

In the last week a cool new Age has hit the streets of Melbourne. With its cool blue masthead, its liberal white, and its big stylised images, it's not just a redesign but a self-conscious aesthetication of the newspaper. The Age still aims to sell to the `A-B segment', professionals and semi-professionals, but it's a decidedly younger, more yuppie lifestyle look; magaziney, with a touch of the coffee table, but definitely latte. There's a new daily `Living' section, food and therapy, sex, fashion and the arts (the old `Metro' was smaller, and there the arts and even TV were never fully reduced merely to lifestyle); a business section doubled in size; an invitation to readers to interact `directly' electronically in a gesture of `opening up' the paper; a revamped editorial and letters page; and again, the big pics throughout the news pages; what of? our Melbourne of course, that newly mythic city of Events.

What does it say about the so-called A-B market, however, that this increase in sophistication seems to mean going `down-market' content-wise? If page one `looks good', it also has about half the content it used to, certainly half that of the Australian, or other big dailies overseas. With advertising, especially self-advertising, the central big image (so important to the paper's identificatory strategy) and the index (a full column), taking so much space, there's room for three small stories--one almost certainly human interest--and the first paragraph of another. Information, in the age of information, seems actually to be disappearing, at least from this source. OK, the following news pages could pick up where page one leaves off, but the cosmopolitan look is belied by a shocking parochialism, page after page of it. World news remains negligible; the editorial is reduced to three short grabs; the opinion pages look the same for the moment, but what if they're to be made more sexy too; while the old-standard of the letters page---the argued point of view--seems also to be under threat, as brief e-mail and fax messages are given equal billing. Maybe it's good news for sports fans that there is a new, separate Sports section which will no longer have to compete with classified ads for space. But sport is, de rigeur, a part of any populist strategy: again, see page one: sport or sports advertising, everyday.

In all of this Steve Harris, Editor-in-Chief, is transferring some of what he learnt at the Sun Herald, and from the success of the Sunday Age, to the `tired, old girl'. But more important, his combined position as business head and editor gives him enormous scope to fuse editorial strategy with market concerns. Stuart Littlemore showed how reporting a particular blockbuster art exhibition could be vastly influenced by this kind of editorial relationship to business: how reporting became a form of advertising, and the professionalism of journalists--their autonomy and commitment to ideas, even truth--held hostage to business. But there is a larger problem associated with Harris's editorial connection with the market. The Age seems to be promoting itself as a new kind of commodity.

Every newspaper has a marketing strategy, and every newspaper has always had a readership that has come, in some sense, to identify with it. But the new Age seems to be offering itself as a brand name, and perhaps even more novel, to be marketing itself as an experience; a new kind of aid to identity construction. The images used in its self-advertising campaign are illuminating here. In an unheard-of, seemingly self-indulgent eight-page wraparound on launch day--virtually all images, with a few slick lines like `seize the day'--a sumo wrestler, all grotesque to our eyes, and a tiny infant meet eye to eye; on another page a full-page babe in arms, fresh and sweet and impressionable, meets us. The shock of incongruity? A sweet little blank page? Schmaltz and savvy signwork; everything you'll need to put a life full of surprises together. Only seize the day.

The other big shift in recent times has been the fact the Premier Kennett seems prepared to talk to the Age, and even to write for it, something he wouldn't do under the editorship of Bruce Guthrie. Guthrie was unceremoniously replaced despite there being no falling off of sales under his editorship (in fact since Alan Kohler it had been steadily growing) and no public criticism of his handiwork. Well it may be that powerful political forces leant on the Age's editorial board to effect this change, as it has been speculated privately by journalists. But whatever the true story here, and it hasn't been reported, there has, at the least, been a coincidence of elan; a meeting of life-force. The old liberal notion that a newspaper might be a transparent conduit for `news', and a key site of open public discussion between citizens, of course was always flawed. But as an ideal of freedom and public discourse it is surely under threat when a self-conscious advertising strategy appears to dump it. Quite apart from whether or not the paper is evidently pro or anti-economic rationalist, pro or anti-Kennett, Kennett has won if the Age becomes a brand name and reading it an event or lifestyle choice. Let's hope that longer-standing journalistic traditions and the hard work of producing challenging writing will subvert the Harris marketing plan.