Journalism Leadership - Winner

Eric Beecher

As you map the career of Eric Beecher you find a man who has never been afraid to chance his arm. His first foray into journalism was at 17 with Australian Cricket, a magazine that combined his passion for journalism and his passion for a sport where fortune favours the bold. After that he reported for The Age, The Observer and the Washington Post before coming to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1984 – where at the age of 33 he became the paper’s youngest editor.

His youthful enthusiasm and revolutionary ideas, shook old Granny out of its conservative torpor and made it one of the world’s best newspapers. He redesigned the SMH and changed people’s thinking about the role of a modern newspaper.

The sections developed were not advertising supplements, where the words were just flowery wallpaper. They were informative, well written, well researched and were produced at the same high level of journalistic excellence as all other parts of the paper. It was a classic "If we build it they will come" philosophy and they certainly came. Readers loved it and so did the advertisers.
In retrospect, one marvels at the boldness of the plan and the courage of the Fairfax management to back Beecher’s vision. It is the sort of courage not evident these days as modern newspaper management turns its back on content-led solution to their problems. It says much about Beecher’s powers of persuasion.

Beecher’s changes to the SMH set the standard for all other major newspapers in Australia. He oversaw a massive revamp of the Melbourne Herald. Beecher is a man who follows his own voice, but he hasn’t always been right and has had some painful and spectacular failures. The Eye magazine, while critically acclaimed never quite got there on circulation and folded after heavy losses.
Now, as newspapers struggle with their formats, Beecher has plunged into online journalism. He surprised everyone when he bought out Stephen Mayne’s idiosyncratic online news-sheet Crikey, and now he has launched a finance-based online site hiring some of the most well-respected names in Australian financial journalism to help him.

The thread through Beecher’s career has been that quality content is king and without quality content, all else fails. He is an outspoken critic of much of the media’s tendency to dumb down. In Do Not Disturb, a series of essays on the media edited by Robert Manne, Beecher gave an insight into how he sees the role of media proprietor:
"In the old days, owners like Warwick Fairfax and Frank Packer tacitly acknowledged that being a media proprietor was different to running other businesses because it included a public interest responsibility, conferred power and influence on the owner, and therefore wasn’t just about making profits.

Today, most media owners and their shareholders regard their business as no different to any other one; they see their role as concerned solely with maximising profits and satisfying shareholders. Media proprietors no longer act as if they were custodians of a ‘public trust’."
It is clear from his career that Beecher will never be one of those media proprietors.