An unseen weakening of Fairfax's journalism culture: the impact of copy sharing in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Canberra Times books pages

The value of covering new books and literary culture in Australian newspapers has been widely accepted even if it has not been widely studied in journalism scholarship. The massive transformation of media in the Web 2.0 era has affected the Australian press in numerous ways, collapsing its well-established business model and driving publishers to offer print journalism online. The impact on newspaper journalists can be seen immediately in the large numbers that have been made redundant or have taken packages in recent years. More difficult to assess is the undoubted impact of such wholesale change on the cultural authority associated with print journalism and on Australian journalism culture itself. This conference paper focuses on one aspect of newspaper journalism in an effort to engage with these questions. It examines how the transformed media climate has affected Australian newspapers’ coverage of books and literary culture, by describing and analysing the expansion of copy sharing in the books pages of Fairfax Media’s three metropolitan daily newspapers, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times.