CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The Sydney Morning Herald has today announced an unprecedented recruitment drive, as the major masthead hires 150 budding journalists to exclusively report on the grievances of the wealthy parents of the state’s most prestigious Christian and Grammar school students.
This new boost of talent comes as a surprise to the rest of the Australian media landscape, given the Nine Newspaper’s last ten years of cutting fat from their actual product by forcing their underpaid staff to wear as many hats as possible – a model that has resulted in anyone under the age of 50 being asked to act as digital producers, and forcing opinion columnists to write glowing advertorials for major restaurant conglomerates under the guise of ‘lifestyle’.
It’s also surprising because none of these new journalists will be asked to report on anything remotely of interest to 99% of New South Wales.
The once esteemed newspaper, famous for bringing down multiple state and federal governments – as well as blowing open multiple organised crime Syndicates and corrupt police forces – is now directing all resources to reporting solely on property market speculation and wildly uninteresting dramas involving private schoolboy football teams and staff changes.
It is a particularly bizarre niche for the Sydney Morning Herald to focus on, especially after such diligent Federal Election reporting that saw swathes of blue-ribbon conservative seats vote in teal independent MPs after the relentless skewering of the ‘detached’ Morrison Government.
With the people of NSW in the midst of a cost of living crisis, rising case numbers and climate-change-related homelessness caused by floods and fire – it remains unclear why the fuck the top brass at the SMH think that their readership gives a fuck about a new Olympic-standard hyperbaric oxygen tank at Hopscotch Boy’s College.
However editorial staff maintain that this kind of reporting has always been part of their mission, and that it is highly important for them to cover the stories that their kids tell them over the kitchen table before school drop off.
When asked why they didn’t cover any of the recent teacher’s strikes, a spokesperson for the SMH said reporting on trade union action is the type of naval-gazing nonsense that the average Australian has no interest in.
