The Sun-Herald

The death of The Bulletin -- one editor's view

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by David Dale
On my first day as editor of The Bulletin, in February 1988, I was taken to lunch at Mario's restaurant in East Sydney by the then managing director of Kerry Packer's empire, Trevor Kennedy.

I'd just spent six weeks in New York researching trends in the magazine industry, and I outlined a transformation plan that included a physical redesign, new sections on architecture, entertainment, technology and food, and an irreverent approach that would take the magazine back to its larrikin roots. I used the phrase "a tone of benign scepticism" a lot.

"Yeah, yeah, that's all fine," Kennedy said, "but there's only one thing you need to save this magazine." Goodness, I thought, my first day on the job and already I'm getting the magic formula from the man who'd taken The Bulletin to its peak of political influence in the 1970s.

"What's that?" I asked. "F---ing good stories," Kennedy replied.

I argued with him then, and I argued with Kerry Packer when I met him a week later, that magazines were no longer about breaking stories.

That function was being performed very well by daily papers and by TV stations. What a magazine could do was break ideas, attitudes, and new ways of understanding society, and present them in an individual voice that would delight more readers than it would offend. That could be the point of difference that might attract readers under the age of 50.

I'm not sure that Kennedy ever agreed with me and I'm quite sure Packer never agreed with me. Two years and one month later, Packer fired me for publishing a cover story called "The Great Australian Balance Sheet - Our human assets and liabilities" (an updating of an earlier cover called "The 100 Most Appalling People in Australia").

Apparently at least one of the human liabilities was close enough to Packer to persuade him that this irreverence was not the best way forward for his venerable weekly.

When I left, the circulation was 112,000 a week. These days, as the mag takes its terminal breath, circulation stands at 60,000 a week.

It's sad that a piece of Australian history will disappear from our newsstands, but it's not surprising. If not for Packer's nostalgia, it would have gone ten years ago. Like John Howard, The Bulletin outstayed its welcome.

I was just one of a series of band-aids applied to the magazine over the past two decades, each trying a different desperate measure to avert the inevitable.

Better journalists than I have edited The Bulletin before and since my period, but none has been able to overcome the fundamental problem -- there is no role in a multimedia society for a weekly publication that simply reports and analyses news.

Packer never recognised that. He kept the magazine going against the advice of his money managers. He never lost hope that it could still exert influence.

One afternoon in 1989, he ranted at me for an hour about the need for a cover story that would stop the federal government from embracing free trade, because the economy would not survive the removal of protectionist barriers.

I said that would make a discussion for the business pages, but as a cover story it would bore our target audience and destroy all the circulation gains we'd been making recently. He didn't care.

The Bulletin has gone and with it, the age of media proprietors who will allow eccentricity to override expediency. That's the really sad part.

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. For daily updates on Australian attitudes and behaviour, go to Who we are.