<i>Illustration: michaelmucci.com</i>

Illustration: michaelmucci.com

Tonight journalist Malcolm Brown will feature on the ABC's Australian Story. With Malcolm, you often heard him before you saw him. For 40 years he was a Herald general reporter but also the paper's great mutterer. He often engaged in what could be described as an animated argument with himself, sotto voce. His eccentricity was in no way offset by his appearance, almost always a suit and tie, white shirt, woollen vest in winter, brogues, glasses, a front pocket full of pens. Throwback. Category of one.

So Malcolm gets to represent the Herald on national television, as if this were a paper of eccentrics, when the paper is shedding its eccentrics. Once you've shed idiosyncrasy and eccentricity, and replaced them with a fast, shape-shifting commodity called breaking news and analysis, you don't get it back.

Malcolm departed a few weeks ago. He was not alone. Seventy-four journalists have left the Herald in the past three months via voluntary redundancy. Last Thursday saw the final ritual in a rolling series of Thursday rituals. At 4pm we have been gathering at the news hub and listening to the words of those about to leave.

The speeches by and about those departing have been, mostly, funny, with an eye for detail, because if they didn't know how to tell a story, or know that detail is the essence of narrative, they wouldn't have been here in the first place.

We listened, we applauded, we saluted them. We gave them the ceremonial banging out as they departed. Then we had a slice of cake, signed farewell cards, wrote affectionate comments, and went back to work. Because it was that time of day. The immutable matter of the ship that sails every night, departing about 10pm, and we are the crew.

Did I mention eccentrics? Last Thursday's final farewells included Doug Anderson, our TV columnist, long and languid, stick thin, grey goatee, and an unruly cascade of heavy-metal-rocker hair that long ago turned to white. A man who refused to use email, was never going to stomach the digital age. Besides, after 42 years, they were offering good money to go. He began his farewell words by describing his first day in the industry, when he was a hired as a proofreader, on the spot, but couldn't afford the 60¢ he needed to join the union. It was an era when we had proofreaders and printers turned molten metal into words.

Another who went last Thursday was Hamish McDonald. There are only two journalists in Australia who can write lucidly about Asia with the strategic depth and breadth that comes with experience in the field, and Hamish was one of them.

We also said goodbye to Peter Kerr, our executive editor. He's the one who dealt with all the complaints from readers, never compliments, which meant I helped keep him gainfully employed. In a spiky business with more than enough prima donnas, he was always calm, kind, courteous. His kids must love him.

And there was Helen Anderson, the doyenne of travel journalism in Australia, our travel editor, whose limpid brown eyes were, in recent months, sometimes reduced to yellow lizard slits caused by overwork. She was there to say goodbye last Thursday but said nothing. It was too hard.

Readers respond to informed eccentrics and eccentricity. People like relationships with writers and they like surprises. Today the commodity called news comes faster than ever before, from more sources, with fewer lulls and mostly it comes at no cost. There is always a cost, at the root, it is just a question of who pays. What are readers willing to pay for? This is the great question of the digital age.

It will not matter in what format the journalism is delivered. It doesn't matter if newspapers survive without paper - or even without news.

It matters a great deal, however, if the ozone layer in the public debate formed by quality journalism is degraded into irrelevance. Because the public relations industry dwarfs the news media. Governments have enormous resources of message delivery and spin. So do corporations. So do advocacy groups.

It has proved unwise to dismiss newspaper publishers simply because they are, at least traditionally, newspaper publishers.

One company I have been following since its inception is A.H. Belo Corp. It was formed in 2008 when a regional media conglomerate, Belo Corp, decided its newspapers were holding back profitability and spun them off to fend for themselves. The newspaper group has been operating since 1842, is anchored by the Dallas Morning News and includes the Providence Journal, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States.

A.H. Belo was spun off in January 2008, with a modest market capitalisation of $US300 million, during the unseen prelude to an approaching global financial freeze. By March 2009, its shares had fallen to US59¢. The company's market value was just $12 million. Its management lived in a harsh world but at least they lived in the real world. They slashed costs to a level that could survive the storm. Because costs had been aligned with reality, I thought Belo looked like a bargain.

Last Friday, A.H. Belo shares closed at $4.95, up more than 900 per cent since the bottom less than four years ago. There's a message here.

Doug Anderson's final column appeared last Friday, on page 22, in its usual humble but cunning spot between the TV guide and the puzzles.

Confronting the prospect of retirement and reluctantly leaving his readers, he quoted D.H. Lawrence about getting on with life: ''A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.''

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