“It pains me deeply, as I’m sure it similarly affects all those former colleagues who toiled beneath the masthead to bring genuine news and heartfelt views to its distinguished readership,” writes journalist ROBERT MACKLIN.

Splashed beneath the famous Canberra Times masthead of Sunday, March 9, is a huge gambling ad: 

“ bet 365 

ODDS DRIFT PROTECTOR, 

Every Race, Every Day. 

If the price at the jump is greater than the price you took, you’ll be paid out at the bigger odds.”

Then to give it a modicum of relevance it says, “Canberra Cup”.

There’s lots of small print, but you get the message: The Canberra Times has sold its soul to the gambling industry.

It gets worse. You open it only to find it on page two – and it stretches into a massive ad across two pages both sides, back and front. 

It flags the death knell of the paper after Alexander Murray sold his four-page Federal Capital Pioneer to Thomas Mitchell Shakespeare and his four sons who produced its first issue of The Canberra Times on  September 3, 1926.

It pains me deeply, as I’m sure it similarly affects all those former colleagues who toiled beneath the masthead to bring genuine news and heartfelt views to its distinguished readership. It saddens me that it happened on the watch of current – and I suspect the last – managing editor John-Paul Moloney.

He was a thoroughly likeable bloke and a fine young sports reporter on the Canberra Times in the years I was there from 1990 to 2003. By then I had been associate editor since May 20, 1999 after founding the role of arts editor, becoming a Page 3 columnist, running a heritage page and regularly writing leaders (editorials). 

That’s when I was suddenly terminated, along with Crispin Hull, then deputy editor and Ian Sharpe, the excellent illustrator-cum-cartoonist. I was told I wasn’t sacked, but the position of associate editor was no more so I should collect my things and depart. It was the same for Crispin and Ian.

It was the first squeeze by then owners Rural Press in the gradual strangling of the paper’s lungs by a fierce combination of managerial incompetence in the face of a technological revolution.

Sunday, March 9 is not the final physical edition; that will follow its death throes of some mixed online and paper productions, but nothing will be the same after surrendering its ethics to the gambling industry. 

That ethical link is the lifeline of any publication in the news business and once broken can never be fully restored. 

Some felt it was stretched almost to breaking point with the forest of trees devoted to the advertising of a furniture business that, without explanation, declined to return the government funding during the pandemic. 

But that, apparently, was insufficient to keep the presses rolling, so when the Furies came calling, the Canberra Cup provided the starting gun for that fatal next step, for Every Race, Every Day.

In another bailiwick it might have succeeded, but Canberrans have signalled time and again that they want fewer gambling ads on their media, not more, and certainly not a four-page wraparound in the Canberra Times.

Similarly, most of their columnists, I imagine, will be desperately seeking some formula to avoid withdrawing their talent from the ramshackle remains of a once great newspaper. 

“We have to pay the bills,” they will say. “It’s not our fault if the managers do what’s necessary to keep the paper going.”

Good luck with that. At least you will have a front stall seat for the final rites.  

robert@robertmacklin.com