Modern industrial relations coverage: hold the presses

And let's not talk about that other Fairfax paper, The Australian Financial Review, where in recent months they seem to have gone from two roundspeople to zip.

The legendary metalworkers union leader Laurie Carmichael once used to enthusiastically tell his militant union delegates not to read the Daily Telegraph, not to buy the Herald Sun, but get the AFR and read it on the way to work if you wanted to know industrial relations, and get a fair and balanced account of what was happening and what the bosses were thinking.

This retreat from coverage of the industrial round is part of a worldwide media trend. In the USA media observers say the retreat began in the late 60s - so that today the AFL-CIO claims there is no more than a dozen labor reporters nationally.

And most of the reporting of unions and their membership is buried in the back part of the paper as part of the business pages because in the USA labour is reported as a cost-input, rarely as a human story about the tragic lives of low-paid workers trying to live in the heart of the beast.

Up till the start of the Accord era, here in Australia, the industrial round was considered one of the plum beats for journalists - especially ambitious young journalists would brawl with each other to get an opportunity to report Brother Ducker's words.

To get ahead in the media you had to have 'done' industrial reporting.

Well into the early 80s, on the 7th floor of the Sussex St Labor Council's office in Sydney, there was always a hive of media activity in the cubbyholes the journalists occupied as part of the IR press gallery.

When I first joined the IR gallery, as a cadet reporter in the mid-70s, the SMH had three people covering the round; the now defunct afternoon tabloids (The Sun and The Mirror) had two each; The Daily Telegraph had at least two and sometimes three people on the round; The Australian had one or two; AAP had one person and a second person got attached when the round was busy; the ABC had one full-time TV industrial reporter and one full-time radio industrial reporter and another reporter when things were busy - and there was always one or two commercial TV and radio reporters using the spare cubby hole laughingly called an office.

Industrial reporters would regularly scurry up to the 10th floor to door stop Ducker, Unsworth and McBean to get the latest on an industrial dispute - just like the door stops we now see outside Parliament House in Canberra. (Though there were a hell of a lot more gruff words and "f*ck offs" when Barrie or the two Johns didn't want to talk).

At the Thursday night weekly Labor Council meeting at least half a dozen mainstream journalists were there (plus the Community Party's Tribune journalist) to covering proceedings.

There were then two pubs, on the corner of Sussex and Goulburn Streets, after hours (wink wink ) you could catch union officials from the Left in one pub, and union officials from the Right in another - many a half-sodden journalist would nearly get run over as they crossed Goulburn St going from one pub to another to pick up the tribal stories.

The Sydney IR gallery was replicated in Victoria where, among the wonderful old architecture and furniture of the Lygon St Trades Hall, there was an IR reporters' gallery where - I jealously noted - the media offices were larger and better appointed than those in Sydney.