It is saddening to learn of the retirement of the great and inimitable Michael Stutchbury, the longest-ever serving editor-in-chief in the Australian Financial Review’s seven-decade history.
The good news is that Stutch will be succeeded by the talented James Chessell, who has long been viewed as possessing the journalistic horsepower, management nous and stakeholder relationships required to lead one of the most profitable and important newspapers on the planet.
Stutch was basically my first boss when I joined the AFR 12 years ago as a contributing editor, punching out three columns per week.
While his formidable intellect and policy prowess meant that Stutch had robust instincts on everything, I have never met a more thoughtful, dispassionate and committed media leader.
Stutch combined bona fide brilliance with terrific intuition and the resolve to rise above the nontrivial pressures that editors are inevitably subject to as vested agents continuously seek to influence them. He was simply the best and will be hard to supersede.
Stutch was most focused on bringing new stories to light, shaping the public agenda, developing sophisticated policy debate, fostering top-notch journalistic talent, and ensuring that the AFR emphatically dominated its space.
And that is what he has delivered: taking a wilting paper that barely made money with scores of rivals circling the wagons and transforming it into an immensely profitable and dominant quasi-monopoly in the Aussie market for financial news and ideas.
What will probably be lost in the history and analysis of the AFR was that this was all driven by Stutch’s edge in content creation. It had little to do with fancy management strategy, cost optimisation, product development, and/or conventional commercial matters.
Stutch’s business strategy was to always focus on cutting-edge news and analysis across a very diverse spectrum of subject channels. That was the AFR’s competitive advantage: out-think, out-write, and out-produce the competition.
With Stutch, you always had the sense that he would back you if could present a well-thought-through proposal, irrespective of how weird or wonderful it might be. How about the Coalition wanting to buy Virginia Class nuclear submarines all the way back in 2012, which many thought preposterous at the time? Stutch put my story on the front page, which would be vindicated a decade later.
This columnist certainly tested Stutch's preparedness to support unconventional angles, which in my early years writing for the AFR included breaking contentious global new stories on cyber wars, Huawei spying for China, interviewing top spooks at the CIA, NSA, ASIO and ASD on various scandals, penning a Lunch with the AFR column with the divisive Kings Cross identity John Ibrahim, and ruffling feathers across the banking, financial and, occasionally, political landscapes.
My thanks go to Stutch, to whom we are all deeply indebted. You are a brilliant newspaper and digital media man.