The Advertiser cannot work with the Fringe in the current climate | Gemma Jones

For decades The Advertiser devoted time and money to helping build the Fringe into a success. It is time to set the record straight, writes editor Gemma Jones.

Adelaide Fringe CEO Heather Croall, centre, at the launch of the Adelaide Fringe 2022 program. Picture: Kelly Barnes

The Advertiser and sister publication the Sunday Mail have a long and proud history of supporting Fringe artists and the entire cultural life of this state.

For decades, The Advertiser has devoted countless reporter hours to helping build the event into the huge success it is today.

There are many artists who have a coveted Advertiser Fringe Award, a longstanding program stopped in 2012 when the Fringe began its own awards.

Our awards, reviews and star ratings had been achievements held up by artists to promote themselves and their shows at festivals around the world.

Many of our readers would also be familiar with the Tiser Fringe Adviser, another great initiative of this masthead. It was a product within our wider advertiser.com.au site that contained hundreds of easy-to-navigate reviews, star ratings, and show and venue details as well as where to purchase tickets.

This worked well until the Fringe recently began publishing reviews on a Fringe Feed website with an almost identical format and functionality as our Tiser Fringe Adviser.

The decision by the Fringe to launch a rival review website undermined our ability to find an audience and, therefore, the capacity of The Advertiser to continue to review hundreds of shows and publish them online.

It undermined our ability to cover the cost of dozens of full pages of newspaper coverage, production hours and freelance journalists who file on shows.

The Advertiser’s former review site Fringe Adviser.

Adelaide Fringe’s own review site Fringe Feed.

In another unexplained snub, the Fringe decided not to distribute its program through The Advertiser in 2021 for the first time since at least the 1980s. A pattern had developed.

It is time for The Advertiser to set the record straight.

The Fringe walked away from The Advertiser, not the other way around. On the way out the door, the Fringe has torched a decades-long relationship, and it is the artists who will suffer as a result.

Fringe chief executive Heather Croall suggested to a boutique news and lifestyle website on Monday that she believed the failure of a commercial partnership was the reason The Advertiser had stopped reviewing Fringe shows.

Wrong.

In addition to creating a rival site, the Fringe also imposed conditions on our journalists that to have accreditation and access to review tickets, they had to upload their reviews into the Fringe Feed website.

The process was time consuming and aggressively policed by the Fringe, with journalists left in no doubt that if they failed to comply, then their accreditation that allowed access to shows for review would be cancelled.

Advertiser staff were left demoralised and distressed and, in one email chain, were reduced to begging for a release valve as one journalist was left working after-hours and weekends just trying to comply with Fringe demands.

No journalist on The Advertiser has registered for media accreditation this year. This has my full support. I saw the toll the aggressive approach the Fringe took on Advertiser staff last year and did not want to see a repeat, nor any staff publicly embarrassed if the Fringe had followed through and cancelled a journalist’s accreditation or access to review shows.

Ms Croall has privately indicated she will publish all emails between Advertiser staff and the Fringe staff and that they show offers of help.

That there was at least recognition of the burden the Fringe had imposed – indicated by individual Fringe staff wanting to help – is nice but that should never have been necessary.

It is also of interest that the boutique website Ms Croall chose to air her grievances with has a commercial deal with the Fringe, a fact belatedly added to the online story.

The managing director of that website’s publisher was appointed to the Fringe board in October 2022.

Both parties deny a conflict of interest. This should be of interest to the state government, which has contributed an extra $8m to the Fringe over four years. The only conclusion to draw from the past week is that Fringe administrators thought they could take The Advertiser for granted and still expect the same level of support.

The indignation now is baffling, in some ways, when the Fringe has achieved what it had appeared to want when it did things such as start the Fringe Feed over the top of the Tiser Fringe Adviser.

It has achieved on the accreditation front, too. We have stepped away, yet that has also been weaponised by the Fringe in the past week.

There is a sad sense of entitlement that all of these things would happen and The Advertiser would not respond.

The Advertiser cannot work with the Fringe in the current climate.

However, it can work with venues and with artists to promote their work.

From this week, we will celebrate places such as the Garden of Unearthly Delights, Gluttony and smaller venues, too – and all the fantastic things they represent.

We can, and will, do all of this without the Fringe administration.

The Fringe provides review tickets for accredited journalists but The Advertiser will not partake in this program. Instead, we will directly support artists by purchasing tickets, as every other festival lover in this state does.

While the Fringe Feed operates as it does by taking the work of all publishers and running it on their own site, including the first par and star rating with a token click through to the source website, we cannot review hundreds of shows as we once proudly did. However, we can still support artists on merit in our news pages.

I empathise with readers and artists who will be disappointed about the reviews, but we did not create the circumstances leading to this outcome.

Fringe venue The Garden of Unearthly Delights. Picture: Dean Martin

There was a stark contrast this week between the Fringe Festival and the Adelaide Festival. The Advertiser has been proud commercial partners with both over many years. The interactions with each could not have been more different.

The Advertiser has condemned the decision to include in the Festival’s Writers’ Week two authors with repugnant views about Israel and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

We condemned the move as a masthead that has raised almost $200,000 to support Ukrainian refugees and also stood against anti-Semitism.

When The Advertiser sought to distance any element of our partnership from Writers’ Week and to withdraw our staff from the Breakfast With Papers initiative, the Festival worked with us with respectful understanding of our position to achieve that outcome.

We will continue to proudly work with them on covering the Festival’s cultural program because we want to support great artists and inform our readers who want to see their shows.

That is what mutual respect looks like. Respect is what I have asked of the Fringe if The Advertiser is to restore an editorial relationship in the future.