Peter Blunden still passionate about papers after all these years

Newspaper veteran Peter Blunden is ‘as good as gold’ after an unprecedented period off work for open-heart surgery | LISTEN

HWT managing director, editorial, Peter Blunden. Picture: David Geraghty.

Peter Blunden is “as good as gold”, he wants everyone to know. But for a while he wasn’t.

The newspaper veteran of more than 40 years and editorial boss of News Corp’s Victorian division recently had an unprecedented period off work for open-heart surgery.

“You don’t want to bust a valve if you’re in these jobs, and I did,” Blunden, 59, tells The Australian’s Behind the Media podcast, available online. “I busted a valve in my heart so I had to have open-heart surgery.”

The managing director editorial of Herald and Weekly Times concedes that lying in a hospital bed was hard for a man who has spent more than four decades living journalism 24/7.

But it did provide a chance to reflect. “I was off pretty close to seven or eight weeks, which is a record for me,” he said. “I was back at work in the middle of January and feeling as passionate about it as I ever have.”

I had met Blunden only once previously, but sitting in his 12th-floor office in the Herald and Weekly Times tower on Melbourne’s Southbank, he is ami­able and charming. But I don’t completely buy it.

A successful editor needs to be obsessive, ruthless and demanding. “I’m capable of sometimes getting a bit too passionate about some issues,” he concedes. “I was known many years ago to throw a few pens around the ­office. You can’t do that these days, and I don’t.”

His formative newspaper environment in the 1970s was an era of “clunky typewriters rattling away and people with cigarettes ­hanging out of their mouths”, pop­ulated by uncompromising edit­ors who instilled passion and drive.

“I’ll drive it hard — I do — and I’ll drive people mad sometimes with the interests that I have in stories. But I would generally see myself as having an excellent ­relationship with the people that I work with.”

The Victorian division of News Corp, which Blunden runs alongside managing director commercial Peter Zavecz, encom­passes not just the Herald Sun, the biggest selling daily newspaper, but also the Sunday Herald Sun, rural paper The Weekly Times, the ­Geelong Advertiser and Leader local newspapers.

The phone rings a lot, Blunden says, often with requests — or pressure — to pull stories.

“You have to listen and you have to make a judgment call that you believe is in the best interests of our readers. And, many times, of our staff.

“I’ve had people call up threatening suicide if a story runs. You have to go one way or the other. If you buckled every time someone made a threat …” He leaves the thought open but recounts the time the Herald Sun learned a ­famous AFL footballer’s wife had gone to the police after an alleged assault.

“We ran the story on page one. At the time the fellow was the reigning father of the year in Victoria. I had his manager threaten all sorts of things and I had to make the call, and thankfully I did because he turned up on the television the following day with a big smile laughing about it all.

“The number of times that I’ve woken up at three or four in the morning thinking, ‘Well, gee, I wish I’d handled that differently.’ Once the presses are rolling, you can’t change it.”

Blunden is aware of the “enormous role” HWT plays in Victorian society. So is he the most powerful man in the state?

“Hardly. I’m not the most powerful person in my house, quite frankly.”

The Herald and Weekly Times is intrinsically linked to News Corp and the Murdoch family. Sir Keith Murdoch ran HWT but, on his death in 1952, son Rupert took control of only The News, the afternoon paper in Adelaide, and didn’t acquire interests in HWT until 1987. Blunden is bullish about its future, saying the company still sells about 300,000 newspapers a day and the Herald Sun is nearing 100,000 digital subscribers.

“Our weekly audience is now over three million, and when we were print only it was about 1.6 million. It’s a pretty healthy story,” Blunden says.

But he sometimes doesn’t think the company is successful enough at articulating the bright spots. “I think we try hard but there is still a perception that somehow newspapers are dying, and they’re not. Look, it’s fairly cool on social media to be critical of mainstream media.”

It takes a lot to change that perception but he points to the recent success of the “We’re for You” marketing campaign as a way of changing attitudes.

Last Thursday was kick-off for the 2018 AFL premiership, the Richmond Tigers playing Carlton. And HWT has been busy ramping up its coverage, publishing its ­annual AFL glossy magazine and launching an initiative around its dominant SuperCoach digital. It is billing SuperRankings as “footy’s unmissable list” — the most comprehensive player ranking in football, generated by data showing every player’s kick, handball and goal.

Blunden is a Richmond supporter. But not always. His talent for becoming the consummate Melbourne insider was evidenced by a surprise party a few years ago celebrating 40 years in journalism.

It was attended by retail billionaire Solomon Lew, AFL boss Gillon McLachlan and Collingwood president Eddie McGuire, among many others.

Also present was ­former premier Jeff Kennett, with whom Blunden has fielded many a phone call since he became ­editor of the Herald Sun during Kennett’s premiership in 1996. “We’ve agreed to disagree, going right back.”

Not bad for an impostor from Sydney. “Sort of,” he replies, partly rejecting the tag. “I have been here 23 years now and this is home.”

Blunden says his secret to editing is: “You have to instinctively know what people want. You have to have a feel for what’s on people’s minds and whether it’s in the boardroom or at the pub. What are people talking about?”

That philosophy served him well when he arrived in Adelaide, as editor of Adelaide’s The Advertiser. That was in 1990, and in his first year the State Bank of South Australia collapsed and the Gulf war broke out. “But the story that eclipsed them both in sales was the formation of the Adelaide Crows.”

Blunden was the launch editor of The Australian Magazine. “Then (News Corp chairman) Ken Cowley asked me to go to back to Adelaide to edit the Advertiser. I think it was late in the week and I said, ‘Well, when do you want to start?’ He said, ‘You’ve got to be there on Monday.’ ”

Blunden had a young family at the time. “It was part of the culture you tended not to say no. I’ve moved seven times altogether and I think most of them were done on one day’s notice.”

Melbourne followed and in 1996 he became editor of the Herald Sun, then editor-in-chief and later managing director, before moving to his present role.

Blunden admits to “a couple of dramas over the years”. “I mean, spending a day in the Supreme Court getting grilled over something wasn’t much fun — that was probably about my low point.”

That something was the sacking of Bruce Guthrie as editor of the Herald Sun in 2008, when Blunden was managing director. An unfair dismissal court hearing in 2010 awarded Guthrie $580,000. “Yeah, it was character-building, particularly when you’ve got a rival publication that was relishing every moment of it. I don’t blame them,” Blunden recalls.

“We made a call and I don’t ­regret anything that we did. I don’t agree with what happened but you have to accept the umpire’s verdict. And we did and moved on, and it’s a very distant memory now.”

He laughs when asked if he gets a warning when News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch rings. “No I don’t need it. I think it’s important for him to talk to his editors; he has always been like that. He astounds me with his knowledge of what’s happening in Australia.”

Journalists, he says, need the same spirit of inquiry. “You’re not going to be a great journalist if you sit around waiting for something to land on your desk. You’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to talk to people and you’ve got to pursue stories, and you have to have that element of intrigue and curiosity.”