When Eureka Street went online
This Eureka Street Plus article, typically exclusive to subscribers, has been made available to all readers.
There was a moment in the early 2000s when print magazines all seemed to realise, at roughly the same time, that the internet wasn’t going anywhere, and was no longer a novelty tacked onto the edge of print publishing. Some responded cautiously, some more optimistically. Quite a few panicked and cobbled together websites. Others disappeared before they could figure out what the internet was going to do to them. But Eureka Street did something that seems, in retrospect, a little more radical. In 2006, it stopped being a print magazine altogether and reinvented itself as an online-only publication before most Australian magazines had seriously considered making that leap themselves. At the time it probably felt reckless, but twenty years later, the decision feels both premature and oddly farsighted.
In a media landscape where digital publications appear constantly and disappear almost as quickly, Eureka Street has become one of Australia’s longest-running online publications. In this conversation, former editor Michael Mullins looks back on that transition – the excitement of building something new, the temptations of click-driven publishing, the push to reach younger readers, and the strange feeling that once you start publishing online every day, the internet slowly changes not just how you publish, but how you think about stories. Underneath the story of adaptation is the question of whether a publication that produces serious, reflective journalism can survive online without the internet eventually changing its personality completely.
David Halliday: When Eureka Street moved online in 2006, you mentioned there was a deliberate effort to ‘draw a line’ under the print magazine. At the time, there wasn’t really a precedent for a print-only magazine transitioning to all-online. With many publications having similar conversations back then, why was such a sharp break thought necessary for Eureka Street, given many similar publications decided to operate on a hybrid print-and-online model?
Michael Mullins: The easy answer to this is practicality. The cost of producing and distributing a high-quality print magazine with a relatively small and declining print run was prohibitive. Subscriber numbers were in decline and going online exclusively was a more responsible use of available funds.
That tension between financial reality and editorial identity seems central to the transition. You suggested that after 15 years, Mick Kelly — the Jesuit priest and media entrepreneur who helped establish Eureka Street — had begun to view the print version as a failure. But you saw it differently.
That’s right.
What do you think the print-era Eureka Street had achieved that risked being lost in the transition? And on the other side of that coin, what opportunities could you see?
He felt that Eureka Street was failing financially and was appealing to a narrower audience than it needed to. But I was in awe of Eureka Street for its distinctiveness on the Australian media landscape and the respect that it had generated over 15 years, most notably under the editorial leadership of Morag Fraser. But I accepted that it was elitist in some respects, and that we needed to appeal to a broader cross-section of Australians.
The opportunity we had was that we inherited a ready-made masthead with a solid reputation, and the new online media form was going to allow us to spread our net more widely. What risked being lost was the intellectual rigour and reflective pace of a monthly magazine that defined the print Eureka Street. A well-reasoned argument had to form the backbone of every article, and this would be harder to achieve day in and day out with the rapid-fire energy and increased volume of articles in Eureka Street online. The new opportunities offered included a democratisation of the publication. Many more voices would be heard, especially younger ones.
“What risked being lost was the intellectual rigour and reflective pace of a monthly magazine that defined the print Eureka Street. A well-reasoned argument had to form the backbone of every article, and this would be harder to achieve day in and day out with the rapid-fire energy and increased volume of articles in Eureka Street online.”
It sounds less like a migration than a shift in editorial philosophy. Various publications have tried to preserve continuity between print and web, sometimes doing both at once and many still do. But instead of seeking continuity, it seems Eureka Street saw this as an opportunity to reinvent itself. Can you elaborate on that? And were there particular elements of the earlier magazine that prompted debate about what to preserve and what to abandon?
There was a deliberate discontinuity, though I think we were able to preserve some of the character of the print publication. What made it possible to reinvent Eureka Street was the experience Mick Kelly and I had in establishing the CathNews online daily news service in 1999. We learned how to keep an audience engaged by feeding them daily content based on news and commentary on current events from a religious or Catholic perspective. This was a more dynamic approach than the monthly journal model that was prevalent throughout much of the 20th century.
I was struck by the more radical ‘slash and burn’ approach of the British Jesuits around the same time as Eureka Street’s switch to online. They closed their 137-year-old print magazine The Month in 2001. A seven-year gap followed, then they established their online replacement, Thinking Faith.
Your brief from Mick Kelly was to remake Eureka Street for a younger readership. And when you read Eureka Street from those years, it did have a fresh and irreverent political energy to it, in its cartoons and commentary and its range of voices. At the time, what was the feedback like from readers and publishers?
I think there was admiration that we had managed to step into a new era and produce an online publication with a professional look and feel, partly thanks to the bespoke content management system developed for us by Christian Townsend. The publishers, including Mick Kelly, the Jesuit Communications Board, and the CEO Tom Cranitch, were all very supportive of what we were doing. As far as I could tell, established writers from the print era seemed to understand what we were attempting, even if they didn’t agree with it, or despaired that the standard of the writing was diminished.
From the readers, we had many online comments at the foot of the articles. I think they appreciated being able to discuss the articles, and a spirited conversation often took place. The content management platform gave us instant feedback on which articles were the most popular and we quickly learned how to create clickbait, thinking it was the right thing to do. I think the value of this is not to be underestimated, as I sometimes noticed anecdotal evidence that subscribers to the print publication did not always read much of it. But the clicks and the comments suggested to me that the online publication was better read.
You mention both the excitement and the temptations of online publishing there — especially the pressure to chase clicks and immediacy. Looking back, what was the hardest part of editing Eureka Street through that transition?
I think I would have to confess that we consciously devalued experienced writers, and instinctively I knew there was something wrong in that. The theory was that if we had mostly young people writing for us, a younger readership would magically materialise. Our young assistant editor James Massola, now National Affairs Editor for The Age and The SMH, was masterful in his ability to source younger writers. That achieved a certain freshness, but we slowly walked back the approach when we realised that the result was arguably somewhat undergraduate in tone and we had come a long way from the consistently high-quality writing of the print era.
At the same time, though, Eureka Street was experimenting with forms of online publishing that many publications hadn’t yet embraced. What would you say were some of your innovations as editor?
Two features come to mind. Neither of them was considered part of the core business of online publishing back then, but these days they are just as important, and arguably more important, than the articles themselves. One was podcasting and the other video. Peter Thomas was a radio broadcaster who volunteered to professionally voice the two articles we published each day, which we published as podcasts before most people knew what a podcast was. For several years, Peter Kirkwood, who had recently retired from his role as producer at ABC’s Compass, produced videos for Eureka Street, which we published each fortnight in the early days of YouTube, long before TikTok existed.
What’s interesting is that even amid those changes in format and audience, Eureka Street retained a distinctive identity. And Eureka Street still tries to occupy a difficult space where it’s intellectually serious, morally reflective, Catholic in origin but broad in readership. Did moving online affect identity at all?
I think we managed to remain in that space, even during the ‘adolescent’ early days of Eureka Street online. This is largely due to the presence of Fr Andrew Hamilton for the entirety of the 35-year history of the print and online publication. He embodied Eureka Street’s outlook and had a clear vision of the selection criteria for articles as a longtime member of the article evaluation panel.
Listening to you describe those early online years, it’s striking how experimental and uncertain the digital publishing landscape still was. With the rise of online platforms like Substack, Ghost and Medium and Patreon, it’s arguably easier than ever to start a digital publication with a subscriber newsletter. And it shows in the numbers. There are several million active publishers on Substack, and similarly, around 4.5 million registered podcasts globally. Looking back over twenty years of digital media, has the internet fulfilled its promise for small publications like Eureka Street, or made survival harder?
Eureka Street has an independence that is not possible with platforms such as Substack, which are geared to the commercial interests of large overseas companies. I think the survival of independent media has become harder the more entrenched social media becomes in people’s lives. I don’t claim any special expertise in social media as my personal use of it is negligible and I consciously access content via the content creators’ mastheads. In that sense, I am counter-cultural, which I hope Eureka Street is as well.
That raises another question about the economics and attention patterns of digital media itself. What’s the way forward for sustaining serious longform journalism in future? And if you were launching Eureka Street in 2026 rather than 2006, how would you do it?
Perhaps the answer to this lies in the publishing of some longform journalism, as that is increasingly rare and time-consuming to produce. In my time as editor, we did not want longform journalism. We were trying to cater for the ‘modern attention span’ and required articles to be no more than 700 words. Over time, I came to admire the longer articles in Inside Story in particular, and now think there is a niche that can include the longer articles Eureka Street now publishes.
And despite all those changes in technology, publishing models and audience habits, Eureka Street has survived. After 20 years as an online publication, Eureka Street is one of the oldest digital publications in Australia. What do you think it still offers that you don’t find elsewhere?
I think Eureka Street still offers what it always has, which is a bridge between secular and religious thinking. In publishing an article, I would always ask if it would be credible to both religious and non-religious readers. The basis of the article needs to be rational argument, and not loyalty to a particular religious tradition or the Bible on the one hand, or a political ideology on the other.
Michael, thank you for your time.
