From Singapore: There is a particular kind of journalism that does not announce itself with breaking news alerts or market-moving headlines, yet quietly shapes how the powerful behave. The gossip column, at its best, is accountability dressed in a dinner jacket. Stephen Brook's farewell from the Sydney Morning Herald's long-running CBD column is a reminder of that underappreciated function.
Brook, who has spent years chronicling the private moments, unguarded remarks, and occasionally embarrassing missteps of Australia's corporate and political class, stepped back from the column this month. His parting reflections, published in the SMH, offered readers something rarer than a scoop: a behind-the-scenes account of how those stories came together in the first place.
For a business correspondent based in the Indo-Pacific, the appeal is more than nostalgic. Australia's commercial culture, with its tight networks of board members, lobbyists, and political donors, is unusually compact by global standards. In markets like Singapore or Tokyo, the overlap between political power and corporate influence tends to be formal, institutionalised, and largely visible. In Sydney and Melbourne, it operates through relationships that rarely appear in a prospectus or a ministerial diary. That is precisely the territory a column like CBD covers.
The Value of the Gossip Beat
Critics of political and business gossip columns often make a reasonable point: that they can trivialise serious issues, reward the well-connected with free publicity, and reduce complex policy debates to personalities. Those are legitimate concerns. A column that exists primarily to flatter the bold-faced names it covers serves readers poorly and powerful people well.
The stronger counter-argument, though, is that character and conduct matter. A chief executive who behaves badly in private is more likely to govern a company badly. A politician who says one thing to a journalist and another thing on the record is telling you something important about how they exercise power. The gossip column, when it functions as Brook's evidently did, is less about entertainment and more about texture: filling in the human detail that official statements and press releases deliberately omit.
Australia's Press Council has long grappled with where the line sits between the public interest and mere curiosity. Brook's column, by most accounts, stayed on the right side of it. His farewell suggests a journalist who took the ethical dimensions of the beat seriously, even when the subject matter was, on its surface, light.
What the Column Revealed About Power
Brook's reflections touched on encounters with some of Australia's most prominent figures in business and public life. Without fabricating specifics he did not disclose, the broader pattern he described is familiar to anyone who covers powerful institutions closely: the gap between the public persona and the private reality is almost always wider than it appears.
That gap has real consequences. When a company's culture is set by an executive who is privately dismissive of accountability, that eventually shows up in governance failures. When a politician's public civility conceals private contempt for rivals or institutions, it corrodes the cooperative norms that democratic systems depend on. Journalism that documents those private realities, even in the form of a gossip item, is doing something useful.
The Parliament of Australia and the boardrooms of the ASX are both institutions that benefit from scrutiny, not just of their formal decisions but of the human behaviour that shapes those decisions. Columns like CBD contribute to that scrutiny in ways that formal accountability mechanisms often cannot.
A Changing Media Environment
Brook's departure also arrives at a difficult moment for Australian journalism. Newsroom resources have contracted significantly over the past decade, and the kind of patient relationship-building that a long-form gossip beat requires is harder to sustain when staff numbers are thin and digital metrics reward volume over depth.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has documented the structural pressures facing Australian news organisations across multiple recent reports. Those pressures are real, and they fall unevenly: political and business gossip columns are among the first casualties when budgets tighten, because their value is diffuse and long-term rather than immediately measurable.
There is a genuine debate to be had about how much of a newspaper's resources should go toward this kind of coverage versus, say, data journalism, investigative reporting, or policy analysis. Reasonable editors will weigh those choices differently. The risk, though, is that cutting the gossip beat entirely leaves a blind spot in coverage of how power actually operates day to day.
Brook's sign-off deserves to be read not just as one journalist's fond farewell, but as a small case study in what independent Australian media does well when it has the space and resources to do it. The Sydney Morning Herald, whatever its own commercial pressures, has maintained that space for a long time. Whether it continues to do so will say something about the priorities of Australian media ownership in the years ahead.