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SCMP Reporter

When Jack Spackman was made business editor of The China Mail in 1972, friends presented him with a book called How to Bluff Your Way in Finance.

The gnarled newspaperman was truly grateful; he took the job admitting frankly that he knew absolutely nothing about the subject he was supposed to cover.

Within a week, there were frank, hard-hitting articles on complex shipping, banking and trade issues  in the afternoon tabloid. Jack Spackman may not have known much about the technicalities of high finance, but he was aware totally of what made a good story.

The veteran Australian-born journalist died last week in San Francisco, aged 70.

He lived in Hong Kong between 1967 and 1987. He arrived on vacation accompanied by a wife and young children. Hong Kong entranced him. The Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam war put the city firmly in the front line of Asian news centres.

John Flint Spackman was born in a small  town in New South Wales, started work on a small  newspaper in outback Queensland, and worked on leading newspapers in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne before coming to Asia.

Working 12-hour shifts six days a week on Hong Kong newspapers made him aware of the sheltered life he had enjoyed in his homeland. It also sparked in him a determination to help improve the training of young Hong Kong journalists and to elevate their standards of work and treatment.

In 1968 he almost single-handedly founded the Hong Kong Journalists Association. Publishers at first viewed the body with suspicion on political and financial grounds.  Today, the HKJA has 400 members and speaks for staff  in most of the mainstream press.

Cliff Bale of RTHK, who was an elected journalist association representative for many years, yesterday paid tribute to Spackman as a giant in the journalism world in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s.

'Jack felt passionately about journalism, founding the Hong Kong Journalists Association in 1968 and later the Hong Kong Press Club,' Bale said. 'Jack worked hard to build up the association, helping to make it a voice to which government had to listen. He also worked tirelessly to improve the lot of the ordinary journalist and to lift journalistic standards.'

Legislative Council member Emily Lau Wai-hing,  who was for years chairman of the HKJA, said: 'I have great respect for Jack Spackman. He was the first chair of the association. He and his colleagues worked hard to defend rights of journalists in Hong Kong.'

Spackman loved his craft. And he was a master at it. He had fun being a reporter but was equally capable of holding down administrative and production roles, which he did in various capacities on the South China Morning Post.

In 1974, he was financial editor on The China Mail when the proprietors, which in those days  were basically the owners of TVB and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, decided to close the oldest newspaper in China.

The devoted staff of the tabloid were devastated. For years they had fought a bitter but highly engaging circulation war with the rival English-language tabloid The Star.

Enraged by the closure, lack of consultation and miserly payoff, the editorial staff, led by Spackman, staged a sit-in at the newspaper office, which was shared by the South China Morning Post. 'The siege of Tong Chong Street', the Sunday Morning Post headlined it next day.

Spackman went on to start Hong Kong's first talkback radio show, which he quit in disgust while on air. He launched and published computer magazines in an era when  information technology was a novelty.

He was divorced from his Australian wife, Maggie,  and later married Shanghainese Liu Ling,  a workmate on a computer magazine. She migrated to California with her family and Jack joined her there.

For the past 16 years he worked on newspapers in the East Bay area near San Francisco.

His health was never good;  he fought for years  the prostate cancer that finally killed him.

He worked until the last, being wheeled into the newspaper office to do his editing stints.

He will be buried tomorrow in San Leandro, near San Francisco. His many friends are organising a wake to be held next month in Hong Kong. He is survived by first wife Maggie, their children Maria and Sophia, and Liu Ling.



A giant of journalism and master of his craft