War has broken out between two prominent Australian editors. An email published in the Australian by John van Tiggelen, editor of the Monthly, accuses Ben Naparstek, former Monthly editor and current editor of the Sydney Morning Herald’s weekend glossy, Good Weekend, of being devoid of ideas, stealing writers and paying female writers less, amongst other things.

Van Tiggelen ends his strongly worded email with the curious and nerdy insult “[g]et some ideas of your own, and stop behaving like a f…ing dalek.” (After the evil mutants of Doctor Who.)

Ben Naparstek is widely regarded as a boy wonder, having been given the editorship of the Monthly, an Australian national magazine of politics, society and the arts, at the tender age of twenty-two. Nick Leys, in The Australian, writes that many expressed doubts about his youth and inexperience when, after three years, he was hired at The Sydney Morning Herald to edit The Good Weekend, which is read by around 1.4 million people each weekend.

The central accusation of van Tiggelen’s email is that Naparstek is trying to undermine the success of The Monthly by stealing their ideas and poaching their writers with offers of better pay.

“Every month, various contributors to the magazine bring to my attention that the very day after the new issue is sent out, they get a call from you asking them to pitch ideas to Good Weekend. Invariably these writers are struck by your lack of guile…Today I found out just how far you will go…you very recently badgered one of Australia’s very best writers to pull a story he’d agreed to write for the Monthly and sell it to you instead. You eventually offered that writer $2.50/word. This meant that writer would get $15,000 more for his story. To that writer’s eternal credit, he did not go back on his gentleman’s agreement with me. There is no question in my mind that you offered that kind of money not just because that writer was worth it, or because the readers of Good Weekend were worth it, but because you wished to undermine the Monthly. This is despicable. It is also plain weird.”

Van Tiggelen also suggests that Naparstek is offering rates to male writers that he has never offered to female writers.

“Within my first weeks in the job, contributors to the Monthly were letting me know you were offering them $1.50 a word. I kept a list; within a month there were eight on it. Interestingly, they were all male. Yet you denied this, both to me and publicly (to the Australian). You were lying, but you had to, as you were simultaneously insisting to other writers (who, interestingly, were all female) that 80 cents a word was as high as you could go.”

Australian newspapers are facing budget cuts as harsh as any in the United States. I’ve heard that the Herald is now staffed by no one so much as recent J-School grads and shell-shocked veterans who wish they’d taken buyouts when they had the chance. In fact, from Monday, the paper will no longer be a broadsheet but a tabloid, or what the paper is calling “compact”. In this brave new world, $2.50 a word is quite an amount, especially when others are being paid only 70 cents.

A number of female writers at The Herald have now said that they’ll consider boycotting writing for the paper until their pay is increased. In Crikey, Lisa Pryor, a former opinion page editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, acknowledged that newspapers had to have varying pay rates, but worried that the nature of freelancing disadvantaged women.

Fairfax metro media editorial director Garry Linnell — Naparstek’s publisher — hit back at van Tiggelen in a interview with Crikey, denying that the Good Weekend sinking under Naparstek and was also adamant that women are not being paid less. He took aim at van Tiggelen, saying that “everyone used to talk about [the Monthly] under Ben’s editorship, and it’s a pity that it no longer happens. Here’s hoping John can recapture some of its former cachet.”

On The Monthly‘s blog, van Tiggelen doesn’t address Linnell directly, but retorts in his own way.

“The circulations audit for the latter half of 2012 revealed sales of the major newspapers, including the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian, dropped between eight and 15%. Meanwhile the Monthly’s circulation went up 10%.”