The once great Fairfax media empire, once a fearless protector of our democracy, on Wednesday announced a further rationalisation in an effort to save $30 million.
This is another in a long list of ‘Adjustments’ and programs which have become code for making editorial staff redundant.
The Fairfax announcement of 30 million in cost savings, promises to turn the Fairfax publications into ‘genuine digital businesses with the capabilities and cost base to best operate in the current media environment’.
This is code for no more news that we should be hearing, and more mindless nonsense about footballers hammies, bar brawls, and steamy affairs with soapie stars.
How do such stories give us the intellectual depth and investigative rigour needed to keep the forces of greed, self indulgence, neglect, corruption, and sheer criminality at bay?
From a commercial perspective, it is reasonable that a private organisation follow the market that it needs to service in order to survive, but that survival, assuming it happens in this case, comes at a long term cost to the community it serves.
Lord Beaverbrook, amongst many colourful quotes is credited with something like ‘my papers give the public what they want, which is not necessarily what they need’. At this time, never has a truer word been said.
In 2016 Fairfax saved $15 million by cutting 120 editorial jobs, on top of the 1200 saved in 2012, which included the closure of a number of its printing operations. Saving another $30 million will see the cleaner writing the editorials.
If this was just another business going broke, and struggling for its identity and survival in a disrupted industry, it would be one thing, but this is Fairfax, a group that for 180 years has kept those who seek to govern us honest, or as honest as they can be, and has exposed the corrupt and venal amongst us to fearless scrutiny.
It has been clear for decades that people bought newspapers for the classified advertising, the cars, jobs and houses being sold turned into a ‘river of gold’ for the newspaper proprietors, who invested a bit of the river back into the public good.
Now the rivers have dried up, the public good is being left to fend for itself.
Therein lies the tragedy, it can’t without help.
In the absence of an accountable and fearless press, we are all in trouble.
Without Fairfax, and the determination and commitment of Kate McClymont and others like her, we would not have the current Royal Commission into the Institutional abuse of our kids, and Eddie Obeid and his cronies, like Sir Lunchalot would still be running the state for their personal benefit, to our collective cost.
The lesson for the rest of us is that you ignore the tsunami of change that is coming at you at your peril, and collectively unless we find ways to replace that which is lost in some way, our children will pay a very big price indeed.
Hi Rory,
Sadly you are right, the business model used so successfully for a century by Fairfax et al is as dead as the proverbial dodo….. almost.
The New Yorker is flourishing, as is the Atlantic, and a few others who recognised the changes they needed to make. Meanwhile, the pollies and bureaucrats play games with the ABC, while not without its faults, about the last bastion of investigative reporting left.
Mr. Zuckerberg may have committed FB to being a personalised news medium you could trust, and it has if you want to see the latest scorn and scandal, bit it has no relationship with journalism that I can see.
Hi Allen, the Fairfax digital strategy has been a long time coming… still not sure if they actually have one? I also lament the loss of quality investigative journalism and objective news and opinion – but I just don’t think we can expect it to come from Fairfax, more’s the pity. Unless social media can be nudged into paying for the news content plagiarized by its customers who post copyright material with no fear of having to pay for the use, the newspaper business model no longer stacks up.
Speaking of Facebook, remember what Mark Zuckerberg said a few years ago, about wanting to become the “world’s best personalized newspaper”: http://wp.me/p2YdIi-9l
I suspect FB has moved away from this position, in the light of fake news, inappropriate content and ad placements, and the realization that “proper” newspapers generally have to be registered/regulated and responsible for the content they publish…