Newcastle Herald staff strike as Fairfax Media proposes to cut 69 jobs across the Hunter

Big reductions. It looks very much as though the print business is dead. There won’t be any money in online so the Hunter will be getting quite a shock in terms of local media.

So cutting two thirds of Newcastle Herald’s editorial staff represents “significant modernisation” and “upskilling” of journalists and sales staff? In the words of McInroe: You CAN NOT be serious?? What sort of fools do you take your staff and your readers to be, John Angilley and Fairfax. Neither the Herald or the Maitland Mercury — reduced from 5 days to 3 days a week – will be around in two years time. They will have been cost cut to oblivion.

Where is the rest of the media on this? While everyone has been fixated on the metros and online, Fairfax has watched/managed the demise of one the world’s largest, most successful regional newspaper/online networks (Rural Press). This was one of the most profitable companies in Australia and it has been gutted – arguably more importantly it wasn’t just profitable it provided the community (and most other news channels/mediums) with their news sources. At what stage does the rest of Australian media take an interest? Fairfax has been allowed to roll this out this across Victoria, South Australia, most of NSW (rest is looming) and Tassie and Qld are next, with no-one asking any hard questions. It’s all been done with the same message – it is about revitalisation and modernisation. If you keep repeating, repeating, repeating, the exact same mantra, does it become true? The Maitland Mercury is the third oldes continuously printed daily in Australia and serves the fastest growing and largest inland city in NSW. At what point does somebody say to Greg Hywood, Allen Williams and John Angilley: “Really? Do you think this is much of a strategy? What have you done to the bottomline and the regional communities while you’ve been collecting your bonuses?”

The journos at these mastheads should just walk out the door en-masse. Fairfax is an appalling employer and deserves to suffer because of the terrible way it treats its staff. The jobs are gone in the long run anyway. Walk, and Fairfax get the result they deserve.

Newspaper readership is parochial. Syndicated copy is not, so it is next to useless in many papers. As local interests dominate the only way a paper can acquire content is by having staff colleting it and putting it into the paper. If Fairfax wants to keep regional newspapers (or even websites) the only way to do it is with local staff. If Fairfax does not want to keep these publications they should sell them off now while there is still something to sell. What they are doing now is in nobody’s interests.

This is all about cutting costs to improve the bottom line and keep the sharemarket and analysts happy (given the only other way to improve the bottom line — increasing revenue – is a non-starter when it comes to print). Forget about digital for regional and community papers – the markets they are serving are local and ipsofacto, small. And to make decent money in digital, you need very big audiences. @liam is right
: these two papers (and probably numerous other local/regional papers) will not be around in a couple of years.

This is a sad situation for many but, as always, the commentary is all about criticism and not about solutions to the revenue catastrophe. In the end, companies need revenue to pay for staff. The remarkable thing is that more journalists don’t pay attention to the plight of their industry. They focus on other industries, such as the car industry, with great insight. Yet they hardly look into mainstream media’s dire situation. It’s not hard – all you have to do is compare the size of the papers from a few years ago. Easy benchmark.

As a redunded fairfax employee as of 2012 I can only watch with despair as the world I committed myself to for more than 43 years implodes. There will still be a news service but the vast canvass of the world in which I painted my pictures is no more.

Would I be correct in assuming that able journo’s could group together and fire up a new brand, in the same region and compete with their old print newspapers?

Mumbrella did it using WordPress. That is all you need. The world has always changed and these redundancies surely create new opportunities: be your own boss, operate without the shackles and potentially still earn the same wage, or more.

The Herald has been denigrating the local industries and mining for years now, without any thought as to how this would affect the people working in them. They had to see this coming with the way the digital world is evolving. It is not a nice feeling losing your lively hood but journalists are not immune to this either. Over 10000 people have lost their jobs in the Hunter mining industry not to mention the hundreds of jobs from off shoot industries. There is an old saying, “you reap what you sow”

@Ron Burgandy, the reason no-one is talking about a solution to the revenue catastrophe is that there isn’t one, certainly not for small papers that don’t have scope to achieve the sort of audience scale needed to play in the digital space. Which is why the story we’re reading here is playing out the world over. Newspapers have two revenue streams — advertising and circulation, both of which are dependent on building and maintaining large audiences. Those audiences are in terminal decline and unless newspapers figure out a way to miraculously turn around a trend that has been gaining momentum for 20 years, there is no revenue solution.

@AJ My point exactly. There seems to be such outcry when cuts are announced yet it’s surprising that some regional papers are still printing six days a week.