Fairfax Media gives notice on Pagemasters contract, up to 40 jobs in the air
Fairfax Media is set to end the subediting of its newspapers by Pagemasters, in a move which has seen 40 journalists told their positions will be redundant from July 10.
Fairfax has been gradually outsourcing subediting of its newspapers – including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times – to AAP’s Pagemasters and increased the scope of these contracts during the publisher’s wide-ranging cutbacks of 2012 and 2013.
Many of those employed by Pagemasters are former Fairfax Media and News Limited staffers who lost their jobs during the cuts.
Fairfax has now given notice that it does not intend to renew the contract when it expires in just over two months’ time, although Pagemasters says it is hope to ease the blow with “new project work”.
It would be lovely to think that Fairfax is reacting to the drop in quality in their papers since outsourcing most of their subbing to PM (I cannot remember a day since they switched that there hasn’t been some type of error, be it spelling or grammar, in the iPad edition of the SMH…), but sadly you have to think that this is just another gambit to drive the price of production down.
It seems to me that Fairfax should be going back to having an internal subbing and layout team – you could hire a lot of subs by getting rid of a layer of upper middle management IMHO…
It is hard to spot any positives in the SMH since the sub-editing was moved. May be there has been an improvement in costs, but that is more then offset in reader dissatisfaction. Perhaps those running Fairfax are just not interested in the quality of the product which they are asking readers to spend money on.
Watch them hire back the subs they’ve paid out. Stupid.
Does this mean fairfax is going to stop publishing a daily print paper and move it all online?
@Waitandsee What are you basing that on?
The MEAA’s response is laughable… but that seems to be the standard for Australian unions these days when their members face job losses.
the CEO of Fairfax said, “Cost cutting is in the company’s DNA”
To quote his own paper “FUKT”.
An insider told me at least a year ago that Pagemasters’ SMH gig was in grave danger over its repeated failure to meet the performance benchmarks mandated in its contract. I believe these were reviewed every six months or so and that each time Pagemasters’ quality control was found to br seriously wanting. Very much a culture of “let’s go, let’s go, it’s OK, we can fix it in the second, send it NOW!”
If there’s any problem with quality, don’t blame Pagemasters. The SAME Fairfax subs have been handling The Age at Pagemasters for the past three years as handled it previously at Fairfax – they just transferred across to Pagemasters when Fairfax sacked them. People who blame Pagemasters are ignorant. Fairfax’s sinking papers have been full of literals and factual errors for years _ much as some people would like not to admit it, The Age has been on a downhill run since the days of the great Graham Perkin and Les Carlyon. In relatively recent times, the Internet and Anthony Catalano have taken away Fairfax’s ads. But long before that started to happen, Fairfax’s pathetically weak management let stuck-up, disgruntled, dysfunctional, trendy, latte-sipping Leftists poison the papers’ editorial content destroy their credibility. In recrnt years The age has read more like a uni rag than a so-0called “quality” newspaper. Graham Perkin would turn in his grave.
You should all be so lucky.
Here in Canberra Fairfax has a monopoly and they’re not firing any of them, despite the copy belonging in a rural rag. It’s circulation is certainly less than a rural rag. (Sub 25k or something.)
I’m not sure how the Canberra Times keeps going, unless they’re patting themselves on the back for all the visits who are just trying to bypass The Age/SMH paywall. There’s probably a correlations between the front-to-back local government advertising and a lack of hard-hitting local politics yarns.