Fairfax shake-up avoids full print-online integration

Tim Burrowes

March 19, 2009 10:33

Fairfax has stopped short of bringing its online and print mastheads together, but taken a step in that direction.

The company has announced to a new structure to the ASX that sees most of its online classifieds move out of Fairfax Digital and combine with their print counterparts.

Meanwhile Fairfax’s powerful New Zealand classifieds site Trade Me will now come under the auspices of Fairfax Digital boss Jack Matthews.

But the link-up does not yet cover editorial. Andrew Jaspan, the former editor of The Age complained in a radio interview after he was ousted that he had no control of the online masthead.

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Tim Burrowes

Tim Burrowes is the publisher of Mumbrella and Unmade. He co-founded Mumbrella in 2008 and sister title Unmade in 2021. He's worked in the UK, Middle East, Asia & Australia and has specialised in writing about the communications world for the last 25 years. He wrote the book Media Unmade, published in 2021, and became the presenter of MediaLand on ABC Radio National in 2025.

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2 COMMENTS

Digital Guy 20 Mar 09

Does anyone else think this is just a little embarassing? No offense, but how does Jack Matthews get more responsibility for running digital into the ground at Fairfax?

…. (edited by Mumbrella) ….

Fairfax Business Media has made a mess of the AFR online (which David Kirk pointed out at the time) and yet still has the same management team, who are a bit FIGJAM about their ‘brilliant online model’ (sic).

Fairfax is getting spanked by News Digital in the market, and risk sliding further into irrelevancy…hmmm but the new offices are nice.

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JM 20 Mar 09

“Increasing integration of print and online going forward” these guys are hilarious. This “step-by-step process” has been going on since I worked for Fairfax Digital back in 1999 – you think after 10 years they would have taken some steps – even baby steps would be good.
Unfortunately for Fairfax the horse has laready bolted in classified advertising verticals – seek.com trumps mycareer.com, realestate.com trumps domain, carsales.com trumps drive.com.
Even more hilarious is FFX’s inability to curb such start ups as seek. realestate – where they had the opportunity to buy out these competitors
No matter what marketing spin Fairfax places on classified market – print classifieds are dead in the water (no more rivers of gold for FFX).
This company is losing relevancy quickly – and needs to get with the program for its very survival.

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