Fairfax staff cuts will worsen decline in corporate investigations
In this crossposting from The Conversation, Andrea Carson argues that new journalist redundancies at Fairfax Media come at a time when corporate Australia needs more scrutiny than ever.
Yesterday’s announcement of another 45 jobs to go at Australia’s second largest newspaper proprietor Fairfax Media is yet another marker in the decline of Australia’s print media news sector.
In an email to staff, Fairfax’s Australian Publishing Media managing director Allen Williams told it plainly: “The current revenue environment remains challenging … we must also find cost reductions across our business.”
No one can argue that managing a newspaper in the digital era is easy. Technological, social, political and economic factors have seen newspaper revenues and circulations steadily fall from the heady days of great profits in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Thanks for a good article.
When a government obtains power by deception (for example, the economy is tanking when Europeans consider our problems luxury problems) and the country swallows the lie wholesale and regurgitates it in social media, you need investigative journalists more than ever.
I think we now have a serious problem on our hands.
This is an excellent article. The main issue for media Companies today is that consumers are turning off advertising and being bombarded by advertising every time they go to a web site. They want information but not the video’s inside a story or the slash banners intruding into their read.
On the other hand big vendors are investing in other forms of communication such as instore merchandising, better retail training and social media, not traditional media.
As a result the dollar that funds traditional journalism is in decline across all sections of the media.
What is also worrying is the move by organisations like News Corp to cuddle up to partners like Telstra who is a 50/50 partner in Foxtel. One has to question whether News Corp will go hard in hammering Telstra on consumer issues or the laying off of 1,100 employees.
News has already become a part political broadcaster for all things positive about Telstra, last week they got the Google Glasses story ahead of any tech journalists.
Where is the line drawn between good independent journalism and journalism survival and ongoing exposure of business activities?
Right now Fairfax and News Corp are kissing the backsides of vendors to get dollars and this will only get worse as revenues decline.
The AFR has gone bad. I dont know if its the cost cutting or the new people but it has become much less useful and interesting. It used to be constant in questioninh things but now spruiks the interests of people. Is this a Hywood plan?
Decline in readership leads to a decline in advertising leads to a decline in profits.
It’s a vicious cycle.
Less ads mean potential advertisers are less likely to get in on it and the problem compounds.
Does the author have a subscription that she paid for out of her own pocket? And how about the other commentators?
Also, this isn’t just Fairfax, but News Limited as well. At least Fairfax is still trying to appeal to the broadest demographic rather than chasing readers in Western Sydney.
Widest demographic Derpist..are you kidding, the Age in melbourne is so marginalised it’s not funny…their audience is shrinking at an alarming rate in print, and the the digital audience has topped out