Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood denies ‘knee jerk reaction’ to revenue resulted in editorial cuts

Hywood: “We are reshaping our staffing levels so we can…continue to invest in the journalism we saw today”

Fairfax Media CEO Greg Hywood has denied the newspaper company had a “knee jerk” reaction to poor revenue numbers resulting in the proposed 120 editorial cuts.

Speaking on Sky News’ Mediawatch program, Hywood said: “We’ve been transforming our publishing business for five years and it’s about reshaping our publication so they can deal with the sort of disruption that’s occurring in the advertising market and reshaping our publishing models so that it can still deliver, at scale, high-quality journalism.

“We don’t just look at a set of revenue numbers and have a knee jerk reaction to them, we assume that there’s big structural change in print revenues, and we assumed that five years ago and we were proven to be correct.”