HuffPost and Fairfax joint venture ends
HuffPost Australia‘s joint venture with Fairfax Media has come to an end, the US based website announced this afternoon.
It is believed Fairfax Media will redeploy staff members – of which there are more than 30 – into the metro business, while others will be left without jobs as the Huffington Post’s local team is expected to be reduced to a handful of contractors.
A spokesperson for HuffPost Australia said in a statement: “Employees were briefed today on the decision of HuffPost and Fairfax to bring the Australian joint venture to an end. HuffPost will operate a standalone Australian edition from December 1 with a smaller local team. If redeployment is not possible, regrettably redundancies will occur.”
https://twitter.com/_Tors/status/935736073006845953
Sad to hear, thoughts are with friends affected
Increasingly apparent that it’s not just traditional media co’s struggling with building sustainable digital businesses. Even the digital pure-plays are struggling — Vice, Mashable, Buzzfeed and now, Huffpo.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40497566/digital-media-meltdown-troubling-outlooks-for-buzzfeed-mashable-oath-and-vice
The fact is that, apart from the big platforms (FB, Google, Amazon), any business with a business model built around ad revenue will struggle.
Increasingly apparent that it’s not just traditional media co’s struggling with building sustainable digital businesses. Even the digital pure-plays are struggling — Vice, Mashable, Buzzfeed and now, Huffpo.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40497566/digital-media-meltdown-troubling-outlooks-for-buzzfeed-mashable-oath-and-vice
The fact is that, apart from the big platforms (FB, Google, Amazon), any business with a business model built around ad revenue will struggle.
This has little to do with digital publishing as a sustainable business.
Anyone that worked there needs to acknowledge the fact Huffpo published absolute rubbish. It attracted an audience with little interest in quality journalism – HuffPo was a click to escape boredom. Just look at the trending articles as evidence of that.
If you churned out that shit you knew your days were numbered.
New payment models are needed. Subcription model is no good for news, I don’t want to sign up and pay a monthly fee if I may only read a couple of stories, but I would be happy to pay a few cents to read a story. We need something like bitcoin or similar to make this possible. It’s time to rethink!
It was hopeless. I note the man who launched it is now running Fairfax Media. Chris Janz
This is a big shame for the local staff and best of luck to them.
But for the Huffpost brand, after the Donald trump election and entertainment section debacle, this was a foregone conclusion. Their globalized partisan hackery was always dead in the water after that.
Fairfax still do great journalism evidenced by the Sam Dastyari stories today – who Was exposed as a possible subverter to our country at worst, and a dodgy leftie darling at best.
Fairfax are still courageous it would seem, after all the Chinese don’t like a media that expose their tactics! We need media companies like this in our country.
It’s the culture of Fairfax that hangs in the balance right now. I’ll admit, that after stressing about the state of the media for many years in this country I have just decided to crack out the popcorn. The ones that expose truth to power will always win, most people are willing to pay for that
This is great news! As a paying customer of The Age, I hated how many of the articles opened up in HuffPo. They were mostly click-bait and rubbish – totally different to the quality of The Age articles.