Fairfax lays off more senior journalists
Fairfax Media is understood to have come to the end of its latest round of redundancies with some senior journalists leaving the company after being told their “skill sets are not aligned” to the way the business wants to move forward.
Around 100 reporters, including several senior staff members from the Australian Financial Review, have been made redundant, with 30 forced redundancies among them after too few staff came forward for voluntary redundancies.
The company has declined to comment on reports in today’s The Australian that some journalists were told they were not generating enough online clicks as part of their redundancy meetings with managers.
Welcome to the age of click-bait journalism. Sensationalist click-bait stories. Forget reporting the news, investigative journalism…… It’s all just becoming marketing content pretending to be news and awkward cross promotions hiding as news too.
A national disaster. Thanks Mr Hywood.
Digital only, great. So Todays Paper, the virtual one, has been on the fritz many mornings this year. Idiotic management.
And if you follow the click bait – computer generated copy. Algorithms can string sentences together and ‘compose’ news stories.
Illiteracy will increase and ‘the source’ will disappear. On the other hand, wikileaks and the CIJ will be inundated with news leads about potential corruption and corporate propaganda.
“reports in today’s The Australian that some journalists were told they were not generating enough online clicks as part of their redundancy meetings with managers”
How do we know whether this is true, or a clickbaiting headline??
“Last day today. Told my skill-set not aligned with Fairfax strategy going forward. #sacked”
So, we’ve officially moved away along from making positions redundant.
No point being too upset about this – Fairfax became a basket case under Fred Hilmer. So many opportunities, so many opportunities missed. Hywood is just doing his best after Hilmers lack of vision destroyed the company…
A tragedy for democracy. Reaffirms the vital importance of public broadcasting/publishing and the need to increase funding.
I’ve noticed the quality of Fairfax publications heading south at an increasing rate over the last 6 months. The SMH, once a highly respectable paper, is now the domain of click bate and low quality journalism. How sad. It’s one step off News.com.au. It’s a race to the bottom which will likely alienate it’s premium audience and hence over time destroy it’s ad business. Good work!
Who in their right mind would pay for a digital subscription anyway? The model is completely broken. There are numerous ways at getting through the pay-wall and never paying. For years it was free entry before digital publications had their “whoops moment” and realised it was not sustainable. They then promised more with paid subscriptions and delivered less. The digital experience is becoming more and more woeful. Click bait writers sub editing and sourcing their own pics! It’s soon look like a high school online newspaper.
If Michael West’s skill sets aren’t relevant to Fairfax any more then I’m dumbfounded. His columns were compulsory reading as he called out the cheats and rorters of the Australian tax system and shone a light onto all sorts of shonky practices carried out by big business and multi nationals in this country. He truly represented the value of and necessity for a vigourous ‘fifth estate’. His absence will be sorely felt by this reader and I can only hope he’ll be swiftly picked up by the ABC or The Guardian. This country desperately needs voices such as his and it’s a massive indictment of Fairfax that they make him ( and Tony Walker,Alan Mitchell etc.) redundant. I’ve supported the SMH and FReview through my subscriptions but this latest round of cuts is pretty much the straw that breaks this camel’s back.
I’d like to leave my comment anonymously because my partner is one of those 30 who was forced to take a Fairfax redundancy and I don’t wish to cause any more issues for him than he’s already facing. This story makes me sad because he was told “it’s not about your performance” and in fact he (bewilderingly) had a great performance review recently that praised his digital skills and in particular his strength on Twitter (as an aside, when he asked for a copy of that review he was told by HR that they “couldn’t find it” – how very convenient). A story like this tars him with the ‘print dinosaur’ brush, which is upsetting – as if it’s not going to be hard enough for him to get back out there and find a new job without everyone in the market assuming he “doesn’t have the skill set”. I wish I understood why Fairfax chose who they did for redundancy, but it makes no sense to me at all.
What a disgrace! I have also noticed that SMH has taken a hike down south – getting thinner and thinner both physically and in the content department. Surely there must be a better way than succumbing to click-baits and algorithms journalism? I will seriously think this over. It is with sadness. The moment when the paper is picked up and opened in the morning has been such a special moment of each day. Now it is a disappointment. I for one would never pay for a subscription with SMH – a hotch botch newspaper peppered with click-bait articles with no other strategy than to earn money for its shareholders. This would be ok if balanced with high quality reporting by high quality, experienced journalists but its not as is evident in the latest action by Hywood. Watch the Fairfax space! The one person that should be moved on is Hywood as he is the one totally unaligned with the expectations of his loyal audience – the readers.
I lived through a decade of redundancies at Fairfax and each time we were told that it wasn’t the person who was made redundant, it was the position.
This is an important distinction because to qualify for redundancy, there has to be evidence of corporate restructuring. Yet time and again, Fairfax would advertise those exact same roles that were made redundant but at lower grades and salaries.
The corporate regulator, well aware of this boondoggle, refused to investigate.
It appears that in letting go journos of West’s calibre – who are compulsory reading – some other agenda is at play. We can only hope that the many talented and switched on journos quickly find roles elsewhere suitable to their skills.
Perhaps the next crop of redundancies can be at the top, just for a change.