Dr Mumbo

News Corp makes a dime through Fairfax publishing

stop-the-pressesDr Mumbo notes the publication of the thing the Australian media world has been waiting for, another book about the fall from grace of Fairfax Media.

Reading the blurb published for journalist Ben Hills’ new tome Stop the Presses! How Greed, ambition and incompetence wrecked Fairfax Dr Mumbo could not help but notice there was no holding back in the assessment of the publisher’s plight.

It starts with the phrase “In the last few years the once-mighty Fairfax media empire has careened from disaster to disaster”, moving onto the problems of print ad revenues drying up, describing its strategies for digital as having “made it the laughing stock” before adding “its management decisions have yielded moments of high drama and low farce”.

Then Dr Mumbo noted the publisher of the new book is none other than HarperCollins. That would be the same HarperCollins owner by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which also published last year’s Pamela Williams work Killing Fairfax.

If nothing else the new book  promises to be a “lively ride through Fairfax’s slow and painful decline” which focusses on “the characters who have bought the place to its knees”.

 

 

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