Could this be media’s end of days?

The last 12 months have seen some of the greatest upheaval in the history of the Australian media industry and the business will never be the same again says Tim Burrowes in a piece that first appeared in Encore.

When you write about media change, it’s hard to avoid cliches as you try to get across just what dramatic times we are currently witnessing.

And yet, we’ve seen most of our media behemoths go through the biggest upheaval in their history.

Next week, we’ll watch Fairfax Media make the last throw of the dice as far as its newspapers are concerned when it takes the SMH and Age tabloid. This is on the back of a year that saw hundreds of redundancies and wrenching change for the company. The damage wrought by young Warwick Fairfax is nothing compared to the dramas we’ve just witnessed as it tries to move to a digital life raft before the print boat sinks.