Has Fairfax lost its voice in a race to the middle?

Miranda this is the whole point and the reason Hywood is wrong for the job. The plain evidence is that he has no capacity for the product challenge. He doesn’t get it. This is why he relies on jargon and 80:20 nonsense. You only have to look back to his career as a journalist to see that while he stayed in favour with cushy overseas or Canberra jobs he was never a success in the big chair.

I for one, broke my decades long SMH habit a while ago when I could no longer trust it to be a great NEWSpaper. It became a noisy agitprop tool, occasionally saved from shame by investigative pieces. Too patchy in its honest news coverage and too heavyhanded in its bias.

It must be very frustrating for publishers that articles like this keep telling people how to avoid their paywalls.

How can they invest in quality journalism if it’s seen as socially acceptable to avoid paying for something the owner has put a price on? It’s basically shoplifting.

Here is my summation of the problems with The Age/SMH:
1. At least 70-80% of the content online for both is shared. Why am I expected to cough up for separate subscriptions costing the same?
2. The Age in particular has become a bore to read. I enjoy reading long articles but too often, the ‘news’ is stuff I already knew with no behind-the-story new information. I find myself grabbing the Herald Sun if I’m at a cafe and it seems many other do the same. It’s an engaging read, even if it’s considered lower brow.
3. Get some good columnists who have an opinion and voice that’s worth listening to, regularly. It often appears like a mishmash of long-ago-made-redundant-from-Fairfax old men.
4. The digital versions are just terrible. Totally agree with Miranda. It’s click-bait central and blatant cross-promos, which is why anytime Waleed Aly or Karl Stefanovic opens their mouths it’s headline news.
5. We’re not that stupid. Treat us with some respect.
Sadly I was one of those born and bred on The Age and it now feels and reads like an ageing disgracefully old duck. It’s ugly, sad and embarrassing to watch.

@Version: if Fairfax wanted the paywall to work it would work. The fact that it doesn’t tells you all you need to know about Hywood and his “strategy”. As Miranda suggests, this guy has no idea of product or the value people put on real news.

Please, please, smh, no more real estate stories. If the home page was full of investigative reporting from the aforementioned Kate mcclymont and peers, I’d say more would pay. (Is she the only senior journo still on the payroll, though?) And for goodness sake, fix the paywall dodge. It should not be that easy to get around and screams to the public the management is not serious about digital.

@Version – It’s very much not shoplifting. If the local butcher is giving away free samples and selling the same thing I’ll take the free sample. I might not get the whole sausage but that doesn’t bother me if I’m not interested in it. I’d probably pay for Fairfax if it was paywalled although increasingly it’s day old reddit rehashing and thing’s I’ve already seen posted to Facebook. Now they’ve cut their arts coverage I’m even less interested. Tvtonight does a bette job at news about the Tv industry and Mumbrella is also very strong. Arts-Hub is good too. Along with the Guardian I don’t really need Fairfax. If the paper isn’t telling me what’s happening in my city then it loses it’s relevance.

Nail on the head. What content? All SMH articles these days revolve around a catchy headline with a ‘story’ that usually adds nothing, or plays on the cute innuedo of the headline or is smear / payback or advertorial. It’s addictive like Macca’s chips, but its also easy to get bored of the lack of substance. I for content I read Crikey, Guardian, Economist, Conversation and New Matilda instead.

Maybe if the IT department at Fairfax were as smart as the ones at NEWS they could figure out how to max out article reading at 30 per month even while using the private browsing function in Firefox. Why pay (or complain about clickbait) when you can read as many articles as you wish in private browsing mode without handing over coin.

You’re right in many ways, Miranda. But let’s remember that the SMH has significantly more digital subscribers than The Oz. As I mentioned in the other thread, recent growth for The Oz and News Corp tabloids is likely to have come from their free tablet promos. They are willing to burn cash to get their numbers up.

But I totally agree that Fairfax digital subs will continue to decline if they insist on click bait, churnalism etc. Fairfax papers MUST stand for quality, and for holding powerful interests to account. They are still pumping out top notch investigative journalism, while the News Corp papers entirely rely on government drops for stories. But the cheap journalism designed to attract eyeballs and the hideous clickbait headlines in Fairfax’s digital products need to go.

Michael West’s last day at Fairfax today, tweeting “Told my skill-set not aligned with Fairfax strategy going forward.”

Unbelievable.

Top story Miranda. One of my biggest peeves from the Fairfax websites is wire copy from major overseas titles which have already had wide circulation. Many are days and up to a week old.

Also hate the guess what stories where the incident happened in Manchester or Wichita. Newspapers have always done this but in the age of Internet such underhandedness should have been consigned to the dustbin of history

Great summary, thank you Miranda.

The answer to your question for most of us Im guessing is yes, they’ve lost their voice (read brand, read purpose, read soul). As a brand they don’t represent anything anymore. They exist now only as a “consultant developed strategy” to optimise the exit of institutional shareholders who regret they stayed the course so long. Components of that strategy include:
* cut costs very aggressively until you find the line where you are sustainable and you reveal the more saleable assets
* try be digital with what minimal money, ideas and passion you have and hope you can make that work in some way – even though there’s not much evidence you can
* sell a line to everyone you are a content centred company with a purpose when you aren’t, to keep the troops morale at a level that will get you to the end and to give the brand some vestige of a framework
* optimise your remaining good assets like Domain, sell them high (as they likely will), then at the end sell what’s left to whoever wants it.

You can understand the strategy to some degree because there isn’t a business model for an old media company that let itself get into that state. There isn’t much of a business model for ‘old media’ per se, really.

Good people like Kate McClymont , Adele Ferguson and the like are the remains of a bygone brand and you would have to imagine they are there for strategic (symbolic) purposes only. The senior management is using them to represent to the markets and clients that Fairfax is still what it once stood for. But this is a facade that management will do much to maintain until they make it to the end.

The end of this strategy is that there is nothing left. It’s sold piece by piece and then wrapped up. It’s possibly not a bad strategy now. It is reasonably cynical though and you might argue that a different leader may have been able to pull the company out of the dive it had been in for years when Hywood started.

But from any financial perspective it’s far less risky than any sort of transformation.Both for the shareholders and for Hywood. It’s a minimalist and pragmatic financial strategy. Something you do when there is nothing else. And you might argue, there isn’t much else.

Hywood’s agenda was clear from the start and he has carried it out to a tee. He’s sold a story to markets and the staff, reduced debt and costs well, kept things stable and lucked in with some key assets (Domain key among them). He will do well himself and he probably isn’t seen in such a bad light by institutional investors. In their minds, a job well done. And in another world – not ours – it is a job well done.

In our world, where we loved what they once did, Fairfax doesn’t exist anymore. We need to move on I guess.

Looking at it another way, the SMH has by far and away the highest number of digital subscribers, while its website is the second most popular in Austalia. The Oz and News Corp tabloids barely rate in the top 10 Australian news websites. So maybe the strategy is working to an extent. Benefiting from high digital subs as well as advertising revenue from having a very popular website. I’d prefer they ditch the clickbait, but perhaps they feel this is the right balance to maintain their lead in both subs and website rankings.

The suggestion that Fairfax’s investigative journos are now merely symbolic is a big stretch. Have you seen the big investigative scoops they have been churning out of late? In the meantime, News Corp sits on its hands, or even worse, actively campaigns in favour of the corrupt.

@jeremy: so you’re thinking the instos have a clue?
The irony here is that everyone thinks Domain is something other than the consequence of Hywood’s grasping at straws. Just to take one obvious example in today’s AFR. The notional product is an elite newspaper yet it is remarkably shallow and barely recognisable as a business read. The actual paper ($4) is smaller than the pagination of the SMH Domain preprint, the cost of which is undoubtedly one reason the product people buy is so brutally shrunk. Of course the once expensive property ads have gone from the AFR. Perhaps to Domain.
Fairfax was always going to have a big shakeout but Hywoods approach has no structure or consistency other than the primacy of the Domain construct. I wonder whether it’s a mirage.

I think it is amazing they have so many paying subscribers given the content. The revenue and content model for their digital offering seems dictated by advertiser revenue/requirements. It puts into question the entire value proposition of subscriptions for their digital audience.

Fairfax is obviously a big publisher with lots of irons in the fire, but they really need to jump to a new revenue model. “Market share” of news article pageviews doesn’t really matter in a digital world where highly targeted demographics achieve premium CPM/CPC advertiser dollars.

@Sebastian: what you’re saying is that the market for ads is now presented in demographic slices with narrow targets. So the player with the biggest aggregation and best segmentation data sets the lead. We’ve known that for almost two decades. Yet Hywood is still talking about shares versus newspaper companies when Google has not only eaten his lunch, its occupying his building. He is so far on the wrong track it’s a wonder he gets home at night.

The Guardian online certainly has more vivaciousness and I would say is eating into the Age’s readership as well. When the paper went tabloid and increasingly initiated the look of NewsCorp papers, that was when the decline really started. You can’t maintain your identity and imitate all the cheapness that characterises your opposition at the same time. That, and the content has become stale. Haven’t subscribed to the online service.

As someone who owns a newsagency and is watching Fairfax walk away from our channel, your article is very succinct and gets to the heart of the issue. People won’t pay for content they don’t enjoy or value.

How does Hywood and his senior execs keep their jobs? Surely that’s the big question. Talking down his own products for 5 years whilst failing to build anything viable to replace it besides thought bubbles and press releases. What was the point of all those consultants? He accelerated the decline with a clear lack of commercial nous or solid networks amongst advertisers. Domain already existed yet he gave his mate Catalano the deal of a lifetime and almost everything else has been sold along the way. Now NZ and then whatever is left. It’s like they have given up, slowly dismantling themselves into the grave. Fairfax is without purpose. It exists purely to remenurare and reward those at the top. Otherwise unemployable outside of Govt jobs. Just ask their staff. They are hopeless.

The Guardian have destroyed Fairfax across almost all aspects of digital news – everything about them is better. They have a better desktop website with a hell of a lot less crap on the front page, better apps, better columnists, better coverage of live events. It’s also free and it’s cheap to remove ads if you wish.

I would say almost everyone who would have bought a digital sub but hasn’t is reading The Guardian. Print newspapers are dead and alliances to the old guard are dying. Fairfax really needs to get its shit together.

Enjoy the morning print version – easy to read with breakfast but also catch up with the thru-the-day releases, but the Guardian provides a lot of depth – here and in the USA and UK, so news and comment is well covered.
But as more journalists leave, such as Michael West, Ross Gittens or the long departed and lamented Graeme Davidson, less reason to read the Age. Hence, the danger is that if the news-breaking stories (and not those soft and to me uninteresting) celebrities stories go, the Age moves to a local suburban newspaper standard – and so worth an occasional browse but not a real or a real-time contributor to sought knowledge.
The Panama papers is an example of collaborative investigative journalism that would be costly to undertake, but for me is far more important than reports of an actor’s tweets.
The problem is exacerbated by the number of good newspapers available online from the UK and USA that are free to access.
Paying for a paywall and the general celebrity news behind that is not really a need.
Problem for the Age managers – need to research their market a little more.

Their print & websites are so woefully dull it’s hard to know what Fairfax can do to save themselves. This dullness is especially boring when their click bait material is easily read elsewhere or as with Fairfax, invariably a couple of days after the rest of the world. And that infuriating ‘don’t play’ video concept (the only newspaper in the world to have this weird feature): usually a journo simply repeating some of the text you have clicked to read puts me right off. I will no longer click on article that has a video symbol. I don’t mind supporting their advertising but anecdotally many people tell me they hate Fairfax’s ‘opt out’ video concept.

This is an important issue, not only for the commercial reasons but for the often cited public interest in having viable independent news sources.
Fairfax has been the home of reliable and often valuable reporting since the 1980s when our government and regulators inexplicably allowed the primary news sources all to be merged essentially into two groups.
Fairfax’s failure to maintain its quality is obviously not a function of the Internet and its effects. It is a failure to understand and commit to unique value. That is, the news we rely on.
Unless something changes at Fairfax, which appears unlikely, the best we can hope for is that the commercial failure accelerates to make way for a well founded startup.
None of us wants a Fox News agenda for Australia.

Well said! I have long offloaded the daily routine of checking smh.com – if I really need to know what the Kardashians are up to (which I dont), then I wont be paying for the privilege. The tone and content is the hurdle hobbling this once fantastic news source. I choose The Guardian for actual news – Fairfax have lost their way. Which is sad.

My thoughts for what its worth.
1. Guardian has eaten away at Fairfax’s target editorial readership.
2. Too many arts student type lectures from people who have barely achieved anything. People don’t like being talked down to – especially from some mid 20 something know-it-all.
3. Too many opinion pieces and not enough genuine news articles.
4. Too much focus on what Twitter is saying and what the latest ‘going viral’ issue is.
5.Barely any feel good articles. The tone is that generally the world is a miserable place.
6. Do they really need a journalist seemingly dedicated to a weekly QandA article? Why are they repeating what happened to the people who in all probability have already watched the episode.
7. We get that you think Waleed Aly is some form of god. Is there any need to remind us 3-4 times a week.