Fairfax to axe journos from AFR, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald according to reports
Fairfax Media’s management is understood to be a preparing for another major round of job cuts across The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review.
A piece in today’s Rear Window column in the Australian Financial Review said management were preparing for the cuts, but said “the precise size of the program is not yet final”.
Mumbrella understands that this latest rounds of staff cuts, which comes after the 1,900 job losses of 2012 and a further smaller round of job cuts at the metros in 2014, is likely to occur in the second half of 2015.
Rear Window columnist Joe Aston today exposed the long rumoured cuts, noting staff were already bracing for the job losses.
He wrote: “There’s a palpably sombre mood in the ranks of Fairfax Media’s editorial management as they prepare to implement yet another round of major cost-cutting in the news division that contains (what’s left of) The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age…
“Cuts of that magnitude are a terrifying prospect for the three mastheads now running on the smell of a rag – no, the rag’s not even oily any more.”
Fairfax initially declined to comment they have since said they will always continue to look for efficiencies across the entire business* while comment is also being sought from the union representing journalists, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).
In the strongly worded piece Aston takes aim at Fairfax and News Corp’s profitability, noting about his own employer: “Fairfax’s Australian business (excluding Domain and radio stations) reported earnings of $215 million (off revenue of $1.2 billion) in 2014 and so was still cash flow-positive after a $60 million capex bill. But that was mostly down to the performance of regional newspapers, not the three marquee mastheads.”
Cuts are also underway in newsrooms of regional Fairfax papers.
Source: SMI
On News Corp he writes: “The numbers are no prettier at News Corp… Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspapers contributed earnings of $115 million in 2014 off revenues of $1.85 billion. But factoring in its capitalised costs of around $120 million, it is either a break-even or loss-making concern.”
Last week’s Audit Bureau of Circulation figures showed continuing declines in print sales across Fairfax and News Corp, with digital subscription growth continuing to stall.
Fairfax even recorded declines in their digital subscription growth on The Age and SHM, a point they attributed to a seasonal drop off in education sales.
According to Standard Media Index, media agency spend across all newspapers has fallen from $1.3bn in 2007 to $783m in 2014.
Nic Christensen
*Update 2.00pm: Fairfax has just issued the following statement saying: “There is no proposal, but we will always continue to look for efficiencies across the entire business.”
Typical of the cynicism at Fairfax these days. This is clearly another example of Hywood warming up the unions and others for the next carve up. Management by spin. The fact that its papers are just vehicles for this crap says it all.
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Hywood and co are obviously trying to maintain the bottom line on their print business (or what’s left of it) by cutting costs in line with falling revenue. But theres
‘s a limit to how far any business can go with cost cuts. The cuts at Fairfax have gone beyond doing what’s necessary to save the patient, they’re now killing the patient. Once you’ve chopped off all limbs and removed most of the internal organs, what’s left?
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Newspapers are produced by journalists. If a news orgainsation does not empoly enough journalists it stops gathering news and then readers go els where for their news.
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Looks to me as if Fairfax has already wrecked the business. The SMH, Age and AFR are unreliable, opinionated and extremely patchy. Nothing like what their audiences want. Like HMV, I’m appalled at the overt self-referencing and corporate spin that appears so much these days, especially in the AFR.
Hywood is taking them to the bank and there won’t be many left at the end of that ride.
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Fairfax newspapers have been going downhill for sometime now. It won’t be surprising if they announce the end of weekday print editions soon.
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Is this cost cutting anything to do with the Huffington Post venture?
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This won’t be the last of the redundancies. The circulation figures tell the story. For instance, Newcastle Herald circulation has fallen more than 40 per cent in fewer than five years. You need revenue to pay for staff. Without revenue, staff get laid off. The suggestion Fairfax could have avoided this is wrong – it’s happening across the western world. Printed newspapers are in palliative care. But the consumption of news and information continues to surge.
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The editorial slant of the SMH and The Age is aimed fairly at the Left/Green bloc. When this alienates the other 85% of your potential readership – at a time when newspapers are on the nose anyway – it any wonder your business is in ruins? [Edited by Mumbrella]
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@ observer. Yes consumption of news (across all platforms) is surging. Audience is not the problem for publishers (not if looked at across all platforms). Monetising that audience is. Digital (desktop) ad yields are a fraction of print yields. Mobile yields are smaller again. And while in the past many were prepared to pay for printed content, very few are prepared to pay for digital content.
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Spinner, if you think the editorial slant of the SMH and Age are aimed at the Left/Green bloc you must be viewing them from a long way to the right. Both papers are close to middle of the road / slightly to the right of centre. There are no (that is not one) main stream newspapers in Australia which lean to the left.
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@spinner is exactly right – the SMH has moved left to the Age thus disenfranchising every reader who works hard for a living, pays a chunk of tax and resents Australia the welfare state. Given the commercial pressures on the business, i can only assume this was not a politcial but commerical, marketing-based decision. This strategic mis-step is right up there with failing to understand that job-seekers will prefer to execute their 30 minute task in 1 minute using an online database query.
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Sack them all. Fairfax publications would be much better without the journos.
I’m looking forward to them all looking like a Woolworths junk mailer – thanks Roger, can’t wait.
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Lindsay, if you think the SMH / Age are “close to the middle of the road / slightly to the right of centre”, how far to the left would they have to go, in your view, to qualify as leaning to the left? It would certainly be a lot further than the 85% of their potential readership mentioned by Spinner would want to go. Some of us remember actually valuing the SMH. Now, I never see a copy without the thought coming unbidden to my mind, “How much longer can Fairfax stagger on?”
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The SMH and The Age do not champion communism or even socialism. The papers are full of support to free enterprise and the business world. They might be down on crooks – be they in the social or business world – but only other crooks would oppose that. There might be stories on global warming in the paper, but that is not left wing, that is simple fact. There might be too much social gossip and arts in the paper, but again that is not left of centre rubbish, just rubbish. Mostly. Yes they papers are not as far to the right as the News Limited products. That is a positive. Those suggesting the papers are left wing have forgotten (or never knew) what left of centre is. Sorry Pardell and Spinner but in the real world the left is much further to the left than you will find in the Fairfax newspapers.
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The Guardian is recruiting.
And has no paywall.
I wonder if these are related facts?
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Anonymous — the Guardian Media Group is funded/subsidised by The Scott Trust. It is not profitable. Last year, it reported losses of £30.6m. It is certainly not the benchmark for commercial success – paywall or no paywall.
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Anonymous – Guardian Media Group is funded/subsidised by The Scott Trust. It is not profitable. Last year, they reported losses of £30.6. It is certainly not the benchmark for commercial success, paywall or no paywall
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To those posters who argue that Fairfax’s falling revenues are a result of its supposed left-wing editorial slant, how do you explain the same heavily falling revenues for News Corp’s far-right tabloids and national broadsheet? The SMH still has the largest cross-platform audience of all Australian mastheads.
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yes @thefacts, that’s true.. But the big challenge for publishers isn’t audience. Thanks to digital platforms, most have audiences bigger than ever before. The challenge is monetising that audience. and that’s not about being left or right leaning. It’s about digital economics.
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Lindsay, I grant you that the SMH is loaded with rubbish. I also grant you that it does not advocate socialism or Communism. After all, not even Pravda or the People’s Daily do that any more.
But none of that means that the SMH is “close to the middle of the road / slightly to the right of centre”. This is a paper in which not so very long ago all the letters began with “Sir”, and which carried Vice-Regal notices in the lower right of the same page. Compare and contrast today’s description of attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace. It addresses the reader thus: “That’s right, I took one for the team. And now I’m going to tell you what it was like. Feel free to hate-read.”
I think the writer knew his target audience, and it was not from the centre right!
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The facts is obviously the Fairfax guy. Which is why the response is so predictable. So, Facts, here’s my question: why do you care about having the largest audience? Your shareholders do not. In fact, it’s only a measure of costs.
By the way, when you try that one on advertisers, are they inclined to say things like, say, WHAT ABOUT GOOGLE?
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Paridell I think you will find the letters in the SMH stopped starting with Sir around the time dinosaurs stopped writing letters and interest in Buckingham Place dropped off soon after. Neither points have anything to do with politics. Left or Right.
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@Paridell
You write like one of Rupert the shepherd’s sheep!
SMH / Age: Fairfax is NOT left wing ffs. You have certainly been eating Rupert’s grass haven’t you. His PR machine and PR team must be so happy with themselves. Any reporting of facts and you shout out “loony left!”.
Try basing your life around primary evidence. Take anything secondary, with a pinch of salt, certainly if it is being stated in a newspaper, or (shock horror) by a politician.
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The SMH is now often filled with grammatical and spelling errors. They just don’t seem to care any longer about standards. The paywall is a big put-off and seems to prove that Haywood was haywire in his approach to finding urgent solutions. A national tragedy.
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The SHM is full of spelling and grammatical errors because someone high up in the organisation did not think the paper needed sub editors. They also moved the printing to the edge of Sydney so it became very hard to distribute. Obviously these decisions were made by people who did not understand the industry.
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The problem is that there is no left-wing these days given that the political spectrum has swung to the hard right.
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