Paralysed by its own ineptitude, Fairfax deserves to fail.
And if it does, as Crikey publisher and former Fairfax editor Eric Beecher writes today, it won’t have the global financial downturn or the rise of a free-for-all internet to blame — only itself:
“It is a dysfunctional company led by an incompetent board chaired by a former retailer, Roger Corbett, whose answer to the crisis afflicting newspapers is to sprout generalities…”
But it can’t fail. In a concentrated media market — squeezed harder by a dwindling club of proprietors over the last few years, as Crikey documented on Thursday — Fairfax’s collapse would bring down a large chunk of fundamental institutional journalism with it.
Too big to fail? Don’t you believe it — the writing is already on the wall for The Age in Melbourne. Too important to fail? Somehow, injudiciously, this rusting hulk has to be re-floated.
I agree that Fairfax’s demise would be most unfortunate; mind you, Fairfax’s lurch to the right has also been unfortunate, altho that is reversible.
stuff fairfax – it hasn’t done anything worthwhile for 25 years at least. If it goes, it goes… Newscorp will follow, and something else – better — will rise in their place.
The great days of The Age is long past – it’s increasingly the Melbourne edition of the SMH. I think Fairfax management would like to make it that completely. The idea of Australia’s second largest city (and home of Australian liberalism) becoming yet another Murdoch newspaper monoculture is sickening.
Gavin – perhaps the lurch to the right was a last-ditch attempt to attract Limited News buyers.
Davo – Newscorp won’t follow. If you want a major Oz newspaper that is a financial disaster, forget the Age, look at The Australian. But that’s irrelevant because Murdoch cross-subsidises it. The problem is that Fairfax doesn’t have a world-wide empire to fall back on.
A “simple” solution – Fairfax to abandon SMH and The Age and launch a national broadsheet – consolidation of journalistic fire-power, reduced costs and significantly increased market opportunities at a single stroke
Murdoch hasn’t managed to get a national broadsheet to make money after 45 years, so I don’t see how Fairfax could do any better in direct competition with the Australian.
I thought the attraction of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald was their puting international and national developments in a local context, and conversely, giving Melbourne and Sydney readers the impression that their actions and views were important nationally.