Cutting for Gold: the Fairfax Story

In the world inhabited by Fairfax’s management, cutting journalists from papers across the nation is somehow good for journalism.

I’ve watched with horror as the venerable papers of the Fairfax Media stable have been cut to the bone by wave after wave of redundancies, restructures and strategy changes over the past few years.

In 2012, it was announced that Fairfax would:

all but halve its journalistic workforce, close two printing plants, erect online paywalls and trim its broadsheets to some unspecified ‘compact format’.

At the time, I wondered:

In that post, I noted that whereas the metropolitan mastheads “ collectively dropped 10.6% readership in the year to March 2012”, the circulation at regional papers like The Illawarra Mercury and Newcastle Herald declined less (9% and 4.2%). Nonetheless, in 2015, The Illawarra Mercury and The Newcastle Herald (along with their smaller cousins) had their staff of award winning journalists, photographers and sub-editors slashed. Dissenting editors also seemed to disappear rather quietly.

On March 17, there was news of more cuts at The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, to which staff at those papers responded by striking.

Today, Fairfax has again announced cuts to regional papers, this time in Southern New South Wales and ACT, including Canberra Times, Queanbeyan Age, Queanbeyan Chronicle, Cooma-Monaro Express, Jindabyne’s Summit Sun, Yass Tribune, Goulburn Post and Southern Highland News.*

Despite the widespread view of journalists, commentators and politicians that these job cuts are inherently bad for journalism, news, and democracy, Fairfax continues to couch each announcement in euphemistic language. These are not cuts, they are:

• “[an] historic switch”
• “building stronger, sustainable and modern media network”
• “a reflection of what we know about the ways our readers are consuming our stories”
• and, from the header image above, a “modern plan”

Calling BS on this language earns the rebuke of none less than Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood, who called on readers and critics to

put to bed the myth that as Fairfax Media reshapes its publishing model to respond to a very different set of industry economics… there is some dire threat to quality journalism.

Nick McKenzie in The Age argued that:

Fairfax reporters take pride in producing stories that give ordinary Victorians a voice.

These responses, frankly, miss the point: Fairfax is doing nothing but gutting the staffs that make any of these papers worth reading, and Hywood, among others, is having himself on if he thinks differently. They are stopping the journalists they still employ from having the time and resources to chase the stories that matter to their communities. For the managers there, the commercial interests of Fairfax, even at a very local level, come into play before any interest in journalism.

I read a lot of Fairfax articles in papers such as the SMH, Age, Illawarra Mercury, Goulburn Post, Southern Highland News, but I cannot see how any of these papers can continue to produce the journalism that matters under the models being imposed.