I never chemicalised anyone.
They can strike for a year for all I care:
JOURNALISTS at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have voted to immediately strike for one week after Fairfax Media announced major cuts to editorial staff.
Fairfax Media earlier today said it is cutting 25 per cent of its remaining metropolitan journalist staff — equal to 125 full-time jobs — in an effort to help save $30 million across its Australian newspaper operations.
The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s journalists then voted at stop-work meetings to walk off the job for one week, which means its journalists will not cover the Federal Budget on Tuesday.
The Brisbane Times’ journalists also walked off for seven days.
Fairfax is cutting costs in the face of declining advertising and circulations and told staff on Wednesday it is looking to cut positions across The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Brisbane Times and WA Today.
“While we will be looking across all parts of the newsroom, at the end of the redundancy program we expect there will be significantly fewer editorial management, video, presentation and section writer roles,” the company said in an internal note.
Staff have been given a deadline of Tuesday to nominate for a voluntary redundancy, with a decision to be made by May 12.
The journalists’ union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, said in a statement that Fairfax staff were “disgusted” by the job cuts decision. “None of the other parts of the Fairfax business are worth anything without the journalism and yet it is the journalism that Fairfax always cuts,” MEAA chief executive Paul Murphy said.
“The editorial staff are really angry. They think the company has made a terrible decision that is not in the best interests of the company, its audience or its staff.”
Fairfax axed 120 editorial jobs from its newsrooms in Sydney and Melbourne a year ago in an earlier cost-cutting exercise and outlined its latest target last month.
Ad revenue for Fairfax’s metropolitan media arm plummeted 16.6 per cent in the first half of the current financial year, with its real estate classifieds business its most profitable.
Domain generated 39 per cent of Fairfax’s total earnings in the first half of 2016/17 and is subject to a review that looks likely to end with it being spun off into a standalone business.
Fairfax is also reducing its casual workforce with the saving of $3 million, reviewing its third-party contracts and auditing all contributors.
The cuts come as regulators rejected a proposed merger between NZME and Fairfax Media’s New Zealand operations, saying the benefits of saving money and extending the life of some newspapers did not outweigh the harm it would cause to democracy.
New Zealand’s Commerce Commission announced its final decision a year after Fairfax Media and NZME proposed the move.
The companies sent a flurry of late submissions arguing that they needed to pool resources to compete with online giants like Google and Facebook, but the commission stuck with a preliminary decision it made in November.
The Commission said the combined company would have controlled nearly 90 percent of the daily newspaper market and a majority of traffic to online New Zealand news.
“This merger would concentrate media ownership and influence to an unprecedented extent for a well-established modern liberal democracy,” Commission Chairman Mark Berry said in a statement.
He said the merger would have reduced the quality of news and the diversity of voices and argued competition between news outlets resulted in better content.
Both Fairfax and NZME said they were disappointed by the decision. Fairfax said it would need to cut costs and consolidate some of its publications, while NZME said it was considering its options.
In April, the company announced a major structural overhaul to editorial operations aimed at delivering about $30 million in annual savings.
The changes affected newsrooms at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Brisbane Times and WAToday.
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Not reading past the first line, but I’d like to say …WGAF?
Bye Bye!
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I would like to say FOAD, but if Fakefacts goes all we have is Murdoch.
And that quite frankly is very, very scary.
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Where will one go for wall-to-wall anti-Trump and anti-Abbott stories now?
Oh wait … the ABC
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Caro will keep her job or get one elsewhere.
Some Fairfax bloke on the news said ‘this is a threat to democracy’
Showing about as must self reflection as Hilary
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FINISH THEM!
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Guardian?
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The[quote=“Riolio, post:247, topic:1932, full:true”]
Caro will keep her job or get one elsewhere.
[/quote]
She already has a TV gig, and I think a radio one? This won’t bother her at all.
This’ll hurt the GOOD journos more than anyone. The ones who do patient investigative work that takes time and is not glamorous and annoys powerful people, because they generate less copy than those that simple regurgitate press releases from political parties or the AFL, or who vomit out uninformed op-eds on complex issues that they know nothing about. And if there’s any journos left who are willing to cause trouble by pushing back against the editorial line, you can bet they’ll be conveniently moved on too.
From everything I hear, management who actually make the decisions will remain unscathed. The Fairfax CEO copped a nice comfy $2.5 million bonus just a month ago.
Hard to blame Emma Quayle for getting out while the getting’s good, isn’t it?
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I’d happily take an Uzi to their Football dept, but as Boot said, we can’t afford to lose the last vestige of non right wing propaganda sheet press.
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To paraphrase a recent bomber fan:
Get a big dog up ya Fairfax!
■■■■ you all.
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Karma.
No sympathy whatsoever.
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Age journalist interviewed on ABC News:
“If they keep cutting jobs like this, there won’t be a media”
Kinda true.
The newspaper business (which is where 90% of real journalism is done, with the remaining ~10% split between online and a vanishing few decent TV news shows like 4 corners) is no longer something that makes money. It’s that simple. Online destroyed the classified ad market, and paper purchases (and online ads) don’t remotely cover the costs.
Journalism is no longer an investment that you can get revenue from. It’s a cost that you pour money in to and never get it back.
Media outlets that actually do real reporting are either disappearing, or they’re having to find other income streams not related to journalism, and an owner that is willing to run the paper at a loss in the long term.
Fairfax is just a media outlet. They (moronically) sold seek.com for peanuts back in the day, and now they have no other income streams.
The ABC runs on government money, it doesn’t make a profit.
The Guardian is tiny content-wise, has no printing/distribution costs, and relies very very heavily on opinion to fill its content, because opinion is cheap. Even then I don’t think they make a profit, but they have investors willing to take the hit (for the moment).
Murdoch’s papers lose money and have done so for years, the only reason they’re not going through the same cuts as Fairfax is that the Murdochs find them politically useful and so are ok with letting them continue to run at a loss, and covering their costs with revenue from Foxtel etc.
Fairfax has no Murdoch. Gina Rinehardt looked like she had her eyes on making them her tame media outlet a while back, but the board and other owners fought back and she gave up and sold out her stake as far as I remember.
I can’t see a way in which Fairfax can turn this around without a big change in the nature of media. If media outlets continue to be treated as businesses that need to make a profit, they’re doomed to either nonexistence or reduction to propaganda outlets.
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Yep. Wherever there’s shiit, there’s a job for a shovel.
Deckham, 2017
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See above.
Who cares
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Yes all that is true, of course
My post was about how a supposedly literate journalist would think there was “a” “media”. This was apropos of the thread title and also the continuing death of literacy.