The Age’s weekday cover price is $2.80. I think it must have gone up sometime in the last month because it was $2.50 in September.
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It must’ve gone up for the first week of October because the air freighted price went up just last week. But not by thirty cents, SEVENTY cents!
I asked the newsagent this morning and he said The Age increased its cover price to $2.80 last Monday, October 3.
On another matter, The Australian reports today on high level talks between Nine Entertainment Company and Fairfax. According to the article, one pitch drafted by investment bankers that would not require media reform involved Fairfax spinning off assets, such as its events business, its Stan stake and its 54.5 per cent interest in radio group Macquarie Media, into Nine in exchange for an equity stake in the free-to-air and digital company. Fairfax would retain its Domain property listings business, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review.
If the deal is approved, Fairfax will give up ownership of the iconic City to Surf and other events like Good Food Month to NEC and will have to find new revenue sources.
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Nine sold it’s event business Nine Live, so why would they want to acquire another event business?
According to Radio Today, Judith Whelan, who has been editor of The Sydney Morning Herald for just eight months, will quit the paper to join the ABC as head of spoken content, overseeing ABC Radio’s flagship programs within the Capital City radio network, Grandstand and Radio National. She will start in her new role on November 7.
More lefty rubbish then, clear what they wanted hiring her. The SMH has been plummeting towards irrelevance long before her, but she made no attempt to arrest the nosedive.
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The money from Nine Live was used to strengthen the business. Admittedly, I would have preferred the events division to have been retained but the company has reduced debt and has more cash to invest in its future.
Could be a way to re-enter the industry. Nine Entertainment needs to be more than just Free TV, but only the right businesses, not just any reason to diversify. The right opportunities, brands and delivering value to succeed.
Fairfax’s Metro Media Publications will slash reporters and production staff at the nine Weekly Review suburban titles in Melbourne, with production outsourced to AAP Pagemasters and 16 journalists made redundant next month. The Weekly Review will continue to move towards lifestyle publishing as opposed to local news.
Hilarious
I think Albury is right, perhaps Hamilton?
The Age tablet app has won the prize for best tablet app in Asia at the Asia Digital Media Awards last night. The awards are organised by WAN-IFRA, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.
Still not turning a profit anywhere near what newspapers did. Fairfax are great at self inflicted death.
The Age editor-in-chief Mark Forbes has been stood down after a sexual harassment allegation, according to The Australian.
Mark Forbes resigned as The Age editor-in-chief this morning and will leave Fairfax altogether, after The Australian reported of a second allegation of sexual harassment against him. Forbes is an experienced journalist and has worked with The Age since 1985, it’s disappointing his time at the paper ends in this way.
If the allegations are true then he’s only himself to blame.
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Today there is speculation in The Australian that Fairfax could offload the AFR to Japanese media group Nikkei, and in the AFR that they should offload their stake in Stan. In a year or two Fairfax may not exist if all the potential deals go ahead.
I can see where the first speculation comes from. The AFR currently republishes selected articles from Financial Times (which is currently owned by Nikkei). If Nikkei buys the AFR it can turn it into the Australian offshoot of FT (meaning there is no need to print FT in Sydney for local distribution anymore).
I don’t think Fairfax should offload its stake in Stan given it is one of few successes of the company. Not only it is close to be profitable, it will be the only locally-owned streaming service after the closure of arch-rival Presto next month.
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News Corp assets have been predicting the demise of competitors for decades. It’s a usual Murdoch tactic.
But the reduced staff and intellectual capital at Fairfax has resulted in what Aus radio expat Ronnie Stanton describes as as narrow P1 focus can lead to pivoting your product for the benefit of an ever-dwindling group of people rather than growing your audience.
In Fairfax’s misguided case, they consider the P1 to be non businessmen who are anti business and anti Liberal and so on.
In that case, yes, time to save print business media in Australia and sell it to Nikkei.
Foreign investment in media can serve Australia well. We wouldn’t have Nova and Smooth thanks to DMG’s considerable and in hindsight, somewhat lavish investment.
More clickbait to fill the hollowed out brains of the dills who consume such rubbish content. There is a growing market for it unfortunately.
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To be independent you can’t have personal views?
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Sadly, personal opinion doesn’t have to be articulate.
His ranting is rather strange - there’s many ways to constructively attack Hockey’s performance as US Ambassador; these tweets don’t do that.