Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Apologies for the Australian football reference, but Rick Edmonds catches Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood saying print may have a shorter lifespan in Australia than some may think.
Talk about digital disruption. The CEO of Australia’s giant Fairfax Media said last week that he is preparing the company to abandon printed newspapers entirely “in three, five or 10 years.”
“Print revenues have been going down and are going down faster now,” Greg Hywood recently told the annual World Congress of the International News Media Association in New York. To the extent print newspapers have a future, he said, they will be “expensive, bespoke and narrowly distributed.”
Pressed on when Fairfax papers in Sydney and Melbourne might reduce frequency to a few days a week, Hywood declined to offer more specifics. He did add, however, that just dropping a day or two might have a minor impact on fixed costs, and “you can lose revenue without comparable savings.”
