Publishing finds its equilibrium
Following news of redundancies, staff at Fairfax Media’s Sydney and Melbourne newsrooms walked out for a full week of protests in 2017. The cuts, impacting more than 100 roles, were considered too deep for a company that had already lost close to 2000 staff five years earlier. While the walkout made international headlines, it made little difference, with Australian news publishers continuing to trim roles around the nation as advertising revenue continued to fall.
The decline of advertising revenue that once propped up journalism has been sharply felt in recent years through layoffs and sometimes title closures. However, the trend stretches back two decades when classified advertising was unbundled from newspapers with the arrival of the internet. New technology meant advertisers could reach a wider, more targeted audience for less.
From 2001 to 2016, classified advertising revenue in Australia dropped from $2 billion to $200 million, according to estimates from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). When adjusted for inflation, that’s $3.7 billion down to $225 million.
At the time, publishing executives didn’t appear to respond with the same force that their advertising revenues were leaving their businesses. Instead, they spent the early years of the new millennium trying to shore up growth in ad dollars.
In 2002, then Fairfax Media CEO Fred Hilmer outlined the company’s revenue focus in its financial report: “We completed a restructuring within the publishing operations to sharpen our focus on generating growth in advertising revenues across the metropolitan mastheads in the key advertising categories of real estate, employment and automotive, and in retail and national display advertising.
“This will enable the company to capitalise on the
