KILLING OUR MEDIA

THE IMPACT OF FACEBOOK AND THE TECH GIANTS

“On the same day Facebook announced its first-quarter earnings, Fairfax Media employees across Australia went on strike after the company decided to cut 125 editorial staff in a bid to save $30 million.

The staff cut was greeted with great public anger and frustration. Most of it was directed at Fairfax management, particularly CEO Greg Hywood, who’d landed a $2.5 million share bonus a couple of months earlier. (Some reports suggested he may have earned as much as $7.2 million in 2016.) Fairfax’s management has not excelled over the past decade, and Hywood was never going to please many outside his family for accepting the bonus while shedding workers. But the problems Fairfax faced were much greater than those stemming from its management, and have been growing for years, just as they have at News Corp, the

Guardian and almost every other major news organisation not funded by government.

It’s self-evident that news doesn’t report itself, but the economic model that has traditionally supported quality journalism is mid-collapse. Newspaper revenue has been falling by 5% per year worldwide since 2009.”