The Oz's Mark Day has an excellent little primer on the new Fairfax CEO, Greg Hywood's, designs and challenges (HT: Sinclair Davidson). He draws special attention to the likely short half-lives of The Australian Financial Review's (AFR) long-time leaders, Michael Gill and Glenn Burge, and is justifiably withering in his criticism of their performance.
The protracted, decade-long demise of that once great masthead has been genuinely disappointing for all of its readers. Over the years, many have documented the waves of departures of seasoned journalists to rival publications in protest of The AFR's narrow-minded, and progress-resistant leadership. In a world that is rapidly becoming dominated by the Internet and manifold digital communications, The AFR's absolute neglect, even distrust, of these new electronic innovations has led to a profound destruction of both brand and shareholder capital. They must be the only news organisation in the world that actively obstructs and resents the facilitation of reader interaction via article-appended 'comments'. As one leader of a major political party remarked to me several years ago, "the AFR's online strategy is a victim of its executive's vanity."
When you do speak with the decision-makers, they seem to be occupying a time-warp, unwilling to acknowledge the realities of the world in which we live, and convinced that the old ways will win the day. The real question is why the AFR's decay has been allowed to persist for so long. After so many of its most important executives and customers have relentlessly relayed their discontent, why weren't changes made years ago? The fact is past Fairfax CEOs are just as culpable as the men on the ground today.
Without wishing to detract from the sublime execution and hard work of its management team, one obvious explanation for Business Spectator's success, which currently accounts for a readership arguably as large as the AFR's audience, is the online vacuum left by the latter. Prior to the advent of Business Spectator, Australia did not have a full-service financial news site. By willfully vacating this space, the AFR's leadership spawned a new competitor. News Ltd is responsible too. The Australian's approach to disseminating business content online is confused at best. Its most valuable asset, informed analysis, is randomly allocated around the nether regions of the home page, and only aggregated in a hard-to-find Opinion subsite. Amazingly, The Australian has all but given up on business blogs in spite of the tremendous success of its role models, the FT and the WSJ, with these tools.
With the exception of perhaps Laura Tingle, Andrew Cornell and Alan Mitchell, all of The AFR's most highly regarded columnists have left the building. Many of my colleagues in finance no longer pick it up, opting instead for the convenience of electronic content. The op-ed pages, once so influential, are now a veritable ghost town. After all, who would write for a paper that locks their content away behind both paywalls, and, remarkably, the Internet itself? That's right, The AFR's leadership have tried to deny the most intrinsic value of the world wide web: the ability to search for, and identify, information. They will even proudly explain to you how you'll never find their content by looking online. As a consequence, publishing with the AFR threatens one with irrelevance, as Rupert Mudoch might say.
With all of the above in mind, here is my advice to Fairfax's Greg Hywood:
1) Go see the ABC's ascendant media maven, Mark Scott, and absorb everything he has to offer. I am sure he would be happy to share his thoughts with you. Mark had an almost-as-challenging-task reforming Aunty, and has, in my opinion, worked wonders. I think he has been especially effective in prosecuting Aunty's online strategy, which faced similar complexities in pooling multifarious products;
2) Merge all (and I mean all) of the business resources across The Age, The SMH, and The AFR to create a single, unified financial news centre, and treat each separate platform as a conduit of information from this central content-producing hub. Think of journalism as being manufactured in a factory, with the output distributed to shop-fronts around the country. So more generic and retail business news can be farmed out as freeware via The Age and The SMH online, and through their print iterations. The higher value-add product would be made available via subscriber-only channels, such as The AFR/Business Spectator, Eureka Report, and other specialist offshoots (on this note, Australia is desperately in need of a weekly property investment equivalent of Eureka Report);
3) Buy Business Spectator and that cash-cow, Eureka Report, now why you can still afford to do so (or before News Ltd does), and get a world-class financial journalist with deep digital experience to run the whole show for you. Do not allow one of your existing executives to do the job--they've likely already been contaminated by Fairfax's less-than-ideal DNA. As discussed above, leverage your editorial resources across a multiplicity of mediums. So Michael Pascoe and Ian Verrender could write for The SMH, The Age, and Eureka Report. Likewise, The AFR could draw on The SMH/Age's Peter Martin, Adele Ferguson and/or Michael West. The prettier talking heads should be harnessed for financial TV (see below)--think a business analogue to News Ltd's political hunk, Peter van Onselen, who anchors numerous Sky News shows;
4) Create a new partially paywalled, super-site merging The AFR and Business Spectator, but like the FT and the WSJ, permit 'commodity' news and some other richer content to be read for free in order to generate subscriptions. Ditch The AFR's current online publishing system, and allow summaries of all news and articles to be accessible in searchable form via the Internet;
5) Create a genuine online business television channel as a small-scale competitor to the (pay-walled) Sky that is largely free and employed as an alternative platform to deliver visual advertising. This is a huge opportunity, and precedents have been set by the likes of Bloomberg Television;
6) Move the financial news production model to a 24/7 cycle, and break all important stories as and when they become publishable, thereby driving eyeballs to your online channels; and
7) Replicate the very successful and mostly free FT and WSJ blog strategies, such as FT Alphaville, Money Supply, and Real Time Economics, as uber high-end forums that aggregate sophisticated research and trading talk, to stimulate 24/7 traffic amongst your deepest-pocket users: institutions. Blogs are also a very powerful way of engaging your readership to dynamically and interactively produce content for you.
