As if any more proof were needed that Mark Day hasn't contributed even an informed utterance on the media industry since his days editing Truth from Melbourne (before Henry Bolte turned a sod on the West Gate Bridge).
The dinosaur railed yet again in The Australian on Monday against the folly of Fairfax Media's management after the publisher (of this newspaper) announced more editorial job cuts last week to mirror its declining print advertising revenues.
The redundancies are heinous, Day argued, because Fairfax has "rushed headlong into an uncertain digital future where profits are both minuscule and elusive", to say nothing of print's uncertain future where profits are equally minuscule and elusive – vastly higher revenues yes, but vastly higher costs too. Which is why News Corp has only two profitable newspapers left in the world, neither of them in Australia.
So a columnist whose last scoop came before the Chinese invented paper is expounding on the press's commercial realities in a newspaper that in the last five years has lost News Corp shareholders $80 million (and the rest). Breathtaking, much?
And by Tuesday, News Corp had announced it was cutting $40 million (which can't be far from 300 people). And there's nothing to celebrate in that. Note that many of the fallen will be photographers, a profession Fairfax largely outsourced three years ago (to the sound of Holt Street's howls). News' Adelaide operation will shrink from having 24 employed snappers to eight. Huh? What the hell did 24 photographers do in Adelaide all day besides photograph serial murder scenes and offline power plants?!
Another factoid: News had more than 25 staff photographers at the Melbourne Cup last year. The front page pic splashed across the next day's edition of The Oz was syndicated from Getty. So while Day and his fellow (stone) tablet carriers – like Chris Mitchell and various others from the comfort of their defined benefit schemes – bag Fairfax for living in the current day, we can only feel sympathy for all that flab hanging off Rupert's corporate jowls.
