Competing in the new media environment

The job cuts at Fairfax demonstrate that they, like most major old-media corporations, fundamentally fail to understand the new media environment. The consequence of the growth of the internet is the springing up of myriad news sources, with as many agendas, standards and business models.

There is still a place for the venerable broadsheet and the local newspaper, but it is as an arbiter of quality, a centre for debate and a beacon of trust. However, the soulless businessmen who make these decisions have resolved on the route they find most intuitive, that of cost-cutting and vivisection of what should be timeless institutions. What they fail to realise is that anyone can plug an AP line into a
collection of opinion pieces and a thick slathering of celebrity gossip; to survive, print media needs to be more, not less.

The SMH in particular needs to fund real, hard-hitting investigative journalism, and forget about the divas, of both Hollywood and opinion page varieties. Until then if I want the classic feeling of a broadsheet, I'll hold my nose against the smell of right-wing hysteria and read The Australian. At least those Tories aren't trying to shove Paris Hilton down my throat.