www.theaustralian.news.com.au

Marketers investing in the broadsheets are going to have to think on their feet as time gets lean for the papers.

In a recent speech to the Sydney Institute on the future of print media and quality journalism, Fairfax Medias chief executive David Kirk, defended the companys restructure and 550 redundancies, saying that growing competition meant their papers no longer aimed to deliver the news first, but to deliver it the best quality journalism in a profitable environment.

Quality is not just about numbers – how many journalists you have – it is about performance and what our journalists produce, he said.

Quantity does not equal quality.

Today Fairfax, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, was dramatically different from the past as those mastheads now only
contributed less than 20% of total earnings, Kirk commented.

New technologies meant Fairfaxs newspapers were no longer the gatekeepers for news each morning.

We still do set the news agenda for electronic media – there is no doubt about that. And we set the news agenda because we have the resources to do it.

This further solidifies the important implications marketers must consider when revising their advertising and media strategies, and how best to allocate their budgets in response to declining paper circulation numbers.