Yesterday they sacked another editor. Today they sacked the CEO. But the problems at Fairfax will get worse, not better, unless and until someone sacks the company’s board of directors.
Fairfax Media is suffering from an almost total absence of direction, strategy, comprehension of its problems or understanding of its business.
Of course, David Kirk was way out of his depth and added substantially to the Fairfax malaise. The same is true of his predecessor, Fred Hilmer. Between them they contributed a decade of misguided and misjudged “leadership” of a company that requires reinvention in an age of momentous turmoil in media and journalism.
But don’t blame Kirk or Hilmer. They are not the culprits. They did not appoint themselves, and they did not endorse their own strategies.
The culpability for the smoking mess at Fairfax, and for the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of Australia’s best journalism at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, lies entirely with the board.
A board made up of a former retailer, a former property developer, a financier, a former luxury goods executive, a former IT executive, a former TV executive and two members of the founding Fairfax family. A board that does not understand the basic DNA of its own industry. A board that has demonstrated appalling misjudgement in nearly all its key decisions for a decade. A board that is as far out of its depth as a toddler without floaties in the deep end of an Olympic pool.
The idea that Fairfax Media could emerge successfully from its current turmoil under the current board is prepostrous. And it’s only when this is understood by the major shareholders — including, presumably, the beleagured and much poorer Fairfax family — that this company and its newspapers will have a chance of surviving the current maelstrom intact.
For journalists and those who care about quality journalism, watching the assassination of the Fairfax brands by this board is an unfolding tragedy. And, believe me, there is no solace in the fact that this will soon become a requisite business school casestudy in the incompetence of a corporate board in managing change.
The words in today’s announcement of Kirk’s “resignation” to the Stock Exchange, by Fairfax chairman Ron Walker, summed up that tragedy: “During his more than three years in the role, David has been an outstanding CEO of Fairfax Media. He and his team have led the complete re-positioning of the company, from a metropolitan newspaper publishing business to a position in which the company is now clearly the leading media company in Australasia”.
Apart from “and”, “the” and “a”, not a word in that statement resembles reality. These are the words of the chairman of a company that has been hijacked and destroyed by a board of directors whose epitaph will read: They murdered Australia’s best journalism and newspapers without knowing what they were doing.
That patronage drops off forcing more fiscal ‘proberty’ causing job cuts as training and expertise are deemed superfluous extravagance has nothing to do with the paper morphing from a broadsheet to a rag. As long as the pay packets and the rhetoric tells another story the Ron Walkers and Fairfax Board will never see it any other way. It’s the ar*e-about business model familiar only to the same old players with a finger in every pie as they hop from one board to another doing nothing more than damage. They’re like buzzards – until the carcass is picked clean they’ll feed off it forever.
Well done, Eric. It had to be said, but who will listen? Certainly not Ron Walker. I always thought the chair of a board was meant to be a leader, knowlegeable in in their field, capable of inspiring and leading the organisation to new and better ways, particulalry when times are challenging. It is, as you say, a tragedy.
Amen! And that gem Eric should be circulated to the boards of radio and television outlets similarly gutted of their ID. The Bill Caralis radio model in the Sydney, Hunter and Tweed is a prime case of mangling the airwaves and depriving millions of radio listeners of relevant news information and entertainment. Hiving off essential services to private operators and handing out radio and television licences like lotto tickets is all part of a national media meltdown. Another job for Rudd to put on his 2020 vision list.
As a former Age and BRW journalist, and a former colleague of Mr Beecher at The Age for a short time, I couldn’t have put it better. The board and management have been brain-dead for as long as I can remember – Hilmer and Walker possibly never had brains at all – and some of the editorial executives would have been better employed as the ingredients for pumpkin soup. Somehow, magnificently, they have managed to make Young Wokker look good. The only thing left of note in the stinking ruins is the Fin Review – let’s pray that they are forced to sell it.