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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Business
Naaman Zhou (now), Helen Davidson (earlier)

'Fairfax will exist – it will just be a 100% owned subsidiary of Nine,' Greg Hywood says – as it happened

It’s expected the takeover of Fairfax by Nine will completed by the end of the year.
Fairfax’s Greg Hywood and Nine’s Hugh Marks. The takeover of Fairfax by Nine will be completed by the end of the year. Photograph: MICK TSIKAS/PAUL MILLER/AAP

Summary

And with that, we’ll be closing this live blog for today.

Here’s what happened:

  • Channel Nine has acquired a majority share in Fairfax Media in a $4bn deal, with $50m in cuts forecast.
  • Nine confirmed that acquiring Stan and Domain – not journalism – was the prime motivation.
  • Fairfax CEO Grey Hywood said the Nine board signed the Fairfax charter of editorial independence, and promised that its quality of journalism will continue. He added that Fairfax had been actively “working towards” the takeover for a long time.
  • Top investigative reporter Kate McClymont said the partnership could be healthy as long as Nine remained strong against commercial pressures. “I’m not sure our readers care who owns us as long as our journalism is good,” she said.
  • Malcolm Turnbull has welcomed the move, which resulted from his government’s changes to media laws in 2017. Labor opposed it and said they wanted increased funding and protection for the ABC.
  • The MEAA said the takeover was “not a good day for democracy and diversity” and predicted other companies like NewsCorp and Channel 7 will now try and merge.
  • There has been no solid guarantee on the future of Fairfax’s regional newsrooms.

Thanks for reading.

Updated

More analysis from the ABC’s business editor, Ian Verrender, and Mumbrella editor Vivienne Kelly.

Verrender is not too worried about the $50m savings, saying they are small in the scale of the cuts both organisations have already seen. “I don’t see where Fairfax can sack any more reporters. It’s a pretty bare-bones organisation. At Nine I know people are saying the same thing.”

Kelly says that if Nine chooses to cut the regional newsrooms, it could be bought up by a private equity firm. Today’s move could see the “formation of something new”.

Updated

Emma Alberici, following up on her prediction from before, says the ABC has an exclusive interview with former Fairfax chairman Roger Corbett tipping a bidding war for Fairfax shares.

Former ABC presenter Dom Knight is calling for greater protections for the national broadcaster.

Updated

More reaction is filtering in. In the Monthly, Paddy Manning writes:

The death of Fairfax has been pronounced so many times that we are nearly numb to it. But today’s announced Nine takeover, if it completes, really will mark the end of a 177-year history.

It is great news for the Coalition, knocking out a perceived source of centre-left reportage. Fairfax was already shifting determinedly rightwards, and that tendency will surely accelerate at Nine.

Updated

Kate McClymont, the Sydney Morning Herald’s top investigative reporter, has told journalists in Sydney that staff at Fairfax are “shellshocked” at the announcement this morning.

“It is a great disappointment and it’s very sad,” she said. “I think everyone is shellshocked, I don’t think people saw this coming.

“The big concern for us as journalists at Fairfax is that [the company] has been around since 1831 and we’re proud of our independence. Our concern is will this be maintained? What is going to happen when the two companies merge?

“In some ways it’s disappointing to know that really our sole attraction was Stan and Domain, not our journalism.

“Having said that, it’s a media company we’re merging with and as long as we can be assured [our] journalism will remain unchanged and things such as advertising won’t be affecting the stories we cover, then I think we’ll just have to see if we can make the best of it.”

The president of the journalist’s union the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Marcus Strom, called it a “watershed moment in the history of Australian journalism”.

“It’s not a good day for democracy and diversity. We say that not because of the name but because of what Fairfax has stood for for so long. Vibrant, high-quality, independent journalism. We hope that will continue with Nine but there are real concerns.”

He said the union had written to the CEOs of both Fairfax and Nine asking for assurances that any merged entity preserve members’ rights, entitlements and pay conditions and guarantee no job cuts in newsrooms.

McClymont said it was hard to know whether to trust Nine’s promises.

“Greg Hywood [the Fairfax CEO] has promised there will be independence but he of course is basically taking redundancy so we don’t know,” she said.

Asked whether Hywood’s legacy would be the death of Fairfax she replied “you might say that”.

Updated

More tidbits from the Hywood address to staff.

He says the future of the Pyrmont building of the Sydney Morning Herald is still up in the air, but that “it might move to Nine’s headquarters”. Previously, it was reported that they were looking to move to the city.

Someone asks “Will Nine News or Nine online have first dibs or greater access to the news we are writing?” and will there be duplication of stories?

Hywood says “Nine is going to publish it’s own stories.”

“We have a double up of content with the Fin Review and the Herald, and the Herald and The Age. There’s a double up all the time. There’s just a different perspective of those stories aimed at different audiences.”

And finally, that snappy quote: “‘Fairfax will exist – it will just be a 100% owned subsidiary of Nine”.

In other media news, SBS presenter Lee Lin Chin has announced she is leaving the network. She plans to work with her own newly-created production company, with a few shows already in development for other networks.

“I thought SBS would just fire me one day so I’d never have to make the decision,” she told Channel Ten. “They obviously didn’t and in fact offered me a two year contract extension at the start of the year. So I had to start considering it a lot more seriously.”

The Guardian’s current editor-in-chief, Katherine Viner, has also called it a dark day for media plurality.

Marcus Strom, from the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, predicts this will lead to more and more mergers, and fewer diverse voices.

“If this gets through the ACCC in its current form, you can expect there will be other companies, like News and Channel 7, eyeing each other off as well.”

He said it was a “natural consequence” of the watering down of ownership regulation in 2017.

Matt O’Sullivan, the head of Fairfax’s house committee, says he had a good conversation with Greg Hywood about jobs. He hopes the new owners hold to these promises and there is “no mass gutting of these newsrooms”.

Nine have provided “no insight” yet into the future of the print editions. “We’re in the hands of new owners and hope they stick by quality journalism ... If they went down the road of combining these newsrooms, it would ultimately threaten those mastheads.”

Question for McClymont: “The banking royal commission was essentially the result of a joint Fairfax/ABC investigation. Are you concerned if they will able to continue?”

McClymont: “What happens if we do a story like Dominos pizzas and they are a major advertiser of Channel Nine? If Channel Nine bosses are going to be as tough as ours have in not caving into commercial pressures, then that hopefully will be good. It will be sad to not do any more joint investigations with 4 Corners but, new horizons I guess.”

Updated

Fairfax staff are addressing the media right now. Kate McClymont is asked about how different Fairfax and Nine are.

“I am brushing up on my welfare cheats as we speak,” she initially jokes. “I am all set for a whole new career.”

Speaking more seriously, she says:

“I think they are completely different entities. And this is the big uncertainty. The mastheads will go on for the foreseeable future, it’s what is over the horizon that no one knows.

“If the print products stay as they are and Nine does what they do, I am hoping we have a viable and healthy media business, which might be good for all of us. I’m not sure our readers care who owns us as long as our journalism is good.”

Updated

Question: “Under the agreement with Nine can Fairfax still include an EBA?”

Hywood: “It’s a bit weird to say it’s business as usual on a day like today. But it is. In the sense that nothing changes in the way that the business is managed.”

Question: “At the SMH we seem to have shifted from a strategy of chasing clicks to a strategy of chasing subscriptions? Does Nine see a value in that?”

Hywood: “Absolutely. Nine likes that. Fairfax likes that.”

Hywood has answered questions from staff.

On contracts:

It won’t change. Fairfax Media becomes fully a owned subsidiary of Nine. All the contractual arrangements and employment contracts are intact, nothing is renegotiated. The current EBA negotiations continue as per usual.

On the Fairfax name:

On independence:

If we didn’t deliver independent journalism, they [readers] wouldn’t come to us. They would walk. The fact is that the business of publishing would fall apart if we didn’t deliver that independence. So it’s a double protection.

More from Hywood. He credits Stan and Domain with rescuing the company from collapse, and says the commercial benefit of the move is “the right thing for journalism”.

We’ve had some tough times. We all know we’ve had some tough times. But we’ve built these new businesses [Stan, Domain] that have sustained us and grown us through what is an incredibly difficult time that threatened the company.

In 2014 our share price was in the 30c range. People said it was the end of us. In fact, fuck it wasn’t the end of us.

Our mastheads will be stronger, they will be underpinned by a more robust commercial model. That means more opportunity for better journalism

As we wait for more to come out of that meeting, the ABC had more analysis of the takeover. It’s not pretty.

The ABC’s business editor Ian Verrender describes the move as “two wounded operations trying to join forces to bulk themselves up”. “They supported the media law changes. All of them were in trouble ... Unfortunately the future doesn’t hold that much promise.”

Mumbrella editor Vivienne Kelly says it was the threat from online that pushed the two together.

“Whilst they are competitors, they are on the same side in the war they are trying to fight against Google and Facebook. They need to work together, they need scale ... Fairfax needs some more weight and clout behind it to survive against such big internet players.”

Former editor-in-chief of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger has expressed his sadness at the move.

Updated

Updated

Hywood says Fairfax planned for this and strived to achieve it.

“We’ve been working towards this for a long time now. We very actively supported and advocated media law reform because we believe that scaled media companies were in the best position to compete.”

Full video of his opening comments below.

Bit of gallows humour from Hywood. He tells staff: “The shoe’s on the other foot, I’m here announcing my own redundancy for a change.”

Hywood tells staff that the “independence of what we do is not under threat”.

“Culture of independent journalism will continue to thrive”, he said, according to journalists at the meeting.

Fairfax staff in Sydney have gathered for their meeting with CEO Greg Hywood.

Updated

Who will be the biggest shareholder in the new combined Nine-Fairfax company? That’ll be Bruce Gordon. The 89-year-old media mogul owns roughly 15% of Nine, as well as TV station WIN. His investment vehicle Birketu Pty Ltd is also the largest shareholder in Network Ten.

15 minutes to go now until Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood addresses staff at 3pm.

We’ve also heard there will be a press conference at 4pm with Fairfax staff and the union, the MEAA.

Stay tuned – we’ll bring updates as they happen.

Labor has released a statement on the takeover, predicting job losses and calling for a strengthening of the ABC and SBS in response.

Australia already has one of the most concentrated media markets in the world. This proposed merger means it is about to get even more concentrated.

There will be further job losses in the media, potentially even in regional areas.

Democracy suffers if you have too few media voices; workers suffer when mergers inevitably lead to job losses; and citizens, consumers and communities get less diversity, less coverage and less choice.

The 2012 Finkelstein review estimated that our top four media companies hold 99% of newspaper circulation, compared to 74% in the UK, 48% in Japan and 22% in the US.

“Australia is the only country in which the leading press company accounts for more than half of daily circulation,” the review said.

Updated

Channel Nine’s editorial culture is “characterised by mediocre journalism”, writes Denis Muller in the Conversation.

There is a huge question mark over the future editorial quality of the newspapers ... A particularly pressing question is: what will happen to the Age’s investigative unit?

The Fairfax story has all the elements of Greek tragedy: heroism in the creation of the company, then a combination of comedy, pride, stupidity, greed, arrogance and hubris to bring it down.

Updated

Some concern from current Fairfax employees about the huge disparity in union membership between Nine and Fairfax. The merger could have a significant impact on any future EBA.

Former prime minister Paul Keating has savaged the merger, practically turning the air blue and accusing Nine of having “the opportunism and ethics of an alley cat”.

Channel Nine will run the editorial policy,” he writes. “The problem with this is that in terms of news management, Channel Nine for over a century has never other than displayed the opportunism and ethics of an alley cat.

There has never been a commanding ethical or moral basis for the conduct of its news and information policy [and] nobody has lanced the carbuncle at the centre of Nine’s approach to news management. As sure as night follows day, that pus will inevitably leak into Fairfax.

The cross-media rule gave Australia 30 years of media diversity. Those barriers in the wholesaling of news underwrote diversity of opinion, guaranteeing an altogether better informed and livelier public debate ... Today’s announced takeover of Fairfax by Channel Nine brings the big wholesalers back with a vengeance. And with it, were it to be permitted, a major shutting in of diversity.

Updated

Nine CEO Hugh Marks’s latest comments, published by 9 News itself, promise that quality journalism – well, “content” – will be the priority of the new company.

“Content will be the future of this business,” he said. “Its whole essence of competition will be around the quality of its content.”

Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood has also played down the loss of the Fairfax name.

“I think what’s important is the mastheads. People out there read the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Australian Financial Review. That’s what people have a connection to, not with a family name.”

Updated

Speaking in Tasmania just now, Malcolm Turnbull has doubled down on his support for the merger.

He stressed that both Nine and Fairfax were strong supporters of the media reform laws, and says it will make both companies stronger.

It’s a very competitive media environment, as we all know. That is why the industry, especially Australian companies, need to be able to consolidate. It will make for a stronger business overall.

Updated

“A name is only a word, but sometimes words stand for something,” writes Gay Alcorn.

Read her lovingly-crafted eulogy to Fairfax – a 177-year-old establishment that was important not for its name but for what it meant.

Fairfax was about brave, hard journalism. From the Age Tapes in the 1980s, to the rape allegations against Geoff Clark story, to the late Evan Whitton’s uncovering of corruption, to stories that drove the setting up of the banking royal commission. I was so proud to work for Fairfax, and I know journalists still are.

Updated

Are you after a quick breakdown of what this deal means and how it’ll happen? Read on:

This infographic from the new company’s merger statement, which pairs off Nine and Fairfax properties, has raised a few eyebrows.

The sensible Domain / The Block synergy aside, it pairs Good Weekend with lifestyle network 9Honey, and Good Food with the fairly low-rating and forgettable Family Food Fight.

On the ABC, Emma Alberici predicts a potential bidding war for Fairfax shares, which have already surged 13% today. “Fairfax is there for the taking, it’s quite cheap,” she says.

But she thinks the financial outlook is bleak, given the decline of print journalism. Apart from the valuable weekend editions, “it’s hard to see that print journalism has a very big future at all”. “If it all migrates to online you have to ask, what is the point of the mastheads?”

Centre Alliance senator Stirling Griff has expressed his support for the takeover, after his party helped usher in media law changes in 2017.

The Nick Xenophon Team, as it was then known, was crucial in passing the reforms that made this merger possible. At the time, they traded their vote for a $60m “innovation fund” to support regional journalism. All eyes will be on Fairfax’s regional newsrooms to see whether the NXT deal results in a net good or harm.

Either way, Griff today hailed it as “survival” in a new social media world:

All old media groups need to diversify their offering so they can have a strong advertising package. It’s not about editorial control. It’s about survival.

They are commercial groups that are required to make decisions that ensure they have a financial future.

Updated

There are a couple of analyses around suggesting the merger has grim prospects.

This from Robert Gottliebsen in the Australian:

In theory the Nine Network takeover of Fairfax could work brilliantly but in practice, around the world, mergers between struggling companies rarely succeed. What happens is that the bean counters see all sorts of opportunities to slash costs and make the merger ‘work’ in that way.

In the process revenue falls and even more costs cuts are required and what is left is a skeleton of a business that will be snapped up at a low price by a predator that can pick the bones.

And from Bernard Keane in Crikey:

Successful media mergers or major acquisitions in Australia (or overseas) are very rare. They usually result in someone losing a lot of money ...

This eventually translates into lost jobs, smaller budgets and cuts to the high-cost area of production like news-gathering. That two-year period of job cuts is likely to turn into several years of them as the promised synergies, efficiencies and ‘value creation’ that are being used today to justify the takeover fail to materialise.

Updated

The “saddest aspect” of the merger is “why we’ve got to this situation”, says Andrew Jaspan, who edited the Age between 2004 and 2008.

Jaspan is among several current and former Fairfax staff members who have spoken to my colleague Luke Henriques-Gomes about today’s announcement.

“I think somebody needs to look very closely at what I consider to be the directionless and pointless approach that the current management has towards looking after these great brands,” he said.

“It’s brought us to the situation where they’ve given up and said ‘you have a go at running it because we just don’t know how to make it work’.”

Read the full story here.

Updated

Fairfax investigative reporter Nick McKenzie has told the ABC that staff at the Age in Melbourne are in shock.

“Consolidation no doubt poses a threat to diversity, independence and to debt. By that I mean synergies will no doubt be sought and that likely means job losses.”

He said Fairfax was a journalistic institution and staff would fight for their future.

Fairfax staff will be briefed at 3pm by Greg Hywood.

Updated

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young has criticised the merger and called for Nine to be upfront with staff about job losses.

“In this era of little faith in politics, and the rise in fake news, we need greater diversity and stronger public interest journalism. It is greatly disappointing to see our media diversity continue to be watered down,” she said.

“Between this merger and the ongoing assault on the ABC and SBS, Australians will be very concerned about the quality of their news on television, online and in print.”

“The merger will have significant benefits for Nine, as it will open up access to Fairfax’s newspapers and online publications, as well as Fairfax’s Macquarie Media radio interests,” says IBISWorld senior industry analyst, Andrew Ledovskikh.

“However, the merger will have possible implications for how Fairfax operates, putting into question, for example, its regular investigative journalism partnerships with the ABC.”

Ledovskikh says the merger of the second largest newspaper publisher with the second largest free-to-air TV broadcaster will result in the second largest media organisation (behind News Corp).

The newspaper publishing industry has declined at an annualised 8.4% as circulation numbers have dwindled, he said, and free-to-air TV by 2.6% over the past five years.

“Fairfax has struggled over the past five years, with its revenue declining almost 50% since 2012-13. The company has tried to cut costs, announcing 115 job cuts in May 2017. Nine Entertainment hasn’t seen the same sort of declines, but revenue growth has been stagnant over the past five years.”

Updated

The journalists’ union says the merger will be bad for Australian democracy and a diversity of voices in an already concentrated media market.

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance has called on the competition regulator to block the takeover.

Today’s takeover announcement is the inevitable result of Coalition government’s short-sighted and ill-conceived changes to media ownership laws that were always going to result in less media diversity, Marcus Strom, president of MEAA Media said.

With ongoing inquiries into the independence and long-term viability of quality journalism under way, the ACCC must block this takeover.

This takeover reduces media diversity. It threatens the editorial independence of great news rooms at Nine, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Canberra Times, Illawarra Mercury, Newcastle Herald, Macquarie Media and more – right around the country. It harms the ability of an independent media to scrutinise and investigate the powerful, threatens the functioning of a healthy democracy, undermines the quality journalism that our communities rely on for information.

Greg Hywood twice refused to answer questions from journalists about his future role with Nine and how much money he would take with him when he left Fairfax.

When a second journalist asked how much money Hywood would walk away with there were gasps and the telephone media conference was terminated.

Hywood, a former journalist, was paid as much as $7.2m in 2016.

Updated

The federal government is all over this announcement, claiming credit off the back of its media law reforms.

From the communications minister, Mitch Fifield, a few minutes ago:

Our changes to media law are giving the opportunity for Australian media organisations to look at how they can make themselves the strongest they can be.

The whole reason behind changes to media law is because we want to see Australian media organisations be strong ... and still tell Australian stories in Australian voices.

Today we have this important announcement, it’s now a matter for shareholders and for regulators.

Fifield said we can’t pretend we’re still in the 1980s and the internet doesn’t exist, and that the old media laws could have seen organisations “going out the back door”.

Media diversity is fine, he added, noting the money the federal government puts into ABC and SBS.

“The company might be called Nine but the mastheads of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and the Australian Financial Review ... continue. What this is about is securing the future of great Australian mastheads.”

[A short time ago Nine chief executive Hugh Marks confirmed that it was mainly about Stan and Domain.]

Updated

Stan and Domain were Nine's primary motivations

Greg Hywood has confirmed that the Fairfax heritage name will die along with the merger with Nine. But he says the mastheads will remain and that’s what people connect to. “That’s what’s important here.”

Hugh Marks has agreed that the Stan and Domain assets – and not the journalism – were the primary motivator for the merger.

Updated

This graph of Fairfax Media shares since 2007 tells its own story.

It never recovered from the GFC era but that also coincided with the full onset of digital news.

Fairfax Media shares since 2007.
Fairfax Media shares since 2007. Photograph: Yahoo Finance

Please note this quote from Hugh Marks, the proposed chief executive of the new company, who does not specifically use the phrase “job losses”.

“Such a merger of two major media groups will of course result in some duplication of functions and you will read about synergies that will be pursued by the business as part of this transaction.”

Updated

Fairfax shares have jumped 13% after being suspended for the stock market’s first hour.

Investors also liked Domain shares, which are up 7.5%. Nine’s shares, however, are down 6.5%.

A lot of talk has been around what this takeover means for regional and local journalism. Under the new laws around media diversity, it’s now more than likely many regional centres will lose out.

Michael McGowan earlier noted that for Newcastle in NSW, the two major news sources for residents are Nine’s regional broadcaster, NBN, and the Fairfax-owned paper.

In 2015, Fairfax made massive cuts to regional newsrooms, including the Newcastle Herald, and last year flagged selling off papers including the Newcastle Herald and Canberra Times.

Nine also did a major overhaul of its regional services last year. Some newsrooms, including in the NT’s capital city Darwin, were massively downsized, with production of its nightly bulletin moved to Brisbane. But other regional centres, including Cairns and seven other Queensland cities, would get local bulletins for the first time.

Southern Cross Austereo also advertised jobs for 80 new staff in 18 regional centres across Victoria and NSW.

Updated

The takeover could have implications in regional markets where Nine and Fairfax compete.

In Newcastle, Nine’s regional broadcaster, NBN, and the Fairfax-owned Newcastle Herald are the city’s two main media outlets.

Last week NBN announced it had sold its headquarters in Newcastle to a property developer. The company said in a statement that it would “continue to lease the property for the next couple of years as we look for a new location to lease in Newcastle”.

Updated

There’s a lot of speculation about what working life for Fairfax journalists will be like at Nine.

A couple of people who have worked in both places have been pretty unanimous in noting it would be, at the very least, “different”.

Here’s a quick take from one unnamed former employee of both companies:

The big difference in the culture is that Nine is incredibly results-oriented and traffic driven.

It’s obviously populist, but back when I worked there, they didn’t have a sense of public mission. Their real mission is to serve the reader but it means some more unpalatable bits of content that Fairfax might have – even if it didn’t get lots of traffic it would run as marquee journalism – I don’t think would be valued as much under the Nine I knew.

It’s fun to work there, but it’s also brutal and they can churn through young reporters quite quickly. If you can keep up it’s lots of fun, but they’re not into worthy stories.

It’s a very neoliberal newsroom, like: what do people want, what can we give them that they want.

That’s their metric. They don’t give a fuck about Walkleys.

There’s going to be a real culture shock for a lot of people.

Updated

Nine’s takeover of Fairfax would realise a long-held dream of the late Kerry Packer, media tycoon and once owner of Nine.

The below is from Packer’s obituary, printed in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2005.

Mr Packer had also long championed a change in Australia’s cross media ownership rules which would have allowed him to own a newspaper in the same market as his television network.

He spent the better part of the 1990s and the start of this decade stalking the Fairfax newspaper group but never saw the regulatory environment which would have allowed for a takeover.

Australia’s existing media rules prevent one company owning more than one TV licence, two radio licences or a newspaper in the same city.

In 1995 the Labor government moved to tighten restrictions after Mr Packer launched a raid on Fairfax, taking a 17.2 per cent stake in the newspaper group despite a 15 per cent cross media limit.

The coalition accused Labor of political payback because Mr Packer had backed then opposition leader John Howard as a future prime minister.

Labor’s response was to claim that the coalition had promised the media magnate it would relax media laws if it won government.

When it came to office in 1996, the Howard government attempted to lift restrictions on owning only one newspaper, radio or TV station in the same city but Labor and the minor parties joined forces to prevent a watering down of the rules.

Successive attempts over the years also failed.

Mr Packer eventually got tired of waiting for change and sold his stake in Fairfax in 2001.

Updated

Hugh Marks said the Nine board is happy to adopt the Fairfax charter of editorial independence.

“Our principles are the same as Fairfax.”

On Tasmanian LAFM Radio Malcolm Turnbull responded to the merger news by noting it will have to go through regulatory scrutiny by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission but “the parties expect it not to face any regulatory hurdles”.

Turnbull even took credit for the merger:

It’s been made possible by the changes in media ownership laws we made. To be frank, I welcome the announcement. Fairfax is a great Australian company.

The Nine Network was the first network to be on air, with Bruce Gyngell. I used to work for the Nine Network in my journalistic and legal past. Bringing them together will strengthen both of them.

Online and print journalism – it’s a very tough environment today. The arrival of online news has made the media so much more competitive than it used to be... [the merger] allows two strong Australian brands with great traditions to be able to be more secure


Turnbull said he “couldn’t see any reason” why the merged company would cut back on local news, arguing that the “economics of regional newspapers has held up”.

Updated

Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood has told analysts, Nine has a “great history of journalism” and he believes the television company is “a great home for the mastheads”.

Hugh Marks, chief executive of Nine, said news was an important part of both Nine and Fairfax and the two newsrooms would now have multiple platforms to distribute their content on.

Updated

Some Fairfax staff – including those with senior editorial positions – received this morning’s email from Hywood at around the same minute the news broke on TV.

It’s left current and former staff reeling, with some open hostility towards Fairfax over the manner in which the news was delivered and the lukewarm recognition given to staff.

Updated

Outgoing Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood told staff there will be “plenty of Fairfax Media DNA in the merged company and board”, but the 177-year-old media company will lose its famous name when it becomes the minority owner.

Stuart Howie was the editorial director of Fairfax regional media from 2012 to 2014.

This morning two of Australia’s most recognisable media companies, Fairfax and Nine, announced a merger but the details quickly led observers to label it more of a takeover by Nine.

Nine will acquire all of Fairfax’s shares and the new company, to be named NEC, will be 51.1% owned by Nine.

It’s expected the merger will be completed by the end of the year, and is believed to be worth about $4bn.

Our full report is here.

There’s a lot of reaction to the announcement – much of it negative – and we’ll bring it to you this morning.

Updated

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