As hundreds of Fairfax journalists in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra walked off the job on Thursday, management were rolling up their sleeves to produce a strike paper and keep the media company’s websites ticking over.
It is perhaps fitting they they chose a wrap-around house ad to cover the Age and the SMH front pages: a big green ad for Fairfax property website domain.com.au, the only part of the company that is profitable and growing.
The company has managed to translate the old “rivers of gold” classifieds in the weekend papers into highly successful websites and apps. Domain contributed to an improved pre-tax profit for the group of $161m in February when Fairfax returned a net profit of $27.4m for the first half. Its revenue grew by 38%, an acceleration from 30% last financial year.
Strike papers traditionally rely on wire services and stories and photographs which are already in the can to produce a paper that is not just blank pages. Sometimes editors and subeditors who are exempt from striking even go back to their roots and write the odd story if absolutely necessary.
Today’s Herald is certainly a thin one, even allowing for the shrinking of the once-fat broadsheets that were the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
There are only six tabloid news pages in the Herald before the arts, world news and business pages further back. In the Age there are 11 news pages and a normal book of 44 pages, plus the wrap-around ad.
The bylines you see are from striking journalists who filed their copy before the 2pm walkout on Thursday. Deadlines are notoriously early in Fairfax newsrooms these days. Editors have also taken copy from what was already written for the websites on Thursday and repurposed it for the paper.
Columnist Waleed Aly, who is not a Fairfax staff member but a contributor, has been given top billing on the front page of the SMH for his piece about US presidential hopeful Donald Trump. But Aly also filed before the strike was called, insiders say.
They’ve done pretty well with the Age and it’s hard to tell it’s a strike paper. The lead is the mafia killing of the lawyer from a court case on Thursday that lifted suppression orders.
The websites are not vastly affected, although regular features from Jo Tovey in New York and Latika Bourke’s daily news wrap, Double Shot, do not appear.
The real challenge will be to produce the Saturday and Sunday papers, which are far bigger and more vital to the company’s bottom line than the Monday to Friday papers.
Many of the stories would already have been filed, however, and the lift-outs such as Spectrum and Sunday Life will have already been printed.
The Age reports the strike on page 3 and the Herald on page 2.
Journalists are picketing the Herald and Age headquarters on Friday and are asking readers not to buy the paper or read the websites.
