Fred Hilmer, Fairfax CEO, presented a paper at the 58th World Newspaper Congress on Seoul last week. The full text of the speech is available from the company website here. They have also made available the accompanying PowerPoint presentation.
The paper, Building off the Print Franchise, is an interesting journey into an Australian publisher’s perspective of the changing world of news and information. Since the forum was public the paper is not as broad in some areas as I’d like. However, the discussion of growth in online is interesting as is his discussion of the Fairfax focus on building their community newspaper franchise. A quote I like is “Small may not be as beautiful as it once was, but local still is.”
Hilmer’s paper ought to be read by newsagents and anyone else involved in the news and information supply chain – not out of fear or looking for coded information but to understand that there is a strategy. Hilmer’s opening comments put the strategy in perspective as these selected quotes show:
The technological changes we face, such as the internet, may be new but the challenges they represent are, in a profound sense, quite old. The internet may be the latest but it is by no means the last new entrant in the media space.
My main message is that the challenges we face are real and acute, and demand multiple initiatives and responses.
There is no magic bullet—no one answer that works for all parts of our publishing businesses.
Nor is there room for complacency: The challenges of competition, technology and audience fragmentation are not going away. In fact, they seem to be accelerating.
I’d love to have an opportunity to talk with Hilmer and his strategists to discuss “competition, technology and audience fragmentation” in pursuit of mutually beneficial strategies. Our problems are, in the main, their problems and vice versa. They have resources small business newsagents do not have and there must be a way we can tap in and access these resources in a business like and co-operative way.