No wonder Fairfax has lost $15 million in advertising revenue from the Melbourne Weekly (see Crikey’s story yesterday). Anyone in real estate knows that The Age‘s management — CEO Don Churchill and advertising head David Hoath — are disconnected from Melbourne’s major advertisers and power elites. The threat to The Age‘s real estate revenues has been no secret, with agents openly suggesting Age management has been asleep at the wheel.
Recently Churchill, in a desperate attempt to curry favour with real estate agents, went on a last-minute hurried round of meetings with Fairfax Community Newspapers head Colin Moss to try and shore up The Age‘s real estate business. In a bizarre move, Churchill, thinking he was offering something new, promised agents they could pay their accounts by credit card. Amazed agents responded they’d had this capability for years.
Bemused agents are wondering how long the Fairfax board and CEO Bryan McCarthy will tolerate Churchill and Hoath as they witness the biggest en-masse exodus of advertising clients in The Age‘s history.
What crisis? As The Age reels from the biggest hit to its rivers of gold advertising stream with the news that virtually all of its real estate advertising in Melbourne Weekly has gone, Age advertising supremo David Hoath is said to be lying on the beach at Noosa Heads in Queensland …
What’s going on with The Canberra Times? The paper still isn’t available in Melbourne, the second largest city in Australia, though it is available in Brisbane and Sydney. The smallest of the Fairfax metro dailies has enjoyed something of a renaissance, despite chronic staff shortages, running some very good stories of late, but you wouldn’t know it if you were in Victoria.
The sooner Fairfax sorts out the integration of Ruthless Press and Fairfax — not to mention treating the Crimes as something more than a digital afterthought — the better. Correspondents such as Virgina Haussegger, Jack Waterford, Ross Peake, Crispin Hull, Karen Middleton, Rudd biographer Nicolas Stuart and ANU academic John Warhurst are missing out on the wider audience they deserve — and a draconian, denialist, internet-doesn’t-exist policy is to blame. Lift your game, Fairfax!
Myer talks about its growth strategy as the panacea for its sales woes, with 15 new stores planned over the next five or so years, each to generate about $30 million in sales. One disturbing fact that seems to have slipped by most commentators is that Myer has opened five new stores in the past three years (one each in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales and two in South Australia). On its own numbers, that should have given the business a $150 million sales lift, which has not shown up in overall sales numbers to date.
In fact, as Chanticleer pointed out in the Australian Financial Review last week, sales were $3.06 billion in 2007 and are expected to fall to $2.97 billion this year. Even taking into account the $80 million hole caused by the Myer Melbourne redevelopment, this is a deeply worrying trend for a business that has not been able to achieve any sustainable sales growth in the past 44 months.
The fact is that Myer is going backwards — new store growth is fine, but if the business cannot achieve same store sales growth (growth from existing stores) then that shows its customer base is shopping elsewhere.
DJs will report robust sales growth this half, and even Gerry Harvey is seeing good times (which is troubling for Bernie Brookes who blamed weak electric sales for his recent falls).
Last night Jetstar’s Darwin-bound flight JQ670 had to return to Adelaide after 10 minutes into the flight when the right engine blew. A big thud, followed by sparks, and the engine continued to glow for some time.
After about 10 minutes we were informed by the captain that we were returning to Adelaide on one engine. Emergency services were on the runway but the captain did a good job to land smoothly and safely.
The National Gallery of Victoria would have been red-faced after its website was hacked over the weekend. Anyone trying to purchase tickets to the current Ron Mueck exhibition or upcoming Rupert Bunny show were greeted with the following:
Hacked !
Zombie & KroNicKq & DigitALL & NoFearx38 & _Al_Bayraqim_ [root@localhost:/1923Turk] # One Turk Against The World [root@localhost:/1923Turk] # This System Owned !
1923Turk Grup Turkish Cyber Attack And Defance Army
[ www.digitallsecurity.org ] [ www.s3curity.tv ] [ www.mp3keyfi.biz ] [ www.katliam.org ] [ www.sirperdesi.org ]
Contact : digitall [at] hackermail [dot] com
Is the Tasmanian Government trying to cover its tracks ahead of this weekend’s state election? Spotted this truck outside Parliament House yesterday…
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