Fairfax has been sending demands to newsagents to post headline posters outside their businesses. Newsagents say it’s a desperate bid to increase sales for the media giant.
Director of newsagency marketing group NewsXpress Mark Fletcher said on his blog it was a “heavy-handed” approach that would do nothing to increase sales, and it could even discourage agents from stocking Fairfax titles including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review.
Newsagents are required under their contracts with Fairfax to display posters outside if there is room, or in the window or inside the store.
Fletcher said newspapers were of “declining interest” to shoppers, and newsagents made little return from them.
“Do we need newspaper traffic in our businesses to survive? I don’t think so,” Fletcher wrote. “Newspapers are nowhere near as important today as they were ten years ago.”
He said newsagencies were closing, in part, due to less foot traffic for print media.
“You can’t fix that by being a tougher cop,” Fletcher wrote. “Lead by example, clean up your product, make it more compelling.”
Fairfax said in a statement to Crikey the letters were a reminder of the newsagents’ contractual obligations.
“We really value our working relationships with newsagents. We were simply reminding them of agreed contractual obligations. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Last week Fairfax outlined an editorial plan to cut $30 million from its annual budget to try to keep its newspapers afloat. — Emily Watkins
Instead a desperate Fairfax needs to improve their product, …advertising a poorly crafted product will not increase sales.
Having worked at a newsagent years ago, the writing was on the wall even then.
Anybody with any business sense was either retiring or selling out and moving on.
I do think that Fairfax needed to really look at their situation years ago. But to be honest with you, even a well crafted product isn’t going to save them, their need to rely on opinion pieces in many of their papers instead of facts, has often turned potential readers a way, plus also many people have developed a distaste for news media because of this. Realistically the horse bolted years ago. They just haven’t realised it yet.
There has been something wrong with fairfax’s marketing for years;it is not possible to buy their products in Coles or Woolworths, or the majority of newsagents, and if they do carry say The Age it is in limited numbers which the owners reckon is the fault of the publisher. Maybe they should start a push for improved distribution.
Wot Bill said – the SMH has for the last decade been little more than a suburban free throwaway life style sheet.
The decline began when Wocca bought out his rels but since then the idiot owners have tried all sorts of brilliant wheezes like firing journalists, sub editors, then more journos and di I mention getting rid of the few remaining journos,
Once the decent columnists left there was only Devine & Sheehan, of whom the least said is way too much.
Why anyonbe would pay akshal money to read its recycled stories, agency rewrites and cretinous fluff pieces is beyond me.
I’ll miss the xwords & cartoonists but nothing else.