It continues to amaze me what a strong, front foot player for a CEO can do for a company’s standing in the markets.

Or a former All Black captain and halfback.

Take
Fairfax Media. For years, the Fred Hilmer reign was characterised by
bouts of indecision, doubts, poor staff relations and a poorly
communicated strategy.

Hilmer was of course a thinker, a management consultant saddled with the baggage of McKinsey and textbooks.

There
was Hilmer’s buy of the News Ltd papers in New Zealand, a deal which
showed how poorly the Murdoch mob had run the papers, but that was the
sum total of Hilmer’s achievements, and he was paid millions of dollars
in a ‘golden goodbye’.

A new CEO in David Kirk arrives from PMP
(and he was replaced at PMP by Brian Evans, a Fairfax senior manager
whose departure wasn’t felt).

Suddenly
deals were being done: the
Trade Me website buy in NZ for more than $600 million; the Albury paper
in regional NSW for $150 million; a website to reach into the 
Brisbane media market and then the takeover of Rural Press that pushed
the company
out of reach of Kerry Stokes at Seven, with the help of Rupert Murdoch,
and brought back the Fairfax family into the company as a major
shareholder.

Now Fairfax is back in favour, its Sydney Morning
Herald website has just moved to number one, and its prospects are
being talked up.

Leading
investment bank and broker, Merrill Lynch is the latest to have
upgraded Fairfax Media to a ‘buy’ claiming “We have been saying for
some time that Fairfax was a much more attractive company post the
Rural Press acquisition.”

Fairfax shares recovered 12c in early trading to $4.72 from the low of $4.60 hit on Monday.

That
doesn’t mean to say it is out of the woods. The move to a new Sydney HQ
is taking much longer than expected; the company still has a board
that’s too deeply connected to the Liberal Party through chairman Ron
Walker and the performance of the Australian Financial Review
and bits of other business media assets, especially the afr.com website
strategy, leave a lot to be desired. The long term editorship of the
Melbourne Age needs resolving: Will Garry Linnell replace Andrew Jaspan?

Fairfax
is showing that old media (with the help of new media strategies) isn’t
dead, a view that a bigger
competitor in Rupert Murdoch also shares. Meanwhile, the company’s
long-time antagonist, the Packer family, is distracted by the doubtful
joys of gambling and its addictive hold on
its customers.

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