AFR shrinks, old-timers stay. Take a look at this mornings edition of The Australian Financial Review and wonder how much smaller can the Friday edition get before it becomes irrelevant? The paper proper is just 40 pages — it was 44-48 pages earlier in the year. The Domain property insert is 64 pages (it has been bigger than the paper proper since the inserts started), the Life and Leisure section is 16 pages and the Review section is eight pages (it used to be 10). That’s 88 pages in non-financial content in the paper.
The AFR gets revenue from ads in the Life and Leisure section and the Review part, but the revenue from the property ads in Domain goes to Domain and not the paper. Does Domain pay the Review to distribute Domain? It’s all really internal funds shuffling inside Fairfax. The AFR is merely another distribution channel to increase the reach and frequency of ads in the section. The AFR has its own (shrinking) property section on Thursdays.
The 45 redundancies Fairfax is aiming for after closing its glossy Sydney and Melbourne magazines and merging BusinessDay’s coverage in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age with the AFR are being re-offered, with few acceptors. Will some of the $200-300,000 dinosaurs on the Review take their money and run, or will compulsory redundancies be the order of the day? Many at Fairfax think the latter. — Glenn Dyer
Fin website: what do you think? Meanwhile, stay tuned for a new-look Australian Financial Review web portal. A survey seeking feedback on the website was dispatched to readers today …
Abott typo: that’s Life. Well this is unfortunate. The first issue of Territory Life — a magazine on northern Australia development — has a real clanger of a typo on its cover …
Front page of the day. American business titan and conservative political player David Koch is one of the biggest benefactors of local Boston PBS network WGBH. Some of the locals — including this Sesame Street impersonator — don’t like his anti-climate change views …
A crocodile took their “B”?