Indeed, the AFR needs your support – its parent company Fairfax has experienced a share-price decline of 35% over the last year, trading at 86c in early November. Somewhat worryingly, John B Fairfax in effect ended his family’s association with the company a few weeks ago, dumping $194million worth of shares at a 7c discount to the closing price on the day the sale was announced (10/11/11). It was an ominous sign.
As far as we’re aware, most major Australian online news sources will soon be subscription-based. Many of you will have seen the move by The Australian in late October to limit online access to those paying for the privilege. The AFR was a much quicker mover in terms of restricting online access and commenced doing so way back in 2006. The measure doesn’t appear to have been a huge success – the publication had just 74,000 online subscribers as at June 2011 (a highly interesting interview with incoming AFR editor Michael Stutchbury can be seen here. See also a fascinating article on the challenges to the industry here). If you’re going to ultimately pay for online news content, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the new value of an AFR subscription.
On the topic of the AFR, we wanted to extend a big thank you to several of the newspaper’s journos in particular for their tireless and cutting-edge reportage in 2011. Thanks to Alex Boxsell, Agnes King, Samantha Bowers, Rachel Nickless and James Eyers for your fantastic stories this year. Special mentions to Georgina Dent (BRW) and Chris Merritt (The Australian) too. If you are a keen observer of stories relating to corporate Australia, we strongly recommend you pay close attention to the insightful articles published by these journos.
Whilst we’re thanking people, we also wanted to thank our friends at Roll on Friday for another fantastic year. In 2011 the UK-based site introduced a fantastic Asia-Pacific section which often contains fantastic scoops on the Australian market. Make sure you check it out here every Friday. RoF is conducting a 2012 Firm of the Year Survey – it does an excellent job of keeping firms accountable with this survey, so make sure you dish the dirt on your firm here.
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So FirmSpy arent lawyers or accountants but are in reality PR/marketing types for Fairfax? Certainly sounds like it.
Surely, surely with the plethora of high end brands that advertise in the AFR’s glossy inserts (in particular) and the massively inflated advertising prices generally the AFR would never need to charge anything for their print version? or have they always done it, and charged nearly 3 times the price of a ‘normal’ paper, to create exclusivity? that ridiculous unjustified on-line price would seem to indicate that was their motive
Any plans to go subscription based when FS develops the readership?
Can we take this as confirmation that FirmSpy is in fact written by the AFR? Certainly the embarrassing arse-licking above is hard to explain otherwise.
Suckholes.
WTF? Is this a pre-draft of the AFR section of the Fairfax Annual Report?
FS and the AFR, sitting in a tree
K I S S I N G
And all because the AFR published an article that gave FS credibility