When I was a boy there was NEVER a typo in the Sydney Morning Herald. In fact I recall My Year 6 teacher bringing in a copy one morning outraged that someone at the Sydney Morning Herald had confused it’s and its. These days it’s not uncommon for typos to slip through, and personally I don’t think it’s a big deal.There’s been a lot of criticism recently of the Fairfax decision to outsource its subediting at the cost of 90 jobs. As someone who started his career as a starry eyed journalist (never good enough to work at Fairfax, I confess), I’m saddened by the job losses. As anyone who has worked in both print and online publishing will know, the economics, and business models of each type of publishing are completely different, and in an environment where advertisers are not willing to pay more for quality editorial, and that’s what it ultimately comes down to – (yeah, I know, sounds weird doesn’t it?), quality publishers like Fairfax have to make some really tough decisions, like how to produce something of reasonable, not high, quality, at a lower cost.And just to show complex things are, if what advertisers are really after is response, they really don’t care too much about the quality of editorial, unless they’re only interested in a branding campaign, so that means Fairfax is competing directly or in directly with any website containing Google Adsense, where actually it’s lot easier to measure return on investment. There is no easy way out for Fairfax or any other quality publisher, which is why I think criticism of Fairfax is unfair. The only other thing Fairfax could have done is to have made these changes a long time ago. And by the way I have been known to be a critic of Fairfax.
The Fairfax subs dilemma
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