There is only thing to regret about the passage: The Spectator was fetched to the Billabong from the newsagent only today, whereas it was formerly available of a Friday morning. It seems the distributor now delivers on Mondays, meaning less good reading to enhance the weekend pleasure of a comfy chair.I did not know whether to laugh or cry last week when I read two pronouncements from the Fairfax stable. The first was a headline in the Age: ‘Royal Mail appoints new chef’. It illustrates that the Age is no longer a newspaper but a lifestyle magazine that is besotted with the incestuous food culture and the celebrity gods who rule it. There is no law against headlines like this, but it highlights the absurdity of a commercial organisation chasing a narrow section of the community to the prejudice of the majority, its real potential market. Even stranger is that it continues this suicide march despite collapsing circulation and share price. The Age forgets that the readers it needs to survive are not the minority who pay $100 for a meal prepared by a celebrity chef at some over-priced clip joint, but the majority, the normal average citizens who simply cannot afford such luxury or self-indulgence. But the Age has, sadly, long lost any sense of representing normal, average citizens.
Tom Switzer, who edits The Spectator, should do his utmost to see Friday distribution restored. It would be in his readers' interests, hence his own. It is just wrong to be kept waiting for Rod Liddle's thoughts on the Affair of the Racist Handbag, quite possibly the funniest thing any of us will read this year.
That marketing niche strategy could work...if they could charge $100 an issue.
ReplyDeleteYes, it was not the same when I could not get the Speccie for weekend reading. Mr Switzer beware.
ReplyDeleteI'd tip less than 10% of the population in "The Age's" distribution area even know what the Royal Mail is, less would know where it is, and even less would give a f&^%!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, these people are supposed to be adults, are they so blind that they simply do not understand that they are killing their own publication?
Or is it more like the same cultural rot that has set in at the ABC? Are they simply too far gone [culturally] to save?
The Fairfax papers need to be closed down or sold. The share price would rocket based on the viability of 3AW alone.
ReplyDeleteCurrently Fairfax is a dwarf trying to pull two boulders. Remove the rocks and watch the little fella sprint.
All hail to Neil Brown. The first person ever to describe me as 'normal.' I take some exception to 'average,' but 'citizen' will do me nicely, when there are so many about who do not deserve the compliment. And yes, I was an Age reader for 40 years, but gave up the battle long ago. Not for me the monotone of the progressive, politically correct, collective.
ReplyDeleteWho would read the editorial and opinion pages of the Age and the rest of the Fairfax press.which set out to INSULT (e.g. most recently Carlton and Stokes), rather than inform, 50% plus of its potential readership, plus many other levelheaded supporters of its political agenda. That goes a long way to explain its 50cent share price and the increasingly rapid circulation loss.
ReplyDeleteI had a drink with Mr Brown recently - he mentioned they were having distribution problems and the only way around them at present is to subscribe and get it in the mail.
ReplyDeleteRod Liddle may be a wet little pseudo leftie but he can certainly turn a phrase.
ReplyDeleteActually, the Age's problem is my friends whoi can afford $100 for a main course in a Restaurant, are not buying the Fairfax titles.
ReplyDeleteRococo Liberal
In the UK last week, Prof, I picked up a copy of The Independent (for my sins) which, like Fairfax, has gone down the 'Lifestyles of the Lefty Middle Classes' route. They somehow survive because the market for what they peddle ('How to fire the cleaner' etc) is much larger. Not so here.
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