Whatever you want to call it, the new look for Fairfax’s metropolitan dailies marks a significant shift in the Australian newspaper landscape. With the print media’s business model unravelling after years of declining revenue and circulation, both The Age and Sydney Morning Herald have shrunk. The gravitas of the broadsheet has been substituted for the public transport-friendly pith of a tabloid-sized publication, or to use Fairfax’s preferred parlance, a “compact”.
Fairfax’s editors and marketeers have been at pains to point out that a reduction in physical size will not be accompanied by a commensurate diminishing of good, old-fashioned journalism. According to Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood, the long-mooted change in format was about providing a “modern format for modern times”. For the print media in Australia, the modern times represent uncertain times, with the classified advertising – or “rivers of gold” – that formed the basis of the print media’s business model for over a century long since gone. Not to mention the years of questionable management that beset Fairfax from the 1980s. Now Fairfax is hoping that the move to a new, more accessible format will not only cut printing costs, but bring new and existing readers to their print and online offerings.
“Quality” tabloids are not a new phenomenon. Across the world, many former broadsheet newspapers are published in compact formats with the success of The Guardian, Le Monde and The Times likely serving as models for Fairfax’s change. The problem for The Age is that it is still yet to find its feet as a “compact”. The first edition in the new format lacked impact and was rather poorly laid out, with odd areas of white space. The largely unimaginative layout is baffling, considering the amount of effort Fairfax apparently went to during the design process, including brain scans of readers! Although the page layout has somewhat improved since, Fairfax editors are yet to successfully wield the pith of the headline so devastatingly employed by their competition at News Limited.
Wordy banners that worked quite effectively on a broadsheet do not translate well to a smaller layout. The dominant impression from the first few compact editions of The Age is that its layout has more in common with Fairfax’s weekly suburban news magazines than it does broadsheet newspapers. The compact format makes it more difficult for Fairfax to convey a sense of gravitas and control through their layout, which stands in contrast to other quality compacts such as The Guardian, which truly feel like smaller broadsheets. Time will tell whether Fairfax editors can make the new size feel as natural to The Age as sensationalism and cats up trees do to the Herald Sun.
Readers seem satisfied with the changes, with commuters less able to annoy fellow passengers with the ritual folding and unfolding of the broadsheet paper. So long as the content remains the same, what does it matter what format it’s in? This of course assumes that the content will remain the same amid the massive layoffs at both Fairfax and News Limited over the past twelve months and as duties are increasingly outsourced to external companies.
But does any of this matter? Aren’t newspapers doomed anyway? The answer, of course, depends on who you ask, but the consensus around media buyers is that the print daily’s days may soon be numbered. Fairfax’s valiant attempts to revive the daily newspaper may ultimately end in failure. As a format for distributing the latest news, the print newspaper seems more-or-less dead. The challenge for Fairfax, if they are to survive, is simply to convince people to pay for the online services as they move toward what Mr. Hywood has called a “digital first” editorial model. ‘Monetize’ as you commerce students are so fond of saying. This is, however, easier said than done. The newspaper business model has not only collapsed, it has imploded, leaving behind it some 1900 sacked staff at Fairfax over the past twelve months. When television threatened to ‘kill’ cinema, Hollywood responded with CinemaScope widescreen and stereophonic sound. Newspapers have no such evolution to make. Fundamentally they have remained the same since Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe. Lucky for Gutenberg, he didn’t have to contend with the internet.
