The ComCom had already put the brakes on the plan with its earlier decision late last year, and there wasn't much to indicate they had changed their mind. Even though both companies had made submissions warning of media apocalypse if they didn't get their way, they also couldn't help talking up their rising online numbers and readership figures in the months since, which severely undermined their own argument.
While the future for these companies may look shaky and uncertain, as they struggle to make money while giving away huge amounts of content for free, one thing was always going to happen, no matter what the result. A shitload of journalists are going to lose their jobs, and they always were.
The corporate heads at both companies have done a brilliant job of covering their own arses, and can slash costs by getting rid of staff and piling more work on the poor, damned souls who survive the cull. If the merger went through, they could have argued that having things like two business editors was redundant, (promises that all those extra resources would be diverted to creating more original work were treated with the open contempt they deserved); and now it's rejected, they will blame that denial for inevitable cost-cutting.
Fairfax has already made its intentions clear, with promises of consolidation and compression. Hours after the ComCom decision, the Australian arm announced it was slashing the editorial staff at some of Australia' biggest newsrooms with a rusty machete, and intentions are clear.
They don't say it, but it's undeniable. Remarkably, the head honchos at both companies have once again forgotten who they employ, and try to reassure staff with corporate buzz-words and blatant bullshit. Journos are trained and experienced enough to see through that shit when other companies try to justify dire news with optimistic nothingness, they don't turn off that part of their brain when it comes from their own bosses.
After all, this has been going on for a while, and there are hellishly experienced journos who have never worked in a newsroom that wasn't suffering a death by a thousand cuts. It's been happening since the start of the digital age, and literally thousands of other newsrooms all over the world have gone through this shit, over and over again.
So more journos will lose their jobs, and those that survive will be left with a humongous workload, and some of them may actually crack if they hear one more fucking speech about the physics-defying impossibility of 'doing more with less'.
Which will all result in an inferior product, leading to more cuts, and an inevitable death spiral. The bosses at NZME and Fairfax still don't have a fucking clue how to pull themselves out of it – the point of the merger was unashamedly just to buy more time until they could figure out how to make money from this new-fangled internet thing – but at the very least, one option has now been taken off the table. What else have they got?
- Ron Troupe
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