After decades of media dominance on both side of the Tasman, the Australian arm of Fairfax is about to be absorbed by the mighty Nine Network, and it's already been made quite clear that the Fairfax title will be replaced by the bigger media group.
Fairfax has, of course, already been renamed in NZ, with the group taking on the Stuff moniker that has been so successful for its website for 20-odd years now. So when Nine gobbles it up, that's it, it's gone for good.
There have been a number of comment and analysis pieces that have greeted this news with sadness and made a great deal over the Fairfax name will go, and that it symbolises the end of an era in journalism.
It's certainly some sort of era-defining moment, and it will be morbidly fascinating to see how the mega-media company functions over the next few years. But one thing you can count on is that the people on the newsroom floor had more things to worry about than the sign outside the building and all that symbolism it represents, not when they've got kids to feed and rent to pay, and they don't know if they'll have jobs in this new world order.
There will be an inevitable gutting of resources and mass layoffs, leading to vastly more mediocre journalism being produced in bulk, and compared to that, who gives a shit about the name?
Media companies are constantly changing names, especially when a new bunch of executives comes in, and tries to leave some sort of mark with a hugely expensive rebranding exercise. These names are almost always met with a resigned shrug by reporters, editors and producers - they've got plenty of other things to worry about.
We've seen this happen several times in New Zealand here in recent years, and it's usually pretty painless. The worst thing about NZME's birth from the ashes of APN was the executive branch's insistence that pedantic grammar hounds in their newsrooms had to put the full stop on the end of the acronym; while Newshub just sounded bloody weird when TV3's journos had to first spit it out at the end of their reports, but you now see reporters and presenters referring to The 'Shub with some affection.
And nobody really cared when Fairfax became Stuff over here - a dorky and awkward name for a website has become utterly synonymous with the news in this dorky and awkward country, and now the whole company here is lumbered with it.
But so what? It's the work that matters, and the people who do that work in these companies. The biggest worry about the Nine/Fairfax merger is the way the big boys in the Australian boardroom are so mindlessly dismissive of their NZ operations, putting the livelihoods of dozens and dozens of top-class journos over here at risk, (and giving NBR publisher Todd Scott some lunatic ideas for a takeover of the country's biggest publisher, which the Media Scrum team are just going to try and politely ignore and shuffle away from).
Once upon a time, when journos could be guaranteed a job for life with the same company, they might have put some faith in that company's name, but after decades of being treated by shit by the powers that be, journos don't give a damn. It's no use putting your loyalty behind a name that gives none back.
Fairfax is just a name, and it's now officially a name from the past. After all, nobody cares about the actual Fairfax family anymore, not after they gradually pissed away their vast media legacy.
Journalists are the kind of wankers who quote lines from The Crucible in real life, and while nobody is denying that John Proctor's fervent belief that he should be left with his name (because that's all he has!) is a good and just one, because sometimes all you've got is your name. But Fairfax will leave dozens of newsrooms and hundreds of talented journalists behind when it fades away, and they should be the focus for the future.
- Ron Troupe
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