The shrinking of Fairfax Media’s books pages: A microstudy of digital disruption

Abstract

This microstudy of digital disruption in newspapers analyses the book review sections of Fairfax Media’s metropolitan dailies, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne The Age and The Canberra Times, and how they changed between 2013 and 2017, before the newspaper company merged with Nine Entertainment. Through content analysis and interviews, the study documents how the diversity and variety of the books coverage declined steeply after Fairfax management imposed cost-cutting and review sharing on legacy sections. It also documents the demoralizing experience of journalists working in these sections: decreased resources, increased workloads and no time to innovate. The study elucidates how Fairfax management left its papers’ long-standing, hard-won reputations for cultural authority and literary impact to wither on the vine while it pursued a survival strategy of digital diversification.