Fairfax Media chief executive Greg Hywood has struck a deal with News Corp to combine printing assets.Credit:Louie Douvis
Fairfax will see a full-year benefit of about $15 million from the end of the first half of fiscal 2019. Mr Hywood said it was a rational decision,pointing to a recent Google partnership for programmatic advertising as a similar commercially-focused choice.
“The beauty of[the Google deal] is it’s a commercial arrangement which is good commercially for us and it’s good commercially for them,so it’s not some sort of cross-subsidisation of journalism,it’s a commercial arrangement that works.
"They’ve got scale,we’ve got premium inventory,we need scale,they need premium inventory and away it goes,"he said.
“We have to deliver the numbers in the deal,” he said,confirming they were reaching targets. “We’re doing well.”
He pointed to the partnership with the search giant,subscriptions growth and riding out the worst of the print decline as major achievements.
"And we’re doing these back-end arrangements within the industry to continue to push out the life of newspapers,"he said,noting the growth in digital subscriptions was"more than offsetting the decline in print subscriptions",helping to mitigate the print revenue declines.