In the wake of falling print sales figures and the lowest share price in the company’s history, Fairfax Metro Media boss Jack Matthews has decried an undue emphasis on the media giant’s print circulation at the expense of other performance metrics.
Last week’s Audit Bureau of Circulations figures showed Fairfax metro newspapers dropping 11.35% year-on-year for the first quarter of 2012. Meanwhile, the company’s share price has hit its lowest point ever this week, dropping to 65.5 cents on Tuesday (15 May).
Matthews told AdNews that agencies and advertisers generally understand Fairfax’s position in the market, but said an unbalanced focus on print circulation figures from some media outlets and investors can lead to an “incomplete picture” which doesn’t recognise Fairfax as a multi-platform media company. He argued this might partially point towards the low share price. “It’s probably not too big a leap to think some investors don’t quite understand what we are doing [beyond print],” he said.
It has been widely reported Fairfax has launched a holistic reporting system which includes print, online, mobile and tablet figures. Matthews said circulation declines reflect the company’s intentional strategy to follow audiences into other platforms.
“People don’t seem to recall we went to the market and said we were going move the circulation down, before circulation started going down. Some people have alleged we came out with this story after it dropped but if you look at the timeline we didn’t. You’ll see these circulation declines for a while,” he said.
“For us to tie our future to a newspaper metric alone just doesn’t seem very strategic. It’s frustrating when people talk about circulation and we see readership numbers that say our total audience over the past five years has grown by almost 30%, but you’d never know that if you just look at circulation. Going forward, total readership is more important than circulation.”
While Matthews spoke against an excessive emphasis on print sales figures, he was careful to point out the onus was on Fairfax to change this perception. “If they’re missing the point, I would say it’s because we haven’t done a good enough job of making the point clear,” he said. “I’m not trying to point the finger at the media. I think we have to do a better job and a more persistent job of explaining what we are doing. Let’s face it, we have competitors in the market that will do their best to muddy the waters.
This article first appeared in the 18 May 2012 edition of AdNews. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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