The ABC’s Drum is running the staff announcement of Fairfax’s CEO Greg Hywood.
This seems to be the key bit:
We will increase our investment in quality journalism for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun-Herald, The Age and The Sunday Age – and The Canberra Times. This is fundamental to our strategy.
We will immediately look to recruit a number of high-quality reporters and writers. We will expand our trainee programs. We will invest in comprehensive multi-media training and equipment.
This investment of millions of dollars will dramatically enhance our ability to deliver journalism that attracts and grows audiences in our target markets.
To achieve this we are restructuring the way we produce our newspapers. New workflow and work practices will be introduced which will not only facilitate the investment in journalism, but will underpin quality.
Under this restructure it is planned that copy sub-editing of news, business and sport will be outsourced to AAP through its subsidiary Pagemasters. As you will be aware, Pagemasters has been successfully producing many of the sections for our metro mastheads for the past three years.
This is not an unprecedented decision. Pagemasters and other independent production houses now produce many high-quality newspapers around the world.
As we move to establish a sustainable model, work is also being finalised on a number of initiatives in other parts of the Metro publishing business. These will be communicated to staff as soon as practicable.
These decisions are critical to developing sustainable Metro publications. The Metros and the journalism they produce are critical to the future of Fairfax.
We must do everything required to ensure that future.
One imagines the Canberra Times existing subs will be applying for the extra journalism jobs. We look forward to seeing how the outsourced subs go applying local knowledge to catch errors.
UPDATE: Our word from within the CT is that this won’t affect them. We hope the CEO knows.
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