There must have been a wry smile on the faces of one or two people at Fairfax Radio on Friday when the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald’s online edition featured a friendly profile of 2UE’s Drive presenter Paul Murray – Mr Nice Guy of talkback up for a challenge. It was the type of help the struggling radio station could have used much more of from it’s newspaper sister during the three and a half years since Fairfax welcomed it, and the rest of the network, into its media family. But Friday’s story had more to do with attracting buyers than listeners. Needing cash and to focus on it’s troubled core assets, print and online, Fairfax has seen fit to put radio on the auction block as surplus to its needs.
It hasn’t helped that the past few years has seen a succession of CEO’s come and go from the Fairfax helm, none of them having held the position long enough to invest time or budget into the radio network.
Hence the great synergy between media outlets that many expected when Fairfax bought the stations from Macquarie Bank’s media group, never really materialised. There has been no great cooperation between news rooms or cross-platform promotions or sales strategies that truly exploited the vast resources that the combined outlets had on tap. Cost cutting is not the same as realising economies of scale.
Arguably Macquarie’s 2GB and MTR get more cross-promotion from the Murdoch press, in which it has no financial stake, than Fairfax radio ever got from Fairfax newspapers.
Whatever other reasons there may be, the feeling remains that while Fairfax may be newspapers, it ain’t radio. It was a lesson that television’s greatest proprietor Kerry Packer learned quickly in 1986 when he bought 2UE and 3AW in the mistaken belief that if he put Channel Nine’s biggest stars (including Don Lane and George Negus) on the wireless their vast TV audiences would follow. The experiment was an abject failure, not only for the stations but for the reputation of his TV personalities. Packer sold the stations at (a rare for him) loss the following year.
Historically, radio has rarely fared well when owned by people whose core business lies elsewhere, even if it is other media.
But perhaps these are different times. Are they?
More specifically, could mining magnate Gina Reinhardt, who is rumoured to be a prospective buyer for the Fairfax Radio Network, run a talk radio network just as effectively as a radio veteran John Singleton?