John Fairfax Holdings

From Freepedia

**John Fairfax Holdings**

Type	Public (ASX - FXJ)
Founded	Sydney, Australia
Location	Sydney
Key people	David Kirk CEO; Ron Walker Chairman
Industry	Media
Products	Newspapers, Magazines
Revenue	$639 million AUD (2005)
Employees	7,200 (2004)
Website	www.fxj.com.au

John Fairfax Holdings Limited is an Australian media company, working prodominantly with newspapers. It publishes two of Australia's most well-known newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's The Age. It was founded by the Fairfax family but they lost control of the company on December 11, 1990.

In Australia the company also owns The Sun-Herald, a Sunday newspaper, in Sydney, The Illawarra Mercury in Wollongong, The Newcastle Herald in Newcastle and The Standard in Warrnambool.

In New Zealand, its subsidiary Fairfax New Zealand Limited owns a stable of papers formerly owned by Independent Newspapers Limited (INL), including The Dominion Post in Wellington, The Press in Christchurch and The Sunday Star-Times in Auckland.

The Fairfax Community Newspapers and Text Media subsidiaries publish community newspapers throughout Melbourne and Sydney. Additionally, a number of community newspapers are produced throughout NZ by Fairfax New Zealand.

The company also owns a stable of Australian business publications, including the daily business newspaper The Australian Financial Review, and the magazines BRW, BOSS, Shares, Personal Investor, Asset and MIS.

The company owns a profitable Australian online subsidiary, Fairfax Digital which was once known as the F2 Network. The company's websites include its subject focused:

News: Newsbreak
Employment: My Career
Cars: Drive
Property: Domain
Personals: RVSP
Finance: Trading Room
Personal Investment: Money Manager
Australian Rules Football: Real Footy
Rugby Union: Rubgy Heaven
Australian Towns: Walkabout

All these sites are in the top two of their fields. The Age and SMH websites also have a couple of jointly produced sections that differ only in their branding. However, they are not independant sites - they don't even have their own domain name.

Note that both The Age and SMH produce a limited amount of video content, which is only available online.

In NZ, Fairfax's websites form the stuff portal. Sites include:

News: stuff
Employment: jobstuff
Property: propertystuff
Personals: personalstuff
Food: Cuisine
Shopping: stuff on sale

While newspaper stories regularly cross the Tasman between papers (and their websites), the website and magazine originated content seldom does. For instance, one cannot find NZ property on "Domain" or Australian property on "propertystuff".

In February 2004, a proposal was put to the board of Telstra to buy John Fairfax Holdings. This proposal was not supported by the board.

In July 2005, fairfax acquired the RSVP dating site for 38 million dollars.

In August 2005, Fairfax ended its 16 month search for a new Chief Executive Officer with David Kirk, a former Rugby Union World Cup winning captain of the New Zealand All Blacks being appointed to replace departing CEO Fred Hilmer. David Kirk gets the nod ahead of Fairfax COO Brian Evans (former head of Fairfax New Zealand) and Doug Flynn, who took the top job at UK Pest control company Rentokil after negotiations with Fairfax broke off.