Fairfax Media journalists took the fight for quality journalism up to CEO David Kirk yesterday, asking why he was rewarding himself with a 23.8% pay rise to $3.41 million - the equivalent of 10 prime ministers or 30 top notch journalists. Kirk and co-CEO Brian McCarthy are paid more than the Australian Cabinet (including the PM). Their salaries could hire 50 top journalists.

Kirk once again was unable to explain how he will guarantee that quality journalism can be maintained after cutting editorial staff by 14%. He defended his massive pay rise by saying it was commensurate on hitting certain performance targets (Fairfax shares hit a low of $1.59 while he was saying this - when Fairfax merged with Rural Press in may last year they were trading above $5.40). Kirk added that senior salaries had been frozen for a year - albeit at the higher rate and only after 550 people have lost their jobs. Read the story and listen to the report on ABC Radio's The World Today

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A host of local and international speakers - including the Pulitzer Prize-winning executive director of Washington’s J-Lab Institute, Jan Shaffer; Stephen Brook, formerly of The Australian, now assistant news editor at MediaGuardian.co.uk; and Professor Phillip Meyer, the author of The Vanishing Newspaper -  will be among a stellar line-up of speakers when the Alliance hosts its next Future of Journalism summit in Melbourne on Wednesday November 26 (the day before the Walkley Awards) at the Telstra Conference Centre. Book your tickets now: $50 for members, $80 for non-members and a special package deal of only $225 for both the Wallkey Awards and the Summit. View the program here

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David Kirk, Fairfax Media's $3.4 million man, saw his pay jump 23.8% in 2008. He is now paid more than 10 Australian prime ministers. And on August 26 he and Brian McCarthy announced that 550 people would lose their jobs. But check out this line from Kirk's speech to The Sydney Institute: "When things get tough, what do families do? They sit around the kitchen table and pull their belts in."  Read the curious speech here

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In his speech to the Sydney Institute tonight, Fairfax Media's $3.4 million CEO David Kirk underlines why he does not understand that quality journalism at Fairfax Media is threatened. "The publishers, together with the editors, looked at each part of their business and assessed where things can be improved. It is a bottom-up-driven process, not a Draconian top-down diktat."

In reality, Kirk and his deputy CEO Brian McCarthy did indeed issue a diktat on August 26. Their e-mail told staff, and sharemarket analysts, that 550 people would have to lose their jobs in order to cut $50 million in costs. Neither Kirk nor McCarthy could identify specific editorial areas where jobs would be lost.

Also on August 26 Don Churchill, chief executive and publisher - Victorian metropolitan and community publishing, told Media Alliance officials and members that the company had a dollar amount that had to be cut and that Age editor-in-chief Andrew Jaspan had not been given any forewarning of the cuts. The next day, Jaspan was sacked, 

Finally, up to a month passed before editors and publishers could identify the specific areas where people had to go to meet the numbers Kirk and McCarthy had come up with. And as late as September 29, the number of editorial redundancies at the Sydney Morning Herald suddenly jumped from 60 to 70.

 
Kirk now claims: "Because of that bottom-up process we can say that we are confident that these changes will be made without loss of quality in our journalism."

And if further proof is needed that Kirk has managed this process by top-down disdain for the considerable media experience and journalistic expertise of his staff rather than a bottom-up approach: in the 49 days since issued his diktat, he has refused numerous requests to have a face-to-face meeting with the affected editorial staff - even though most of them work in the same building.

Instead, he has chosen to speak to The Sydney Institute tonight. 

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The Fairfax Media annual general meeting will be held at 10.30am on Thursday, November 13 at Crown Casino in Melbourne. There are three items to be voted on: adopting the accounts, approving the remuneration report (which saw the Fairfax directors and just five of the company's executives receive  $11.67 million in the year to June 30), and re-electing director Peter Young, an investment banker (Young's remuneration from Fairfax in 2008 rose from $152,600 to $167,860... the board of directors met eight times in 2007-2008).

Several directors have increased their shareholdings in Fairfax (the share price has fallen 54.9% from it's peak to just $2.23 last Friday - a 15-year low). They are:

• Roger Corbett up 4214 shares to 48,294 shares
• John B Fairfax up 3277 to 216,489,162
• David Evans up 3745 to 59,740
• Robert Savage up 3511 to 26,831
• Nick Fairfax up 2414 to 2,420,554
• Julia King up 3511 to 52,904
• Ronald Walker up 18,877 to 1,081,044, and
• Peter Young up 3979 to 29,162.
  

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According to the company web site (http://fairfaxjustthefacts.com.au/justthefacts/) David Kirk and other senior executives have made at least 12 public guarantees that the 550 redundancies announced by the Fairfax Media will not lead to a decline in quality journalism. The guarantees have been made in the press, on radio, to the stockbroking community, on the internet. But neither Kirk nor his colleagues have been able to explain: "how".

How will Kirk, McCarthy and co. guarantee that there will not be a decline in quality journalism when there will be a loss of 14% of the editorial staff of the metro daily newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne?

How will Kirk, McCarthy and co. ensure that quality will be maintained when Fairfax Digital boss Jack Matthews noted: "If Fairfax is going to become the integrated media company we aspire to be, we need to ... maintain a solid level of journalism resources"?

How will Kirk, McCarthy and co. demonstrate that Fairfax Media's senior management understands what is at stake, given that former editor of The Age Michael Gawenda says the company has suffered from a decade-long " failure of imagination and commitment, a result of a lack of experience and knowledge and love of newspapers"?

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