James O'Neill I have to agree with you yet again.The elites use the left /right paradigim to confuse and control the masses.Why would Gina Rinehart buy controling share in Fairfax which is shrinking? She wants to control the political agenda and select which party is best able to sing to her tune.

Unless people start looking at sites such as http://www.globalresearch.ca/ ,they will continue to be slaves to the banking military industrial complex.ie BMIC

Our journos in all our pop media are just whores to the pipers of wealth and power.Gerald Celente calls them "presstitutes".

I still think we are better off wth a SMH and The Age without Rinehart, for what it is worth.

Fairfax is my name, related by blood without the money. LOL
In the days of afternoon tabloids I would buy two or three papers daily but eventually cut down to just one, usually the SMH. Now I buy none.
I stopped buying the SMH because of climate change. The on and on and on lies and spin about CO2 was a waste of money and time.And those lies and spin allowed legislation and is now causing inflation.
Reality to me would be functional Parliament debating development of new productivity and business and employment, such as building an aqueduct system to harvest wet tropical north rain and run it to Qld headwaters of the Darling that already runs to the Murray River.
Useful water infrastructure is however ignored. Parliament debate time is taken up for example with attacks on mining, yet it was mining that prospected and built the mining industry that today is keeping Australia out of recession.
Lets not forget the NBN, imagine if $30 billion plus was spent on water supply and wetland restoration.
Food sustainability should be on the agenda including more water for farmers instead of less and with licenses that consumers will pay for anyway.
News media in my view should be encouraging whole of water ecosystem management to achieve productivity, including management of coastal estuary food web nursery ecosystems presently excluded from so called Marine Parks.
On OLO previously I mentioned sewage proliferated algae warming areas of ocean, warmth not caused by CO2. These days the evidence is building but still the media is failing to investigate.
To date nobody I am aware of has been able to produce evidence that photosynthesis-linked warmth in ocean algae has been measured and assessed by AGW and Kyoto science. It has not been measured to my knowledge.
Sea ice is melting where algae is present. Interesting news helps sell papers. Investigative journalism is needed instead of politics and spin.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/10/world/phytoplankton-mega-bloom-eco-solutions/index.html
Whether or not nutrients are being blown off snow or whether nutrient loads are coming down from Pacific and Indian Ocean waters is subject for debate.
http://wordlesstech.com/2012/03/08/massive-algae-bloom

So true JF. The media refuse to present all the growing evidence that the whole CO2 thing is a left fraud, designed to give control of our lives to the bureaucrats at the UN. It is used to allow bankrupt left administrations to extract even more tax from the long suffering masses.

The attitude could never be considered anything but left.

The SMH is clearly biased on the climate change issue, but then so is most of the media. In some cases it may be political, as with the ABC, but in general I think it's just that stories about doom and disaster sell more papers than 'Everything's OK, nothing to see here.'

What I have also noticed in the SMH is a pervasive reluctance to mention the religious motivations of terrorists: we read stories about how this group or that has killed so many people or blown up a building, but the SMH carefully avoids any reference to the fact that they were motivated to do so by their belief in one particular brand of Invisible Friend. Isn't answering 'why?' supposed to be one of the six essentials of journalism?

I think its really going to depend on how much they charge. I
would happily subscribe to the AFR for instance, but not at the price
they want, which I think is far too high. Similarly I'd be prepared
to pay for the SMH if its reasonable. I cancelled my Eureka Report
subscribtion when they tried to jack up the price by 20% and I found
it no longer value for money.

Perhaps Fairfax can learn something from the Microsoft-Apple story.
Apple nearly went broke when they tried to overcharge for their
product, Bill Gates saw the light with his Windows 3 for 49.95 and
the rest is history. Now Apple commonly charge just a few Dollars
for great Ipad apps and sell them by the tens of millions, which
still ads up to a great deal of money.

So my Advice to Fairfax is to go in cheap and do deals. Offer me
a SMH-AFR combination at a reasonable price and I'm interested. Try
to screw me and I'll do without.

Australian businesses commonly make the mistake of trying to earn
huge margins, whereas the Walmarts, Aldi's and all the rest have
shown us, that volume and not overpricing are the way to make a quid.

Give your customers great value for money and they will have a reason
to support your business.The days of ripping them off are over.
Consumers have options these days, unlike the past