Hagar Cohen: Fairfax has been forced to defend its newspaper fortress on multiple fronts. There was Google, online car sales, real estate, Facebook and YouTube. In 2004, the board asked online media proprietor and former Fairfax editor, Eric Beecher, for advice. He was taken aback by the attitude of the board.
Eric Beecher: I outlined to the Fairfax board what I described as a catastrophe scenario, which involved losing a decent chunk of their classified advertising, predominantly in the Sydney Morning Heraldand TheAge. And I sketched out how I thought this might happen—I didn’t say it would happen, but I said if this was my company I would ascribe a probability to whether or not this kind of catastrophe scenario could occur and if the probability was 20 per cent, let alone 60 or 80 per cent, then in my view that required them to take immediate action to broaden the base of the company, to become attackers as well as defenders, to really press the alarm button, because the trends were so obvious. And