Fairfax head sizes up market

By SIMON HENDERY

The newly installed head of Fairfax New Zealand says he intends spending a year getting to know the local media market before looking to expand the publishing stable Fairfax has bought from INL.

Brian Evans, the former group general manager of Fairfax's regional and community newspapers in Australia, officially became Fairfax NZ chief executive this week after the completion of the $1.19 billion purchase of INL's publishing assets.

The deal - which includes the country's two Sunday papers, metropolitan papers in Wellington and Christchurch, seven regional titles, 53 community papers and several magazines - has not been without its twists and turns.

About 130 INL staff - 5 per cent of the workforce - have taken redundancy cheques totalling about $10 million.

And while a planned tax-saving masthead sale-and-leaseback arrangement was scuppered by the Government, Fairfax has picked up a bonus $60 million as a result of currency fluctuations as the sale went through. Evans will be based in Auckland but says Fairfax has no intention of starting an Auckland daily paper to compete with the New Zealand Herald, owned by its Australian rival, APN News & Media.

He said basing himself in Auckland made sense because it was the country's commercial capital and Fairfax's Auckland operations (including the Sunday papers, magazines and community papers) accounted for a third of the New Zealand business's revenue and profit.

"Sometimes you buy a company that's got a lot of upside but the upside comes because you've got a lot of hard work to do. This is quite the opposite because it's a very good company with good titles, good mastheads and good opportunities," he said. "So it's steady as it goes, keep the business on the rails, get the performance we're really looking for, get through the first year and look for opportunities thereafter."

Fairfax intends cutting costs, which Evans said would come through developing back-room synergies rather than from squeezing the editorial side of the business.

The wave of redundancies in the final INL days "gives us an opportunity to rebuild some of the departments the way we'd really like to", he said.

Evans said he had looked at the "sizeable" contribution his papers made to the New Zealand Press Association and would be interested in pursuing changes to its structure.

"I'll be asking 'Am I getting value for money?' It's not an issue of will we be there or won't we be there - we'll be there. But that doesn't mean I want to play by the rules that have been there up to now."