Following the resignation of Simon Tong from Fairfax, we revisit Ben Fahy’s comprehensive 2015 interview with him to get a sense of what he was trying to achieve at the media company during a period of enormous change.
Fairfax Media managing director Simon Tong has stressed the need to diversify the streams of revenue feeding into the business. And today, the company has taken a rather unorthodox step in this direction by announcing the launch of Stuff Fibre, a joint venture with New Zealand Fibre Communications Limited selling high speed, unlimited fibre connections.
It’s no secret Fairfax is reorienting its business around digital—and, specifically, mobile—with Stuff as the central pillar of that strategy. And while managing director Simon Tong recently told us in a fairly candid interview that the magazine division had largely been left to its own devices, its main magazine brands have now been swallowed by that content-hungry beast stuff.co.nz.
We asked some stalwarts a simple question. Here’s what Simon Tong, managing director at Fairfax Media, had to say.
The figures released by Paymark for March read somewhat like a patch-work quilt of spending. While weekly growth was steady nationwide, regional and industry spending was more of a mixed bag.
In news sure to warm marketers’ cockles, the latest figures from Paymark, the network that processes over 75 percent of all electronic transactions in the New Zealand retail market, show that good old fashioned consumer spending is on the up. But the increased shelling out evident in some of the smaller centres is not being shared equally across the regions.