Strategic Management Report: Sydney Morning Herald Analysis

This report provides a strategic management analysis of the Sydney Morning Herald, a prominent Australian newspaper established in 1831. The report examines the organization's purpose, which includes expanding reporting skills and adapting to modern technologies, including online publishing. It summarizes the internal and external analyses, highlighting the newspaper's circulation primarily in Sydney and its dependence on the printed version. The report also explores the primary challenges faced by the Sydney Morning Herald, such as staff reductions, poor management decisions, and competition from online news sources. It further provides strategic recommendations, including leveraging the merger between Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media to enhance the newspaper's quality and customer value proposition. The report suggests focusing on core channels, injecting capital, improving the online portal, and developing social media promotion strategies. Finally, the report concludes by emphasizing the importance of addressing the challenges and leveraging the merger to strengthen the organization's position in the market.

Running Head: STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Strategic Management
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Author’s Note

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Table of Contents
1. Purpose of the organisation......................................................................................................3
2. Summary of internal and external analysis..............................................................................3
3. Summary of primary challenges...............................................................................................4
4. Recommendation......................................................................................................................6
5. Conclusion................................................................................................................................8
6. Reference List...........................................................................................................................9

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1. Purpose of the organisation
The Sydney Morning Herald is one of the leading newspapers of Australia, established in
1831. Recently, that is also published in online version along with their paper version. Publishing
most relevant news, they have been able to keep pace with the time. In fact it is one of the best
Australian newspapers that were first published online. The organisation constantly strives
towards expanding their reporting skill (McDonald, 2016). The reporters of Sydney Morning
Herald are constantly trying to make index coverage of most current issues on national as well as
international level. In the recent times, the organisation has invested over modern machineries
and modern means of production in order to newspapers more years to read which the news
presentation being more organised. In terms of market leadership, Sydney Morning Herald has
had always a close fight with the Daily Telegraph, regarding publication of local as well as
national news.
2. Summary of internal and external analysis
The circulation of the newspaper is primarily surrounding the areas of Sydney. This is a very
populous city having large number of Suburban areas, government areas and 15 specific regions.
The organisation has separate market segments for the two different versions of newspapers.
Firstly, their targets are the elder generation of customers who are more comfortable with for
current printed version. However Dwyer and Muller (2016), highlights that various newspapers
as well as magazines have shifted completely to the online domain, like the Australian financial
review and so on. Considering the sales of Sydney Morning Herald, the organisation is still more
dependent on the printed version for their revenue. The increase in unit revenue is capitalised on
increasing sales of the printed version of the newspaper. In this context, it was mentioned that the
biggest target market of printed newspaper in Sydney and in most parts of Australia are the

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educated middle class. Nevertheless, the recent developments of Technology have made the
availability of online newspaper easier as well as more popular. The entire national target market
for newspaper sales is comprised of 15.5 million readers.
Compared to to the sales growth with other Rival insipidus, it can be highlighted that the
sales of Sydney Morning Herald has decreased by 3.5% in comparison to Daily Telegraph as
well as Herald Sun within the financial year 2017-18 (Ho, 2015).
Most of the new as well as existing news media Agencies are aimed on attracting the youth
readers. This section comprises about 45% of the news reading customers. However, this tech
savvy customer section is mostly attracted by online version of newspapers as well as the online
blogs published by news agencies.
Considering the economic factors, it can be highlighted that in comparison to the national
level newspapers like the Australian, the Saturday paper or the Australian financial review, the
sales of the Sydney Morning Herald, which is concentrated in its sales over the New South
Wales region only is lesser by only 5 to 10% (Mayes, 2016).
3. Summary of primary challenges
Initially, Sydney Morning Herald had more than 250 editorial staff in the year 2011.
Currently, after their parent brand, Fairfax media cut down 21 jobs there are roughly around 91
staff for Sydney Morning Herald.
Researchers like Van Heekeren (2015), do not only blame the shift of the scope of media
landscape from paper printing to online Publication, but also the poor management as well as the
missed opportunities after organisation. The wrong entrepreneurial decisions like purchasing the
Tullamarine printing press which day had to sell latter, incurred heavy financial losses for the

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organisation. The wrong strategy of merger and acquisition like purchasing internet Giants
realestate.com.au, carsales.com.au or seek.com.au has resulted in disastrous outcomes (Johnson,
2017).
However, because of penetrating much deep into this businesses, the parent company of
Sydney Morning Herald lost their focus from mainstream journalism and concentrated on
development of commercial blogs and online news feeds. The news content in the printed
versions were commonplace and seems to be ineffective in providing new news content to the
public. The actual business conception of the organisation was commercialisation of the
newspaper by development of revenue earning sources like advertisements, brand news creation
as well as other names of extracting maximum capital out of sponsorship fees. The plan of
Organisation was to invest this money on the only remaining money making sector that is there
real estate brand domain which was estimated at 1 billion Australian dollars. The ineffective
distribution of share price confused the higher management regarding the future goals of the
parent company.
The operational costs of the Sydney Morning Herald also started to rise because of
involvement of third party Agencies for their News Feed since their own reporters were very less
in number. On top of that, the increasing cost of printing ink as well as news print paper
contributed to the rise in operational cost also.
In this context, the organisation displayed brand management bye managing cost and
expenses through strategies like reduction of the number of staff. The completely disregarded the
fact that this could hamper the quality of news produced by the Sydney Morning Herald
(Myllylahti, 2016). It was an evident outcome that Rival newspapers like The Age or The

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Australian went ahead in terms of sponsorship, readership as well as corporate sponsorship value
also.
4. Recommendation
It can be recommended that the merger between nine entertainment and the Fairfax media for
publication of Sydney Morning Herald should be invited in good spirits. Nine entertainment have
a large production team as well as high end Technologies and article designing equipment that
will help to give the newspaper, new look. The customer value proposition of the newspaper can
also be developed by appointing the staff from nine entertainment in order to incorporate
exclusive interviews of famous celebrities, famous political personal as well as providing first
and review of various domains by famous people. At the current situation, it will be unscientific
for the management of Sydney Morning Herald to think of the share benefit that will be
delivered to them as an outcome of the current merger between the two associations.
Nevertheless, it can be recommended that the dominant partnership holding should provide a
place for more than 50% share preposition for nine entertainments (McLennan, Becken &
Moyle, 2017). This is because of two primary facts. Firstly, the staff line of Sydney Morning
Herald is very short and secondly they lack necessary article designing expertise as well as
technology by means of which they can make the newspaper interesting. On top of that, the
reporting team of nine entertainments is experienced and we can work closely with the news
reporting and development team of Sydney Morning Herald.
Most importantly, the inclusion of nine entertainments has to be used strategic early in order
to benefit the news production team of Sydney Morning Herald. Nevertheless it is arguable that
in the current moment the basic needs are to develop the quality of journalism, not only
reflecting it through the quality of linguistic value, but also through the potential news content,

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that is produced first hand. Secondly, media diversity has to be reduced and the organisation
needs to focus on one or two primary channels like the print version as well as online version of
the newspaper as well as 1 online and offline news magazine and either a entertainment
magazine for financial or technical gadgets based magazine. Given, the current position of the
workforce and the strength of news production team, the enhancement of media diversity can be
directly accountable for the degradation of the quality of content produced by Sydney Morning
Herald.
The Fairfax media team should also look up at injecting Capital liquidating into the
organisation as they keep profiting from the Merger. Nevertheless, it is also the responsibility of
nine entertainment Board members who have voting rights in the joint directorial committee.
Their primary objective should be to prevent the regular job losses and employee turnover.
The news production team of Sydney Morning Herald should emphasize on providing sales
Collateral to their distributed and other clients. In order to do so, they have to monitor their sales
in a proper way so that the organisational growth and unit revenue increase can be calculated
properly (Dwyer & Muller, 2016). This can be done by implementing and audience metrics like
Ipsos, digital matrix survey through Google Analytics or other reliable source as well as
demographic metrics using the data provided by the Australian Bureau of statistics.
The online portal of Sydney Morning Herald have to be made more user friendly, by
providing the choice to customers for downloading the newspaper, alongside reading it in PDF
format, word doc format or even saving the newspaper file as JPG images also. The organisation
also needs to develop new social media promoting Strategies for evidence frequently publishing
the first page of the online newspaper over Facebook or other similar social media platforms.

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5. Conclusion
Considering the Heritage and importance of Sydney Morning Herald, in consideration to the
distribution of print version newspapers in Sydney and the allied areas, it can be articulated that
the need to resolve the challenges facing Sydney Morning Herald as well as its Publication team
as well as the parent company of the newspaper is very important. The major challenges facing
the organisation are the lack of Management strategies, insufficient staff for news reporting as
well as lack of innovative ideas for designing offline and online newspaper versions. The
strategic recommendations provided in this report mainly highlights the policies by means of
which the organisation can utilise the new merger between nine entertainment and Sydney
Morning Herald to the benefit of the internal stakeholders which will help to strengthen the
organisational position for improved operations.

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6. Reference List
Dwyer, T., & Muller, D. (2016). FactCheck: is Australia’s level of media ownership
concentration one of the highest in the world?. The Conversation. https://theconversation.
com/factcheck-is-australias-level-of-mediaownership-concentration-one-of-the-highest-
in-the-world-68437.
Dwyer, T., & Muller, D. (2016). FactCheck: is Australia’s level of media ownership
concentration one of the highest in the world?. The Conversation. https://theconversation.
com/factcheck-is-australias-level-of-mediaownership-concentration-one-of-the-highest-
in-the-world-68437.
Ho, C., (2015). People like us”: School choice, multiculturalism and segregation in
Sydney. Australian Review of Public Affairs.
Johnson, C. (2017). Growing Sydney. Growing Compact: Urban Form, Density and
Sustainability, 343.
Mayes, X. (2016). Livestock and climate change: an analysis of media coverage in the Sydney
Morning Herald. In Impact of Meat Consumption on Health and Environmental
Sustainability (pp. 75-105). IGI Global.
McDonald, W. (2016). Women in journalism: Margaret Jones, gender discrimination and the
Sydney Morning Herald, 1965–1985. Media International Australia, 161(1), 38-47.
McLennan, C. L. J., Becken, S., & Moyle, B. D. (2017). Framing in a contested space: media
reporting on tourism and mining in Australia. Current Issues in Tourism, 20(9), 960-980.

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Myllylahti, M. (2016). Evolving Funding Models of News Publishers and Public Service
Media. Nordicom Information, (38), 25-29.
Van Heekeren, M. (2015). Charles Brunsdon Fletcher, the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia,
Asia and the Pacific. Media International Australia, 157(1), 124-132.