Fairfax used VANA to announce that the country edition of The Age would not be produced today and that the metro edition could be challenged or not produced at all. I’m not sure why the publisher did not make the announcement directly. Their website gets plenty of visitors – more than VANA. I can’t see any announcement on The Age website this morning.
Publishers have a history of using newsagent associations to distribute news they themselves should distribute.
A couple of tweets indicate the announcement form VANA may have been misunderstood.
the SMH is late in sydney metro today, and for all of us outside metro, NONE.
i have just been on the phone with cirtulation and our run will not be supplied. mondays SMH is our 2nd biggest paper (after saturday). i cant wait for today to be over
Peter I’m surprised that these two different papers printers in two different cities appear to have experienced the same problem on the same day.
Mark
Newcastle hearld and smh were 3 hour later in Toronto production problems here also but we got the smh
No SMH or AFR in country NSW today. We were told it was due to a power failure in Sydney printing plant. Obviously more to the story.
Peter, no heralds in the highlands today, we were told a gas leak or power outage at pyrmont. If both age and herald had problems maybe its computer caused. Too much of a coincindence.
Well this is odd isn’t it.
Make that 3 different cities Mark.
In Adelaide, the AFR didn’t make it on time to our depot so all Newsagents that I know of left this AM without it.
The Fin for Adelaide consumers is printed in a nearby regional town about an hours drive from Adelaide.
Given that Fairfax Media are so aggressive when it comes to putting digital newspapers to the forefront, I’d love to speculate on this event, but will wait to see if FM explain for themselves.
Dennis
we get our SMH from Brisbane as we are in far north NSW and nothing here. Power outage again?
SMH arrived in SEQld OK
Thats garbage, first you hog the state of origin now you won’t share the SMH.
5 hours late NSW south coast, this is a joke. Fairfax never communicate when they have an issue like this. Nothing on connect this morning we found out through the courier they would be late.
Another nail in Fairfaxs coffin.
Fairfax papers arrived at about 5:30 from our supplying agent this morning.
Poor buggers I hope they don’t cop any road issues with the late home/subby runs.
smh and fr arrived about an hour or two ago – country NSW
Cannot believe our Fairfax rep or the circulation staff do not know who did and who did not get papers today. This means every subscriber needs to phone Fairfax for a credit! Max you are a very lucky man. How far from Bowral are you? I can send customers to you.
Gosh, I fervently hope that every subscriber does phone for their credit!
We got all our papers just fine this morning… QLD/Brisbane Metro…
Gee what a pain in the ASS! We were lucky enough that there was a fax on the machine when I got into work saying…
“Due to the on going issues relating to significant delays with the production of pages for today edition of the age.
Unfortunately we are not able to distribute deliveries of the “The Age & Financial’ to your business due to unforseen circumstances.
The Age regrets the inconvenience caused to you, Your staff and your customers -your patience and understanding is very much appreciated.
Yours
Julie Bickle
So really no answers or papers… so how about tomorrow?
From todays SMH.
THE Herald apologises to readers who were unable to access our website or missed out on a copy of the newspaper today following a power outage that affected 4800 homes and businesses in Pyrmont yesterday.
The outage triggered a chain reaction of events at one of the data centres that serves Herald computer systems, holding up production for more than four hours yesterday.
So fairfax no apoligy to Newsagents
This issues raises a few questions, considering a delivery only territory owner would rely on the distribution of a newspaper to produce an income.
No paper, no distribution, no income.
Do the new territory agents receive compensation for such errors?
What penalties are forced upon the publisher to prevent lateness of newspapers?
I would be interested to know how SE QLD agents doing the T2020 trial would answer these questions. If their is a compensation built into their new agreements, or they just have to “cop it on the chin”
Jenny ( #13 ). They would have to hop on a plane and hopefully they could land here!!
Hasn’t anyone told the publishers how few newsagents are members of VANA these days.
Carl,
What is a fax?
😉
Jarryd: It was a last century interim technology used in between the telex and email eras. We had a cleanup in 1997 and donated ours to a museum (along with some wagon wheels, bridles and saddles and mouldboard ploughshares ).
On a more serious note we still have a machine in our store. We rarely use it ourselves but there are plenty of customers around who still want to use it. At $3 per page we generate $180-200 per week from fax services.
Jarryd, I have had to keep one to be able to receive these very important “faxes” from Fairfax!