JON FAINE: Colin from Richmond’s going to ask you a question that’ll do nothing for your blood pressure. Good morning, Colin.

CALLER COLIN: Yes hi. I’m a subscriber to Crikey and I was just wondering if Andrew – actually one of the things I like about Crikey is that I get a daily email and so it feels like I’m actually getting something delivered into my inbox for…

JON FAINE: So you subscribe to the daily service?

CALLER COLIN: Yeah yeah I do. And I really read that and I don’t really read the website that much at all. So I’m just wondering if you’d like to comment on the impact of these new publishers. And then I’ve got another question just about classified ads and how important that is for paper business because there seems to be a lot of websites out there which do classified ads better than a lot of the newspapers.

JON FAINE: And that’s hit Fairfax particularly hard for what’s called the rivers of gold…

ANDREW JASPAN: Correct.

JON FAINE: …that traditionally were the main income stream. So, Andrew what do you think now that you’re freed of the constraints of working for a rival media organisation, you were never happy with Crikey when you were editor of the newspaper.

ANDREW JASPAN: No I don’t intend to go there, Jon. What I would say however is that we here in Melbourne had a lot of thoughts about how we wanted to develop the online service, and I’m not going to rehearse them all here, but I think if we’d allowed local initiative to take hold and we could have developed The Ageonline as we wanted to do it here in Melbourne, we would have been offering very much the kind of things that Crikey and others can do out there. But the fact of the matter is that The Age online was largely run out of Sydney by a different division with its own, you know, its own costs and profit motives and its own business structure.

So – but that’s, you know, that’s up for discussion right now.

Your second point on classifieds…

JON FAINE: Is that all you want to say about for instance…

ANDREW JASPAN: No I…

JON FAINE: …about Crikey? You don’t want to say anything about Crikey?

ANDREW JASPAN: No no not particularly. I mean, you know…

JON FAINE: You were pretty angry with them a few times in your tenure as an editor of the paper.

ANDREW JASPAN: I was, I was but you know I think the previous editor was as well, and so it goes on. I don’t mind being held to account, I really don’t mind. You know, the editor wields or can wield a great deal of power and I don’t mind people holding us to account.

JON FAINE: Alright.

ANDREW JASPAN: What I dislike is just snide cynicism, as it were, but that’s another issue.

Snide cyncicsim? How nice!

As head News honchos met today at the Sydney HQ word filtered off what might just be the target number for shedding across the Australian group. That number? Remember that Fairfax tapped 550 last year, and made a lot of noise about the 5% cut it to impress the market. Not that that worked!

News won’t be out their spruiking — swift, silent execution is more the house style — but the target number of cuts is said to be 800. That’s the goss this afternoon from Sydney agency land. The person you talked to last week, isn’t there this week. Sort of like a journalistic equivalent of Pinochet’s Chile.

Guess everyone wants to impress Rupert when he’s here next week.