Pamela Williams has won the prestigious Walkley Book Awrd for 2013 for her book Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch And The Ultimate Revenge – an incisive, hard-hitting and utterly compelling exposé of media, powerful mates and multimillion-dollar deals.
Killing Fairfax tells the inside story of the decline of hallowed media company Fairfax, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age And The Australian Financial Review.
Covering a decade and a half of lost opportunity and mismanagement, this story culminates in Fairfax’s catastrophic loss of the classified advertising market to the internet, as the famous ‘rivers of gold’ run dry. The savage twist in the tale is that the new companies dominating the online advertising market were not just hungry internet start-ups – but one by one, each of the new leaders in the field came under the direct influence of two traditional media tycoons, James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch, both intent on expanding their own online businesses.
With exclusive and unprecedented access to both Murdoch and Packer, as well as an extraordinary line-up of Australian business leaders and influential powerbrokers, this is a powerful insiders’ story of the deals, the power plays and the machinations behind the influential media organisation’s decline. A riveting, never-before-told tale of Shakespearean dimensions, Killing Fairfax is an unputdownable account of corporate ambition and arrogance; fathers and sons; old media and new media; and brutal business dealings.
About the Author
Pamela Williams is the Editor-at-Large for The Australian Financial Review, writing investigative stories across politics and the corporate world. She is the author of the political book The Victory, and has won five Walkley awards including the Gold Walkley in 1998 for her coverage of the waterfront dispute. She has won the Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year award; the George Munster award; a Melbourne Press Club Quill award, the Melbourne Press Club/Trawalla Arts Journalism award, and the Citigroup Journalism Award.
Grab a copy of Killing Fairfax here
About the Contributor
Andrew Cattanach
Andrew Cattanach is a regular contributor to The Booktopia Blog. He has been shortlisted for The Age Short Story Prize and was named a finalist for the 2015 Young Bookseller of the Year Award. He enjoys reading, writing and sleeping, though finds it difficult to do them all at once.
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