from Crikey: Michael Gill pounded over AFR.com fiasco

This little piece in Crikey is music to my ears.

Fairfax Business Media boss Michael Gill copped both barrels yesterday in a meeting with about 10 corporate communications executives from a number international and top 100 firms ... . He was left in no doubt that the entire process has been a major blunder from the start.
...
But earlier this year AFR launched its new website, abruptly cutting off all access to archive stories from the Fairfax Digital platform and putting them all on its own website, and ending its long-running relationships with Media Monitors [and Factiva]. They also constructed the site so that the stories couldn't be cut and pasted into an email and forwarded on.
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The system, which uses Flash rather than HTML, is so bad that some subscribers can't even type in the search terms without trying three or four times.
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One senior comms person for a major company said their execs now considered The Australian "the newspaper of record for financial markets" because they simply couldn't get anything from the Fin. ...

When Australian librarians first heard about AFR.com, many of us were outraged about it too - it seemed like a lousy product with a business model totally at odds with how libraries work. Fairfax intimated that the product was not designed with librarians' concerns in mind because it was optimized for their core corporate market. That's why it's made my day to read that the corporate market is rejecting AFR.com as well.

I've already taken a little look at AFR.com during its beta. I was not impressed. Now that it's out of beta, I'm going to be taking another look at it to see if it's improved at all. [I did end up doing that and my opinions are in the main blog]

Comments

[Nora Martin]

I worked as a Research Librarian at Fairfax Media for 15 months, (full time for just over a year), then went down to part-time (3 days/week). As I needed full-time work, I took a casual position with the AFR for 5 weeks (2 days/week). I was employed as 'Executive Librarian' on the AFR.com helpdesk, it was an absolute nightmare. I totally agreed with the feedback received from corporate information managers & fellow librarians, however, had to toe the company line. This product was riddled with bugs, & they expected people to pay $1650 for 2 months access! As a result I ended up resigning, and I was successful in obtaining a senior Librarian position, as a Library Manager in the public service ... best move I ever made!