Part of Rupert Murdoch's huge success in the global media is that he is very hands-on. He actually knows the businesses he runs.

Tim Blair writes:

It’ll take until March to convert the Sydney Morning Herald and Age into tabloids. Seems rather a long time. Perhaps someone with experience in the field of reviving doomed broadsheets could act as a technical consultant:

The story is told in one Murdoch biography (Murdoch by William Shawcross) that shortly after purchasing London’s Sun he decided to have it printed as a tabloid. Told by his printers that the broadsheet presses he owned could not print a tabloid, Murdoch informed his employees that their printing presses were originally supplied with bars designed to fold pages to tabloid size. The head printer, Shawcross reports, denied this. Whereupon the publisher removed his suit coat and jumped up onto the press. “In a box at the top of the machine,” writes Shawcross, Murdoch “found the bar in question wrapped in sacking and covered in ink and grime. The printers were impressed.”

That’s not the current mood among Farifax’s printers, according to AMWU official Lorraine Cassin:

“Tullamarine is a 10 year old state of the art plant – and the people who work in it should not be condemned by the bad decisions of a media company through a change of direction.”

Fairfax should hire them as editors.