Just in:
Margaret Simons, "Fairfax's business arm shooshes the librarians", Crikey, 9 July 2008
Australian Financial Review and Fairfax Business Media have opted out of a new budgeting system under which they were called on to pay their share of the cost of groupwide services, including IT, accounts and library services. Fairfax Business Media have decided they don't need to pay for the library. [my emphasis]
...
Now, according to Brown's [Deborah Brown, Information Services Manager at Fairfax Media] e-mail, AFR bosses Michael Gill and Glenn Burge have decided that journalists can be "self-service researchers". Yet she says that previously, Business Media reporters have accounted for twenty per cent of the work of the library.
Anybody who cares about the quality of business journalism in Australia, or the role of libraries in media organizations will read this and weep.
