This is desperation, a last roll of the dice to attempt a restructure that will whittle a coherent, nimble, modern media company from the addled mess that Fairfax has become.

The conventional wisdom will blame the internet for the state the business is in. You'll soon read how the web slowed the rivers of classified advertising gold to a trickle and left Fairfax parched.

That analysis will loom large following today's announcement by the publisher of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald that it will all but halve its journalistic workforce, close two printing plants, erect online paywalls and trim its broadsheets to some unspecified 'compact format'.

But that's only half right. The seeds of Fairfax's failure sprouted well before the web raised its head and swept away the tens of thousands of little ads. This was the company taken to receivership, let's not forget, by a gauche family power play in 1990; a company that has reeled through successive ownerships and managements and revolving doors for both corporate executives and senior editorial staff, a game of hoppo bumpo that hasn't ended yet.

The Age, for example, has been edited by Mike Smith, Alan Kohler, Bruce Guthrie, Michael Gawenda, Andrew Jaspan and Paul Ramadge since 1990, almost all of those changes also reflecting a switch in overall management, if not ownership of the business.

For 20 years the company has been focused on cost and declining sales. Way before the world wide web Fairfax management was absorbed in a struggle to counter the decline through natural attrition of its readership and circulation. Its subscribers were dying. The papers needed to be more 'female friendly', more 'youth focussed', more anything you might think of that showed a glimmer of demographic hope. The marketing people took a prominent role. The focus groups were never ending.

But still the numbers fell: TV and the more immediate allure of the tabloids claimed young eyeballs long before the smaller screens and rapid fire infotainment of the internet.

Commercially things were no better, and the editorial resources that once propelled the earnest reporterly papers of Graham Perkin and his ilk were spread out from news to feature frippery in order to paper the cracks. Journalists and the budget resources that go with them were diverted into increasing segmentation of the Fairfax broadsheets.

At Fairfax, nothing could be more significant than a revenue stream, and in the myopic calculus of newspaper management, the only way to attract an advertiser was to deliver editorial content that spoke directly to the business they wanted to bleed. Want car ads? Then you need a car section. Food ads? A food section. And so the journalistic resource was salted about the business chasing endless rabbits down numberless burrows and never really hitting pay dirt. The intention was not to please the audience ... unless that audience was buying space by the half page.

And that's where the editorial staff ended up, beavering away at sections and supplements.

Unless of course they were bunkered down in endless pillow plumping redesigns and tweaks led by editorial executives who wouldn't know newspaper design from their elbows, but had unshakeable convictions on the power of splattered red ink, mastheads suddenly stamped as blue boxes, endlessly reworked page one blurbs, and increasingly ludicrous opinion page photo bylines.

There were days in the recent history of The Age when a general reporter was hard to find. There was no market in old-fashioned solidly serious reporting. Maybe no readership either. The old-fashioned newspaper model of facts assembled diligently then pummelled on a subeditorial floor into a consistent coherent form was broken.

Subeditors took on more and more of what were once pure production roles, or they were sacked. Journalists that could multi-skill between writing and reporting were favoured, opinion and impressionism began to dominate.

What credibility and gravitas the Fairfax papers might have had as serious endeavours focussed on news were eroded by the realities of cost and slow commercial failure. The company has been in long tactical withdrawal that in recent years has looked more like a rout.

These have been the editorial obsessions of the past 20 years at Fairfax ... these and the trimming of costs and the slow but increasingly eager corrosion of the once solid 'Chinese walls' that for years shielded editorial operations from direct contamination by the company's commercial objectives.

The sad truth for journalists in a commercial construct is that their department is exclusively a cost. It produces no revenue. Yes, it makes content, but the expense of doing that just drags on the gun arm of the business. In the commercial mind, journalistic content is either the plaster between the ads or something tailored specifically at attracting them.

Because the business is not content, not journalism; the business is selling advertising.

Which is where the internet comes in, a final self-tapping screw in the lid of a coffin already three quarters shut.

The truth is probably that Fairfax was just too big, too clumsy, too hydra-headed, too Sydney-centric, too Melbourne-focussed, too slow ... too everything wrong to respond to the challenges. It held the market in small ads after all, it was quick to go online. But it fumbled and fluffed and squandered its early chances.

They'll ponder all this and its implications for serious journalism and the health of the fourth estate, and they'll say now that the Fairfax business model was broken, but there was never a business model for quality broadsheet journalism in this country, only a media company that simultaneously sold a lot of little ads and by coincidence produced thoughtful well-reported newspapers.

There never was a relationship between the two things, and in the end, as it turned out, precious little readership for the journalism once the little ads walked out to the door to a brighter, more sympathetic and compelling environment online.

There was a moment, maybe 10 years ago now, when a bold management at Fairfax might have picked the company up by the scruff of the neck, rationalised the staff, integrated the online and print operations, trimmed the paper size, and moved the content toward a premium mix of context and analysis.

They would have looked adventurous, bold, purposeful; they would have left the competition in their dust. But that was 10 years ago.

A longer version of this article will appear in the next edition of Overland.

Jonathan Green is presenter of Sunday Extra on Radio National. He worked at The Age for 15 years in numerous roles until 2006. View his full profile here.