News Ltd will spend $27m to fix its Year 2000 problems, which may force the company to put off other, strategic IT projects, it said. Lachlan Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Ltd, described the cost as significant but essential. Dr Ross Wood, IT chief of News competitor John Fairfax, said his company’s Year 2000 figure is around $2m, excluding big IT projects which encompass Y2K compliance. While that’s exclusive of major projects that have a year 2000 component, I would suggest that we’re not deferring any major projects as a result of the year 2000, Dr Wood told the Australian Financial Review – one of the newspapers published by Fairfax. Murdoch, who was speaking at the 51st World Newspaper Congress in Kobe, said that newspapers needed to understand that new threats to classified advertising revenues were coming from outside the industry. Our competitors are small advertising agencies, telephone companies, Bill Gates and Microsoft, he is reported as saying. Murdoch the younger also admitted that it was only recently that he unearthed the fact that Telstra Corp’s contract with News for the Foxtel cable TV venture stipulated that News may not sell classified advertisements over the cable network.
