Case Study: Fairfax Media achieves faster time-to-market and improved search and audience insights with Elastic

Powering the Search for a Modern Media Publisher

Fairfax Media, a 185‑year‑old publisher behind titles such as The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, needed to modernize as digital competition and changing audience expectations made rapid innovation essential. Its legacy search infrastructure was a developer bottleneck, limiting the ability to build new products, surface relevant content, and gain timely insights from logs and analytics.

Fairfax replatformed on the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, X‑Pack) to power its content API, centralized logging, and near‑real‑time analytics. The move enabled developers to build and release features much faster, improved user experience and content relevancy, provided analytics within ~30 seconds, helped detect and mitigate incidents, and scaled to ingest billions of documents monthly—positioning the business for future channels like voice and bots.

Fairfax Media

Rob Hill

Head of Operations and Infrastructure