Forget the chatter about “synergies” and “multi-platform distribution models”, the Nine-Fairfax deal is a direct threat to the survival of Australia’s big mastheads, particularly the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
That’s not because of the loss of the (relatively weak) Fairfax Media brand. It’s because of the loss of Fairfax Media’s existential purpose.
Let’s go back to the roots of Fairfax as a diversified (what we’d now call a multi-platform) media company in the 1950s and ’60s, when it spread across metro and regional newspapers, magazines, radio and television. The elder Sir Warwick Faifax and his trusty sidekick, Rupert “Rags” Henderson, were open about their goal — to entrench The Sydney Morning Herald.
This evolved with the launch of the AFR and the takeover of The Age, to the goal of being the Australian standard-bearer — almost the owner — of the broadsheet journalism brand, delivered through its big city mastheads.
That defensive infrastructure morphed and survived through the ownership changes after the elder Warwick died in 1987: the younger Warwick in 1988, Conrad Black in 1992 and the Rural Press reverse take-over of 2008.
It’s why when the board marched up to the Rubicon of ending printing Monday to Friday in 2012, it’s existential purpose wouldn’t let it cross — what was bad for the mastheads, simply couldn’t be good for the company.
But Nine has its own existential purpose: a culture that aims to put Nine at the centre of Australian television. Now, decisions will be made based on what’s best for Nine in television. The mastheads are now just another bit of someone else’s defensive infrastructure — devalued from kings to pawns.
The bits that Nine really wants are the advertising revenues that come from majority ownership of Domain (on its own, two-thirds the value of Fairfax) and control of its own streaming future through total ownership of Stan.
There are other bits it can make work as profit centres, like the radio networks or the AFR. Will it want to? That’s another question. It may, instead, seek to pay down debt by on-selling.
There are bits it can’t wait to offload, the bits that bring costs not revenues. Nine CEO High Marks has already indiscreetly suggested the regionals will go, although there was some polite walking back over the weekend. Still, they’ll either be moved as a block through private equity (potentially through News Corp on the way) or be closed or sold one by one in the manner that Fairfax has been quietly shedding its New Zealand regional papers since February.
Then there’s The SMH and The Age. Nothing in the scale of the merger makes them more financially viable.
As in all mergers, there will be a hunt on for synergies. Nine has a history of pushing square pegs into round holes to justify takeovers or investments. For example, Crown casino being a venue for the Logies.
So, sure, the printed papers are useful for promoting Stan and practical for distributing Domain. But neither so useful nor so practical as to offset the continued slide in print revenues.
Ramping up the cover price (now at $3) and ending costly regional distribution cut circulation of the Sydney and Melbourne papers to about 80,000 when the company withdrew from publicly audited circulation last year. In Victoria and NSW, with about 5.8 and 7.6 million people, this is printing as promotion, not distribution. Almost performance art.
In a television focused company like Nine, nostalgia for the mastheads is unlikely to keep the printed product alive for long. The killing time? Probably not until after the federal election. But what’s saving it then?
And if there’s no physical masthead, why keep multiple news sites alive? The new Nine is planned as a multi-platform, not a house of brands. Sooner or later, a director or manager will ask, “Aren’t we better off consolidating our news online under a single brand? Isn’t it all about scale?”
And then they’ll say, “Isn’t Nine our brand?”
Good piece. Yes, the newspaper is gone. But so ultimately is free-to-air TV and radio broadcasting. It’s the long relentlessness history of human sentience, repeatedly escaping the tyranny of the medium. We’re very close to being done with hard copy information modes at all. We don’t need cash, we don’t need paper copies of anything, we don’t need hard copy personal information, libraries, archives, files, contracts, plans, pictures, posters, policies, leaflets, treaties, laws…we are accelerating fast towards an untethered digital epistemogical wonderland. Whether it’s a dystopian nightmare of fake news, Matrix style isolation and statist manipulation, or the next-newest libertarian realm of enlightened, pluralist continuity…depends as always on the quality of the information providers on the medium. The weight of numbers of the sentient decent and deft.
Abandon the legacy media ship, all ye of talent and good faith and goodwill. Let the newspapers crumble and die, like a corrupted church. Let free-to-air broadcast babel itself into decadent deafening silence.
Hard copy is dying. Help put it out of its misery. Fast!
Fahrenheit 451 and no need for firemen.
For the pittance it’s worth, as far as I’m concerned, for all the pulse it exhibits, print media might as well be dead.
* Anathema to a civilised, coherent, tolerant society as well to an informed, functioning, vibrant, healthy democracy?
* Corrupted as it has been by money/profit/expediency, short-term priorities and power, the lack of diversity of opinion when opinion has become news.
* The sort of thinking and sentiment it encourages, nurtures, legitimises and validates : rather than challenging when it should, for the greater good?
* The selling of it’s sponsor indulgences – worse than The Pardoner.
* The promotion and prominence given to individuals sympathetic to the views of owners, pushing their politics – before the greater good?
* Look at magazines – what they’ll do to boost circulation, to attract advertisers to boost profits?
* The Fin Revue – the self-centred, elitist conservative partisan poop they churn?
* Then there’s the “turd in the pool” foreign owned Limited News Corpse (with it’s Fiddler on the Roof “Journalists Professional Code of Conduct leading nowhere just for show”), the indulgence of US citizen Rupert “IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT” Murdoch :-
i) Feeding it’s shock-jock dependents, there’s FUX, with it’s garish black and white minstrel “Skew News” revue (would Speers get his gig if he didn’t dress at least 60:40 to the right?)?
ii) With Rupert (along with that Dick Cheney) on the advisory board of US monolith Genie Oil & Gas – the way it’s used to peddle “the virtues” of Adani and coal to punters – when was the last time his rags were critical of the “fossil fool” industry – or anything but sceptical of “climate change”? But then I’m only 67, so perhaps it was before my time?
iii) The Doctor Teeth Electric Mayhem and Muppet Show that it is.
Stars like Savva – who used to work for Costello and continues doing Limited News Party PR for Rupert. Except when it comes to Abbott who was able to “steal home where Costello struck out”? She seems to hate him (and The Credlin) more than she does Labor?
Van Onselen – who used to have a weak-end column on the disassembly line that is our Curry or Maul – “screwing Labor, hammering the Greens and buffing out Limited News Party imperfections”. Now he’s on loan from Limited News to fill in on The Dum, because, apparently, the ABC doesn’t have someone as good to do the job? That and promote Limited News think – “in case” we didn’t know where to go if we wanted?
I’m not saying they’re all fluffy hacks – I do like Farr and am impressed by what I’ve seen of the Primrose Riordan, and there are one or two up here in Qld, with binocular vision too, but I do wonder if they’re not there just to show how “balanced” Limited News can be?
Imagine roles reversed and GetUp! held so many of our media cards? The heaven and facts Turnbull and IPA Senator Fifield would move, to “kerb” their reach and influence on the electorate psyche?
‘Pittance’ be arsed, Klews – crackerjack wizard prang…Who knew?! You been on the chuff?
Over the barricades and have at them, ethereal/ephemeral-word comrades all: the hard copy leviathans are beached and gasping. Let’s kick the shit out of all who ride ‘em – Legacy Hacks, Botoxed Stupid-Box Whores & Autocued Rent Boys, flat-foot Bookword-gumbies like that twat Flanagan over at HR’s….kick, kick the withering, ossified, word-dying world of hard copy wordsmithery until The Tyranny of the Medium is dead.
Without a medium there can be no power toll gate. Without a container there’s only the content; only words, carrying only ideas. And then we all get to fight…fair. Fight fair. Using only our word and idea talent.
Fire up, Teh Klewmonster, Klewso of Teh Interwebz. That stuff worth the sub man. Shit got real.