Australia’s media owners spent the last quarter of the 20th century trying to get big. Real big.
They were giants in the earth in those days, so powerful that any passing mention of their given names — Rupert, Kerry, and even once upon a time Warwick — was enough to freeze the blood of Australian politicians.
Those same giants (or their commercial heirs) are now caught: too big to pivot to the opportunities of new media; too small to compete with the new giants of the tech world; too reluctant to give up the power and influence their size once brought them.
In the media equivalent of the now official trans-Tasman bubble, this week has given us a couple of on-again/off-again insights into the underlying process.
On Monday morning, NZME, publisher of The New Zealand Herald, was going to buy Nine’s local subsidiary, Stuff, for $1. Then by midday it wasn’t.
At the same time The Australian revealed one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets: News Corp was trying to sell its regional papers (most of which it absorbed from the break-up of APN Media in 2015) to Australian Community Media (which was spun out of Fairfax last year after the Nine takeover). Then a day later it wasn’t.
$1 has become the price of choice for declining media properties, ever since the New York Daily News tabloid sold for that in 2017. It was the same asking price that Bauer sought (unsuccessfully) from the New Zealand government for its local magazines last month.
Of course it’s not really about selling media. It’s about off-loading liabilities, particularly those owed to staff such as for leave and redundancy. In the case of the New York Daily News, for example, these were more than $100 million.
Paradoxically, these liabilities are keeping old media alive — for the time being at least. Current (if declining) cash flows can support existing costs with regular redundancy rounds to adjust outgoings downward while liabilities roll forward. Closing a product immediately crystalises the liability costs while turning off the income tap. It would require real cash from the parent company.
This week’s on-again/off-again shufflings came the week after the two remaining giants — News Corp and Nine — released trading updates that illustrated how well (or poorly) they’re managing to rescue themselves in the middle of the COVID-19 shock.
The News Corp figures came courtesy of its end-of-quarter reports. These demonstrated that its once mighty Australian newspapers are now worth … hmm, approximately nothing.
News Corp’s value comes from Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, its book publishing arm, Harper Collins and, most significantly, its holding in REA Group. The share boost off the sale of News America Marketing last month suggests the rest of the company is holding it back.
But a look at the company’s claimed digital subscription figures (613,300 at March 31) suggests there’s a good little new media company trying to get out from under the old giant. The most recent breakdown by masthead (at June 30 last year) shows this total is spread reasonably evenly across its tabloids: about 81,000 at Adelaide’s The Advertiser up to about 108,000 for Melbourne’s Herald Sun.
The Australian is already all but a digital play, with an average Monday-Friday print circulation of about 84,000 across the previous year (probably lower now) compared with a combined print and digital subscription of 164,000 at last June 30 (certainly higher now).
All the company’s major mastheads operate behind a hard paywall with limited free access. The Australian papers are fully priced. At $10 a week for all-access digital, The Australian is about twice the price of The New York Times.
The transition would be rough, and costly, although there was a faint pointer that News Corp is taking the first baby steps with a management restructure around subject verticals (like food) rather than delivery mechanisms (like mastheads) — the sort of restructure that led to the 2013 editors revolt resulting in the resignation of then-Australian head Kim Williams.
A new fully digital media company would support maybe a third of the already reduced numbers of journalists currently employed (and maybe a quarter of the total staff).
But the major cost would be in influence and power, particularly with all its content behind a paywall. How eager will News Corp be to pay that price by giving up its status as an enduring media giant?
As long as news corpse only cater for their shrinking redneck minority their appeal and circulation will continue to diminish, only the braindead are left buying or watching news crap and Allan Jones forced retirement is only the first as the remaining media try to regain the middle ground audience, the Hadley`s, Steve Price`s, Bolts and Credlins will be the next to be sacrificed at Murdochs profits at all cost alter and the servile grovelling journos that sold their self respect to Rupert Murdoch will be increasingly shoved out the door onto the scrapheap of a dying right wing media as just reward for their long years of arse licking to their masters .
And now it seems the miracle talking tapeworm Alan Jones is probably joining the rest of the afterdark weevils on NewsCrap Sky News
He’s had a show there for at least the last 18months, part of SKY’s After Dark Creature Features.
One of the first things any company does in a downturn is cut advertising, which is why the already deeply troubled media section is bleeding so badly right now. In my 40 year-long working career in the field, I was made redundant twice, both times during “the recession we had to have” in the early 90s. Around the time of the GFC (which barely affected most Australians but caused another round of casualties in consumer magazines), the company I was involved in finally had to admit defeat, and give up any notion that “we could take on Rupert.” We struggled gamely on for a few years, but finally folded in 2017. Our News Corp rival has now also ceased printing also.
Unfortunately for the haters who regularly post mean-spirited commentary (like the comment directly above, astonishing in its arrogance and blind ignorance), the Covid panic recession may well spell curtains for an entire industry. No one will be spared – not the car magazines, the home decorating ones, the celebrity gossip titles, the cooking mags, the fashion “bibles” and the weigh-loss ones (and I’ve worked on them all…). Any media that relies on advertising and the discretionary income of its readers now faces extinction – and that includes not just News Corp, Nine and Bauer titles but the small independents, the “quality” weekly and monthly news mag run by a Melbourne property developer, the local all-so-worthy start-ups like the local rag in my area called The Beast, and even the innovative digital pioneers like Buzzfeed, whose Australian arm closed today – as another story on this site laments.
If anything can survive, its probably a digital version of The Oz, believe it or not… Well, the rest of us can all get our “news” and information from Facebook, Twitter and Google – hip hip hooray… So when we want to read about Covid and all we have left are conspiracy theories involving Bill Gates, self-serving product spruiks from charlatans with miracle cures and a steady diet of unchecked misinformation, maybe even the haters who post on Crikey will miss the mainstream media…
But where will they vent their intolerant rage? Crikey won’t be spared the from Covid cull. I mean, I hope tor the best, I really do – but honestly, does anyone really expect that there will be anything worth saving after the dust settles from this latest catastrophe?
“No one will be spared – not the car magazines, the home decorating ones, the celebrity gossip titles, the cooking mags, the fashion “bibles” and the weigh(T)-loss ones…“… you seem to think that is “ a bad thing“.
If there is anything worse than tree slaughter it is using their once life giving fibres to be soiled by such tripe.
“Tripe”? Ahh, I get it… the authentic voice of the patrician elite expressing their disdain for the tastes and aspirations of the masses… Now why can I always rely on a leftish website to feed me that?
Blodeuwedd, I’ll assume you don’t know how appalling you sound, but you should get this: Modern printing in this country exclusively uses sustainably sourced or recycled paper whose cultivation and manufacture forms the economic backbone of many regional communities, supports thousand of local jobs and feeds just as many downstream industries – all of whom pay taxes in this country. With the loss of a local media, all we have left is Google, Facebook and a handful of US-based tech giants – none of whom employ anyone much in this country, or contribute to its tax base. How is that not “a bad thing”?
The assumption that information requires a unifying masthead to give it shape, coherence, context and credibility is simply no longer applicable. There is just the one gigantic ‘magazine’, now: it’s called the internet. Everyone has their own masthead(s), page(s), byline(s). Everyone does their own advertising. Manages their own budget. It’s an information level playing like none ever conceived before in publishing. Talent rules. If a site does wither, it withers for one reason only, and it will be the same reason every other site withers: wither-worthy content. The quality of content will shrink or grow its audience commensurate with…its capacity to do so. The ultimate information sector adjudication. You get the audience you deserve. What a magnificent time to be an information worker, with talent. A single brilliant meme can win a billion eyeballs. All the truckloads of newsprint on the road ain’t necessarily going to do same. The days of dominating a medium by sheer weight of push-polled presence…are numbered. The endgame is rushing up for ‘legacy’ journalism and the information future is becoming clear and out of the hands of us all, pro and amateur alike.
How good are you? How good is the information you’ve got in the game? Scary, huh – all you lazy cossetted pro’s. Welcome to Teh InterWebz. No-one here gets an information free ride.
So what does the serious information professional need, really? All they need? Here, tomorrow? Talent with information, originality with words/images, an independent brain, something to write with and on…one ham sandwich & one good fart a day. Maybe a virtual rattle jar, probably a second gig (for slow news days). The rest – the mastheads, the gallery passes, the Walkleys, the flawless design and subbing, the $3/word commissions, the $20K/day photo shoots, the ‘style’, the ‘conventions’, the walking the line, the head sheds, the diva tanties, the Byline GlamHeadShots, the recognition, the Elderhood, the guilds, the cliques, the commish ed bum-licking and publishing space incumbency politics, the soul-destroying self-censorship, churning out bullsh*t you know is a lie against your own information talent and bullsh*t detectors, a lie against your love for and deft way with words themselves, the soft plagiarism, the self-loathing certification of inferior information, the scrambling to collect inside contacts, the contra, the conga-lining, the lemming-like fads and lynch mobbery and follow-me info-fashion, by which weak thinkers and unoriginal chancers graft themselves spectacularly mediocre information careers, bedding in platitudes and clichés and intellectual vested interest…flogging bulldust with their wordy talent, killing words, breaking them with misuse…all for the sake of the advertising and patronage hustle that protects and preserves only the least important, the most destructive things about the ‘information industries’: the wasteful dinosaur containers of information, the vicious bullying information hierarchies…the ruthless, anti-democratic information barons.
Well, all that can f*** right off, now. Over. Done. Gone. In the bin. Out of everyone’s hands. Business model’s cactus. These ‘information industry’ add-ons have always been info cuckoos in the nest, and now they’re unviable. Professional information workers – journalists especially – didn’t ever need any of it, and now you won’t have it, even if you still reckon you do need it. You don not. It’s all information dust. All information sparkle dust in your sparkle-dusted eyes, and it’s now helplessly clearing itself away. God bless neoliberal economics, for rationalizing bad information out of viability. Bad ‘journalism’, especially. All the good stuff needs is five working senses, hacks, one smart phone, and some or other means of staying alive when, if and as your information work alone can’t. Lots of carer work around. Or get on your knees literally, if/when you have to. Far more honest than the demeaning way you’ve all been whoring out your vocation metaphorically for so long now, in the erroneous delusion that by kissing up to a Rupert or a Packer or a Kerry or a ChairFax boardroom or a passing Communications Minister, you’re somehow keeping it alive with any dignity or efficacious point.
Journalists: the real Golden Age of journalism is upon you. Get some goddamned vocational swagger back. Get some arrogance back. Stop being so wet, so passive, so sooky and pathetic. Get rid of the junk around you. In the bin with the Ruperts and the Ferrari Flogs, the Ideological Curtain-Twitchers and the celebrity wannabes.
You’re supposed to be the grown-up keepers of the public record. Now’s your chance.
In the mid 80s Max Headroom first hit the screens – the 3 part UK version, not the deracinated US series – and even then its central premise, that the simple act of exposing of the sheer corrupt/incompetent nature of Power would lead to its negation, struck me a fanciful.
The following decades only convinced me in that view. The vitiation of the meeja would not have been so complete had some integrity remained but the Ferrari fondlers put that to the sword.
The mere fact that it took FOUR DAYS for your comment to emerge from the Modbot cloaca is proof enough of every point you made above.
You ought to be on staff – there are several stenographers in the bunker who’d be more productive picking oakum – but that ain’t gonna happen.
Wow! – “At $10 a week for all-access digital, The Australian is about twice the price of The New York Times.”
Who can those people be? How many are truly paying themselves rather than writing it off as a business cost?
It’s time to grow up and cast off the 19/20th century mindsets. Instead of waiting for some cashed up media outfit to figure out how to profit from the current mess, it would help us all if we identified what we need from a news media and start to create media designs that will work in the 21st century. We don’t need competing media outlets shouting for attention so they can attract ad revenues. We need services that can provide and guarantee valid and current data for all matters of interest. A well designed global information system (GIS) wouuld help us to address problems and threats, produce the sort of co-operation needed to create employment and inform citizens (because we’d all be working from the same sets of facts) and provide businesses and governments with critical information. Designing media to achieve such goals, we’d soon realise that our global systems are now very complex and therefore we need reliable information systems that deal that can act as decision support tools. Whether our decisions are about what studies would best prepare our young, which threats were developing and what the critical intervention points were, or what businesses and strategies are going to be needed to feed, house, clothe and employ our people while nurturing our environment, they should be informed by reliable information services. Our existing services couldn’t meet our recent needs, let alone whatever is roaring down on us from wherever. Good riddance to them now let’s get to work designing what we need and want.