A Murdoch led consortium. Get ready for a rent seeking campaign the likes of which the world has never seen. Rupert Murdoch is talking with some of the biggest publishers in the United States about forming a consortium that would charge for online news content. In the last couple of weeks News Corp executives have met with their peers at the New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp. and Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times.
Some sketchy details of the Murdoch plan were disclosed in Friday’s LA Times: “Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller has positioned News Corp. as a logical leader in the effort to start collecting fees from online readers,” said the story, “because of its success with the Wall Street Journal Online, which boasts more than 1 million paying subscribers.”
It was in the same paper the next day that columnist Tim Rutten blew the whistle on what the the major purpose of the proposed consortium would be.
“… the Australian-born media magnate understands that what’s required for serious — which is to say expensive-to-produce — journalism to survive is that all the quality English-language papers and news sites agree to charge for Web access and then mercilessly sue anyone who makes more than fair use of their work without paying a fee. For such a scheme to work, the papers’ owners need to agree on when to act and what to charge.”
Rutten explained that American papers had combined revenues of $34.7 billion from the advertising in their print editions last year and just $3.1 billion in advertising from their online sites, despite the fact that, on average, 67.3 million people visited them each month.
Unless that imbalance is reduced, all but a few quality papers will disappear. Which brought him to the nub of the likely lobbying proposal:
For its part, Congress needs to move quickly to grant the newspaper industry at least a temporary exemption from antitrust and price-fixing laws so that publishers and proprietors can, in essence, collude for survival. The question that naturally arises is why the government should have any interest in supporting newspapers — unhealthy or otherwise. In fact, U.S. authorities have used their regulatory powers to support a free press — whose foundations were and remain newspapers — since the Colonial era. As deputy postmasters general of British America, for example, Benjamin Franklin and William Hunter allowed newspaper subscribers to receive their copies through the mails free of postage.
They permitted single copies of any paper to be sent free from one printer to another. That was crucial to the free flow of information because it allowed the foreign and financial news that aggregated in the port cities to pass uninhibited to the printer/publishers of inland papers, while events in the hinterland were transmitted back to the major cities.
When the nation’s first Postal Act was passed in 1792, it not only continued Franklin’s and Hunter’s policy of free transmission of papers between printers but set a heavily subsidized postal rate of a single cent on copies mailed to subscribers. In 1851, Congress granted free postage to weekly papers mailed within their counties of origin and later extended the subsidy to dailies.
More important, if Congress acts as it should, it will do so not on behalf of newspapers but for their readers. The press, after all, does not assert 1st Amendment protections on its own behalf but as the custodian of such protections on behalf of the American people. We ought not lose sight of the fact that the 1st Amendment links the rights to religion, free speech, a free press and peaceable assembly for the redress of grievance for a reason. The framers wisely judged that a healthy democratic government required people informed by a free press, acting according to the dictates of their own consciences, speaking their minds without inhibition in the free associations of their choosing.
There is a kind of spiritual symbiosis in the complementary exercise of these most fundamental rights. If the unlooked-for consequences of technical innovation somehow threatened religious freedom — which is to say, liberty of conscience — or inhibited free speech or intimidated people from assembling, there’s no doubt Congress would act expeditiously. So it now should on behalf of a free press.
Newspaper proprietors with as serious an interest in their readers’ interest as their own bottom lines ought to follow Murdoch’s unlikely lead into a consortium of pay-to-view news websites or adopt one of the other proposed models as quickly as practical. Congress should enact the legislation required to allow them to act and price collectively, which has to be done if any of these schemes are to work.
Unless our lawmakers empower the newspaper industry to act on its readers’ behalf, it’s only a matter of time until there are too few serious sources of quality — or “premium” — journalism to guarantee the reality of the free press on which all the 1st Amendment’s indispensable liberties depend.
A beautiful bit of spinning. You’ve just got to love the Team Rudd spinners. Choosing the Garden Island Naval Base as the location for the joint meeting between the Australian and New Zealand Cabinets was an inspired choice. Here was one of the dullest political meetings of the year getting coverage because the backdrop was irresistible for the television cameras. Wonderful symbolism of the ANZAC tradition.
Giving the Nationals a chance. Forget about dumping Malcolm Turnbull. The leadership change a serious Opposition would be making is to give the top National Party job to Barnaby Joyce. Senator Joyce has the rat bag flair which might, just might, be enough to exempt his lot from the electoral disaster which is looming for the Coalition. He showed at the Party’s national conference at the weekend that he realises that the key to survival for the Nationals is to get back to the bush as quickly as possible having got as far away from the Liberal Party as possible.
Demonising Jews. The Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has a strange notion of freedom of the press. He has refused to be critical of the left leaning Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet which has published a story accusing Israel of killing Palestinians to plunder their organs. “No one can demand that the Swedish government violates its own constitution. Freedom of speech is an indispensable part of Swedish society,” Fredrik Reinfeldt was quoted as telling the Swedish news agency TT on Saturday. Now freedom of speech might be just as PM Reinfeldt described but surely a blast of criticism expressing disbelief that the Israeli Defence Forces were in the body parts stealing business would not have gone astray. The Jerusalem Post reports relations between Israel and Sweden are a little strained at the moment and no wonder.
After recently reading aboutRupert Murdoch’s sucking up to the communists in China in expectation of commercial gain, and the disgusting excuse for journalism otherwise known as Fox News, I am totally suspicious of anything coming from Mr. Murdoch whose major claim to fame is screwing anybody close enough for him to reach.
If Murdoch was really interested in quality journalism he would pull the plug on Fox News immediately. His only interest is getting his hand in your pants, to grab your wallet of course.
Your item on the Murdoch plan to charge for on-line access confuses the existence of quality journalism with the continuation of present day newspapers. Readers have been abandoning traditional print journalism for two very good reasons: (a) they are sick of being lied to and/or not being told about important stories; and (b) there is now an alternative in the form of the internet.
There is a project in the US runout of the University of California called Project Censored. It has run for a number of years. Each year they list the top 25 stories that were either ignored by the so-called mainstream media, or received only the barest of coverage, often relegated to small paragraphs on page 67. A review of some of those stories is very enlightening. If one excludes those of peculiarly American interest, most of the stories ignored or underplayed are similarly missing from Australian mainstream media.
This is more than a coincidence. I suggest it is one of the major reasons that readers are voting with their feet and instead relying more and more on a huge range of alternative sources freely available on the internet.
It is a peculiar arrogance of print media journalists (and their radio and tv counterparts) that only they produce quality journalism. The truth is that there is an enormous amount of well researched and well argued quality material available to those who take the trouble to look.
Unless and until Fairfax, Packer, Stokes, Murdoch and their foreign equivalents realise the grave disservice they too often do to the public we are likely to see the demise of many newspapers. Good riddance.
@Greg – my wallet? Well, that *is* a relief.
@Swedish press, well, should governments be in the business of criticizing the press? Next thing they’ll be expecting the PM to offer comment on the page 3 girls in tabloids.
Oh yes add the Swedish ‘outrage’ to the recent flurry of the Yids in big media here lately. Maybe it is an outrageous libel. Maybe it builds on a body organs scandal that was reported out of New York fairly recently?
It’s way beyond me to decipher the reality but it’s sure a prominent minority in the news lately for and against.
Present day Israel doesn’t need “demonising”. Interestingly from a karmic point of view, Israel seems to be rapidly becoming to the Palestinians what the Third Reich was to European Jews in the 1930’s. The state will come to the same end too, eventually. Horrific institutionalised inhumanity, abuse and injustice will eventually bring about its own destruction in this case as it did in that.