Twitter Flashback: 2010 - The Age Newspaper Sacks "Outrageous" Columnist Over Logies Tweets

Twitter Flashback.

THE AGE NEWSPAPER FIRES MOST POPULAR COLUMNIST BECAUSE SHE UPSET RUPERT MURDOCH'S THUGS AND GOONS

May, 2010: The Melbourne Age newspaper has fired one of Australia's most successful comediasn for using her Twitter feed to snark hard on the Logie Awards, and its participants.

Dullards and wankstains from 2GB, 3AW and crimelord Rupert Murdoch's Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail, The Australian (media that employs people to scan celebrities Twitter feeds as a full-time job) went in hard and chanted in unison Fairfax had to fire Deveny, while News Corp created, launched and ran a Boycott The Age Advertisers/Cancel Your Subscription campaign, across Murdoch newspapers, nationwide.

Of course The Age caved in. They fired Deveny.

Deveny responded she was using satire "to expose celebrity raunch culture and the sexual objectification of women, which is rife on the red carpet".

"It was just passing notes in class, but suddenly these notes are being projected into the sky and taken out of context," she said.

This wasn't Deveny's first Twitter crime against all that was still good and sacred in Australian media, and all that they held sacred.A week earlier, Australia's conservative media got all frothy and furious because Deveny tweeted:

"Anzac Day shits me."

Deveny: "People who are offended by tweets are probably the same people who find Hey Hey funny, a show that I find deeply offensive."

Deveny said, in 2010, most of the public, and older journalists, did not understand Twitter.

"Twitter is not a news source, but it is starting to be used as one".

"Six months ago Twitter was just people saying 'Oh my God, I'm so hung-over,'" she said.

"Now really serious people are using Twitter to communicate, people like Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, the New Scientist.

"It's about everyone assessing the information for themselves. This is a great challenge for us, to have a sophisticated response to the evolution of communication."

Murdoch media goons came over all politically correct in demanding censorship of Deveny, and Rupert Murdoch allowed his newspapers to call for Advertiser Boycotts of Fairfax newspapers if they kept publishing Deveny's work.

Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Piers Akerman, and nearly every big city Murdoch editor, chanted together subscribers to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald should cancel their subscriptions to 'show Fairfax this can't be tolerated.'

This was Paul Ramadge, editor of The Age in 2010, explaining why he caved into a Boycott Campaign run by Murdochs News Corp and fired one of Fairfax's most popular columnists.

"We are appreciative of the columns Catherine has written for The Age over several years but the views she has expressed recently on Twitter are not in keeping with the standards we set at The Age."

@Catherine Deveny 's Twitter account surged in followers after Fairfax followed the orders of Murdoch thugs and goons, adding more than 1200 more new followers in three hours. In 2010, that was a remarkable surge in Australian Twitter followers.

By midnight on the day of Deveny's May, 2010, dismissal, she had received more than seven hundred responses on Twitter supporting her, railing against The Age and asking what happened to the once legendary Australian sense of humour and love of a piss-take.

Well, the politically correct Murdoch media of the 2010s beat it out of us, didn't they?

BREAKING NEWS: NewsCorp Reveals NewsCorp "Least Biased"

It's a special kind of humiliation for the remaining decent journalists at Rupert Murdoch's crumbling Australian newspaper empire that they even have to think about 'crafting' stories like this, let alone having to run them all over their media (image via TomWConnell) :

  

Hilarious. The desperate attempts at credibility-salvaging and face-saving going on at NewsCorp Australia is getting ridiculous, and quite sad.

Curiously, even NewsCorp readers don't think the ABC coverage of Federal Election 2013 is particularly "Leftist." But their columnists and editors keep pumping that line about ABC being over-run by leftist hordes and its news reporting being riddled with bias against conservatives.

Not even Murdoch tabloid readers believe it.


Here's a small sample of recent tabloid front pages from Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp - "Australia's Least Biased Publisher."

This Is What It Sounds Like, When A Blog Dies

A few weeks ago, Andrew Bolt let slip on his blog, a preview of future Bolt Blog plans:

"I don’t want to waste your time. I apologise, but all media outlets are now under severe pressure, and we cannot keep offering what’s essentially a free service. Should you have better suggestions, feel free to let the paper know."

Andrew Bolt deleted the above a few hours after posting it.

Bolt was the first of the Murdoch stable to hit his readers up for subscriptions and paywall ladders, and it was a complete disaster. Nobody wanted to pay to read online. Nobody.

Now, quite the opposite to executive-stacked newspapers and TV news room, small independent media in Australia is actually doing OK. It's the ones that have to kick up a few million a year to The Boss and all his executive buddies that are in the deepest shit.

Small, lean, fast digital news rooms (no office, no execs, no physical product) are the future, of course, it just took the likes of Murdoch, and Bolt, a lot longer than digital natives to understand.

Praying To The Digital Gods

By @DarrylMason

The Australian takes its column inches hogging obsession with the iPad to hilarious extremes:



How obsessed with the iPad is The Australian?

Utterly.

It's almost as if the newspaper's entire existence hangs on trying to convince 50,000 or more Australians to buy, and keep buying, its $4.99 per month (for now) iPad application. Which, of course, it does. Particularly considering owner Rupert Murdoch is planning to phase out the print edition within the next two or three years and shut down the printing presses forever, a Death To Newspapers move Murdoch described in September 2009 as "great" :

“I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees.

“Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It’s going to be great.”

Mumbrella noticed how obsessed The Australian has been with the iPad, and did some Googling. Since the start of February 2010, The Australian has run more than three dozen stories about the iPad, how absolutely brill it is, why it will save newspapers and how and why you should buy The Australian iPad app.

In just two days (April 12-13) The Australian ran at least six stories on the subject, most shamelessly hawking the digital tablet to readers in pure advertorial speak. On May 24, The Australian broke its own record by running four stories on the iPad.

Good luck to them. If their launch product is anything to go by - thin on content, visually bland - they're going to need it.

More From Mumbrella Here

The Australian Piles On The Lawyers To Hide Its Secrets

Amazing :

...the federal government anti-corruption agency, the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity....cut a deal with The Australian in which ACLEI agreed not to publish any of the information obtained about the newspaper during the investigation. ACLEI has also agreed to allow The Australian to review any future report it writes that refers to the paper or its employees.

A federal government anti-corruption agency has to allow a newspaper to review reports which discuss, or refer, to possible corruption at that newspaper. All of this results from a story The Australian ran on its front page about a anti-terrorism squad raid, a story they ran before the raid actually took place.

Your Right To Know?

Not in this case.

No wonder News Limited despises Crikey so much, they're just about the only news media company in Australia willing to report on how News Limited fights so hard to keep its secrets. And successfully so.

"Print Is Dead"

Rupert Murdoch should have listened to Egon, who made this prediction about the future of printed works back in 1984 :

Why Rupert Murdoch Loves The iPad

By Darryl Mason

Media readers, like the iPad, will effectively, eventually, shut out the free news competition :

Sweeting says he thinks many of the major media companies would love to see computers discourage people from searching the open Internet for content.

"I think the media companies will leap at this," he says. "It offers them the opportunity to essentially re-create the old business model, wherein they are pushing content to you on their terms rather than you going out and finding content, or a search engine discovering content for you."

Overhead-heavy bloated media corporations, like Murdoch's, who want to "put a tollbooth on the ocean" are betting the house that locked up media readers will save their outdated 20th century business models.

But they seem to be the only ones who believe that there will be enough people willing to pay to make it profitable enough to continue paying corporate media executives like Rupert Murdoch tens of millions of dollars a year.

Media Watch chewed through these issues last night.

Murdoch newspapers like The Australian are already planning to do away with their print versions, at least on a daily basis. It's the only way they can survive. The sums have been done and print must go. Here's The Australian's editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell :

"When you remove the fixed costs in newspapers, they become much more viable. So if you think of a newspaper without paper and ink and petrol and trucks, you're taking out between 60 and 70 per cent of the cost base....

"But I guess my view is that the core of the business is your ability to dream up ideas to create news - the things that we chase each day. "

"Dream up ideas to create news." What a curious thing to say, or to reveal about how the newsrooms of a corporate news empire actually work.

And you thought their job was to simply report the news.

September 17, 2009 : Rupert Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great!"

October 2009 : The Australian Tries To Rally Support For Murdoch's War On Free News Media

He Really Liked Peter Costello

The glory days of the influential, hard drinking, extremely well paid political journalist are over.



Glenn Milne is one of the last to fall :

The automated email response from News Limited gallery hack Glenn Milne delivered the news: “Please be advised that as of the 13/03/2010 I no longer work for News Limited Sunday Papers, I still work for The Australian.” Milne is directing correspondents to a Gmail account, presumably because his role at News is now as Australian column contributor only.

Interesting. So Glenn Milne gets sacked from the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Herald Sun for being a very expensive and all but useless inventor of quotes from anonymous 'senior Labor officials', but will still be writing columns for The Australian? Presumably the rate of publication of his columns in The Australian will fall off as he eased out of the way in time for serious election coverage.

Unless he writes them for free, of course.

VexNews :

Warned late last year after being summoned to a gathering of the Sunday newspapers’ editors that he had to pick up his game, the axe finally fell this week.

Milne is believed to have been on a package well in excess of $250,000, a number considerably in excess of most of his bosses. They compared their own productivity to his poor performance as a Gallery lounge lizard and found him wanting.

Frequent complaints about Milne included his lack of current political connections, his failure to generate exclusive stories of the kind he frequently promised and his tendency to share with editors “his stories” that were not much more than prevailing gossip around the water-cooler in the Gallery.

Exhibits from Glenn Milne's Hall Of 'Journalistic' Shame & Hilarity. 1) :

....more Australians have died as a result of the Rudd government's home insulation program, "administered" by Environment Minister Peter Garrett, than lost their lives in the Iraq war.

2) Glenn Milne announces Tony Abbott's friends should tell him to quit politics and go home to his wife :

...watching Abbott's disintegration you have to ask whether the strength of those convictions was ever viable in an environment where the electorate increasingly likes its politics "lite" in all respects, including when it comes to values.

In some senses, Abbott is simply too honest and too raw for modern politics...

3) My favourite :

Peter Costello will take over a decimated Coalition unopposed as Opposition Leader, knowing he would have been able to mount a stronger fight against Kevin Rudd and Labor.

There is unlikely to be any credible challenge to Mr Costello when he formally stands as leader at the first Liberal Party caucus meeting.

Previous contenders - Alexander Downer, Brendan Nelson, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull - have all faded under the weight of their own mistakes.

Glenn Milne used to get paid $250,000 a year to come up with stuff like that?

Just another example of the amazing excesses of 20th century corporate journalism. How could such a business model do anything but fail as the decades long decline of newspapers ran headlong into endless free comment and content from the internet?


..

Digital Rupert Predicts Death Of All Newspapers

Ex-Australian alleged newspaper industry visionary Rupert Murdoch now believes that only a
Kindle-like digital reader can save the newspaper business :

“If it doesn’t, newspapers will go out of business. All newspapers. There’s just not enough advertising to go around.”

All newspapers, Rupert? Or just most of yours?

The day that Australians are expected to start paying to gain access to Digital Rupert News Media seems to keep slipping deeper and deeper into 2010.

Meanwhile, NineMSN, Yahoo7, the ABC and SBS will not be charging readers to access their online news, and now Fairfax has announced it will Wait N See how disastrous the paywalls turn out to be for Digital Rupert before they make a decision.

The other huge problem that Digital Rupert doesn't mention, at least in the US, is that even while established newspapers are still online for free, eyeballs are already going elsewhere online. America's most famous newspapers, including Murdoch's New York Post, are hemorrhaging readers.

More than two out of three among the top 30 newspaper Web sites reported year-over-year declines in unique users in October according to new data from Nielsen Online.

It's not just a case of, as Murdoch claims, "there's not enough advertising to go around." There's also not enough readers, for the massive abundance of digital news, to go around. There's simply too much else to do online, or on an iPhone, than to read through the same headlines you've already seen on half a dozen other news sites, or on Twitter.

Physical newspapers are no longer essential for most people in their day to day lives. And online newspapers are becoming, likewise, less than essential for those who can access a world of free information and news already.

These are revolutionary, and revelatory, times for the established corporate news media that can now no longer control, or even majorly influence, the flow of news and information. At least, not like they could and did, only a few short years ago.

Tim Burrows (Mumbrella) : Murdoch Not Bluffing On Threat To Block Google

Murdoch Attacks Bloggers, Again, As His Empire Self-Destructs

This is from an Associated Press story, about the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, and News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch complaining, once again, about search engines and bloggers "stealing" their content. Interestingly, this story is hosted on Google who paid Associated Press to the use the story, and yet the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, is angry about search engines like Google using their content without paying for it :

The leaders of two of the world's major news organizations said Friday that it is time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay up.

The comments from Tom Curley of The Associated Press and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch come as the media industry struggles in the Internet age. Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune from their articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organizations producing the material.

"We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing.

"Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content."

He said content aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators.

"We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it," Curley said.

Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in Beijing's Great Hall of the People that content providers would be demanding to be paid.

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph," the News Corp. chief executive said.

The AP and its member newspapers contend that unauthorized use of their material is costing them tens of millions of dollars in potential advertising revenue at a time when they can least afford it.

The AP's revenue is expected to be around $700 million this year, down from $748 million in 2008, in part because of reductions in the fees it charges newspapers and broadcasters, whose advertising revenue has been dwindling as more marketers shift to less expensive or better-targeted options online.

Murdoch and Curley were speaking to 300 representatives from more than 170 media outlets from 80 countries at a meeting that will look at the challenges and opportunities the media face from the Internet, changes in technology and the world economic crisis.

It'll be interesting to visit this story again in three or four years and see what's happened.

Murdoch Media Reports Murdoch Media Plans Won't Work



It was there on the front page of Rupert Murdoch's news.com.au for a few hours, then it was gone. A story featuring Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, explaining why Murdoch's plans to charge people to read digital news is doomed to fail :

Publishers of general news will find it hard to charge for their content online because too much free content is available, (Eric Schmidt) the chief executive of Google says.

Mr Schmidt was responding to an announcement by News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch that he could start charging for content online.

"In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity," he said.

The story was open for comments, all of whom agreed with Schmidt. One example :

Gone are the days of people getting all of their news from the one source. People get their news from a variety of sources now. There is absolutely no reason to confine oneself to a singular edition of news on a single web site. I wonder why Murdoch doesn't understand this?

No doubt the automated publication of that news wire story on news.com.au must have caused a few palpitations.

Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great"

By Darryl Mason

It's not just smirking bloggers and feisty independent New Media snarking over the Death Of Newspapers. Now Rupert Murdoch, who convinced a generation of British fathers in the 1970s and 1980s that they should be proud to see their 18 year old daughter's tits on Page 3 of The Sun, is joining in the newsprint grave dancing :

"I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees.

“Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It’s going to be great.”

But the monopoly of distribution and political influence he once enjoyed, and exploited, with newspapers is gone forever. Now Murdoch's news has to compete in the ultimate free market, as he tries to force readers to pay for news that they will (soon after it breaks) also be able to find elsewhere on the internet for free.

Murdoch has also announced plans to increase prices for the cable sports programming he controls. He believes News Corp. has been “undercharging". Australian subscribers to premium Fox Sports channels will be surprised to hear that.

The first example of how Murdoch's YouWillPay! system will work, as far as news and opinion content is concerned, comes with the announcement that :

The Wall Street Journal...will start charging non-subscribers $2 a week to access content on mobile devices such as the BlackBerry, he said. Current subscribers will be charged $1.

So even if you already pay a few hundred dollars a year, or more, to access The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's going to hit you up for another $52 a years minimum to read it all on your hand screen.

The headline on this Financial Times story reads :

Murdoch Hails E-Readers

Like he has a choice now.

Malcolm Turnbull On Death Of Newspapers

Turnbull writing on the fall of newspapers, and the controversy over mainstream media charging readers for news content, in The National Times :

It was Rupert Murdoch who shrewdly, if gloomily, predicted: "The internet will destroy more profitable businesses than it will create."

And there are few businesses more vulnerable to the internet than newspapers, especially those dependent on revenues from classified advertisements.

It is hard to imagine many people poring through hard copy classifieds if they have access, as most do, to the speed, functionality and comprehensiveness of online classified sites.

While the demise of newspapers has been greatly exaggerated, the trend is certainly against them.

As an avid consumer of news, I can say that I only buy hard copy newspapers nowadays out of habit.

The vast bulk of the news and opinion I read I have received electronically – much of it before the newspaper itself actually finds itself to my front door.

We all understand that the circulation revenue of most publications, and certainly all newspapers, was always woefully inadequate. The newspaper was a cheap, on occasions free, platform upon which to sell advertisements both display and classified.

A similar observation could be made of free to air television, although there the oligopoly was a function of regulation.

The internet has changed all that. As broadband, especially wireless broadband, becomes more and more ubiquitous the barriers to entry to compete against free to air television, newspapers and magazines are evaporating.

From the consumer's viewpoint there is the prospect of almost infinite abundance of information and opinion. Our son in Hong Kong reads the Australian media online with the same ease as he, and we, are able to read the New York Times, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal - not to speak of the South China Morning Post.

And the access to opinion is not limited to those big names. Increasingly opinion leaders have their own online blogs. If you want to get an expert, often contrarian, insight into the Chinese economy for example you can go to www.mpettis.com a specialist blog by a professor at Peking University and enjoy not just Michael Pettis' views but also a vigorous debate and commentary on every post.

The days when only a handful of media companies controlled access to the media megaphone are fading from view.

There are four main players in this game and it is interesting to consider each of their positions in the old and new worlds.

The author of the content – the journalist for example – faces the challenge of news organisations with diminishing revenues. But he or she still has a valuable and important contribution to offer. People want to read Annabel Crabb or listen to Alan Jones. But what about the humble news reporter whose byline is less memorable or compelling? The advertiser has it made. The avenues for spruiking their wares gets wider and cheaper all the time. The internet offers the opportunity of very precise targeting too – so its all upside for the advertiser.

The consumer too has it made – content is becoming more and more diverse and almost all of it is free. Those sites which try to charge big money run the risk that they drive down traffic which then reduces their attractiveness to advertisers who after all are only interested in eyeballs.

The publisher, the big, established media company, has the most to lose. It is all downside. The reason the Sydney Morning Herald could charge a premium for its classifieds (or indeed its display advertising) was because it had a large number of dedicated readers for whom there was no, or very few, alternative mediums – now there is an enormous range of alternatives most of them offering vastly superior functionality.

Many traditional hard copy publishers have sought to move into online publishing, but in doing so they have arguably only hastened their own demise. Because they assumed the hard copy publication was paying for the content, the marginal cost of repurposing it for the internet was negligible. Hence access to online newspaper websites is almost invariably free. They therefore offered advertisers the opportunity to access the readers who were interested in the content offered in hard copy for a tiny fraction of the price of an advertisement in the newspaper itself.

And you can see this decline in the share price of Fairfax. When the Tourang consortium took over Fairfax in 1992 the shares listed at $1.20. Today – seventeen years later – the stock price is $1.64.

So who wins out of all this? Certainly the advertisers and the consumers, that's a no brainer.

The established newspaper companies will struggle to build enough additional value in their online businesses to offset the loss of value in their declining hard copy businesses.

But what about the writers and journalists? Are they to face an anarchic brave new world where they have to try to sell their wares on line as Alan Kohler and Bob Gottliebsen are trying to do?

And what happens to investigative journalism?

Opinion is relatively cheap to acquire or produce. But who now can pay for a team of reporters to work diligently away at government or corporate misconduct?

This era of profitless abundance should give us cause for concern – it raises real issues for our democracy. Will newsrooms deprived of the resources to do their own sleuthing become more and more dependent on packages of information prepared and presented to them by the growing army of government media advisers and spinmeisters?

How independent can the media be if it lacks the financial resources to do its work?

Good question.

The answer will become clear over the next two years.

James Murdoch : Free News Is Anti-Free Speech

Now I may be misquoting James Murdoch to some extent by attributing the above words to him, but it certainly seems to be what he is saying in this remarkably whiney speech, as the worldwide Murdoch media empire loses billions and faces ruin. This is how the Murdoch-owned TimesOnline reported the story:

An out-of-control BBC and addiction to central planning by regulators are damaging democracy and media choice in Britain, James Murdoch said in Edinburgh last night.

Giving the annual MacTaggart lecture to an audience of television executives, Mr Murdoch, 36, the son of Rupert Murdoch, called for a “dramatic reduction of the activities of the State” in broadcasting, arguing that it effectively treated viewers like children.

He contrasted the prevailing political attitude to mainstream broadcasting with the lightly regulated newspaper, film or book industry where consumer choice predominates.

Mr Murdoch, chief executive of the European and Asian operations of News Corporation, parent company of The Times, said: “In the regulated world of public service broadcasting, the customer does not exist: he or she is a passive creature — a viewer in need of protection.

“In other parts of the media world, including pay television and newspapers, the customer is just that: someone whose very freedom to choose makes them important.”

He said that the “chilling” expansionism of the BBC meant that commercial rivals and consumer choice were struggling. In particular the “expansion of state-sponsored journalism” in the form of BBC News online was “a threat to plurality and the independence of news provision, which are so important to our democracy”.

Mr Murdoch criticised Radio 2’s effort to woo younger listeners by hiring presenters such as Jonathan Ross on “salaries no commercial competitor could afford”.

“No doubt the BBC celebrates the fact that it now has well over half of all radio listening. But the consequent impoverishment of the once-successful commercial sector is testament to the corporation’s inability to distinguish between what is good for it and what is good for the country.”

Mr Murdoch’s lecture comes 20 years after his father, the chief executive of News Corp, made a wide-ranging attack on the BBC and the British television establishment. However, this speech fell short of calling for specific cutbacks to the BBC or other changes in broadcasting policy, so as to concentrate on first principles.

He said: “The consensus appears to be that creationism — the belief in a managed process with an omniscient authority — is the only way to achieve successful outcomes. There is general agreement that the natural operation of the market is inadequate, and that a better outcome can be achieved through the wisdom and activity of governments and regulators. This creationist approach is similiar to the industrial planning which went out of fashion in other sectors in the 1970s. It failed then. It’s failing now.”

Defending the BBC, Sir Michael Lyons, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, said that its licence fee funding system meant that it “has no choice but to serve all audiences, but that doesn’t meant that it can or should seek to squeeze out other providers”.

He added: “We have to be careful not to reduce the whole of broadcasting to some simple economic transactions. The BBC’s public purposes stress the importance of the well-tested principles of educating and informing, and an impartial contribution to debate.”

Ofcom, the communications regulator, was criticised by Mr Murdoch for intervening “with relish” whenever it had the opportunity and producing adjudications on what broadcasters “can and cannot say” amounting to “roughly half a million words” long. Its activities included “the no doubt vital guide on ‘How to Download,’ which teenagers across the land could barely have survived without”.

He stopped short of calling for the abolition of Ofcom but said that its activities needed to be reduced “to contemplate intervention only on the evidence of actual and serious harm to the interests of consumers”.

Mr Murdoch, who is also the chief executive of BSkyB, 39.1 per cent owned by News Corp, made clear that he believed that broadcasters such as Sky should be freed from the long-standing requirement to produce impartial news.

He argued that “the mere selection of stories and their place in the running order is itself a process full of unacknowledged partiality”. The impartiality rule was “an impingement on the freedom of speech”.

Ofcom said that it welcomed Mr Murdoch’s contribution. It was “committed to its duty to protect consumers’ and viewers’ interests and to promote competition and innovation based on thorough and objective evidence and analysis”.

For some contrast, this is how the BBC reported the James Murdoch speech attacking the BBC :

News Corporation's James Murdoch has said that a "dominant" BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK.

The chairman of the media giant in Europe, which owns the Times and Sun, also blamed the UK government for regulating the media "with relish".

"The expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision," Mr Murdoch said.

He was giving the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival.

Mr Murdoch said that organisations like the BBC, funded by the licence fee, as well as Channel 4 and Ofcom made it harder for other broadcasters to survive.

"The BBC is dominant," Mr Murdoch said. "Other organisations might rise and fall but the BBC's income is guaranteed and growing."

"The scope of its activities and ambitions is chilling."

News Corporation, which owns Sky television, lost $3.4bn (£2bn) in the year to the end of June, which his father, News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch, said had been "the most difficult in recent history".

Other media organisations are also struggling as advertising revenues have dropped during the downturn.

Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, told BBC's World Tonight that Mr Murdoch had underplayed the importance of Sky as a competitor.

"Sky continues to grow and get stronger and stronger all the time so this is not quite a set of minnows and a great big BBC," Sir Michael said.

"The BBC has a very strong competitor in Sky, and not one to be ignored."

Mr Murdoch said free news on the web provided by the BBC made it "incredibly difficult" for private news organisations to ask people to pay for their news.

"It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it," he said.

News Corporation has said it will start charging online customers for news content across all its websites.

It owns the Times, the Sunday Times and Sun newspapers and pay TV provider BSkyB in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.

Rupert Murdoch addressed the same festival 20 years ago, and criticised the UK's media policy then as well.

Unfortunately for the Murdoch empire, now crying "Unfair!", the vast majority of Brits, like the vast majority of Australians, are very happy, and very satisfied, with their taxpayer funded broadcasters.

The Fairfax/Murdoch Merger Grows Nearer

It doesn't sound like it would be legal, but they're open to discussing it anyway :

Fairfax Media managing director Brian McCarthy said he would be "happy to talk" to rival News Corp about charging readers for online news content.

Mr McCarthy's comments came after Fairfax posted a net loss of $380 million for the year to June 30, due to a downturn in advertising and writedowns forced by the financial crisis.

"We're looking at all the options and if that's one of the options we'll look at it," Mr McCarthy said on a teleconference on Monday.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp, said in August his global media group would start charging for access to online news content this financial year to combat falling advertising revenue.

Mr McCarthy said if News Ltd chairman and chief executive John Hartigan were to ring him: "I'd have a chat and we'd look at it".

"It certainly would be something we'd be open minded to at this stage."

Mr McCarthy remembers the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission :

"There is a group called the ACCC and whatever we do, we have to make sure we're doing it within the law.

"Putting that to one side, as I said I'd be happy to talk to anybody about any suggestions."

The Los Angeles Times reported on its website on Friday that News Corp's chief digital officer Jonathan Miller had met with executives from the New York Times, Washington Post, Hearst Corp and Tribune Company to discuss the formation of a consortium to charge for online news content.

The Murdoch and Fairfax media already both fund and share the content of the Australian Associated Press news agency.

Paywalls For Murdoch Bloggers?

"No. NO. N.O. Nope. Nah. Never. Ever."

By Darryl Mason

Yesterday, we had a look at the responses in comments at Andrew Bolt's blog to the announcement that Digital Rupert wants everyone to start paying to read his 'quality journalism', and presumably blogs as well.

Murdoch wants his star online writers to pay their way now, they have to prove their worth by showing that they have plenty of loyal readers who will fork over some cash to get access to their thoughts and insights and research.

When The Professional Idiot asked, whaddayathink? 99% of Boltoids responded "No!"

In short, the 'Step One : Gauge Public Reaction' exercise in slowly introducing thousands of Andrew Bolt readers to the 'You Will Pay!' model was a Total Fucking Disaster.

So then Tim Blair, casual blogger at the Daily Telegraph, took a shot at finding out if his readers will now pay for what they've been reading for years online for free.

According to Blair, the installation of pay walls across the Digital Rupert empire....

....might happen more rapidly than people expect. You all up for payin’?

Cue a Total Fucking Disaster Part 2 as dozens of Blair's most dedicated readers and commenters, those expected by Digital Ruper executives to be the likeliest to pay, crush dreams of healthily profitable blogging :

"The short answer is: never. I’ve never paid for on-line content and never will."

"Nope."

"No."

"No."

"Sorry, not paying. Ever."

"You all up for payin’? No."

"tell ‘em their dreaming."

"NO There are plenty of other free sites around."

"People won’t pay. They just won’t. It may suck, but there it is."

"I’d be disappointed if I was asked to pay for access to a blog and probably wouldn’t, with all due respects to your talents, Tim."

"No."

"Hell no"

"Nice blog you’ve got here, Tim. Pity if something should happen to it."

And my favourite :

"I’m getting a very strong 'Super League' vibe about this whole idea."

After dozens of utterly negative comments towards the possibility of Blair stepping behind a pay wall in Digital Rupert's NewsOTainment Online Fortress, Blair's very good friend 'WB' dropped by and, what a shock, announced that 'You Will Pay!' is damn good idea, actually :

"The point for Rupert I guess is that ad revenue is just not enough.

....he’s having to turn his mind to charging and I am having to turn my mind to paying for the content I access multiple times daily and currently for no more than my ISP and mobile phone charges.

I love online content. It rocks for the most part. And I think it has value that should be paid for to the authors and creators of it. So I kind of hope Rupert gets this up..."

'WB' was all but a lone voice backing 'You Will Pay!' in all those pages of negative comments :

"No. N.O. Hell, no."

"You all up for payin’? Nope!"

"Ha! Dream on."

"You all up for payin’?"

"Nope"

Tim Blair has the same fundamental problem that Andrew Bolt has. Their thousands of readers might yet come round to the idea of paying something each month or year to read their blogs, with plenty of incentives, but they most certainly will not pay while Bolt and Blair remain a part of the Digital Rupert empire.

Many Blair and Bolt readers have no love or loyalty for Murdoch, and they don't appear interested in the rest of Digital Rupert's world of content. They don't want their money being used by the Daily Telegraph and Courier Mail to denigrate society with celebrity porn filth and art wank, helping to fund the cursed leftie Obama & Al Gore faithful cheer squads they appear to believe have infested the news rooms of virtually all the Australian news media.

For someone who was in the vanguard of Australian bloggers back in the dark and turgid days of the early 2000s, this must be quite a monumental moment for Tim Blair. It's certainly an extremely significant event in the history of Australian blogging, for professional bloggers to turn to their audiences and hold out a permanent begging bowl.

But can the 'You Will Pay!' model be made to work?

The very concept of a blog has to change. It can't just be a text blog anymore. A 'You Will Pay!' site built around one journalist, or opinionist, will have to thumping with content, video, audio, decent search engines to trawl the archives, and plenty more to turn something that was free into something that costs money.

No readers of any Australian blogs seem to like the idea of the blogs they like being moved behind pay walls, and why should they? It clearly means a lot less other readers and commenters. The community of readers built up around a blog with lively comment threads will always be decimated by the shift from free to pay for access.

Like bloggers, prolific and verbose commenters love to know that the blog that they're spending time and thought commenting at is actually being read by more than a few dozen, or a few hundred, people.

These commenters like the big audience that a Bolt or Blair blog site provides. They're not going to have that behind pay walls. They know that. As many at Bolt and Blair's blogs have already pointed out, a 'You Wil Pay!' blog becomes like a private club, with limited attendance, and the same old people coming back every day until the club closes due to extreme boredom.

Seriously, what's the point of dropping landmine comments at Digital Rupert blogs baiting Stupid Lefties by claiming they frothingly fantasise about a four-way with Hitler, Stalin and Mao, if a pay wall means that no Stupid Lefties will be reading such witty utterances?

And to top it all off, there will also be no more anonymous or alias-only commenting under the Digital Rupert New Media Order. Tim Blair is also preparing his readers for that alarming prospect.

Regardless of whether pay walls go up around the Blair & Bolt blogs, a Digital Rupert ID system for commenting is on the cards. Digital Rupert wants to data-mine readers and give the information culled from registrations to advertisers and marketers. It's all part of the Digital Rupert strategy to allow advertisers to "target you across multiple platforms". Sounds painful.

To finish, another sampling of the 100-plus negative comments Blair received when he dared to ask his readers, folksy-style, "You all up for payin'?":

"Nope. Two things I would never pay for - and online news is one of them."

"Tim - I’m also going to have to say no. Sorry."

"I’m afraid not, Tim. For all the reasons listed above."

"You all up for payin’? HAHAHAHA......HAHAHAHAH....GASP.... HAHAHAH wait, you’re serious? nope"

"The concept of having to pay to read this blog is very amusing."

There's a lot of Murdoch execs, and journalists, who can't see the funny side of the prickly predicament they're now in.

A media empire is crumbling, gushing billions, losing audiences, and perhaps most crushingly for Rupert Murdoch himself, Losing Influence. Murdoch lost truckloads of money keeping The Australian in production through the 1980s and 1990s because he knew he could influence and control the government of the day with a national broadsheet read by the country's most powerful business leaders, politicians and ruling classes. Those days are over.

To save his fortune and his business, Murdoch will dare to lose one million online free readers to suck some bucks from 1000 who are willing to pay.

These are desperate end days for the Murdoch media empire.

Murdoch has to find readers who will pay. Millions of them around the world to stem the massive losses, even after he shuts down the printing presses for the last time.

And where are all these people who will pay to read what they used to get for free?

Nobody seems to know yet.

Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt went looking and they certainly couldn't find any.

Except for 'WB' of course.

Go Here For More Stories On Digital Rupert, Paywalls And The Fall Of Newspapers

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How To Kill A Blog In One Simple Step

The Professional Idiot Shyly, Slyly Asks : Will You Pay To Read My Blog?

The Answers Are Unanimous & Ugly

By Darryl Mason

The anticipation builds for Australia's media corporations and hundreds of nervous journalists. Will readers of Fairfax and Murdoch media pay to access the content they now get for free? Will a You Must Pay! system save Australia's corporate media from crashing and burning?

I'll guess we'll see, with both Murdoch and Fairfax now having announced plans to introduce charges to access some of their online content.

And so a carefully worded proposal from The Professional Idiot to his readers, and the dozens of commenters who supply much of the overall content of his blog, is floated under the ominous heading A Warning To You.

In this proposal, this delicate testing of the waters, The Professional Idiot asks "think it will work?" as he embraces the Digital Rupert New Age Of NewsOTainment mantra of convincing people they should pay to read Murdoch media news and blogs.

The answer from the Boltoids is unanimous, from the casual visitors to the diehard Andrew Bolt true believers and obsessive compulsive commenters. Fuck No, Rupert. We Won't Pay!

It's a nervous time for Murdoch execs and Rupert himself, along with many hundreds of Australian employees, they lost a lot of money, ad sales are down anything from 20-40%, or more, they have to give away thousands of copies of the supposedly blue chip asset, The Australian, everyday in the foyers of dozens of office towers in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, to keep advertisers happy, the old business model is rivering blood. They're fucking scared.

A few years back, Rupert Murdoch looked at the blog phenomena and decided that kind of content was going to become a big part of the new digital media future he was reluctantly forced to quickly try and get a grasp of.

Rupert Murdoch loved that prolific comments provided so many hits and free content for blogs, and on news stories. He was overwhelmed by the idea that there were all these independent bloggers doing what they did for free, for free! not like all those real journalists with their demands for....expenses and....sunlight and.....chairs, and all the rest of it. Rupert seemed to understand a few years ago that the blogger provided the starting point, the ignition switch, for the comments to flow, adding content, drawing readers back again and again, even if they weren't commenting, just to read what everyone else was saying.

So snap up a couple of independent bloggers, turn columnists into sorta-bloggers, and load their pages with ads. Oh, wait. The arse just completely fell out of ad revenue. Fuck, look at it go. Okay, what now? Let's make 'em pay!

Rupert fantasised, or believed the exciting blitherings of some 22 year old digital maverick who convinced him, either in all seriousness or in jest, that one day people will be happy to pay to read blogs. Yes, they will. They'll pay to read them and still write pages of comments for free. And they'll do it happily.

This idea must have been particularly tasty to Rupert : they will pay me to contribute free content to my media sites which I'll then charge others to read! Brilliant!

Well, if Rupert Murdoch did believe some scenario like that, he can forget about it right now.

That business model is already bagged and slabbed.

The daily readers of The Professional Idiot, the most popular (at least as far as hits go) of all the Australian Murdoch blogs, have filed their complaints about soon having to Pay To Read, and the complaints are many, and annoyed, and tone dark with the sound of soon to be departing eyeballs and interest :

"Shareholders should see this a sign of dementia - they should to tell him to enjoy his retirement and move over for his sons."

"Pay to post on news blogs? Tell ‘im he’s dreamin’."

"Once again MSM is planning to control what we read. I think it will actually bring a lot more underground blogs up which can only be a good thing. MSM is merely a propoganda machine anyway."

"It would kill blogging and kill your readership. It would kill discussion and debate on important issues."

"I trust that if Murdoch is planning on charging us to read your blog he’ll also be paying us for our contributions. Some of the entries posted by amateurs demonstrate more originality of thought, and indeed a higher degree of technical savvy, than articles written by Murdoch’s ‘quality journalists’."

"I’m sorry Andrew, I love reading your blog, but if I have to pay I will spend my time elsewhere. The content is great, but at the end of the day it’s entertainment and there is plenty of FREE entertainment on the net to choose from."

"Charge to visit the blog and the advertisers will walk out the same door as the readers."

"lol....paying for propaganda or half the story supplied by the murdoch globalist empire...the world according to rupert and his minions will need a truth and integrity injection before they get a cash injection..."

"I wont support a pay wall. Uncle Rupert will be lucky to make this stick. Lets say China decides to print News Ltd stuff for free. Is Rupert going to shirt front Beijing? Worked real well last time he tried."

"Pretty sad business sense. Loyalty was once a valued customer trait - not anymore - bleed the bastards dry."

"NewsCorp is mostly left wing dribble not much better than the Age. I look forward to their downfall."

"NOTE TO THE INCOMPETANT IDIOTS running NewsCorp: If you want more readers, sack your lying left wing arts degree journalists, and hire real journalists who will write the truth and and not the politically correct dribble most of them write."

"News Ltd are the bastions of the right wing point of view. If News Ltd make all their site user pays they are giving up ‘free’ news to the left."

"In terms of this blog. Nobody, except Andrew’s diehard supports are going to pay to access this blog. Then there will be so few people her that it just wont be the same. Very little debate just a love feast between a few."

"This is a business decision by someone who don’t understand the web."

"As much as I like you Andrew, if Rupe puts you behind a pay-wall then this is good bye."

"I ain’t gonna work"

"Like pornography, there are plenty of people willing to look up the news online when it’s free, but when it comes to paying for it, very few will do so."

"If Rupert wants to charges us to do so then I will cancel delivery of my Herald Sun. Therefore, the local newsagent will lose a customer and I imagine I won’t be the only one ‘pulling the plug’."

"Pay to read the news, and pay to post on news blogs? In a pig’s eye!"

"If he goes ahead with this it will be the worst decision he has made and one which will see the end of his media empire."

And countless examples of short and simple :

"No."

"No."

"Hell, no."

"I won't pay."

The major problem seems to be that most of The Professional Idiot's daily readers think the rest of the Murdoch online media is worthless trash riven with pagan socialist secret muslim leftie journos and global warming propagandising Rudd worshippers.

They don't want to pay to read Bolt's blog, and they'll be fucked if they will pay some sort of overall fee to get access to read the blog and the rest of the Herald Sun or Adelaide Advertiser, they don't sound interested in other Murdoch content outside of Bolt's blog, and they openly mock the daily Murdoch news as celebrity guff and Green-brainwashed fluff not worth a single click.

So it would appear the only way to capture any money from the Boltoids would be to charge readers for access only to The Professiona ldiot's blog, and not some package drawing in other Murdoch content.

If Rupert Murdoch is seriously considering charging to read a blog, or to comment at a blog, or to read comments, how much would he need to charge to make it worthwhile for the blogger, and to pay for the admin and moderators and researchers?

A You Must Pay! blog has to spot on, no mistakes, constant postings, breaking news as it happens, instant moderation and updated comments, all of this around the clock. The complaints from those who pay will be vast, grating and time-consuming.

Basically, Bolt's blog would need to become something of a news portal and blog, with quick turnover of stories, columns, comments. If Bolt doesn't then rely on free labour from students and interns, he's going to have be charging 10,000 readers at least $50 a year to make it worthwhile, or even break even.

But he's not going to find 10,000 who will pay to read his blog. Maybe a thousand, if he's lucky, more likely only a few hundred, and then only if the price is low.

If you could charge to read blogs, more bloggers would be doing it. It doesn't work. Unless you're a time traveller and can go check out the future for your subscribers and give them advice on how to avoid falling tree limbs or cyclones or shitty stock or house-losing divorces, people won't pay to read a blog.

And nor should they.

A likely scenario is that Bolt, like Tim Blair, Piers Akerman and Janet Albretchsen will be bundled together in a single subscription, monthly or yearly. You pay for The Idiot and get some bonus Planet Janet and Ak Attack. Such a subscription service might work on e-readers and iPhones, where the charge is added to your account, simple, but the problem remains that most of their online competition will not be charging, and everything they do charge for will end on fair use sites anyway, or liberally quoted in blogs.

They could call it The Sad Conservative Ranter Value Bundle.

Bolt's got maybe 30,000 readers who visit his site at least once or twice a week, that's a very generous estimate. The daily readership is obviously much less. It might be only 5000 or 6000 readers, for the most heavily promoted blog site in Australia.

Could Rupert charge Boltoid's $100 a year if The Professional Idiot got in and interacted with subscribers in the way George Mega already does at The Australian? Actually talked to them? Maybe a daily video of The Professional Idiot's eye-rolling, girlish shoulder shrugging and impudent whining that only Premium Content Bolt readers can experience?

The shock to come that should already be so obvious to professional media execs who get paid to know this kind of shit is this : most of The Professional Idiot's audience is attracted to the blog because of the range of intelligent to crazed to WTF? comments his blog attracts. When Murdoch starts charging to read the blog, the comments will disappear, the throb of life of anger of laughter of mockery of bullying of hysterical attacks of slayings and occasional good-natured cajoling will be gone.

The Professional Idiot's commenters mostly know this, because they are people who won't pay, and won't come back if they're expected to.

I know that market watchers have poured over all those comments at The Professional Idiot's as he tries to gauge reaction to a You Must Pay! version of his blog, and other Murdoch online media content. The reaction from Boltoids could not have been any more disastrous.

There may be You Must Pay! content on Murdoch media sites by January, 2010, but it seems unlikely to include Murdoch bloggers, particularly The Professional Idiot and Tim Blair.

Good luck to them if they can make it work.

Digital Rupert Wants You To Pay To Read His News So He Can Datamine Your Personal Info For Advertisers

"News Is Very Expensive To Create"

By Darryl Mason

Here's Richard Freudenstein, CEO of Digital Rupert, explaining to the recent Sydney Advertising & Marketing Summit how the Murdoch media will not only charge for online content but will also suck up personal details about readers and make them available to advertisers.

In short, the Murdoch media want you to pay so they can target ads directly at you.

"The problem is that the traditional advertiser-supported model is not enough, by itself, to pay for the level of investment in journalism that society needs.

So to make up the difference we have to look at charging for content.

The question is having been given it for free, will people now pay for online news content?

The first thing to remember is that people happily pay for news every day.

Indeed nearly 19 million newspapers are bought in Australia every week.

So clearly there is a healthy market for news.

But the future for Murdoch media is not newspapers, that old "dinosaur industry" as Stephen Mayne calls them, but Digital Rupert's holy grail/messiah: The E-Reader.

"a high-definition full colour e-reader, containing all your favourite newspapers and magazines from around the world...."

Sounds awesome.

But wait....

"It will deliver high definition ads which, when touched, will run a video, give detailed product information, download a brochure, or run a price comparison across local retailers.

An exciting proposition, I’m sure you’ll agree."

So you will have to pay to have some hyper-reality ad leaping out of the middle of a story shouting your name and telling you how absolutely rocking you will look in this new electric car.

Who will this paid content e-reader near-future world of Murdoch news be actually serving. The consumer, or the advertiser?

Some refreshing honesty from Digital Rupert's CEO :

Indeed, uppermost in our minds is that whatever the platform is, it must work effectively for not only our readers, but also for you – our agencies and advertisers.

We’re confident that the combination of print, online, mobile and e-reader presents a terrific opportunity for advertisers.

We’ll have a large, highly engaged opt-in audience who are open to advertising messages.

Now it sounds fucking shit, particularly if I'm paying for it.

And we all know what 'opt-in' means. If you don't read the contract and/or agreement carefully enough and see the part where you have to 'opt-out' to stop the bombardment of advertisers, you will automatically be 'opted-in.' Some still seem surprised to learn that someone else can own the rights of their photos when they publish them on social networking sites.

But here's the hook for those who want to drive you bonkers with ads, it's the real brilliance of getting people to pay for online content in the first place: the customer be able to sign on to get the news anonymously, there will be mandatory details that will have to be supplied, along with the payments. Not solely for security reasons, but so your personal details and interests and online habits can be auctioned to advertisers. Data-mined in other words.

"....we’ll have their full registration details – location and demographic details. We’ll know their consumption habits and we’ll be able to target them across multiple platforms."

I don't know if you've ever been "targeted across multiple platforms", but it doesn't sound pleasant.

So this is the future of Murdoch "quality journalism"?

It's the digital equivalent of what one of my old newspaper bosses told me about the value of news and feature stories in his publications : "They fill the space around the ads. They give readers something else to look at."

And finally this revelation from the Digital Rupert CEO :

But when it comes down to it, people want the news, and they want news they can trust.

The problem is that such news is very expensive to create.

Did he just confirm that the Murdoch media "create news" instead of simply reporting it?

There is a very exciting e-reader news revolution about to begin, but there will be many who will find a way to make it profitable without data-mining their customers and storming their brains with electronic advertising designed to distract you from what you're trying to read, or watch, or hear.

"The Media Can't Be Trusted To Tell The Truth"

By Darryl Mason

Jonathan Holmes, host of Media Watch, in a debate, lists a series of recent debacles from the mainstream media :

On July 21, four days after the Jakarta hotel bombings, Seven News reported: ‘‘Another bomb has exploded in Jakarta. The device went off just moments ago at a building near the Australian embassy.’’ No, it didn’t. No bomb, no unexploded bomb, no suspicious package. Nothing but a couple of hoax phone calls.

On June 20, the first edition of The Daily Telegraph and other News Ltd papers read: ‘‘Revealed: Email that could topple a Government.’’ That email may yet topple an opposition leader. But it won’t do any harm to the journalist who ‘‘revealed’’ its content, or the editors who decided to publish it, even though it turned out to be a fake.

Then there’s page one of The Sunday Telegraph on March 15: ‘‘PAULINE BETRAYED. Provocative: A young Pauline Hanson pouts for the camera in racy lingerie … ’’

The Sunday Telegraph editor promised to quit if the 'Hanson' photos turned out to be fake. They were fake, the editor didn't quit.

Holmes is just scratching the surface. He argues one of the biggest problems gouging away at the credibility of mainstream media today is not solely a lack of journalists, or highly skilled journalists, but the Deadline Now! atmosphere of 24 hour breaking news on TV, on radio, and online.

Fewer and fewer people are under pressure to produce more and more. That means less time to research, less time to write, less time to check, fewer subeditors to knock copy into shape.

Which is why the media, arguably, can be trusted less than ever to tell the truth.

Holmes posits a greater problem, however, about what modern journalism in mainstream media actually means :

"The media are not in the business of telling us the truth. The media are in the business of telling us stories.

"That simple little word dominates any professional conversation between journalists. I’m working on a story. It’s a good story, a great story, a balltearer of a yarn. Or, it’s a dud story, it’s a non-story, there’s no story.

"The idea of the story, of course, dates back to the time when people made little distinction between fact and fiction. Was Homer telling us the truth about the Trojan Wars? Did the Cyclops really have one eye, or Perseus winged feet? Does it matter? They’re great stories.

"They’re about love, and fear, and rage, and jealousy, and courage in adversity – the same emotions that 2500 years later sell copies of the Tele, or attract viewers to A Current Affair.

"But the media, of course, are supposed to tell us true stories."

How 20th century of you, Mr Holmes. This is the age of manufactured news media realities. The story is everything. Does it matter if it doesn't turn out to be true? It's fun for a few days, and the truth reality is always a bit of a bummer.

The reality a series of stories builds up, even if they are only brushed lightly with the truth, in the media over days, or weeks, or years, becomes for some all the truth they need to know. Or want to know.

Why shatter the manufactured reality with too many distracting facts?

Today, if you want to live in a reality where the future of the planet faces "dire consequences" resulting from our addiction to old energy sources and only the wisdom of carbon tax profiteers like Al Gore and Rupert Murdoch can save us all, you can follow certain columnists, haunt certain news sites and blog sites, all of which will mostly continue to enforce that reality. And addd to it.

Or you can believe the climate crisis is one big fat conspiracy created by those who stand to most benefit from the implementation of a global carbon tax.

You can, depending on the radio shows you listen to and the newspapers and bloggers you read, live in Sydney and truly believe that you are under constant direct threat from Al Qaeda (via Somalia/Lebanon/Pakistan/Iran) linked Islamist terrorists.

You can easily find enough material on a handful of mainstream news sites to reinforce that dangerous reality most days, and ignore anything that tells you otherwise, that threatens to bite away at the manufactured reality you enjoy with those annoying teeth of truth.

Whatever your choice of fear, it's easy to find a selection of news media and online screeds to feed it and sustain it. You can get Google to send you news alerts every time a story or blog post involving your favourite fear is published online.

Personally, I live in perpetual fear of both UFO invasions and surviving into the post-apocalyptic aftermath of a massive meteor impact. Fortunately, my double fear is countered by supreme confidence that the world-crushing meteor will arrive just as the UFO invasion begins and destroy them all, resulting in the meteor being obliterated into harmless but beautiful fiery dust in our night skies.

You'd be amazed at how stories find their way online from across the world every week about looming UFO invasions and planet-killing meteor strikes. Then again, you may already know. You probably read the mainstream media as well.

The rest of the Jonathan Holmes piece is here.

You Say "Significant Slump", I Say "Fraction"

Duncan Riley asks did John Hartigan, CEO of News Limited, deceive the market when he claimed, on July 1, that :

...newspaper ad revenue in Australia has been growing – not declining over the past 5 years as it has in the US and the UK. Even in the past year, the decline in ad revenue in Australia is a fraction of what’s been happening overseas.

ABC’s AM reported on August 6 :

Rupert Murdoch says his papers in Australia have endured a 30 per cent slump in classified ads and a 12 per cent drop in display ads in the fourth quarter, and that’s thanks mainly to a drop-off in car and real estate and employment advertisements,

Riley zeros in on the use of the word "fraction" by Hartigan, and rightly so.