Catallaxy Files

I have never seen a media outlet provoke so much hissing and spitting as The Australian has over the past year or so. Not even The Truth which, at its worst, attracted many defamation suits but was not mentioned in polite company.

Certainly the Oz – in its leaders and (most, not all) of its opinion pieces – leans towards a free market position. It is not particularly conservative on social issues but unlike any other paper in the country it has run articles from climate change sceptics. Its choice of front page articles also sometimes display a government questioning position. Yesterday it ran a story on an auditor general’s report suggesting that much government expenditure was wasted. The Sydney Morning Herald led with the news that this year’s Tour de France winner had failed a drug test. But I don’t see the Oz as being as far to the right as, say,  The Age is to the left.

But the left leaning blogs boil with outrage at the Oz. On one blog there is a call for secondary boycott of companies that advertise in the paper. A while back one commenter on a blog proposed that the government use its Corporations power simply to close down the paper.I won’t link these blogs – you know who they are and you can read them if you doubt my assessment.

And it’s not that the Oz is particularly influential. It sells under 140,000 a day Monday to Friday and 300,000 on Saturdays. That is national and about half are in NSW and a third in Victoria. The SMH sells about 211,000 a day during the week (360,000 on Saturday) and The Age  200,000 and 280,000. So in NSW the Oz (roughly) sells less than one third of the SMH during the week and in Victoria less than a quarter of The Age.

The biggest selling paper in the country is, by the way, the Sunday Telegraph (650,000) which endorsed the ALP for the recent election.

Underneath a lot of the rage seems to be a belief that everything the Oz publishes is at the direction of Rupert Murdoch. This is nonsense. Murdoch has in the past directed his papers to run a political line when his interests are at stake but I doubt he has much interest in Australian politics these days. If he was intent on destroying the ALP government he would not have allowed the Sunday Telegraph to recommend a vote for it.

It is all even stranger when you realize that the most influential political commentators these days are the talk radio people – Alan Jones, Steve Price, Ray Hadley et al. They get no attention from the angry blogs, probably because the chatterers do not listen to daytime radio.

There might be a clue in that. I have long thought that the reason the ABC gets so many complaints about its political bias is that a big hunk of its audience are upper middle class Liberal voters. Last time I saw surveys that group watches ABC TV and rarely commercial TV. So they believe it’s their ABC and grind their teeth when they watch the 7:30 Report or Lateline. I suspect that the left leaning true believers in the universities, the schools and the public service are mostly print consumers. They read – and take seriously – the broadsheets even though they deny ever buying the Oz. They don’t see the Daily Telegraph or the Herald Sun so they don’t complain about then, except  for Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, who they read online.

That’s as close as I can come to explaining the wave of rage directed at the Oz from the left.

News Limited has announced a very interesting reorganisation in Australia. The Australian, the national daily, will move out from under Nationwide News which contains the state based dailies. It will, says the report, “position The Australian for further growth in print and online, as well as through emerging digital platforms such as smartphones and electronic readers, at a time when the media group is looking to charge for online content.”

Reorganistations  can happen for all sorts of reasons: a slow week in the HR department, personality conflicts, a need to give a promising manager a chance to run something. With a well managed company like News though, we should give the benefit of the doubt and accept that there is a good business reason, though not necessarily the one announced.

Murdoch has been trying to thrash out an online strategy for quite a while. He (and on important issues we can assume that it is his decision) has made mistakes. MySpace looks like an expensive mistake. He has publicly canvassed whether he can or should charge for content online and seems to have changed his mind a couple of times on this. His  current position is that he will.

Many tech scribblers dismiss Murdoch and his organisation: “he just doesn’t get the internet” is a common theme. This I think is a misunderstanding of how, in the real world, companies develop strategies when technology changes the game. No-one can predict the future so trial and error is the only way to get there. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple all did that.

I would not bet against Murdoch. If any old-media organisation will survive, my guess is that it will be his.

Coming back to the reorganisation, I suspect that The Australian has been chosen as the publication to survive in Australia. Classified advertising is dying and that is hurting the state papers – though not Murdoch as much as Fairfax – and the future is probably in national content and national advertising. It is a big bet, and ironic after those stories that The Australian was continued for many years to give Murdoch as bit of class in his home country.

It seems to me that The Australian has improved a lot in recent years. You might want to bleep over the leaders and some of the columns if they offend you and you are left with meatier and better news stories than you get elsewhere.

It will all be most interesting to watch.