Whose Australian?

Finding articles to criticise in The Australian is like shooting fish in a barrel, all too easy. It is also usually eminently resistible, like the paper itself. While the so-called national broadsheet and its weekend equivalent continue to outdo each other in paroxysms of confected right-wing rage, they are usually best ignored. However occasionally the paper publishes a particular egregious piece that so obviously serves no purpose other than the publisher’s own ends, it needs to be called out for the hyperbolic sham it is. Such an article appeared in the Weekend Australian this Saturday called “whose ABC?” penned by journalist and former Alexander Downer media adviser Chris Kenny.

The long piece appeared in the Inquirer section giving it a veneer of investigative journalism it did not deserve. This was 2,700 words of News Ltd propaganda, with complaints from a few politically motivated but unnamed sources and only one source on the record, former ABC board member Ron Brunton who despite being ideologically motivated as a member of the IPA, was only identified as an “anthropologist”. The self-serving article had a companion piece, an even more pious anti-ABC editorial that drove home the message from Kenny’s talking points.

The articles take as their starting point a piece in the Guardian (coyly described as a “progressive newspaper" by Kenny and “a left-of-centre newspaper” according to the openly more hostile editor) about ABC boss Mark Scott and his well-documented stoushes with News Ltd. The enraged Australian was anxious to do a gotcha on Scott, particularly on his use of the phrase “market failure broadcasting” which Kenny said was code for a political and cultural counterpoint to the commercial media.

Kenny achieves his aims with a remarkable leap of logic. Rather than go through the tiresome process of proving his points, he asks the readers “to assume, just for argument’s sake” the ABC critics are right. This assumption allows him to airily dismiss flaws in his argument and immediately swing into action rectifying the “problem”. Without a shred of evidence, Kenny suggests the organisation is unaccountable and then gets to the nut of his complaint, the ABC “caters for an inner-city progressive elite”. Apart from the breathtaking arrogance of ignoring how many people in the bush enjoy the ABC, it also brings in the familiar right-wing weasel words “inner-city” and “elite” which are conflated to mean “other” (never mind that it insults the paper's own demographics) in opposition to equally imprecise but culturally loaded phrases like "battlers". According to the editorial, the ABC had the temerity to turn to Qatari Al Jazeera for its Osama news instead of the less well-informed but racially more acceptable BBC or CNN. What this proves is Auntie has been the victim of "a left-wing coup" where a “coterie of like-minded inner-city” staff members “commandeered” the airwaves to broadcast to “the vocal minority that share their prejudices”.

Both editor and Kenny were keen to share their prejudices too. Kenny's ones are dated and rehashed from the culture wars of the John Howard era. There is a tired argument about Counterpoint, a program seven years old, and a tedious diatribe about David Hicks, who has not been a newsworthy citizen for over four years. He also reheats the coals of the long-forgotten Brissenden/Costello affair (which also embroiled two non-ABC journalists) from 2007 and has a moan about The Drum, the ABC’s public opinion site.

Kenny’s and the editor’s central argument is their fury over market failure broadcasting: that of “taxpayer’s funding” serving a “small audience”. The ABC audience remains a lot larger than the Australian's audience but more to the point it has always been a market failure broadcaster. Scott denied making the politically sensitive market failure statement and the actual words in the Guardian was that Scott “thinks of the ABC modestly as a ‘market failure broadcaster’”. The use of “thinks” rather than “said” suggests the Guardian is paraphrasing rather than quoting but Scott need not back away from it.

From the start of radio in the 1920s, there was a strong tradition of public ownership of broadcasting medium (except in the US where market failures are anathema) both as an information service in the service of democratic debate and decision making and also as a counterpoint to the partisan and usually right-wing press. The ABC was founded in 1932 along these lines but it also had a cultural aim inherited from the BBC. As its boss in 1934 WJ Cleary put it, the ABC’s task was to promote “the finer things in life” in order to teach people to “find interests other than material ones to live by more than bread alone”.

This paternal Reithian philosophy was conservative and hypocritical at the time - the BBC refused to cover the 1926 General Strike - and it still exists in some parts of the ABC but today’s market failure broadcasting is not about bringing ballet to the hoi-polloi. It is about defending the public’s supposed right to have free access to news in digital platforms, and this is where the ABC steps on News Ltd’s commercial toes. Whether ABC should have that right is an economic argument well worth having, though the Australian studiously avoids it in its sanctimonious stance. Perhaps they don’t want anyone looking too closely at their own market failures. One could argue given several full page ads from Telstra in the same edition, your telco bills are subsiding the Australian's own small, elitist audience.

News rings management changes as it plans for paywall

News Ltd announced a series of important management changes today affecting their Australian news operation. The most important change was the appointment of News Digital Media chief executive Richard Freudenstein as chief executive of The Australian. Freudenstein keeps his old job and the move was widely seen as a key predecessor to the introduction of online paid-for content which Rupert Murdoch announced for 2010.

The 43 year old Richard Freudenstein joined News Digital Media when it was created 2006. Prior to this he was a key member of the team that launched Foxtel Pay TV in Australia in 1995 and then spent seven years at British Sky Broadcasting. There he was a leading negotiator in Sky's 2004 $2 billion deal for Premiership football. He is also chairman of realestate.com.au Ltd and a director of The Bell Shakespeare Company.

The move also sees The Australian being moved to a new stand alone division within News Corporation Ltd as part of an "aggressive and ambitious growth strategy" for the national broadsheet. Freudenstein will report directly to News Ltd chairman and chief executive, John Hartigan in this role. Up to now, The Australian has been part of Nationwide News, publishers of Sydney's The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. "This announcement reflects the significant expansion of our ambitions for The Australian," said Hartigan in a statement. "By creating a separate division and deploying more resources, we aim to enter an unprecedented era of growth."

The establishment of a separate division should give The Australian more flexibility when it comes to negotiating its printing and distribution arrangements with News Limited's other state divisions. But this move is not really about sales of the broadsheet. Hartigan hinted as much when he said News Ltd also wanted to expand The Australian's presence online, on mobile phones and on "new platforms". Nick Leeder will follow Freudenstein from NDM into The Australian as deputy chief executive, but unlike his boss he leaves behind his current post as NDM chief operating officer. Chris Mitchell will continue as editor-in-chief of the newspaper, a role he has held since he joined the paper from the Courier-Mail in 2002.

However the news comes on the same day as the result of a survey shown at The Content Makers that showed 70 percent of Australians would not be prepared to pay for Internet content. The survey by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation at Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research is part of the World Internet Project which is the leading international source of research on how people use the internet.

Eight hundred Australian internet users responded to the question “A daily newspaper costs around $1.50. How much would you be prepared to pay to read an online newspaper?” Another surprising result showed that “news junkies” are those least likely to be willing to pay for it. Perhaps not as surprising is that urban dwellers with limit access to quality papers (ie the ones with “Murdoch only” press) were more prepared to pay for content than those living in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra. Nevertheless, the findings are challenging for the Murdoch empire and lend credence to crankynick’s observation in Larvatus Prodeo that the paywall may well be aimed more at corporate organisations than individuals. Time will soon tell.

Is Rome burning? Murdoch picks a fight with the ABC

“You want sensitivity training? Don’t hang out in a newsroom, that’s your sensitivity training."
(From Overheard in the newsroom #1979)

Everyone know the media is a harsh business full of oversized egos and a well defined sense of self-importance. So when there is substantial disagreement on a major matter of media principle, it likely the bruises will be public. No noses have been bloodied yet in the big private v public access battle is playing out at the moment but it is only a matter of time. This fight is serious. Corporate media led by Murdoch want to charge for content but are aware they will leak substantial audience to publicly-owned media companies who have no intention of charging directly for content. Public enemy number one in Australia is ABC boss Mark Scott who is fast becoming a talisman for the power of new media.

The charge of Murdoch and his formidable empire is public corporations are inherent anti-competitive institutions whose funding power gives them an unfair advantage. The ABC undercuts private companies’ ability to provide content on the Internet, says Murdoch. Last week, ABC boss Mark Scott took up the cudgels and compared the empire of The Sun King to the Fall of Rome. He ridiculed News Corporation’s plan to charge for Internet content and provided a spirited defence of the national broadcaster’s right to provide "free" news to the masses.

It didn't take long for the Empire to strike back. Today a couple of News big guns took to the columns of its Australian flagship newspaper to defend their turf and attack Scott's assumptions. It was no surprise ABC’s own Media Watch would cover the “conflict” in its program tonight. As an ABC product, Media Watch is not entirely bi-partisan but it is considered an Internal Affairs watchdog and therefore usually not afraid to put the boot into its own employers.

Scott’s speech took on the challenge provided by paid content head on. His theme was end of empire. Taking his cue from Gibbons, Scott charted the progress of the media giants who are now struggling in these “desperate days” to cope with the new realities of Internet. According to media writer Margaret Simons, the Internet’s revolutionary intent is comparable to the printing press which changed religion, democracy and the organisation of societies.

Big Media still has a role to play in the revolutionary new world of the Internet but is hamstrung having has been subsumed into Big Business. There are very few people in the banks and private equity companies that understand how the media business works. In a time of crisis, they are all waiting for Murdoch because he is the only “newspaper man” left. And he is on the defensive. In Beijing he hammered the philistine bloggers and plagiarist aggregators that feast on News’s content. He also condemned the search engines that make their money from pushing around other people’s content without giving anything back to the creators. Murdoch’s son James went further and warned the public their ways must also change. It was essential for the future of independent digital journalism, he said, for a fair price to be charged for news “to people who value it”. The message was the Internet free ride was over.

But Mark Scott said that News “empire” no longer had the power to dictate terms over the cost of the ride. The audience has the power now he says, and media providers must engage with those audiences on their terms. For 15 years people have gotten used to the idea of not paying for online content and are unlikely to start wanting to pay now, he says. News Digital CEO Richard Freudenstein retorted today in Media Australia that Scott was “shielded from the commercial reality”. Freudenstein says people are willing to pay for journalism online but advertising alone won’t work on the Internet. People will pay for online content if it is relevant and delivered in ways they want, he says.

His article was accompanied by a Kudelka cartoon which shows an appreciative Prime Minister Rudd hugging Scott for thinking he had come up with a way not to require government funding. “Wayne's(Treasurer Swan) beside himself" gushed the wonkish and delighted PM, always thinking about red lines that might disappear from the $53b budget black hole. The cartoon Scott is increasingly distraught as the PM "misunderstands" what he means about free content.

But misunderstandings or not, the ABC is an important part of the culture and not likely to disappear anytime soon. News Corp can try to undermine its authority but will also have to be creative in their pay offerings. In the same edition of today's paper as Freudenstein and Kudelka's barbs, The Australian's media analyst Mark Day inted how News might implement their paywall. It would not be an old newspaper-model, he said. “They'll be more akin to social networks, a hybrid of news, services, commerce, information and entertainment designed for like-minded people or communities,” Day said. They will not be providing old content for “like-minded people” but new content. Basic news will still be free.

Simons said paying will work for some things but people will not pay for general news in countries that have strong traditions of public broadcasters (eg Australia and the UK). James Murdoch calls this issue the “dumping” of free state-sponsored content which makes it difficult for journalism to flourish on the Internet. Murdoch notes that the distinction between broadcasters and newspapers is irrelevant on the Internet and what we have now is an “all media market” (Keating’s “Princes of Print and Queens of the Screen” looks very dated 15 years later).

And if commercial organisations need to charge people for content in this new converged environment, they should not face competitors who provide the same content free courtesy of the taxpayer. James Murdoch says it is fundamental for journalism and the creative industries that public media “exist on a far, far smaller scale”. Or as the Times put it to the BBC in Chinese-fashion, they should get its tanks off our lawn.

Mark Scott says the public pays the ABC to provide distinctive content to them which they are entitled to view “free of charge”. Free to the user but not to the taxpayer. The ABC has a guaranteed $844.6m budget (2007 figures) that insulates Scott's decisions from his audience’s actual wants. The private companies must however live or die by their paid content. Media Watch says the signs are we won’t be asked to pay for what we are currently getting for free, but for new content.

Scott says one of the reasons the ABC is required is because of the abdication of news in commercial companies citing Channels Seven and Nine’s attenuated coverage of current affairs. ABC should not be crippled just to make private concerns wealthier, he says and crucially, he adds “there is no political sentiment to make this happen". Media Watch cited the $14m ABC got over four years to provide websites for regional Australia.

It interviewed APN Media boss Brendan Hopkins which questioned this strategy. APN is in direct opposition to ABC Regional as it owns 14 regional newspapers in northern NSW and Queensland (disclosure: this journalist has worked for APN and is hoping to do so again) and Hopkins says he cannot see the government supporting a model of the ABC where the cost “keeps going up”.

He says if APN think ABC is getting unfair treatment they will talk to Graeme Samuels at the ACCC and “hold them to account”. When asked whether after 75 years the ABC should even exist, Hopkins said “now is a good time to have that debate". With Margaret Simons agreeing that the ABC is now in a serious position to hurt the commercials’ business model, this argument has a long way to go. Maybe it is, as Hopkins says, time to honestly re-evaluate what is meant by “your ABC”. The Anglosphere has tended to scoff at Sarkozy’s 600m euro press interventionism in France, but how is our public broadcasting funding much different?

When kleptomaniacs collide: Old media declares war on new media

The sheer onion-ness of President Obama’s Nobel win yesterday has deflected international attention from the fact that a conference of media Canutes had just declared war on the Interwebs. The announcement came at a three day “world media summit” between Western media elites and Communist cadres that Japanese Kyodo News dubbed “Beijing’s Media Olympics”. Among others, Associated Press’s CEO Tom Curley and News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch joined Chinese leader Hu Jintao on stage in the Great Hall of the People to denounce the people for the way they used media content. (photo of Internet pioneer Vinson Cerf by centralasian)

Today, that bastion of free media, the Chinese state press agency Xinhua, published the full text of the World Media Summit Joint Statement. The Forbidden City conference theme of “Cooperation, Action, Win-Win and Development” was a signal that management doublespeak lay ahead. Most of the sentences failed Bill Easterley’s not-test of summit outcomes. The not-test asks whether it is possible to negate it and create a sentence that a sane person would utter. Who, for instance, would NOT hope that “media organisations around the world will provide accurate, objective, impartial and fair coverage of the world's news events.” There was nothing in the bland communiqué that suggested war was on its way.

But many of the media leaders at the conference departed from the prepared script. The boss of AP passed Easterley’s not-test with flying colours by saying many sentences that sane people will disagree with. For Tom Curley the problem was nothing less than regaining control from “crowd-sourcing Web services” such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook, search engines and blogs. They were all hurting his business model but he was not going to take it lying down. Curley said AP would “no longer tolerate the disconnect” between those who gather the news and those who “profit from it without supporting it."

78-year-old Rupert Murdoch was equally bellicose about the future. He described fellow conference invitee Google as “parasites” who make money off traditional media. He said the “philistine phase” of the digital age was almost over and “the aggregators and plagiarists” will soon be forced to pay for “the co-opting of our content." He saw the contest as a battle to the death between content creators “the people in this hall” and “content kleptomaniacs”.

But Murdoch needs to remember content kleptomania is a two-way sword. In August, his own Sky News weren’t initially keen to pay for using an eye-witness picture to a London police shooting a citizen journalist named Joe Neale had posted on Twitpic. It was not until Neale tweeted to the world “Newscorp use your photos without permission but have plans to charge for reading their content” that they came to the party and paid him £330.75.

New media won this particular battle but it will be harder to win the war. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff said this week in Vanity Fair war is Murdoch’s natural state. The enemy is the Internet. When Wolff explained to Murdoch a news aggregator business he is involved with, the media mogul said “so you steal from me”. Wolff said Murdoch did not understand the Internet and his online investments were all failures (Delphi, iGuide, Myspace, Pagesix.com). Murdoch runs his business not on the basis of giving the consumer what he wants but through more old-fashioned methods of structural market domination. Wolff called him “a scold who can intimidate the market into doing what he wants it to do.”

Weston Kasova at Newsweek was unimpressed with the scolding Murdoch and Curley dished out at the Beijing conference. He called it “macho outrage” which was calculated to be quotable but is fake. Kasova said aggregators actually draw audiences towards traditional media sites and their advertisers. News Corp and AP could shut off this traffic with one small piece of code (User-agent: Googlebot. Disallow: /) but of course they don’t do it. “They'd rather blame someone else for their failure to compete in a changing marketplace,” says Kasova pointedly.

Link economy advocate Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine also condemned the “Proletariat of the Press”. He said the Beijing conference was a “suicidal attempt to protect outmoded models and fight the future”. Jarvis prefers a different template of the future based on “new efficiencies, specialization, targeting, [and] value that comes with the collaboration that the internet and its links enable.” It was the “irresponsible stewardship over journalism” that was killing newspapers not the Internet. “We are not kleptomaniacs,” said Jarvis. “We are the new (free) distribution.”

US media academic Robert McChesney puts the question more pointedly in a rare old media act of contrition from Le Monde Diplomatique. McChesney wondered when the debate took place which ratified large corporations as the guardians of American media. “When, exactly, did Americans approve of the idea that a handful of corporations selling advertising were the proper stewards of the media or that it was inappropriate to ever question their power?” he asked. “When had the American people ratified the corporate media system as the proper one for the United States?” The answer is, of course, “before the Internet arrived”.

Let the war commence.

Google launches Fast Flip as first response to content pay plans

Google released Fast Flip to the world today to mixed reviews. Many reviewers saw it as a throwback to earlier ways of accessing information while others praised it for exactly the same reason. Silicon Republic said Google has initially partnered with three dozen major publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek to provide content in fast-loading newspaper or magazine style. They saw it as a way of a good way of avoiding waiting for content rich sites to load when all users want to do is “skim through the paper”.

Meanwhile over at Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw calls it “an analogue-mindset concept” that will further weaken the news sites that serve it. Google will run ads alongside the Fast Flip articles and will give an undisclosed share of the profits to the news providers. But Bradshaw says that Fast Flip screen shots may be sufficient for a lot of users who will no longer click through to the sites. This may be particularly true when users are on the run - Joshua Gans says its sideways scrolling motion works better on the iPhone than on a computer.

Webware agreed with Bradshaw that it would take advertising away from publishers but called Fast Flip a “platypus of news readers”. The author said it was an intermediate online form which recreated the experience of reading microfiche. “Fast Flip is a good solution for putting a magazine or newspaper online, and it makes scanning even a more modern Web feed really fast,” he said. “But it still feels forced.”

Perhaps it has been forced upon Google in reaction to news paywall plans which are gathering pace. Google have been conspicuously silent on the plans of Murdoch and others but they are surely worth watching as a party with a strong vested interest in its outcome. Google does not rely directly on subscriber services – it makes its money on advertising. In 2008 Google had revenues of $21.8 billion of which $21.1 (97 percent) was advertising. That amounted to a profit of $4.2b which at 20 percent wasn’t bad for such recession year (it is improving again in 2009).

But Google’s founders know how quickly that could change if they don’t stay ahead of the game. In his book “Linked” Albert-Laszlo Barabasi talks about how he met Larry Page in March 2000 when few people had heard of the search engine. The pair were speakers at an Internet Archives workshop in San Francisco. The event attracted an eclectic mix to hear about digital trends. Page gave a short talk about the search engine and bought his audience with a box of T-Shirts that had Google’s tag written on them: “I’m Feeling Lucky”. Barabasi says he tried out his t-shirt when he got home and also tried the search engine. He, like many others after him, became quickly addicted to Google’s product.

According to Barabasi, whose specialty is networks, Google should not have had the success it had as it violated the prediction of scale-free networks. Older sites such as Yahoo and Alta Vista had the advantage of becoming hubs quicker. But Google’s fitness for purpose gave it a commercial advantage that exponentially outweighed the disadvantage of their relative youth. To users, he says Google is easily tens of thousands of times more useful than any one web page.

Google has been busy adding to its stable of products since its t-shirt days. It offers services across a key range of products include email, images, video, blogging, RSS, maps, documents, advertising and news aggregation. With Google News the search engine behemoth faced claims of parasitical activity by the news industry. Google’s response is that it does not sell adverts on Google News, it a the major source of traffic to news websites, and publishers don’t like it they can simply turn off the flow with simple HTML script.

Margaret Simons reiterated that last point in her welcome return to blogging at The Content Makers. She says Google hasn’t broken into news sites. “The newspaper companies have allowed it in – and indeed hung out a 'welcome' sign, and they have done so because it suits their purposes,” she said. “Google has built their site traffic.” They may now decide they want to be paid to access that content but it is also highly likely that companies such as Google will opt to pay for the right to index and link to the content. In other words, Google might choose to be part of the club, and thus bring us all in. One possible way of doing that might be by linking Google News to micropayment systems.

In his book “We the Media” journalist Dan Gillmor said he was a fan of Google News even though it generally doesn’t acknowledge news content from the sphere of grassroots journalism. Google News was the brainchild of Krishna Bharat who realised after 9/11 it would be useful to see news reporting from multiple sources on a given topic assembled in one place. Bharat told Gillmor Google News has one basic rule; news requires editors and Google News is displaying what editors think is important at any given moment. Bharat saw Google News as complementary to what newspapers do. While Gillmor acknowledges it wouldn’t exist without news reporting from elsewhere, he said in 2006 it could become the front page for the rest of us.

From a distance of three years hindsight, that hasn’t yet happened (though it is being increasingly wrapped into products such as iGoogle). But perhaps the announcement of the new product today may yet prove Gillmor right. Fast Flip is a more visual representation of Google News. It also seems to tap into the “tabbed browsing” zeitgeist and as Gans says, is likely to prove especially popular on cell phones. Fast Flip may indeed be a platypus, but it is likely that higher-order products won’t take long to evolve.

Paying for online news: the debate continues

The prestigious English publication The Economist is the latest high profile media outlet to announce it will charge for online content. The weekly magazine (which currently retails for £4) has decided on a paywall to be implemented in the next six months. It follows a review it undertook after Rupert Murdoch announced similar plans for News Corp content last month. The Economist had previously charged for online content but gradually opened it up for free in last three years. Yvonne Ossman, its UK publisher, claimed that “people will pay for analysis and debate”. (photo by sekimura)

Ossman may be right for a quality title such as The Economist. Its brand of high quality journalism is certainly a sad loss to free content. What is more problematic is exactly how much people will be prepared to pay for all the “newsy” things they used to get for free. The paywall market is becoming increasingly crowded and may end up competing for scarce discretionary dollars. Brisbane academic Terry Flew doubted last month whether consumers will accept paying for what they are currently getting for free simply because they know it costs the publishers money to produce.

Besides questions of profitability, the other main local argument is what sort of content might go behind paywalls. The impressive newcomer to Crikey’s Pure Poison collective, Dave Gaukroger, outlined a case earlier this week for how Murdoch might make it work. He says sport is one of the main attractions in getting people to subscribe to Pay TV and could work for online also. Gaukroger also suggested that News may leverage off its stable of political commentators particularly the popular demagoguery practiced by Akerman, Bolt and Blair. He said that “people will pay to access content that reinforces their world view, so long as it has a level of authority that they are comfortable with.”

Writing in New Matilda yesterday, Jason Wilson picked up on some of Pure Poison’s points and added a few of his own. Wilson agreed with Gaukroger that News could make its venture work but didn’t think News would gain from hiding their celebrity commentators behind a paywall. But he did agree that paying for sport might succeed behind a paywall if it can be packaged with on-demand and interactive services or bundled with Pay TV subscription. Wilson says “the tide is running in the direction of multi-channelling, niche audiences and content that's made for (and increasingly by) reasonably discrete fan communities.”

Over at Larvatus Prodeo, Mark Bahnisch isn’t sure that niche content will pay its way. He says the questions that haven’t been answered are how much of News’s content is “actually stuff people want at all, and then how much do they want it.” He says people read very differently online compared to print and stuff that might sell magazines would not necessarily have a price online.

I also think there is a question that hasn’t been answered, though it is not the same as Bahnisch’s. I don’t know exactly what content News will put behind a paywall but I assume that whatever goes there will likely be a money earner even if audience numbers are well down. What interests me more than News’s profits is who will benefit from the gaps they leave behind? All sorts of openings will appear in the fields of whatever content is taken out of the free public sphere. Whether it is news, sport, expert opinion, commentary, specialist reporting or some combination of those, their absence will provide opportunities for others. Initially what remains of free coverage in these areas may be scratchy (depending on coverage by the ABC). Those who can afford it will pay News and the other providers for the convenience. But there will remain a large audience out there who either cannot or will not pay for content. These people will be casting the net around widely for other ways of finding out what they need to know.

This is a great opportunity for bloggers and social media exponents - especially ones who can take advantage of higher rankings in Google searches and flourish without the drip feed of linked news. As Flew noted there are new ways of gathering a reputation “through ranking systems, word of mouth, shared links via Facebook, Twitter feeds etc.” While the big players are locked away with their monetised audience, the wider field is open to new voices who can make consistent, compelling and attractive arguments. It is worth noting that a recent Future of Media Summit in Sydney rebadged itself as "The Future of Influence" because “media is becoming far more about peer influence than information and reporting”. Influence is based on conversations and aggregated opinion and paywall content fails on both counts.

This is why News Corp’s plans are truly revolutionary, albeit unintentional. Regardless of whether Murdoch makes money behind the paywall, his actions will set off a chain reaction that gives smaller players a unique opportunity to become trusted brands.