Globe and Mail : will the Commercial paywall become merely a Conservative echo chamber ?

Hoisted on his own Petard !

Ironic, ain't it ? Most of the world's loudest & most bombastic right wing newspapers have totally disappeared from public view --- behind a commercially-oriented paywall --- reducing their public influence to zero. This certainly wasn't their original intention (money,money,money was their intent) - but this situation is the totally unexpected results.


The right wingers who own and run Canada's leading newspaper, the GLOBE and MAIL and who are about to leap in the fire and erect a paywall should pay heed to the sad story of Rupert Murdoch's earlier experiments in this area.

Whatever inane right wing notions Rupert Murdoch's LONDON TIMES is touting this week, you and I (because we are not living in the UK) won't even hear of it, unless we pay to get behind its digital "all or nothing" total  paywall.

The TIMES, as you have probably noticed, as been marked "absent" from the worldwide digital news conversation the last few years - even search engines like Goggle carries nothing from them - because Rupert-Murdoch-the-Genius planned it that way.

As a result, even the influence of the once all-powerful print version of the paper has also been reduced to nearly zero.

Sure its subscribers read it faithfully - but they are die-hard right-wingers so there is no influencing the undecided at play here : you can't preach to the already-converted, you can merely confirm their faith.

The result is a tiny closed community of true believers, echoing each other in the echo chamber that is the LONDON TIMES : a mere 400,000 readers in a world of more seven billion citizens.

Murdoch bought the TIMES to serve as his bully-pulpit, to expand the influence of his inane right wing notions --- and to make him more money.

Paywalls around right wing newspapers reduces their influence to zero : become echo chamber for right wing subscribers only

The paywall didn't make him money, merely reduced his huge losses ---- but it also reduced the political-public impact of this once world opinion leader to echoing the certitudes of a few hundred thousand die-hard far righters.

So news that Murdoch has totally thrown in the towel and admitted this total paywall was an abject failure editorially, comes as no real surprise.

He will now admit defeat and allow Google and other search engines to index the headlines and opening paragraph "lede" of the TIMES' articles : hoping that if the unconverted will not buy a subscription , they will at least absorb some of his bile from the misleading headline and dishonest opening lede.

Public Influence or Profitable Paywall : pick one.

Lots of money and lots of influence, the age-old dream of lots of newspaper barons, is dead : you can have one but not the other.....

WWII : Jazz Agers pulled the trigger but Victorians pointed the gun

They pulled WWII's trigger, but didn't aim gun

It is true that most of the people that actually, physically, pulled the triggers in WWII were kids of the Jazz Age, born roughly between the Fall of 1916 and the Fall of 1929. Equally true, and rarely acknowledged then or today, is that most of the people pointing those guns were born in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901).

Petain, the supreme leader of Vichy France, pour exemple , was born in 1856 ---- a full sixty years before the start of the Jazz Age. In today's France, he'd be an old age pensioner when that Age began!

Then, as now, men aged roughly between fifty and seventy five ruled all aspects of the world as business CEOs, senior government advisors, defence departments chiefs, media barons or simply as owners of most of the wealth.

Jazz Agers pulled WWII's triggers, but those guns pointed by men with High Victorian Age values...

In WWII terms, the men who started and ran the war were men born in the late Victoria Age. Already fully mature young men, in other words, with a full set of Victorian value, when the Victorian Age faded away in the Great War trenches of Western Europe.

But like silent Shingle viruses inside our bodies, they carried on emanating those Victorian values, under the very noses of the new Jazz Age, until these young Victorian men of 1916 died off as very old Victorian men in the 1960s.

Cut to today and the battle over climate change : young versus old ways of thinking about science and humanity's limits.

Rupert Murdoch, for example, was born in early 1931 and his headmasters were themselves fully mature "Victorian Age" young men when Queen Victoria died 30 years earlier in early 1901.

That is to say that we must never ever forget that the elderly climate deniers of today were educated by teachers themselves raised in the "there are no limits to Man's abilities" values of optimistic Victorian Scientism......

Tony Abbott would deny his OWN EYESIGHT --- if it made him Prime Minister

Denying will bite, Tony !

On the assumption that Australian Libertarian Party leader Tony Abbott can and does read, today's Australian newspapers couldn't have been pleasant reading. (Cue the inside story.)

"Naked ambition versus scientific facts, part XXCLV"

AUDIO : sound of newspapers being thrown angrily away...

VOICE IN HIS HEAD : Best soldier on ,Tony, just ignore your  eyesight, got to focus on that prize in your mind's eye : that dream of a lifetime.

TONY : Becoming Prime Minister !!!
(Not really quite sure what I'll do when I get there, but "the joy is in the dreaming" , as my priest always says.)

VOICE : Bad, bad newspapers ; spoiling the Nasty Abbott's day like that . (Cue : Aussie sharks washing up on English Channel beaches ; tropical fishes ending up off Tassie.)

VOICE : And blaming it all on global warming : the cheek !

TONY : Rupert - bloody -Murdoch and his warmist claptrap !
Must-remember-mummie : the prize-the prize.

FADE TO BLACK.....

Clever Germanic Races point way to future (if any) of newspapers : the A4 micro size

A newspaper the size of a magazine !

Don't you just hate jumped-up newspaper chain owners who insist on their newspaper spreads sprawling to 3 feet by 2 feet, to compensate for their "weiners" being, er,  very much smaller than that ?

This newspaper spread, the so called quality "broadsheet", is emblematic of the oversized egos of the super-rich, who insist that their newspapers must be B.I.G. to show that their readers are somebodies who require a lot of space, to read and reflect on the news.

But most people who hang a strap in a subway actually read a tabloid-sized newspaper - roughly half the size of a broadsheet : now a spread of only  1.5 feet by 2 feet , it is still much too big to read on a crowded train or bus.

Best is the A4 Micro newspapers common in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and their surrounding neighbours : a quarter the size of the broadsheet, they are a spread of one foot by one and a half feet.

Each page is ever so slightly bigger than an ordinary-sized  sheet of letter paper in the North American (non-metric) dinosaur world of paper.

But, you sputter, "that is just a magazine or newsletter by another name !"

Yes it is : and that it why it is so successful as a magazine format size, all throughout history and in every nation in the world.

It fits the hand well and the eye well - a pleasure to hold and read and a size that allows the design of each "spread" to be taken in at a glance and as a whole : print designers love it !

It would be equally successful as a daily newspaper, but for their publishers' well-founded fear that readers might stop regarding daily newspapers and their billionaire owners as demi-gods if their offering was the same size as every Tom, Dick & Harry's magazine or newsletter.

The biggest attraction to retaining the broadsheet size is that it severely limits potential competitors to just the super rich.

The  press to print a broadsheet costs tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars : to make a4 newspapers only costs about $250 at the minimum (aka the Tabloid sized inkjet computer printer) .

As a heavy duty newsprint webpress for small runs of a few thousand copies a day, the prices - if the format became popular - would probably be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to a million dollar range.

That is scary thought for billionaires like Rupert Murdoch who has relied, for a lifetime,  on the high entry costs to owning a big iron broadsheet press (rather that the non-existence "quality" of his junky-fakey newspaper columns) to keep potential competitors at bay...

Murdoch's antics lose billions for investors, as his personal GOODWILL assets worth negative $

Rupert Murdoch 

If the Gauleiter of Greed Rupert Murdoch wants to die still deluding himself he was a successful newspaper owner, he better shuffle off this moral coil right some time soon.

The goodwill of his newspaper mastheads, as posted on company books, far exceeds anything the market (judging by recent sales of other newspaper properties) feels they're really worth.

And bankers and security authorities don't like that : so they order accountants to direct their clients to write down the goodwill to bring market cap and book asset value in line.

Huge paper losses follow (ie huge losses to individual shareholders when they try selling their shares) .

But also huge restraints for the entire company on borrowing any more bank funds to 'kite' your ever-expanding newspaper empire.

(That is the sophisticated game of constantly squeezing value out of the newly bought newspaper, to keep older properties looking spritely and the whole confidence scheme afloat).

Lines of credit are secured by a newspaper empire's net worth and when that is reduced to a third, so too are the billions in bank credit that you can secure ---- expect  Murdoch newspaper buying to finally slow down. (Thank God !)

Now for most newspaper owners, the loss of 'goodwill' attached to the name on the masthead is simply the result of loss of subscribers and loss of advertisers.

Papers which were once valued at one billion dollars only a few years ago (shout out to the San Diego Union-Tribune ) are going, with great difficulty, for $50 million.

 Less than what their press, trucks and real estate are worth : now that is "negative value goodwill" in a textbook wrap !

Murdoch's massive loss of moral worth has cost his individual shareholders billions

But in the case of Murdoch, good will has less to do with this strictly business sense of the phrase and more to the fact that newspaper readers and advertising executives can't personally stand the guy for all the fake news writing his newspaper empire has written since 1952.

Murdoch has run out of our goodwill.

"Sixty Years of Lies is enough - for God's sake , Rupert - go !"

The phone-tapping scam was the last straw ---- that a girl's parents were misled into thinking their murdered daughter was still alive thanks to a Murdoch operative's doing, was the final blow for billions of people.

And billions of dollars in losses followed - falling on ordinary shareholders of the News Corp empire - not on the dirty old dog himself.

Pity, that .......

" Don't cite Gators ! " Newspaper influence fades behind Paywalls

How often have you heard someone - usually a blogger someone - cry out "don't cite gators !" and wondered just what it meant ?

It means, don't cite or link to any news story that is hidden behind a newspaper's internet paywall ------- that gated community only open to those wealthy enough to pay Rupert Murdoch and his ilk's stiff fees to read The Times etc.

Or people lucky enough to have the big corporation (and ultimately the taxpayer) pay for breaching the paywall .

These people, the executive types, are almost by definition wealthy enough to pay for The Wall Street Journal on their own, but prefer to have the taxpayer pick up the tab.

This libertarian tradition is why Isaiah Berlin called libertarianism "Liberty for the wolf and.... Death for the lamb."

Paywalls come at a high cost to billionaire owners who bought them to swing influence as well as produce profit - again Murdoch-the-greedy comes to mind.

The Times is a money-loser no matter how the financial figures are guised in rose-coloured paper and now its influence is fading faster than its physical asset worth.

Papers not cited by others lose influence, whether that paper be a scientific paper or a daily newspaper - and The Times and the Wall Street Journal are suffering badly here - when the real action today is on the Net and responsible, influential, people carefully cite their sources.

The diminishing worth of the Murdoch papers : in the negative dollar range ?

This should matter a lot to Murdoch and the few Wall Street newspaper analysts still left : because as Philip Meyer pointed out in his 2009 book, "The Vanishing Newspaper", only 20% of a daily newspaper's worth is its physical assets : real estate, press, trucks, building etc.

Instead that intangible known as brand trust and influence is at least 80% of the value.

That's the traditional rule of thumb.

But recently, papers worth one billion dollars only a half dozen years ago are selling for $50 million today : when their physical assets are worth even more today than they were six years ago !

Trust is long gone: dead from a slow, slow overall erosion among readers and voters and consumers about many institutions, but press influence didn't fade --- until quite recently.

Perhaps the recent decision to hide their opinions behind that gated community of wealth known as the costly paywall might just be the reason.

Murdoch-the-greedy has thus gained a brand new title : Murdoch-the-powerless..... Tis ironic isn't it ?