So, Margaret Simons, writing in today’s Crikey, probably rightly, suggests that the latest revelations in the #notw phone hacking saga imply that to Rupert’s crown, no woman or man of Murdoch born will succeed.

No great surprises there – Guy and I were saying the same thing here back in July.

You don’t need to be a prophet to see that the logical end of the #notw story is a News Limited without a Murdoch at its head. You don’t need to be a media analyst to see that combining that with the endless failures of the “killer app to save journalism” quest and the impending death of dead tree news, that papers like The Australian aren’t likely to be around all that much longer. (Same goes, double, for Fairfax’ broadsheets.)

So, again, Margaret Simons:

Be careful what you wish for? Without Murdoch, we will probably soon lose The Australian. Meanwhile Fairfax is weak.

Those who care should begin to think about what Australia will be like without any broadsheet newspapers. And I am not talking only about their print iterations, but about the journalistic capacity they represent.

Time to stop gloating, lefties, over what is happening in the UK, and get to grips with the emerging civic crisis at home. Or at least mix the gloat with some plans for action.

Alright, it’s headdesking time.

When will journos realise that there is a reason that they are positioned somewhere along with pollies at the tail of the field in all those surveys about professions the public respects?

What does “journalistic capacity” even mean if what is served up is heavily opinionated News on one hand and anodyne and bland click-driven non-news on the other?

I mean, really.

There are good reasons why the readership of broadsheets is in decline, and they are not all about the internetz. People don’t want to read the product, and those who do don’t see it as worth paying for. That must imply something about the actual content, not just about readers.

I’m also not sure that lefties are under any particular obligation to formulate a “plan for action”. But I am sure that the professional mouthpieces of journalism don’t have an effective one. Professions change. Professions die. Approaching the problem by posing the question “how can we find a business model to support what we do now?” is the way to ensure the second outcome.

There are a few key interlinking threads here that I think invite some serious discussion: the state of the Murdoch brand, the UK media context and finally the Australian media context.

The News International media brand, in the United Kingdom at least, has been positively smashed, perhaps irrevocably. When News of the World published its final edition, with all proceeds going to charity, it had trouble finding charities willing to accept its money. The details of recent formal and informal meetings between the Prime Minister and the Treasurer with members of the Murdoch family are now being pored over with genuine distrust and disdain in the public, rather than the indifference that is typical. James Murdoch, the youngest Murdoch scion (strangely relatively unknown in Australia), has had his character brutally tested and his reputation as an executive dragged through the mud by all the allegations of wrong-doing on his watch. Rupert Murdoch’s image has morphed instantly from the powerful media mogul to end all media moguls into a tottering 80 year-old man who you wouldn’t be overly surprised to find in your local nursing home. Corporate dynasties suddenly seem just a little “last century”, relics of a more feudal, slightly more despotic capitalist era. If I were a financial advisor or a stock market activist, I would have some serious concerns about the transparency of the dealings of the various family members perched around the top of the News hierarchy, and advising my clients accordingly.

In the UK, the phone-hacking scandal has emerged in an age where circulation is in decline and newspapers seem on the fast track to extinction in their current form. Prices are being forced down (The Sun is just 20p!) and so is quality. Travelling on the underground in London, it quickly becomes apparent that the majority of people who bother to read a newspaper read the Metro, a free rag churned out by Associated Newspapers, who own the right-wing Daily Mail. Dead paper is – let’s face it – nice on a lazy weekend, but in this age of portable, wireless technology, really quite dumb. Personally, I’ve just subscribed to the Guardian Kindle edition – and boy does it make massive sense: cheaper than the paper edition, more convenient (downloads automatically each morning, readable on a packed train), and so much more environmentally friendly to boot. Is this the future of news?

If indeed it is the future of news, from what I can gather (admittedly from several thousand miles away), it might take Australia more than a little time to catch up. Australian newspaper circulation is of course also in long-term decline. Evolution in the Australian publishing market is also restrained by its diabolical levels of concentration; Fairfax and News Limited dominate the scene to such an extent that their half-life as newspaper publishers in the traditional sense is probably going to exceed that of their UK counterparts. I am not getting the sense that the Daily Telegraph or the Herald Sun are suffering from any significant amount of backlash from the exploits of the News of the World (please correct me if I am wrong in the comments!).

Will this saga be the watershed for publishing and the media/political nexus in Australia that it seems it will prove likely to be in the UK?

If you sit back and take the longer view, reality is actually shaping policy – the reality of climate change, the reality of female workforce participation, the reality of changing attitudes to gender equality, the reality of an impending end to dirty and unrenewable fuel… and same-sex marriage can’t be far off.

And the forces of reaction have nothing to peddle but fear. The peddling of that fear, in terms of public opinion, has of course, been spectacularly successful. To date.

But there may be another tipping point – the decline into collapse of industrial media. Given that the NotW scandal has now seen it suggested, plausibly, that the Murdoch family may lose control of News, I’ve seen it argued, also plausibly, that come the next election, there may be no Australian to run its “campaigning journalism”. It’s not outside the realm of possibility.

Thinking, though, that everything will always be the same in the Australian mediascape is almost certainly also out of step with reality. We may be seeing the end of newspapers as we know them.

Elsewhere: On some of the issues tossed around concerning mooted and current media reviews, Mr Denmore at The Failed Estate. Anthony Burnett has an interesting UK take at Open Democracy.

NB: Earlier Murdochracy discussion on LP is here.

This afternoon, Crikey broke the story that Rupert Murdoch met Tony Abbott while he was in Australia for his mother’s birthday celebrations.

Bernard Keane writes:

There’s now a simple test for News Ltd – whether it covers Abbott’s meeting with its proprietor in the same way as it covered Conroy’s, and whether it demands the same details of Abbott as the Sunday Telegraph demanded of Conroy – what was discussed and what hospitality did Abbott enjoy from Murdoch?

And, most of all, was there a deal made between the two for favourable coverage?

Those are good questions, though it’s a bit hard to imagine how Abbott’s coverage in The Australian could be any more favourable than it is already…

Update: Trevor Cook on Stephen Conroy’s defence of the licence fee decision.

Rusbridger’s topic was “Does Journalism Exist?”. It’s a long piece by online standards, but one of the very best I’ve read on all the vexed and often repetitive debates on the future of journalism. Gary Sauer-Thompson summarises the talk’s themes by arguing that it maps out a path towards “a mutualised news organisation”.

Rusbridger is concerned to interlink the debates about media business models with those about the role of journalists and their public responsibilities in a more sophisticated way than most writers on this set of related topics. But he does make it crystal clear that the model he believes is in the process of emerging can only do so on the basis of a business model which incorporates open access. For The Guardian, then, the economics of Rupert Murdoch and the New York Times‘s paywalls just doesn’t stack up:

My commercial colleagues at the Guardian – the ones who do think about business models – want to grow a large audience for our content and for advertisers, and can’t presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content. Last year we earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business, but not trivial. My commercial colleagues believe we would earn a fraction of that from any known pay wall model.

They’ve done lots of modelling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded. They’re looked at the argument that free digital content cannibalises print – and they look at the ABC charts showing that our market share of paid-for print sales is growing, not shrinking, despite pushing aggressively ahead on digital. They don’t rule anything out. But they don’t think it’s right for us now.

There’s more on this at the Reuters blog.

That’s a topic Marni Cordell takes up at New Matilda:

Scott’s speech was warmly welcomed by most if not all of the journalists, new media pundits and academics in attendance at Media140. Not a single hard-hitting question was asked of him at the time — or indeed, since, in any coverage of the event that I have read (people seem to be too busy firing shots at the very soft target of News Ltd journalist Caroline Overington who dared to talk about her own media organisation’s digital ‘vision’). I find this bizarre.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Scott’s efforts to align himself with the cutting edge of digital technology are commendable — a good public broadcaster should keep on top of new media developments and the ABC has mostly done so pretty well.

But how is that going to contribute to the production of “quality journalism” that these very same punters like to fret about? Missing from this debate — and from the uncritical applauding of Scott’s foray into community-driven content — seems to be a collective recognition that Scott oversees a very large part of a dwindling resource: that is, money to be spent on good, original journalism.

In comments on the piece, Cordell recognises that she ommitted to mention one question put to Scott at Media140 by a commenter on the thread – whether the ABC’s new local community hubs (for which 50 digital media producers are being hired) will pay people for their contributions, and if not, what that does to the income opportunities of freelance journos, film makers, and so on. The answer, as she notes, is probably obvious. In that context, it will be interesting to see whether the new ABC Online opinion site – to be edited by Jonathan Green, currently Crikey‘s editor – will follow The Punch and The National Times and not pay contributors.

The hackneyed debates between social media proponents and opponents usually tend to obscure the central fact that both big and small media are contributing, whether consciously or otherwise, to a trend to outsource the production of content to unpaid or poorly paid labour. That’s recognised by some contributors to the debate, but tends to be obscured when the big guns are fired. Notions that “journalism will become an avocation” are tossed off too glibly, and in such a way as to obscure the political economy of the emerging media space. It should not be so, and ethically, I would strongly argue that public broadcasters have a duty not to be complicit in this trend.

Elsewhere: Margaret Simons.

Disclosure: I applied for the gig Green got, which was advertised. The one week period for applications suggested to me that there was probably a preferred candidate. I would be very interested to learn if there was ever a shortlist, or if he was in effect the only candidate considered (and effectively head-hunted for the role). I am not casting any aspersions on Green himself, for whom I have worked and for whom I have a liking and considerable respect. But I think there’s a potential issue here about the ABC’s practices in this regard.

Update: Margaret Simons on Green’s departure and the current shake up at Crikey.

Further update: Margaret Simons:

However, I understand that despite appearances, the job was NOT stitched up before hand. Green was interviewed only recently, along with other candidates, and was informed of his appointment late last week.

I’m happy to accept that, but I think some questions remain. The job ad specified that the position could be taken up in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane. I was surprised to see an announcement made 6 working days after the applications closed given the logistics of organising interviews with candidates from several cities. Having worked in HR myself in a previous incarnation, I am somewhat bemused – though stuff ups are always a plausible explanation, too.

I’d reiterate that I think Jonathan Green will do a top notch job. But he’s not been done any favours either, when his appointment was bound to come under political fire. Decision makers at the ABC – who we’re constantly told are savvy to how information travels online – need to understand how important good process and transparency are, and there’s a little bit of an object lesson here.

Another update: Margaret Simons has the answer to the question of whether contributors to the ABC Online opinion site will be paid (yes) and has more on the idea of the thing, and the ABC’s digital strategy generally.

Elsewhere: qed on the corporatisation of ABC culture.

Make of it what you will. It seems pretty incoherent to me. I think Cory Doctorow’s pretty much right – these musings are fantasies, and his editors are going to have a horrible time trying to implement all these confused thought bubbles.

Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson.

As Jason Wilson observed yesterday in New Matilda, Murdoch’s previous business plays were built on positioning himself for oligopolistic market shares in emerging media. This strategy doesn’t work in the world of online content, so Murdoch is trying to reshape that world to suit his modus operandi. Cutting public broadcasters out of the equation would be an essential component of such a strategy, but despite the fact that he’s leveraged political influence in the past for his own private interests, Murdoch finds himself isolated. Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd are hardly likely to do him any favours, and the very fragmentation of audiences and platforms he’s seeking to counter has reduced any potential for his implicit political threats to have teeth.

Public broadcasters, in other words, have a unique role to play in preserving the openess and competitiveness of new media ecologies.

There’s been lots of commentary on Scott’s speech. Margaret Simons writes at Content Makers, Gary Sauer-Thompson chimes in at Public Opinion, while Ethical Martini and Trevor Cook both put somewhat different and interesting perspectives to work in analysing Scott’s lecture.

Update: Guy Rundle.

Update: Sophie Cunningham.

Update: More from Margaret Simons in today’s Crikey.

Update: Ben Eltham in New Matilda:

As I watched Scott’s speech and the ensuing questions, I began to get a sense of how clueless many media executives really are. I’m fairly certain Scott knows more about this stuff than, for example, Roger Corbett does. In fact, Scott pointed this out later in his speech, arguing that old thinking and internal barriers to reform are the biggest problems for media organisations. “We have seen the enemy, and it is us.”

If Scott is among the savviest — and he may well be — then the path ahead for big media organisations in this country will be rocky indeed.

In the land of the blind, the man with a print-out of a Clay Shirky blog is king.

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.

Elsewhere: Spinopsys and Jeff Jarvis (link rich post).

The irony is just too obvious. At the summit, Chinese leaders tell media leaders to create just ”’true, correct, comprehensive and objective’ news coverage.” As we say online: Heh.

The website.