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April 14, 2005
The Yellow Internet?
Bleeding Edge had a chilling experience of deja vu with the news that Rupert Murdoch has advised newspaper editors to “grasp” the Internet. That’s pretty much what Microsoft’s Bill Gates said when he set about attacking Netscape with such success, except that he used the word “embrace” and added a couple of other words, to produce the strategy called “embrace and extend”.
Murdoch is clearly plotting to do the same with the Internet, at least to that part of it that dispenses news and community information, having been convinced – what a coincidence – by Bill Gates, that Internet advertising will be worth $US30 billion a year within the next five years.
Look at the damage Murdoch has already done to newspapers, particularly in this country. Look at Fox News. Journalism – at least the sort of objective reporting of fact that most of us think of as journalism – has been strangled by Murdoch’s embrace, which makes his comments about bloggers sadly ironic:
“…we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists.”
In many cases, bloggers have much higher standards for accuracy and reliability than the people who are regularly employed by Murdoch's more popular titles. We suspect though, that it's not really accuracy that Murdoch is looking for from bloggers.
Murdoch isn’t much impressed by the quality of his journalists. He quoted a recent study which suggested that “the percentage of national journalists who have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the American public to make good decisions has declined by more than 20 points since 1999”. He sees that as a reflection of “their personal politics and personal preferences”. In other words – as difficult as this might be to imagine – they’re too damned left wing for Murdoch.
What Murdoch is clearly proposing is to capture his “fair share” – i.e. the lion’s share – of the Internet audience with a brand of “journalism” modelled on that of Fox News. As he puts it: "Success in the online world will beget greater success in the print medium. We can and must begin to assimilate to their culture." That sounds like "embrace and extend" to us.
Read his speech and tremble. Even the Internet is likely to have some difficulty evading that man’s grasp.
Posted by cw at April 14, 2005 06:21 PM
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Comments
The man is a menace no doubt, but on the basis of the speech, the core of which I'll bet he didn't write, he remains pretty clueless.
The Murdoch papers have been shockingly bad in their approach to the net, you just have to go to any of their sites to see a trashy mess, pretty much bereft of much infomation. Insiders have suggested to me that Murdoch was very lukewarm on the whole thing from the beginning, especially the fact that it was free. He saw the net as competition for his papers not as the future of them, or an enhancment of them. I thought this was pretty much a good thing given his amoral track record.
Over at Fairfax they've done a much better job, their sites are extremely good and it may be that Margo's web diary at the SMH is the sort of thing being eyed by Murdoch in his comments about the blogosphere. Maybe he'll buy up Tim Blair, though his site rarely reaches the intellectual heights of Fox news. Still peons to medocrity, and the reinforcement of prejudice and ignorance, are basically what News Corp is editorially about.
However at Fairfax, they have had a heavily exploited workforce, a talented too few doing the work, and have neglected to think very strategically about the site. I would sack Hilmer for his years of incompetence on this but then he's already gone with his golden handshake. How can it be that the Australian news websites which are only rivalled by the ABC (nine msn is a joke), that have masses of varied content, and are well laid out, have other sites pipping them to the post and slowly strangling their home newspapers in their basic format - classifieds. The net is obviously built for classifieds, no more wading through the ads, no more going down to the Age at midnight to pick up the bargains. And yet they've slipped up here. It's not the journos faults, its lack of vision by the suits.
The only consolation is Murdoch's lot have been worse, but I believe he's put plenty into dedicated classified sites. Will be interesting to see what happens if he's now getting seriously into the web. I hope your Toad is a tabloid spider eater!
Posted by: tflip at April 15, 2005 09:27 PM