After a full day’s Senate hearings where the Murdoch media denied they were a monopoly, what do his tabloids deliver today in 8 different cities? The same cookie-cutter article published in 8 different papers! They really take us for fools. #MurdochRoyalCommission pic.twitter.com/O3uyKHh29p
— Kevin Rudd (@MrKRudd) February 20, 2021
Back in the day when a promotion like the latest book offer from News Corp. was launched there would be advance information, including to software companies – so newsagents could land the offer in their business with the right data management processes to ensure efficiency and maximise the opportunity.
No more.
This book offer from News Corp. this past weekend, ahead of a price rise slipped in unannounced, leaving newsagents and newsagency software support people dusting off previous advice late. It was okay in that previous advice worked. That’s not the point though. Some newsagents, especially some new newsagents, were unnecessarily stressed because of poor comms from the publisher.
The weakened circulation management infrastructure in capital city newspaper publishing offices results in less support for offers like this and less engagement in newsagencies.
This video is a 14 minute except from a 41 minute video released to Washington Post subscribers in which they meticulously lay out what happened in the attack on the US capitol. As a WaPo subscriber, I have seen the full length video. It is chilling. It is also representative of excellent, fact-based, journalism, for which I am happy to pay.
This is the challenge for commercial news outlets, creating genuinely valuable content that people can trust.
Following relentless lobbying by News, Nine and some other commercial news outlets, agreement was reached for Google and Facebook to pay a fee for news stories to appear in search results.
Now, a few weeks later, Google is said to be trialling eliminating some news outlets from search results. It’s a kind of careful what you wish for moment.
This story has a bit to play out yet. It will be interesting to watch and see where it lands.
The thread was drawn to my attention when a journalist tagged me in a comment. The whole thread makes for interesting reading. The original poster has 260 Twitter followers. Looking at the comments and re-tweets, it has reached tens of thousands. That in itself is a story about the ripple impact of social media.
Unsold Herald Sun, The Australian and The Age newspapers from the weekend outside my local newsagent (inner Melb). The Age ones are the two piles furthest away – all the rest are Murdoch papers. 👏👏👏@DaveMilbo @deniseshrivell pic.twitter.com/NDaf5H2d2c
— Carolyn Wood (@CannieW54) January 13, 2021
I know newspapers are important to you, but I’d like you to consider no longer stocking Murdoch newspapers, especially The Australian.
The request was as simple as that. Gentle. Respectful. Straight forward.
I asked why. They said what has happened in the US triggered them into action. They are, apparently, going around other newsagents and retailers and making the same request.
While in our case it is only one person, I wonder if more will make this request, especially in Victoria where the Murdoch press campaign and disinformation against the state government was extraordinary.
The campaign against The Sun in the UK started small and local. Now, it’s got quit the following.
It is terrific seeing the Naracoorte News going strong. remember, this newspaper was launched in the middle of Covid last year, in response to a local newspaper closing. I love their listing at their website of retailers carrying Naracoorte News.
I also love their approach to encouraging local business support, through their sponsorship program. This is smart for them and smart for local businesses.
Local newspapers like the Naracoorte News are vital to local communities. I hope it continues to thrive.
In our high street newsagency we are tracking excellent year on year results for newspapers with dailies up 12% and foreign language newspapers up 25% – based on unit sales.
I’d be interested to hear how newspapers have gone for others through December.
I expect high street, regional and rural businesses will have similar results to the above. I think the Covid bump will be here for some time, hopefully long term. And, by bump, I mean – more people shopping any from malls and more people buying papers, especially foreign language papers.
Looking deeper at data from a bunch of regional newsagencies for November / December this year compared to last year, it is obvious that traffic from low-margin legacy products is not key to the health of a business.
In each case, local newspapers closed, slicing hundreds of transactions from each business each week. There was no negative financial impact. Transaction count was down, but not revenue.
Even though I have commented here for many years about the inefficiency of newspapers for retail newsagencies, plenty of newsagents are discovering it for themselves. The newspaper shopper is likely to purchase a newspaper and nothing else around 80% of the time – less so in regional Australia, far more so in capital city shopping centre newsagencies.
Plenty of local newspaper closures are not adversely affecting the performance of newsagencies.
For decades, newspaper publishers, and other low-margin legacy suppliers, said yes our products are low margin but they drive traffic and you make money from that.
No, most low-margin legacy products are inefficient for newsagents. They may sell in volume. however, rarely does that shopper purchase higher margin items. No, the new higher margin items newsagents source often drive net new traffic.
While the closure of local newspapers is disappointing for the reach of local news, retail newsagents can have a bright future regardless.
I get that retailers like foot traffic. The key, however, is that foot traffic has to be commercially valuable. Single item purchase of low margin product is not as commercially valuable as it once was.
After decades of loyal, low cost, accurate newspaper home delivery service, News Ltd. is planning to send letters to subscribers in which they throw newsagents under the bus, inferring their service has sub-standard.
News Ltd. has send impacted Queensland distribution newsagents newsagents a package, including letters to be sent to subscription customers. This paragraph is from the second letter:
This is appalling wording. Improved customer experience? To do that, News Ltd. will need to:
Back to the paragraph from the letter, it suggests that News Ltd. has been delivering the paper, when it has not. Sure, there is a nod to the accuracy of newsagents – but News Ltd. claims this is their achievement, when it is not.
For a company in the communication business, this letter is appalling.
I feel for Queensland newsagents and what they, and their customers, are about to endure.
In a move that shows them thinking about future revenue streams, there Murdochs have increased their investment non gambling.
This, from Crikey, last week.
Toxic betting industry no barrier to the Murdochs as they up gambling stake
The Murdoch family has profited big time from the gambling industry over the years and they are doing it again with Dublin-based Flutter Entertainment, which last week bought an additional 37% stake in US fantasy sports outfit FanDuel for a whopping US$4.2 billion.
The deal was partly funded by a $1.8 billion Flutter share placement which the Murdoch-controlled Fox Corp was happy to back once again.
The Flutter announcement included this 16-page presentation, plus this approving quote from Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch:
“ We are delighted to participate in this capital raising. Maintaining our ownership stake in Flutter signifies our long-term commitment to Flutter, and ongoing confidence in management’s ability to execute against the fast growing US [sports gambling] opportunity. FOX’s audiences have proven to be highly engaged with free to play and wagering content, and we are excited to offer them access to products from Flutter’s market leading stable of US brands. Flutter is fast becoming a global behemoth. Through its NT-licensed Sportsbet brand, it is now Australia’s biggest online gambling company with an estimated market share of 52% after including the recently merged BetEasy business. It is forecast to extract around $2 billion of the $25 billion that Australian gamblers are expected to lose in 2020-21 and has been making a fortune during COVID-19, particularly because the racing industry was nationally exempt for the shutdowns.
These two fantasy sports businesses are now seen as the fastest way to access gamblers as deregulation sweeps across America and cash-strapped states look for new revenue streams after their budgets were ravaged by COVID-19 shutdowns.
Rupert Murdoch used to be against gambling, partly on the grounds that it took dollars away from consumers who might buy his media products.
But then he saw the profit potential of linking gambling with sports broadcasting and in 2005 successfully lobbied Tony Blair to deregulate gambling rules in the UK.
As Crikey has noted before, the Murdochs then built up Sky Betting & Gaming which ended up delivering clear profits of about $2 billion to the broader Murdoch interests (via Sky PLC) when that business was sold to Canada’s The Stars Group for US$4.7 billion in 2018.
Having tasted success in the UK, Fox Corp subsequently created the 50-50 Fox Bet joint venture in the US with The Stars Group once the US Supreme Court legalised sports gambling in May 2018.
Fox Corp took a 5% stake in Stars for US$236 million as part of the Fox Bet joint venture which then became a 2.6% stake in Flutter once those two businesses merged earlier this year. The original 3.23 million Flutter shares which Fox Corp inherited through the merger are now worth around US$650 million but Fox Corp has subsequently supported two further placements by Flutter this year as it dives further into the gambling business.
Like denying climate change, backing Trump and tolerating industrial-scale phone hacking, there are few ethical barriers which stand in the way of the Murdoch modus operandi. They seem to have no problems whatsoever profiting from the toxic gambling industry.
I have two points here:
This article by Bernard Keane at Crikey should anger any everyday taxpayer in Australia.
Tax dodging News Corp continues to rip Australia off — and is subsidised by taxpayers to do so
News Corp retains its crown as a champion tax rorter, yet again paying next to nothing in tax despite billions in revenue.
Next time you see a News Corp employee or contributor, or a News Corp editorial, opining about fiscal policy in Australia, or how tax revenue should be spent, or how the economy should be run, there’s a simple question to bear in mind.
How much tax has the foreign-owned Coalition propaganda arm paid in tax in Australia in the five years to 2018-19? During that time News Australia Holdings has earned more than $360 million in profits from nearly $13.1 billion in revenue.
The answer, of course, is zero. It hasn’t paid a single cent in tax.
It’s a different story for News Australia Investments. In 2017-18 it reported $291 million in taxable income, on which it paid … $201,000 in tax. And no, there isn’t a zero missing.
Admittedly News Pay TV Financing — the vehicle for News Corp’s takeover of Foxtel and Premier Media Group nearly a decade ago — reported a $27 million profit way back in 2015-16. It paid tax on that that year: $8.2 million.
So, including everything, in five years News Corp has paid $8.5 million in tax on more than $680 million in profits and $13 billion in revenue.
In that time the Coalition has handed $40 million to it in untied grants, swamping even the miserable $8 million. The net position is that off revenues of more than $13 billion, taxpayers have actually paid the Murdochs more than $30 million.
All this is because News Corp is one of the worst tax rorters and dodgers in the country. That’s why, in 2015, the ATO deemed it the highest tax risk in the country.
The recently released ATO corporate tax data for 2018-19 — well before the pandemic — shows that the US-owned News Corp earned $2.1 billion in revenue, down from $2.4 billion the previous year, but claims to have made no profit at all — in contrast to previous years when profits where sneaked away offshore.
The numbers illustrate the extent to which News Corp has nothing to do with Australia and Australians. It is foreign-owned, Rupert Murdoch is a foreigner, and the company pays no tax in Australia.
Of course, that doesn’t prevent the company’s outlets from lecturing real Australians who live here and pay tax here about what they should do, how they should live and vote, and what fiscal and economic policies we should follow.
Read the rest of the article online.
I get that some may say it is smart to take steps to minimise tax. News Corp. is different. It openly meddles in democracy, plays with the truth to serve its needs, tells us how to live our lives. Yet, it pays no tax. This alone should strip of what it seeks to do.
I think what News Corp. does re tax is un-Australian, wrong and purely selfish.
All companies have a social responsibility to the countries in which they operate. In my opinion, News Corp. is not demonstrating social responsibility in its tax arrangements in Australia.
Shame on all politicians who pass the rules that allow News Corp and so many other companies to pay fair tax.
This is an interesting and thoughtful piece from Crikey yesterday on the prospect of News Corp putting its capital city papers up for sale:
Psst! Wanna buy a paper? Well, you’re in luck. Looks like News Corp might have a few on the market.
The Murdochs appear to be looking for a buyer for their chain of metropolitan tabloids like the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph and The Courier-Mail. Only hitch: it doesn’t seem any of them are making much — if any — money.
If the sale happens, expect it to be soon: Rupert has always liked timing deals leading into Christmas, allowing any unavoidable huffing and puffing to fade in the torpor of the holiday season.
The tabloids have become too large a problem to be managed. Ever since the Murdochs split their media business into two back in 2013, the old media News Corp has been an ungainly mix of assets that make money (The Wall Street Journal, realestate.com.au) and those that don’t (the tabloids, regional newspapers, Foxtel).
News Corp shares have been worth less than they would if the company were smaller, thinned down, without those loss-making parts. That’s a conundrum for a family trust much of whose wealth is tied up in those shares.
Over the past year, the company has been methodically working through its portfolio, closing and shedding the parts that don’t work. In March, it sold off its coupons business, News America Marketing, to private equity for about $335 million.
In May, it stopped printing over 100 of its regional and community newspapers, closing some and leaving others to limp on with a purely digital presence. The residue has been considered on the market, perhaps to Australian Community Media that bought Nine’s similar portfolio last year.
News Corp predicts this restructure is reducing revenues this financial year by about $160 million. According to the published accounts, it cost most of the $150 million the company spent on termination payments last year.
Then, in August, the end of year figures separately reported results for the loss-making mastheads in Australia, the UK and US and for the money-making WSJ. The reporting put the difference up in lights: the remnant News Media revenues fell by about 20% (much of it before the COVID-19 crash); in the new Dow Jones-WSJ segment revenues were up.
The stock market seems to have sniffed something is up: over the past month, News Corp shares listed on the NASDAQ exchange have jumped almost 40%, over twice the market’s broader post-Trump bump.
The challenge for the tabloids is the challenge faced by traditional local or city-based media around the world: an audience too diffuse to resist the flood of advertisers to the micro-targeting of the tech platforms; yet too geographically focussed to find enough people prepared to pay subscriptions.
In a surprise for long-term Murdoch watchers, it looks like the once-vanity project of The Australian is now more financially stable — even profitable, maybe powerful — than the once-dominant tabloids. At June 30, the company says, The Australian had about 200,000 paying subscribers (in digital and print), the most the paper has ever had. It positions the paper to claim a lion’s share of any payment for news from Google and Facebook.
News Corp will be betting that, along with Sky News, The Australian will sustain its clout in Canberra without the tabloids
By comparison, the Herald Sun, once Australia’s largest paper with more than 600,000 in circulation, now claims only 125,000 paying subscribers. Like The Courier-Mail, it failed spectacularly in turning its power against the local Labor premier.
London’s The Sun, which boasted a circulation well over 3 million back when it was making and breaking British governments, now limps along at about 1 million. It has no paid-for digital offering.
Traditionally, when Murdoch has sold mastheads, he’s sold to other media players or to a management buyout. For the Australian tabloids, that would make local management and Seven West Media the front-runners. Owner Kerry Stokes has been a long-term ally of Rupert. The West Australian already shares copy with News Corp.
And the price? Nine’s sale of New Zealand’s Stuff earlier this year may have set the market: NZ$1 to its local CEO. Sounds about right, but expect that to be buried in exchanges of rights, share-holdings and liabilities.
Regulars here will know my response – we should all be running our businesses to rely less of traffic freeways and more on traffic laneways. In other words, more sources of shopper traffic than the usual regular ones on which we, as a channel, grew up.
I decided to cancel my subscription to The Age a three days ago. I figured it would be easy – log into their website, select my account and click cancel from the next billing cycle.
I figured, 1, 2, 3 and I’d be done. I figured that because that’s how online works. It’s easy, self-serve, fast.
But, not at Fairfax Media. Their approach is broken, cumbersome and laden with barriers.
I logged in. Then, I had to log in again when I selected my account. There was no explanation as to why I had to log in twice. I guess it as because they are two different tech systems.
Anyone, I got in. But once in, there was no button I could click to self manage the account.
I had to call or email the. So, I selected email, thinking I could write an email. But, no, that would be too simple for Fairfax Media to implement.
On selecting email, it took me to another page that I had to complete. They asked for my subscriber number. I went back to my account page, there is no subscriber number. I checked and checked and could not find it. So, back to the web form, I completed the details including having to tell them why I wanted to cancel.
But that was not enough. They will consider my request. They emailed suggesting I call them if it is a time sensitive request. It’s not, so I’ll let it play out. Gees, I hope they don’t call. I don’t want to speak with anyone. But … here we are 3 days later and I’ve heard nothing.
As I said, appalling customer service from Nine Media’s Fairfax.
If I was a Fairfax shareholder I’d be thinking about the manpower cost of such a broken subscription management system. Talk about broken, old-school, out of date. It’s a joke. My own small business subscription related consumer websites offer far better customer self-service experiences.
It’s simple really, Fairfax Media. I want to cancel my subscription. These hoops and barriers feel like it is a business strategy to keep customers, by making it too hard to quit.
The experience turns me off. It makes me want to tell others how bad dealing with them is.
The approach by Fairfax Media to managing online subscriptions is what I’d expect from a dinosaur business, a business out of touch with online. Oh, wait…
This is a must watch video from Michael West for anyone interested in News Corp. and related companies:
If you have a newsagency in or near Bermagui or Cobargo, you may be able to help…
Bermagui / Cobargo in regional Eden Monaro have no outlets selling anything except Murdoch / NewsCorpse newspapers. Cannot buy Guardian, Saturday Paper or any other even vaguely LW press. Is this common in Regional Oz & if so does it reflect LNP voting successes?
— Lord Rivers of Beer & Antifa (@MarekRivers) November 21, 2020
Australian Story on ABC TV next Monday looks like a good story about a local newspaper in Broken Hill fighting for survival.
Fight for the Truth
Five hundred kilometres from the nearest capital city, the outback mining town of Broken Hill is fighting to save its only newspaper.For over a hundred years, the Barrier Truth has told the town’s stories, documented wars, droughts and the Depression, and recorded the lives and deaths of its citizens.
But when the pandemic struck, advertising revenue collapsed, forcing the newspaper to shut down.
Former Broken Hill resident and mining executive Robert Williamson heard about the community’s distress and raised enough money to restart the printing presses temporarily.
Now the newspaper’s union owners face a tough decision: should they sell their beloved paper to private interests?
Airs Monday November 9, 8pm (AEDT), on ABCTV and iview.
The latest results posted by News Corp. speak to challenges for the company in the print space with newspaper revenue down 20% and the benefits leveraged by the company in the digital subscription space.
The results are worth a read by newsagents as they provides context for understanding the focus of the company – digital.
I have seen several IGA supermarkets promoting free News Corp. newspapers for shoppers who spend $20 or more in-store at the IGA.
One newsagent told me that in their situation, two doors away from an IGA running the promotion, they have seen News Corp. sales decline – they think because of the promotion.
I get that News Corp. does what it needs to do to achieve circulation / readership goals for ad revenue targets. I think the regularity of these deals speak to challenges for the company getting people to pay for its product.
What is a newspaper worth? Shop here and you pay $2.00. Shop at IGA for it’s free if you spend more than $20.00.
What diminishes the value of the newspaper product further in my opinion is the mechanic of the free paper at the IGA. The offer is not consistent. Sometimes it is offered while other times it is not. The wording is especially inconsistent.
That checkout counter offer of the free paper opens conversations about the papers and there is where brand damage can be delivered. Simply by offering a free News Corp. paper invites a response. Given the extent of growing negative feelings toward News Corp. in some locations this year, I would have thought that opening the door for sharing opinions was not ideal.
A quick check of Twitter shows plenty of people talking about the latest News Corp. giveaway, like this one:
My local IGA has a new deal :
if you spend $20 you get a free Murdoch ‘newspaper’, not one person took one!😂😂😂
and an elderly lady behind me said to her friend maybe I should grab one to line my kitty litter tray.
GOLD!!!#NewsCorpse— I Can’t Breathe #BlackLivesMatter (@KarolinaVoit) November 3, 2020
And this one:
Overheard at an IGA supermarket. Checkout staff. “You get a free newspaper as you’ve spent over $30”. Shopper. “I’d rather just have a free plastic bag”. @theheraldsun #NewsCorpse #cantgiveitaway
— onhold (@iratecaller) September 21, 2020
Yes, these types of deals have been around for years. That does not mean we should ignore them and consider the challenge they present to retail newsagents.
Oh, and some in News Corp. may say the free paper today could convert someone who goes on to purchase from the newsagent in the future. To this I would say, show me the evidence of this. Like the claims for trickle-down economics, I suspect it is wishful thinking not backed by evidence.
In another move against print media in supermarkets, the UK Kroger group has removed free newspapers and magazines from its stores. Check out this report from earlier this year.
Kroger will be removing free newspapers from all of its stores, effective Oct. 15. Locally, those publications include The Memphis Flyer, Focus, Memphis Parent, Memphis Health & Fitness, and Best Times.
“We are removing the publication racks from our stores because more publications continue to shift to digital formats, resulting in less customers using the products,” said Teresa Dickerson, corporate affairs manager of Kroger’s Delta division.
Even so, the move may hurt local news organizations.
“It’s a huge blow to Health and Fitness because we move 20,000 magazines a month out of there,” said Amy Goode, the publisher of Health and Fitness.
Free publications rely on a paid advertising business model: Advertisers buy ads with certain assurances that their marketing messages will reach a certain number of customers. This is why having a reliable, wide-ranging distribution point such as Kroger is so important.
I say it is another blow because of moves announced earlier about a branch of Aldi getting out of newspapers.
It feels like there is more evidence of a growing anti-Murdoch sentiment in Victoria, especially on Twitter. Many tweets reference what happened in the UK when locals rose up against the reporting of a local matter by The Sun over there. Given the firm negative stance taken by The Australian and the Herald Sun on matters related to Victoria in recent months, I guess this type of social media commentary is not unexpected. Read the re reply from someone in a cafe.:
Here’s me. “When Murdoch’s tabloid failed Liverpool the people kicked it out of town for good. What’s stopping Melbourne?”https://t.co/tBrvT8dJd7
— David Milner (@DaveMilbo) October 28, 2020
CATS FANS – cheer your team on to Grand Final glory. Get your free team poster with the Herald Sun at newsagents tomorrow. DETAILS > https://t.co/Vih9ARNb7G pic.twitter.com/svqaaDHgKE
— Herald Sun (@theheraldsun) October 15, 2020
Communication from News Corp. has failed again with plenty of newsagents telling me they are yet to be advised of a price rise for The Australian and The Weekend Australia that started October 5. Here is part of the letter from September 28 I was sent by a newsagent yesterday.
The poor communication has cost some newsagents money given the poor approach to product data handling by the company.
This would never have happened 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, News Corp., folks made sure newsagents knew in advance as well as software companies – so that newsagents had the current advice a week before any cover price change. Now, with so much institutional knowledge lost in News Corp. it is no wonder newsagents who were not informed last week are furious.
News Corp. like to tell Australians how to live their lives. If only they sorted their mess out first.
The Paperboy website provides access to the front pages of newspapers from around the world. The site gets around 1,200 visitors a day from Australia and around 46,000 a day worldwide currently.
I don’t see it as a threat to over the counter sales.
A newsagent contacted me yesterday about the site, worried that it was another risk point. The reality is The Paperboy has been around for 2 decades.
