It will be interesting how it all plays out.

I am not as concerned as others. I think most people get their news from the electronic media in any case. I would be much more worried if the ABC vanished.

As for myself, I hardly ever read hardcopy Australian newspapers. I mostly listen to radio, watch current affairs, read OLO, and surf the net through google by typing certain subject topics alerted to me by radio (including Aust online newspaper sources).

I think if people want to be informed, they still will be. The others, i suspect, will stil rely on the electronic media.

The smh with a "soft left ideology". Well, I suppose it depends on where one starts in the ideological spectrum. In recent years the smh has supported the attack on Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently it is content to repeat the neocon argument about Iran,s supposed nuclear weapons program. I cannot recall the last time if ever there was an honest appraisal of the threat Israel poses to peace. It provides editorial opinion space to a range of right wing view points, eg Gerard henderson, but no comparable space to any columnist who could be even vaguely described as "soft left".

A although olo is not perfect it does provide a wider range of views, particularly in its comments sections. I suggest it is that function, as with cricket, new Matilda et al that is a major reason people are deserting the so-called mainstream in droves.

I believe what is occurring around the world to the print media is probably a good thing.
There was a time when we had a veritable plethora of print media. This was the time when editors had complete autonomy, and or Journalists focused simply on reporting the news, rather than highly partisan opinion?
The sheer weight of competition for readership compelled that very outcome and limited the plaguerism; given that would be quickly exposed by eagle eyed Journalists, who as a group, would be arguably incensed by this sort of, piggy back, lazy journalism!
The one hundredth year centenary commemorative issue of the London times, reportedly cost the lives of 50,000 trees?
The print media needs to go completely electronic if it would survive; ditto the planet's forests!
And it would need to compete with sites just like this one, for the rivers of gold that classified ads used to produce, and the very readership that produced that very outcome.
In fact, that single source of income, made it possible to sell every edition, for a lot less than it cost to produce.
Some of the very small and still very successful urban papers, supply their papers entirely free!
The very best outcome of the print media being compelled to go electronic, is the diffusion of ownership, editorial opinion, and the need to once again, have a very real competition for readership, ideas, and or, potential customers for the advertisers, that pay for the site?
[Hopefully, occasionally?]
Most of the people I know, even pensioners, would pay 50 cents a day for a quality electronic product, particularly one that relies entirely on quality, [rather than tracking cookies,] to keep their loyal readership involved and interested!
The soft sell is still the only one that really works!
The appetite to visit a particular site, will quickly wane, if we the readers have to spend half a day disinfecting the PC after every visit!
Will never ever pay for or subscribe for that intended invasion of privacy.
Rhrosty.

As one of the potential losers in yesterday's announcement - I am not likely to be retrenched but will Fairfax last until I retire? - I cannot disagree with anything Graham has written. However, I will point out that the Alan Kohler Business Spectator/Eureka site he mentions - an all digital online site - is known to lose money. A few hundred thousand a year, as I understand it.

The trouble with going online is that consumers are just not willing to pay for content, any content, no matter who provides it - whether it is the soft-left journos who Graham quite rightly says still dominates the media, or anyone else. If consumers are asked they say they want quality content, but when asked what consitutes quality they will nominate topics like the environment and education, when there is already heaps of that stuff around and they are turning away from it. In fact, what they want is light entertainment, lifestyle stories and celebrity gossip, which they also won't pay for.

Although the technology has changed the way people consume news, consumer tastes have also shifted away from the hard news beloved of political writers. My colleagues will just have to adjust to that.

I guess people who think know that what is printed in the media or shown on television has little to do with either 'news' or 'the truth'.

What is presented is what the media barons and corporate crooks want people to think, to believe, and to buy. They media is mainly an instrument of indoctrination, one which, for most, eventually takes the place of parents and teachers.

Until humans break this cycle of indoctrination, they will be manipulated and used by the Oligarchs who runs most of the world through the 'media' and captive Governments!

David G

nope, all wrong.. go back and read Graham's article and a few of the posts. the problem is that the media reports news and consumers, by and large, no longer want news, or at least aren't going to pay for it.. One problem with Fairfax is that it sin't controlled by anyone, although Reinhart is messing around with it.. News Corp is, and it has broadly the same problems - albeit a bit less so because it doesn't have quite the same soft-left bias of Fairfax.

Part of the problem is that people moving away from thinking in the left-right terms that are still important to you, and that's part of the reason why political news no longer holds their attention like it use to..

Hi Curmudgeon, according to this Crikey story, sourced from the information memorandum for sale of The Business Spectator group the Eureka Report actually makes $1.9 M http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/01/30/business-spectator-eureka-report-for-sale-the-leaked-profit-figures/ although the group somehow manages to make a loss a bit less than that.

There are a number of financial tip sheet style publications that seem to do OK. Huntley's Your Money Weekly being the most established.

I think there are things that people will pay for and that what they are prepared to pay will increase. In the early days of the Internet no-one was prepared to pay for anything, including software. Since then you've had an increasing growth in plug ins that you can buy for open source software, as well as media sites that charge you for access. The number of sites you have to pay for is obviously going to increase, and so I think, will acceptance of the proposition that you have to pay.

I have not often read a major daily since I stopped catching a train from Cronulla to the city office & back, about 50 years ago.

Then the morning & evening papers would just about last the hour or so the trip took, before getting to the trivia.

The last time I bought a Courier Mail, it took less than 20 minutes to read just about everything in it. No wonder they are going down the drain. Still they should retain the train commuters, with just a little more effort.

I don't know Graham if you caught Swanny complaining about Gina Rinehart & her increasing shareholding. Obviously James O'Neill didn't or his argument is a bit thin. Swanny is obviously terrified they might get an unbiased, even handed line taken in the Age, once Rinehart gets her board position.

I do find it interesting that according to Swanny, those charged with making the newspaper viable, are not supposed to take any hand in what's printed in it. I would have thought their job was to make the thing appeal to those who might buy it, not help keep a lousy government in Canberra.

Our Labor lot are struggling so much, even with a compliant media helping them, just how bad would it get for them with a balanced coverage by part of the media. They might have to get by with just the ABC, & they have got so bad these days their coverage is disappearing "pretty damn quick", as they say.

Just imagine if we had a media who told the truth about the global warming scam, or the rhorts that go on in the UN. & some of these people deny the left bias of the media in general.

It really is interesting how people's view of the truth is so biased by their politics.

Curmudgeon,

"Nope, all wrong!" you say. How pretentious.

Is your name Rupert Curmudgeon?

Graham, it seems to me that one of the key issues for all forms of media is fast becoming “issues based polarization”.

It’s hard to deny that so many blogs have a clear position on most of the key issues. Likewise many journals are noted for and supported by readerships predisposed to certain issues.

Because of this the public is also becoming increasingly focused on just a few key issues. We might nominate for example, national economics, healthcare, education, border security and energy. Because the media has focused the minds of audiences upon such issues, the audiences have likewise adopted the polarized perspectives.

This is fine until the audience changes its opinion on such topics because any media that continues to promote what its audience has abandoned is likewise abandoned.

Much as Fairfax would like to think it’s the delivery vehicle to blame for its decline, that market would appear to think differently. I don’t think Fairfax has drifted away from it’s readers, they have grown up and moved on as dictated by market forces.

The ABC, SBS are funded by the government and we don’t have a choice so we can’t move on. CH 7, 9 and 10 have now benefited from $5.0 bn from the public purse since 2007 and can no longer be relied upon to be quite as independent of commercial as they were previously, more choice is therefore lost.

If issues based support continues to take hold we may see more of the Fairfax dramas.

Hi GrahamY - okay, I take your point on Eureka, although I was told by others who would be in the know that the Business Spectator part of the operation looses money.. as for the tip sheets, yes, it is true that specialist sites, notably the securities market/investment sites can make money but they are still rare..

Sure, people will pay more over time but its not going to replace a fraction of the revenues from full print newspapers, as they were, for a long time, if ever.. which is in many ways a shame..

David G - the trouble is that you think like most journalists (my colleagues for more than 30 years), and that's been the problem.. they have to change their thinking, so should you..

Hasbeen, I don't know what parallel universe you occupy, but anyone who can write that the Age would show an"evenhanded line" when Rinehart takes control and that Labor is down notwithstanding the media's support is clearly living in a different place than me.

The point of my original comment was that for Graham to describe the SMH as "soft left" can only be understood relative to the position one occupies on the political spectrum. The SMH, like all the mainstream media, pours out a relentless propaganda line that almost invariably supports the status quo, that being defined as what is in the interests of the plutocracy that actually make the important decisions.

I cited three examples but there are countless others. A useful yardstick is to go to the Project Censored website, a project run for many years out of the University of California at Sonoma. Each year they publish the top 25 most censored stories in the US press. Some of those are specific to the US, but there are a lot that resonate in Australia as well. Ask yourself, having read those lists over say the past 15 years, just how much have you read about them in the australian media? Then ask yourself why not?

Or as another example, look at the stories that they have covered which were later shown to be complete furphies. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is an old example; the massacre at Houla allegedly by Assad's troops a more recent one. Despite both the BBC apologising for its original misreporting and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung publishing a more accurate account of what happened at Houla there has been no mea culpa from our subservient press, nor an apology to the Syrian charge d'affaires.

The fact of the matter is that there are a large number of areas that our allegedly "soft left" media won't touch with a barge pole and it is not too difficult to figure out why.

James O'Neill I have to agree with you yet again.The elites use the left /right paradigim to confuse and control the masses.Why would Gina Rinehart buy controling share in Fairfax which is shrinking? She wants to control the political agenda and select which party is best able to sing to her tune.

Unless people start looking at sites such as http://www.globalresearch.ca/ ,they will continue to be slaves to the banking military industrial complex.ie BMIC

Our journos in all our pop media are just whores to the pipers of wealth and power.Gerald Celente calls them "presstitutes".

I still think we are better off wth a SMH and The Age without Rinehart, for what it is worth.

Fairfax is my name, related by blood without the money. LOL
In the days of afternoon tabloids I would buy two or three papers daily but eventually cut down to just one, usually the SMH. Now I buy none.
I stopped buying the SMH because of climate change. The on and on and on lies and spin about CO2 was a waste of money and time.And those lies and spin allowed legislation and is now causing inflation.
Reality to me would be functional Parliament debating development of new productivity and business and employment, such as building an aqueduct system to harvest wet tropical north rain and run it to Qld headwaters of the Darling that already runs to the Murray River.
Useful water infrastructure is however ignored. Parliament debate time is taken up for example with attacks on mining, yet it was mining that prospected and built the mining industry that today is keeping Australia out of recession.
Lets not forget the NBN, imagine if $30 billion plus was spent on water supply and wetland restoration.
Food sustainability should be on the agenda including more water for farmers instead of less and with licenses that consumers will pay for anyway.
News media in my view should be encouraging whole of water ecosystem management to achieve productivity, including management of coastal estuary food web nursery ecosystems presently excluded from so called Marine Parks.
On OLO previously I mentioned sewage proliferated algae warming areas of ocean, warmth not caused by CO2. These days the evidence is building but still the media is failing to investigate.
To date nobody I am aware of has been able to produce evidence that photosynthesis-linked warmth in ocean algae has been measured and assessed by AGW and Kyoto science. It has not been measured to my knowledge.
Sea ice is melting where algae is present. Interesting news helps sell papers. Investigative journalism is needed instead of politics and spin.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/10/world/phytoplankton-mega-bloom-eco-solutions/index.html
Whether or not nutrients are being blown off snow or whether nutrient loads are coming down from Pacific and Indian Ocean waters is subject for debate.
http://wordlesstech.com/2012/03/08/massive-algae-bloom

So true JF. The media refuse to present all the growing evidence that the whole CO2 thing is a left fraud, designed to give control of our lives to the bureaucrats at the UN. It is used to allow bankrupt left administrations to extract even more tax from the long suffering masses.

The attitude could never be considered anything but left.

The SMH is clearly biased on the climate change issue, but then so is most of the media. In some cases it may be political, as with the ABC, but in general I think it's just that stories about doom and disaster sell more papers than 'Everything's OK, nothing to see here.'

What I have also noticed in the SMH is a pervasive reluctance to mention the religious motivations of terrorists: we read stories about how this group or that has killed so many people or blown up a building, but the SMH carefully avoids any reference to the fact that they were motivated to do so by their belief in one particular brand of Invisible Friend. Isn't answering 'why?' supposed to be one of the six essentials of journalism?

I think its really going to depend on how much they charge. I
would happily subscribe to the AFR for instance, but not at the price
they want, which I think is far too high. Similarly I'd be prepared
to pay for the SMH if its reasonable. I cancelled my Eureka Report
subscribtion when they tried to jack up the price by 20% and I found
it no longer value for money.

Perhaps Fairfax can learn something from the Microsoft-Apple story.
Apple nearly went broke when they tried to overcharge for their
product, Bill Gates saw the light with his Windows 3 for 49.95 and
the rest is history. Now Apple commonly charge just a few Dollars
for great Ipad apps and sell them by the tens of millions, which
still ads up to a great deal of money.

So my Advice to Fairfax is to go in cheap and do deals. Offer me
a SMH-AFR combination at a reasonable price and I'm interested. Try
to screw me and I'll do without.

Australian businesses commonly make the mistake of trying to earn
huge margins, whereas the Walmarts, Aldi's and all the rest have
shown us, that volume and not overpricing are the way to make a quid.

Give your customers great value for money and they will have a reason
to support your business.The days of ripping them off are over.
Consumers have options these days, unlike the past

Curmudgeon, hidden in the announcement of News Limited's restructuring is the fact that they have bought the Business Spectator/Eureka Report site. I think that probably settles the question as to whether it is profitable, or will be so.

It also confirms another part of my announcement in that News looks to be seeing itself as an amalgam of niche sites more than a monolith.

That's all sensible and true Yabby. In addition though I think the SMH should get back to fearless journalism reporting real issues and solutions that need reporting to get them in front of politicians.
A Current Affair began with fairdinkum to-the-point investigative journalism but then went into travel and individual problem and handicapped sympathy stories.
I would buy a newspaper that strived for a true and better deal for everyone while not being afraid of the politics - even though major advertising contracts from government might not eventuate with media that does not fall into line.
There can be no doubt carbon pricing is upon us all because SMH and other journalists and editors have not reported conflict in debate, for example the conflict between genuine CSIRO science and political CO2 agenda.
I think it amazing that actual law has been legislated based on lies and spin about CO2 causing AGW.