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.