Outfoxing the print dinosaurs

He may be the scourge of the liberal media, but Rupert Murdoch wants to offer young people a revolution in the way they access news. Conor Brady reports

Rupert Murdoch is now American. Or, at least, News Corporation – the world's largest media empire, by a long shot – is now American. Murdoch's lawyers recently completed the final incorporation of the organisation in New York. Bye bye Australia. Welcome the land of opportunity.

And there are opportunities a-plenty for News Corporation in the United States. The US remains the world's single largest media market, with the richest advertising pot, the biggest TV audiences and a ready appetite for new media.

President Clinton's deregulation of the media industry, through his Federal Communications Act, opened the doors to profitable amalgamations and cross-ownership of TV, radio and print outlets. Economies of scale and centralised servicing have enabled managers to drive down costs and boost profits. The US is the best place to be if one wants to make a lot of money out of media in the next decade.

That is why Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation are there.

Murdoch was the keynote speaker at the conference of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in New York last month. Remarkably, he still owns only one newspaper in the US, the New York Post. But what he may lack in newsprint he more than makes up for in broadcast power. Fox Broadcast Network is now the network of choice for most Americans in the 18 to 49 age bracket. Fox News is now the number one US cable news network, leaving CNN far down the field.

And we may anticipate that by the time Murdoch has done with it, he will probably also be a dominant player in web-based media in the US.

Rupert Murdoch is no Howard Hughes. He does appear in public and he participates in gatherings – like ASNE – from time to time. But his appearances are rare enough to be noteworthy.

With perhaps uncharacteristic humility, he told his audience in New York that, yes, he had been slow to understand the power and potential of the internet. He is, he said, a "digital immigrant", who has come to the new world of web-based media from an old world of media that was based on conventions which no longer apply.

"I come to this discussion, not as an expert," he said, "but as someone searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language. Like many of you, I am a digital immigrant... I grew up in a highly centralised world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors who deemed to tell us what we could and should know."

Media owners and editors need to understand that the next generation of people accessing news and information have "a different set of expectations", he said. They have different expectations "about the kind of news they will get, where they will get it from and who they will get it from".

"What is happening, in short," Murdoch went on, "is a revolution in the way young people access news. They don't want to rely on the morning paper for up-to-date information. They don't want a god-like figure from above telling them what's important... Instead, they want news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media instead of being controlled by it."

I wasn't at the New York conference. But I know newspaper editors, including a good many of those who would have been present. And I think I can pretty well imagine the squirming and the agony that these remarks will have generated across the audience. Editors may be very good at what they have traditionally done. But in general they are notoriously conservative and have real difficulty thinking outside the box within which they have grown up – professionally speaking.

Rupert Murdoch's words would have been gall and vinegar to most of them. And he put it up to them in terms that few of them could have denied.

"I venture to say that not one newspaper represented in this room lacks a website," he said. "Yet how many of us can say we are taking maximum advantage of those sites to serve our readers, to strengthen our business or to meet head-on what readers find increasingly important to them in receiving news?"

The truth is that most newspapers have failed to understand what Rupert Murdoch is spelling out. A decade after the advent of the internet as we know it, there is still insufficient awareness in most traditional newsrooms, or indeed in newspaper boardrooms, of the synergies and potential that are possible between the values of print-based media and the web.

Paradoxically, there was a more active awareness five years ago. Many traditional media companies were then spending more in researching web opportunities than they are now. The recovery in the western economies in 2002 to 2003, along with cost reduction, have brought most print and broadcast media back to a phase of modest profitability.

Many traditional media, having failed to make profits from their web-based operations, have put them on the back-burner, hammered down the costs and turned their focus back on what they were at before. Newsroom websites have been allowed to run down. Many of the skilled young journalists who were recruited to them in the late 1990s have migrated elsewhere – often with the "encouragement" of the cost-accountants.

But Rupert Murdoch knows that the best days are ahead for the marriage between print and web – and indeed between broadcast and web. That is why he was at ASNE.

He spelled it out plainly for the editors.

"It is a monumental, once-in-a-generation opportunity... Our industry has the potential to reshape itself and to be healthier than ever before."p

Conor Brady is Editor Emeritus of The Irish Times. He is a senior teaching fellow at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, UCD, where he lectures in modern media