Mark Scott, Chairman Rupert, Libby Purves, and good luck with charging for content on the intertubes

Mark Scott, current head of the ABC, starts his rebellious speech about the state of media and digital content on the intertubes - the public servant rebel standing up against the evil empire from the icy wastes of the planet Hoth - by quoting a little W. H. Auden and his work The Fall of Rome (and it being the full to overflowing intertubes you can find it here).

I actually think Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley is more to the point, with just one minor amendment:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Chairman Rupert, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

How the mighty are fallen is an adaptation of Scott's A N Smith lecture in Journalism at the University of Melbourne, but as is often the way these days, the link they give in the SMH for the full text isn't working (at least at the time I tried), so you might be better off going here, with a link to a pdf copy, courtesy of Margaret Simons and Crikey.

Scott makes a number of solid points in solid style, and is generally restrained, though there's a delicious lick of the lips at this point:

Now most owners are not barons; they are investors. It's just a business. It could just as easily be a shoe store or a grocery.

Today, when their protection is most needed, most of the barons have gone. The Packers have largely sold out of traditional media. The Bancrofts took the cash. The Fairfaxes own less than 10 per cent. Tony O'Reilly's in trouble, Conrad Black is in jail. And Rupert? Rupert is in a category all his own.

Phew, at least he's not in jail.

Scott ends with the note that the times are a changing and that the digital natives are unlikely to disturb the red backs and red bellied black snakes in their wallets and purses:

... Rupert Murdoch, the man who just four years ago said he wanted to ''make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands of the digital native'', says he's not going to respond to the demands of these digital natives. Instead, they - who have never in their lives paid for news online - will be asked to respond instead to his demands and start paying.

It strikes me as a classic play of old empire, of empire in decline. Believing that because you once controlled the world you can continue to do so, because you once set the rules, you can do so again, thinking that you still have the power that befits the Emperor.

Scott has to be careful, because public broadcasters are in fact the leak in the dyke, the hole in any paywall that Chairman Rupert and his cabal of like-minded wannabe oligopolists are going to have to take out if they want to control digital content on the intertubes. So he deflects the looming war between Murdoch and public broadcasters by referencing the consumers.

But he needn't have been quite so coy. Because there are other leaks in the dyke, and no matter how News Corp might imagine plugging them, alternative business models keep popping up.

Here's Libby Purves having a now typical News Corp anxiety attack in The future is not cost-free in The Australian:

Yesterday was a small milestone in media history. For the first time in its 180-year history, the London Evening Standard has become free. Scuttling commuters will no longer throw 50p to street salesmen (occasionally copping a dodgy umbrella as incentive).

Instead we will pick up this substantial newspaper, with well-paid writers and ambitions towards gravitas, as if it were one of the fluffier freesheets littering the Tube floors. The owner believes that doing this, and doubling the print run, will create a monopoly that - through advertising revenue - will turn a profit.

My first concern, I must admit, was for the tribe of Standard sellers - part of London's human landscape with their fingerless grey gloves and mournful cries of "Eeeeeeningstanner!". Most will be paid to hand it out free, although the six that I talked to last week all fear for their income. The second thought was for small newsagents who will miss the revenue generated by workers dashing in for an afternoon paper and a Snickers bar to sweeten it. The third was for the Standard itself: if the gamble fails there are a few of its writers that I will miss.

Et tu Evening Standard, and no one to mourn for your tribe of sellers? And then at the end of the last Purves par the secret hope, perhaps even a yearning, that the gamble might fail, and then there can be more mourning, for the writers fallen on the scrap heap of life at the behest of the foolish proprietors.

The folly of the 'free' thinkers, it could be called.

Followed as you'd expect by what's now become the standard Murdoch line, the cry of despair:

But the fourth concern was bigger. Huge, in fact. It was about the whole "business model" of free-ness. Call me a reactionary, call me a Murdoch lackey, but the fact is that, after a vague flirtation with the concept that "information wants to be free" and years of internet surfing, I feel a sense of revolt.

It's been fun: like a jammed fruit machine spewing free tokens or a whisky-galore shipwreck. But it's got to stop. Content - whether music, films, pictures, news or prose - can't be free and flourish. The music and film industries are fighting: journalism, after the ego trip of gaining millions of online readers, is following. It has to. There is no alternative.

Well of course dear Murdoch lackey, you might be feeling a sense of revolt, but personally I can't sense an urgent desire amongst consumers to fork over their hard earned readies to Chairman Rupert.

Because, you see, there are alternatives. That's how I can listen to radio free (both commercial and public broadcaster), and how I can choose to pay for television, or watch it free, loaded to the gills with advertising, or provided via tax payer dollars in the form of public broadcasters, or I can go online and get content supported by advertising, or by piracy.

Purves' explanation of this dismal state of affairs? It's the academics at work yet again:

For the owners to ask for payment is a diabolical liberty. The young are conditioned to think this way because that is how the internet feels. A web invented by academics rather than business people, its default setting is "free".

Well actually it's default setting isn't free, not unless you've managed to wangle a free computer, or such like similar mobile device, with free programs (okay that's the easy bit), and free wiring, or free access to the ether, which will provide you with a free connection to the world of broadband and a free uncapped right to download whatever you want. By golly, at that point I'm sensing free is in the thousands of dollars category.

What Purves means to say is what's in it for Chairman Rupert instead of all those dreadful ISP's and the Googles and the Amazons, who made their moves while the mainstream media sat in the middle of the stream like salmon waiting on a claw up from a bear.

As a result, her column is a marvel of defensive thinking and paranoid self-pity. Because there is a trick to getting paid. Deliver content people want and they will pay for it. I pay for content all the time. But in the case of The Australian for example, what happens if I prefer to pay for The New York Times, and get my local content from other sources?

What happens in the antipodes, when the hardened arteries of News Corp - long reliant on a seventy per cent or thereabouts share of hard copy newspapers and lots of associated knick knacks - have to get out and compete on a global basis with a system that pumps more information in my computer than I could handle in a dozen lifetimes? Who will pay for the desperate gibberish that is the Daily Telegraph (antipodes version), or The Punch ... gasp ... a blog?

The old days of recycling international content locally are gone (though still present any day of the week you might care to fork out hard cash for a hard copy of The Australian Financial Review on a Friday and find you might be reading a piece first run in Harpers or The New Yorker). Once local papers could control content in the way the film industry tried to control regions with territorial restrictions on DVDs, but that ain't gonna fly no more.

Losing this control has led to a weird kind of schizophrenia in journalists and Purves never fails to delight. She takes to Chris Anderson of Wired, and his philosophy of free and amateurs (never mind the many ways journalists in News Corp employ link to YouTube and like services), and after dismissing bloggers as a window on minds in a world gone crazy (yep, The Punch is that), offers up this as an insight, which presumably she thinks worthy of some kind of payment:

I didn't buy Anderson's book, obviously. I read chunks of it online, free. Just as we all do every day, during what I think we will soon look back on as a strange interregnum - a Star-Trekky time warp between the age of paper and the age of subscription. I don't say this just because News Corporation - The Times's (and The Australian's) parent company - looks likely to be the first big organisation to ask a payment from online readers. Nobody told me to say this. It just seems, as Basil Fawlty would say, the bleedin' obvious.

Well actually, News Corp isn't the first big organisation to ask for a payment from online readers. So it's just as well nobody told you to say this, and so after refusing to buy Anderson's book, like any other self-respecting intertubes pirate, I'm wondering why I should take you at your word when you offer up as benefit of payment the following?

For (Anderson) media will become a mere hobby; already, he says, most news is "created by amateurs". He sees no problem in freeing us all from the tyranny of accuracy, professional research, training, care and, presumably, legality into a gossipy twilight of twittered, undigested rumour, half-baked plagiarism and urban myth.

In much the same way as you freed yourself from the tyranny of accuracy and a sense of care while out stumping and spruiking for the Chairman?

Because here's the real fright and the real nightmare for Chairman Rupert and other wannabe oligopolists. What if they decide to ask for a payment, and consumers decide not to pay? What then?

It's the big fear, because it's a big gamble that might see online consumers change their habits, seeing as how opinionated prejudiced inaccuracy of the kind Purves peddles can be found elsewhere at the click of a mouse or a thumb on a touch screen.

Who knows what kind of cheese the mice might find if they're allowed to roam, and then whatever synergy has been built up through trading on mastheads might actually dissipate.

In the end, Purves gets almost plaintive when complaining about the onerous deal terms offered up by the likes of Amazon and Google to providers of content:

Indeed, often enough the receptive public thinks them worth nothing at all, not even the price of a fag. Does that seem fair, to you?

Well actually it does, because fags kill, and the thought of paying for the likes of Janet Albrechtsen or Miranda the Devine to rant at the world from a very comfortable sinecure induces a really strong kind of smoker's cough in me - when I can rant, and read the rants of others for free, and the real business of collecting and disseminating useful information goes untended.

Here's the thing. The intertubes isn't free, unless you go into a public library, and they're already full to overflowing with any amount of advertising, but the canny advertisers pay less than what the old media giants need to keep them in their bloatware style.

So offer subscriptions, and good luck with all that, and those who want to pay - out of a sense of civic duty, or because they perceive value for money, or because they just love to shove money down the throat of one of the few old fashioned media moguls left in the business - will cheerfully hand over their cash.

And the others will go elsewhere, and the links culture will continue to thrive, perhaps with a little added piracy as subscribers reprint articles for those outside the golden circle (and a new layer of anti-piracy measures can be added to the intertubes), but don't expect to be able to take out the public broadcasters to make the seawall strong, and don't expect to be able to use oligopolistic tactics to force non-believers inside the News Corp tent.

The digital natives are out where the wild things are, running wild and free and howling at the moon in their freedom.

So bring it on, take on the content kleptomaniacs head on, and show us how it can done, and if it works, jolly good, and if not, look nervously over your shoulder, as the likes of Mark Scott of the ABC, and the Evening Standard circle like wolves (or jackals - your choice of simile) in the dark fading light ...

(Below: jeepers Batman, with content like this, can the Evening Standard fail to appeal? And they're giving it away for free!)