(Above: yes, and no need for formality dog, a "will" is as good a "shall" when addressing your mistress or master)
It was only a few days ago that the pond noted a story in the lizard Oz by Christian Kerr headed Viewers turning off ABC1, cheekily dubbed an "exclusive", and purporting to explain how viewers were dropping the broadcaster like flies who'd discovered a fresher, more enticing cow pat elsewhere.
Oh it was gripping, compelling stuff, and it produced the relevant squawk from the ABC, as you can read in Crikey in ABC boss fires back over The Oz's out-of-date claims, if you can get behind the paywall.
Mark Scott, the clap happy head, sent out a stern note, Setting the record straight (which happens to be outside the paywall).
Never mind, how swiftly the cruel wheel of irony turns these days.
Scan the digital pages of the lizard Oz this day and you won't see an exclusive headed Readers turning off The Australian, though the exclusive is there to be had.
Instead the pond notes that the top of the pages "exclusives" are a little sparse, with only an "exclusive" about former Chairman Rudd allegedly snubbed on the matter of the fifth anniversary of the Stolen Generation apology (it seems we now must celebrate apologies on a yearly basis, and never mind the state of indigenous affairs), and an "exclusive" about the man who allegedly hanged himself in an allegedly suicide-proof Israeli cell.
Sadly neither were enough for the pond to kill off the family of red backs nestling in the purse, and splash the cash on a digital pass.
Which happily leaves the pond with its own front page exclusive on newspaper data.
Well it would be an "exclusive", except for the fact that the ABC broke the news - in much the same way as you can find many of the "exclusives"of The Australian elsewhere - and with a header just as cruel as any the lizard Oz could conjure up:
Remarkably in the last few months of 2012, the lizard Oz dropped its physical circulation by nearly 10% on weekday editions, while the weekend edition dropped by more than 8%.
It's even worse for Fairfax, with the Sun Herald 23% off the pace (the Sunday Terror only dropped 3.2%), and the daily Herald and The Age clearly in a death spiral (or as the ABC politely phrases it, in steep decline).
The rest of the figures make for compelling reading, and the trend is clear, and well worth that header Readers turning off newspapers.
Hmmm, how to spin this in a way that only The Australian could weave as it seeks to produce a lovely Charlotte's Web of ingenious slant.
It's good news!!
And what's more it's good news which you can only read behind the paywall, despite the fact that all the facts are available at the ABC.
The pond immediately felt the need to burst into song:
It's good news week
Someone's dropped a bomb somewhere
Contaminating atmosphere
And blackening the sky
Naturally the pond took a dive around the paywall to read Good news for newspaper mastheads as digital sales rise strongly (remember the paywall if you click), but sadly the obdurate figures about physical sales were exactly the same, and remarkably there was no mention that the lizard Oz could only boast of some 40,000 digital subscribers. Which is more of a sneeze than a tsunami to offset the drop in physical sales and advertising revenue.
Still, there's a profound irony there. The rag that routinely disses the NBN and by extension the internet, clutching at digital as its salvation.
This brought the pond to a state of metaphysical musing - the pond is always off on an existential journey - and it wasn't just because of listening to a media guru, Megan Brownlow, on Fran Kelly explaining there was a deep structural adjustment required, and cost-cutting wasn't the answer. And that even the word 'paywall' suggested a problem.
The pond is always attracted to musing about matters apocalyptic or armageddonish, or perhaps karma.
(Things being what they are you can already head off to the intertubes to listen to what Brownlow had to say, here).
Back to that karma.
For years Australian newspapers had their heads in the sand over the matter of the intertubes, and The Australian and the whole Murdoch stable were at the head of the queue.
Their rage and fear about the NBN was part of the fear and loathing about the way that the internet was a major threat to their business.
Did they adjust to the new reality? Did they show the flexibility that destructive capitalism - which they purport to love - demands?
No, they just kept on with the nattering negativity, at one with their fearless leader.
The trouble is, it's always very well to talk about heading north or talk about heading back to dam-building as a nation-building exercise, as an alternative to the NBN - but the internet is now out of the box.
While the rest is just blather, idle chit chat of an uncosted kind, subjected to mischievous leaks to expose the half-baked ideas and discussion papers to the blinding glare of day.
If they'd been led by the Labor party, they'd have been destroyed in an instant as the worst kind of Soviet big government intervention five year planning. Ye ancient cats and Barners dogs, the dams strategy was dismissed even by some coalition people as just a list of dam proposals they were considering (well said, Mr. Hunt)
Even if Abbott and co. drags the NBN back into the dark ages - and Malcolm Turnbull, who knows better but keeps toadying up to the boss in a lickspittle way, keeps saying they will - there's no way back for newspapers.
And free to air television should watch out too, because even the pond goes to the intertubes for its supply of Portlandia, rather than wait for FTA to catch up (yes, even if it's quirk for quirk's sake these days, it's so easy to display a residual loyalty).
The point, of course, is that if the pond wants to reference the burblings of Turnbull, here's the visuals and a transcript, already up on the tubes after being aired last night under the header Interview with Malcolm Turnbull.
Watching hapless big Mal dance around on the head of a pin in relation to HFC delivery was something to see.
It seems that just as with dams, the coalition is looking to take the suburbs of the major cities back to the early nineteen nineties with a hybrid service using crappy old HFC - at least until big Mal sputtered and said I cannot give you a definitive answer on HFC.
Perhaps the pond could help big Mal out, and give a definitive answer. Compared to fibre optic delivery, HFC is shit.
The pond has watched in astonishment these past few days as one after another half-baked ideas have been floated in leaked reports of coalition policy ideas, ranging from cuckoo-land proposals to head north (a kind of Brisbane line in reverse) to listing a range of dams that might be built, and never mind the urgent immediate needs of Australian infrastructure, at least if you live in the real world, working to a real budget.
The problem goes back to the installation of Tony Abbott, whose only thought was to oppose the NBN, rather than argue for a better way to implement it (and let's not talk about fucked up notions that reverting to HFC is an actual implementation), and ditto opposing either a carbon tax, or a carbon trading scheme, though Abbott had in the past spoken in support of both.
On the evidence, he's not a policy wonk, he's a bubble-headed booby ferreting around in a frenzy for something positive to pitch.
The same problem confronts newspapers. They spent years opposing the internet, fighting it tooth and claw, denying it, rather than working out how to work with it, and make it work for them.
Which is why a peculiar nausea gripped the pond when it saw the Terror's response to the figures:
It doesn't mention the actual figures, or the actual drop in them, and it verges on the fraudulent.
In love with a fraud? Go eat your pyjamas ...
It took the music industry years of suing their customers to work out that deploying the lawyers was a dead end. The film industry hasn't yet learned the lesson, and the book business is now finding out it's also in deep trouble, given the way a pdf, an epub or a mobi can be broken and downloaded at the drop of a hat.
It turns out that newspapers are deeply conservative institutions, and none were more myopic, traditional and conservative than the Murdoch flagship The Australian, and its twofold response - denial and denial - has now got it in a pretty pickle.
Brownlow pointed out in her interview with Kelly that big global brands like The Guardian and the New York Times could transition to the intertubes and survive, and she suggested that The Guardian, outside a paywall, could make a big splash in the Australian market.
Well yes and it frequently rains in London.
It continues to astonish the pond that the Australian mastheads keep on re-printing stories from across the seas, as if punters don't have immediate keystroke access to those stories at source. (It conjures up fond memories of the days when the Adelaide Advertiser was known as the Observer on the Torrens, when the cost of air freight meant something).
This is actually beyond ideology or theology or Abbott's nattering negativity or his determination to piss money against the wall on the north or on dams, rather than continue to create a clever wired country up there with South Korea or other Asian countries.
Nothing will save physical newspapers, no matter how many they fling at Qantas customers for free to maintain fake circulation levels, and nothing will save the stupidity and hubris embedded in Chris Mitchell's ancient conservative Brisbane tabloid view of the world.
Or poor old Kim Williams forced to mouth this hapless gibberish to rally the troops:
Kim Williams, the chief executive of News Limited, said the data showed Australians continued to love the print medium, with the company selling 11 million newspapers a week - more than any publisher in Australia.
"You cannot underestimate the power of newspapers. As an advertising platform they provide advertisers with highly targeted audiences," he said.
Mr Williams said he was delighted the company's online network of sites was attracting a total unique audience of 7.2 million, while its mobile network was the biggest in the country.
Thank you to all our readers for your support
Ever heard the gasp of dying whales? It's a pitiful sound and a pitiful sight. Avert your eyes.
How to end on an up note?
Oh yes, the pond feels like bursting into song all over again. Take it away Hedghoppers Anonymous:
It's good news week
Someone's found a way to give
The rotting dead a will to live
Go on and never die
Have you heard the news
What did it say?
Who's won that race?
What's the weather like today?
It's good news week
Families shake the need for gold
By stimulating birth control
We're wanting less to eat
It's good news week
Doctors finding many ways
Of wrapping brains on metal trays
To keep us from the heat
It's good news week
Someone's dropped a bomb somewhere
Contaminating atmosphere
And blackening the sky
It's good news week
Someone's found a way to give
The rotting dead a will to live
Go on and never die
Have you heard the news
What did it say?
Who's won that race?
What's the weather like today?
What's the weather like today?
It's good news week
Families shake the need for gold
By stimulating birth control
We're wanting less to eat
It's good news week
Doctors finding many ways
Of wrapping brains on metal trays
To keep us from the heat
To keep us from the heat
To keep us from the heat
Oh look you can even find that one hit wonder on the intertubes at YouTube, and it only runs 2'08".
Fancy that. And isn't it grand that people will look at newspapers with the same pleasure and nostalgia as silly cultists currently do for LPs and vinyl ... (not to mention Quentin Taratino putting them up on film).
Bring back reel to reel, the 8 track and VHS, the pond says.
Squirrel, Mr. Mitchell, squirrel ...
"You cannot enderestimate the power of newspapers
ReplyDeleteAs a PR/propaganda platform our muppets provide their masters with highly targeted audiences."
Keep up the sterling job Mr.Williams.
Go eat your pyjamas!! Toooo funny.Thanks DP.
By heck, I think you're right DP. With all of those new loony tunes about "let 100 dams burst forth in the north", it's only a matter of time before the "ring the GABite with nuclear powered desalinations plants" gets another run. After all, we've gots lots of Uranium ore in Oz.
ReplyDeleteOh glorious day that I should have lived long enough to see such things.
"Families shake the need for gold
ReplyDeleteBy stimulating birth control"
The words were changed at the end of the song. Something about we butchered all the sacred cows??
Butchering sacred analogues is unstylish.
ReplyDeleteI love the alliterative description of Abbot. (Abbott? Abott? I can never remember how to spell it and I hope I never have to. Let's just call him Buckethead.) Allit. Is probably easy for one who's a wizard wordsworker. See how an amateur struggles.
ReplyDeleteBTW Does Christian Kerr's middle name start with "O"?