Opinion: Murdoch vs. New York Times? Does mainstream journalism have a future?

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The New York Times is a class act. Its A grade journalists are the guys I read, because they happen to be damn good writers, like David Brooks. NYT may drop the ball occasionally in terms of coverage, or produce the odd, strangely quilt-like patchwork piece, but on the whole, you’ll see good work. Journalism as it is supposed to be.

NYT is also in a decline affecting all print news media. It sells a million copies a day, its stock price is down from $50 to $14. Advertising revenue is down, and NYT, if not on the ropes, is feeling the blows. If you’ve had a look around the NYT site, you can see that NYT is remodeling itself, bit by bit.

The revamp comes courtesy of the Sulzbergers, the owners of The New York Times. The family is described as utterly dedicated to the paper, and the net version of NYT is no minor achievement, on a par with anything its much bigger rivals have, but keeping the cultural vibe of being the US newspaper.

Culture is an extremely important issue here. The world’s news media are re-engineering themselves, and the whole concepts of news media and journalism are being reinvented in very different forms. Citizen journalism itself is the first step to methods of handling news which simply haven’t existed before. Communication is a human right. That right can now be enforced, and people are exercising it as much as they can. One of the reasons for the decline of old news media is that it's so far behind the market.

Even so, news media is still, rather simplistically, and not for much longer, defined as tabloid or broadsheet. Even the terms are antiques, and the definitions are pretty wide of the fact. The current culture of global news media comes courtesy of Rupert Murdoch, Turner, and a handful of others. They’re the actual motive forces.

Murdoch, rather selectively, and staggeringly inaccurately, is portrayed as a tabloid merchant/politically motivated capitalist, not to be taken seriously as a newsman. The New York Times is portrayed, a bit optimistically, as the definitive liberal broadsheet, although “All the news that’s fit to print” obviously hasn’t been entirely lost.

Polar opposites, in many ways, so when Murdoch and Sulzberger start taking potshots at each other, it does get interesting.

After meeting, Bambi takes a swat at Godzilla after Godzilla bought the Wall Street Journal.

The UK Guardian has a nice piece on the clash:

Disappointingly, perhaps, there was no showdown, no baring of teeth or flexing of muscle. The two chatted amiably and Sulzberger assured Murdoch he need not worry about an editorial in the next morning's paper, addressing Murdoch's new purchase.

But when the piece appeared, Murdoch was not pleased. It spoke of how he had bowed to political pressure from the Chinese government to protect his business interests and how, in Britain, he had allegedly interfered in the running of the Times. With characteristic bluntness, Murdoch fired off a handwritten letter to Sulzberger: 'Dear Arthur, it was a pleasure to meet you last night...' it began. Then, after furiously denying the (often-repeated) accusations, it ended bluntly: 'Let the battle begin.'

The Wall Street Journal sells two million copies a day. (Or pre meltdown, it did. It may be double figures even now.)

NYT, to my knowledge, has never been seriously criticized on the basis of its own content. So there may be some changes of underwear if Murdoch uses any of his own heavyweight A grade news people, who I promise you can put a few words together when they feel like it.

(I should warn readers that the cottage industry of attempting to psychoanalyze Rupert Murdoch is now going into mass production. Murdoch is neither a nutcase nor an idiot, and they seem to be having trouble with the product quality control.)

The Guardian piece, which has a lot of solid facts in it for once on the subject of Murdoch, uses his takeover of the Wall Street Journal as a descriptor of his approach to “taking on the establishment”. It includes a few anecdotes which indicate how feared Murdoch is in some quarters. We’re also talking news media folklore, and that itself is highly revealing in terms of how out of date and uninformed the “information media” are.

It also includes for once an accurate assessment of how Murdoch works in the industry:

The fact is, Murdoch is a businessman before he is an ideologue. He has invested billions buying a newspaper and he wants to make the Journal a more powerful force, not a down-market one. Though the Journal's political clout could be vital for promoting News Corp's wider interests, 'most of what Murdoch does is less an exercise in ideology than a smart business move', according to Rick Edmonds, a media expert at the Poynter Institute journalism school in Florida.

When covering the WSJ takeover, I was stunned to find that “global media” didn’t get the business basics. It’s taken them over a year to figure this out, but someone has finally joined the dots. If you don’t understand the business angle, you don’t understand Murdoch. I’ve seen him do this kind of takeover many times before, and the fact is he’s just damn good at it.

There’s even a bit about “not destroying” the WSJ.

Of course he didn’t “destroy” the bloody thing. What possible value would a Sun-like version of the WSJ have? Who wants to see pictures of a topless Dow average, anyway? Particularly now?

As for “establishment”, what establishment? Where is it? Hiding under a rock somewhere? Is it wearing its nappies?

Turner and Murdoch ate the festering remains of the old post Henry Luce “establishment” years ago.

This may not be much of a punch-up. NYT is looking a bit arrogant, according to some. That’s not a good approach. The basic rule is if you take on Murdoch feeling superior, you learn otherwise pretty fast.

Love him or hate him, he took a provincial newspaper, which would barely qualify as a Midwest country paper, and turned it into News Corp. He’s no featherweight, personally, as far as I can judge, and he’s spent most of his career boxing well above his weight in the industry. If you throw snowballs, you’ll find granite boulders coming back at you.

He’s no mug as a journalist, either. His father, Keith Murdoch, was one of the first of the modern journalists, highly respected. Rupert’s talent may be business, but the genes are there. I’d advise NYT not to underrate his ability to produce top quality product.

Just for the record I’d also suggest not leaping off the first available cliff on the China story, either. The various garbled versions of News Corp in China, from ex-News people, are heavily slanted to present Murdoch in the worst possible light. There are holes the size of the San Andreas Fault. They also don’t take any account of the sheer complexity of doing business in China. Innuendo and news aren’t a terrific mix, if you’re trying to score points.

Meanwhile we may be looking at NYT in eclipse:

Sharks have been circling for a while. Two years ago, a Morgan Stanley investment manager, Hassan Elmasry, tried to use his share of the company to change the family ownership structure. He failed. But another challenge swiftly followed, led by hedge-fund manager Scott Galloway. He and his allies ended up owning 20 per cent of the company and won two places on the family-dominated board. That could lessen the power of Sulzberger rule. Indeed, rumours are rife of revolutionary changes. Some hope New York's billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, may ride to the rescue and take over. Others think Google could buy the newspaper. Or perhaps the family could take the paper fully private again.

Er… yeah, great, but what about the NYT’s other problem, adapting to a different world?

See what I mean about Murdoch’s methods? With him, the business angle is keeping his papers afloat. He’s said for years that the papers were a losing proposition, and he’s been adapting the News network into a modern form. He keeps the production, and revamps it into a 21st century business model.

He also gets the archives, which are worth more, in the case of Fox and/or WSJ, than the rest of the global print media put together, including antique furniture, human or otherwise.

WSJ didn’t modernize to any great extent. It turned into a penny pinching bookkeeping operation at production level. Like the NYT, it kept an obsolete model in operation long after it should have adapted, and look what happened.

This could be Bambi’s Last Stand.

It’s as easy as falling off an ideologue.

So-Does mainstream journalism have a future?

Well, does it?

If so, why, and in what form?

Have a guess.

Oh, and welcome to DJ, guys.