DC Thomson sells the feelgood factor

Last week, News Corp, owners of the Wall St Journal, New York Post, (London) Times, Sunday Times, The Sun, News of the World, the Australian, BSkyB Television, Fox, Star TV Asia and others reported a 10.7% decline in revenue to $7.67 billion (almost $800 million) and quarterly net losses of $203 million. Bad as it sounds, it is a big improvement on the previous quarter’s losses of $6.4 billion (Thus passim) which were inflated by a huge writedown on the Wall Street journal. The ‘extraordinary item’ this time is kids’ social networking site MySpace, which lost $136 million and will never recoup its 2005 acquisition cost of $580 million, much less make a profit.

In the same week, UK Commercial TV network ITV announced first half losses of £105 million and sold mums and dads’ social networking site Friends Reunited at a loss of £150 million to a subsidiary of DC Thomson, Dundee-based of the Scottish Sunday Post, People’s Friend and iconic kids’ comics such as the Beano and Dandy. Don’t snigger: Thomson is one of Europe’s most profitable publishers. Friends Reunited will be integrated with Thomson’s geneology sites. Presumably, its new owners will revive the paid-for element of the site, which ITV dropped in a pointless race for advertising eyeballs just as the recession hit.

Unlike most of the jealous, self serving pixies in the World of Journo, I have long admired Rupert Murdoch’s commercial prowess and am not afraid to say so, even though I dislike his single-minded mission to dumb down media and most, if not all of News Corp’s lazy, sleazy middlebrow, overtly skewed output (and that’s just the upmarket stuff). I agree with Murdoch’s statement: ”an industry that gives away its content is cannibalizing its ability to do good reporting,” but see it as a damning self-indictment, not as a solution to his problems.

News Corp sells the feelbad factor

While it is true that most of News Corp’s profitable content is the result of never knowingly underestimating the public’s need for cheap, vapid soma, the internet is full of such claptrap and thus it is difficult to see why people would pay for it online. While in the past Murdoch has proved capable of exacting a premium for lowest common denominator jibberjabber – witness BSkyB and Fox – thus it would be foolish to write off the declared intention to make folk pay, but, at the risk of stating the obvious, the web has changed everything. People who surf the web for serious news and opinion are a tiny subset (estimated at less than 1.5%) and even so, they are looking for more depth, colour and controversy than the popular press brands are accustomed to provide. The success of ‘conventional’ US online news sites such as Huffington Post and Politicos shows that there are substantial audiences, but that delivering them is not particularly profitable. The BBC, meanwhile, has built a huge online audience but does not need to worry about how to pay for it while the estimated 1.8 billion audience for blogs of all varieties (including this one) is attracted by the diversity and independence of views on offer, virtually all generated free by idiots such as myself (Thus passim).

Leaving aside e-commerce, there are highly profitable models of paid content on the web, ranging from sex sites to iTunes to The Economist Intelligence Unit, but Murdoch’s strategy, which depends on choking off all other sources of free vanilla news, will require bullying, conning or cajoling all the major commercial players, including Reuters and Bloomberg into restricting their online newsfeeds while relying on the Tories in the UK to curb the online output of the BBC (Thus passim) once elected. While not inconceivable, this still assumes that web audiences will be sufficiently motivated to pay for the bland crap that passes for output in the News Corp universe. The odds against are high: despite boasting 3.5 million unique visitors, the costs of Guardian Media Group’s massive website, which offers high quality centre-leftish news, comment, opinion and arty stuff, theoretically more suited to the countercultural webwise generation, have unquestionably contributed to last week’s reported losses of almost £83 million which in turn threatens to close down the world’s oldest English language newspaper, The Observer, which can’t turn a profit on a circulation in excess of 400,000.

Murdoch’s success, as with all the media barons of the past, has been based on the Big Lie inherent in the adage: ‘half of my advertising budget is wasted -the problem is I don’t know which half.’ Unsurprisingly, people don’t buy generalist newspapers to read the advertisements, and remote controls give them the opportunity to skim past TV commercials, but hitherto the grey area has given publishers the benefit of the doubt. In the digital universe, there is no such ambiguity. Advertisers to precisely measure who is accessing content, when and for how long, and profiling can even determine precise demographics (Thus passim).  While unsophisticated advertisers may buy page impressions in the same way as old timey direct marketers sent out blanket mailshots, most advertisers buy qualified unique visitors and take context into account, placing generalist publishers at a distinct disadvantage.

While News Corp’s multi platform presence should be an advantage as digital technologies converge, when they try to aggressively charge for content, the thinness of their offering will be exposed, unless they genuinely up the ante. The Murdoch formula of sensationalist tittle-tattle, barebreasted stunnas, fantastical sports and pop rumours masquerading as fact and barely-disguised ultranationalism masquerading as comment pales by comparison with the no-holds barred porn, libellous celebrity weirdness and wild, untramelled speculation freely available on the web, thus it is difficult to see why the existing News Corp products could command a subscription premium or attract sufficient numbers to be viable as advertising moneyspinners. To an übercapitalist such as Rupert, this vindication of neo Darwinianism should be good news, but I doubt if he or his son James will see it that way.

John J Kelly

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance - oh, alright, you can take a quick look - it's probably all made up anyway

Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, Metropolitan Police anti-terror ‘supremo’ ‘promptly’ resigned yesterday after he was photographed outside 10 Downing St clutching a top secret document listing UK Al Qaeda suspects atop a sheaf of papers. “YOU CAN’T QUIT QUICKER THAN A THICK QUICK QUITTER” screamed the Sun, referencing the cheery advertising slogan of KwikFit, a tyres and exhaust (muffler) depot. But Thus readers know that his resignation, far from timely, is long overdue. On December 22, 2008 Thus Passim: bob-be-nimble-bob-be-quick-resign-from-the-enquiry-now/ detailed how Assistant Commissioner Quick was leading the investigation into Home Office leaks which saw an outrageous and probably illegal raid of the office of Tory MP Damien Green under the auspices of the government, who openly accused the Tory Front Bench of colluding in efforts to compromise national security. We questioned whether it was appropriate for Quick to head up this enquiry – into himself. Needless to add, the ‘investigation’ continues. More worryingly, Thus reported that had compromised the security of his own family and his own force by running a wedding car hire business under his wife’s name from his home, boasting in local newspaper advertisements: “Cars . . with former police officers at the wheel.”

Loadsamoney! Taser lady Jacqui Smith can't stand all this whingeing about executive perks. She pays her mortgage, subsidises her sister's house, employs her hubby and buys his TV porn, all on a miserable Cabinet Minister's salary. What's your problem, losers?

Had PC Quick done the honourable thing at that time, the alleged security services raids on UK ‘terrorist cells’ in Manchester and elsewhere which the spin doctors are now predictably calling ‘a real and present Al Qaeda threat to Britain’ would not have been allegedly compromised. He was gifted at the time with the full support of Home Secretary ‘Taser’ Jacqui Smith (Thus passim) herself deeply implicated in the politically-motivated raid on the Tories. Subsequently Ms. Smith herself was revealed to have ‘misinterpreted’ the rules on MPs’ expenses, having used her ‘second home’ allowance to pay the mortgage on her (first home) family residence while staying at her sister’s London house. It was also revealed that Ms Smith’s husband (employed at taxpayer expense as her constituency secretary) had bought subscriptions to porn movies which the Home Secretary had submitted as expense claims.

Cloying statements of regret and gratitude from Ms. Smith for Bob Quick’s sterling work in saving the country from (unspecified) perils float on a reeking sea of cant. Video footage which shows that 47 year old father of nine, Ian Tomlinson, who died of a heart attack at the recent G20 protests, was not only an innocent bystander posing no threat and taking no part in the protests, but was savagely assaulted by a masked riot police officer surrounded by colleagues, who were not ‘showered by bottles and stones’ and who did not identify themselves after the incident, indicates the dangerous levels of unaccountability into which ‘Fortress Britain’ has descended. The ‘investigation’ into what looks very much like criminal assault resulting in death will be held by another division of the Metropolitan Police. We all know the conclusions, so why bother?

Jacqui Smith should resign, not least for her abuse of the public purse, but also for promoting, sponsoring and endorsing Quick’s former worrying behaviour in running a second business, albeit in his wife’s name, using police credentials as its calling card. Predictably, the Establishment has attempted to spin away from this latest descent into Third World farce by listing the tireless work in which the police and security services are engaged to keep the Al Qaeda threat at bay. But whilst we marvel in admiration at their efforts, let’s not forget the last time we heard about a major terror threat emanating from Manchester. On 19 April, 2004, 400 police raided several homes and held 8 Asian men, a woman and a 16 year old boy on suspicion of engineering a plot to blow up Old Trafford stadium and cause mass carnage. The evidence was a block purchase of tickets by a ‘group of Asians.’ The headlines in the (Murdoch-owned) Sun, at that time a partisan supporter of Tony Blair, read: “EXCLUSIVE: MAN UTD SUICIDE BLASTS FOILED.” There was absolutely no substance to the plot. Their only crime was supporting Manchester United (not yet indictable). They received no apology. Neither did those accused of the equally fantastic, unfounded ‘Ricin plot.’ Today’s Daily Telegraph cites ‘M15 sources’ in stating that thousands of shoppers were targeted over Easter. Despite the release without charge of one of the ten Pakistani students arrested and no discovery of a bomb factory or explosives of any description so far, Phil Woolas, the gaffe-prone northern Immigration Minister whose particular fetish is identity cards, declared brashly on Channel Four news: ‘We got them.’ Manchester police have now declared the ‘target zones’ safe for Easter shopping after all, so Woolas must be right. There appears to be some confusion amongst these high level sources, however. Some reports claim the Pakistani students were Taliban, others Al Qaeda. Britain, and the US, are certainly ‘at war’ with both, but Taliban activity so far afield would be very rare, if not unique. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmiri group allegedly behind the Mumbai attacks would seem the more likely candidates if any, especially since a couple of the nitwits behind the failed 21/7 London suicide bombings were allegedly members. Two of the suspects travelled to Pakistan last year, but then again, they are Pakistani. Two come from Peshawar, a hotbed of terrorism, but then again Liverpool John Moores University, where they study, actually has a student recruitment agency in Peshawar. But I’m merely speculating, unlike our brilliant police and security services, who have saved the day yet again.

It would be cynical to see this latest ‘Al Qaeda terror threat’ outbreak as an attempt to spin the beleaguered UK government and its incompetent Home Secretary out of the more prosaic clear and present danger resulting from an objective enquiry into her personal affairs, abuse of police power for political gain and the unlawful killing of an innocent man (two, if you count Juan Charles de Menezes). It would probably be unfair to equate the uptick of fearmongering with the tactics of Tony Blair in 2005, who announced, on BBC Radio Woman’s Hour of all places: “What they [the security services] say is that you have got to give us powers in between mere surveillance of these people – there are several hundred of them in this country who we believe are engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts – you have got to give us power in between just surveying them and being sure enough to prosecute them beyond reasonable doubt. There are people out there who are determined to destroy our way of life and there is no point in us being naïve about it.” In the year following the introduction of the 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act, despite the ‘several hundred identified terrorist operatives,’ only 17 people were convicted, but the government diverted attention away from a far more destructive force – Gordon Brown’s bulimic public spending surge, designed to disguise the Tsunami of the swelling bubble economy. 

Al Qaeda, whoever or whatever they may be, needs to do nothing at all. The UK government’s off-the-leash attack dogs are acting as the provisional wing of the public relations department of Terrorism Inc. They need new handlers.

John J Kelly