News Ltd CEO John Hartigan has used a National Press Club address this afternoon to launch a savage attack on online media while threatening to close News Ltd’s Press Gallery offices and focus less on “the politics of politics” and more on “hyper-local news” such as shopping and traffic information.
Hartigan also used the address — read at times haltingly from a teleprompter and broadcast on the advertising-free ABC — to extensively promote News Ltd’s recent changes and boast of how well it had covered the Victorian bushfires earlier this year. He also claimed that the company’s newspapers would prosper while mastheads in the UK and the US collapsed in the face of the challenge of new media.
The News Ltd boss warned that political coverage needed to change because readers had lost interest in it, as evidenced by opinion polling following the fake email affair, and caused a stir amongst his own staff – many of whom were present for the address – when he said he had a longstanding desire to close News Ltd’s large Press Gallery facilities and move political journalists into offices elsewhere in Canberra. He also wanted greater turnover of its political journalists.
Hartigan attacked sites such as Crikey which, he claimed, have little original content and offer only commentary on mainstream media publications, before going on to spruik News Ltd’s new comment website, The Punch. He also several times endorsed the views of web entrepreneur and blogging critic Andrew Keen who has called online journalism “digital narcissism” that “poisons debate”, lowers its users and fails to maintain a proper traditional distinction between journalists and readers. Hartigan also echoed the attacks of more senior News Ltd figures on content aggregators like Google, warning the company was actively looking for ways of disseminating its content as widely as possible without aggregators coming between the company and audiences. He also flagged greater moves toward subscription content, arguing online readers generated only one-tenth of the advertising revenue of hard copy readers, and noting the Wall Street Journal had successfully moved to a subscription model.
Pressed on whether publications had acted ethically in publishing the forged utegate email as real, Hartigan claimed Julia Gillard, who today attacked News Ltd publications, was merely reacting to the company’s campaign against educational stimulus spending and that the company’s papers had behaved appropriately, although they had early deadlines and had acted to correct inaccuracies.
I thought this was a classic line from the speech:
“Blogs and a large number of comment sites specialise in political extremism and personal vilification.”
I don’t even know where to start with that. Bolt? Devine? Akerman?
Well, in fairness Evan, Miranda Devine is a Fairfax purveyor of political extremism and personal vilification rather than one in the employ of News. Still it’s a point well made – we hardly need to resort to blogs for this kind of thing.
Hartigan has delivered all of this without any sense of irony, which may be the most bewildering aspect of the entire speech.
“Immediately following the speech, Hartigan destroyed a mechanical loom”.
“Immediately following the speech, Hartigan destroyed a mechanical loom”.
I suppose that the shorthand version of the speech in which he threatened to pull News out of the press gallery and decried internet news services would be “Less Rudd, more Ludd”.
I was in the audience when Hartigan gave a very similar speech at the Andrew Olle Lecture in 2007 . It was a load of self serving bs about how News Ltd was taking the lead in the new digital media publishing environment and how they would soon be offering a great new media package for its online readers – namely, they would be featuring blogs by their lead writers.
We’ve seen what’s become of News Ltd since – and the “blogs” by luminaries such as Shanahan and Albrechtsen et al have proved to be little more than the same old op eds repurposed with the dubious ability to leave comments. I’m reminded of the editorial tizzy the Oz threw when Shanahan’s pumping of Newspoll in the Lib’s favour in the lead up to the 07 election [“2% swing to Libs is the begining of the fightback!”] resulted in a bitchy, testy editorial from the Oz reminding the blog commenters that it was they who had the expertise and the commenters were just scum.
As News Ltd sacks staff and continues to operate their website like a walled garden [no links, no nothing] these typically dunderheaded comments from Hartigan are just more of the same.