Eric Beecher| The Rogues Gallery Of Media Moguls & The Men Who Killed The News

The Men Who Killed The News (Book)

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Eric Beecher is a veteran journalist, editor and entrepreneur whose experienced first hand the dramatic evolution of the previous 40 years of media. 

From broadsheet’s to TV to the internet to facebook, podcasts, now AI. Eric has been across all these, both an employee and employer as the business models were repeatedly shaken and recast. 

And he asks, what is the cumulative damage when owners of journalism place profits and power over civic responsibility and decency. 

That book is called, ‘The Men Who Killed The News’ and series a history of media moguldom, the perennial story of power and influence chipping away ever so gradually, the role good journalism esteems in helping us make sense of the world. It’s not nostalgia for the good old days, but rather an attempt to understand how we got here, and whether there is anything that can be done about it.

Eric was formerly the youngest editor at the Sydney Morning Herald before being recruited by Murdoch himself to run at the time, his latest media acquisition, before resigning sighting ethical differences. 

Eric runs today alongside his colleagues, Crikey, The Mandarin and SmartCompany. Eric is a major architect of modern Australian independent media, and it is my pleasure to welcome him to the podcast. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Eric Beecher is a veteran journalist, editor, and entrepreneur who's experienced firsthand the dramatic evolution of the previous forty years of media. From broadsheets to TV, to the Internet, to the SEO slop, to Facebook, to podcasts, now AI. Eric has been across all of these, both as an employer and an employee, as the business models were repeatedly shaken and recast. His central concern, which he contributed an entire book to, is what is the cumulative damage where the owners of journalism place profits and power over civic responsibility and decency. That book is called The Men Who Killed the News and series A History of Media Mogledom, the perennial story of power and influence chipping away ever so gradually, the role good journalism esteems in helping us make sense of the world. It is not nostalgia for the good old days, but rather an attempt to understand how we got here and whether there is anything that can be done about it. Eric was formerly the youngest editor at the Sydney Morning Herald before being recruited by Murdoch himself to run at the time one of his latest media acquisitions before resigning, citing ethical differences. Eric runs today alongside his colleagues, Krikey, the Mandarin, and Smart Company. Eric is a major architect of modern Australian independent media, and it is my pleasure to welcome him to the podcast. Thanks, Ryan. All right, Matt. I would love to start off with a brief history of the great media mogul.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

So moguldom really, media moguldom really started in the late 1800s. William Randolph Hearst, the Northcliffs, who founded the Daily Mail in London, Joseph Pulitzer. They were the founding moguls, if you kind of look at it like a coterie or a club. And that coincided with the rise and rise of the newspaper as a powerful, influential medium in society because of printing technology and distribution and that kind of thing. And then advertising. And advertising became the pot of gold that funded these newspapers. Obviously, lots of people bought them, millions and millions. This was very much pre-radio, little own pre-television. And these moguls uh discovered fairly quickly the formula, which I kind of talk about in the book quite a bit, which is a kind of formula which is that sensational journalism equals millions of eyeballs equals hundreds of millions of dollars or pounds of advertising revenue every year equals power. And if you were one of these moguls and were able to establish uh one of the main mastheads in initially in Britain, uh the US, and then in Europe, and then after that in Australia, it was literally a license to print money.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

What was the real golden age of that advertising model? When were rates at their highest?

SPEAKER_01 2:57

The golden age of newspaper profitability, which was driven largely by advertising, but not only by advertising, was essentially most of the 20th century. I mean, I uh was involved in giving advice to Fairfax in the early thousands when they still had Saturday editions of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, broadsheet newspapers that were running literally hundreds of pages of classified ads every Saturday, and each of those mastheads was making uh a hundred million dollars a year plus in profits. So it lasted a century.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

You said it's not just advertising which made the 20th century the golden age for newspapers. Was there immense competition like there is now because the advertising dolls were so lucrative back then as well? We just don't necessarily hear of the losers, we only heard of the winners? The answer is no.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

The barriers to entry, and this also later applied to television and radio, the barriers to entry to media up until 20 years ago were enormous. I mean, to run a newspaper, you had to own vast printing presses, you had to have a distribution network, you had to employ hundreds of journalists. And so, what I said earlier, if you could actually establish the masthead in a city or a country, mainly they were mainly cities and states, that dominated, it was like Warren Buffett has this description of the moat as the best businesses that he's ever invested in, have a moat around them. And those mastheads, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the London Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, they had gigantic moats around them.

SPEAKER_00 4:37

What was their moats? Is it simply just how popular they were, or was it the quality of the work that they produced?

SPEAKER_01 4:43

The moat was largely what I just described, which was the barrier to entry. And if you were able to establish that, and then you built the readership, and then the advertisers followed, particularly classified advertising. I mean, a lot of people listening to this, younger people, probably don't even have a memory of these what was known as the rivers of gold, these classified advertising printed newspapers. But they were the commercial key to the success of newspapers, and they funded all the journalism.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Is that why media is so acquisition heavy? You don't necessarily see incumbents get competed away. They rather just purchase all of the threats.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Absolutely. I mean, that that is changing now as the barriers to entry have come down. But even now, I mean, the Telegraph in London, uh, which has suffered the same as most other newspapers, which is to say its circulation has collapsed, its advertising base has fallen, it's still marginally profitable, is currently the subject of a really fierce takeover battle with the kind of multiples applied to its value that would surprise most people. And that's because it has this historic position in the newspaper market, which has now migrated online as well. And so, yeah, if you run a media organization, you're prepared to pay very, very big sums to acquire a business rather than start a business.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

If you think about the history of acquisitions within media, which would you say is the single most successful in terms of bought at X price and now worthwhile?

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Depends whether you're talking about pre- or post-internet, because the multiples and the valuations applied to online businesses are just stratospheric. Whereas old-style media, they seemed like, you know, pretty high prices at the time, but relative to what's going on now, they they were relatively small. But, you know, Rupert Murdoch uh I went to work for Rupert Murdoch in the late 80s, and he just acquired uh a business called the Herald and Weekly Times, which still exists, was his father's old business, and it owned the main daily newspapers in all capital cities of Australia except Sydney. And he paid several billion dollars for that acquisition at the time. A lot of people thought that was too much, but it paid back in spades. And he knew exactly that if you owned the Adelaide Advertiser, you owned Adelaide. If you owned the Courier Mail in Brisbane, you owned Brisbane. You know, that was worth paying for.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

Talk about what that means to own Adelaide. These sort of intangible power that you might have in being able to shape whether it's political direction or economic direction that you would like it to go, because that's impossible to really calculate in some potential acquisition. What is the value of us having this intangible power over a city? How do you make sense of that?

SPEAKER_01 7:41

So it's kind of one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that I wrote this book, which is media power. It's something that resides um below the surface. It doesn't get talked about much because surprise, surprise, the media itself doesn't want to talk about its own power. But just think about it this way. Um if you're uh the premier of a state, if you're a cabinet minister of a state, if you're the prime minister of a country or a cabinet minister, if you're a CEO of a big company, if you have any influential position in society and there's one or two very large media outlets either in your city or state or country, um you know that they are arguably the most important ally that you will ever have. And the last thing you ever want is for them to turn on you. Not just politically, but personally. Media outlets get very, very personal, and they start digging into, you know, your family or your relationships or how you ran a business, things like that. And that can be devastating, both at a personal and a commercial level.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

And is it kind of this underscored implicit quid pro quo? Like, I'll be your guy and you won't do that type of stuff to me, but you will do it to my enemy. Sometimes it works like that.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

You wouldn't want to rely on quid pro quo if you were dealing with Donald Trump, for example, and you ran a media organization, maybe today, but not tomorrow and next day. I think it's more just uh what I'd describe as the shadow of power, that if you need media either to support you or more importantly, not to attack you, you're constantly sucking up to them. You have to. And so you hope there's a quid pro quo. Sometimes there is a quid pro quo, sometimes it's even relatively formal, not necessarily written down, but it's tacit and understood. But the power of media is, I think, grossly misunderstood. And to the extent that it does get discussed, it's often discussed in terms of, oh, well, this media outlet has, you know, X hundred thousand or X million viewers or readers, and therefore that's why as a politician or someone else I need to be on the right side of them. But it's not about necessarily the size of the audience. It's about, I think, about the sharpness of the blade that's being wielded by the media owner.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

That's fascinating. You're seeing that play out right now with Tucker Carlson. He certainly has one of the biggest podcasts in America, but the value of his show s severely outweighs whatever the raw listener numbers are. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Because also remember, these days you have social media and you have TikTok and you have everything else that's instantly going to pick up whatever interesting or controversial content appears on other media, including old media like newspapers. And so the amplification effect these days is enormous.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

You say that generally the power of media is really misunderstood. I'm not necessarily sure if that's the case. I think most people kind of implicitly get it, but perhaps you can rely on one or two powerful anecdotes that can really exemplify just how powerful media is and therefore justifying how it's misunderstood.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Ah, there are just so many. I guess uh Pick the best one. In this book, I talk about my two-year experience as a as an editor in the Murdoch organization. Uh that was about 40 years ago, but it it hasn't the organization hasn't changed that much. And the the mogul in charge is still the mogul in charge. He's a lot older, he's in his early 90s now. But I watched him very closely then. I reported to him. I used to see quite a bit of him, partly because the station that he bought that I then went to work for was his father's old media company and his father's old newspaper. So I became the editor of the newspaper that his father used to edit, the Melbourne Herald. And so it was quite personal, even slightly nostalgic. And so I used to, it was the first time I'd worked for the City Morning Herald in the age before that, which have a completely different kind of culture. And so it was the first time that I'd actually watched a mogul up close. I remember Rupert used to live and as he does now, live in New York, but would come back to Australia quite frequently in those days because of this acquisition. And I watched with, I don't know, a combination of horror and awe, and even a slight amount of admiration, I suppose, to see how this power was wielded. So I remember once he came back and uh Bob Hawke was the Prime Minister of Australia then, um, Rupert and I used to have offices opposite each other when he was in Australia. So he would come out of his office often and we'd have a chat and he'd walk into mine. And he'd been back a couple of days and he came in and he said to me, Hawke keeps leaving messages for me. Do I need to speak to him? You know, this is the Prime Minister. And then another time, um, I I used to arrange lunches and meetings with some of my senior editors and Rupert when he was around so that they could kind of be exposed to his um wisdom. Uh, we were having this meeting where we were talking about ideas for a uh a public campaign, that we would campaign for something important that was going on in Melbourne or Victoria, and and Rupert said, Oh, you know, what are the things that are happening in Melbourne at the moment? Remember, he he was born in Melbourne, he grew up in Melbourne, and so it was a city that was, in a sense, close to his heart. And one of the editors said, explained that at the time there was a real um issue with teenagers who were jumping onto moving trains and spraying graffiti on the carriages of the trains. And so the trains were looking a bit of a mess and the police were trying to stop them. And Rupert said to us, he said, that's a fantastic issue, because he loved the idea of urban crime being attacked, because he was living in New York, which in those days was a fairly dangerous place. And so we started talking about, well, if we were going to run a campaign uh on the teenagers' graffiti on the trains, how would we, what would we say and what would we advocate that should be done to stop this? And we're throwing ideas around and then there was a little silence, and then Rupert clearly had something in his head, and we waited, and he just came out with two words, capital punishment. And so we just moved on because I realized then that if we'd pursued that discussion, we may well have ended up with a front page campaign for weeks and weeks advocating capital punishment for teenagers on train.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Speaking of Rupert, did he did he sort of inspire admiration? So was there some sort of, you know, seductive proximity to power that you couldn't help but feel when you were around him and working for him, despite the fact you knew it might have been a bit ethically grubby?

SPEAKER_01 14:36

If you're talking about me personally, there was probably an early period where I kind of had that feeling because it can be quite intoxicating. But what he's been very successful in doing is building up across the various countries in which he operates this sort kind of slavish loyalty by people who often will work for him for decades and decades and decades. To them, he's like a god. To them, the proximity to power is a big part of that. And whether it's politicians or other public figures, they don't see much of Rupert Murdoch or Lachlan Murdoch, but they do see the local editor or the local news director or the local reporter, and they are like the Murdoch proxy representative, and so they carry that power with them.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

Do you think there's any truth to that? Is is Rupert himself actually that inspiring of a person? Does he have such a strong command of the issues and opinions and He's highly intelligent, he's incredibly well informed, he's very articulate.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Uh I mean he ticks virtually all of those boxes. What you have to do if you're on the receiving end is you have to decide, is that worldview, are those perspectives, is that political perspective or uh views about particular social issues, is that something that I want to support and believe in? Because they tend to be fairly binary. You know, he had periods where he was uh prepared to accept the existence of climate change, but that period is over. So uh I don't think there's any question mark about his almost his intellectual savvy and certainly his uh communication skills. It's probably the content that some people might have some questions about.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Do you think he genuinely uh believes the stances that he might publicly take? Or is it just a cynical way that it's good for business, therefore I'll do it, irrespective of how bad it is for society?

SPEAKER_01 16:37

I think it's primarily the latter. He discovered Rupert Murdoch was in his very early twenties when he inherited his first newspaper. His father died suddenly from a heart attack. Uh Rupert was at university in uh England and came back, hadn't worked in the organization or hadn't worked in media at all. He'd done a little bit of training at the Daily Express in London part-time, and was thrown into this business and inherited the day uh the a daily afternoon newspaper in in Adelaide, the Adelaide News. And media newspapers then were very state, very kind of conservative, not just politically. And this was an afternoon newspaper in what was and still is quite a small city, but it was much smaller then. Uh it had a morning competitor, the advertiser, which was the newspaper of the establishment. And he's sort of realized the way I kind of think about this is if you're running media and particularly that kind of media, it's like you have this invisible dial in front of you. And if you turn the dial down, the circulation goes up and the ratings go up. And the more you the more sensational, the more you turn it down market, the more the audience size goes up and often the advertising goes up. And Rupert discovered this almost, I mean, there was no training, there were no books about it or anything like that. He discovered it basically on the streets of Adelaide and caused quite a stir. And then within you know, a few years he was doing it in Perth. He bought the Sunday newspaper in Perth, and then he bought the Daily Mirror in Sydney, which was a very much a popular tabloid um uh street newspaper in Sydney, and he carried the dial with him, and then he bought the London Sun and he carried the dial to London, and he bought the News of the World, and he bought the New York Post, and at each turn he was able to turn the dial down and everything else went up.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

Which sort of set the standard for all of his competitors, I suppose, as well. And that's just a race to the bottom. That's right. That's and that's still going on, and you see that now with Fox News. So succession really glorifies the Murdochs and their equivalent of News Corp. What what did you make of the show?

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Uh well, a lot of my friends said, gee, this was really entertaining. And I'd say to them, well, to me it was a documentary. So uh it resonated in all sorts of ways, and not just with the Murdochs, but if you work in media and you kind of see it at that kind of ownership executive level, uh there's a there's a language, there's a jargon, there's a mindset, there's a mentality, there's a ruthlessness, and that absolutely came through in succession. So to me it was a documentary.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

He famously, Rupert, doesn't, or rather, hates commenting on anything that's written about him. Do you have a sense for what he made of your book? I have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

I have no idea. My book got fairly widely reviewed and and covered in all media except one company.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

Finally, on the sort of broad mogul questions, if you could just give us your rogues gallery for the most pernicious media moguls over time.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Look, there's intensive competition here. Robert Maxwell, whose daughter is now featuring very prominently in the US in the in the Jeffrey Epstein saga, Gollaine Maxwell. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a kind of um uh bad mogul from central casting. He was very large physically. He was quite offensive in every way. He made quite a bit of money from other media and then started buying newspapers and mainly the Daily Mirror in London. And he used his media to propagate his views. But he was a crook, literally. And he stole to keep his media afloat, he stole money from his company pension fund, like hundreds of millions of pounds, not a few dollars. And the authorities were on his tail and about to, and they he was being investigated. The Financial Times was about to do a big expose on him, and so he had this boat, which was named after his daughter Ghlaine, the lady Golane. He used to occasionally go out in his boat all alone, except for a crew of six or seven people, and uh he was off uh the coast of Spain for a few days and uh he disappeared and his body was recovered from the ocean. And I don't think the autopsy didn't show uh how he died, but I don't think there was much doubt by anybody, probably even including his children, uh that he committed suicide. So that was quite a mogul saga. Conrad Black, the Canadian, who also owned uh the Daily Telegraph in London and owned the Sydney Morning Herald and and The Age in Australia and the Financial Review for a few years. He was also a crook. He ended up in jail for several years for um basically embezzling money uh from his company, Hollinger.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

So, you know, it's pretty competitive that field of who's the worst mogul. But as you write in the book, Rupert really is the mogul's mogul. Does he sit atop the rogue scala, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_01 21:41

Yes, but I I put him in different category. I don't put him in the category of criminal. I mean, he was his company presided over phone hacking in in the UK, which was criminal activity on a major, major scale, but he's not been implicated personally in that. And I don't think people would, you know. I mean, I think he's he's pays as little tax and his companies pay as little tax as possible and and that kind of thing. I think he's the mogul's mogul because he's been able to um grow and manipulate his media in a way and on a scale that no other media uh owner has ever been able to do.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Speaking of the phone hacking scandal and also Rupert's uncanny ability to turn down the knob. What do you make of Piers Morgan? Have you come across his latest show? Because for me it's a total exemplar of that. I haven't seen much of his show.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

I've seen uh what he's done over the years, and he was a newspaper editor earlier on, like a lot of uh those podcasters and TV people. Um but he learned at the knees of the master. I mean, he worked for Rupert Murdoch for quite a while. Uh and you could say there's a formula. I mean, it doesn't mean that if you replicate the formula, you're going to be successful. Um, but part of the formula is um this sense of um the way the word I would use to describe it is indifference. Francois Mitterrand, the former president of France, was once asked the secret to his success as a politician, and he said indifference, which is the same word in French and English. And what he meant by that, and what I see with these moguls who are really successful, quote unquote, is that they are entirely uh apersonal, they're not interested in the personalities or the the private lives or anything like that. It's just like everything is business or everything is ratings or everything is circulation. That's all that matters. Irrespective of what you do to your own reputation and how you get there. Well, I mean, in some ways, the best and worst example of that is the Murdoch family. The mur uh Rupert Murdoch has had three of his six children in a courtroom in Nevada fighting with them in what it's turned out in public, it wasn't supposed to be in public. And basically, is it at in his early nineties, is at war with three of his six children?

SPEAKER_00 24:16

So I don't think that shows a lot of love. No, that's uh I want to just switch gears a little bit. What's the specific evidence you have in mind that points to the cumulative damage for the abuse of media power that you write about?

SPEAKER_01 24:30

So one of the ways I try and describe this is I I call it a gigantic loophole in democracy. What that means is that freedom of the press is protected. I mean, in the US, it's under the Constitution. Many European countries have a freedom of the press protected in their constitution. We don't have it in our constitution, nor does uh the UK kind of given in our societies. And so there's this kind of legal protection uh and societal protection for the freedom of the media, but it doesn't require any ethical, moral, or societal responsibility from the owners of it. And so, therefore, you can basically hide under that cover and then you can do whatever you like. Obviously, there are defamation laws and there are pornography laws, but they're the extremes. If you're given protection for freedom of speech, you can do a hell of a lot of damage, and they do. And they defend it on the grounds that it is uh a societal good.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

So the abuse of power is taking advantage of those lack thereof freedom of speech laws in our country in the UK. What about the specific evidence for how that then damages society further downstream?

SPEAKER_01 25:45

Well, how do you measure that? I mean, take the phone hacking, for example, as a tangible piece of evidence of bad behavior by a media organization. The News of the World, and possibly the London Sun as well, which were owned by News Corp, but particularly the News of the World, tapped into the voicemail, hacked into the voicemails of thousands of people, from the deputy prime minister to cabinet ministers to celebrities to footballers to all sorts of people. And they listened to them secretly, listened to their private conversations. They then used that information to write stories. It started actually with the royal family. So they started with the two princes and then others in the royal family and the royal household. And then that went on for over 10 years. And eventually some of the people whose privacy had been invaded and had information had been published started to try and figure out where did this come from. And the News of the World employed private detectives to get this information, not just journalists. And then over time they started using lawyers, the people whose stories were written about, started using lawyers to try and figure out what was going on. And eventually it became clear that it was phone hacking. And a case went to court, and the Royal Reporter of the London Sun was found guilty of uh and it was described as a he was described as a as a rogue journalist on the paper and no one else was doing it. Anyway, over the years, it turned out that thousands of people had had their voicemail hacked, and news corporations so far, this is still going on, not the hacking, but the settlement deals that they're doing with people whose phones have been hacked, thousands of them. So far, News Corp has paid out over $1.5 billion to these people in settlements, so that they won't go to court. No case has gone to court, so it doesn't actually become public, and they don't get convicted in a courtroom of a crime. I don't think you need much more evidence than that.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

That's definitely um a specific case of the damage. But the feeling I got from the book, and especially the very sort of provocative theme that you started off with, is that case that the abuse of media power is damaging society, and in you right, specifically liberal democracies. Is there something that's not attached to a legal case, but rather maybe the attitudes and behavior of the populace, which you can attribute to the abuse of power from the people that own journalism?

SPEAKER_01 28:27

I mean, there is just so many cases, uh and and they all kind of tend to follow a pattern. And the pattern is that the media, the requirement for the media company and therefore the journalists, is content that is going to get people talking, that has emotion attached to it that is sensational and that kind of thing. And once you're in the market for that kind of content, procuring that kind of content, I mean, whether it's in sport or whether it's in politics or whether it's in business, I mean, there are just examples all the time. I mean, today, today, the day we're talking, the Herald Sun in Melbourne, where I am, which is owned by News Corp, has done has settled in court and published a homepage apology and a page two print apology to the deputy leader of the Victorian opposition. Uh, and they published a story a couple of months ago about him and his wife. And he met his wife, he was a tennis coach, and he then became a politician. His wife was a very talented young tennis player, and he coached his wife when she was 16. That's when they first met. And this story, and then they later got together and then they became engaged and got married, and they have two kids now, and this was about 10 years or so ago. The Herald Sun published this front page story, appalling story in my view, which basically didn't even imply it, stated that people are saying that they had sex when she was under the age of consent, and therefore he, if that's true, he committed a criminal act. They had no evidence for that. They published it. They argued public interest. The editor of the paper went um, gave interviews after it was published and said that this was in the public interest because he might become uh a political leader and eventually a premier, and he may have committed a criminal act, which he never did. And today, a groveling apology. It would be in the public interest if it were true, would wouldn't you agree? Possibly. But I mean, even then it's a grotesque invasion of privacy. But how do you prove it? And the apology's worth nothing. No, but I mean, you're in the gutter. I mean, you're in the gutter in the first place. My view is if I was the editor of that paper, and I used to be the editor of part of that paper, I used to be the editor of the Herald and it's now the Herald's Sun, I I wouldn't be in the gutter. I wouldn't s you know, if a reporter came to me and said, Look, I think there might be a story in this, I'd say don't pursue it. Don't even think about it.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

We don't go into the gut. But it's a prime example of how it's all downstream of the advertising dollars. That that type of sensationalism is going to drive a lot more engagement and and downloads, presumably.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Maybe, although ironically, I mean uh the advertising dollars have almost all disappeared from newspapers, and the circulation has largely disappeared from newspapers. And so what this is, I think, a function of is in the dying era of printed newspapers, is the desperation to be noticed. It's like they get up every morning and get out on the balcony and just wave their arms until someone looks at them.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

If you think about your career in journalism, can can you trace how the business models have been recast again and again? With all the media shifts?

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Well, advertising was and still is uh overwhelmingly the primary commercial driver of media. So it started in the late 1800s with display advertising in the printed newspapers. Classified advertising became a thing not long after that. Newspapers became the primary vehicle for classified advertising. Uh and for anyone that can't remember that, just think Google. Google is the modern version of classified advertising. And for most of the 20th century, these rivers of gold of classified advertising supported the billionaire lifestyles of their owners and paid for the salaries of the journalists and really kind of functioned as the funder of power in the societies in which they operated. And then the internet came along and printed newspapers and magazines basically collapsed as a medium. And Facebook and Google now have that advertising. I mean, Facebook and Google, in Australia alone, for example, I think uh the total amount of uh dollars that's spent on advertising in this country across all media in a year is probably close to about twenty billion dollars. And Facebook and advertising Facebook and Google between them have about half of that, about 10 billion. Uh and that's advertising revenue, that's all it is. And so the storyline hasn't changed, the medium has changed.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

That's that's like just over a thousand dollars per person annually is spent on your particular target. That's right. How are podcasts and substacks disrupting your line of work and the more traditional sense of journalism?

SPEAKER_01 33:34

Look, I think it operates at two levels. At a commercial level, it's a drop in the ocean, and I I think always will be, if we're talking about Substack in in particular and podcasting. Whereas at an information level, at an opinion level, at an analysis level, I think for lots of people they're quite significant. What they are, and what we're now seeing more and more of, is they are niches. And there are lots more niches because the barriers to entry to go into media have collapsed completely. I mean, you can start a substack in five minutes, and you can have your opinions or news up there five minutes later, and you can update it every five minutes, and you can be a publisher on whatever scale you want to be. Whereas up until the arrival of the internet, the barriers to entry prevented anything remotely like that. Having said that, Google and Meta are really the two most profitable media businesses in history. And they are primarily doing that through advertising revenue.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

Isn't that such an incredible thing to think about? They're both multi-trillion dollar businesses. Both Meta and Google are the top five, among the top five most valuable companies in the world in history, and their single biggest income generator is advertising. It's funny to think about, because I I I at least find it kind of counterintuitive. You think these big great software tech companies, the value they derive is from people purchasing their products, but it's actually just selling eyeballs.

SPEAKER_01 35:03

Well, and it's selling eyeballs in an extremely sophisticated way, which is what they did was to invent a better mousetra for advertisers. Up until the internet, advertising was uh an incredibly haphazard business. And in fact, the the owner of Bloomingdale's, the department store chain in in the US, once said back in the middle of the last century, half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half. And now you know which half. Know which one percent is wasted.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

This is a potentially provocative question, but I noted it down as I was reading the book. I don't fully remember the context when I made the note, but I asked, did the media was it actually the media moguls who had killed the news, or was it simply just the change in behavior of consumers driven by expertly targeted algorithms hooking people on all the cheap dopamine? Because that type of consumption is it seems to me at least, is more pernicious than the abuse of journalism from the powerful which you document in your book. So does that that wasn't a well-phrased question, but does it make sense?

SPEAKER_01 36:15

Yes, it does. When my kids were younger and we'd go to the supermarket, if any of the chocolates or the sweets were at a le at their level, at their eye level, which they shouldn't have been, the kids would just take the chocolates, even though they were hopefully well brought up not to shoplift, they didn't steal them. But they were so tempted to take them and they did. And if you own media and you put the chocolates at eye level, and you keep putting the chocolates at that level, and the chocolates get, you know, more and more appealing, lots of people will eat those chocolates. So it it it's I think it's more a question of responsibility. What we know is human nature leads to the chocolates.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

You dedicate some time in the book to AI and how much of the content is producing itself. How do you think that AI will affect media consumption?

SPEAKER_01 37:07

I'm really worried that in most Western countries now, and AI's, you know, in at a commercial level and uh at a kind of access level is only a couple of years old. I'm w really worried that almost no governments are seriously talking about regulation of AI. And so the result of this in all sorts of ways means that the producers or the users, the the people that produce AI or or use AI to produce products, in this case media products, um, are doing it completely unregulated. And again, what that means is that whether it's in areas like pornography or in dating, uh uh radical opinions or in extreme politics, you can use AI to create whatever messaging you want to, and there's no regulation to stop you from doing that. And that's really what worries me, and I I I find it bizarre because we've all seen a lot of the damage that social media has done. And in this country, we now have a government that's just about to introduce legislation to um kids under 16 consuming social media, um, and other countries and states of the US and so on are starting to follow that. Um, but this is like, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years after it was first uh created. And AI is moving so fast and is so powerful and prodigious and is so well funded. My concern is that there just need to be guardrails and rules of the road.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

And if we had those, then hopefully they w it wouldn't veer off the road. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. But it's all downstream of the incentives, Eric. There's uh much more upside in not guardrailing it, and it's likely just going to continue in that fashion.

SPEAKER_01 38:57

Maybe, but what tends to happen in these situations is that something very bad happens using a new technology, and then governments and others are forced to regulate and even legislate and maybe do it more in a more draconian way than they otherwise would have. And I think that AI has absolutely has the potential in the hands of bad players to do that.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

It certainly does, but let's keep it narrow on the role of journalism in society. And think about your career and where you are now running multiple online publications. How would you regulate AI, specifically thinking about its threat to good journalism?

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Well, in my organization, for example, we have very strict rules about the use of AI in journalism, which is actually it's not in journalism. I mean, AI is a very valuable tool for research and for finding things out in the preliminary stages before the journalism is actually created. A friend of mine who's worked in AI for decades often has described it to me like having warehouses full of thousands of people. And you imagine you'd go into that warehouse and you'd ask them to go and find something out, or an AI scrapes all the content in the world. If that's used positively, you know, to scrape court records or, you know, political history or any number of things, and then humans get involved in the decisions about how to use that information. It could be one of the most powerful instruments for better journalism, but not writing journalism.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

So the regulation would look like AI can't be used in the production of content only as a research tool. And presumably there would be ways that you'd be able to actually enforce that?

SPEAKER_01 40:46

Well, in the case of journalism, I think it's really important, and and reputable media organizations do this already, is if you use AI at all in the creation of journalism, which might be kind of quite prosaic kind of journalism, you know, informational journalism, not analytical or thoughtful journalism, that you need to label the use of AI very clearly whenever it's used. I think that would be an obvious prerequisite, but that's not always followed. Uh i uh uh and but if there were uh laws or regulations to say that whenever AI is used and disseminated, uh it needs to be labelled as such, that would be a way, hopefully, of uh preventing or at least curbing uh some of the reckless uh kind of phantom websites and publications that are created by AI.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

Yeah. So many of them. You you you document a lot of them in your book as well. It's real interesting. And I think uh Sylvenia Newscaster, in fact, was even converted to being fully AI. Have you noticed that individuals are now sort of more important within a news organization rather than the publication itself? So whereas historically, if something was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald, you would say, Oh, I read this in the Sydney Morning Herald. Rather now, it might be, well, actually I read Joe Aston who said it, not the AFR. And therefore, the the real most valuable stock any news organization has is actually the the talent and the profile and the reputation and the type of style that individuals might bring to the table rather than the company itself.

SPEAKER_01 42:20

Look, I think it's been a trend that's been going on for several decades and probably predates the sort of widespread use of of the internet, but it's a kind of natural human condition in a way that we we're interested in the movie star, we're interested in the big celebrity or personality. And in the case of journalism, there've always been some of those, and they've been stars who had, you know, columns or they were gossip columnists with their name on it, and that kind of thing. But the collapse of the barriers to entry and the arrival of YouTube and Substack and that kind of thing means that individuals can actually, in some cases, own their own medium and use their own personality to drive that medium and can be successful both in terms of audience but also financial. And so that is kind of driving, I think, the phenomenon that you're talking about. And it means that uh I mean, for example, Paul Krugman, who's one of the very fine uh the finest uh economic commentators in the US, worked for the New York Times for many decades, wrote his column there, and a year or two ago he left and he's now got a podcast and Substack, and I don't know whether he's earning uh a higher income than he did at the Times, but he probably should be. And so therefore the Times needs to look out for uh that kind of and they are looking out uh for those personalities and making sure that they reward them and they give them the platforms as though they were those individuals were their own media owning. Otherwise they will all become their own media owners.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

But doesn't that run in antithesis to what you said earlier about substacks just being a drop in the ocean when it comes to competitiveness? If you look at that Krugman example, if you look at, say, even in Australia, Gideon Hay and Peter Lala leaving the Australian to go and do their own Substack and Podcast and being more popular than ever, there's like a mindless negatives to the traditional media. And therefore, substacking and podcasts may well be a much bigger threat than you suggested it was. I think it's a threat for talent.

SPEAKER_01 44:28

I think, and for that talent, at the sort of top of the pile talent, if you want to call it that, the financial rewards for them, and there aren't that many of them, but for them, the financial reward rewards are considerable. But for as a media platform competing with the New York Times, so Paul Krugman could do really well and probably does do really well not being at the Times. But the New York Times itself is, you know, 10,000 times bigger than Paul Krugman as a commercial entity, if you see what I mean.

SPEAKER_00 45:00

Welcome back, Eric. It appears we've had uh a few technical disruptions because of Australia's world-class internet setups that we're both on. You're in Melbourne, I'm in Sydney. But look, you've been so generous with your time, mate, so I'm just going to leave you with the last two questions, both which I sort of prepared you for yesterday when we spoke on the phone. And the first is quite a sappy one, but I thought nonetheless worthwhile asking just to hear what your framing of it was. And that is what you think, rather. Why does good journalism matter?

SPEAKER_01 45:33

So maybe the way to think about that question is to think about what the world or a country or a city or a suburb would be like without good journalism and properly resourced journalism. And what it would mean, and we see what it looks like in lots of more corrupt countries, which is that power operates without scrutiny. It means that people who run things, whether it's the country, the city, businesses, sports organizations, any kind of establishment, it means that they can operate without a spotlight on them. And when it comes to government in particular, particularly if you live in and believe in democracy, if the power elite is able to uh operate untrammeled and without scrutiny, then you don't have democracy. You have something else. And that's why good, well-resourced journalism is just so critical.

SPEAKER_00 46:31

And if you think about, or rather, if you go around a map of the world, you document this quite distressingly towards the end of the book, that France, India, many other countries, just how populated by just a few powerful interests, all of the journalism output is. And therefore, this isn't a problem isolated to Australia or the UK or the United States, but rather a global one.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

That's right. And if we look at the US this year, what we're watching is journalism and media increasingly cowered by the government of the day. Uh, and that's because the government of the day has so much power, economic power, and other power. And they're using that power to basically create a new order of media, uh media ownership structure and a and a journalism operating structure that supports government and its policies and its leader, not dissimilar to what we've seen in smaller dictatorships and autocracies. And to see that happening in the country where uh constitution actually protects journalism uh is scary indeed.

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Are you optimistic about the future? Or do you think we're trotting down a road from which there is no exit?

SPEAKER_01 47:47

I think we're increasingly heading towards, if not already in, a polarized world, a world of niches for people who believe in the importance of free media and quality journalism, but there's still enough of that and it's still done at a high high enough level to satisfy their needs. In fact, in lots of ways, it's the golden age of content. The problem is if the majority of the population are not interested in that, um, or their time has been diverted into other areas, like they look at screens, and they're not looking at screens to consume journalism or to find out what's going on in the world. They run out of time and therefore run out of interest. And I think that's the great danger, and there's not a lot we can do about that.

SPEAKER_00 48:37

Have you seen the opening forward to Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman? Uh a while ago, I think I did, yeah. So this was written in 1984. Yeah. And he was making the case for how TV news is making America stupid and dividing us on the issues. We're here now 41 years later, and he he frames it as everyone was worried about George Orwell's 1984 being the dystopian vision of the future, when in fact it was just Aldus Huxley's Brave New World, where we're constantly entertained, it's bad for us, but we willingly do it ever anyway. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 49:21

And, you know, there's probably a strong argument for lots of people not to consume much journalism because the world itself has become such a difficult and unpleasant place. And, you know, we have wars going on which we never had, you know, hadn't had in the last 80 years, and all these other things. And so there's so much entertainment and there's so much other screen-based diversions, you know, you can understand why lots of people, including probably a lot of younger people, have no interest in consuming news and media and journalism.

SPEAKER_00 49:53

Of which hopefully we're not contributing to with this very podcast. Certainly not, Ryan. We're not. Eric, um, what didn't I ask you that you think is important or pressing, particularly given the themes of what we spoke about today?

SPEAKER_01 50:07

No, I think we've covered it all. I mean, the business model, I don't know how interested people are in the business model, but the business model issue is just moving so fast now, not just because of AI. You know, like network television, free-to-wear television, is now pretty well a sunset industry. I mean, you know, newspapers have been for a while. What does that leave, you know? But I mean, we've probably covered that, so yeah. No, I I I think I think we've touched most of the bases.

SPEAKER_00 50:39

Brilliant then. I'll leave you with the final question which I try to ask every single guest, and that is what the role has been of serendipity in your life.

SPEAKER_01 50:46

Serendipity has obviously played a big role. I tend to, when I tend to think about what are the factors in one's life that are the most influential, I often think to myself and say to people, and they get very surprised when I say this, but it's mistakes. I find that I learn so much from my mistakes, and I've made so many mistakes. And not to be afraid of making mistakes and not to try and analyse those mistakes. And actually I think you have more control over learnings from your mistakes than you do from learnings from serendipity. Learnings from serendipity? A friend of mine, um, and I mentioned this in the book because it was relevant in a particular part in my book. Uh, a friend of mine often used to say when when one thought about this kind of issue was if you stand on a street corner long enough with your mouth open, a peeking duck will fly in. And I that's the way I think about serendipity. And I don't spend much time on street corners with my mouth open.

SPEAKER_00 51:49

Eric, it's been lovely to talk to you. The Men Who Killed the News, everyone will find it as a link in this podcast description. What else should we draw people's attention to? Where where where should they find you and the work that you're doing?

SPEAKER_01 52:01

Well, I'm not on social media. I don't have a substack. My company Private Media is the publisher of Crikey, and I occasionally write in Crikey and I occasionally write op eds, but I'm not I don't see myself as having a profile as such. Most of my working life has been behind the scenes, and that's uh where I feel most comfortable. Lovely, mate. Well, thank you so much for your time. Okay, thanks, Ryan.