from media expert Guy Rundle who knows his stuff. Do I sound bitter ? You bet. Murdoch's corporation has owed me 500 quid for 5 years and I can't ge the f**kers to pay up !)

Sorry Rupert, we’re not paying for content

New York, early years of the twentieth century and a bunch of rag traders notice that people will pay almost anything to watch these new kinematograph flicker thingies. They hire some halls and pretty soon they’ve got a chain of kinemas. At some point it becomes worth it to start making the fillums themselves. But Thomas Edison controls patents on the cameras, so the new film makers — Louis B Mayer, Sam Gelbfisk, the brothers Warner — send their crews out west to a Los Angeles suburb called Hollywoodland.

From that moment on, the movie moguls attributed their decades of success to some innate sense of what the public wanted. It was all tchtokes of course  — they had just got in at the ground floor. When TV came along in the 50s they didn’t have a clue what to do, and by the end of the decade half of the studios were broke.
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Does the man ( Murdoch )actually have a clue what’s going on? Of course not.
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read it amd weep Rupert:

www.crikey.com.au/2009/05/08/rundle-sorr...ert-were-not-paying/

I cant see them being able to charge for any daily newspaper. Only specialist press can do that because 99% of what they print is from the agencies in any case which is freely available now to everyone via the net and other press.

This is the death rattle of Murdoch's printed press empire. His TV will probably keep the company going but the press will become on-line only and with a much reduced staff. The advertising is being cut very thin out there these days.

good piece on this by Michael Tomasky in today's Guardian.

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michael...ert-murdoch-internet

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michael...ert-murdoch-internet

Even the Guardian are having a laugh at his expense.

the 1000 lb Gorilla in the room that none of these articles are talking of is News Ltd's debt.

It's ginormous and getting worse. Some areas are profitable-like Sky, but Murdoch invested a billion $ in cable TV in Australia with a small population with only a minority taking it up.

He hoped to make it up in India..and then found one person in a village was hooking up to cable and relaying it to thousands.

That's why he has HQed in Delaware in the USA, the only state where corporation secrecy laws allow the books to go uninspected.

His skill has been playing to the lowest common denomimnator but by also dragging quality titles like the Times down with the others he has decreased it's integrity and alienated it's audience.

He has been a master at dazzling bank managers around the world, but quite simply-he just got too huge. All that was needed was the financial calamity too bring the house of cards tumbling down.

Murdoch and a clutch of like-minded worked on Bush to set a two-tiered internet-with gateways controled by them. They never got it and are unlikely to now with Obama. When Murdoch goes to that big printing room in the sky I think the corporation will tear apart.