[LINK] Australia’s media is dying before our eyes

[David Lochrin]

On 2020-04-11 12:52, Karl Auer wrote:

> Might all this not ultimately be a good thing? The landscape will finally be cleared of toxins like Murdoch, leaving an open field for alternatives to arise, and hopefully a lot of them, to combat the disastrous consolidation of past decades.

That thought occurred to me too.  But there are bright spots:

QUOTE - https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2017/10/26/how-the-guardian-found-800000-paying-readers

The strategy to rescue the Guardian from financial oblivion has attained a landmark position by increasing its revenue from readers to a point where it now outweighs the paper’s income from advertising.

This significant shift in the Guardian’s business model, making it less dependent on a highly challenging advertising market for media companies, results largely from a quadrupling in the number of readers making monthly payments under the title’s membership scheme, which has grown from 75,000 to 300,000 members in the past year.

The paper has also slightly increased – to 200,000 – its subscriber base for its print and digital products. And in a development which has even surprised senior Guardian executives, a further 300,000 individuals have made single donations to the paper, which has been posting appeals at the end of articles, urging readers to financially support its commitment to open access journalism.

These one-off donations, totalling several million pounds, come from 140 countries but a substantial proportion has arrived from the US, suggesting that despite a recent diminution of the Guardian US operation, the paper has a committed audience in a country with established traditions of supporting public interest journalism through philanthropy.

Together, the 800,000 contributors (members, subscribers and donors), along with casual sales of the physical paper, give the Guardian a record number of paying readers; more than the half-a-million pinnacle in print circulation achieved in the late 1980s.

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UNQUOTE

> The danger is that our spineless and clueless government will just let it all be bought up by foreign interests and we will start being fed whatever the Chinese (or whoever) want us to hear.

IMHO the Neoliberal ideology of conservative governments in the Trump / Morrison model is rapidly diverging from Reality, and that will become more & more apparent as time goes on.  Hence the increasing support for reality-based journalism of The Guardian, The Conversation, etc.

As has been observed by others, the drought, the bushfires, and now Covid‑19 are all events bought on because we're living beyond our planetary means.  We need depopulation, decarbonisation, and an end to the fantasy of everlasting economic growth.

David L.