psmith, journalist

The latest accounts to be released from Rupert Murdoch‘s News International, covering the 52 weeks to June 28 2009, say much about the company’s content propaganda.

News Group Newspapers, the division that publishes market leading red-tops The Sun and News of the World, made pre-tax profits of £40.3m for the year – that’s 10 percent down year on year and not a bad performance considering the profit drop of various rivals. Revenue falls by £8.4m to £617.9m (Arif at Mediaweek has more on the nuts and bolts).

… Read on after the jump

The report, filed at Companies House, says:

“In the modern media market, The Sun and the News of the World continue to be one of the few mechanisms for delivering a mass audience to UK advertisers – as the market continues to fragment, advertisers will continue to seek the audiences that the publications deliver.

That’s the argument: believe in the “quality of print”, the remaining scarcity that those titles have, and everything will be fine. In fairness to Murdoch, he is thinking radically, he is investing in digital to an unrivalled degree and and wants nothing less than to re-write the mass online content economy rulebook by making us pay for stuff we’ve enjoyed for free for the past 15 years.

But ever since he kicked off this paywall battle, I’ve never shaken the belief that this is really all about print: this NGN statement refers to mass audience as a print mass audience. And that is shrinking – slowly, but surely – first below the psychologically important three million mark and then… who knows?

Murdoch’s plan is, always has been, and for the forseeable future will be about increasing print sales. Exhibit B: the continued coverprice war The Sun is waging on the Daily Mirror and Daily Star. The paper is now just 20p in parts of the Midlands (according, again, to Mediaweek) and is still that price in London and the South East. It cost about the same in the early 1990s, such is Murdoch’s keeness to maintain its mass readership.

As Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff puts it (via J.co.uk), “When he’s talking about this technological future, it’s entirely based on the technological past.”

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• @ CMS2010: A Dose Of Wolff: Rupe’s Mad As Hell, Newspapers Are Over (paidcontent.org)

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