Sultan of print media turns 79

Media baron Rupert Murdoch. Photo / Supplied

Happy birthday? Rupert Murdoch turns 79 tomorrow, prematurely festooned in (mostly New York) articles and blogs setting him somewhere between King Lear and the Emperor Ming.

But there are other voices you can hear now, too. The voices of print journalists grateful for a media tycoon who sticks up for print.

The voices of those who like the idea of pay with their paywalls. The voices of those - Sir Harold Evans and Tina Brown among them - who think he's done a great job refettling the Wall Street Dodo.

Let's turn up that volume for a moment.

Without Murdoch, there would be no New York Post, an endemic loss-maker waving goodbye to between US$15 million ($21.5 million) and US$30 million most unavailing years. But would there be a London Times or Sunday Times, either?

By the time Murdoch turns 80, he'll have owned, and royally subsidised, the Times for three very expensive decades. And the crunch, plus the collapse of the top jobs classified market, hasn't been kind to the Sunday Times for that matter.

Last year News International (Murdoch's UK newspaper operation) reported losses of £51.3 million ($110.4 million) on the daily and the Sunday, up from £43.9 million the year before.

This year's forecasts appear to be running in the region of £22 million for the Times, plus £25 million for the Sunday Times.

Citing such figures isn't, in the Fleet Street dog-chew-dog way, an attack. To the contrary, all quality papers in Britain rely on proprietors with deep pockets and infinite patience.

You can still squeeze revenue torrents from your tabloid offerings, but upmarket the going gets rough.

Murdoch deserves credit, not more blame, for putting loads of money where his print passion remains. It's very dubious whether there could be a Times, and so a reigning "newspaper of the year", without him.

All of which is important to stir into the pot as the Times announces a makeover. For there are lines on the print room floor here.

Murdoch's price wars through the 90s were damned by the rest of Fleet Street - but, as analysts have more recently concluded, they are also proof positive of how much price matters in building newspaper circulation, a textbook case.

They took the Times, languishing on 280,000 or so when he bought it, up to the 800,000 mark before the elastic began to snap.

And now the Times is £1, like its rivals. Now costs have to be cut, redundancies engineered.

Now the new version intrinsically offers less for more (or at least for the same as the rest of the field). Exit Times 2, the pull-out section contrived in the image of G2, its Guardian forerunner.

Exit, therefore, the best means yet devised of trying to achieve consistent, through-the-week sales, rather than a permutation of special interest themes that turn on an audience one day, then turn it off the next.

Exit a pull-out you can actually pull out - and share with your partner at breakfast. Enter, a dominant financial section pushing many other more generally appealing things to the back of the book.

There are positives and explanations, of course. The new £650 million presses are producing some notably crisp copies. Individual section layouts - under design chief Jon Hill - can be cool and assured.

The need to cram more ads on direly squeezed news pages is probably inevitable.

Perhaps, in the end, we may even be allowed to know whether readers approve or reject the switches - rather than finding their reactions buried beneath a blanket of silence only Beijing could love.

What won't change so easily, though, is the direction of circulation travel. Times circulation in January was down 17.69 per cent in a year. No scope for dancing jigs there.

The Guardian and its Sunday sister the Observer are both in much the same boat. Scrapping bulk giveaways played a big, accentuating part in all of this. But Times full-price sales also fell by 53,000 copies a day, only 6000 of them taken over by long-term subscriptions.

In short, the race for sales is over. The strategy of 30 years may have come full circle.

Happy birthday, Mr M. It's been a bumpy, exciting ride. Of course, you always have mixed motives; some of them are good, not contentious. And, launching the World Street Journal's new Metro section to challenge a struggling New York Times, you're fighting to a battle plan you know well.

But we all ought to shiver when the Emperor Ming - duly consulted by heirs and successors - reaches to turn off the tap, and head right back where he started from.

Rupert Murdoch:

* Chairman and CEO, News Corporation.

* Turns 79 tomorrow.

* Net worth of US$4 billion, according to Forbes, making him the 132nd richest man in the world.

* Spouses: Patricia Booker (1956- 1967), Anna Torv (1967-1999), Wendi Deng (1999 -)

* Children: Prudence Murdoch (b. 1958), Elisabeth Murdoch (b. 1968), Lachlan Murdoch (b. 1971), James Murdoch (b. 1972), Grace Murdoch (b. 2001), Chloe Murdoch (b. 2003).

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