New Pod: Eric Beecher ‘The Men Who Killed The News’
- Eric Beecher On Curious Worldview – Spotify
- Eric Beecher On Curious Worldview – Apple
- Eric Beecher On Curious Worldview – Youtube
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 both in his book and this podcast, what is the cumulative damage to society when owners of journalism place profits and power over civic responsibility and decency.
It’s ‘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.
Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…
Ryan
I would love to start off with a brief history of the great media mogul.
Eric
So, Moguldom really, Media Moguldom really started in the late 1800s. William Randolph Hearst of the Northcliffs who founded the Daily Mail in London, Joseph Pulitzer, they were the founding Muggles 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 on pre-television. And these moguls discovered fairly quickly the formula, which I’ll 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 one of the main mastheads initially in Britain, the US, and then in Europe, and then after that in Australia, it was literally a license to print money.
Ryan
What was the real golden age of that advertising model? When were rates at their highest?
Eric
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 was involved in giving advice to Fairfax in the early dozens 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 $100 million a year plus in profits. So it lasted a century.
Ryan
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 dollars were so lucrative back then as well? We just don’t necessarily hear of the losers. We only heard of the winners.
Eric
The answer is no. 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. 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, Sydney Morning Herald, they had gigantic moats around them.
Ryan
What was their moats? Is it simply just how popular they were or was it the quality of the work that they produced?
Eric
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. 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 of newspapers and they funded all the journalists…
