Former CEO says the Australian newspaper business is ‘vaingloriously ignoring the facts’ and is shackled by outdated management systems

News Corp Australia is a company run along feudal lines which is “vaingloriously ignoring the facts” about the digital future of news, says the man who used to run the company, Kim Williams.



When asked to elaborate on his comments on Rupert Murdoch in his new book, Rules of Engagement, the former CEO Williams told the ABC: “Look, one can only describe the organisational framework and general approach on the part of News as being pretty feudal.”

“I think it’s a simple descriptive statement of the obvious for anyone who has worked there.”

On the publicity trail for his book, the erudite Williams has been throwing polite bombs at his old employer for the past week, partly in response to the company’s willingness to blame his 20 month-tenure for its bleak 2013 financial results.

Williams has accused the company of “repulsive” revisionism. When Williams broke his silence with a book a year after departing News Corp Australia on bad terms with Rupert Murdoch and his newspaper editors, it was always going to be interesting reading.

But when it coincided with a major leak to Crikey of alarming financial accounts, the floodgates of mutual dislike were opened, unleashing what Williams calls a “festival of vengeance”.

“To paint the decline in revenues ... to me is to deny the cyclone of change that has swept through the media in the course of the past six or seven years,” Williams said on ABC Radio’s Breakfast on Tuesday.

News Corp is “almost vaingloriously ignoring the facts of what is happening around the world”, Williams said, becoming increasingly exasperated by the accusations he abandoned print in favour of digital.

One commentary piece, by the Australian’s media business media writer Darren Davidson, in particular infuriated Williams with its claim he was “too eager to get ahead of the digital curve” and that was his “fatal mistake”.

“Look I stopped reading that piece because I thought it was so ill informed; so clearly indifferent to actually doing a piece of proper journalistic discovery that it didn’t warrant reading,” William said.

“Ahead of the digital curve is such a fascinating concept. If ever a set of companies were behind the digital curve, were behind the whole tsunami of change that consumers have wrought upon on the world in response to technology enablement it is print journalism media companies. I mean really? Let’s all grow up; let’s all become serious adults. Please!”

The former Foxtel chief, who ran the pay TV business partially owned by Murdoch for 10 years, said Murdoch’s film and television business, 21st Century Fox, recognised the importance of talent and was run as a meritocracy. But the print media operated very differently. “And it is in many ways an industry which is frozen in many ways in terms of different forms of hierarchy and management where it hasn’t really adapted as much to modern technologies and general modern management systems,” he said.

Williams said Australia’s print news media had to “radically reinvent themselves” and find new digital revenue streams because the trends were all down.

“It wasn’t I who decided to give the product away digitally for free for 20 years, which would have to have been one of the most stupid ideas in human history, but seems to have been one that was embraced very widely throughout the media community because they never took digital technology seriously,” he told Lateline’s Emma Alberici.

Williams also said that one particular event led to him being forced out of News and that was his decision to launch a book by a Labor politician before the federal election at which News was backing the Coalition. Williams said Murdoch told him it was an act of “corporate treachery” and he resigned shortly afterwards.

It was wrong to interpret his launching of the book by Chris Bowen as supporting the ALP, he said, because he was simply promoting a book about the importance of good public policy.

“It became very clear to me that there was a well of dissent [at News] that would require a circuit breaker,” he said.

“I don’t think anyone could accuse me of being a fan of Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard. I think they ran government poorly.

“But the general tenor of politics in Australia, I think, has diminished and there are a number of politicians in our parliament who clearly have a limited understanding of the nature of our constitution, the nature of our court system, the way the international system operates.”

Williams struck a markedly more bullish tone in discussing the prospects for News Corp’s print products when he was interviewed about a major restructure at the company in 2012 and was asked when the news would be delivered digitally only.

“In 2020 I’m very confident that we’ll be producing very fine newspapers and that they’ll be consumed very actively across the length and breadth of Australia,” he told PM’s Mark Colvin.

“There seems to be some kind of dramatic desire on the part of some media organisations or journalistic commentators to call the death of print because it amuses them to do so.”