Wolff: Murdoch's Sun sets
This is a tip of the hat to the passing of one of the most curious, and enduring, institutions in modern journalism: the Page 3 girl.
In 1969, Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, the two tabloid interlopers in British journalism, went head to head in a competition to buy the once left-wing broadsheet turned youth-market tabloid, The Sun. It was controlled by IPC — the owner of Britain's biggest tabloid, the Mirror, run by one of Fleet Street's greatest names, Hugh Cudlipp — which was desperate to sell the ever-declining Sun.
Murdoch, the Australian trying to make a name for himself in Britain, had taken an almost moral position against Cudlipp and the Mirror: a great paper, "an anti-establishment and soldiers' paper," he believed had been corrupted by Cudlipp's efforts to go up-market, and his desire to hang with the "champagne people."
IPC wanted The Sun to go to Maxwell, who promised not to compete with the Mirror. Murdoch, however, went around IPC's back to the unions, who, sensing impeding job losses, forced IPC to sell to Murdoch, who was promising a big expansion of the paper.
The great tabloid avenger then used The Sun to smash the Mirror, practically overnight increasing The Sun's circulation almost threefold to 3 million a day. ("Pussy Week in The Sun" — a special feature on British cats — was one of its early promotions.) The burgeoning tab then began to provide the cash flow to finance Murdoch's worldwide growth. The Murdoch-created feature that propelled The Sun, thereby creating the Murdoch empire, was, on the paper's Page 3, a smiling, fresh-faced, British girl without her shirt on.
This innovation, in its way among the most significant developments in journalism since the invention of linotype, appears to be coming to an end. Murdoch's other UK paper, the Times, last week reported on Page 3's demise. And although a bare chest appeared rebelliously later in the week, by all reports the end is imminent.
This is a development that has been met in Britain by almost universal acclaim, such that you might think some historic human wrong had been righted. Most of this outpouring of umbrage at Page 3 and satisfaction at its demise came from the media itself — another blow against chauvinism and a further humbling of Murdoch.
Not surprisingly, nobody in the media took the opportunity to note how hard it is to sell news products in the present age, nor to wonder why there have been so few strategies to replace those certain news fixtures and crowd pleasures, among them the Page 3 girls, that turned so many people into devoted followers of favorite news brands.
Arguably, the response among so many people in the news media, this sense of moral victory, of liberators dancing in the street, frames the issue quite precisely: News, in the post-modern age, has largely come to be the province of do-gooders, the high-minded, and the politically correct. It is, save for a few throwbacks and outliers like Murdoch, much less of a brand-centric and audience-focused enterprise than it once was.
Of course, it is easy to make the argument that this is all quite to the good. No matter that you can find a trillion women without their shirts on the Internet, Page 3 certainly wasn't helping the cause of gender equality. Page 3, long having outlived its own prurience, has been a nagging reminder of how low and vulgar the press, particularly the Murdoch press, could be.
Still, it seems as elemental to argue that a certain understanding of the nature of the beast, of what made news such a compelling pastime, has been lost in this more earnest age.
Murdoch's view — the one he has always been pilloried for — is that news is not really about news. It is a package of inducements, a collection of individual identifiers, a mirror of the world as you more or less want it to be, and then, and only then, some who-what-when-and-where.
Those enticing aspects of a news package could go high or low, quality or tabloid, but there once was a certain understanding that you couldn't do without the range of canny orchestration and distinguishing elements necessary to making a reader yours.
In some sense, the effort to make these sorts of connections, to fashion these hooks, to create such compelling elements and formulas, has now fallen to the social media specialists. BuzzFeed's listicles are a form of Page 3 girls. But in this there is a misunderstanding of purpose, of cause and effect.
BuzzFeed is about fleeting notice, The Sun about habituation.
The new news, however precisely social media-tested, is not something anybody seems willing to pay for; the old news, with Page 3 girls, was a gladly afforded distraction. (Fox News remains a good example of this — a must-have part of many people's expensive cable bills.) The former, with ever-more anemic advertising revenues, shrinks; the latter, if you can unlock its secret, might yet be (or might have been with a little more attention and less earnestness) a powerful business.
But who anymore understands the true nature of a Page 3 girl?
The real Murdochian emphasis is not even on the girl, it's on the page — in New York it's the Post's gossipy Page Six. Murdoch's belief is that you should want to go someplace specific in his papers; that you ought to know what you'll find when you get there; that it needs to be something that you wouldn't get anywhere else; and that it should feel like something other people wouldn't want you to see or know.
Hence, Page 3 could not have seemed more obvious and logical to even a prudish Murdoch. That was the business he was in.
And that's the business that, along with Page 3, is disappearing.
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