The story told short? In the 2014 financial year, it appears that News Corp Australia’s publishing operations, which account for more than 70 per cent of Australian newspapers, earned in the vicinity of just $A24 million. ... In two years, Rupert Murdoch’s original newspaper empire has gone from earning $A285 million to $A24 million. It’s a 92 per cent drop in the two years, after seeing sales fall an eye-popping half a billion dollars since 2012. For all its shortcomings, Fairfax Media’s transition in this same period in both revenue and cost control has been hugely more successful. And News is still propping up loss-making ventures like The Australian. How long can it afford to do this?

So, remember how we wrote about the big EFF filing in the Jewel v. NSA case, about how the NSA and DOJ had been knowingly destroying key evidence by pretending that they thought the preservation orders only applied to one kind of spying, and not the kind that was approved by the FISA Court (despite at other times admitting that the surveillance at issue in the case was approved by the FISA Court)? Yeah, so, yesterday, the EFF realized that despite the big kerfuffle this whole thing had caused, the NSA and DOJ were still destroying that evidence, and sprinted over to the court to file for an emergency temporary restraining order on the government.

The existential crisis that has gripped Rupert Murdoch’s Australian arm began with a rude discovery just after 2pm on Wednesday afternoon. The Crikey news website had stumbled across some of News Corp’s most intimate lingerie, and had just put it all up on the the net. ... The 276-page document is called the Blue Book, a weekly and year-to-date rundown of results at June 30, 2013 for every News Corp business in the country. ... The great newspaper engine which was Rupert Murdoch’s original springboard to take over the world was already under stress. In 2013, 70 per cent of its earnings disappeared, leaving operating income precariously balanced at $87.6 million. As Crikey pointed out, trying hard not to gloat, another year even half as bad as 2013 could put News Australia into the red.

Crikey published what the Rupert Murdoch company calls internally "the blue book", the company's operating accounts for all its businesses. The documents, which date from last year, show News Corp's print and digital publications were suffering from large falls in revenue, with flagship paper The Australian losing $27 million. Late on Thursday afternoon Crikey removed hundreds of pages of the documents.