What’s wrong with the full-page advertisement above appearing in today edition of News Crap Australia’s daily Brisbane turdbloid The Courier-Mail?

Our Media Glass House researchers think it is evidence of – in their humble opinions – is a wrong-headed business strategy being employed by the Murdoch media.

We all know that hard-copy newspapers have been dying out for decades now. Hell, News Crap Australia has helped the trend along by shutting dozens and dozens of its own regional titles across the nation just a few years back.

Yet the big ad today offers would-be subscribers a deal that includes digital access to some News Crap Australia outlets plus seven-day home delivery of a hard-copy Courier-Mail or Sunday Mail.

Surely, our MGH teams say, the cost of throwing an actual paper over a subscriber’s fence must have skyrocketed in recent times.

Combined with an obvious decline in the consumption of news via hard-copy editions, the economics of encouraging new subscribers to sign up to receive their news or News that way doesn’t make sense.

Certainly advertisers are voting with their feet, or dollars.

For instance, the same Monday edition of The Courier-Mail that carried the ad for the subscription deal also carried 17 display ads ranging from an eight-page up to full pages – not counting the classified pages or the racing guide liftout.

Only trouble is that 13 of the ads were in-house Courier-Mail ads or ads for News Crap Australia-related entities such as its pay-TV outfit Foxtel, its far right-wing TV service Sky News, or news streaming service Flash. (below)

The actual paid ads look pretty lonely scattered throughout a 56-page newspaper.

Not even the numerous pages devoted to the Commonwealth Games appear to have attracted advertiser support.

Still, our MGH researchers are big enough to admit they are no experts in the business side of the newspaper game.

They also acknowledge that if there’s to be a dollar made, Rupert Murdoch himself would be on a bike pedalling up and down streets throwing newspapers over people’s fences.

So are they missing some part of a grander, more cunning strategy at play?

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Speaking of The Courier-Mail, and we don’t mean to single it out, but our MGH teams were perturbed to read a summary bulletin emailed by the paper to subscribers last Friday. (below)

In it was news of a successful court appeal by former Public Trustee of Queensland, Peter Carne, who had sought to block release by the state’s corruption watchdog a report it compiled of misconduct allegations made against him that when made a few years back led to him being stood down and eventually quitting the job.

No substantive action ended up being taken against him on the basis of the allegations, yet the Crime and Corruption Commission still wanted to put all the claims into the public arena by having its report table in the Queensland Parliament.

The emailed news summary cast Mr Carne’s success in having the court rule in his favour as “more evidence” of the Palaszczuk Government’s “secrecy”. The paper has been running a bit of a campaign against the state government on alleged secrecy and integrity issues of late.

Our older MGH researchers suggest that if the person at The Courier-Mail who penned the summary hasn’t already been fired, they should be made to sit down and watch the infamous interview with former premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen from the time of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police and political corruption where he struggles with the concept of the separation of powers in the Westminster system.

Perhaps they should watch it over and over until they start to get an inkling of why what they wrote was so very wrong.