New News Corp an investor in the news business THIS column comes from New York, home of News Corporation, where the long-planned and much speculated-on split of Rupert Murdoch's global media monolith takes place this week. So far, the bell-weather deferred-settlement trading on the Australian Stock Exchange which gives an indication of the value of each new entity has not produced any surprises. There is a consensus view that it will be several weeks before the markets settle down and we can see how the two new companies - 21st Century Fox and the new News Corporation (publisher of The Australian) - are valued. The opening indicative value of the new News of around $14 is unlikely to hold. Many US investors are expected to exit the print-heavy stock in favour of the more growth-oriented 21CF. To counter this News will spend up to $500 million on share buy-backs to shore up the price until the market settles down. The bigger questions around the split look to be longer-term issues. How will the company seek to grow? Will it concentrate on developing new e-businesses, or will it back itself to lengthen the profitable life of print by snapping up legacy newspapers at fire-sale prices? Already the doomsayers are predicting the end of the world as we know it, or at least, the unprofitable papers in the News stable. Michael Wolff, who writes on media for London's Guardian, penned a scathing piece predicting the closure of the New York Post but his animosity towards the paper and Murdoch probably has more to do with his pique over the Post's reporting of his messy love life than his fair analysis of the broader situation. Wolff and others prophesy that the separation of the print assets from the TV, cable and movie monolith 21CF will mean the end of subsidies for newspaper mastheads and therefore they will become unviable. That is a nonsense proposition. Individual mastheads will still be part of a whole, and the whole new News Corp contains assets which are profitable powerhouses. These include The Wall Street Journal, the News America marketing division, Foxtel in Australia, Fox Sports and realestate.com.au. This is not to say there will be a profligate tolerance of losses. News CEO Robert Thomson has said there will be a heavy emphasis on containing costs, but there will also be a culture of growth where every opportunity to grow new businesses will be exploited. The bullish view of the future of print depends on how you look at newspapers. It requires a flip in thinking: instead of the old view of newspapers having add-on websites where, counter-intuitively, content has been given away, mastheads should be seen as just another platform for an integrated news distributing business where the consumer has a choice of taking the product online, on a tablet, on phones, in print, or in any other way yet to be invented. Total readership and digital subscriptions for many mastheads are growing. Online advertising revenue is growing and sooner, rather than later, the online tail will wag the legacy dog. Thomson will have a $2 billion war chest after the share buy-back allocation has been absorbed. No-one expects him to sit on it, although even at today's low rates the interest alone would be enough to cover the Post's or the London Times's annual losses. Clearly, a portion of his corporate inheritance will go into building existing business and in buying transactional digital companies that can clearly make a contribution to the bottom line. The big question being asked here is whether Murdoch and Thomson will be tempted to buy more newspapers. This may be a risky move because of the market's undisguised dislike for legacy print assets. But prices may become so cheap that they become irresistible. The Boston Globe, purchased by the New York Times for $1 billion a little more than a decade ago can't find a buyer at $125 million. The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and a host of other mid-size city papers are up for grabs as their parent company sinks under debt. Warren Buffett, a very canny investor, has been buying up chains of small-town papers, following a strategy of developing them into hyper-local news and information sources and he has been mentioned as a potential buyer. Also on the radar are the Koch brothers, David and Charles, who inherited America's second largest privately held company, Koch Industries, from their oil tycoon father. They are said to have revenues of $100 billion a year and Forbes magazine estimates their wealth at $34 billion apiece. It is said they keep $20 billion in the bank, just in case something comes up. The Koch brothers have acknowledged their interest in newspapers as a market place of ideas, which in their case is being seen as code for their mission to re-educate America. Not to put it too finely, the billionaire brothers come from the far, far Right of the the American political spectrum. They have provided millions in backing for various Tea Party-aligned think tanks and organisations urging swingeing cuts in welfare and the adoption of a pure and free market to boost the capitalist system. While much of the reported $196 million donated to political causes last year ultimately supported Republican candidates, the brothers think the party is made up of wimps. This gives rise to an interesting theory: who ever buys the Tribune company will also buy a TV station in Chicago and LA and, under US law cannot own a newspaper and a TV station in the same market unless a waiver is granted. Conventional wisdom says Rupert Murdoch, who already has TV assets in each city, would be unlikely to get a waiver from the Obama administration because of the conservative leanings of his Fox News network. But if the alternative were the Koch brothers, far, far to the Right, who would Obama prefer: the devil he knows, or the devil he doesn't? The plot thickens. Due to a production error an earlier Mark Day column originally appeared in this space.