Kim Williams

Kim Williams is the new boss of Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd, which publishes two-thirds of Australia's metropolitan newspapers and more than 120 suburban or regional titles. And we don't need to tell you how powerful that makes him.

But we reckon playing second fiddle to Murdoch will be a tough gig for the one-time composer—whatever his skills—and we believe he will face four big problems.

The first is Rupert, who, at the age of 80, has appointed himself chairman of the board, and obviously intends to be around more. News is a family company—or behaves like one—and what Rupert says goes. He flies into town, grills all his editors, rips the front page apart and sacks anyone who's not playing in tune. That will prove challenging for Williams, who conducted the orchestra at Foxtel, while the Murdochs, Packers and Telstra jostled for power in the wings.

Second problem is the pay-TV boss likes doing everything himself. The Power Index understands from people who have worked closely with him that he is a "micromanager" and a "control freak", who insists on delaying even the most trivial decisions and campaigns until he has signed off on them. The chaps underneath him at News won't like that much.

This will magnify his third problem, which is how to tame The Australian and Daily Telegraph'srampant editors—Chris Mitchell and Paul Whittaker—who have soured News's relations with the Gillard government. If Williams wants to fix that relationship, and influence the editorial direction of the group, he will need to bring these powerful editorial barons into line. And he'll find this hard. Unlike Big Harto, the man he replaced, he's not a journalist and hasn't earned their respect. And (see first problem) he'll also have Rupert (who is a journalist) looking over his shoulder. Worse still, he might have to deal with Col Allan. The Australian has suggested that the abrasive editor of the New York Post and former editor of the Daily Telegraph may be sent back to Sydney, which would make life interesting for Williams and severely limit his power. 

Fourth is the nature of the task he faces. As circulations decline and newspapers shut down around the world, Williams's job is to make readers pay for news on the internet. And he's got to perform the trick on Murdoch's mass-market tabloids, as well as The Australian, which is currently trialling a paywall. Asked this week whether he could make punters pay, he said he was, "Very, very confident".

So is he a strange choice for the job, as some have suggested?

"No", says one who has known him well for decades. "He's a genius: he's persistent, he's bright, he's competitive. He turned Foxtel round from being a big drag on revenue to being highly profitable, and he's just the man Murdoch needs if his strategy is to make money out of papers on the internet."

"But," he cautions, "Kim's got no experience in journalism, and he has a deep disdain for journalists, because they're outsiders and he's an insider." That's going to make life difficult for him, and for the journalists he'll be managing.

On the plus side, Williams has friends in high places and is a world-class schmoozer. His second wife, Catherine Dovey, (his first was Kathy Lette), is the daughter of Labor god, Gough Whitlam, while Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer are two of his biggest fans.

He has worked hard on this, of course. "Yes, he's a courtier," says our informant, "but he hasn't built his career on charm alone. He's always had a big brain, and he's incredibly determined and astonishingly competitive." Even at playtime.

In this context, The Power Index can reveal Williams was Australian Lego champion as a teenager. Nowadays, he focuses on winning arguments. And rarely does he countenance defeat, as we discovered when we asked what would happen if the Foxtel-Austar merger fell over. "I have not contemplated not being successful", he replied. 

The bald-headed, black-spectacled culture lover is also "extremely ambitious", sometimes to the detriment of friendship and loyalty.

Back in 1995, Williams was running the ABC's putative pay-TV service when Murdoch sunk it by torpedoing its deal to supply two news channels to Foxtel. The documents were about to be signed, and Williams and his team were on their way to the ceremony, pens in hand, when Rupert called his minions to say there was no way he would give the ABC a leg-up. Almost immediately afterwards, Williams accepted the great man's invitation to run Fox Studios. To say that his mates at the ABC felt let down is an understatement.

"Kim is a very weird and strange creature," says one. "He's very secretive. I doubt if his executive assistant even knows what he's doing."

"He's a very shadowy, hidden person," our first source agrees. "He's always willing to tell you his opinion, but he never makes his ambitions or strategies clear."

Another tells us he "could never be described as gregarious". But we're not sure this is quite fair. Kim has plenty of friends in music and the arts. So perhaps it's just that few (or none) of them are journalists.

Whatever the true story, the opera-loving Williams (who has been a very successful chairman of the Sydney Opera House) is as different from his predecessor, cheery, beery, blokey John Hartigan, as you could possibly get.

At last month's dinner with Murdoch at Paddington's Lucio's restaurant—which doubled as Harto's farewell—Kim stood apart from the throng, drinking Campari, and talking Italian to the waiters. Similarly, at a recent NRL Grand Final, which Kim endured from a corporate box, he shocked companions by demanding the wine list.

But it's not just the News template Williams fails to fit. He was educated at a state comprehensive school, where (in his words) "most of the boys were herded towards metal work and the girls to home economics". And when he won a Commonwealth scholarship to Sydney University, he chose to study music. 

With his heart set on being a composer, Kim spent time in Italy in the 1970s pursuing his dream, and lectured in music at the Sydney Conservatorium. His first step on the corporate ladder was the general manager's job at Musica Viva, whence he climbed to managing director. He then quit for the same role at the Australian Film Commission, before going on to run TV production house, Southern Star and thence to the ABC.

As Williams has climbed the corporate ladder, so he has descended the cultural slope. And he'll now be running a company where culture, music, opera and the arts are often derided. Indeed, he's exactly the sort of elitist that Rupert Murdoch has been so busy hating for the last 50 years. So, we predict an interesting future.

But he's tough enough to handle it. He once described his negotiating style as "aggressive-aggressive". And he has made success a habit.

Our spies at Foxtel tell us he can be "a prick to work for" and claim "people have a skip in their step now he has gone". We also hear Foxtel's ad agency Clemenger cracked open the champagne when they heard he was leaving. So, watch out at News. You could all be in for an exciting ride.