Hugh Marks and Lisa Davies. Peter Dutton, Jessie Taylor and Tim Redhead. Julia Baird.

The new new thing is “scale”. We’ve been missing the importance of “scale” for so long, particularly when it relates to such things as the takeover of Fairfax Media by Nine Entertainment, two more culturally antithetical outfits being hard to imagine.

Percy Marks jewellery progeny and Nine boss Hugh Marks said “bigger scale” is good because it produces more revenue. Greg Plywood at Fairfax thinks that the fused company’s scale is the way to confront giants such as Google and Facebook. No wonder he’s sold his Maserati if he thinks like that.

Prime Minister Trumble and his sidekick, the Smiling Toilet Brush, are also big-scale men. The floor polish and soap powder salespeople are also aping the mantra. Everything can be saved if it has scale.

Of course, it’s a pile of bollocks. Think HIH, Kodak, Lehman Brothers and the Dutch East India Company, for starters. Scale will not save anyone if people don’t want to buy the product, or if it’s madly managed.

Lisa Davies, the well-regarded editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, did her best to spruik the changes in a message to subscribers: “… it is a reasonably straightforward ownership change of the company, designed to allow greater investment in journalism, greater scale to appeal to advertisers and increased opportunities for growth”.

Good luck with that. No one, surely, believes Channel Nine’s diet of fast food, power tools, and meat-tray advertisements will cross over to Fairfax readers. Nor will Fairfax’s “10 delicious things you can do with quinoa and kale” go down well with Nine’s programmers.

In any event, it looks as though the takeover has lost its market gloss as major shareholders watch the premium disappear down Mitch Fifield’s toilet.