Mar 3, 2010
News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch confirmed Tuesday that The Wall Street Journal will launch a section devoted to covering New York next month, in the company's first public acknowledgment of the project.
The planned section will put the Journal squarely in competition with established New York media organizations, including the New York Times Co. and News Corp.'s own New York Post.
Jan 13, 2010
We're not even a month into 2010 and The Economist has already declared it to be "The year of the pay wall."
"There are plenty of examples of paid content thriving even when free alternatives are available," according to the magazine. "Punters are happy to pay for multichannel television even though commercial broadcast television is free. Such alternatives thrive because they offer desirable content. One considerable advantage to building a pay wall is that it forces newspapers to think hard about what their customers (as opposed to their advertisers) might really want."
Kenneth Li and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Jan 5, 2010
News Corp has unveiled its biggest restructuring of Dow Jones since its $5.6bn takeover of the financial information business in 2007, merging its consumer and enterprise divisions.
The reorganisation will see the departure of Clare Hart, president of the enterprise business, who had driven a more web-based strategy for a business dependent on distributing its newswires content over the terminals sold by Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg.
Jan 4, 2010
The performances on “American Idol” may be erratic and the plot twists on “Lost” may be unpredictable, but one facet of television is certain: the costs just keep going up. On New Year’s Day, the News Corporation, the media empire controlled by Rupert Murdoch, wrangled new payments from Time Warner Cable, including subscriber fees for the Fox Broadcasting network, which is free for viewers with over-the-air antennas.
Dec 28, 2009
Marketing may resemble warfare from time to time, but if you play by the rules of war -- dividing commerce into winners and losers -- you will eventually be defeated. The relationships which are the true foundation of marketing have always been consensual. Misunderstand this in this, the Age of Limitless Choices, and you're cooked.
David Carr
Dec 14, 2009
Sunday was the second anniversary of the sale of The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. At that time, a chorus of journalism church ladies (I was among them) warned that one of the crown jewels of American journalism now resided in the hands of a roughneck, and predicted that he would use it to his own ends. Here we are, two years later, and The Wall Street Journal still hits my doorstep every morning as one of the nation’s premier newspapers. But under Mr. Murdoch’s leadership, the newspaper is no longer anchored by those deep dives into the boardrooms of American business with quaint stippled portraits, opting instead for a much broader template of breaking general interest news articles with a particular interest in politics and big splashy photos. Glenn R. Simpson, who left the newspaper back in March, is not a fan of the newsier, less analytical Journal.
Dec 9, 2009
Google on Tuesday introduced a new approach to presenting news online by topic, developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that if the experiment succeeded, it would be made available to all publishers. The announcement of the “living stories” project shows Google collaborating with newspapers at a time when some major publishers have characterized the company as a threat. Google has also taken steps recently to project an image of itself as a friend to the industry.
Dec 7, 2009
When Axel Springer, the founder of the German newspaper publishing business bearing his name, laid the cornerstone in 1959 for a high-rise headquarters in Berlin only steps away from the tense line separating East from West, people called him crazy, arrogant or both. While the Berlin Wall has come and gone, Springer executives are looking into another ideologically divided realm — cyberspace — with a similarly stubborn mien
Dec 5, 2009
The media business, and especially the News Media business is going through tough times. It's being hit from the left by a stubborn recession and on the right by massive waves of new technologies.
Jeff Jarvis
Dec 3, 2009
There’s one thing that Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington, Steve Brill, and I agreed on yesterday – and and there’s probably nothing else one can imagine this group would ever find consensus around. At the two-day Federal Trade Commission “workshop” (read: hearing) that asked how journalism will “survive” (their word) in the internet age, we all told the commissioner to kindly butt out.
Dec 2, 2009
Amid criticism from media companies that it unfairly profits from news content, Google is closing a loophole that allowed some motivated newshounds to read large numbers of articles on subscription-based sites without paying for them. The company’s “First Click Free” program, which publishers of pay sites can choose to participate in, is designed to allow readers to get a taste of a site’s content. For example, someone who finds a Wall Street Journal article through Google News can read it free, but if the reader tries to reach other articles from that page, he or she is asked to buy a subscription.
Ben Parr
Dec 2, 2009
As newspapers and old media companies have seen their revenues shrink, they have essentially done one of two things: found ways to embrace the web or blamed Google for their problems.
Now with the heat being turned up on Google (Google) by News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, the search giant has decided to appease angry media outlets and give them more control over how their links are treated in Google Search and Google News.
Kenneth Li and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Dec 1, 2009
Stories from US newspapers are being copied without permission on the internet on average 4.4 times, rising to as much as 15 times for the largest national publishers, according to a study that forms the basis of an industry push to get paid more for online content.
A month-long study of how 101,000 articles published by 157 newspapers proliferated around the internet found that more than 75,000 sites reused 112,000 almost exact copies without authorisation. A further 520,000 articles were reprinted in part.
Nov 24, 2009
News Corp.'s talk about listing its sites exclusively on Microsoft's Bing sounds unpromising in several ways, but all of Rupert Murdoch's recent agitation and exploration are at least pushing one fact back to the fore: Web traffic only gets publishers so far in their quest for digital ad dollars. After a certain point, actually, traffic may not even matter. More traffic means more bragging rights and helps attract advertisers who need to reach a lot of people quickly, but each new increment of visitors is something less than a new gold mine. Most sites, for one thing, already have much more inventory than they can sell.
Aug 10, 2009
Does Rupert Murdoch have one more revolution in him? The man who took over newspapering in Australia and Britain, and upended the cable news business here, planted a new flag last week, pronouncing that, contrary to popular reports, information does not want to be free; it actually wants to be paid for.
Aug 10, 2009
For a moment last week, it seemed like paid content was really on the march. Rupert Murdoch announced his intention to charge for every News Corp. news site. DirecTV, the second-largest pay-TV provider, was found in talks to launch a web-video service -- for its paying subscribers. And a comprehensive new forecast reported that consumers were spending less time with media that's heavily subsidized by advertising -- and more with media they pay for.
Eric Pfanner
May 17, 2009
Will May 2009 mark the beginning of the end for the free, unfettered Internet? From all the wailing on the Web — and the fist-pumping in some old-media redoubts — it might seem so.
Mar 20, 2009
MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe talks about why he thinks he has a better business than Facebook and what it’s like to work for Rupert Murdoch.
Diane Mermigas
Nov 7, 2008
There has been little talk by big media executives of the innovation
necessary to create new income to replace the old revenues that will
not return in a recovery. A deep, protracted recession is one thing; a
permanent digital shift in industry economics is another.
Davis Thinking
