Davis ThinkingMr. Murdoch wants the take it up a notch and buy Dow Jones & Company and the world’s leading financial paper, the Wall Street Journal. Who can blame him, really. His portfolio of holdings could be more balanced, and the Journal certainly could benefit from his legendary approach to cost management.
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.
Magazines, books, newspapers -- all that printed stuff is supposed to be dying. Advertising pages, which have been steadily declining, dropped 26% in 2009 alone. But here, surely, was some evidence that publishing might have a chance. If an adolescent who otherwise spends every waking hour on a laptop still craves the printed word, then maybe, just maybe, there's a little new growth left in old media.
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.
A year-end flurry of ad spending helped moderate steep declines at some newspapers and magazines, and has fueled an uptick at others, raising hopes for a recovery in 2010. Still, following a brutal 2009, when scores of publications closed or made drastic cutbacks, publishers remain wary of declaring an ad rebound as marketers selectively reopen their wallets. Publishing executives attribute the recent influx of ad money in part to marketers hurrying to spend the remainder of their annual ad budgets after doling out those funds sparingly earlier in the year amid fears of an economic collapse.
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.
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.
Has Wikipedia really peaked as The Wall Street Journal's recent headline "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" suggests? The data presented by researchers cited in the article present a good case to support the headline. However, this is where our ongoing strategy process with the Wikimedia Foundation comes in. Wikimedia is engaged in the community's first-ever strategic planning process. The challenge of participation in the community is a primary thrust of the work. Our animating question is: what will it take to cultivate, grow and sustain a strong community to support the next stage of Wikimedia's development?
News Corp. is considering blocking Google’s search engine from displaying its news articles and is talking to Microsoft Corp. about displaying stories on its Bing site, people familiar with the situation said yesterday. MediaNews Group Inc., the Post’s publisher, will block Google News when it starts charging readers in Pennsylvania and California for online content next year, Chief Executive Officer Dean Singleton said in an interview. Morning News owner A.H. Belo Corp. may also introduce online subscription fees and also block Google, Executive Vice President James Moroney said.
National news outlets' battle to provide local news and win local advertisers is suddenly heating up fast. The Wall Street Journal's new weekly San Francisco Bay Area edition will appear for the first time tomorrow, confronting a similar Fridays-and-Sundays push from The New York Times that began there on Oct. 16. The Journal is simultaneously planning to hire new reporters for metro coverage of the New York area, according to insiders who confirmed a New York Times report breaking that news yesterday. And The Times plans to introduce a Chicago edition in the next few weeks, fed by a deal with the new Chicago News Cooperative.
It was a good day for newspaper Web sites when Mercedes-Benz USA introduced its updated E-Class cars this summer. Mercedes bought out the ad space on the home pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and had those sites create special 3-D ads for them, at an estimated cost of $100,000 a site. The days after were not as good. While Mercedes was happy with the newspaper sites’ performance, it shifted money to cheaper, more tightly aimed ads bought through networks, which bundle ad space from many Web sites.
The Web has long relegated advertising to the sidelines as part of a do-not-interrupt mandate that separated cyberspace venues from traditional media. That's slowly changing.
The Wall Street Journal has launched what it’s called a LinkedIn Killer. How’s that for self-serving promotion? But responses to the professional network from News Corp’s flagship publication have been lukewarm. It’s difficult enough for printed media companies to transfer their customer base and revenue generation from tangible to virtual, in the form of websites. Is a LinkedIn competitor the best way for WSJ to go?
Murdoch and his team can keep news organizations afloat. They can move the needle of a media company—they’ve proven that over the decades. But though Murdoch went to considerable lengths to acquire the Journal, he and his top lieutenants have displayed barely disguised contempt for its core strengths. They have moved the paper decisively toward a more terse, scoop-oriented form of journalism that they believe is more in keeping with the information age. The question, then, is whether this strategy will work at the Journal, and if so, at what cost? Murdoch’s managers, as one reporter put it, “don’t fully appreciate what they have.”
The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers that charges for content online, released an app for the iPhone Wednesday which sets their content free, poking another hole in one of the internet's oldest pay walls.
Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a "parasite" or "tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet." The Web site aggregates links to stories. Along with the links is a short description of the news. Thomson and others in the newspaper industry say it's unfair and unlawful for Web sites to profit from their content without compensating them
This is the cultural moment of the narcissist. A forthcoming book, The Narcissism Epidemic, says we went on a national binge of I-deserve-it consumption that's now resulting in our economic purging.
Charlie Rose today started a series on the future of journalism. It was a fascinating discussion about micropayments, subscription models, and how newspapers can adapt to the challenge of low online ad revenues. Robert Thomson, Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal, said, "Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google but it's terrible for content providers." He said that Google doesn't distinguish between the quality of the content around which it serves up ads, it is concerned with quantity rather than quality.
Can The New York Times, America’s paper of record, survive the death of newsprint? Can journalism?
The Wall Street Journal's print edition and The New York Times Online will both introduce new elements Thursday morning as The Journal makes a play for new ad revenue and The Times tries to increase its allure to web surfers.
Copyright © 2009 Davis Brand Capital. All Rights Reserved.
