Rupert Murdoch withstood intense grilling at News Corp’s annual shareholder meeting today, which focused largely on the phone-hacking scandal that is causing such an upset in the company’s financials and leadership. But among other things, Murdoch owned up to the debacle that has been Myspace.
“I made a huge mistake,” he said. “We then proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way. All of the people concerned with it are no longer with the company.” Except for himself, of course. The fact that it was a mistake and a mismanaged one at that is not news to the rest of the world, but the unmixed apology for the billion-dollar boondoggle reflects how low recent events have brought the once-proud news giant. → Read More
Jim Breyer, a partner of venture capital firm Accel Partners, has been nominated for election to the board of directors of media conglomerate News Corporation, the company announced this morning.
Breyer will stand for election at News Corp’s annual meeting of stockholders on October 21, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. The company also said that directors Kenneth E. Cowley and Thomas J. Perkins – yes, that would be the founding partner of VC firm and Accel Partners rival Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – will step down from the board afterwards. → Read More
Over the last week, there’s been quite a bit of news swirling around Rupert Murdoch’s empire, including, most recently, the now infamous LulzSec’s pwnage of The Sun, News Corp’s daily tabloid newspaper.
On Monday, the loose network of merry hacktivists hacked into The Sun, pinned a fake news story about Murdoch’s supposed death on the homepage, redirected the site to its Twitter page, and brought down a number of other News Corp and News International websites — all in one fell swoop. → Read More
News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch are facing the heat today during a British parliamentary inquiry over the illegal hacking of cell phones by News Corp.’s recently shuttered News of the World publication. Of course, Twitter is exploding with commentary on the elder and younger Murdoch’s testimony.
Unsurprisingly, the sentiment around Tweets being sent on the Murdoch testimony is mostly negative. According to a sentiment analysis on the word Murdoch, 67 percent of Tweets are negative. → Read More
News Corp’s IGN gaming and entertainment property has just acquired Hearst’s gaming and entertainment property UGO, we’ve confirmed with the company. And yes, the move is step one towards News Corp. spinning out IGN as its own property sometime relatively soon, we’re told. This news was first reported by MediaMemo a few days ago as the deal was still being finalized.
I got the chance to talk to IGN President Roy Bahat about the news and he wanted to reiterate that while there’s been a lot of talk about News Corp. trying to ditch properties that are underperforming (*cough* MySpace *cough*), this is not the case here. Instead IGN is doing really well, Bahat says, and making money. They will bring in north of $10 million in profit this year, and that number is expected to be significantly higher next year, he says. He also notes that ad revenue is up 30 percent year over year. → Read More
TrueCar, which helps people research new and used car prices and find local dealer savings, has acquired automotive social media company Honk.com, dubbed the ‘Facebook for car buyers’ in the news release.
Interestingly, Honk.com was co-founded by Tom Taira, who is also the co-founder and former president of … TrueCar.
News Corporation, an early investor in Honk.com, will retain an equity stake in TrueCar as part of the agreement. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. → Read More
When Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily launched last week, Apple’s VP Eddy Cue got on stage to announce one-click subscriptions for iPad publications through iTunes. The Daily already has the one-click billing option as a feature, and Cue promised it would be made available to other iPad newspaers and magazines soon. Cue then started to make the rounds of print media companies in New York City to explain how subscription billing will work on the iPad.
Who will have control over subscriber revenues and data has long been a point of contention between print publishers and Apple. The magazine and newspaper companies want to be able to control subscription billing by sending readers to their own sites to process iPad app subscriptions, but Apple is insisting that they use iTunes. To get through this impasse, I’ve heard that Apple is offering a compromise. Publications might be allowed to route subscribers to their own websites or payment portals to grab their credit card numbers, but they will also have to offer the option of subscribing through iTunes. → Read More
One thing about The Daily that bugged me from the second I first laid eyes on the iPad newspaper that launched yesterday is that there is no one place where you can see a simple list of every story in the issue. There is a table of contents, but it shows only ten featured stories. Like any good hack, The Daily: Indexed creates a feature that is missing from the original but is deeply needed. The Tumblr blog put together by Andy Baio creates a complete table of contents for The Daily. → Read More
News Corp. and Apple have just announced the launch of The Daily, an iPad-only digital newspaper of sorts that promises to, if nothing else, shake things up a little bit. But will it be iPad-only forever, or does News Corp. have other ideas? Survey says: other ideas. → Read More
After today’s unveiling of The Daily at a press event at the Guggenheim museum in New York City, we were handed iPads loaded with the news app. I shot the video above with my iPhone to give a quick sense of what it looks like and the navigation.
It looks like a magazine more than a newspaper, with lush photography and the occasional interactive graphic or video in place of a photo. The first thing I noticed is that there are no links in any of the stories, although you can share stories via Facebook, Twitter, or email. But that is about the extent of the social features in the app. As I expected, it is does not (yet) offer any social reading features like Flipboard or the yet-to-launch News.me → Read More
Today, Rupert Murdoch is introducing The Daily, his foray into an iPad-only newspaper. “New times demand new journalism,” he says. The challenge he says, is to “take the best of traditional journalism—competitive shoe leather joranlism, a skeptical eye, and combine it with the best technology such as 360 degree photographs. The iPad demands that we completely rethink our craft.”
Murdoch notes that a growing population of news consumers no longer read print or even watch TV. His aim with The Daily is to combine “the magic of great newspapers” with the magic of technology. “The Daily is not a legacy barnd moving from the print to the digital world. We have license to experiment. We believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told.” → Read More
At todays much anticipated launch of News Corp.’s iPad-only newspaper The Daily, Rupert Murdoch unveiled the new journalism venture.
Murdoch revealed that The Daily will cost $0.14 per day ($0.99 per week) and says the app will be “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” The app will also include “stunning photography” and HD video. Murdoch adds that Apple’s Steve Jobs has changed “the world of technology and media” and that Jobs has been a “champion of The Daily since day one.” → Read More
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it’s not.
This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The New York Times iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files—I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of Wired are 500 MB—with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence. → Read More
James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and currently Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, Europe and Asia, was interviewed on stage at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany.
Murdoch touched on everything from its relationship with Google and Apple, to paywalls for online newspapers, iPad applications and more.
These are my notes: → Read More
Whenever a company lays off 500 people, as MySpace did earlier this week when it gave half its employees walking papers, it generates quite a bit of anger and bitterness. The latest tip in our inbox from a dispirited former employee goes into a details about do-nothing managers who still have their jobs while all their underlings are now unemployed.
I won’t repeat the character assassinations here, but the former MySpacer did include something else I will share: The kiss-off letter from CEO Mike Jones. “He didn’t even take the time to personally sign the letters. It’s just a xerox copy,” laments the former employee. You can read the termination letter below. It is pretty standard, thanking those being laid off for their “dedication and commitment to MySpace” especially through its recent relaunch.
This is the part, though that must really rankle: → Read More
It looks like News Corp. has unloaded its Fox Mobile Group division. According to a release, investment company Jesta Group has acquired Fox Mobile Group (FMG) from News Corporation. Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the release.
FMG operates a number of mobile services including Jamba, Jamster, Mobizzo and iLove, as well as Bitbop, a recently launched mobile video service and entertainment platform. FMG will become part of Jesta Mobile Holdings. → Read More
News Corp is taking the iPad very seriously as a new way to distribute the news. The media giant is taking it so seriously that it is developing a new publication called the Daily which will only be available on the iPad (no print edition, no Website). News Corp is hiring 100 journalists for this iPad newspaper and is reportedly working with engineers on loan from Apple to make it shine.
The last time a big media company hired so many journalists to launched a splashy new publication was Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine, which was more of a print venture and didn’t survive. I hope the Daily fares better and really takes this opportunity to rethink how news is presented to readers without any of the limitations of print. For one thing, based on who is getting hired for this project, it looks like the Daily will be heavy on video, interactive graphics, and rich photos. Nothing too startling there. Pretty much every newspaper and magazine edition on the iPad is going in that direction. With all the hype that is brewing around the project, hopefully it will push the envelope beyond those obvious iPad features.
But the fact that News Corp. is putting so many resources into this project raises a basic question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily: What should an iPad newspaper look like? → Read More
The Rubicon Project, a Los Angeles based display ad optimization platform, confirmed today that it has completed its acquisition of parts of the Fox Audience Network from News Corp. I outlined the main details of the deal last week. Rubicon is purchasing mostly the technology (ad server, MyAds self-service ad buying platform, targeting technology, realtime bidding algorithms) and taking on about 100 of FAN’s technology employees (after the other half of FAN’s employees, the sales team, lost their jobs last week). FAN’s third-party ad network is not part of the deal.
At the same time, the Rubicon project raised another $18 million from investors including News Corporation, Clearstone Venture Partners, IDG Ventures Asia, Mayfield Fund, and NBC Universal’s Peacock Equity Fund. So News Corp now owns a minority stake in the Rubicon Project as a result of this transfer of assets plus some cash. → Read More
A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles about a supposed Facebook privacy breach. We and others noted that the article was complete rubbish. We also noted that the Wall Street Journal’s sister company, MySpace, wasn’t mentioned in the article – either as a disclosure of a conflict of interest or a discussion of whether MySpace was doing the same thing.
The WSJ was actually investigating MySpace, says a source close to the company, and were planning on publishing the information the investigation uncovered.
MySpace has had three different CEOs in the last two years, as well as a period where they were led by co-presidents. If you count Jon Miller, who runs the whole show, they’ve had four CEOs. Based on MySpace’s overall level of disorganization and constant leadership changes, we’re not surprised that the WSJ investigation landed on their doorstep, and discovered questionable privacy practices.
But the story was shelved. → Read More
News Corp, publishers of the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and a slew of other international papers including The Sun, has cancelled plans to offer a tablet-based newsstand, code-named Project Alesia. The project would have brought all of News Corp’s media holdings together in one app as well as aggregate news from other sources, a la Google News. The project has apparently been folded back up into News Corp. → Read More
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