Public school systems are cheerfully decorated dictatorships: discipline, standards, and testing are the driving concepts of modern k-12 education. The very reason why districts purchase bundles of the same textbooks is so they can keep classrooms in lockstep alignment as teachers meticulous meet timely instructional goals. Amplify, NewsCorp’s new education division, finally revealed its… → Read More
News Corp’s SEC filing during its attempts to split into two companies showed that the company lost $2.1 billion on the publishing side this year. → Read More
Well, The Daily failed. It wasn’t all that fun while it lasted. And it didn’t last all that long. If everyone had known that it was going to cost $25 million a year to run, it probably would have been easy to predict its eventual failure. At a high level, the reality is simple: the economics didn’t come close to working.
But because the media industry loves nothing more than talking about… → Read More
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is planning once again to let stories from its paywalled UK newspaper The Times get indexed by the search giant Google. This reverses a two-year-old policy in which News Corp’s UK newspaper division News International dramatically yanked stories from Google as it prepared a paywall to better monetize that content and do away with low-value single-story visitors from… → Read More
News Corporation has just reported its quarterly earnings. For Q4 it had revenues of $8.4 billion with earnings per share of $0.32, both down compared to the year before (Q4 2011 the company reported revenues of $9 billion with EPS of $0.35).
The company also reported a net loss of $1.6 billion for the quarter, compared to a net income of $683 million in the same quarter a year ago. The… → Read More
Old media, some think, is headed for the graveyard, and they’ll be damned if it takes young and cool new media with it. But it ain’t dead yet, and some growling comments made today by Rupert Murdoch, the CEO and chairman of News Corp., underscored how it will continue to keep on ticking for some time still.
In a conference call today to discuss the confirmation that News Corp. will, in fact… → Read More
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… → 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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
News Corp. has acquired Irata Labs, a small social software development studio based in San Francisco, the LA Times has learned.
The company, which builds games and other apps for social networks, has confirmed the deal to us and on Twitter (check out these tweets from Irata Labs CEO Chris Abad and co-founder and designer D. Keith Robinson). The terms were not disclosed. → Read More
Fox Mobile Group, a division of News Corp’s Digital Media Group, is set to announce a new wireless video subscription service at CTIA later today. Dubbed Bitbop, the service will allow people to view premium video content on their smartphones for $9.99 a month.
As GigaOM called it, you can think of the new offering is a Hulu on-the-go. Bitbop users will be able to both stream and download movies… → Read More
Which online video companies will get bought in 2010? Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers. Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of… → Read More
News Corporation this afternoon announced financial results for the second quarter ended December 31, 2009.
Zooming in on the ‘Other’ segment, which houses News Corp’s Digital Media group, things are not looking too bright over there, in contrast to the rest of the business.
The business unit, which manages MySpace, IGN Entertainment, as well as the Hulu joint venture with NBC Universal, took a… → Read More
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