Did Rupert Murdoch wait way too long to fix MySpace? It’s easy to get that impression from the News Corp. earnings call today.
The takeaway: The site is losing traffic and money and is going to get at least $100 million less from Google than it once thought. “It’s a work in progress,” News Corp. says, over and over again.
Rupert Murdoch and company aren’t exactly celebrating, but they did provide a better earnings number than Wall Street expected. They can thank Fox News, and yet another “Ice Age” movie. Not helping the cause: The company’s broadcast TV and newspaper properties. Not very relevant: MySpace, et al.
News Corp. is reportedly interested in purchasing the Travel Channel from Cox for something like $800 million. Here’s one way to help pay for a small piece of that deal: Sell off Fuel TV, its modest surf, skate and snowboard-themed cable channel.
Rupert Murdoch has been pushing The Wall Street Journal to raise its prices. Here’s one way to try it: Levy an additional fee for subscribers who want to use the paper’s iPhone or BlackBerry apps.
New York’s Internet Week featured party after party, attended by the same group of Webby movers, shakers and hustlers gulping down drinks and snacks, night after night. The finale: A rooftop gathering in midtown Manhattan that hosted a large number of the digital media’s movers and shakers, plus their bosses, including Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, Tim Armstrong and Jon Miller. Here’s the video.
The New York Times turned down a chance to borrow money from Hollywood mogul David Geffen last winter and went with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim instead. So says the New Yorker, which also reports that Geffen tried to buy the paper outright in September.
A new series of reports argues that billionaire David Geffen doesn’t want to make money by investing in the New York Times–he wants to save it. Fair enough. But how exactly does he plan to do that?
File this one under “hard to say it’s news”: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the company would consider more layoffs–if the economy falls off another cliff. Gotta credit him with consistency: He said the exact same thing a week ago.
Charge people who want to read stuff online? Heresy in the media world until recently. Now everyone is noodling with it, and News Corp. is charging hard. Rupert Murdoch says he plans on exporting The Wall Street Journal’s subscription model to other sites soon–but not via Amazon’s Kindle.
For the past year or so, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has been a consistent voice of pessimism, and he forecast an ugly economy before his big media peers did. And now he’s more upbeat than his fellow media CEOS. Here’s his opening salvo: “It is increasingly clear that the worst is over… there are emerging signs in some of our businesses that the days of precipitous decline are done and that revenues are beginning to look healthier.”
MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe is likely to be on his way out of the company he helped found, and News Corp., which bought the social network in 2005, has a single potential successor in mind. Sources say that person is former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta, who is currently CEO of music start-up Project Playlist. People familiar with the matter tell me that DeWolfe and News Corp., specifically new digital boss Jon Miller, are discussing a leadership change today.
My colleagues over at The Wall Street Journal have been able to convince more than a million people to pay for full access to the paper’s Web site. Can it find even more people who are willing to pay for even more online stuff? We may find out: WSJ.com is contemplating what sounds an awful lot like trade newsletters.
The Associated Press is fed up with… the Internet, apparently. And it’s going to do… something about it. At the news-gathering co-op’s annual meeting today, AP chairman Dean Singleton let rip a sort of hellfire-and-brimstone speech in which he announced the AP’s vague plans to stop unnamed scoundrels from making money from their work.
Unstated but obvious public enemy number one: Google.
Here’s yet another fan of the Kindle, Amazon’s much-hyped e-book reader: News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who likes the device enough that he’s considering investing in a Kindle rival.
From the small victories department: Cablevision says that its purchase of Newsday last summer wasn’t quite the disaster it had feared. That is, instead of taking a $450 million write-down on the $650 million purchase, the cable company is only writing off $402 million on the Long Island newspaper. Even better: The paper didn’t do that poorly in the last three months of 2008.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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