Murdoch tells Abu Dhabi to ride the creative wind

Rupert Murdoch's attention has now turned int seems to the Middle East as today he launched an attack on the unliberal attitudes of the media.

Speaking at the the inaugural Abu Dhabi Media Summit which opened today,the News International chairman told the conferenece that censorship is counterproductive and that the region's citizens should be free to unleash their creative talents.

the Arab world can adhere to traditions and values, while also investing in a thriving creative industry and avoiding over-regulation and hurdles that keep out foreign players.

and added

"As I speak, there is a powerful creative wind blowing through this region," he said, according to a copy of his speech. "Ride this wind and you will raise from these desert sands something extraordinary: a capital of creativity that is modern...that is global...and that is fully Arab."

The event will represents an opportunity to showcase its existing media infrastructure and outline its future plans and Murdoch's remarks make clear that the region must embrace the free market.

How old is he? He looks like a kid.”

The start of a Murdoch,Guardian spat? Maybe

Michael Woolf has posted a response to Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger's Cudlipp address at Newser

Up until yesterday, no reputable newspaper has truly articulated the reasons for staying free, nor dedicated itself to this model. Vowing to stay free, the Guardian becomes something of a spoiler. It is not outlandish to assume that the New York Times will lose as much as 90% of its traffic, with the Guardian scooping up a tidy piece of that. The Times no longer sees itself in a position to proselytize for its brand and its left-liberal authority; the Guardian, an inveterate proselytizer, may suddenly have the field to itself.

And according to Woolf in his many conversations with Rupert

He did not insult Rusbridger, as he does most of his competitors, but he didn’t quite regard him as someone he might ever want to be alone with either: “Kooky,” was his description. “And what’s with the way his hair falls in his face?” Murdoch asked once, scowling in his dark way, about Rusbridger’s bangs and mop-top. “How old is he? He looks like a kid.”

Could this be the media story of the year?

Twitter was alive with rumour lasy night that the Times and the Sunday Times may be up for sale.

This is where the rumour started,(ht-Jon Slattery)



Michael Wolff is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the founder of news aggregator newser.com. He no doubt has aninsight into the thinkings of the Murdoch empire.

His latest book is The Man Who Owns the News, a biography of Rupert Murdoch, based on nine months of interviews with Murdoch and his family and associates.

Could this be the media story of the year?

Glover on the Cameron Murdoch pact

The Indy's Stephen Glover speculates over what if any agreement there is between the Murdoch empire and David Cameron in his column this morning.

There is evidently some sort of understanding between Cameron and the Murdochs. Whether it is an actual deal, time alone will tell.

he concludes and refers to a speech by Matthew Freud, the PR mover and shaker and Rupert Murdoch's son-in-law,who

attacked Fox News, which he said "embarrassed" and "sickened" some members of the Murdoch family.

What are we to make of all this? A reasonable interpretation might go as follows. The Murdochs want to get rid of the impartiality laws so they can re-fashion Sky News as and how they please. But through Freud they also want to convey that they won't turn it into Fox News, which is regarded as beyond the pale even in America, and would be unacceptable in Britain – a less right-wing country.

No doubt we will have to wait and see

Huffington's Golden age

I just love these quotes from Arianna Huffington in response to Rupert Murdoch's attacks on news aggregators

Trying to deny news consumers as wide a range of options and viewpoints as possible seems shortsighted -- and ultimately self-defeating. This is a Golden Age for news consumers who can surf the net, use search engines, access the best stories from around the world, and be able to comment, interact, and form communities. The value of having the world of information at your fingertips is beyond dispute.

and of Murdoch?

"It's the news industry equivalent of "your mama wears army boots!" Although, not quite as persuasive. In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back. Not in the media. They'd rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content."

Paywalls continue to grow

The news that Google is to limit the amount of free articles that a user can download from its search engine will be seen as another step towards the building of paywalls.

The announcement follows a sustained attack by News Corp and Rupert Murdoch in particular over the service essentially living off the back of free access to online information.

Google announced the move on its blog overnight and according to Josh Cohen,its senior Business Product Manager,

One way we overcome this is through a program called First Click Free. Participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. The user's first click to the content is free, but when a user clicks on additional links on the site, the publisher can show a payment or registration request.

Of course as Guardian media point out

It remains to be seen whether this will placate Murdoch, who told the US Federal Trade Commission workshop yesterday: "Producing journalism is expensive. We invest tremendous resources in our project from technology to our salaries. To aggregate stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it is theft.

So look out for the registration page

Murdoch is flawed -there is no such thing as scarcity in the 21st century media

While we are into predictions,Harvaad business school's Umair Haque has paid short shrift to the Murdoch Microsoft attacks on Google

The simplest flaw in the MicroFox's strategic logic? MicroFox is trying to create artificial scarcity instead of value. That might have worked in the 20th century, but in a hyperconnected world, creating artificial scarcity kills orthodox businesses dead. That's because though MicroFox can block Google, there's no way to block people from using Google to find stuff that doesn't suck. Artificial scarcity is usually a one-way ticket to oblivion, as people simply defect to better alternatives.

Ht-Martin Stabe

Maybe Murdoch has figured out the internet

There was a lot of commemt and bravado circulating yesterday over Rupert Murdoch's latest foray into the online world.

It is worth reading John Gapper's interpretation in the FT

Mr Murdoch appears to be willing to sacrifice a lot of traffic to the websites of papers such as the Wall Street Journal and The Times in return for a payment from Microsoft. In effect, he would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing.

adding

that suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not “get” the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible.

Banks not keen on paywalls or for that matter bloggers

Do read Josh Halliday's review of former Mirror editor David Banks' views on paywalls,aggregation and bloggers.

This on Rupert Murdoch's plans

"I just don't see how he's going to make it work. I think there are possible ways to make it work. The other day, I needed a new virus scanner, and I wanted a free one so I went online. So I went to their site and it said free download, so I clicked it, and you had Love Film, something else, you had ink supplies - you had to buy something from one of their advertisers and that's all you had to do, and as soon as you did, within about half-an-hour you were told you'd got the free virus scanner and I also bought a couple of cartons of ink for the computer.

and this on bloggers

"I could be a blogger, and I could offer this stuff for free on my site, you know, I'll read the papers for you - it's called being a journalist. Except, what do they call it? They don't call it plagiarism anymore, they call it aggregation - that's the word. Aggregation is the word of the nation. Roy Greenslade, the great Professor, he's an aggregator, or an aggregationist, and he aggregates, but really he's sucking stuff from anywhere else and you don't have to read media stuff in the world's press now you just go to Roy's site and read that. He's breaking the embargo really and it's wonderful, it's wonderful that bloggers can do that."

A glitch for Murdoch's paywalls

The path to paywalls does not run smoothly with even the Murdoch empire being beset by problems

According to the Guardian this morning,the media baron

is finding it harder than expected to introduce charges for readers browsing his newspaper websites and may miss a target of next June for the introduction of so-called "pay walls".

He declined to comment on the reasons for any delay except to say that he was talking to rival publishers including the Telegraph group in Britain. "It's a work in progress and there's a huge amount of work going on," Murdoch said.

Murdoch calls for media freedom in China

It was nice to see that Rupert Murdoch is calling for media freedoms in China.

As the FT reports he asked its leaders to

allow a more open media sector, saying Beijing needed to compete in a global "marketplace of ideas" just as it had opened its industrial economy up three decades ago.

adding that

"In this new world, China will also have to compete in the marketplace of ideas - the media. That's a noisy, messy, colourful market,

Of cause cynics may see this and his embrace of the Chinese premier as another cynical attempt to get a hold on the Chinese media market potentially the bigest in the world.

But I will for the moment applaud his call for freedoms

Another shift in the Murdoch stable?

So does the decision by the Murdoch empire to close the London paper mark a radical shift in Rupert Murdoch's attitude to free news?

Last night his son James announced that the experiment in shoving free papers in the faces of London commuters had "fallen short of expectations.

The project which employs over 60 people lost £12.9m in the year to June 2008.

According to Patrick Smith writing at Paid Content

Murdoch’s decision to axe that paper today shows just how much the axis of publishing has shifted: just as proprietors are growing weary of readers enjoying their online news for free, there is not nearly the same confidence in the free print model there was three years ago and publishers are reverting to ways of maximising user revenue in all media instead of giving it away for nothing.

No doubt the other London freebies,Lite and the Metro will be watching developments and maybe up here in Manchester the MEN's free experiment will also be coming under scrutiny

Martin Belam illustrates the economics of pay walls

The relationship between scarcity and Price is a standard economic principle and can be related to the charging for online news.

Martin Belam seeks to illustrate this principle to demonstrate why Rupert Murdoch's paywall won't work and provides this image where newspapers from the UK, US, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong and India are all covering the same story.



And concludes that

when we think about asking the market to pay for newspaper content online, I think we have to look honestly at that content, and ask, what have we got that is unique and desired by consumers?

Pilger on Murdoch's attack om journalism itself

A rather damming critique of the Murdoch empire comes from John Pilger writing in this week's New Statesman

No stranger to controversy himself,Pilger writes that

Murdoch’s papers have relentlessly assaulted common truth and decency, but their most successful war has been on journalism itself

and reflects on the paper's dealings after 96 Liverpool football fans had been crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium.

When sales of the Sun fell by almost 40 per cent on Merseyside, Murdoch ordered his favourite editor to feign penitence. BBC Radio 4 was chosen as his platform

It's a good read and you can look at the many allegations levelled against the Murdoch empire

Why is the BBC on the front of the Times?

Both the Times and the Telegraph carry front page reports on the BBC this morning.

The Times' is particually scathing on the corporation with the paper reporrting that

The BBC is to publish details of public money being spent on expenses within hours but is poised to provoke a fresh row by refusing to disclose details relating to its stars.
One week after MPs caused public outrage by blacking out details of their own expenses, the BBC is refusing to reveal how much is spent on hospitality and gifts by its best-paid celebrities.

Is there soemthing afoot.Well the Guardian's Michael White thinks so

At present Murdoch is cross that the Brown government may divert BBC cash to ailing ITV and Channel 4 – but not to Sky, which Margaret Thatcher's favours first breathed into lucrative life. The Murdoch fleet is gently turning back towards the Tories.
So when the Times, Sun, Sunday Times or News of the World attack the BBC and all its works – and they do all the time – or turn up the gas on G Brown – bear in mind they are acting as His Master's Voice to advance Rupert's corporate interests. It is sometimes so blatant you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Stephen Glover on why the Murdoch paper's role in the Iraq wqr should be examined

Stephen Glover's media column in the Independent seems to get more and more controversial.

Today he says that any inquiry into the Iraq war should take a look at Rupert Murdoch's role pointing out that whilst much of the press was horrified at last week's announcement

The Times, however, thinks there should not be an inquiry at all. In a first leader last week the paper grumbled that there had already been two of them, and it doubted that a third could tell us anything we don’t already know.

adding that

There are many aspects of this affair that remain unexamined. One of them is the attitude of some newspapers, in particular the Murdoch-owned Times and Sun, in uncritically promoting the Government’s flawed case for war, and defending, or even omitting to report, its mistakes.

Life under Rupert Murdoch at the WSJ

It is a year since Rupert Murdoch took control of the Wall Street Journal.

At the time it was,at least in some quarters seen as the end of financial reporting as we knew it.

The Columbia Journalism review has taken a look at the journal in its latest magazine and has discovered that

It’s clear from conversations with reporters on a range of beats, throughout the newsroom, that the emphasis on breaking news, coupled with the shrinking space for stories, means the paper is less committed to this sort of journalism. “We’re getting down to four hundred/five hundred words,” says one reporter. “You can barely introduce what you’re talking about. What’s the point?” Within a week in March 2007, the Journal published a dozen stories over two thousand words in the front section; within the same week in March 2009, only three stories exceeded that length.

However its readership is growing no doubt in part as a response to the financial meltdown of the past year and its policy of discounting.

There now appears more of an emphasis on news as opposed to business news and according to Liza Featherstone,

While the Journal has excelled in some areas—its coverage of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns comes to mind—it was caught short in others, notably the aig bailout and coverage of Henry Paulson’s Treasury department. Worse, the paper has failed to explicate the big questions—what happened and why—ceding the role of authoritative explainer and investigator to,

Are Murdoch's comments signifying a shift in the business model

People are getting used to getting everything on the net for nothing. That’s going to have to change somehow.” One change would the relationship with Google and others: “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights? Not just Google I think if you’ve got a brand like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal you don’t have to do that.”

The words of Rupert Murdoch addressing the attendees at The Cable Show (via Paid Content.)

Now the major media mogul is talking about paid content maybe this is a shift in media buisness strategy.

News Corp takes a very prudent view

The big media business news this morning is Newscorp's results as the group unveiled $6.4bn quarterly loss and forecast a worse than expected 30 per cent drop in operating income this year.

The loss is at a result of a prudent Murdoch writing down $8.4b based on what it considers a deteriorating situation for its TV channels and reflecting the acquisition of the Wall Street journal.

Maybe these results will be seen as a benchmark for media companies as one of the more successful predicts a gloomy outlook.

According to Murdoch,

the company was acting “when things are bleakest” to cut costs and improve margins so that it would emerge stronger when markets turn. “I recognise that we may never return to record levels, but we do believe we can capture a large proportion of the advertising that does return

via FT.com

But with income down 42 per cent compared to the same time last year,the downturn for News Corp is already none too apparent

How Murdoch is planning a move for the NYT

More evidence that Rupert Murdoch has his eyes firmly set on the acquisition of the New York Times

The New York Times is Mr Murdoch’s “favourite train wreck”, writes his latest biographer, Michael Wolff, who had unprecedented access to the tycoon, his family and his employees.

reports this week's addition of the Economist adding

I’ve watched [Mr Murdoch] go through the numbers, plot out a Times merger with the Journal’s backroom operations,” writes Mr Wolff. “He has conjured, too, how in Murdoch style, he might convince the Sulzbergers to let him in, if he promises to leave Arthur in charge—and how he could then make Arthur his puppet.”

And there is a fair amount of speculation that the Sulzberger family may be coming under pressure as

Ultimately, the Bancrofts lost the (Wall Street)Journal because the family was torn apart by intergenerational warfare: the younger family members, who had no real connection to the newspaper business, were keen to sell and thus bank their inheritance. There are reports that the fifth generation of Sulzbergers is similarly restless,