News International accused of intrigue with the Tories

The Independent's lead story this morning suggests that David Cameron has done a deal with News International.

After this week's attacks on Gordon Brown in the Sun,Peter Mandelson went on the Today programme yesterday to accuse the Tories of such a move.

They suspect that the Conservative Party has been tailoring its policies on media regulation and the BBC to suit the commercial interests of News International, which owns The Sun, and that the paper's aggressive support for the Tories is a pay-off that could spread to other parts of the mass media.

and as if to further the cause

Yesterday, The Times, another Murdoch newspaper, announced that its veteran political editor, Phil Webster, is leaving the Commons, where he has been based for decades. Mr Webster is very well thought of by New Labour. His replacement, Roland Watson, was a friend of David Cameron's at Eton

It's a Google day

Yesterday was certainly a google day across the world.

The organisation announced that it had agreed to acquire AdMob, the fast-growing mobile advertising start-up, for $750 million.

Ad Mob,it may not surprise you is one of the leading developers of mobile apps in the US and its acquisition could help establish Google as an early leader in the small but rapidly expanding mobile phone advertising business.

Meanwhile the compnay was on the end of a tirade from Rupert Murdoch who threatened to remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

According to Guardian media,Murdoch said that

newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web.

However as Charle Arthur points out

The threat to exclude Google from News International websites won't have caused much lost sleep over in the search engine's headquarters in Mountain View in California.

adding that his threat

is akin to a runner at a sports event threatening to shoot himself in the foot: the ticket-seller, noting that all the other entrants aren't making the same threat, isn't going to be worried.

Hari on why the Beeb's model is more necessary than ever

A rallying cry from Johann Hari in this mornings Indy for the BBC.

He writes that the Tories' plan to scrap impartiality would mean Sky mutating into Fox News.The "deal" that the party has done with the Murdoch empire he says will

The Tory government will sweep in and widen the gap, while unleashing a snarling pack of Fox News-style hounds across the rest of the channels. And for what? To win the favour of a foreign right-wing billionaire.

He adds that

Far from becoming outdated, the BBC model is more necessary than ever. Commercial television is losing its ability to produce quality programmes, fast. Advertising money is leaking away to the internet: this week, for the first time, online advertising overtook TV ads in Britain. Revenues are expected to fall by 20 per cent in the next decade, and to continue spiralling after that. As more of us get digital packages that make it possible to record programmes and fast-forward through the ads, it will only get worse. Budgets for shows on commercial channels are in freefall. We won't get good programmes for nothing again. The BBC is the simplest answer, and we are overwhelmingly happy to pay it.

Murdoch's last gamble

Everyone is getting rather uptight about Rupert Murdoch's comments that all his news sites will be charging for content within the next twelve months.

But what does this really tell us?

Personally for me there has been one organisation ie Murdoch's that has transcended all the other media organisations but yesterday's losses at NewsCorp mean that even he can no longer buck the trend that the old model has failed.

There is a great post from Polis' Charlie Beckett who asks Is Rupert Murdoch an asset stripper, gambler or genius?

three possible rationales I can see for what Mr Murdoch is doing:

1. ‘Asset-stripping’: get as much cash out of these businesses as you can without completely killing the customer base to pump up the balance sheet while other media organisations burn their capital and plunge further into debt.

2. ‘The gamble’: If a few titles go down that just proves their weakness. Whatever is left standing will dominate a depleted market as the rivals follow in the wake of News International. In the same way that putting the price up of the Sunday Times actually strengthened its market dominance. If you are a sector leader - such as The Sun - then you have the brand community to set the pace and help dictate consumer behaviour.

3. Genius: Murdoch understands that enough of the public want to preserve their source of news and will be prepared to pay. They realise that they have had a free ride. They identify with the product and recognise that like anything worth having, you have to pay. Just like Sky. While the Internet enthusiasts preach the value of Free, most people pay for a lot of things online (shopping, books etc) as well as for broadband itself. Murdoch has clever schemes to wrap the payments into other services that will make it feel aspirational and valuable to pay a small charge for premium products.

For me it is the last one

Wade's new appointment

Rebekah Wade's appointment as the new CEO of News International has been met by surprise not so much because of who,but because of the timing.

It had been assumed that she was stay at the Sun until the next election,but in a sign that the Murdoch's were not prepared to wait another 12 months to develop their new model for news.

As Paid Content points out though,

Wade will certainly have her work cut out developing it

They have identified three areas which she will have to focus on

1.Generating a workable model for paid content.

2.Increasing the return on investment from News International's new media projects.

3.to monetise new readers,paying special attention to those of the Sun and the NOTW who have been lured by discount pricing.

Mail and News International putting Brown under pressure

The government has been put under pressure to drop certain clauses from Criminal Justice & Immigration Bill relating to the buying of personal data


Iain Dale follows up a story in this morning's Guardian which suggests that the might of Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch are putting pressure on Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown has demanded the scrapping of longstanding plans for a clampdown on newspapers that illegally buy personal data, such as health, bank and telephone records, the Guardian has learned. This has provoked criticism that he has bowed to pressure from the media.

Iain points out that

About eighteen months ago it was revealed how many times different national newspapers had effectively stolen people's personal data, using middle men to do it. Three hundred journalists had used agencies to uncover details illegally, most of them from the Mail Group and News International.

and claims

News International, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and the Mail Group have been lobbying the government hard to remove Clause 76 from the Bill.

But according to Iain tomorrow the Information commissioner will

issue a stark call to politicians to resist attempts to water down new penalties for deliberate breaches of people’s health, financial and other personal details.

News International reveals its new print works

Roy Greenslade has spent the day touring Rupert Murdoch's new printing plant.

Press Gazette reports that

News International claim the plant, just off the M25 near Enfield, is the biggest printing centre in the world. It is part of a £650m initiative including plants in Knowsley, near Liverpool, and Motherwell, near Glasgow.

According to Roy

Superlatives fail. It is the biggest, most efficient, least labour-intensive press plant in the world. It's also unusually clean, eerily quiet - except, of course, inside press hall itself - and spookily devoid of human beings. Rolls of newsprint glide around on automated tracks until they are loaded on to the presses without a single person having touched them.

And describes

12 presses, with giant towers (though two are yet to come on stream). When working at full capacity they are capable of churning out 86,000 copies in full colour every hour. To get that in perspective, the company's Wapping presses did 30,000 copies an hour at best