Magazines find Murdoch has great ideas, and use MySpace to realize them

Posted by Elena Perotti on May 5, 2006 at 5:57 PM

In March MySpace reached a grand total of 60 million registered users. Owner Rupert Murdoch announced that video content will be added to the site, and said to Newsweek that newspaper companies had been caught out by the rapid increase in web video and still "have their heads in the sand". Responding to this challenge, The Sun (owned by Murdoch) announced on March 16 that its online version was exploring the possibility of teaming up with MySpace; the idea was to enable users to create a “MySun” portal on thesun.co.uk using the MySpace software. Could it be that the “head in the sand” problem that Murdoch claims is affecting the newspaper world does not concern the magazine one?

Evidently 7, the weekly supplement to Washington The Spokesman-Review, read a good opportunity in The Sun idea, and has already created its own MySpace profile.

Meanwhile, Seventeen magazine is reportedly using MySpace as a promotional tool. Launched in 1894 by Publisher William H. Cowles, The Spokesman-Review is a family-owned local that has shown itself to be internet friendly. In February 2006, SpokesmanReview.com was in fact recognized by the Newspaper Association of America as the Best Overall News Site for newspapers of its size (100,000 to 250,000 circulation) in the annual Digital Edge awards, and Spokane7.com, the newspaper's entertainment site, was named the Best Entertainment Site in the same competition.

Seventeen debuted in 1944 and counts 14.45 million total readers each month. The word is that the idea of the links between Seventeen and MySpace came from editor in chief Atoosa Rubenstein, known for having been founding editor of CosmoGirl.

On July 18 2005 Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation announced the purchase of Intermedia Inc. for approximately 580 million dollars News Corporation’s US web traffic was about 23 million monthly users before the addition of MySpace and Intermix’s network of sites: Murdoch announced that he expected that figure to double shortly after the acquisition. “We see a great opportunity to combine the popularity of Intermix's sites, particularly MySpace, with our existing online assets to provide a richer experience for today's internet users." said Rupert Murdoch. The actual results of the operation overcame the expectations: according to Alexa Internet, as of March 2006 MySpace was the world's fifth (now fourth) most popular English-language website and the eigth most popular in the world. The question at this point is: will at least the next newspaper to launch a profile on MySpace belong to Murdoch?

Sources: journalism.co.uk, and here, Gawker.com and here

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