Results matching “a new media empire”

Australian public broadcaster the ABC has launched a new digital initiative called ABC Open to feature user-generated content on existing ABC local websites.

The initiative aims to develop the digital skills of local communities to tell their own stories. The reports produced through the project will be published on the broadcaster's local websites and other sites, and may also be distributed on radio, television or mobile platforms.

More than 50 editors and producers, based in local radio offices around the country, will be charged with helping communities design and develop media-rich local stories.

Jeff Jarvis, author of What would Google do and media columnist at the Guardian, has spoken out against News Corp's recent decision to block NewsNow from linking to its content, condemning Murdoch's as empire "foolish".


In his column, Jarvis argues that permitting linking is not only in News Corp's interests - as (previously) it directed traffic to the likes of Times Online, Sun Online and NotW.co.uk - but is also in the interests of democracy, allowing the public access to public information. "What's public is public - that is, we, the public, have a right to observe, point to, share, and comment on it. And the internet is public," writes Jarvis. Denying NewsNow the right to link, by disabling its crawler using the robots.txt file, impedes free comment and therefore freedom of speech, he adds.

In his latest move, Murdoch has vowed to remove newspapers in his media empire - including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal - from Google's search index. The mogul sees this as step towards encouraging people to pay for online content, the Guardian has reported.

The revelation was made in an interview with Sky News Australia, shortly after Murdoch claimed that "Google, Microsoft, Ask.com ... a whole lot of people" are stealing News Corp content and as a solution proposed blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories online.

A law passed in Argentina earlier this month placing limits on media ownership, has raised eyebrows over the motivations of the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, with many arguing she is attempting to restrict press freedom.

The legislation, which at its core prevents ownership of more than 35 per cent of cable and broadcast operations in a single market and requires the renewal of a license every two years, was declared a victory by Fernández for the 'democratization' of media. She said the measure would free up the airwaves and offer a platform for non- profit groups, universities and the government to express themselves.

After filing for banckrupcy protection earlier this month, Canwest Global Communications has announced that flagship daily newspaper, The National Post will probably be forced to close after Friday, if it isn't transferred to a new holding company, Reuters is reporting.

Canwest said a group of creditors led by the Bank of Novia Scotia indicated they no longer wanted to fund continuing losses at the Post, which employs 277 people. The creditor group "will not continue to support funding the National Post Company in the long or short term past Oct. 30, 2009," Canwest said in a court report released on Thursday.

Mobile giant Ericsson has moved to fill the void between publishers' desires to charge for online content and the infrastructure to actually do so with its Internet Payment Exchange system. 

ABC Managing director Mark Scott has announced that the Australian national news service will never charge for its online content. Speaking at the annual AN Smith Memorial Lecture in Journalism in Melbourne, Scott said that a fully paid online content model for media organisations was doomed to fail and that the ABC would not bow to pressure from commercial media outlets to go down this path.  

"The public pays for the ABC to deliver distinctive, quality content to them - and if it is content we are creating and packaging for them now, they are entitled to view that content free of charge," he said.

A government-owned public news service, the ABC has not felt the post-crisis pain of many commercial publications who depend wholly on advertising, sales and subscriptions to survive. None-the-less, it's refusal to charge for content makes it harder for other publications to do so. For people to accept paying for content, it has to become the norm for all news publications. If there is a respected alternative source that remains free, readers will continue to seek this out, as a recent PCUK/Harris poll found.

Something the ABC is not immune to, however, is the challenge to stay relevent. In his speech, Scott talked of the difficulties currently facing the media industry to continue to prove it's value when there is so much other content available. He emphasised the need for publishers to adapt if they are to endure the emerging climate saying that the only organisations that will survive are the ones that accept that "all the rules have changed."  

On Wednesday, Clarity Media Group announced that Rubert Murdoch had sold the Weekly Standard to Phillip Anschutz. The Huffington Post was one of the first sources of the rumor that emerged speculating that media groups News Corp. and Anschutz were discussing the transaction, more than ten days ago.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Murdoch may not necessarily "need" the right-wing political magazine, since its editorial tone echoes that of the more influential Wall Street Journal, a publication that Murdoch recently added to his media portfolio.

New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee gave details on her Twitter feed of the paper's discussions at a strategy presentation to staff yesterday on how the Times might charge for online content, amongst other things. The meeting for news staff was held at the company's Manhattan based headquarters, reported the Guardian.

Her 'tweets' indicated that the NYT is considered introducing a tiered membership scheme, which was compared to an American Express credit card membership with different levels such as platinum and gold. The paper is also "rethinking the assumption that home delivery subscribers get access to everything," and thinking of membership as a "brand building product, not online product."

Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson has told the Financial Times that the paper is planning to launch "a sophisticated micropayments service" this autumn along with premium subscriptions. The system will be aimed at occasional users and pricing would be "rightfully high," Thomson said.

The premium subscriptions will focus on specialist areas such as energy, commodities, wealth management and other niches, reported the FT, and premium subscribers will have web access to the Dow Jones newswire, which is currently a product aimed solely at companies. When WSJ Online executive editor Alan Murray mentioned this "premium initiative" in April, he also suggested the paper was considering a news service for chief financial officers.

Press Gazette, after facing its near closure, has been bought by Mike Danson's Progressive Media group. They will continue to publish both their monthly magazine and online; meanwhile, the current owners, Wilmington group, will retain control of the British Press Awards (where most of the magazine's revenue comes from).

Rupert Murdoch, News Corp Chairman and CEO, has announced that the company is to create a new portal that will allow its worldwide editorial properties to share content and resources across the entire organisation. "The creation of a new unit designed to share valuable news content and harness the power of News Corporation's vast editorial resources is vital to our success as a global media entity," he said.

Executive VP of News Editorial for Fox News John Moody has been appointed to oversee the new unit. He will be reporting directly to Murdoch, and will collaborate with news chiefs across all News Corp properties "to improve news gathering efficiencies and identify areas of cost savings," which implies that the move is largely financially motivated. News Corp's vast empire includes the Wall Street Journal, the Dow Jones Newswire, the Times of London, the Sun, the New York Post and Sky Italia, as well as Fox News.

The announcement last Friday that Sir Anthony O'Reilly will step down as CEO of Independent News & Media provoked two things: firstly, it sent the company's shares soaring,  then sparked a revived debate regarding its future.

When O'Reilly turns 73 in May, he will be replaced by his son and current chief operating officer, Gavin O'Reilly, who is also president of the World Association of Newspapers. The restructure of the INM will also affect the Board, which will be reduced from 17 members as it presently is, to just 10. According to son Gavin, his father's decision to leave had nothing to do with the impending 200 million euro bond repayment deadline, also in May.

Walter Isaacson, ex-managing editor of Time magazine and current CEO of the Aspen Institute yesterday addressed the current conundrum of the printed press: how to make money.  The crux of the dilemma is that printed news costs money, yet identical content online is given out for free.  This combined with a decrease in advertising revenue due to the global economic crisis has left many newspapers and magazines struggling.

In a Time piece entitled 'How to save your newspaper', Walter Isaacson bluntly reveals his attitude to the printed press; "Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it."  His logic is indisputable; very few people would pay for that which they can have for free.

Isaacson is struck by the irony of the situation; news publications have a higher readership that ever when you consider both print and online figures, yet they have never been more under threat.  He links the problem back to the online advertising boom which at the time looked like its revenues would be more than sufficient to carry both online and print editions of any newspaper.

The Guardian recently spoke with John Wintherow. In his first interview in nine years, the Sunday Times editor discusses the "tactile" joy of the Sunday paper, reading every word of the paper (and other nostalgia) and impersonates the competition. Below follows an edited transcript of what appears on the Guardian's website:

Over the past year, speculation about the future of the longest-serving editor in Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper empire has mounted as his paper's sales have declined... Highly successful and very low-profile, Witherow is in some ways like his newspaper - admired and respected, but without much fanfare.
 
Declining print sales and online competition have led several newspaper groups to merge the daily and Sunday staff with their online counterparts. News International has ruled out such integration. "We will remain separate entities with separate staff" says Witherow, adding that Sunday titles suffer from integration. There will be no editorial job cuts despite an efficiency drive conducted by the Murdoch-appointed Boston Consulting Group. He is talking to his daily counterpart, James Harding, about how the Sunday can be better "represented" online - the weekly drives a third of timesonline's traffic. Witherow is boyishly enthusiastic about the "tactile" joy of a Sunday read and wonders jokily whether the environmental damage of reading his newspaper online is greater than printing all that paper. "Newsprint still has the same elemental excitement about it - don't you think that?"

He still receives a weekly call from Rupert Murdoch, typically on Saturday evenings. "It's always been the same," he says. Unlike his counterpart at the Sun, Rebekah Wade, Witherow wasn't called to give evidence in the recent House of Lords inquiry about the influence of the media titan on his titles but he has always been "open" about it, he says. Does Murdoch suggest what the paper should be covering? "No ... he just likes to know what's going on. The conversation is invariably about world economics."

...One of the biggest criticisms of recent years is that the paper breaks fewer stories than it did. Even the first two issues of the relaunched paper failed to deliver a knockout scoop. "Ideally we would have liked something bigger but you can't always organise it that way," Witherow concedes. The conservative paper has instead landed big interviews with the former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and French first lady Carla Bruni.

A former foreign and home news reporter, Witherow sounds a little nostalgic for the fiercer competition of the 1980s and accepts that "generally Sundays on the news front are not as strong as they were" then. Staff and former colleagues suggest that he is far from complacent. One calls him "absolutely relentless", regularly berating editors if he felt their sections could improve. And Witherow does admit that there's something in a rival newspaper every Sunday that he wishes he'd had.

He denies that the Sunday Times is going downmarket in a bid to beat the Associated titles or the top-selling Saturday Telegraph and instead suggests there must be something for everyone in the paper. "He knows the Sunday Times reader better than anyone else and, annoyingly, he is always right," says Will Lewis, who spent three years as Witherow's business editor before going on to edit the Telegraph.

Despite a reputation as a tough perfectionist, Witherow is relaxed, thoughtful and funny during our interview - even doing impressions of rival newspaper executives. His public image seems largely derived from his failure to grant many interviews - "are they a useful thing to do with your time?" - and from the contrast with his predecessor Andrew Neil. "Both he and Dacre are in the same mould," says Hinton. "They're old school in that way and don't hang around on TV ... You can't get him to go out for lunch after Wednesday. He is a very, very involved editor."

Witherow used to read every word of the enormous newspaper before it went to print. "I tried to do it for a few years and went cross-eyed," he laughs. "It drove me bonkers, not because of the content but just demands of time." Now he signs off every front cover and reads three main news sections before publication.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

For the second time since 1982, the Wall Street Journal parody, Off the Wall Street Journal, is published by New York Press. The first parody and its follow-up issue sold more than 650,000 copies. Now it has been renamed to My Wall Street Journal to honor "Rupert Murdoch's ever-expanding media empire which now includes everything from MySpace to the Wall Street Journal."

Founding editor-in-chief Tony Hendra, former editor of National Lampoon and Spy Magazine, returns with fellow '82 veteran David Blum, Todd Hanson from The Onion, and Jeff Kreisler from Comedy Central's Indecision 2008. Other contributors include writers for The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, and the Harvard Lampoon.

The tabloid is 24 pages and has the tagline "We Distort, You Decide" with sections such as a gossip section, "Obitcharies," and  "Police blotter - A day in the life of the white-collar crime cops."

My Wall Street Journal is now available for a cover price of $3.95 on their website, Amazon.com, and in newsstands and bookstores in major cities.

According to The New York Times, someone at The Wall Street Journal has left at least one newsstand with no copies remaining for anyone else to buy. He reportedly wore a shirt with a WSJ logo and paid with an American Express business card.

"He grabbed them all, said, 'I need to buy all of these,' " Alexander Laurence who was working at a Los Angeles stand said. "He had been going around to different stands, buying them."

There is also a spoof of Rupert Murdoch on a profanity-laced tirade against WSJ staffers, available on Youtube.

Source: Poynter Online, New York Times

The Long Beach Press Telegram started off helping expand the LA Times empire in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1980s, the Long Beach Independent, the Telegram's afternoon counterpart, printed its last edition. Now it may be time for the Press Telegram to print its final edition because of the declining newspaper industry.

Last month, the Telegram combined with its neighboring daily, the Daily Breeze to cut costs. In maintaining profits, journalists were bought off or laid off.

The city of Long Beach has already complained to Media News that the Telegram isn't doing a good job of reporting the news and has threatened to pull its legal advertising, which would result in the paper's demise.

Though the effects aren't as glaring in larger papers, they are in smaller papers such as the Telegram, according to Dennis McDougal, former Telegram writer. He believes that now, mistakes of reporters make it into the print more frequently and newspapers shy away from investigative stories.  If local papers continue to disappear, there would be no substitute for local reporters covering local news everyday in a local newspaper.

Source: LA Times through Poynter Online

At the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Awards, the topic of many conversations ultimately turned to the Wall Street Journal and the takeover by Rupert Murdoch. WSJ journalists were buzzing, asking people who had previously worked for Murdoch questions, like what it would be like to work for him and if their credibility would be lost.

Editor & Publisher senior editor Joe Strupp made his selection of the top 10 newspaper industry stories’ for 2006. It won’t really help you sell more newspapers or boost quality, but it’s a good sum-up of the year’s issues. 

According to BBC Monitoring, Pro-Putin oligarch Vladimir Potanin, owner of the Prof-Media holding who in the past focused on ownership of print media and avoided TV and the internet, is reversing strategy, selling off his main newspapers and buying TV channels and websites.

Since early 2006, he has bought three small TV channels and in late October bought the big Rambler Media company, which owns the prominent internet news site Lenta.ru and the popular search engine Rambler.ru.

The boundaries between social and mainstream media are becoming increasingly blurred. The popular social network Facebook is providing website publishers with a logo button they can stick on their site so that Facebook users spread the word about their publications. In doing so, the social network has struck deals with traditional publishers such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Dow Jones.  

News Corporation has expanded into New York’s outer boroughs with its recent purchase of two newspaper groups.  The owners of the New York Post are excited to expand their empire into Brooklyn and Queens.