Results matching “a new media empire”

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.

Glasgow PM and Manchester Evening News are the latest additions to the United Kingdom’s mounting pile of free papers.  Glasgow PM (including a bar of chocolate) is offered in the afternoon for 15 pence while the Manchester Evening News is given away for free in the city center.

Confirming suspicions, News International, the newspaper wing of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp empire, will launch a free newspaper entitled thelondonpaper in September. The 48-page full-color paper will be mostly focused on entertainment and will include content created by readers.

The BBC plans to offer a “personalized” radio service that will use peer-to-peer internet technology to provide “thousands, ultimately millions, of individual radio services created by audiences themselves,” BBC Director-General Mark Thompson said at this week’s Radio Festival in Cambridge.

News Corp. isn’t the next Google. Or so says CNN Money writer Paul R. La Monica, who thinks most of the speculation surrounding the future of MySpace is just hype.

Eight news organizations donated $52 million yesterday to the Newseum, the Washington, D.C. museum dedicated to the news industry — one of the largest combined media gifts in history, The Washington Post reported. The building is not yet finished, and the gift will go toward a $100 million capital campaign.

The BBC’s desired expansion into Internet terrain has spurred concerned media groups to term the growth ¨digital empire-building,¨ stressing the necessity of government intervention.

Despite doubling its profits last quarter, Rupert Murdoch's media empire News Corp's newspapers are lagging behind the rest of the company. Although News Corp depends on other media for most of its revenue, it has significant print holdings in Australia and the UK and owns the New York Post in the US. Murdoch blamed a slump in newspaper advertising for the poor results.

Sources: Los Angeles Times, The Age 

Murdoch’s group, NewsCorp is attacking British Broadcasting Corporation’s recent moves to gain younger audiences and revamp its website. Murdoch is accusing the BBC of building a “digital empire,” which would be paid for by taxpayer’s money and compete directly with commercial rivals.

Tabloid paper The Sun is teaming up with MySpace.com to create an online readers network titled MySun. MySpace.com, recently acquired News Corp, is an online community and networking site with over 60 million registered users. The plan is for readers to have a MySun portal where they can create their own web page, blogs, share photos, etc. using the MySpace.com software.

Blogging and new technologies are the future of media says magnate Rupert Murdoch. In a recent speech at the Stationers' Livery company in London, he stated that "power is moving away from the old elite in our industry," and that "we are at the dawn of a golden age of information- an empire of new knowledge." A digital future that will "put that power in the hands of those already launching a blog every second." According to Murdoch, to survive in this new 'digital' era, newspapers will have to change tactics, offer more.