Rupert Murdoch explains why government assistance is a greater threat to the press than any new technology:

In my view, the growing drumbeat for government assistance for newspapers is as alarming as overregulation. One idea gaining in popularity is providing taxpayer funds for journalists. Or giving newspapers “nonprofit” status—in exchange, of course, for papers giving up their right to endorse political candidates. The most damning problem with government “help” is what we saw with the bailout of the U.S. auto industry: Help props up those who are producing things that customers do not want.

The prospect of the U.S. government becoming directly involved in commercial journalism ought to be chilling for anyone who cares about freedom of speech. The Founding Fathers knew that the key to independence was to allow enterprises to prosper and serve as a counterweight to government power. It is precisely because newspapers make profits and do not depend on the government for their livelihood that they have the resources and wherewithal to hold the government accountable.

When the representatives of 13 former British colonies established a new order for the ages, they built it on a sturdy foundation: a free and informed citizenry. They understood that an informed citizenry requires news that is independent from government. That is one reason they put the First Amendment first.

Our modern world is faster moving and far more complex than theirs. But the basic truth remains: To make informed decisions, free men and women require honest and reliable news about events affecting their countries and their lives. Whether the newspaper of the future is delivered with electrons or dead trees is ultimately not that important. What is most important is that the news industry remains free, independent—and competitive.

Rupert Murdoch, head of the international media company News Corp.,  recently challenged Google’s right to use the content of his publications. He proposed an arrangement that would make the news stories produced by his organization available exculsively to bing, for a fee.

“Whether we’re in print or electronics, the important thing in journalism is finding out what needs to be found out,” says Harold Evans, 81, in Toronto to promote his memoir My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times.

Harold Evans, esteemed U.K. newspaper editor, weighed in on the debate. “Google has shown insufficient appreciation of original work. For instance, they thought they could get away with the idea of taking books in copyright and making them available for nothing,” he said. “It was outrageous, but they didn’t seem to realize how outrageous it was.”

The article goes on to discuss the future of journalism both online and in print. Evans said he believes journalism’s revenue should be protected as well as creative rights.

What do you think? Is Murdoch out of line in his comments to Google? Do you think that journalism needs to be protected? Has the industry already ruined any chance of protecting its revenue online? Check out the full article here.

History keeps repeating, and it gives me indigestion.  In 1963 Bob Dylan wrote the famous words:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Well, at the risk of speaking too soon, I have to say that this bit of history that’s got me all riled up has happened plenty of times before and the end is fairly predictable.

In case you haven’t heard, our Modern-Day Citizen Kane, Rupert Murdoch, is teaming up with our Modern Day Rich Uncle Penny Bags, Bill Gates, to limit content on the Internet, and block access to his information services, pulling all searches from Google and transferring them to Bing. I don’t mind that at all, to be honest.  Good riddance to bad rubbish.  Who needs yellow journalism anyway?  There are plenty of other excellent news services, willing to supply a free-flow of balanced information for many generations to come.  Where there may be gaps, creative human nature will be sure to fill them.  So good luck with that, both of you.

Well, Penny, you say, if it’s not bothering you, why write a post?  Well, it’s not the shift of the information to Bing that bothers me, it’s the arrogance behind it.  The hubris, to be more accurate.  The unfettered greed.  There’s a lot of that going around, and it’s killing us slowly.  That’s what roasts my toast.

This is not the first time in history that monopolies have gotten out of control, but the level it has reached in today’s world, certainly has had a dramatic, damaging long-term impact on Everyman.  I cannot find a parallel in previous annals of history since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.  Don’t think in terms of the Great Depression, to me, that is an inaccurate parallel.  During that period large corporations collapsed, and the wealthiest went tumbling down to poverty, and out of windows.  What we are experiencing is much closer to that earlier Victorian age, when the gap between the rich and the poor was widened beyond all reason.

Whether you agree with my particular take on the historical reference point is a lesser point.  We must all agree that it is high time for us to get riled up about the effects this is having on ordinary hard-working people.  Recently, a wonderfully witty twitter, who I enjoy following as she rants and raves through her day, managing to remain fabulous throughout, made an important point.  (If you’re not already following [at]smuttysteff don’t let the name fool you, she’s worse than all that, and well worth the follow.)  Steff said that she was reminded and surprised just how relevant Charles Dickens is today.  I agreed, but it is so sad that it is true.  It shouldn’t be.  We’ve been there.  We’ve done that.  We should have learned something.  Only one word exists for what has brought us to this point: Avarice.

There is far too much of it.  People, like Mr. Murdoch (and he is not alone) have forgotten that there should be a limit to growth in Capitalism.  Not an artificial, arbitrary limit, but certainly a moral one.   These are not my principles alone.  I take comfort in the knowledge that Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism, foresaw a need for limitation on the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a very few.

Monopoly…is a great enemy to good management. The Wealth of Nations, Book I Chapter XI Part I
The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commo-dities much above the natural price. The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VII
The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VII
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is im-possible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and jus-tice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies…

A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows, and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary.

An incorporation not only renders them necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole. The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X

More and more, we have seen the growth of unfettered super-corporations as the principle employers of far too many, exert too much power, on too many powerless individuals and smaller corporations.  They squeeze them of both their lives and livelihood, and leave them out in the cold.  Policies, where they exist, tend to favor these Goliaths at the cost of many Davids.  If we do not take action soon to manage the situation, we will see poverty sky-rocket around the world.  When the western nations have ordinary working people rushing to food banks, unable to find food, the problem has gone too far. That is already taking place, in New York City and far too many other cities.

Rosebud, was the symbol of childhood innocence, of Humanity, that Citizen Kane traded in to fuel his hubris and his avarice, only to realize too late that he had given up the only thing of value he ever had.  When we support the monopolies we each put our Rosebuds into the furnace and watch them go up in smoke.  In case you’ve never seen the film this is what I mean:

That brings us back to [at]smuttysteff and her remark about Charles Dickens.  Dickens dedicated his life’s work to exposing these imbalances, these injustices.  I remember the first time I saw a Christmas Carol, and I remember the thing that scared me the most.  Ironically, it is the very thing that scares me today, not just about the movie, but about our society.

There is the Jolly Giant of Christmas Present, outwardly Merry, but with a dark secret under his coat.  Under there we find two orphans, with terrifying, drawn, hungry faces.  It is one of the most horrible sights I have seen in any movie, full of pathos.  They are Ignorance and Want.

We can and must each do our little part to protect the children under Christmas Present’s coat.  Ignorance & Want are still here, every bit as much as they ever were.  Limiting the free flow of knowledge is abhorrent to the elimination of ignorance, but if Mr. Murdoch feels he must do that in order to add to his fortune and the fortunes of the limited few who profit from him, then fine.  Let’s each help to support the institutions which respect the value of the free press, and disseminate information even to those to poor to pay for it.  For all of the other monopolies that are stifling us, there are similar solutions.  Elect to keep your funds in a Credit Union, up and coming Green Banks, Micro-Loan banks, or other community service banks, instead of one of the larger banking institutions.  Elect to purchase items from known Fair Trade companies, from local shops and Independent Grocers, from corporations that respect Fair Wages, and do not use Slave Labor to produce their goods.  There are plenty, and they need our support.

The monopolies will prey on our insecurities, and make us afraid that by turning our backs on them we will lose even more valuable jobs.  This is only a half-truth.  The greatest employers world-wide are smaller and medium-sized businesses, many of which are being put in peril by governmental neglect and unfair competition from the larger players.  If we begin to support them, voting with our pennies in their favor, they will survive this recession, and each of us will survive it along with them.  Perhaps, as the monopolies tumble, some may lose their jobs in those corporations, but if we ensure the safety net of strong small and medium-sized companies, focused on growth, those individuals will not be facing ages in the unemployment lines, and the peril of poverty.  The smaller corporations, who know their employees faces, and their family histories, wince to have to let staff go, or cut wages.  Their larger counterparts only see numbers on a spreadsheet.

In the hands of our neighbors is the promise of the future.  Each of us needs to do his and her part to support those companies who will stand by us, not just the corporations that tread upon and feed off us.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a report about another “great man” who everyone respects so much, backing a new Chinese suit manufacturer.  Perhaps you saw this news report on Mr. Buffet as well, perhaps you didn’t.  It made me cringe.  Not because he was buying Chinese suits, let the man wear what he pleases (although I certainly consider it more responsible to buy from Fair-Trade tailors paying Fair Wages to make suits that cost a little more and last a lot longer) but it was something specific he said on camera that made me nauseous:  “I have thrown out all my other suits.” Really, Mr. Buffet?  It didn’t even occur to you to call the Salvation Army or another local charitable cause.  Did the thought of donating them to help the poor who need suits to go for job interviews, never cross your mind? You just placed them in the trash? Now THAT is avarice.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

Because I love classics best, I’d like to close with a little Holiday Gift.  I bring you Seymour Hicks who, plays the title role in the first sound version of the Dickens classic about the miser who’s visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve. It’s the entire movie (duration 1:17:35), so make some pop-corn, grab some cocoa, put your feet up and enjoy!

…and that’s a Penny for Your Thoughts.

It was interesting following the outcome of the Amanda Knox trial from the USA where the general view seemed to be that she could received anything but a fair trial.  The ever repugnant Fox News (watch and learn in the UK and remember what it is all about whenever a Murdoch slams the BBC) went further than most and slammed the decision as being anti-American and a travesty of justice.  This, remember, is the land where OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson both bought their way out of prison. Few bothered to spare a moment for the murdered girl.

The backlash has started with calls for boycotting of Italian goods and holidays.   It plays into the “all foreigners are hicks” approach to the world peddled by Fox News.  Knox may well not be guilty, but their kind don’t care.  Knox is American and therefore inncoent as far as they are concerned.  Europeans are backward.

You have to wonder if the reaction would have been nearly as manic had Knox been a 22-stone ugly woman. Or black. Or trailer trash.

THE ANSWER IS YOU!

TWO RELATED ARTICLES FOLLOW – December 09, 2009

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch declares that government funding is a bigger threat to newspapers than new technologies such as the Internet.

In an opinion piece published in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Murdoch acknowledges that print journalism has fallen on hard times and much of the blame has been placed on electronic news sources.

“My message is just the opposite,” he writes. “The future of journalism is more promising than ever — limited only by editors and producers unwilling to fight for their readers and viewers, or government using its heavy hand either to over-regulate or subsidize us.

Benefited Foreign Companies - Neutered U.S. Companies

“In my view, the growing drumbeat for government assistance for newspapers is as alarming as over-regulation.”

Murdoch notes that some favor providing taxpayer funds for journalists, or giving newspapers nonprofit status — “in exchange, of course, for papers giving up their right to endorse political candidates.

“The most damning problem with government ‘help’ is what we saw with the bailout of the U.S. auto industry:  Help props up those who are producing things that customers do not want.”

Complete article and source here

promotionsforLIFE.com – Steven Joseph’s Response

Friends, a lethargy has fallen over many American’s – and over much of the Christian church.  Some hide behind masks of “pray for our President”, all the while ignoring the social experiment that takes place right before their eyes on a daily basis and ignoring their God-given right to participate in our American democracy.

The United States was founded by God-fearing men and atheists alike.  Even in this mix of believers and non-believers – in her original governmental set-up – America’s foundation stood strong on our moral Judeo-Christian faith.  It is who we are.  These values define us, they shape who we are and shape our judicial system as well.

We do not always live-up to these ideals, yet they are the foundation and our plumb-line guiding our steps returning us to sobriety and sanity.

Because of these values, other faiths and non-faiths are welcome in the United States as well — but may I remind you —  the United States was founded on a desire to be free from Tyranny and for freedom FOR religion – NOT freedom FROM religion.

May I also be as bold as to say to newcomers, welcome to America, but this is how we do things here.  You may practice your faith, or lack of, as you see fit – yet Jews and Christians are free to exercise their faith as well, in all aspects of life, government, school, sports, politics, etc.   Don’t believe me?  Read our founding documents.  Don’t believe me even more?  Read our Bible.

Believers, when in doubt as to whether you should follow the laws of man or follow God’s laws, God’s laws ALWAYS trump man’s laws.  So get out there in politics, public school, your workplace, etc. and proclaim the God-hood and life-saving nature of Jesus the Christ.

Open your mouth and take action.  Jesus lost his LIFE for you, certainly you can open your mouth and tell people about Jesus, vote with your values and encourage others with like-minded Judeo-Christian values to vote as well.

You can also sign petitions and attend anti-big-government non-partisan tea parties.  Take action.

The Good Lord knows and the media proves that Satan has no problem opening his mouth in song, school, media, church, home — you name it.  Thus believers – please open your mouths — take a stand for something or our nation will fall for anything.

The same “en-COURAGE-ment” goes for the organized church.  Start paying your taxes and take the governmental gag off of your mouth – please.  People are dying and you are trying to keep your money, to be “non-political” and to be non-offensive.

The only One we are really offending is God Himself, plus the person(s) who went to hell because we would not endorse or support Christian political candidates from the pulpit.  Please stop the madness.

Some in the church might say to me, “Our kingdom is not here, we are just passing through…  Put your eyes on Jesus and don’t worry the government…  Why Steven, don’t you know the end is near?  Focus on him…”

These things are true – yet the very Word of God we claim to profess calls us to GO.

Jesus commands us to GO into all of the world!  Jesus does not command us to Go into all of the churches!

Jewish-born Jesus was politically involved by publically criticising the Jewish governmental and religious order of his day.  He did not criticise the oppressive Roman government, he criticised the Jewish religious and governmental leaders that had oversight of the Jews.  In the days of Jesus, the religious leaders and governmental leaders where one and the same.

Jesus was also all about social justice, equality between the races and sexes, not casting the first stone, etc.

Bride of Christ – please stop your navel-gazing, surrender your 501(c)3 non-profit status, pay your taxes and open your mouths.

People are literally dying spiritually and physically.  One day we will give an account for everything we did or did not do.

Now back to Rupert Murdoch and our current political system.

The very government that is supposed to be by the people for the people are playing a deadly and dangerous Progressive social experiment on the American public, all the while turning a deaf ear and completely ignoring the collective will of the tax-paying American people.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again – America was founded on throwing off the shackles of tyranny — and we will do it again if necessary.

Presently the Washington DC power-hogs have their sights set on “bailing-out” the failing print newspaper industry.

What is our response as Americans and for believers?  Are we going to sit back and do nothing as another private sector business gets sucked into the Obama Progressive “Change” for America?

This citizen says NO we will not.

My desire and my goal is to motivate you past the evening news you see on CBS, NBC and ABC.  My desire is to motivate you past CNN, MSNBC, even FOX News.

My desire is to motivate you to read our country’s founding documents and review your American history to remember who we are.  My desire is for you to review world history, particularly dictatorships.

Which reminds me, where was the Church when Hitler was exterminating Jews?  Were we hiding behind “pray for our leaders”?

Where we turning a blind eye because God sets leaders into power?

Were we busy with our Christian Bible studies, bingo and social clubs?

Why were we not walking with the Lord closely, doing justice and showing mercy?

Shame on us Church – Shame on us!  I can not and will not be quiet any longer.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of NewsCorp is taking a stand against Obama-nomics.

NewsCorp, with $55 billion in assets and turning $30 billion annually, owns and operates multiple media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Twentieth Century Fox Entertainment and Television outlets including FOX News, AmericanIdol.com, MySpace, Harper Collins Publishers and Zondervan (To name a few — Complete list of world-wide assets and media outlets here).

Fox News personalities Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity & Bill O’Reilly have been reporting on this governmental media buy-out for several months and have also been reporting on the government tweaking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to gain control of our radio outlets in the name of “diversity”.  Oh pluuleezzzee.

Progressive power-hogs have one goal and one goal only – complete domination in the name of wealth re-distribution, also know as Socialism, Marxism and Communism.

Maybe Glenn Beck is correct that the Progressive goal is even worse.  Keep in mind that Beck was right about Obama’s pet project ACORN and about Obama’s White House Communist Van Jones.  Sean Hannity was right about the domestic terrorist Bill Aires connection to Obama as well.  Obama tells us to  judge him by the company he keeps.  Go figure.

Perhaps this truly is the systematic dismantling of the United States into a one-world-goverment model.  Copenhagen, false  global warming, Cap & Trade, imaginary jobs saved or created, where does the madness end?

President Obama’s school, medical and birth records are sealed from the public.  Only natural-born citizens are eligible for United States President, yet Obama’s birth records are blocked from public viewing.  Why?

No other President has ever barred public viewing of records to the best of my knowledge/research.  My guess is that he does not want anyone to know how radical he really was/is and perhaps he is hiding his ineligibility.

In Closing…

Friends – there is not a better way to conclude this commentary other than asking you to contact your Representatives at Washington.

Politely ask them to Kill the Healthcare bill – not tweak it, but to kill it.

Tell them you do not support Obama-Chicago politics “bailing-out” print media and other private sector industries, no matter how much of a false spin of a “crisis” our government shoves down our throats.

Tell Obama-Politics to leave the private sector alone and to get out of our business – literally.

Washington DC Tea Party April 15, 2010 - Click for Details. Nashville Tea Party Convention for Leaders - Opryland Convention Center - February 4-6, 2010

Send a clear message to our Representatives, including to President Obama and his side-kicks Rahm and Nancy, that they are ALL being tossed out of office as long as they, Progressive, Democrat, Independent or Republican, continue this political socialist experiment with the beacon of light that is the United States of America.

I also believe that treason is grounds for Impeachment and I sure hope that it is — for President Obama appears to have become the greatest traitor to the American people in the history of the United States, including his side-kicks Rahm and Nancy.

In closing, links to your Representatives are posted throughout this promotionsforLIFE.com Blog in previous entries.

Please use them — and continue to watch Fox News.  Watch all of their programs, news and commentary alike – to receive a more full perspective to the reality of this traitor administration.

I say, pray for our leaders in Washington and throw the bums out for acting contrary to the will of the American people, for trampling our founding documents, for killing our mom & pop and corporate businesses, for crippling our economy, for killing our retirements, for planning to raise prices on energy and for flirting with giving away our national sovereignty.

Throw the bums out.  Long live truth and the American way.

Sincerely,

Steven Joseph, Editor
promotionsforLIFE.com
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News Corporation’s television operations capture more viewers, more desirable demographics and more awards than perhaps any other television group in the world.  This is because, America – at her core – is Conservative.

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed column purportedly penned by the Dark Prince of News Corp., Rupert Murdoch.

The piece, headlined “Journalism and Freedom,” had this uplifting nut graf:

The future of journalism is more promising than ever—limited only by editors and producers unwilling to fight for their readers and viewers, or government using its heavy hand either to overregulate or subsidize us.

Speaking of subsidizing – nowhere in the op-ed is Murdoch acknowledged as the owner of said Wall Street Journal.

That’s not exactly freedom of journalism.

Regarding the previous post, I had no idea there were so many of these conferences on the future of journalism. My brain hasn’t been saturated on the subject, so I still I found some value in listening to the News Media Workshop event at The Federal Trade Commission, which ran from Dec.1-2. If you’re not familiar with much of the debate raging among the journalistic establishment over how to save the newspaper industry, it’s worth watching the entire two-day workshop available for download at the FTC website here. The most interesting fireworks was the war of words between News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and Huffington Post founder and columnist Arianna Huffington. Both their speeches – in the morning session of Dec. 1 – are quite provocative.

Murdoch and Huffington represent two sides of a battle between those in old media who think people should pay to read online news content (Murdoch) and those in new media who think it’s naive that people are going to pay, and that more innovative business models need to be created (Huffington). More specifically, Murdoch and others have accused news aggregators like the Huffington Post and Google of stealing content from online news sites. But aggregators say what they are doing is fair use.

Many in the old media – newspapers and magazines – worry that if people don’t pay for news online, then where are publications going to get the resources to pay reporters? They blame the Internet for much of the turmoil in the industry right now – bankruptcies, reporter layoffs, declining circulation. But those in new media argue that newspapers were in trouble long before the Internet became ubiquitous.

I can understand the concerns of Murdoch and other old-time news publishers. Citizen reporters working for free bring a much needed diversity to journalism, and are a valuable addition to the industry. But there does need to be some accountability in journalism, and that can only come from people who are paid well as professionals. Reporting shouldn’t just be a hobby. On the other hand, I think Murdoch is probably fighting a losing battle. Yes, his Wall Street Journal is proving to be successful at charging for some of its content. But, the Journal’s audience is largely affluent businesspeople who can afford subscriptions. Most people just aren’t going to pay for something that can so easily be had for free. A recent study showed that less than half of Americans are willing to pay for online news content. For people under 30, I’ll bet that figure is much lower.

Besides, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to force people to always pay for information. Knowledge is power, and we don’t want a society with information haves and have-nots, where good information is always offered for a premium. The Internet represents freedom, and I love going around the world on the Web reading about events happening in far off places. Restricting that access to many based on ability to pay would be a terrible blow to that freedom. New media should use its best efforts to come up with better ways to monetize the content, and compensate professional reporters, all the while keeping access as free (or at least as dirt cheap) as possible. For a comprehensive rundown of emerging business models being used for online journalism, watch the FTC’s New Media Workshop, or read this study, The Reconstruction of American Journalism by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson.

Rupert Murdoch is out and about again today in the Wall Street Journal with an opinion piece on the future of journalism.

While I may not agree with all he has to say in this piece, it is part of a much bigger debate that has kicked off about these issues – which is a very good thing.

The opinion piece is a version of what he presented recently to a Federal Trade Commission’s workshop on journalism and the Internet.

Some quick thoughts on what he says:

• He blames the editors, the producers, bloggers even governments – but why not the media companies who started giving away news for free to begin with?
• He is on the button when he says newspapers have prospered only because they provide the news that is important to the communities they serve:

That means covering the communities where they live, exposing government or business corruption, and standing up to the rich and powerful.

• I disagree when he says organisations need to give the people the news they want. This idea can be taken too far.  You can serve a community well without pandering to it and there is a middle ground between producing news for prizes and only news people want:

First, media companies need to give people the news they want. I can’t tell you how many papers I have visited where they have a wall of journalism prizes—and a rapidly declining circulation.

• He says customers are smart enough to know you don’t get something for nothing. Well this is what they’ve been getting for the past decade or so and are now complaining about losing – so I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Readers of the Wall Street Journal may be able to see the value of paying for the content of that publication (after-all it helps many of them make business decisions – so it’s a worthwhile investment), but will readers of the more-general publications like The Times or The Sun feel the same way?
• He says he is open to different pay models, which seems wise considering the various types of publications and products in News Corp’s stable.
• I am not so sure he is the best person to talk about competition particularly in an article in which he renews his calls to the FCC about cross-ownership.

Whether the newspaper of the future is delivered with electrons or dead trees is ultimately not that important. What is most important is that the news industry remains free, independent—and competitive.

Despite asserting that the future of journalism is more promising than ever – this is not the overall tone of this opinion piece.  In fact, it seems to me that even he is not sure of the future or maybe he’s just not ready to show his FULL hand.

B

The calamitous happenings at MySpace are well described in this Financial Times article -  The rise and fall of MySpace.

Murdoch has far too much power, with his newspapers,  TV stations and payTV operations. His conservative, arch-capitalist opinions are frankly intolerable. So it’s nice to know that not everything he touches turns to gold. He paid more than $580m. for the company – that’s not pocket change, even for Murdoch.

As the article says, the company has lost money and users since Murdoch took over. Good.

But by the beginning of 2008, things began to sour. Facebook, a rival social network that was simpler and easier to use, was gaining momentum and starting to grow more quickly than MySpace. Murdoch confidently told the world that MySpace would make $1bn in advertising revenues in 2008 – but the company missed its target. Users began to desert the site, which had become cluttered with unappealing ads for teeth straightening and weight-loss products. News Corp executives could hardly hide their displeasure, and in April this year, DeWolfe left, closely followed by most of his senior management team.

Since then, MySpace has shed 40 per cent of its staff, closed many of its international offices and publicly given up trying to match Facebook in the race to become the world’s biggest social network. (MySpace has more than 100 million regular users, Facebook more than 300 million.)

Ian Hargreaves came to speak to us on Friday. Being able to say that is rather surreal – I can’t imagine another point coming soon in my career when former New Statesman editors will want to have a chat.

He chaired a question-and-answer session on various news-media issues arising from his career, with spin, journalistic standards and the digital revolution taking up the most time.

On the third topic, he took a slightly different angle on the Murdoch-Google pay wall dispute to what I’ve heard before; he looked at it as an inevitable clash of corporate interests, with financial priorities dominating individual concerns.

It doesn’t seem often that we hear about the internet in these terms – we hear far more about the smaller-scale issues of news-media delivery platforms and payment systems, without wondering all that much about the bigger picture.

These issues were certainly the focus of Robert Andrews, UK Editor of paidcontent.org, when he came to Cardiff to give an online-journalism seminar. He talked about the polling data on UK attitudes to pay walls, the majority of which shows we want to pay as little as possible for news, and preferably nothing at all.

He talked about pay walls in a more positive light where they’re used to finance specialist content – Bloomberg and the FT are prominent examples – but for more general news sites they seem to have been discredited in recent years.

Looking at things back on the corporate level, though, it’s not entirely certain what News Corp. thinks the ideal consequences of its pay wall system would be. Is Mr Murdoch’s chief concern the desire to see 21st-century journalism operating effectively and profitably on the internet, or is the aim to challenge Google’s dominance of the market by rendering their search results incomplete (suggested here)? Or perhaps he’s just hoping to drive people back to traditional print-media?

I’ve no idea, and of course there’s no particular reason why these potential motives should be mutually exclusive. But I’m not sure I can share Robert Andrews’ enthusiasm for the age of innovation these changes will bring when corporate clashes are driving the revolution. 1914 was a great time for innovation in soldiering…

Rupert Murdoch has used his most recently acquired newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, to once again rhapsodize on what are presently his two favourite subjects: paid-for content and the deregulation of the media industry. Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp, makes the comments in an editorial running in today’s issue.

In it, Murdoch stresses the importance of a free, popular press, criticising newspapers that win masses of journalism prizes but have falling circulations. He says that even if there is another advertising boom, newspapers can no longer rely on the revenues that once propped them up, namely classified ads. “The old business model based mainly on advertising is dead,” Murdoch writes. “Let’s face it: A business model that relies primarily on online advertising cannot sustain newspapers over the long term. The reason is simple arithmetic. Though online advertising is increasing, that increase is only a fraction of what is being lost with print advertising.”

He is also heavily critical of websites that derive their content from other news sources “without contributing a penny to its production”. In the past, Murdoch has hinted at tackling the issue of the doctrine of fair use and in this editorial he is more blunt, saying: “Their almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not ‘fair use’. To be impolite, it’s theft.” On the bright side, he says that the future of journalism is ‘more promising than ever’ — but essentially only if other publishers get on board with his paywall scheme. This would overcome what is emerging as one of the main hurdles in getting readers back into the habit of buying news: who will pay for something when it is available elsewhere for free? Murdoch responds to such criticism in the piece saying that he believes people will pay for content if “we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing. That goes for some of our friends online too.”

At the same time, Murdoch manages to squeeze in a few words on the issue of government regulation of the media, saying that “the best thing government can do is to get rid of the arbitrary and contradictory regulations that actually prevent people from investing in these businesses”. Murdoch has been critical in the past of US rules on media cross ownership. In the UK, he is concerned about the reach of the BBC. His article is an adaptation of remarks made to the Federal Trade Commission last week

http://www.brandrepublic.com/BrandRepublicNews/News/972492/Murdoch-the-ad-model-dead/?DCMP=EMC-DailyNewsBulletin

Berikut adalah urut urutan orang yang paling berkuasa / berpengaruh pada tahun 2009:.

Barack Obama
Hu Jintao
Vladimir Putin
Ben S. Bernanke
Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Carlos Slim Helu
Rupert Murdoch
Michael T. Duke
Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud
William Gates III
Pope Benedict XVI
Silvio Berlusconi
Jeffery R. Immelt
Warren Buffett
Angela Merkel
Laurence D. Fink
Hillary Clinton
Lloyd C. Blankfein
Li Changchun
Michael Bloomberg
Timothy Geithner
Rex W. Tillerson
Li Ka-shing
Kim Jong Il
Jean-Claude Trichet
Masaaki Shirakawa
Sheikh Ahmed bin Zayed al Nahyan
Akio Toyoda
Gordon Brown
James S. Dimon
Bill Clinton
William H. Gross
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
Lou Jiwei
Yukio Hatoyama
Manmohan Singh
Osama bin Laden
Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani
Tenzin Gyatso
Ali Hoseini-Khamenei
Joaquan Guzman
Igor Sechin
Dmitry Medvedev
Mukesh Ambani
Oprah Winfrey
Benjamin Netanyahu
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Zhou Xiaochuan
John Roberts Jr.
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar
William Keller
Bernard Arnault
Joseph S. Blatter
Wadah Khanfar
Lakshmi Mittal
Nicolas Sarkozy
Steve Jobs
Fujio Mitarai
Ratan Tata
Jacques Rogge
Li Rongrong
Blairo Maggi
Robert B. Zoellick
Antonio Guterres
Mark John Thompson
Klaus Schwab
Hugo Chavez
Sumber: Forbes.com

Social Media News from 11/14/09 covered Rupert Murdoch’s statement about preventing Google from indexing News Corporation publications. This week, Google announced an update to its “First Click Free” program, partly in response to Murdoch’s threats I’m sure. First Click Free allows web users to access paid content, like news from newspaper websites, for free if they found that content through Google search. Now Google is giving more control to publishers, allowing them to lock out unregistered users after a defined number of page views. Google allows paid content providers to limit up to five free page views, per day- after that, users would be redirected to a registration page. Google search plays a huge role in helping users discover paid content, providing a significant amount of site traffic to many of these large publishers. So it makes sense for publishers to allow their content to be indexed by Google. However, publishers of premium content are also interested in making a profit. It will be interesting to watch what happens now, if News Corp. really does decide to completely block Google indexing, and if they decide to make an exclusive deal with Bing. If you’re still confused about First Click Free, check out this great 5-Click FAQ from Wired.

Google also announced a deal with Twitter this week to integrate the microblogging site with its own social media service, Google Friend Connect. That’s really interesting, because Google and Twitter are both in the race for real time search, so in a way Google and Twitter are competitors. It’s also interesting in light that Yahoo! and Bing have recently made deals with Facebook, and Google has yet to follow suit. Check out the Bing announcement here, and the Yahoo announcement here.

Speaking of Facebook, there’s a lot of talk about Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of privacy changes. If you’re worried, don’t be. The announcement, which was posted in a Facebook note to users, doesn’t reveal sweeping new privacy changes. It does say that Facebook is doing away with regional networks, which is a good thing. This only relates to privacy in that you won’t be able to share your photos and posts to all of your selected regional network, which would be the town you live in or the college you attended. If you’re anything like me, you didn’t do that anyway. Users have always had the option to select who sees what, and I generally limit my content to Friends, or Friends of Friends (if you need help understanding how to manage your Facebook privacy settings, leave a comment).

A more significant bit of Facebook news came from Mashable in a reveal of screenshots for the next redesign. This interface update is more extensive than the simpler News Feed/Live Feed update. I’m looking forward to the launch, these new layout changes should improve Facebook’s engagement and usability.

The best tablet computer interface that I’ve seen to date is this demo from Sports Illustrated. SI appears to be moving in the right direction transitioning from print to digital media.

If you’re considering a new mobile site, or looking to improve, check out this article from WSJ: Squeezing Web Sites Onto Cellphones.

Wrapping up, I wanted to point out two important articles from Brandweek. Be sure to read Why Social Sites Are Less Friendly to Video Ads, and A Marketer’s New Worry: Are My Ads Retweetable?

Mashable

Facebook CEO: Prepare for Some Big Privacy Changes

5 Big Changes to Watch in Facebook’s Upcoming Redesign

Microsoft Launches its own Twitter… in China

WSJ

FCC Seeks Revamp of Phone Subsidy

Squeezing Web Sites Onto Cellphones

Media Post

Bing And Facebook Launch New Photo Contest

Ad Age

Sports Illustrated Readies Digital Version for Tablets

Brandweek

Why Social Sites Are Less Friendly to Video Ads

A Marketer’s New Worry: Are My Ads Retweetable?

Geotargeted Display Ads Poised for Growth

IRI Unveils Service for Measuring Online Ad Effectiveness

JC Penney’s ‘Doghouse’ Lives to Bark Another Season

Fast Company

New Layar Makes The World Your Augmented Reality Show

With Redesign and Twitter Deal, Is Google Growing Up?

Blogs And Other News Sources

Yahoo! Extends Facebook Integration to Bring Together Social Experiences From Across the Web (Mercury News)

The Fall Of Bing (Seasonal Release, That Is) (Tech Crunch)

New Data: Canadians Embrace Social Technology (Groundswell)

Placating Publishers by Limited Links: A Google 5-Click FAQ (Wired)

Hmm, paywalls. It doesn’t sound good, does it?

It is very easy to be cynical and say that Rupe has had an epiphany and decided he likes money and would quite enjoy a bit more, but there’s more to it than that. Honest. Something has to be done, or the news business will fall apart. More newspapers will close, quality will freefall, and streets will be lined with shivering old hacks, reminiscing about the good old days of long lunches and bylines (see IMDB for details of The Day After Tomorrow 2: The Decline of the Newspapers.)

Anyway, for a long time, people could be as click-happy as they wanted, and everyone enjoyed it, flitting around, aggregating, searching, taking the news for granted. It was all going so well, and then a billion or so users had to go and ruin it for everyone else. They stopped buying papers. They didn’t get their copy of The Times in the morning and then go online in the afternoon to check up on the stories they had read. No. They left their house, they got on the tube (without a paper), picked up an abandoned copy of Metro, read it and pretended to be outraged by the standard of free newspapers today, got off the train, bought coffee (without a paper), got to their desk and read the news online (without a paper). You see the problem.

And so, Rupert the Conqueror stamped his feet and blamed Google, and has flexed his muscles with a few regionals, but where to now? The constant pushing of Times+ over the last year or so was already starting to make people feel uneasy. It somehow didn’t fit with Sunday supplements and boiled eggs at the breakfast table. Much too “If you like to read the Sunday supplements at the breakfast table while eating boiled eggs, you’ll love Times+… Now, give us some dosh.” Much too Murdoch. So how will people feel when he barricades his content in with paywalls and glitch-ridden payment systems?

He had better be extremely sure that the content he is squirreling away behind these walls is more than worth what he’s charging, otherwise the whole venture’s doomed. Former FT and New Statesman editor, Ian Hargreaves recently told us that he believes people will only pay for something they want but they can’t get free.

The problem here though, is Sponge and Spiker all over again. When James dropped the magic bag and the peach grew, Aunts Sponge and Spiker put up a fence and charged people admission to see it. Some people paid. Some people stood on the wrong side of the fence, were savvy enough to realise they could see a pretty sizable piece of fruit perfectly well from there, and went on their way. It has to be all or nothing with paywalls (and peachwalls). If there are still news providers out there refusing to put up paywalls, which there will be if The Guardian sticks to its guns, then a lot of people will go to them instead.

The spat between Google and Rupert Murdoch has spawned thousands of words of coverage. It arises from the failure of the ad model to scale at the rate of audience growth and the pandemic crisis in print publishing. What should we be concluding from this argument?

First let’s examine whether Murdoch has a point. He alleges, in terms, that Google profits by “stealing” the content from pubishers and then monetising that content by selling advertising. Is he right? Well the concept of thievery requires a victim and News INternational, indeed all print publishers can hardly claim to be that. We have all spent time effort and money optimisiing our sites to get the best ranking we can in the Google listing. Many of us have also invited Google to place it’s ads inside our websites in return for a share of the money. In these circumstances we can hardly plead foul anymore than a householder who invites the burglar into his house, shows him around and helps him pack his swag bag.

Murdoch knows all this of course. He is playing a negotiation game. There has never been anything to stop any of us preventing the Google robot indexing our sites. It’s easy. Much of the web is already behind walls that prevent content being read. Publishers make great play of the power of their brands, but I know of none who have the courage to turn off the search engines and rely on brand for their traffic.

This is a non dispute. We all have a choice about whether we wish to participate in the the Google machine.

So what is this all about? Murdoch has the same problem we all face. We have traffic but not enough money. We fear that the online model cannot sustain our content poduction costs and may be damaging our print brands. None of us, not even Murdoch can succeed in solving this problem by trying to change our customers behaviour to fit our business model. Our readers find content through search engines. Few will pay for news. Those are facts. Somehow we have to adapt our businesses to those facts not try and change the facts to fit our businesses

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• News Corp. to boycott Google? Don’t make me laugh (or wear a dress) (dailyfinance.com)
• Views on the news: Rupert Murdoch’s madness, more banking redundancies and bonuses for Barclays bigwigs (guardian.co.uk)
• Murdoch Takes on Google (newspaperdeathwatch.com)
• Media faces more woes than Murdoogle (guardian.co.uk)

As an intern, I basically get to cover all the things that no one else wants. Or things close to 5:00. My time out of class is dedicated to pressers and head-shots but every now and then I get a presser with someone worth photographing.

For example, Madame Speaker.
Prince Albert II of Monaco. Three tries to guess where he was.
And Co-editor of the Huffington Post Arianna Huffington and CEO of News Corp Rupert Murdoch were at a workshop on the future of journalism online. Personally, the workshop was really interesting and not surprisingly the two had very different views on the subject.

Then there was Saturday. Sarah Palin came to Fairfax, VA on her book tour. Of course the area welcomed her with our first snow of the season. Someone actually asked me if I was going to go in the case it was canceled. The DC area panics with more than an inch of snow on the ground (which was great in grade school) but I think it would take a lot more than 4 inches to scare the former Alaskan Governor away. The two gentlemen in the pair of photos (2nd) camped out overnight to have their books signed and see her for all of 1 minute (which is about how much time I got to photograph her).

Springer, which publishes the biggest daily in Europe, the tabloid Bild, as well as other newspapers in Germany and Eastern Europe, says it wants publishers to get paid for their work on the Internet, at a time when many people assume that online news should be free. Instead of separate pay walls around individual newspaper Web sites, Christoph Keese, Springer’s head of public affairs and an architect of its online strategy, wants publishers and Internet companies to work together to create a “one-click marketplace solution” for their online content. In that system, Google or other Internet gateways would display links to newspaper articles, videos and other content from a variety of providers, as search engines do now. But some of the items would include something new: a price tag. Readers could also buy flat-rate packages providing access to content from a variety of media companies, Keese said, just as they can subscribe to unlimited data access plans via mobile phone networks. Axel Springer’s plans are contingent on cooperation with Google, a company that Mr. Murdoch has accused of “theft,” contending that it earns billions of dollars of advertising revenue on the back of newspapers’ journalistic endeavors. But Mr. Keese said Axel Springer was happy to work with Google, acknowledging that publishers could not match its expertise in monetizing digital content.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/business/media/07iht-springer07.html?_r=2&ref=media

I read a few posts in the last week or so and some of them have been like sparks that ignite something and some others have been so razor sharp that they have cut through the morass of any lateral drift and made a point that has simply rendered a lot of debates pointless.

The most-provocative and brilliant one has been the speech of Les Hinton, CEO Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, on November 30 at Hyderabad. Hinton remarked to world newspapers that ‘Free Costs Too Much.’ His long speech qualifies the criteria that it talks about; it is the kind of content that a reader would be willing to pay for. A small portion of the speech is used here to build the argument of this post.

“It is true that Google is at the heart of the crisis confronting journalism today. That their almost incalculable—and and growing—power warrants great vigilance. But the main, and most uncomfortable, truth is that this industry is the principal architect of its greatest difficulty today.

We are all allowing our journalism—billions of dollars worth of it every year—to leak onto the free internet. We are surrendering our hard-earned rights to the search engines, and aggregators, and the out-and-out thieves of the digital age. It is time to pause and recognize this—Free Costs Too Much. News is a business, and we should not be ashamed to say so. It’s also a tougher business today than ever before. We have survived other perceived threats—radio, television, cable TV. But this time it is different.

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, said recently about the debate on free versus paid: ‘As long as you’re on the side of the consumer, you’re pretty much on the right side of all these debates.’ No doubt he is right. The consumer will determine the business. Consumers will seek the valuable over the vapid because they always do.

Only a few hours ago in Washington DC, Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation told the US Federal Trade Commission: ‘In the future good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract customers by providing news and information they are willing to pay for.’”

The speech of Les Hinton was delivered in Bangalore but I could not find any meaningful coverage in our papers but that could just be due to my inadequate search and may be some great write-ups were done that I missed—I did get a couple of results but they lacked the passion and the vigour of the speech.

Eric Schmidt wrote an opinion piece that was carried by the Wall Street Journal the very next day. “It’s understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry. I certainly don’t believe that the Internet will mean the death of news. Through innovation and technology, it can endure with newfound profitability and vitality. Video didn’t kill the radio star. It created a whole new additional industry,” Schmidt said.

The Google chief has a point here as complacency by past monopolies has hit the newspaper industry pretty hard and revenues have moved substantially towards the Internet in the US. In India, though, the flagships of big media houses have been sustaining their loss-making ventures. A few years ago, Vinod Mehta, the editor of Outlook magazine said in a television programme that the journalists are not the ones who are worried by the foreign media coming to India and it is in fact the proprietors who are more concerned.

Just as Hinton rounded off his tour to India; the Hindustan Times on December 5 became India’s first newspaper to be available on Amazon’s Kindle. In an announcement on their website, they said that they would be offering their daily newspaper on Kindle for a monthly subscription of $9.99.

Keith Desouza wrote on techie-buzz.com regarding this development: “Personally I think that it is ridiculous price to start out with, considering that a hardcopy newspaper costs Rs 5 in India, which would take the total cost to Rs 150 or ~$3.5 per month. In fact, HT has several offers which offer their hardcopy subscriptions for the entire year at half the price they are selling the Kindle version.”

Despite Keith’s pessimism I think it is a good move in the long-run and if HT is able to provide relevant and high-quality content as a differentiator in the future then this presence would serve them. Even now it could bring some subscriptions as a start from the sizeable Indian population in UK and the US.

The decision-makers for foreign private equity investments as well as foreign institutional investments in India, along with the policy-makers at world level, would be more willing to pay Dow Jones Newswires, Bloomberg, ThomsonReuters, the Wall Street Journal and the likes because of the quality of their content and their reporting of financial markets. India should throw open its media in this time of global competition; some local bullies may get kicked around but the industry as a whole would benefit—which in turn would reflect in the gains we would make in other industries as well.

An insulated industry will languish with petty competition as the only yardstick; opening up would show that there is no dearth of talent in India. Sachin Tendulkar would not have been a great player with only the inter-state Ranji Trophy as his hunting ground; his greatness is that he competes with the best in the business and comes out as a winner.

“Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty; it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack,” these are the words of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek; please Google if interested in her life.

Les Hinton also spoke of a former WSJ editor: “Barney Kilgore, the inestimable former editor of the Wall Street Journal and the CEO of Dow Jones, said something we ought to remember in this time of transition. The man who would create the first national newspaper in the US and redefine journalism in the process, said a long time ago: ‘The fish market wraps fish in paper. We wrap news in paper. The content is what counts, not the wrapper.’

Free costs too much. Good content is valuable. That hasn’t changed. It never will. The question is who will provide the content and who will be compensated fairly for the value delivered.”