If there is any lingering doubt that Rupert Murdoch is going to change the Wall Street Journal, consider The Far Eastern Economic Review. The small monthly became part of the Australian uber-mogul's empire in December. The magazine was planning to run a review of a tell-some book about Murdoch's time in China. When editors realized that the book wasn't a Fox News-esque glowing portrait of Murdoch, they ditched the piece.
When I was a lot younger, I taped — onto VHS! — all of the original Star Trek episodes when they aired at 3 a.m. on Friday nights, so I could watch them later. If only I had waited 13 years. CBS has put all three seasons of Star Trek online for anyone to view, along with a number of other old shows to the Audience Network, including The Twilight Zone, Hawaii Five-O and MacGyver.
Thank god that News Corp. bought the Wall Street Journal, so that it can use the paper as a platform to give voice to the voiceless in our society: News Corp. executives. Yesterday, the Journal ran an op-ed by William McGurn, who's back at News Corp. after spending the last three years writing speeches for noted speaker George W. Bush. In it, McGurn identifies our country's leading problem: Reporters who are "full of snark."
As many do for the Super Bowl, I find the ads on American Idol more interesting than the show. It's among the priciest prime-time real estate around. Last year, ads cost $600,000 per 30-second spot. So it raised my eyebrows to see Apple purchasing multiple spots for the MacBook Air in tonight's broadcast. I counted two in just the last half-hour. Did Apple shell out more than $1 million for a couple of ads?
Wrinkly News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch chose Natalie Bancroft, an inexperienced 27 year-old opera singer, for his company's board for very good reasons: He had to choose someone from her family, which controlled Dow Jones before selling to Murdoch last year; The people in the family who might actually be qualified for the board seat would also be a pain in Rupert's ass; and Natalie Bancroft has promised to work her "little butt off" in a quest to figure out what the hell she's doing!
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has lost control of the Yahoo board. New Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock and billionaire Ron Burkle now lead a majority contingent which worries CEO Jerry Yang has let his emotions override his duty to shareholders in the face of Microsoft's takeover attempt. Support for Yang's efforts to resist Microsoft has dwindled to just Softbank's Eric Hippeau and Activision CEO Robert Kotick, the New York Post reports.
Time Warner and Viacom video content will soon run on Hulu, the Web video joint venture from NBC Universal and News Corp. The Time Warner deal is done, while Viacom's is "not totally signed," a source tells us. Both deals are said to be nonexclusive. (A Hulu spokesbot autodialed us to relay the nitpick that the paperwork hasn't been signed yet. Whatever.) The news isn't a shock: Time Warner subsidiary AOL agreed to distribute Hulu at launch and before the site even had a name, Viacom executives have praised Hulu in concept. Just yesterday, MTV exec Van Toffler said, "We've been talking to [Hulu] since the beginning, and we like it a lot." Mostly because it's not YouTube, of course.
A NewTeeVee report suggests Viacom and its subsidiaries may be moving closer to licensing content to Hulu, NBC Universal and News Corp.'s Web video joint venture. "We've been talking to them since the beginning, and we like it a lot," MTV exec Van Toffler told NewTeeVee. He described Hulu as "sleek and simple." We hear MTV is as likely to syndicate content on Hulu as it is on Amazon Unbox or anywhere else. Another MTV exec, Courtney Holt, said, "We're really bullish on syndicating our content." $1 billion says they're not thinking of YouTube. (Photo by L.x. Fringes)
Rupert Murdoch loves to make trouble for other moguls. Could he stop Microsoft's bid for Yahoo? Wall Street analysts have been asking Murdoch if he would buy Yahoo outright. Never mind that the News Corp. chief doesn't have the cash to outbid Microsoft. Such a straightforward deal would be far too boring for Murdoch to contemplate. Instead, here's a scenario bruited about by Silicon Alley Insider.
Bebo had found potential buyers in Microsoft and Yahoo, sources told BoomTown's Kara Swisher, not Google or News Corp. as TechCrunch reported. These facts were "easy to find out about by anyone who can pick up a phone and ask around like a reporter is supposed to," WSJ vet Swisher writes on her blog. Then she goes on to slam Michael Arrington's TechCrunch some more.
MySpace has launched a so-called "developer platform," allowing glorified Web designers to write widgets slightly more sophisticated than a photo slideshow for the News Corp.-owned website. I asked Ted Dziuba of the late, lamented Uncov what he thought. Here's what he said:
So much for the death of television. 97.5 million people, a Super Bowl record, watched my beloved New England Patriots lose to the New York Giants, according to Fox. 107.5 million people watched the last half-hour of the game, besting the 106 million that watched the final episode of M.A.S.H. Television advertisers, who paid $2.7 million for each 30-second spot, definitely got their money's worth. Altogether, they spent $156 million on the five-hour game. It takes Google three days to make that much money.
VC blogger Fred Wilson argues that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger will be bad for users and for the Internet as a whole. "If you think about the Internet, it's a huge distributed network of loosely connected services owned and operated by literally millions. We don't need or want consolidation of services on the Internet," Wilson writes. But you know who the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is even worse news for? The incompetent executives who landed Yahoo in this pickle in the first place. They're ferociously spinning gullible reporters with rescue fantasies. Here are the five most widespread rumors — and why they're unlikely to happen.
A source inside Yahoo says the company is reconsidering a previously discussed business partnership with Google as an alternative to Microsoft's $44 billion hostile takeover offer. Yahoo believes that offer, at $31 a share, significantly undervalues the company. Private equity firms and News Corp. have been named as other possible suitors for Yahoo, but neither are seen as realistically able to get a deal together. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Google CEO Eric Schmidt called Yahoo cofounder and CEO Jerry Yang to offer Google's help in thwarting an unwanted Microsoft takeover of Yahoo.
Are there any other suitors for Yahoo? Not really, according to CNBC. They shoot down a number of potential buyers including IAC, Time Warner, and News Corp. The pundits posit AT&T as the only possible mate. Henry Blodget pours water on that theory too. He talked to a "senior executive" at Microsoft who says "AT&T encouraged us to make the bid. They have no interest in buying Yahoo themselves." GIven the huge premium Microsoft is offering, they may run away with Yahoo without a fight.
The News Corp.-owned Times of London has been paying a search-engine optimizer to do the dirty work of shilling Times Online stories to social media sites like Mahalo, StumbleUpon, and MetaFilter. We can't believe it either — that The Times is actually paying an outside firm to submit stories. My boss makes me do it the hard way.
Creative Capital got ahold of the December 2007 ComScore numbers for the top social networks in the U.S. — and they are, on the whole, not good. Engagement — average minutes spent on the site per visitor — is down for MySpace and Microsoft's Live Spaces, but up for almost all the other sites. Unique visitor growth is ominously low for MySpace and, in the last three months, LinkedIn. Hit the jump to see the numbers for yourself.
MySpace will launch its third-party developer platform on February 5, according to reports. And, because copying Facebook is about more than just following its major initiatives nine months later, the News Corp. social network today announced it would install almost Zuckerberg-aged 26-year old Amit Kapur as MySpace's new COO. But will Scoble find him as charming?
