News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, commented on the future of the Wall Street Journal website: "We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering" for subscribers.
Rupert Murdoch can't hire media maven Tina Brown to the Wall Street Journal, because, well, she hates him and the feeling's probably mutual. But a clone has been found! Her name is Tina, she's a Brit, and she worked at Tatler too! Tina Gaudoin will be the editor of the Journal's new "lifestyle magazine" when it launches in the fall. Rupert, dear, perhaps we ought to devote some time to this during our next session? Murdoch's murky id aside (or not!) what's with News Corp's anti-American hiring proclivities, hmm? Besides Gaudoin (far left) Murdoch's top people include Robert Thomson, the Journal's new Australian publisher and his countryman Col Allan, prickly editor of the New York Post. A few weeks ago, Allan's replacement was rumored to be Rebekah Wade, the firey-maned editor of the Sun. The Post has since dismissed that rumor. Wade wouldn't have been the first UK lady to run the tab—Xana Antunes was editor there till she was canned in 2001. Not that we, um, have anything against editors from overseas. We're just saying.
There goes the neighborhood. Rupert Murdoch is planning to move his Wall Street Journal newsroom from the financial district where it's lived for over 100 years to News Corp's headquarters on Sixth Avenue. The Midtown Journal just doesn't have quite the same ring, though. We predict singing rumble sequences in the cafeteria between WSJ staffers and their new Fox and New York Post siblings. Manhattan's newspapers have either died or migrated uptown over the century, choking the neighborhood around Rockefeller Center, but the Journal was a holdout of a bygone era. After the jump, a stroll around New York's former press nucleus.
Today was tumultuous for the stock markets, and the up-and-down swings took their toll on one MarketWatch editor, who typed "oh shit" into a subhead on the homepage. Whoever it was, we salute you for honesty in financial reporting. Rupert Murdoch, your new owner, should be proud.
Yesterday, we reported that MySpace continues to beat Facebook soundly in traffic. But some, including Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget, reject the U.S. numbers we cited from Hitwise, saying worldwide traffic indicates "Facebook is coming up behind MySpace like a Ferrari about to blow past a bus." And how could we ignore such a simile? It's totally awesome, dude! So here's a chart comparing worldwide traffic for Facebook and MySpace, from ComScore.
Early ratings for Rupert Murdoch's Fox Business Network have materialized, and the news isn't pretty. According to Nielsen Media Research, about 6,300 households on any given weekday are tuning in. Compare that to the 283,000 watching rival network CNBC. The number is so low you won't hear it officially from Nielsen researchers, because it doesn't meet their minimum standards for reporting. While it's still early going and Fox only reaches about 30 million households compared to CNBC's 90 million homes, the numbers aren't pretty.
Lazy, scummy, and smart. That's just the way we like them. YouTube-wannabe Veoh has jumped into Hulu's hoop by adding streaming video from all the Fox and NBC properties we know and love. Only, unlike Hulu, a joint venture between NBC and News Corp., or any of its distribution partners, Veoh hasn't actually worked out any licensing deals. Rather, it's following the smarter tactic pioneered by OpenHulu of embedding Hulu videos into its own site.
Helicopters. Hot metal print. Faked photos. Police scanners and running engines. Even if you're not a journalism wonk, outgoing Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger's recap of his years in the golden age of newspaper reporting is an engaging read, all 2,963 words of it. If you just want the dirt, I've pullquoted Steiger's dead-bird story, plus the time he asked for a helicopter to do some reporting. Does Pajamas Media have one of those?
As expected, Disney has signed a deal with Apple to provide digital movie rentals over iTunes. The terms are similar to last week's deal with Fox. While this isn't particularly surprising — Steve Jobs owns a huge chunk of Disney from when the company bought his Pixar animation studio — it is good news for Apple. Can you name any Fox movies off the top of your head? Neither can I. But I know a ton of Disney flicks that are worth watching. Among them, Pixar's small but universally brilliant library of family movies, which will help iTunes appeal to moms and dads. OK, so that's two studios down. What about the rest? Variety reports that Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. are unlikely to sign on for "various competitive reasons."
The Financial Times reports that Apple and News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox film studio have signed a deal for digital movie rentals. Consumers will be able to rent the latest Fox DVD releases from iTunes for a limited time. The deal, which will likely be announced at Macworld in January, would likely be matched with an upgrade for the woebegotten Apple TV which has been de facto dead on arrival since it was released. It is suspected that Disney, which has extremely close ties with Apple — Steve Jobs is its largest shareholder after Mickey bought his Pixar animation studio — will be on board at launch as well.
Yesterday, a German magazine reported an unsourced rumor that media giant Bertelsmann AG will takeover Harper Collins for the bargain price of $1 billion. CNN picked up the story as did Forbes, but Reuters reported that a News Corp source had told them Rupert Murdoch's company "is not in discussions with Europe's biggest media company Bertelsmann AG BERT.UL or any other party on the sale of its book publisher HarperCollins." A Bertelsmann spokesperson said "I will not comment on that," when we called today. Bertelsmann was also rumored to be ditching their stake in magazine subsidiary Gruner + Jahr, but the company denied that today—they also announced they won't be buying the remaining shares of European broadcast company RTL that they don't already own. Know more? Let us know!
The beta testers on Hulu, News Corp. and NBC's video site, like hot girls just as much as the rest of us. The two most viewed videos of all time? A clip from 30 Rock called "Wear a Bra" and another from Keeping Up with The Kardashians that showcases a comely blonde sunbathing. See both videos after the jump. Other top clips? Most from Saturday Night Live, including "Lazy Sunday," the video that kickstarted YouTube for the masses, and Natalie Portman rapping.
I saw a theme this morning as I perused the various other tech sites: Hulu invites! Hulu, the video-streaming partnership between News Corp. and NBC, is throwing open its doors to many early adopters by offering up thousands of invites on several tech sites. If you haven't gotten a chance to play around with Hulu and want to see just what the hell Paul Boutin is complaining about, here's your chance. GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, TechCrunch, and Mashable are giving away 2,500 invites each. All, we note, are clients of Federated Media, John Battelle's online-ad network. Coincidence, conspiracy, or just part of a future Hulu advertising campaign?
While NBC Universal and News Corp. keep Hulu, their online-video joint venture, under invitation-only wraps, OpenHulu, an independent website which appears to be legally embedding Hulu videos, is actually starting to earn some cash. Not only that, but it's getting a little attention from potential buyers, too. Not bad for just copying and pasting chunks of HTML code.
News Corp. employees picked up their holiday gift bags today—what did they get? "A Simpsons page-a-day calendar, some Jeff Foxworthy book, and The Simpsons Movie DVD," one of the lucky recipients tells us. Anything else? "We also got an Emergency Procedure Guide." Oh! Well that will definitely come in handy should there be a second freak chemical accident at the News Corp. headquarters this week! "In the event of 1211 exploding, we have to take a bus to Seacaucus, NJ," says a staffer. Um, through the tunnel? No thanks!
Famous YouTuber Noah Kalina writes on his blog that a Simpsons writer called to say using the soundtrack from Kalina's YouTube video without paying a royalty was a mistake. Whatever. Here's what we should have said the first time, instead of rambling on about fair use and copyright: Watch this awesome video of Homer Simpson parodying a famous YouTube video. [Noah Kalina. Blog.]
The chemical explosion or fire or what have you at News Corp.'s midtown office building "is now under control," according to reported announcements from the city's Office of Emergency Management. "There are no safety concerns at this point," reads an email to employees of a neighboring building, detailing OEM's report. "All the evacuated floors in the impacted facility are once again populated. Incident closed." Is that the same as saying "conversation over"? Because we're still kind of wondering what someone was doing stirring around 30 gallons of "unidentified utility chemicals" in the first place.
