Murdoch toys with idea of Kindle-like reader
Where will the mogul strike next? Doesn’t seem like he’s yearning right now for The New York Times, which is doing battle with a guild that doesn’t want to give up lifetime job guarantees of 190-odd Boston Globe staffers.
Instead, New York Post’s Peter Lauria reports, Rupert Murdoch has set his sights on building a Kindle-like device that will deliver content from News Corp publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and the NY Post. The device would also offer content from TV shows and movies that come from the News Corp stable. Murdoch sees it as a way of charging for content on the Web, rather than giving it away free as much of the publishing industry has (which, needless to say, is a big source of current troubles).
The global team assembled for this purpose consists of Murdoch himself, son James, Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton and News Corp’s new chief of digital operations, Jonathan Miller, the paper says.
Maybe Murdoch will show the struggling newspaper industry the way out of the morass. Keep an eye on:
- Someone’s going to buy Twitter one of these days. Kara Swisher lays it out. (All Things Digital)
- After two days of rumors, the big-screen Kindle is coming today. (Silicon Alley Insider)
- Journalism confabs and banquets are being canceled due to the recession. (Forbes)
Photo: Reuters
Watch Gannett layoffs in slow motion
It’s layoff week at Gannett — even the second N and T might be redundant.
The largest U.S. newspaper publisher and owner of USA Today, the nation’s biggest-selling daily paper, is slashing payroll just in time for the holidays. We read about layoffs everywhere these days, but if you want to see the slow-motion car crash version of how Gannett is doing it, look to Gannett Blog, run by former company reporter Jim Hopkins.
With no newspaper job to keep him busy, Hopkins chronicles nearly every event that he hears about Gannett. That includes a dose of rumor, but much of what he reports is more right than wrong.
Here is one of his latest reports:
Gannett launched what is likely the biggest mass layoff in newspaper industry history yesterday, slashing 655 jobs by early this morning, in an increasingly desperate bid to return the troubled 102-year-old publisher to prosperity. The final tally could run into the thousands.
Many more layoffs are expected today and tomorrow across the 85-daily community newspaper division, plus USA Today and the Detroit Free Press. As of 1:25 a.m. ET, only 17 papers had been accounted for, based on published accounts and Gannett Blog reader reports.
(My Gannett newsroom sources are telling me the same story.)
How sad. Even sadder is that employees have to learn of it from outside sources. The company usually notifies shareholders first before releasing such news. Not this time!
