Content everywhere? More like content nowhere
Will Big Media and Big Tech companies ever stop punishing their biggest fans?
Like many people, I woke up yesterday and reached for my iPad for my morning hit of news, entertainment and information, so I could start my day. (And like many, I’m embarrassed to admit it.) Padding to the front door to get a newspaper still sounds more respectable, but my iPad gives me a far more current, rich and satisfying media experience than a still-warm printed Times could ever produce.
Except, lately, it doesn’t. Yesterday morning, I saw the exciting news that Bill Simmons, ESPN’s most popular, profane and controversial writer, had secured an interview with President Obama. Simmons published his interview in podcast, text and video form on Grantland, a longform sports journalism website he founded last year under the ESPN umbrella. I clicked over to the story from my Twitter feed and saw three YouTube excerpts of Simmons with Obama. And that’s all I saw. When I hit play on the videos, I discovered ESPN had set them to be “unavailable” on mobile devices.
Moving on, I tried to read a New York Post headline that also found its way into my Twitter feed. But when I tapped in, the Post webpage that loaded was not the story I wanted to read. Instead it was a notice, which I took as an admonition, that to read New York Post content on an iPad, I would have to download the app, which retails for $1.99.
I want to make it clear that I’m not against paying for content. But what I’ve just described aren’t paywalls, where publications warn users that they won’t be able to consume content for free.
The situations I’m describing are blanket denials of content because of a choice I made about which device to use. With these tactics, media companies aren’t creating content paywalls, they’re creating content ghettos. Big Media, set my content free! Stop messing with the user experience to deny readers their content simply because you can detect what platform they’re on. And stop punishing users who are investing in the latest devices to consume your output. In other words, grant my hyper-advanced iOS device or my friend’s fancy new Android phone just as much access to the Web as my mother’s four-year-old Windows XP PC. Which one of us do you think wants to watch Simmons talk crossover dribbles with the Commander-in-Chief?
How long can Murdoch keep it up on Twitter?
You can say what you like about Rupert Murdoch, and most people have, but he doesn’t do things halfway. His decision to join Twitter on New Year’s eve has set the Twitterati and blogosphere alight not just because the 80-year old media baron joined but because unlike every other CEO or executive who’s joined Twitter, he’s actually expressed some real opinions — some of which are controversial given who he is. When Reuters asked CEOs at its Global Media Summit last fall most felt tweeting wasn’t for them.
In Murdoch’s first 24 hours he started off relatively gently praising an op-ed on Ron Paul in his Wall Street Journal, extolled the benefits of vacation, praised the founder of original founder of his New York Post and championed two of his Fox studios’ movies ‘The Descendants’ and ‘We bought a Zoo’.
He seemed to stick to some sort of neutral script for his first 24 hours but by Monday (Jan 2nd) he had praised President Obama for being “very courageous – and dead right” for his decision on terrorist detention, taken a poke at Glenn Beck’s old Fox News show and effectively endorsed Republican presidential candidate hopeful Rick Santorum: “Only candidate with genuine big vision for the country”. He also called on the “courageous” Obama to address what Murdoch sees as the United States’ biggest crisis, its education policy.
Murdoch’s tweets have been widely reported and analyzed by everyone from biographer Michael Wolff who said on Twitter he doubts Murdoch was writing them himself to various other Murdoch watchers.
The question is can the notoriously off-message Murdoch keep this up on Twitter without stepping in the proverbial and causing some sort of minor international incident with one of his off-the-cuff tweets. When you control large swathes of big media which impacts on everything from politics to sports whatever you say publicly will be pored over over for hidden meanings.
Think about what his communications team must be going through as they fret about what next the octogenarian maverick will tweet next from his iPad.
However, my bet is Murdoch will soon tire of the novelty and settle into using Twitter sparingly to supp0rt certain News Corp projects and positions. For the sake of news I hope I’m wrong, but it’s not like Murdoch doesn’t have a $45 billion business to run.
Wow, brutal headline…
Anyway, we doubt he’ll be able to keep it up like the Murdoch-obsessed Guardian (http://www.WeWereWallStreet.com/Opinion .html) but it should be fun to watch. He already “un-followed” Alan Sugar today, and Sugar, oh, sorry, Lord Sugar, whinged some.
It could all be great fun if they cat fight in public – what a treat.
Rupert Murdoch sells A shares, but still in control
News Corp Chief Executive and Chairman Rupert Murdoch sold off the bulk of his common shareholding according to a regulatory filing but, have no fear the 80 year-old mogul is still very much in charge both in terms of management and financial control.
According to the filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, from Nov 16 to Nov 17 Murdoch sold a total of 3.6 million News Corp A shares for between $16.76 and and $17.07 each for a total value of some $62 million. This means Murdoch”s A shares holding went down to just 381,000 from around 4 million. The elder Murdoch had made the disposals for “financial planning” reasons, according to a source. Back in February Murdoch had bought 2.8 million A shares for between $17.19 to $17.53.
News Corp shares got battered through the summer dropping as much as 25 percent as the parent of Fox, Wall Street Journal and Twentieth Century Fox reeled from an escalating phone hacking scandal at its UK newspaper arm. Murdoch did undertake some relatively minor buying and selling of A shares over the summer.
Despite the sell-off Murdoch remains fully in control of News Corp through his family’s 40 percent stake in the B shares which have voting rights and control the company (A shares do not have voting rights).
That’s rich, let’s see. I can preside over a mafia cartel, and then decide to sell my shares and make millions off of that. That sounds like a good deal¡¡¡¡ Where do i sign up??? Wait…that’s the privilege politicians and the media give to hacks. Yahooooo¡¡
Murdoch backs progressive U.S. immigration policy
News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch on Thursday said the United States should work harder at making itself a more attractive country for people to emigrate to, as an important route back to enabling economic growth. Murdoch, 80, who was born in Melbourne, Australia, became a naturalized a U.S. citizen in 1985.
“We have in our DNA the most entrepreneurship,” said Murdoch speaking at a conference on immigration sponsored by the Partnership for New York City and Partnership for a New American Economy. “It’s no accident that people over all over Europe want to come here…and from China. This is a great country.”
Other speakers like New York City Mayor Bloomberg, former Toronto mayor David Miller and New York Times writer Thomas Friedman all supported reforming the immigration system.
Murdoch said for the U.S. to get out of its economic slump there needed to be more certainty, less regulation and better tax codes. If that changed, combined with a better take on immigration policy, Murdoch said: “We’d soon be out of this trouble.”
In particular Murdoch was humorously critical of calls in some quarters to kick out an estimated 12 million illegal workers from Mexico.
“The idea of kicking out 12 million Mexicans it would cost $285 billion which we’d have to borrow from China to do it,” said Murdoch to laughs.
Murdoch pointed to countries like Britain benefiting from having a more open immigration policy simply because it is a member of the European Union allowing workers to move between countries. He highlighted highly skilled Polish construction workers as having an important role in building infrastructure for the London 2012 Olympics.
from Breakingviews:
Rupert Murdoch’s sham governance on full display
By Jeffrey Goldfarb The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Rupert Murdoch still gets a kick out of the “fair and balanced” slogan used by his Fox News channel. He had a good laugh about it only last week at News Corp’s annual shareholder meeting. The results of a vote conducted at that gathering, released Monday, show that everyone’s now equally in on the joke about the company’s shameful corporate governance as they are the conservative bias of his TV news operation.
A majority of stockholders who don’t share the media mogul’s last name snubbed the nomination of his children, James and Lachlan, to the board. Without the support of Rupert’s nearly 40 percent control, three more directors also would have received less than a majority vote, meaning minority holders strongly rebuked a full third of the News Corp board. Strip out another 7 percent backing from Murdoch pal Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, and the sons, each of whom has at one time been considered a potential heir apparent, suffered a roughly two-to-one defeat.
Thanks to News Corp’s skewed governance, the vote is only symbolic. Murdoch, despite his stated humility over a British newspaper hacking scandal that has put a cloud over his $46 billion empire, retains a firm grip. He will be emboldened by the strong support from other investors for his presence on the board and their unequivocal rejection of a plan to split the chairman and chief executive roles. But there’s little comfort Murdoch and other board members can take from these votes.
News Corp investors -- like those at Viacom, CBS, The New York Times, Washington Post, Comcast and other U.S. media groups signed up for the cold shoulder when they bought into a company with a lopsided dual-share structure and a board packed with the chairman’s cronies. Yet while their voices can be disregarded on technical grounds, they have spoken too loudly even for Murdoch to ignore.
Whether on his own or because of the influence of his closest advisers, Murdoch has slowly come around on the use of News Corp’s capital, distributing more of it these days to shareholders instead of on reckless acquisitions. He may be a stubborn and cagey tycoon. But the old newsman also has rolled the presses on enough exposés to know when the jig is up. That time has come for Murdoch’s board.
News International loses top PR exec
If we were at Rupert Murdoch’s daily UK tabloid The Sun we’d probably have a headline today that reads: Will the last person to leave News International please turn off the lights?
Oh wait, The Sun already did that — but with Britain as its subject.
But we can’t help ourselves as News International executives drop like flies following the terrible phone voicemail hacking scandal which has rocked its parent company News Corp right to its core. Nearly 20 executives or journalists have either resigned, been fired or arrested since the hacking scandal escalated.
The Guardian today broke news that Alice Macandrew, the much liked, much respected senior communications executive at News International handed in her notice after falling out with News International top brass including James Murdoch about the handling of the communications strategy once the proverbial good stuff started to hit the fan this summer. We’ve since confirmed the news from our sources.
We’re keen to find out more details of what the disputes over strategy were. We’re especially keen to hear what Macandrew or indeed any other PR folks would have done much differently given the sheer weight of evidence and feeding frenzy around as the media sharks sensed Murdoch blood in the waters.
“Macandrew was personally appointed by Murdoch as his chief press aide in 2009, and was a key adviser on the company’s media strategy from the moment stories about phone hacking were revealed in the Guardian. She reported to Matthew Anderson, group director for strategy and corporate affairs.”
The future of journalism in the UK
By Mark Thompson The opinions discussed are his own.
In the UK we are going through an unprecedented crisis in journalism, a crisis with the boundaries and techniques of investigative journalism at its heart.
We don’t yet know what will emerge from this crisis and from Lord Leveson’s Inquiry, but any recommendations about new laws or regulation will be studied with interest by Governments around the world.
Before the phone-hacking scandal, conventional wisdom suggested that traditional investigative journalism faced two threats: the first economic, the second related to the impact of the internet and new forms of journalism and disclosure it has enabled.
The economic one is so familiar I won’t dwell on it for long. It is that – in common with other forms of quality journalism – the deteriorating business models for newspapers, in the developed world at least, may not be able to support the cost of mounting often expensive and protracted investigations.
The commercial fundamentals may not be quite so challenging in the global broadcast arena, but here too pessimists would point to the pressure on commissioners and schedulers to focus on those genres which bring in the largest number of viewers and commercial impacts: here too, they would argue, investigative journalism is under threat.
But it’s worth pointing out that, in the UK at least, a number of newspapers – The Sunday Times, The Independent as well as The Guardian – clearly regard investigative journalism not just as vital in itself, but as a competitively valuable point of differentiation. Indeed recent editors at The Daily Telegraph have launched what is essentially a new tradition of major investigations, including their revelations about UK parliamentarians’ abuse of their expenses, one of the journalistic coups of the past decade.
Charliethe Chump
Have you ever tried to do serious research on the internet? Look at the slop that passes for research on ask.com. Yahoo! Answers and much of Wikipedia. Just for starters. There is good stuff but most is crap. Serious journalism does cost money, which is why the FT costs £2 a day and Reuters does not give away its company research.
I would trust the BBC a lot more than any of the first four posters here. What are a bunch of Sun reading knuckle draggers doing on a serious business site?
Who stands for the public in Murdoch vs the government?
Editor’s introduction: In this essay, Geoffrey Robertson QC, who has extensive experience representing media companies and free speech cases, explores the role of the Leveson Inquiry, established by UK Prime Minister David Cameron in July to conduct a “judge-led inquiry into the culture, practices, and ethics of the press and the extent of unlawful or improper conduct within News International and other newspaper organisations.” Robertson places the inquiry in the historical context of media regulation in the UK. He casts a skeptical eye on the prospects for meaningful media, especially given the failures of past similar attempts and the low credibility of the UK’s Press Complaints Commission (PCC) in either protecting privacy or enforcing its ethical rulings.He then explores various proposed alternative structures to media regulation. Since the essay deals with UK-specific material, British grammar conventions have been preserved.
By Geoffrey Robertson The views expressed are his own.
The wide-ranging remit of Leveson I is to inquire into “the culture, practices and ethics of the press”, its relations with police and politicians, and to make recommendations for “a new and more effective policy and regulatory regime” which upholds freedom of speech and media independence “whilst encouraging the highest ethical and professional standards”. This is a Royal Commission on the Press by another name: it is the fourth since the Second World War, and its terms of reference are much wider than Sir David Calcutt’s 1991 and 1993 enquiries into privacy and press ethics. Its Report will have more clout than recent reports on the subject by Parliamentary committees. Leveson II – specifically into unlawful or improper conduct by News International (or other news organizations), and by the metropolitan police, must await the conclusion of trials and appeals resulting from “Operation Weeting” and so will not get underway until 2014 at the earliest. At the first stage, recommendations will be made for legislative and policy changes in a year’s time, possibly to be introduced in conjunction with the government’s Defamation Bill.
In choosing Lord Justice Leveson to report on press discipline, the government opted for a sitting judge in the mould of Lord Hutton, from a criminal (mainly prosecution) background and with no evident empathy towards the media. Sir David Calcutt had some free speech credentials, as did Sir Hartley Shawcross (who chaired the second Royal Commission) whilst the third and most recent Commission was chaired by media-friendly Lord Macgregor (assisted, in understanding media law, by Leonard Hoffman Q.C. ) Leveson is to be “assisted” in understanding media issues by six expert “panelists” whose role and power (e.g. to append their own, or dissenting, reports) is unclear. Their “expertise” in the sharp end of news gathering is questionable – two are former political editors who were members of the discredited “lobby” system, together with a former Chief Constable, the Director of “Liberty”, an ex-head of OFCOM and a former chairman of the Financial Times. The omission of any distinguished practitioner of investigative journalism is notable. It does not mean that Leveson will not be supportive of public interest journalism, but it does mean that the press will have to make a convincing case for its own freedom from the kind of statutory restraints requiring ‘due impartiality’ and “good taste” that better-behaved (and less investigative) broadcasters have long had to endure. The demands for statutory regulation, for more criminal laws and for a new civil wrong of invasion of privacy will be difficult to resist, and already there have been siren calls to subject editors and journalists to “professional” regulation – including fines and disbarment – of a kind that have long been visited upon errant doctors and lawyers.
The case against “professional” discipline To the latter kind of reform, there is a fundamental objection. Journalism is not a profession. It is the exercise by occupation of the right to free expression available to every citizen. That right, being available to all, cannot in principle be withdrawn from a few by any system of licensing or professional registration. This nation has not had a press licensing system since the Stationers Company collapsed from extortion and fraud in 1695. The sinister Restoration office of “Surveyor of the Press,” empowered to seize unlicensed presses and prosecute disrespectful journalists and printers, is no more than a distant and bad memory. However attractive it may seem to license newspapers like television companies and withdraw licences as punishment for repeated ethical lapses (as OFCOM very occasionally does with broadcasters), constitutional history revolts at the prospect of a government body silencing a newspaper by administrative diktat, or a journalist by ordering him or her not to write. As Milton put it, “The attempt to keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to keep out the crows by shutting his park gate”.
Of course, the right of free speech may be restricted by rules of law that apply to all who take, or are afforded, the opportunity to exercise that right by speaking or writing in public. So far as criminal laws are concerned, these apply to journalists as forcefully as to anyone else, and may have no public interest defence – rightly so in the case of bribing the police. One discomforting matter that Leveson must consider is by what extraordinary arrogance have some newspaper executives assumed that paying police officers for information is somehow exempt from anti-corruption statutes in force for over a century. And how came it that almost all journalists and their news organisations were ignorant of the fact that telephone hacking was made an offence – by two separate statutes – in 1998 and again in 2000? If Leveson allows cross-examination of editors, legal managers and executives on these issues in stage 1, there may be blood on the carpet. The result could be a recommendation for more criminal laws; it will certainly urge more prosecutions, heavier penalties, and (possibly and dangerously) the removal of the few ‘public good’ defences that remain.
As for civil law, a new tort of invasion of privacy is an odds-on bet to be a Leveson recommendation. This is not as dramatic as it sounds – the judiciary has in the past few years been moulding a civil wrong out of the plasticine of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, allied to the old common-law wrong of breach of confidence, and it is high time that this development received statutory formulation, especially since it is now clear that a P.C.C. self-regulatory system cannot offer an effective remedy for victims of privacy invasion. But a good deal of press freedom will depend on the wording of the new law – especially the formulation of the public interest defence. Whether the media, with its chronic inability to make common cause to defend its own freedoms, will be able to influence Leveson’s formulation of the new tort is uncertain, although this is one area where support should come from broadcasters, since they will be equally affected by any legislation.
What Rupert did
By John Lloyd The views expressed are his own.
The crisis at the News of the World broke in July 2011. It had been gathering for five years, since the first public intimations surfaced in 2006 of a culture of using private investigators to hack into the mobile phones of those the newspaper wished to investigate. Two ‘rotten apples’ were thrown out by News International, the parent company: these were Glen Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by a number of papers to find out secrets of the objects of their investigations; and Clive Goodman, the News of the World (NotW ) reporter who covered the royal family and whose stories had used material gleaned by Mulcaire from interceptions of the royal princes’ phones. The rest of the barrel, the paper and the company said, was unblemished: as evidence of purity of soul, the then editor, Andy Coulson, resigned, disavowing all knowledge of the hacking but shouldering responsibility as the one on whose watch this had happened. A few months later, he was employed as director of communications by David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party and of the opposition; when Cameron moved, in May 2010, into Number 10 as prime minister, Coulson retained his post and moved with him. It was reported that several of those who met Cameron at this time warned him against employing Coulson. The latter’s claim, that he had not asked a senior reporter about the source of stories which would be among the most important published in any given week, astonished those who had any acquaintance with journalism. However, Cameron said he accepted his word, that Coulson deserved a ‘second chance’ and that he had skills which the leader of the opposition needed.
From these quite modest beginnings grew a scandal whose revelations have laid bare journalistic practices which were not confined to phone hacking, nor to the NotW, and involved issues even more serious: the assumption by leading journalists working for the most widely read section of the British press that the private lives of anyone in whom they wished to take an interest should be open to their gaze and use; increasing subordination of the political class to tabloid pressure; and the possible (as yet unproven) corruption of officers of the Metropolitan Police.
This is written as the News International scandal, and others associated with it, roll on. The issue is sufficiently mature, however, for there to have appeared a substantial minority of voices which dissent from the chorus of condemnation which has attended these revelations, and assert that, even if the scandal is shocking, it has been grossly overblown – as a Wall Street Journal editorial had it, overblown because of left-wing hostility to right-wing newspapers. These voices point out that more important matters face the world; and that, even if Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation (whose UK subsidiary News International is, and which also owns Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street Journal) presided over an organization in which such things were winked at, he has also been a force for good in the newspaper trade. He smashed the anarchic Fleet Street print unions which were a barrier to development and growth, invested mightily in an industry from which others were and still are exiting, kept alive (among other titles) The Times at a large loss, provided millions of readers in three Anglophone countries – Australia, the UK and to a lesser extent the USA – with newspapers which they freely and often chose to buy, and ran an efficient and entrepreneurial company. More, as Ros Wynne-Jones argued in the Independent, at times his tabloids did revelatory and campaigning journalism on issues that mattered to a working-class readership: ‘holiday rip-offs, the loan shark thugs, the tawdry parasitical underclass that preys on the poor and elderly’. One could add to her list an appetite for exposing racial extremists: the Sun vividly reported on leading members of the British National Party, which had sought to give a more moderate image of itself, giving Nazi salutes and glorying in racial hatred.
Be careful what you wish for, is the collective message. And given the record, these arguments have force. So we should assert here the importance of what happened, which must be set against these assertions.
First, the News of the World (NotW), for many years the highest circulation newspaper in Britain, systemically hacked into the phones of politicians, celebrities, and people in the news – including murder victims and their relatives – in order to produce exclusives. Their journalists also bribed policemen, both with petty cash and – allegedly – with large payments: an early estimate was that News International (NI) had spent £100,000 on such bribes, though as this is written there is no definite evidence. They found out about the private sins of people in public life – and where they did not print details, they held the results of the investigations over their heads. The Liberal Democrats, the junior party since May 2010 in Britain’s governing coalition, alleged that senior officials had been told that News International papers would ‘do them in’ if they did not press for the government to allow Murdoch to take full control of the highly profitable UK satellite broadcaster BSkyB; he already owns 39 per cent, and his son James was and remains chairman. This was threatened, it is alleged, at the time when Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary, had the responsibility of deciding on the bid. He was relieved of that when, in a sting organized by the Daily Telegraph in December 2010, he told two journalists who were posing as his constituents, that he was ‘at war’ with Murdoch. The responsibility passed from his department to Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary – who was on course to approve it until the revelations came, and the deal was lost. In late July, several journalists who had worked for other tabloids – such as the Daily and Sunday Mirror – alleged that phone hacking was common in these newsrooms, under the editorship of Piers Morgan (1995–2004) and perhaps before and after. It rapidly appeared likely that the NotW was not alone in accessing messages to obtain salacious gossip. In September last year, the New York Times Magazine, in a major exposé of the News International affair, quoted a former NotW reporter, Sharon Marshall, as saying that ‘It was an industry wide thing. Talk to any tabloid journalist in the United Kingdom, and they can tell you each phone company’s four-digit codes. Every hack on every newspaper knew this was done.’
It’s good to get a balanced and incisive essay like this.
The so-called RedTops (not Rebecca, though she would do; UK papers with a streak of Red on the front page) have such endless cheap titillation that I can’t understand how it sustains anything but a yawn.
Next, arguments are (for obvious reasons) distilled to One-Liners maybe backed up by a paragraph.
I can’t see how these enthusiastic “newspaper men”, now out of a job, could live with what they were doing. Even if the public wanted titillation (a la Moseley), are they proud of their activities? If the answer is Yes, there’s a good case for Changes to the laws so as to demand certain standards.
As there is for Utility Companies, Airlines etc. (& maybe one day, Banks – only joking).
Murdoch in good times and bad
By Sir Harold Evans The views expressed are his own.
There is a clear connecting thread between the events I describe in “Good Times, Bad Times” and the dramas that led so many years later to Rupert Murdoch’s “most humble day of my life.” I was seated within a few feet of him in London on July 19, 2011, during his testimony to a select committee of MPs with his son James at his side. Not many more than a score of observers were allowed into the small room at Parliament’s Portcullis House, across the road from the House of Commons and Big Ben. A portcullis is a defensive latticed iron grating hung over the entrance to a fortified castle, the perfect metaphor for News International, which perpetually sees itself as beset by enemies.
Murdoch, as chairman and only begetter of the giant multi-media enterprise News International (NI), was called on to defend his castle and himself as best he could for the outrages of hacking and police bribery inflicted on the British public by his News of the World and the cover-up that he and his company conducted over nearly five years. The paper Murdoch most affects to despise, the Guardian, was the instrument of his undoing.
It persisted with the unraveling story almost alone in the face of repeated denials, defamation and threats and the sloppy exonerations of News International by Scotland Yard and the Press Complaints Commission. Among those waiting patiently – one might say humbly – for admission to the Portcullis House committee room was Nick Davies, the back-packing Guardian reporter, who led the paper’s investigation courageously sustained by his editor Alan Rusbridger. It was cheering to think of the impetus for good contained in Davies’ little notebook as he assiduously scribbled away during the hearing.
Murdoch had begun badly on jetting into London, all smiles in a jaunty Panama hat and embracing his ex-editor and CEO Rebekah Brooks whom he called his “first priority”; she was arrested days later. He quickly sensed the vengeful public mood and made a well-publicized consoling visit to the family of Milly Dowler, the murdered schoolgirl. He apologized profusely enough for his soon-to-be-shuttered paper’s most outrageous invasion of privacy, the hacking into voice mails left for Milly, and the hacker’s erasure of messages to make room for more that the News of the World could milk for despicable “exclusives.”
Observers in the Portcullis room were divided on the efficacy of Rupert Murdoch’s testimony. Some thought his answers revealed a doddery, amnesiac jet-lagged octogenarian. He cupped his ear occasionally to ask for a question to be repeated; at one moment he referred to the Prime Minister David Cameron when he meant Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister Blair’s press adviser. Others saw the testimony as a guileful imitation of “Uncle Junior,” the ageing mentor to Tony, the capo in the Sopranos, who feigned slippered incompetence to escape retribution. I thought, on the contrary, that Murdoch was a good witness, more direct than his son James, who unnervingly sported a buzz cut reminiscent of Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. His father was as taciturn as James was loquacious. Murdoch père paused to run each answer through his shrewd mental calculations of the legal implications of his own words, occasionally smiting the tabletop in front in a kind of brutal authoritarian emphasis that began to make his wife Wendi Murdoch distinctly nervous. She leaned forward to restrain the militancy.
But Murdoch senior’s bluntness had the effect of rendering James’ testimony inconsequential. His father’s testimony in the Portcullis room had flashes of mordant directness, one of his more engaging qualities. When a committee member referred to the “collective amnesia” of his executives, he riposted, “you mean lying” and he was right. James, the eager mollifier, was too ready to seek refuge in convoluted references to “distinguished outside learned counsel” mixed with patronizing explanations for the plebs on how large corporations delegate small details like paying off villains.
Excellent article. I wish Sir Harold every success with his book. If only Murdoch had one ounce of his decency.
There’s one big issue with your article, and that is it doesnt’ touch on the advertising model of an iPad version vs a web version. Though it’s changing fast, advertisers were slower to adopt iPad platforms, and therefore, to the media company were perhaps less profitable. You can’t have an ad-supported or near-free model if there aren’t advertisers willing to buy on that platform.
So far, most of these digital platforms have not monetized as well as the traditional players, and that has everything to do with the decision making process.
Boycott an iPad advertiser? That’s silly. They’re the ones that are helping you out. You should be boycotting the advertiser that ONLY wants tos how up on their web site. There is also generally less real estate on the screen of an iPad app to unobtrusively show you ads as compared to your mother’s 4 year old XP system.
And $1.99 for a permanent application is hardly “through the nose” … How much does a single print edition to the NY Post cost? I can’t imagine that the app couldn’t pay for itself in a few days.
Maybe the real problem is the group of whiney consumers (and blog writers) not willing to spend $1.99 on an app that gives them full access, when in the old days it would’ve been 50cents/day?