We and the rest of the media world that covered News Corp and Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones & Co had no shortage of reporters at The Wall Street Journal telling us how bad life was going to get. Among the complaints was the paper’s increasing focus on politics and non-business news. Wasn’t this “diluting the brand” as they say in mediaspeak?

Not so, according to Robert Thomson, the former Times of London editor who now edits the Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. Business news now is concentrated in the B section of the paper (B for Business, yes, it works.), and Journal reporters are not only with the program, they’re showing a willingness to try things differently.

“It’s been fascinating. There was a presumption that people would be unwilling to change,” Thomson told us at the Reuters Media Summit. “There has been an innate enthusiasm to develop the paper, particularly to develop the relationship between the paper, WSJ.com, Dow Jones Newswires and Marketwatch.”

It’s also a good attitude to take when nearly every other news outlet you might work for is cutting jobs.

(Photo: Reuters)

Sirius XM Chief Executive Mel Karmazin is a serial monogamist when it comes to stocks. No matter where he’s worked, from Viacom to Sirius, he only buys stocks in those companies, he told the Reuters Media Summit in New York on Wednesday.

Lately, at Sirius, “every dime I’ve taken in has been spent buying stock,” he said. To show his fidelity, he wears special cufflinks in his shirtsleeves. One says “XM.” The other says “Sirius.”

Otherwise, he steered clear of stocks in the past decade or so, opting for tax-free municipal bonds or treasury bills. “So I have been a terrible investor because if you look at the past 12 years, my portfolio has only grown… 3 percent a year. If you look at stock market at that period of time, I’ve left an awful lot of money on the table. Over the last year… I’ve done ok compared to where a lot of people were.”

Speaking of Sirius, he notes all the media reports that peg his annual compensation at $32 million are not quite right.

“When I came to the company, I got 33 million options at $4.72 (each). You take the Black-Scholes formula, and it was worth $150 million. Over five years, that’s $30 million a year. And I’ve never sold a share. That four dollars and 72 cents is now worth 18 cents.”

That sounds fairly underwater to us.

(Photo: Reuters)

The Professional Golfers’ Association, like everyone else who’s world depends on business, is teeing off into what executives like to call headwinds. While the PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem seemed pretty confident about the state of play at the Reuters Media Summit in New York, he didn’t shy away from being perfectly clear about life without legendary pro Tiger Woods — now out with a bum knee.

“There is always a silver lining in everything, but it’s largely bad… To have him out is a variety of negative factors.”

Woods arouses a ton of interest in golf from casual fans, and when they tune in to watch him on TV, it usually results in a big ratings spike, though Finchem said that the base where the spike begins is already pretty good. “When he’s in, he dominates the coverage,” Finchem said.

If there is a silver lining, it’s that Tiger downtime means that other nascent players might come to the fore, perhaps making them tomorrow’s stars. To understand how the PGA views Woods in this respect, Finchem pointed out that President-elect Barack Obama *might* be the first person in a very long time to knock Tiger off his perch as the most-recognized American.

As for Woods’s knee? Finchem spoke to him last week: “There’s no indication when Tiger’s returning. He hasn’t swung a golf club yet.”

(Photo: Reuters)

Sumner Redstone is selling low -- way low. Here's The Wall Street Journal with the news:

In an effort to help resolve his debt problems, Sumner Redstone has sold his controlling stake in videogame company Midway Games Inc to a private investor.

Mr. Redstone's holding company, National Amusements Inc., is expected to announce Monday that it sold its 87% stake in Midway to investor Mark Thomas, a move that represents a significant loss on the media mogul's investment but secures a hefty tax benefit as he negotiates other asset sales.

Redstone has been discussing selling all sorts of assets, including movie theaters and his holding in slot machine company WMS Industries, the Journal said.

What next? Redstone already said he wouldn't sell any more shares in Viacom and CBS to cover his debts. But the Journal says the Redstone family is discussing securing their outstanding debt ($1.6 billion) with their remaining assets. Let's watch those stocks...

Keep an eye on

• It's Reuters Media Summit week in New York City, when we get a bunch of executives in a room and get them to tell us about how they're negotiating the downturn. There will even be TV. (Reuters)
• Call it dumb luck. We knew USA Today was going to cut 20 jobs in its newsroom, but one of our reporters on holiday shopping coverage found a business-side person at Gannett's and the nation's biggest paper who said there are going to be cuts on her side too. A Gannett spokeswoman confirmed that this will happen, but a spokeswoman for the paper wasn't available to tell us how many will go.
• Nearly everyone has written about Michael Wolff's new Rupert Murdoch book. Here's a quick link rundown. Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times is quite interesting. For the others, there's us, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, MarketWatch, The Independent and The Age.

It’s not every day that you have a top executive in big business talk about how nice it will be to see the back of the Bush administration. Republican presidencies typically tout their adherence to free markets, unbridled capitalism and, most importantly, a smaller pile of what corporations often consider burdensome regulations. That isn’t what they usually expect from Democratic administrations, even ones led by Barack Obama.

That’s why we thought it so interesting that Time Warner Cable’s chief financial officer, Rob Marcus, is happy for some turnover at the Federal Communications Commission. It is the FCC, after all, that has to approve some key licenses for Time Warner Cable’s split from its majority owner, Time Warner Inc. For some reason, the FCC can’t seem to find room on its schedule to do that, and that seems to have irked Marcus. It is, after all, preventing the two companies from separating by the time Time Warner Cable said it would.

“There’s nothing substantive that has currently arisen in connection with the FCC approval. They just haven’t put it on the agenda,” he told the Reuters Media Summit in New York on Monday.

The FCC has made no special demands, he said. Rather, it just hasn’t seen fit. He did note that Chairman Kevin Martin, a Republican, seems to be the stick in the mud, but declined to talk more about why he thinks this.

So what is he looking for from a commission where three of its five members are selected by the upcoming Obama administration?

“We’re looking forward to a little more rationality.”

Seagate Chief Executive Bill Watkins has a reason to like easy, free ways to consume information on the Internet.

After all, his company is the world’s largest computer disk-drive maker, something that comes in handy for all the storage space required to back up online audio and video.

Here’s Watkins’s reasoning, which he gave us at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit on Wednesday:

People will watch lousy content if it’s easy and cheap and free… . If you think about TV back in the ’50s … Hollywood and all those guys, they said “no way we’re going to let our actors get on TV.” … New York stage did the same thing. Radio did the same thing. So what did TV do? They invented their own content. It was the farm report, the Howdy-Doody show. And all of a sudden, people started watching it because it was easy and free. And then the advertising dollars started following TV. And so what happened? Everyone started having to put their content on TV. Radio had to give up. … You’re watching the same thing happening here on the Internet. And if people got nothing to do with their time, they’ll sit there and watch commercials. I mean, people watch commercials on the Internet and then they share them with friends. But that’s a great thing for us.

They may be empty calories, but they sure do fill up the bottom line.

We found out on Wednesday what happens when you mess around with Big Blue.

CFO Mark Loughridge came to the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit to talk about all sorts of things, but it was his story about building the software services business in India that caught my attention. Loughridge was asked about whether it might make sense for IBM to hook up with a bigger Indian software services company. This was his response:

Well, you know, the Indian services software services company I’d think you want to team up with is us.

He then said that IBM in fact is the No. 1 software services business in India, and explained why:

It was some years ago and I forget exactly how this rolled out, but one of the co-chairmen I believe, of Infosys compared the relative services content of IBM to the Indian providers, and had likened IBM to Detroit and had likened them to the Japanese car manufacturers… The implication’s obviously they’re going to do to IBM what the Japanese car manufacturers did to Detroit. That statement was a seismic event for us. So we now have 74,000 employees in India.

Loughridge also talked about why it’s better to have a good mix of business coming from big, developed countries as well as high-growth emerging markets:

I do think that it’s a different environment now. … If I were in a business model where I needed double digit growth out of the G7 to drive performance, I would be in a cold sweat.

Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar was at the Reuters Technology Media and Telecommunications Summit in New York on Tuesday, where he told us about the best job in the entire world. Read on:

During the course of the beta, we actually had film school grads that are on the team, that actually cherrypicked the best moments from [shows like] “30 Rock” and “Prison Break” and “The Simpsons,” and we now have over 600 clips, for example, from “Saturday Night Live.”

Later, I asked him to tell me more about this job.

It’s a clipping operation — four or five people that focus on clipping and creating great short-form content. It’s a fun job. Every time I walk by their office — we’re all in this open area — it’s so fun because I see Elvin with his headphones on and he’s laughing, and it’s a pretty great gig because basically his job is to watch fun movies and funny TV shows and pick the best moments and put them together.

I can picture it now: Fassbinder’s greatest hits, a collection by Robert MacMillan.

Earlier in Kilar’s appearance at the summit, he talked about how Hulu.com gets a real spit-and-polish, time and again:

We’re neurotic in many ways and I want to be honest about that. We sweat over every pixel on the site. We have arguments internally about how small we can make the Hulu logo and yet have it still be legible because we don’t want it to have to get in the way of the video. We argue over font sizes and font choices and shadowing effects and things most normal people would think is silly.

But we think that’s important, because we think that if we can present franchises like … “The Office” and “30 Rock” in the best presentation possible, that’s critical to the user experience. And what’s interesting is that that carries over as well to how we treat the advertising franchises as well. We trans-code these things ourselves. We sweat over the volume levels so that the advertising commercial break volume level matches identically to the content.

It’s like Stanley Kubrick was resurrected as the head of an online video Web site.

(Photo: Reuters)

Say what you will, but Mozilla got back. In Firefox 3, the latest version of its Web browser, the foundation has made more than 15,000 changes from the last version. According to Chief Executive John Lilly, they range from big to small, including making the back button bigger.

“We did user studies that say people click the back button more than they click the forward,” he told reporters and editors at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York.

Apparently none of us ever learned the old Bob Dylan line about not looking back.

Mozilla also is making some other interesting decisions for Firefox 3, including releasing it in 50 languages.

More from Lilly: “That’s not a commercial decision. That’s a health of the World Wide Web mission-based decision… We think there are important non-commercial considerations that need to be made by people who are innovating with the product. So there’s a difference between policy groups and product groups. We’re innovating with product; we’re competing with product, but with a mission.”

Maybe Firefox 4 will have a one-click solution for forgiving third-world debt.

(Photo: Mozilla Corp)

Some companies have thousands of ways to gauge their performance. Symantec figures it out on two fingers: loyalty and market share.

When asked how Symantec measures customer loyalty, Chief Operating Officer and President Enrique Salem told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York on Monday:

Here is his answer:

We work with a company called Satmetrix, and it’s called the net promoter score. It’s a real simple metric. You ask one question: Would you recommend Symantec? And so, if they say yes, then you give it a score — 1 to 10. If you’re a 9 to 10, you’re a promoter. If you’re 6 or lower, you’re a detractor. If you take promoters minus detractors, that gives you a net promoter score. It’s not a complex thing. If you worked at a company, it’s “would you recommend your friends to work there.” If you did, you’d be a promoters, if you didn’t , you’d be a detractor.

We can then go and look at the groups of folks who say no and say “why not?” And when they say no, there are specific reasons. And when they say yes, we’d like to figure out why you say yes. And it usually [is] innovative products, quality or great support. And and when they say no, it comes down to quality, support or ease of doing business. So at the end of the day we are driving those two metrics - loyalty and market share.

It’s simple, really. Almost like Ross Perot explaining the deficit.