Rupert Murdoch has a way with news

Carl Bernstein, investigative reporter of Watergate fame, and Roger Cohen of the New York Times debate the media legacy of Rupert Murdoch in the wake of the News of the World implosion. Bernstein begins ...
 Has Rupert Murdoch changed the news of the world? by KCRW

News of the World scandal leads to new arrests

British police today arrested the former spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron in the ever-worsening scandal over phone hacking at News of the World. The family of Rupert Murdoch has already vowed to shutter the 168-year-old tabloid on Sunday.

Four Tuesday

1. News Corp.-owned MySpace is about to be sold for an astonishingly low $30 million and will probably devoured (half the staff could be laid off). No one is surprised. And no one has heard of the potential buyers. All Things D

2. The merging and consolidating at AOL-Huffington Post begins in earnest this summer. Many of the AOL landing sites will be folded into Huffington Post - Politics Daily gets rolled into HuffPost Politics, for example. As a result AOL's brands will drop from 53 to 20 and HuffPost will expand from 28 to 36 sections. TechCrunch

3. AOL's streamlining reminded me of a 2009 post I wrote. Maybe I was on to something. Reporter G

4. The New York Times Co. has partnered with USC to offer online extension courses. This is about branding and making money. Only one of the 40 courses has to do with journalism. Inside Higher Ed (found via LA Observed)

Down for the hit count at The Daily

Rupert Murdoch's The Daily, a tablet-only news digest in need of subscribers, has a hard-hitting story up about a stripper therapist. A version of the story is available online, along with video - it doesn't include actual nudity, or any actual therapeutic advice. Here's the words-only summary:

Sessions begin with White fully clothed. As the hour proceeds, she asks if the patient (who are, unsurprisingly, mostly male) minds if she removes her shirt.

Then her skirt. Then her bra and underwear. The patient rarely minds.

One-hour sessions cost $150, and at first are conducted over webcam. Once a level of trust has been established, patients can book in-person sessions, though the price increases fivefold.

The same writer, using the same participatory style, recently did some hits-hunting work for the New York Post, where he profiled a masturbation meditation class.

(found via Gawker)

MySpace cuts again

MySpace will cut 500 jobs from its worldwide operations, AP confirms. A good number of those people work at the company's headquarters in Beverly Hills. The decision was expected and comes two years after another mass layoff, which sent 420 people out the door. MySpace is owned by News Corp.

News Corp's English coverup

The UK-based tabloid "News of the World" is mixed up in a juicy scandal of its own making, one that involves hacking celebrity and government phones, payoffs, jailed journalists, a curiously stalled investigation, and conveniently forgetful executives. Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review offers a fascinating recount of the affair, which raises serious question about the ethics of Rubert Murdoch's UK media empire.

Four in the morning

1. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is building a "newspaper" for your iPad and mobile phone. LAT

2. The science of the crime lab isn't so scientific. News Observer

3. Marketplace described as Twitter on radio (meant in a good way). Nieman Journalism Lab

4. Blogger goes inside Mexico's drug war. AP

Microsoft, News Corp to challenge Google

The Financial Times reports that Microsoft and News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal, have joined together to challenge the dominance of Google as an aggregator of online news content.

From the FT:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

...the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

...the biggest beneficiary of the tussle could be the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct a reliable online business model that adequately replaces declining print and advertising revenues.

The Wall Street Journal has long held the line against giving away all of its online content for free. Meantime, Microsoft's Bing search engine has looked for ways to compete with Google. For its part, Google told FT that newspaper content doesn't account for much online revenue. But how many more people might think "Bing" when they first sign on the Internet in the morning to look for the news (depending, of course, on how many papers follow News Corp's lead)?

The deal that wasn't was the worst

Keith Olbermann last night named New York Times reporter Brian Stelter the third worst person in the world for reporting that the heads of GE and News Corp. had brokered a deal to end the bickering between Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly. Stelter earned the ignominy, Olbermann said, because no deal was ever made. Olbermann then went on to name News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch as the very worst person in the world for meddling in O'Reilly's show. James Poniewozik at Time sums up the logic here.

The pawn shops

The New York Times on Friday reported on a bizarre and troubling "cease fire" arranged by corporate executives at G.E. (owner of MSNBC) and News Corp. (owner of Fox News) to end an on-air feud between two of their companies' biggest stars, Keith Obermann and Bill O'Reilly. For some reason Charlie Rose of PBS was involved, too, as a mediator.

Astonishingly, the reason for negotiating a cease fire had nothing to do with journalistic integrity or bettering the civic dialogue. The discussions were triggered by a fear among top executives that the feud, which was good for ratings in the respective news divisions, would harm the carefully crafted images of the corporate parents. As the NYT writes:

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.

“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”

Neither Fox's O'Reilly nor MSNBC's Olbermann are traditional journalists, so their bloviations are not bound by the ethics most newsrooms labor under. One could even argue that by letting their feud boil over, the two hosts had poisoned the atmosphere for their newsrooms by attracting more cynical and partisan audiences and crowding out good storytelling.

But the cease fire wasn't about content or responsible journalism. These discussions were because rich and powerful businessmen wanted to protect their profits. They obliterated the wall that separates news from business and meddled with news content. And their meddling didn't stop with Olbermann and O'Reilly, as the NYT found:

Shortly after, Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, told producers that he wanted the channel’s other programs to follow Mr. Olbermann’s lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees. At Fox News, some staff members were told to “be fair” to G.E.

If you need more convincing to be shocked, Glenn Greenwald at Salon offers an interesting analysis here. He gets breathless at times, but his outrage is aimed in the right direction.

MySpace getting smaller

The social-networking site MySpace plans to cut 30% of its workforce, leaving the Beverly Hills-based company with about 1,000 employees in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reports:

"Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company," MySpace Chief Executive Owen Van Natta said Tuesday.

Both MySpace and the Journal are owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.