Today’s Financial Times reports on its US front page that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp may spend $2 billion in a “drive to become dominant internet force”.
Leave aside that $2 billion doesn’t buy you very much in the way of Internet force (the same paper reports that Yahoo! will spend $1 billion for 40% of Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba). And you can view with appropriate scepticism Murdoch telling the FT that he is in “very advanced negotiations to buy a controlling interest in a wonderful search engine”.
The problem is that companies like News Corp have consistently shown themselves to be incapable of becoming part of the Internet. Murdoch did make a perceptive speech earlier this year, true, but that doesn’t change his character or the character of his company. News Corp is built on the principles of gatekeeper, we-are-the-authority media, a long distance from the two-way essence of the Internet. Their recent $580 million offer for Intermix Media, which owns MySpace.com shows to me how limited their ambitions will have to be. However much News Corp spends, I’m sure they won’t become a key company for the Internet.
There’s another puzzle about the FT article to me. Who on earth decided that this kind of speculative, puffy news story deserved to be one of only three on the front page? I hope the key editors are all safely in Tuscan villas this week, rather than making such baffling editorial decisions.
A couple of days ago the lead story was “Citigroup eyes Latin banks” or somesuch, based — as far as I could tell — on absolutely nothing. But the FT had managed to land an interview with Chuck Prince, and so they put Citi on the front page, despite the fact that Prince had told them nothing whatsoever. From reading the story, it’s far from obvious that the word “Latin” even passed his lips. Similarly in this case it seems that the reporter managed to get a couple of quotes out of Rupert Murdoch, and any interview with KRM automatically gets front-page treatment.
Lance-
I recently joined Fox Interactive Media after a nearly three-year stint at ESPN.com. The reason I joined is because the powers that be at FIM understand how media consumption is changing, and how we must build products that cater to an audience that want to consume its content where it wants it, when it wants it. I didn’t want to spend any more time selling the idea that the way of the future was in conversations and disaggregated content, not walled gardens and traditional portals.
Please keep an eye on FIM. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Kareem
I hope that’s the case. I’m not anti-Mainstream Media. We need more truly interactive, conversational media whether it comes from individual bloggers or large corporations.
I agree. Stay tuned. =)
Is there any update as to what actually happened with News Corp? and indeed the prices and figures involved.