Rupert Murdoch – Page 6

One final word (I hope) on Olbermann

olbermann_20101110 — Olbermann addressing his suspension last night. Click on image to see video.

One thing I could have made clearer in what has proved to be a fascinating discussion about Keith Olbermann’s political donations is that my support for the principle of journalistic independence should not be confused with support for the specific NBC News policy that tripped him up.

The policy, as reported by Politico, is absurd, as it cites the need to remain an “impartial journalist” as its justification, and states that employees may make contributions if they seek permission:

Anyone working for NBC News who takes part in civic or other outside activities may find that these activities jeopardize his or her standing as an impartial journalist because they may create the appearance of a conflict of interest. Such activities may include participation in or contributions to political campaigns or groups that espouse controversial positions. You should report any such potential conflicts in advance to, and obtain prior approval of, the president of NBC News or his designee.

No one would consider Olbermann to be an impartial journalist, and I can easily believe he had no idea he was violating policy when he donated to three Democratic politicians. Not to be belabor the point, but the principle that I think matters is independence, not impartiality. Check out the nine principles in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s “Elements of Journalism.” You will note that two of them deal with independence, but objectivity isn’t even mentioned.

In his commentary last night, Olbermann implicitly described himself as a journalist by saying that the policy needs to be reconsidered in light of “21st-century journalism.” He is doing journalism of a sort. If you can find a meaningful difference between one of Olbermann’s “special comments” and Frank Rich’s Sunday column in the New York Times (one of my favorite reads), then you’re able to draw distinctions that elude me. And I don’t think anyone would argue that Rich isn’t a journalist.

Olbermann last night not only admitted he should have changed a “Worst Person” segment because of one of his donations, but he also quite properly pointed out the problems that would have ensued if he had contributed to Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva before having him on the show rather than after. That strikes me as a pretty good summation of why even opinionated hosts shouldn’t write checks to politicians.

A final observation: A number of people have criticized me and others for obsessing over Olbermann’s small contributions when Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity routinely donate to politicians, and when Fox News major domo Rupert Murdoch has no scruples about giving $1 million to the Republican Governors Association.

They’re right, of course. Fox News is strictly a talk-show operation — the video equivalent of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. MSNBC aspires to something higher than that. To say that MSNBC is a mirror image of Fox News is akin to arguing that the Nation is just like the Drudge Report. Rachel Maddow explained the difference quite well on Friday. But I don’t think it’s necessary to say “of course, Fox is worse” every time I write about MSNBC.

NBC handled the Olbermann matter badly right from the start, though the final result — a two-day suspension — strikes me as fitting the offense rather well. I’m glad Olbermann is back. And I agree with him that NBC ought to take another look at its policy. I’d make it tougher and clearer.

Amazon’s move is a boon for digital newspapers

The future of digital newspapers just got a lot more interesting.

The New York Times reports that Amazon has decided to let newspaper and magazine publishers have a 70 percent cut of Kindle revenues, a substantial increase over the current 30 percent. In order to qualify, though, those publishers will have to agree to let Amazon sell subscriptions to anyone who has a device with Kindle software installed on it. (Unlike books, you had to have Amazon’s Kindle hardware device in order to download newspapers and magazines.)

When that happens, you’ll be able to read the Kindle editions of your favorite newspapers and magazines on an iPad, a smartphone or the forthcoming Google tablets.

Given the halting nature of newspaper and magazine rollouts for the iPad (stemming in large measure from a dispute between Apple and publishers over who gets to see customer data), this is a boon on two levels. It gives non-Kindle tablet owners a viable workaround until Apple and the publishers can get their act together — and it provides Apple with a huge incentive to make that happen, along with some rare leverage for the publishers.

Meanwhile, John Ellis points to an analysis showing that paid online distribution may have a future: at Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London, online readership is down but revenues are way up since the Times erected a pay wall earlier this year.

Earlier: “The resurrection will be slightly delayed.”

Rupert Murdoch’s dubious donation

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that Rupert Murdoch’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association may backfire on him.

Kevin Convey leaves Herald for New York’s Daily News

Big news today at One Herald Square: Kevin Convey, a longtime Herald veteran who’s been editor-in-chief for the past three-plus years, is leaving to become editor of New York’s Daily News. He replaces Martin Dunn, whose departure was reportedly prompted by his wife’s battle with cancer.

I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but Dunn was editor of the Herald for a very brief period in the early 1990s.

Convey’s new job entails a switch of tabloid loyalties. In Boston, the Herald is allied with its former owner, Rupert Murdoch. Herald publisher Pat Purcell, who bought the paper from his old boss in 1994, helps Murdoch run regional properties such as the Standard-Times of New Bedford and the Cape Cod Times.

In New York, the Daily News — owned by real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, who also has significant Boston ties — has been entangled for years in a steel-cage death match with the New York Post, whose owner, of course, is Murdoch. Here is the Daily News’ press release, along with Convey’s reaction:

I am looking forward to the challenge of editing the Daily News, which has some of the most talented people in the newspaper business and the web anywhere in the world. It is a great privilege.

Convey’s a smart guy who took over the Herald at a time when the paper, and the news business in general, was shrinking drastically. During the 1990s, he was part of the triumvirate that ran the paper, serving as managing editor for features along with editor Andy Costello and managing editor for news Andrew Gully. The trio was known, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not, as the “Micks with Dicks,” a commentary on their aggression as much as it was on their ethnicity.

Convey became editor-in-chief of Community Newspaper Co., which published about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, when Purcell added it to his holdings in the early 2000s. After Purcell sold CNC to GateHouse Media a few years later, Convey returned to the Herald, serving as the paper’s number-two while editorial director Ken Chandler, tarted it up and made it more gossipy — more of a tabloid, if you like. After Chander moved on, Convey took over.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote about Convey’s Herald in 2008.

Best of luck to Convey, who’s a good guy, and whom I generally found to be helpful and accessible back when I was covering the local media for the Boston Phoenix.

Needless to say, it will be fascinating to see who ends up succeeding Convey at the Herald.

Update: Well, that didn’t take long.

Correction: Ken Chandler’s name now fixed, thanks to an alert reader.

Turning seed corn into junk food

This will probably be my last post until after Christmas. But I wanted to note that the Standard-Times of New Bedford will erect a pay wall around its Web site starting Jan. 12.

As Jon Chesto of the Patriot Ledger notes, it’s not entirely unanticipated, since the Standard-Times’ owner is Rupert Murdoch, who has launched a crusade against free content. Murdoch’s man in New Bedford is Boston Herald owner Pat Purcell, who says he’ll unveil his own paid-content system sometime next year as well.

Though I think pay walls are a bad idea, the Standard-Times’ system is better than some: you’ll be able to read up to 10 stories a month without paying, which means the paper won’t be completely closing itself off to the outside blogosphere.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that the Standard-Times’ fine Web site, South Coast Today, won’t deteriorate under the new system. It’s a shame, because the paper’s original Web site, www.s-t.com, was a pioneering effort that garnered national attention back in the mid-1990s.

The print edition may well realize some short-term gains — no longer will local readers be able to catch up on news in Southeastern Massachusett for free. But Murdoch and Purcell are turning their seed corn into Fritos.

Photo (cc) by Daniel R. Blume and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Huffington-Murdoch hatefest hits D.C.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dt2-mqgCZ8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

New Haven Independent editor Paul Bass, on a busman’s holiday in Washington, covers dueling speeches by Huffington Post impresario Arianna Huffington and international media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch has been much in the news of late for threatening to make his properties invisible to Google and to cut a deal with Google’s leading competitor, Microsoft’s Bing — the better to stop aggregators like HuffPost from “stealing” his content.

Particularly entertaining is a video (above) Bass posts of Huffington explaining to Murdoch how to insert a line of code that would stop Google from searching his sites.

Huffington and Murdoch spoke at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism.

What a Bing News deal might mean for journalism

cash_register_20091130 I can’t remember the last time the media world was as excited about a business deal that may or may not be consummated as the one involving Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch. The reason, I think, is three-fold.

First, it potentially moves us beyond the tired old debate about pay walls (I say “potentially,” because we don’t know if Murdoch will give up on that misbegotten notion).

Second, it could provide an answer to the question of who should pay whom, and how.

Third, it could represent a monetary boost for paid journalism at a moment when the profession is in the midst of an existential crisis.

In simple terms, here’s how the deal might work. Microsoft is said to be offering to pay Murdoch and other newspaper publishers (and you’d need a lot of them; Rupe can’t do this alone) to make their sites invisible to Google, a simple matter that involves inserting a line of code. Thus if you wanted to search for a news story about, say, President Obama’s upcoming speech on Afghanistan, you would have use Microsoft’s Bing instead of Google.

Bing News would compete with Google’s automatically assembled Google News service. But, unlike Google, Microsoft would share advertising revenues from Bing News with the news organizations to which it is linking.

To be sure, Google News is the most benign of aggregators. It places no advertising on its home page. That’s important because it’s a customizable substitute front page. Most people read a news site by scanning headlines and ledes, and only occasionally clicking on a story. Thus, if Google were to try to make money from the Google News home page, it could rightly be accused of stealing the most valuable parts of newspaper stories and profiting from that theft. (And, as we know, there are aggregators that do precisely that. As I’ve argued before, Michael Wolff’s Newser may be the most blatant.)

If you search Google News, you will be shown ads related to what you’re looking for. But as Howard Owens has pointed out, if you are searching for a news story on a particular topic, then you are going to click through. Those are valuable readers whom Google is sending to news organizations. And, as Jeff Jarvis argues, it’s not Google’s fault if newspaper executives haven’t been able to figure out how to monetize the audience Google is sending to them.

With that bit of background out of the way, let’s turn this on its head. One of the things about Internet commerce that makes for such fascinating — and frustrating — debate is that it’s unclear which direction the money should be moving in. Even though Google has attempted to step lightly with its news service, Murdoch and some other news executives argue that Google should share ad revenues generated by Google News.

But imagine, if you will, an alternative universe in which newspaper sites were rolling in advertising revenues from readers Google sent their way, but in which Google itself couldn’t find a way to make any money. (Such a scenario requires you to believe a number of ridiculous things, but never mind.) Can you imagine what the debate would be? You’d hear demands that cash-fattened newspaper owners share some of their newly gotten wealth with Google. You’d hear threats that Google would exclude news sites that refused.

My point is that there isn’t really any underlying principle as to who ought to pay for what online. Rather, the debate is driven by who’s making money, who’s losing money and — here’s where we get back to Microsoft — the business model of any particular Internet company.

What is Microsoft’s business interest with respect to Bing? Simply this: to build market share, establishing Bing as a serious search alternative to Google. Bing has a long way to go, with 10 percent of the market to Google’s 65 percent. That said, Bing has received good reviews since its debut earlier this year. And it’s really the only search engine to emerge as any kind of rival to Google pretty much since Google slipped into view in the late 1990s.

Bing News, as a partner of news sites rather than a rival, would have some advantages over Google News. The biggest would be that it wouldn’t have to pussyfoot around with regard to advertising. Since it would be sharing revenue, it could assemble an ad-laden home page, and make its search results more advertising-driven than Google News’ are.

Since it would be sharing those revenues, the news organizations, rather than complain, would be cheering Microsoft on. And if users came to understand that they had to visit Bing in order to search, say, the world’s 100 or so biggest and best newspapers, then Bing would quickly gain market share at Google’s expense.

Sadly, this would represent a significant setback to Google’s vision of indexing all the world’s knowledge. But there has always been an inherent tension in leaving it to a private corporation to carry out such a utopian plan. Look at the ongoing battle over Google Books, which would benefit everyone, but none more than Google.

It would also represent business as usual for Microsoft, which dominated the 1980s and ’90s not by offering more to its customers but by crippling its competitors. This is a company that, as legend would have it, built market share for its spreadsheet, Excel, by rewriting MS-DOS — its Windows precursor — so that the leading program, Lotus 1-2-3, wouldn’t run properly. “The job’s not done till Lotus won’t run” is one variation of the supposed battle cry heard in Redmond. Paying newspapers to pull out of Google is just the latest iteration of that theme.

But will it work? Is there any way a Bing News service could generate the sort of advertising revenue that would make up for a significant chunk of what the traditional media have lost? Somehow it seems doubtful. Still, it strikes me as a far more worthy experiment than whatever Steven Brill has been cooking up with his paid-content scheme for lo these many months. I hope we’ll get a chance to see how this all plays out.

More on Murdoch and Microsoft

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a closer look at Rupert Murdoch’s dalliance with Microsoft, whose search engine, Bing, is emerging as the main competitor to Google.

The Murdoch-Microsoft story, which I first wrote about last week, got a huge boost yesterday in the Financial Times. Today the New York Times follows up.

Rupe to Google: Bing this, mate

Murdoch_on_Bing Two things are clear about Rupert Murdoch’s pronouncements that he will build a pay wall around his sites, and that he’ll make them invisible to Google’s search engine.

First, he’ll fail utterly if that’s all there is. (How much would you pay for NYPost.com? Yeah, I thought so.) Second, given his track record as a media visionary, we should be cautious not to assume that’s all there is. As I told Chris Lefkow of Agence France Presse a few days ago, Rupe has a history of being two or three steps ahead of everyone else.

Now, it’s unclear what Murdoch may have in mind, and it’s likely that’s because he doesn’t know yet, either. But a media-savvy Media Nation reader has been feeding me stories suggesting that newspaper publishers — including Murdoch — may be inching toward an embrace with Microsoft, whose well-regarded search engine, Bing, has quickly established itself as the number-two competitor to Google.

Imagine some of the ways that this might work. Let’s start with the fact that all any Web publisher has to do is insert some code into its site in order to stop Google News from including it in its search results. No one dares do that, because Google drives lots of traffic to those sites. But publishers have long chafed at Google’s refusal to share any of its ad revenue with them.

But if you had to use Bing rather than Google in order to find content from a number of Big Media players, then you’d have to broaden your searches to two engines. Murdoch and his fellow media moguls might keep their sites open (smart) in return for Microsoft sharing the revenue it earns from selling ads tied to news content.

Or Microsoft might devise a more fine-tuned digital-rights-management system so that content-providers could offer a variety of open, closed and semi-open options (not so smart). There might even be a way for Google to include such content in its own searches as long as it didn’t upset Bing’s infrastructure.

At TechCrunch, Mike Butcher describes meetings that Microsoft is already having with European publishers. According to Butcher, Microsoft is prepared to invest nearly $170,000 in research and development. (I realize this sounds a bit like Lorne Michaels’ offering the Beatles $3,000 to reunite on “Saturday Night Live.”)

Jason Calacanis imagines Microsoft making a pitch that goes something like this:

Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and 3,894 other newspapers and magazine?

Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!

Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!

At Slate, Jack Shafer has more, with links from others hypothesizing what may be happening.

What’s clear is that Murdoch is going to try something dramatic, and that he’ll most likely have some major players on his side. What he’s saying right now may bear little resemblance to the strategy that ultimately emerges.

More: Poynter’s Rick Edmonds is thinking similar thoughts.

Earlier: Rupe prepares to take the plunge.

Rupe prepares to take the plunge

News executives love to rail against Google as a parasite that steals their content. Yet none dares to insert a simple piece of code that would make their sites invisible to Google’s search engine.

Until now. Rupert Murdoch, the biggest, baddest media mogul of them all, says he’s moving ahead with plans to start charging for content across the News Corp. mediascape. And he adds that when the moment arrives, he will indeed block Google from indexing his content.

Murdoch even goes so far as to say that he’ll eventually mount a legal challenge to the doctrine of fair use, which allows third parties to use small snippets of copyrighted material without permission for certain purposes, including education and criticism — and, in Google’s view, search indexing.

Publishers have long had a love-hate relationship with Google and Google News. On the one hand, Google News, for many people, has established itself as a substitute front page, making newspaper home pages all but irrelevant. On the other hand, many newspaper.coms receive much of their traffic from Google.

Now Murdoch has adjusted the equation to pure hate.

Two predictions:

First, he may enjoy some success in shoring up WSJ.com, by far his highest-quality outlet, which is already partly subscription-based. But if he thinks people will pay for online access to the sagging New York Post or even a successful operation like Fox News, then he’s going to learn a bitter lesson.

Second, by essentially killing his Web sites, he may well succeed in shoring up print circulation. That’s a short-term strategy, but it may be exactly what he’s got in mind.

Photo of Murdoch at the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davis is (cc) by the World Economic Forum, and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.