Murdoch: WSJ Will Take NYT Market Share In "Months"; Baffled By The YHOO/MSFT Mess (NWS)
We love listening to Rupert Murdoch talk, mostly because Rupert Murdoch loves to talk. But perhaps because we're professional Rupe-watchers, we've heard a lot of what he had to say about News Corp., the news business, MySpace, etc. On the other hand, because his D chat was a leisurely, discursive romp of an interview, there was all sorts of interesting Rupe musings about the economy (the U.S. is deeply screwed for at least 18 months, but he's a big believer in a long boom), politics (he hasn't decided who he's voting for, but he's ready for Obama to make him a believer), and Keith Olbermann (not interested in hiring back his former employee to work at Fox News, in case you were wondering). We'll sum that up in a separate post.
For the tech and businesss set:
- Rupe talked a big game re: plans for the WSJ. He thinks he'll take market share from the NYT in a matter of months by pushing into general news.
- He can't figure out the Yahoo/Microsoft deal at all: He doesn't understand how Jerry's been able to not sell the company when offered a huge premium, and he can't figure out why Microsoft was unable to make it happen. One theory: MSFT isn't used to making huge deals.
- Hulu important to him because it's a way to control his copyrighted material. But if that's the case, why didn't he sue YouTube, a la Viacom? "We had mixed feelings about it, but when it came down to it, we figured it was doing more to promote our shows than it was to hurt them".
Transcript notes follow, video at end of post...
Will Newspapers Survive? [The Chart]
News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch told the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference that print newspapers would outlast him. Not so sure. Industry analyst Mark Potts has been telling clients that rising online advertising will finally offset the decline of print revenues by about 2012. (That's his chart on the right, with online revenue in red making up for the shrinking blue, so overtaken by events that it now represents the optimistic scenario.) But the American Journalism Review challenges Potts' assumptions: traditional newspaper revenues are declining more rapidly than the analyst predicted; and the AJR's Charles Layton reckons their websites will never make up the difference (see left). Ouch.
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This is one reason why Rupert Murdoch is complaining about 8.3 editors touching the average story in the Wall Street Journal. When I taped a segment for CBS News once, I counted 12 people who touched it before it was even edited for air. At Time Inc., the were famous for editing and re-editing every story until it was churned into butter. At The Times, there are three editors for every reporter. But when I consulted at About.com, it had about eight writers for every editor (that ratio has since changed). About.com, like blogs, is a publish-first, edit-later operation. On this blog, you could say that I have no editors — or you could say that I have 100,000 of you.
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