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More Wolff on Murdoch:

Tuesdays with Rupert, October 2008

Murdoch’s Private Game, September 2007

Prudence Murdoch

Rupert had his first child with his first wife - Patricia Booker a daughter Prudence, born in 1958.

EXCERPT

The Secrets of His Succession

With six children from three marriages, Rupert Murdoch’s family is a source of endless drama and speculation—most recently about his attractive third wife, Wendi Deng, and their two kids—its dynamics tightly bound to his News Corp. empire. In an excerpt from his forthcoming book about Murdoch’s takeover ofThe Wall Street Journal, Michael Wolff has an inside look at the shifting power struggles and emotional inheritances of Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James Murdoch, as well as Deng’s ascent, for a portrait of that rare phenomenon: the 21st-century dynasty.

by Wolff, Michael

Rupert Murdoch. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz — From Fleet Street to Wall Street: Rupert Murdoch in his office at News Corporation’s headquarters, in Manhattan. *Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.*

Excerpted from The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, by Michael Wolff, to be published in December by Broadway Books;

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/12/murdoch200812

As cautionary tales go, you could hardly find a more hothouse example of families gone awry, of genetic dumbing down, and of the despairing results of idle hands than newspaper families.

The Bancrofts, the old-line Wasp family that had controlled The Wall Street Journal for more than 100 years, had sunk into terminal dysfunction. This was News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch’s opportunity. Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, had long coveted above all else two things: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Now, finally, in the spring of 2007, having studied the Bancroft family’s weaknesses, he believed one of them could be his.

Another benefit of dealing with the hapless Bancroft family was that it made him feel so much better about the dysfunction in his own family (dysfunction is a modish word that irritates him—he uses it only because his children say it so often). The Murdochs, who have had their problems, are not, he is confident, heading in the Bancrofts’ direction—not yet.

The Bancrofts were an unwieldy lot of cousins who hardly knew one another and who had too much money and not enough ambition—and certainly not enough interest in the business that had been left them.

The Murdochs, on the other hand, as steeped in newspapers as any family—Rupert’s father, born in 1885, had been the most famous newspaper publisher in Australia during the first half of the 20th century; his son, the most famous newspaper publisher in the world during the second half—were in pretty good shape. Despite a few operatic meltdowns within the family and several anni horribiles provoked by a new wife, Wendi Deng, 38 years his junior, and new children, Rupert Murdoch had produced a next generation that, he believed, could be counted on. Whatever he did, whatever Anna, his second wife, might say about his absenteeism when his children were growing up—and Homeric it could be—he had done something right. Or Anna had done something right. Or good genes were good genes.

Prudence

Prue, Murdoch’s daughter with his first wife, Patricia Booker, is the only one of his children not directly competing for his business affections. But her husband, Alasdair MacLeod, is a ranking News Corp. executive, so Prue is hardly neutral about the fate of her father’s company. What’s more, her children, James, born in 1991, Angus, born in 1993, and Clementine, born in 1996, are the oldest grandchildren, which strategically positions them in the dynastic stream.

Still, Prue, at 50, feels free enough to have morphed into the official Murdoch-family wing nut. She gets away with saying what the others won’t, even things that the others won’t think, and she takes the various family members much less seriously than they do themselves. This involves, not least of all, seeing her three oldest half-siblings—Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James—as, each in his or her way, master-race prototypes. Where Prue is short, plump, unfashionable, and rather disheveled, her half-siblings are each striking, precise, intense—almost too good to be true, at least at first glance. (Both of her half-brothers married models, each of whom bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the boys’ mother, Anna—striking, precise, intense—and hence to their sister Elisabeth, who is her mother’s clone.)

Prue’s mother, Patricia, an airline hostess and sometime department-store model, whom Murdoch met and married in Adelaide in 1956, was always regarded by Rupert’s mother as less than she should have been. When he divorced her, in 1966, she married a bad-news Swiss jet-setter by the name of Freddie Maeder, with whom she began a partying life (funded with her former husband’s money), often leaving Prue behind. When Rupert marries Anna Torv, in 1967 (she was not on the face of it a much better match in his mother’s view—an Estonian Catholic is not exactly a catch in Anglo-Protestant-centric Melbourne), nine-year-old Prue begs to live with them. In 1968 the three of them move together to London, where Murdoch acquires first theNews of the World, the 4.5-million-circulation scandal sheet, then the down-market Sun, which becomes the most influential tabloid in Britain, and then, in 1980, The Times of London, the country’s most prestigious paper.

Prue is the difficult stepchild to a pregnant stepmother—and it’s all pretty much downhill from there. Her schooling is a disaster (Murdoch, trying to be an Australian egalitarian, first sends Prue to a London state school—she doesn’t last a term), her behavior often incorrigible, and her relationship with her stepmother at the very least strained and often much worse. In 1974, with three new children, the Murdochs move to New York. Prue, at 15, is plunged into the Manhattan private-school world at Dalton. She’s way out of her element among the New York rich kids.

She’s one of the few Dalton students who don’t go on to college. Murdoch, at this point, still doesn’t see girls as having much of anything to do with what he does, certainly not as part of the future of News Corp. In fact, the only job Prue ever gets at News Corp. is a girl’s job—when she returns to London, she’s briefly a researcher at the magazine in his Sunday tabloid, News of the World.

At 26, she makes what seems to be a favorable marriage to Crispin Odey, who will go on to be the highest-earning hedge-fund manager in London. But a year later they separate.

In 1989, Prue meets and marries Alasdair MacLeod, a Scotsman who shortly goes to work for Murdoch. Prue is strongly against Alasdair’s going into the family business—but Murdoch offers him a job behind her back.

She continues to feel like the stepsister and outsider child—without a place in her father’s empire—and her resentments come to a head in 1999 when she’s plastered on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald under the headline forgotten daughter. Still furious about remarks her father made at a press conference in 1997 in which he’d referred to “my three children,” Prue agreed to sit for the only interview she’d ever given up to that point. In the interview she recounted how, after her father’s public slight, she had had “the biggest row I’ve ever had with my father. I rang up, I screamed at him, I hung up. He was very upset. He then sent the biggest bunch of flowers—it was bigger than a sofa—and two clementine trees.”

The interview appears the day of her half-brother Lachlan’s wedding to Australian supermodel Sarah O’Hare. Prue, who hasn’t seen the interview, arrives at Cavan—the 40,000-acre sheep station outside of Canberra that Murdoch bought in the 1960s—for the wedding and can’t understand why everyone is so tense.

It must be “your fault,” she says to her father, telling him it has to do with his separation from Anna, after 31 years, announced the spring before.

“It has nothing to do with me,” Murdoch says. “It’s your fault.”

“You’ve got Wendi holed up in a hotel in Sydney, and you’ve got Anna here hating you. Why is it my fault?” (At Anna’s request, Wendi Deng hadn’t been invited.)

“Did you not see the front page? You’ve upset them all.”

And yet she is in some ways the child Murdoch is most comfortable with—or at least the child who is least afraid of him. Within the company in Australia, people remark that she treats her father more like a husband—an irritating husband she has to beat some sense into. For her part, she finds it just slightly unsettling that he regularly mistakes her for one of his sisters.

Indeed, Prue is the only real ally he has in the family when Wendi comes into the picture (still, she tells an Australian documentary-film maker, he’s a “dirty old man”). This comes close to costing her: during the divorce negotiations, Anna, who is trying to guarantee that neither Rupert’s new wife nor possible new children will gain an interest in News Corp., tries to assign Prue a lesser position in the family trust. Her father, however, insists on her equal place.

Elisabeth

Murdoch’s ideas about girls seem to change substantially with Elisabeth, born 10 years after Prue. This is partly about the broad cultural change that’s happening as Elisabeth is growing up. But it’s also that Elisabeth is growing up in New York. She goes to the Brearley School, where Murdoch is hardly the only billionaire father and where Elisabeth is not even the most notable heiress.

Wendi and Rupert with (from left) James and his wife, Kathryn; Elisabeth and her husband, Matthew Freud; and Lachlan and wife Sarah.By Tom Stoddart/Getty Image

It’s a steam bath of competition—academic and social and, not least of all, for ultimate worldly position.

He begins raising her with an idea of how he was raised. When Elisabeth is in the ninth grade, he sends her to Geelong Grammar, in southeastern Australia, the same school his parents sent him to, which he had hated. It isn’t any better an experience for Elisabeth. She’s back within a year.

She is often uncontrollable—including a suspension from school for drinking. She fights more with her strict, formal mother than with him. Away so often, he’s the good guy.

He doesn’t actually want to know what she’s up to. He’s careful not to know.

Petronella Wyatt, the daughter of his British friend (and Margaret Thatcher confidant) Woodrow Wyatt, has Liz, in her memory of a teenage summer trip, climbing on the back of a Vespa and roaring off with an Italian man who chatted them up in a Roman bar.

She goes to Vassar College from Brearley. In her senior year, she falls in love with Elkin Kwesi Pianim, the son of a Ghanaian political prisoner. Murdoch sends Elisabeth to work for News in Australia after she graduates—not without thinking the distance might end her relationship with Elkin. But she wants to come back.

In September 1993 she marries Elkin in a huge Catholic wedding in Los Angeles. Elkin, of course, goes to work for Fox.

But Elisabeth remains restless. She persuades her father to help her do something on her own. He suggests that television stations are a good bet. The following February (only weeks before having her first baby, Cornelia), with a loan from Australia’s Commonwealth Bank facilitated by her father, she and Elkin buy two small NBC affiliates in California for $35 million. She’s a harridan of a manager—ripping through the staff, sacking many old stalwarts, and slashing operating costs. Eighteen months later, she and Elkin sell the stations for a $12 million profit.

She gets into Stanford Business School. “I called my dad and said, ‘I’ve gotten into Stanford and I’m going.’

“He said, ‘Are you fucking crazy? No, you are not. I can give you a much better M.B.A. of life than anybody at Stanford can give you, you know. Come work for me.’ ”

She joins BSkyB, a satellite television provider controlled by News Corp., based in London, in 1996, reporting directly to the C.E.O., Sam Chisholm, then promptly becomes pregnant with her second child, Anna. She also becomes a high-profile figure in the London-media social scene.

At Sky, she clashes publicly with Chisholm, who refers to her openly as a “management trainee.” Murdoch chooses his child over his manager, and in 1997 Chisholm resigns.

But Murdoch, annoyed by Elisabeth’s failure to get along with Chisholm, her latest pregnancy, and the increasingly critical reports of her London life, doesn’t give her the top job. Elisabeth “has some things to work out,” he tells Mathew Horsman, a reporter from The Guardian. “She has to decide how many kids she is going to have, where she wants to live.” He adds of his children, “Currently it is their consensus that Lachlan will take over. He will be the first among equals, but they will all have to prove themselves first.”

Elisabeth starts working with Matthew Freud, great-grandson of Sigmund and the most notorious P.R. man in London, on a rebranding campaign for Sky—and, not incidentally, on an effort to improve her profile in the press. Their affair shortly becomes public.

Disappointed by Lachlan’s ascendancy within the company, and taking her mother’s side in the marital battle with her father, and once again pregnant—by Freud—Elisabeth resigns from Sky in May 2000, saying that she plans to start an independent production company. Over both of her parents’ objections, she marries Freud in the British wedding of the year at his country home in August 2001.

By the time her father is thinking about buying The Wall Street Journal she’s running the biggest independent television production company in the United Kingdom.

Lachlan

He’s the first son, which has a profound pull on Murdoch. It also may be that frictionless, affable, constant Lachlan is easy to get along with. Uncomplicated. This is what makes him, in the eyes of the many Murdoch-philes, not Murdoch enough. Curiously, though, it makes him more Australian, which has become his adopted, or in a sense reclaimed, home.

Within a few months of his abrupt and emotional leave-taking from News, in 2005— partly because his father’s executives have ganged up on him, partly because his father can’t give up control—he and his wife, Sarah, have not just settled into Sydney but have become pop-culture figures. He’s as famous in Australia as Prince William in England. His wife becomes the head of the major Murdoch charity in Australia, and, in 2007, the hostess of a popular morning show. They’re the king and queen of Bronte Beach. Australia is his place.

Yet he is hardly Australian. He was born in London in 1971 but grew up in New York. It was a wholly upper-class, establishment—liberal Eastern establishment, to be sure—American upbringing. Dalton and Trinity, in Manhattan. Then Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts. Then Princeton.

After Princeton, Lachlan spends a couple of months at News Corp.’s Sydney headquarters as a management trainee before it’s announced in August 1994 that he will become the general manager of Queensland Newspapers, the Brisbane-based publisher of The Courier-Mail. So at 22—the same age at which his father took over The Adelaide News—Lachlan takes his management role. Three years later—Lachlan’s preternatural good looks, signature tattoos, motorcycle, and famous name having made him an iconic Aussie—he’s promoted to running all of News Corp. in Australia.

That year, 1997, the Murdoch children are summoned to New York, where Rupert tells them that he’s settled the issue of succession and that Lachlan will end up running the company.

Lachlan is a constant newsroom presence in Australia, carefully modeling himself, just as his father had done decades before, as the boy publisher. Among his closest friends in the company is Col Allan, the boozing, bad-tempered editor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, whom Lachlan later appoints as editor of the New York Post.

In 1999 his father brings him back to New York as the head of U.S. publishing and then, a year and a half later, gives him the title of deputy chief operating officer—officially the No. 3 guy at News Corp., behind his father and C.O.O. Peter Chernin.

But, other than the Post, he has no real job—he’s resisted everywhere else at News Corp. in the United States. It’s a lesson that his brother and sister both take keen note of: being too close to their father, and the people who want to be close to him, isn’t a propitious move. Quite the opposite: to be at a distance, at a far remove from the old man, makes them the Murdochs everybody who is also distant from the old man wants to get close to.

Officially, Lachlan will say he’s moving to Australia to look for business opportunities and to give his sons, Kalan, born in 2004, and Aidan, born in 2006, a better life. His father, while not the greatest emotional negotiator, knows that if he is patient his son will surely come back to the company.

James

Unlike Lachlan, James is like his father, News Corp. people believe. Or at least he tries to be. But it may not be so much his father that he’s emulating as some generic idea of the advanced business figure.

In open-necked white dress shirt and steel-rimmed glasses, he’s aggressive, implacable, focused, remote, fit, precise. His father is obviously proud, even perhaps slightly afraid of him, but, one might suspect, a little confused by him, too.

Rupert, being a more clearly primitive business creature, is perhaps most mystified by James’s self-conscious M.B.A.-isms—even more mystified because James does not have an M.B.A. He is so effortlessly programmatic, reductive, and process-oriented. And he’s a marketer—the one thing his father has never been.

Counter-intuitively, James’s diffidence or contrariness, his relative shunning of the family business, is what seems to have paid off. At 15, while working for the Daily Mirror in Sydney, he was famously snapped sleeping during a press conference, and the photo appeared in the rivalSydney Morning Herald the next day.

A bleached-blond hipster, with various piercings, he drops out of Harvard in his junior year, after spending time in Rome, vaguely thinking about a career as an archaeologist. Instead, he decides to make the hip-hop label he’s started in college, Rawkus Records, his full-time career. He swaps out the bleached-blond hair and earrings for a rugged beard and eyebrow stud.

Rawkus is a critical if not quite financial success, with Mos Def and, early in his career, Eminem on the label. His father agrees to buy Rawkus in 1996, and James goes to work in News Corp.’s music-and-tech division.

In 1997 he’s made the head of News America Digital Publishing, a job he will later describe as “doing triage” as he attempts to fix the old empire’s missteps into digital media (though he does not particularly fix anything). His wardrobe changes to sharp suits and thick black glasses in his new persona as the young entrepreneur.

When the Internet bubble bursts, James is shipped out to Hong Kong to run the ailing Star TV business, where he becomes, echoing his father, an apologist for the Chinese government. Among the Murdochs, famously not a verbal bunch, he develops a reputation as the family polemicist. In 2000 he delivers the Alternative MacTaggart, the formal contrarian address, at the Edinburgh Television Festival, and excoriates both English-language centricity and Hong Kong’s democracy movement. The next year, with his father sitting in the audience, he delivers a speech at the Milken Institute, in Los Angeles, accusing Western media of being unfair to the Chinese government and describing Falun Gong as “dangerous” and an “apocalyptic cult.” (Tunku Varadarajan, in The Wall Street Journal, characterizes James as a college dropout involved in the “craft of craven submission to the communist regime in China.”) Sky Asia turns its first profit in his third year of running it. His father promptly moves him to Britain to run BSkyB.

Around this time, inside News Corp., James becomes “the real thing.” Among the reasons James has come to be described in this language (usually when phrases are repeated at News Corp. it means that Rupert has said them first) is that he is not his brother.

The consensus that has formed around James as the better successor comes, at least in part, from the fact that he was farther from the company and from the top job. So the more James was praised, the more that took from Lachlan’s inevitability. The more James was praised, the more his father had an alternative. This reinforces the idea that staying away from the epicenter of News Corp. is the better strategy—one now being followed by Lachlan.

James gets up early, works out at the gym, arrives in the office before anyone else, and leaves in time to put his kids to bed. He has a black belt in karate. Unlike his brother and sister, he stays out of the gossip columns. He tells his P.R. adviser, “You will be a success in this job when the press starts referring to me as the reclusive James Murdoch.” Unlike his father, he has refused to comment on his political views (with the exception of his China coddling) and doesn’t court politicians.

He’s introduced to his future wife, Kathryn Hufschmid, an Oregon-born model, by Lachlan’s future wife, Sarah O’Hare, at a yacht party in Sydney in 1997. The couple get married just outside Old Saybrook, in Connecticut, in 2000, not long before James is shipped out to Asia to head up Star.

The private wedding, a year after Lachlan’s Australian royal-styled affair, was something of a reunion for the family. Wendi and Rupert attended, as did Anna and her new husband, financier William Mann. Dame Elisabeth made the trip from Australia. James read a poem by Pablo Neruda to his bride, and Kathryn responded by quoting James Joyce.

The couple have two children, Anneka, born in 2003, and Walter, born in 2006.

Grace

Wendi’s first child with Rupert, Grace, is born in New York in 2001. As he begins to plot to getThe Wall Street Journal, he’s also worrying about getting Grace, who is fluent in Mandarin and English, into private school in New York. He wants her to go to Brearley, where Elisabeth went. He recruits one of his executives who knows Caroline Kennedy, a Brearley alumna and board member, to get her to write a letter on Grace’s behalf.

Chloe

Chloe, born in 2003, is fluent in Mandarin, too.

Murdoch talks about his children, and their relative potential, with the same openness and tactical nuance that he employs when he talks about anything else that might affect the company. He seems to assume that everybody else has a stake in his kids—that they are figures in the body politic, corporate assets, historic personages. Murdoch’s projection about his children manages to be both compellingly normal and obviously creepy at the same time. This normalcy and creepiness are reflected in the way the company treats them. Except at the highest possible levels of the company, the Murdoch children are accorded not just deference or standing but a kind of love. They represent something—him. Even at the highest levels, the price for pushing Lachlan out was to then declare an alternative Murdoch child, James, “the real thing,” the real Murdoch.

There are now few families living this blood story, this blood imperative. Generally, any effort at this kind of dynastic construct is met with easy ridicule. It’s an extremely difficult modern conceit.

It may be an impossible one. The press scrutiny alone for young people upon whom have been bestowed too much money and too many expectations is deadly. But in this, obviously, the Murdoch children are spared considerable pain—a significant part of the media protects them. And so they have been able to coalesce into dynastic shape.

They’re certainly like the Bushes in their level of advantage, connections, resources, and focus on family entitlement. But they may be more Kennedy-like. The insularity is powerful; there is a sense, especially among Anna’s children—Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James—of being part of a rarefied order, of being judged against it, of there being no escape from it. They are trapped in the Murdoch bubble, in its exceptionalness.

The insularity can seem to take the form of an almost puppy-love closeness. It’s one of Wendi’s first impressions of the family, that they’re always kissing each other and saying, “I love you.” They can’t have a telephone conversation—and they’re always on the phone with each other—without many protestations of love.

Wendi, from a carefully unemotional Chinese family, is a bit weirded out.

And yet there’s an ordinariness to it. Rupert Murdoch is a man obviously burdened by family issues; equally, his children are burdened by a complicated and demanding father. The Murdochs are as fraught as any family, and as connected as the closest of families—there are seldom days he doesn’t speak to each of his children.

He’s not just weighing their futures but plotting their futures with them. He’s not just the patriarch but the mentor and strategist. And if he’s often been the remote father—full of murmured regrets—he is also the long-suffering one, stoically standing by as his children fail to heed him.

So it’s a sort of yuppie-achiever family, everybody in love with everybody else’s success—and everybody just a little too competitive about it and oppressed by the demands.

Of all the bad press coverage of Rupert Murdoch over so many decades, nothing has hurt him so much as the piece by John Lippman and two colleagues, Leslie Chang and Robert Frank, that appeared on the front page of the Journal on November 1, 2000. Charting Wendi Deng’s path to Rupert Murdoch, it was an extraordinary piece of journalism about ambition, guile, and the special abilities of predatory women—specifically, predatory Chinese women. In the W.S.J.’s telling, Wendi Deng was the Yellow Peril.

To the business world, Rupert’s marriage to Anna had long appeared elemental to his success and identity. Anna, who seemed to change her outfit six times a day, gets the Aussie bloke who so often looks like an unmade bed to act at least a little like royalty—although never quite enough (to her taste, anyway).

By the mid-90s, however, Rupert and Anna are barely speaking. News Corp. executives start to notice that they live in separate parts of the big Beverly Hills house. “They passed like shadows in the night,” one former News Corp. executive will say, adding that he believes that, in the seven or eight months before Rupert met Wendi, “he never spoke a word” to Anna. It’s a portrait of a solitary existence: he gets up at four or five in the morning and has a bowl of porridge—“A horse,” he says, “has to have its chaff”—and then, after a shower and shave, drives down the hill to work. He works all morning and then goes to lunch at the Fox commissary, where every day he intently scans the menu and then every day has the same damn thing: grilled chicken, vegetables, and a Diet Coke. It’s practically a Monty Python sketch.

Then he goes home at about 7 and stays on the phone until bedtime, at 11.

If he’s not following this routine, he’s traveling. China has become a sort of liberation. There’s both a messianic sense to this adventure—that he can use modern media to somehow transform China while at the same time making billions—and the typical News Corp. ragtag, throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks business plan. It’s just a bunch of wild Aussies trying to make a killing (and make Rupert happy). Although, as it happens, the Aussies have so far lost several billion dollars of Rupert’s money on his Chinese dream.

It’s one reason Wendi’s arrival at the Star TV offices in Hong Kong in 1996 is so memorable: she’s actually Chinese.

In the Journal’s account, Wendi Deng is an amoral Chinese girl, without prospects, who uses sex and various manipulative skills to seize convenient opportunities—opportunities that she jettisons as soon as better opportunities become available. By dint of coldness and calculation she navigates up the social trajectory of both the United States and China to marry the world’s richest and most powerful media magnate and, by promptly producing two children, ensures herself a central position in all future dynastic developments.

There is great poetic justice in this version, because of course the media magnate brought low by the amoral Chinese girl’s coldness and calculation and preternatural manipulative talents is himself one of the world’s most famous cold, calculating, and preternaturally manipulative sons of bitches. This daughter of a manager at a machinery factory in Guangzhou insinuates herself, in the Journal version of the story, predator-like, into the family of Jake and Joyce Cherry. Jake Cherry is, in 1987, a 50-year-old engineer working in China. His wife, having met 18-year-old Wendi through their interpreter, starts helping the young girl with her English studies. Joyce Cherry returns to Los Angeles to enroll her two young children in school. Wendi and Jake, left to their own devices in Guangzhou, are shortly, according to the Journal, intertwined.

Wendi arrives in Los Angeles in February 1988. Underlining her duplicity and meretriciousness, the Journal points out that she shares “a bedroom and a bunk bed” with the Cherrys’ five-year-old daughter. Anyway, evidence and emotion will out and Joyce, according to the Journal, gets wise to the situation, forcing Wendi, now a student at California State University at Northridge, out of the house. Jake soon follows her and the two marry in February 1990. But in no time at all, she moves on. “She told me I was a father concept to her, but it would never be anything else,” the Journal has Jake saying, adding, “I loved that girl.” She does, however, stay married to Jake for two years and seven months—long enough, the Journal archly notes, to get a green card.

Her next alliance, begun while she’s still involved with Jake, is with a more age-appropriate suitor named David Wolf, a businessman with an interest in China who speaks a bit of Mandarin. She’s involved with Wolf for at least the next five or six years.

The Journal allows as how, at the California State campus, she is regarded as one of the most talented students to pass through the school’s Economics Department. She departs California for Yale’s M.B.A. program. The relationship with Wolf cools, leaving her free to reel in bigger fish. After her first year at Yale, she shows up for her summer internship at Star TV.

But let’s recast the story as a triumphal, even uplifting tale of pluck and achievement. She’s not Becky Sharp, she’s Pip in Great Expectations.

She’s the third child in a provincial family of average station, meaning she’s hungry most of the time in 1970s-and-80s China.

Her two older sisters are away (dislocated by the forces of the Cultural Revolution). Wendi is called “number three.” A third girl, another deprivation. Her parents try again and, finally, produce a boy.

Having learned, having had to learn, how to get attention, she emerges as a young woman of uncommon directness—engaging people with great efficiency and insistence. She’s smart; she’s flirty; she knows she has to look for an advantage. She’s a young person who likes to talk to older people; she’s a young person whom older people like to talk to. And then she meets the American family.

The Cherrys, likely in the thrall of the Chinese Zeitgeist (it’s just getting under way in the late 80s), undoubtedly find her to be an energizing and beguiling young woman. She’s their discovery. Wendi, in her turn—intent on expanding her own horizons, taking pleasure in the pleasure they’re taking in her, caught up herself in the romance of the American Zeitgeist—is equally smitten with them.

The fact that she’s been swept up into what is a problematic marriage, that she’s been appropriated probably in part because it is a problematic marriage, is a circumstance that only an omniscient narrator gets to see. Likely, the 19-year-old isn’t aware of it at all; if she does have some awareness, it’s formless, or in a constellation of factual and emotional variables. The idea—the Wall Street Journal idea—of her as the 19-year-old emotional cat burglar is pure construct.

She arrives in Los Angeles as the guest of the Cherrys at least half a decade before Chinese students in America are a routine part of campus life. She speaks little English. She goes to work in a Chinese restaurant. She registers at the nearest state-university campus.

Almost immediately, the Jake Cherry situation blows up. Here’s the narrow view of even the most sensitive 19-year-old, not to mention one remote from family, country, language: This is just my life happening to me. Obviously—judging from the story’s outcome—she takes on new roles with some ease. The new adventure begins, and she’s open to it—she gets into it, she conforms to it.

The problem may be that she romanticizes each adventure, so after the initial exhilaration, she’s bound to be disappointed. It is not craftiness and duplicity and avarice that are her character weaknesses but, after she cycles through a few adventures, her constant need for excitement, for drama, for change, for the new. For further opportunity.

At the same time, she’s getting educated. And because she’s naturally smart, with a type of studiousness not necessarily common to the adventurous, she’s forging another sort of narrative. While her strained personal life is going on, she’s starting to design another life, envisioning a career, understanding its direction, demands, logistics, exigencies.

Her story, with its domestic dramas, evident personal miscalculations, thoughtlessness, and immaturity, isn’t particularly extreme or more chaotic than that of a great proportion of striving young people—she’s just traveled farther.

Indeed, we may assume that, having gotten a business degree from Yale, she leads a life that is considerably less chaotic and more focused than most. She’s making her way.

It is just because, out of all the women in the world, it is she who ends up married to Rupert Murdoch that we—or The Wall Street Journal—impute Machiavellian method, and systematic amorality, to her upwardly mobile progress.

But, O.K., let’s assume that there is design. She is ambitious, after all. She understands that she has a specific market advantage: she’s a Chinese national with an American M.B.A.

She has an interest in power, in who’s who in the room. There are numerous stories of her at cocktail parties and other gatherings doing thumbnail descriptions of the various men and their achievements, of wittily assessing the playing field, of knowing the gossip. On the one hand, this is avariciousness; on the other, astuteness. Vulgarity or discrimination.

It’s logic as well as design that takes her after her first year in business school to a summer job with News Corp.’s Star TV in Hong Kong. She is, of course, an extraordinarily good candidate, given her background and education.

Almost immediately she distinguishes herself at Star. She’s a presence. A sui generis presence. She has instant stature because she’s a Chinese woman who behaves like an American woman. A Chinese woman who isn’t in the least bit indirect. Every man in the office has a Wendi crush or fixation. She’s both a breath of fresh air and an office fantasy. She’s mascot and fetish. She’s aware of her power, if not exactly in control of it. She speaks constantly, has opinions about everything, eschews self-editing. She has no accurate sense of her place—or, anyway, no compunction about ignoring it. She’s the one person able to turn the hierarchies of a Chinese office—and even an American company in China assumes such hierarchies—into a level playing field.

“To be honest, a lot of the young Chinese executives we were developing,” Star C.E.O. Gary Davey, one of those who encouraged her to go back to Yale, will later recall, “often lacked the courage and initiative that it takes to persistently pursue an opportunity. Very smart people, but there’s a natural shyness to them, whereas Wendi, I mean, she had no fear of anything.”

A year later, in 1997, her degree in hand, she’s back. She’s just a junior staffer. And yet she’s almost immediately elevated (well before Rupert elevates her). There are guilty explanations about her rise.

It is obvious then, when the boss suddenly announces he’s coming to town and needs to be accompanied, needs a guide and translator and aide, that it will be Wendi (in a classic setup, the regular translator is away from the office). She’ll make the office seem sharp, top of the class, cool—indeed, sexy. She’ll make everybody else look good.

So, the circumstance: Rupert, bogged down in a long and tortuous negotiation to get a satellite network off the ground in Japan, decides on the spur of the moment he wants to go to Shanghai and see what he can get going there. He calls Gary Davey and tells him to get to Shanghai, too. It turns out that Davey and the other top people from Star are in Delhi. But Rupert still wants to go and needs a guide, and so Davey says, “All right, I’ve got an M.B.A. for you. She’s really smart.” And Chinese. He calls Wendi and says, “There’s somebody coming to Hong Kong who you’ve got to take to Shanghai. It’s Rupert Murdoch.”

Davey later narrates, “That’s when the flame was ignited. To what extent it was consummated, that we can have no idea of.”

One of the richest and most powerful men on earth, believing he’s about to age out of his reason for being—at the same time he’s looking desperately, inchoately, and not necessarily successfully for new worlds to conquer (China, the heavens, mortality itself)—finds himself with a young woman. And not just a young woman, but a young Chinese woman with impeccable American credentials, who, in addition, is fearless, beautiful, flirtatious, and fundamentally interested in exactly what he’s interested in: power, media, China, getting from point A to point B in this world.

In fact, they talk about business all the time. He’s suddenly not feeling guilty about talking about business all the time. He’s sexy to somebody exactly because he’s talking about business (Anna, on the other hand, had always wanted him to be cultured). And this is a smart person—she’s sparring with him; she keeps his attention.

It’s all so immensely exhilarating to a stuffy old singlet-wearing man.

At the Star offices, it will be a moment for great marveling and sheepishness—and disbelief. Indeed, one morning Rupert calls Davey, who has no idea that a relationship has begun—or even that Rupert and Wendi have seen each other after the Shanghai trip—and says, in a businesslike manner, “You’re probably wondering now why Wendi isn’t back from vacation. Well, she’s with me, and chances are she won’t be coming back to Star TV.” (It’s the stuff of romance novels.)

He may not handle it worse at home than most other departing spouses, but it’s not good. He denies, he prevaricates, he blocks from his consideration the hurt he’s caused or is about to cause. He leaves a confused and devastated family. It is at first, before Wendi’s entrance, just a pained, sad, inexplicable situation, with adult children trying to soothe, mediate, mend, understand. It’s a long-married couple whose grievances, till now held mostly in check, are suddenly heated. Anna’s hurt; he’s hurt. Nobody’s speaking. The whole situation, beyond logic or apparent reason, is unraveling quickly.

First, however, they have to tell his mother. They each go to Cruden Farm, and take long walks in the garden with Dame Elisabeth—unaware of Wendi—who is trying vainly to act as marriage counselor.

Suddenly, there are separate residences. News Corp. legal is going round the clock. And then there is the strange, final announcement through Liz Smith, the New York Post gossip columnist, that Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Murdoch … amicably …

After 31 years of a marriage—during which there is practically nobody who suggests he’s anything more than a suitably repressed, preoccupied, workaholic, henpecked husband—he’s gone.

He continues to deny that there’s anybody else. He will continue, officially, with great difficulty, to deny that Wendi precipitated the split.

Two months after the break with Anna, and three weeks after his daughter Prudence and her family accompany her forlorn father on a sailing holiday where he keeps slipping off to take his behind-closed-door phone calls, he calls Prue, as he’ll call the three other kids, and says, “I just wanted to tell you—hmmm … humm … ahhhh—I’ve met a nice Chinese lady.”

Prue, in the kitchen, gets off the phone and races upstairs, eyes blazing, shouting to her husband, Alasdair, “My God, you won’t believe it!”

Given the billions at stake, the influence at issue, and the dynastic preparations that have been made, not to mention a certain antediluvian and strong-willed matriarch—Dame Elisabeth—who will not be so easily appeased, this is a domestic cock-up of epic proportions.

While such action may seem radically out of character, this is mostly because it involves a woman. Otherwise, it’s very much in character. He closes things off. If he has to sell a business, it’s gone and forgotten. When it comes time to fire a close associate, it doesn’t leave an emotional hole. If he fastens on some new notion or approach or point of view or direction or opportunity, he doesn’t look back. It is, in fact, as though he has some short-circuited or retarded historical mechanism: he instantly loses interest in the past.

So he’s not contrite in the slightest. In fact, he gets his back up.

His mother is uncomprehending and furious. She insults him and belittles Wendi—before even meeting her. Raging and pitiless, she says she will never meet Wendi. Never. Closed subject. He, in his turn, storms off and says, Well then, he won’t speak to his mother.

With Anna, he is, in her view, “hard, ruthless, and determined” as they discuss a settlement. “I began to think that the Rupert I loved died a long time ago,” Anna tells an interviewer. “The Rupert I fell in love with could not have behaved this way. It was so ruthless.”

In the fall of 1998, Murdoch forces Anna off the board of News Corp. At her last board meeting, she delivers, in the presence of her soon-to-be-former husband and her son Lachlan, a scorned-woman valedictory. She says that she has worked for the company since she was 18 years old and this is not just the end of a marriage but the end of a whole life. Lachlan walks her out after her good-bye, deeply angered by what his father has done.

Prue, on the other hand, whose own mother was done in some 30 years before by Anna, finds herself secretly rooting for Wendi. The children show up for Rupert and Wendi’s wedding, on June 25, 1999, 17 days after his divorce, but it’s strained, even coerced. The wedding is onMorning Glory—the 155-foot yacht he and Anna bought, which Anna thought would be their retirement boat—as it circles Manhattan.

It’s only after the wedding that Wendi tells her parents she’s married Rupert Murdoch: “They don’t know who he was. I showed them a newspaper,” she will later recall. “Power of media!”

To the extent that it is possible to change one of the world’s least uncertain and self-doubting men, Murdoch is, in fact, changed, or rehabbed, by his marriage.

The vanity that he’s been discouraged from indulging—by self-consciousness, by Anna’s staid ideal of elegance, by his own views about conspicuous consumption—is suddenly on display. The new suits—“The man went from being a conservative to suddenly wearing Prada suits,” his daughter Prue will say, in continuing disbelief—the fevered workouts, the dyed hair. The urgency and, to many, the ridiculousness of it can’t be missed.

And then China. It’s another reason, inside News Corp. and his family, that Wendi represents such a threat: she represents China.

In fact, Wendi’s real provenance becomes a bizarre and active piece of speculation within News Corp. Where, really, does she come from? Whom might she be reporting to? And just how is it that she knows Jiang Mianheng, the son of China’s president, Jiang Zemin, so well? Hmm?

In February 2001, shortly after he’s finished treatment for prostate cancer, the announcement is made that Wendi is pregnant. Murdoch, at 70, is having his fifth child.

Wendi, whose critics have been accusing her of wanting to be a business figure, the Murdoch who will take over China, re-invents herself as an extraordinary wife. As she will put it to me, “I quit work to work at home. To care for Rupert, slaving, don’t get paid. Construction, chef, and cooking and housecleaning!”

In the spring of 2006, as he’s getting reports about the dysfunctional Bancroft family, he decides to finally resolve his family’s filial and financial dilemma, i.e., who gets what in the family trust after he dies. But he does it on television.

This is both because he does see it as historic and, in its way, necessarily public, and because it’s easier than doing it in person.

Also, it makes it a fait accompli. Decision made. Done. Dealt with. He’s been standing between Wendi and their two children, on one hand, and his adult children, on the other—he has to cast the deciding vote. Which he does on WNET’s The Charlie Rose Show.

With the birth of Grace and Chloe, the family’s financial situation becomes untenable, as his and Wendi’s children, by the terms of his divorce agreement with Anna, are barred from the Murdoch trust and fortune. Wendi’s position is clear: Rupert, fix it.

In this issue of great moment, nearly a matter of state, over the trust, a complex, almost historic agreement—proscribing control over the News empire—Wendi is, to say the least, a discordant note. First of all, she talks constantly, without guile or niceties, boiling it down, reducing, stripping away all conceits, formality, pretense.

Indeed, if that has been the essence of Murdoch-style journalism, he must have been shocked to be so outdone.

His older children resist. They’re furious. In projecting their royalness, it seems to them a terrible breach of etiquette for Wendi—Wendi of all people—to want to interfere with their historic birthright.

It is, however, not just Wendi. If she’s prodding—really prodding—Rupert is himself not about to forgo this further shot at immortality, given two more children, and half-Chinese children, no less.

It’s a long negotiation that begins before Lachlan’s departure from the company and that takes place primarily on the phone with the children and their adult advisers mostly in different countries.

And then, Charlie Rose. His show is a forum that business leaders, especially those in the media, often use to stroke their reputations, or to make valedictory pronouncements, or to smooth over P.R. problems. Rose is a deferential host. His hour-long conversation with Murdoch, which aired on July 20, 2006, was a meandering hodgepodge that seemed to focus mostly on Britain in the 1980s. But then it turned to the message it seems Murdoch was there to impart—a muddled, almost coded message, which made sense only to his family and to those people advising the family on the sticky trust issue. And virtually all of those people were caught off guard. He had either told Charlie Rose more than he intended to or, keeping his own counsel, gone off script to make the private public and therefore definitive.

rose: While you have said that you would like to have a member of the family succeed you—

murdoch: Yes, I think that’s a natural desire.

rose: You’ve said. Either sons or daughters, you’d like to have—

murdoch: They’ve got to prove themselves too.

rose: Where does that stand today? Succession. Lachlan—

murdoch: It’s really up to them.

rose: But, to great pain, when Lachlan left it was painful for you.

murdoch: If I go under a bus tomorrow, um, it’ll be the four of them will have to decide which of the ones should lead them.

rose: Your four children?

murdoch: Yeah, well, and my, uhh, the two little girls are too young to consider this at the moment.

rose: Now do you consider them? You’ve said they are all my children.

murdoch: They’ll all be treated equally—financially, absolutely.

rose: You ran into some buzz saw within the family because of that decision?

murdoch: No, just on a question of power. Would their trustees have votes and these things at the moment, you know? We’ve resolved everything very happily.

rose: It’s your personal business. So, if something happens to you, if you get run over by a bus when you leave this studio, the four kids have to decide who among them ought to be the heir apparent.

murdoch: In terms of power, yes, in terms of leadership. They’ll all get treated equally financially.

What this means is that he has acceded to his older children’s settlement proposal to admit their young half-siblings into the trust economically but to exclude them politically. They will benefit from the company but have no say in how it is run.

Among other elements, this guarantees that Wendi will not be able to act as the regent (with two votes) for her minor children.

The fight that happened between Rupert and Wendi, after the program aired, is News Corp. legend. And yet this is not the stuff so much of recrimination and breakdown, of a rich family’s members at one another’s throats, but of a family with a keen sense of its relationship to the center. The patriarch may be as thoughtless or as hapless at being a father as most, and yet, because of the great stakes here, or because the mythology of the father and the father’s father exists within the family as almost a literal inheritance, or simply because the father, however cornily, is in love with his family, the Murdochs remain one of the last functioning, even highly capable dynasties in the Western world.

Indeed, the battle for The Wall Street Journal once again brought his family to absolute attention, watching the old man in action—Wendi reading him his e-mails, because Murdoch can’t work a BlackBerry—all of them, in their own way, at the edge of their seats.

This is one reason why Rupert Murdoch thought he ought to own The Wall Street Journal and why he thought the Bancroft family, lacking any sense of its purpose, deserved to lose it. If much of the world saw Rupert Murdoch as a quintessentially modern ill, Murdoch saw himself as a very old-fashioned notion, the head of a newspaper family—the last one, possibly, with some game.

Michael Wolff is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

Elizabeth Murdoch- Rupert Murdoch's Mother

Rupert and Anna Murdoch

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James Robinson

James Robinson is Observer media editor. He was previously deputy business editor at the Sunday Express and worked as a reporter for Sunday Business and, before that, the Birmingham Post. He supports West Bromwich Albion

Father and Sun: how the Murdoch dynasty handover crippled Labour
The extraordinary run-in between the Sun and the prime minister over Afghanistan last week was a sign of a more aggressive approach from the tabloid as Rupert Murdoch's son James puts his stamp on the media empire.

ames Robinson
The Observer, Sunday 15 November 2009
Article history

In the 1990s, when the Sun enjoyed unparalleled influence, its editor Kelvin Mackenzie could tell the prime minister John Major that he was about to pour "a large bucket of shit" over him.

Last week's coverage of the Jacqui Janes affair suggests the paper has lost none of its power to intimidate, despite falling sales. Gordon Brown's correspondence with Janes, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, and his subsequent apology, which was secretly taped, dominated the headlines.

The growth of the internet may hasten the hour when the sun finally sets on Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, but it can still make the political weather.

Peter Mandelson took to the airwaves last week, claiming that Murdoch had done a deal with the Tories, promising slavish support – and unstinting criticism of Brown – in exchange for policy concessions.

Brown's phone call to Janes, meanwhile, was quickly followed by another to Murdoch, whom the prime minister described last week as "a friend". During that conversation, Brown told Rupert Murdoch that the Sun'svitriolic attacks over his letter to Janes had been unwise and unfair. He made his points firmly, but was careful to avoid sounding riled. There is a recognition in government that the electorate is unlikely to vote for a man who is bullied by a newspaper proprietor.

Brown and Murdoch have forged an unlikely friendship, based in part on a shared admiration for America, but the prime minister may have been appealing to the wrong man. Murdoch has handed control of his British operation to his younger son, James, who now oversees the European and Asian arm of News Corp, the media conglomerate his father controls, and is being groomed to take charge of the company. One senior industry source with intimate knowledge of News International, the Murdoch subsidiary that owns his UK papers, said that Murdoch senior is "not really interested in Britain" at all.He has been based in America for many years, but his purchase of theWall Street Journal, now the biggest-selling paper in the US, has kept him busy. He is also gearing up for a fight with Google over copyright, a battle he believes he must win to ensure consumers pay for his newspapers' online content. Murdoch didn't phone the prime minister before the Sun loudly declared it had lost faith in Labour on the day of his speech to party conference, according to the source. That should not be regarded as a snub, he added. Murdoch is simply detached from events in the UK. It was Rebekah Brooks (née Wade), the former Sun editor and now chief executive of News International, who delivered the news of the Sun's U-turn to Peter Mandelson after failing to get through to the prime minister. Brooks's importance cannot be overstated. She acts as a foil for Murdoch, an American who can hardly be expected to share her instinctive understanding of the concerns of Sun readers. She was also behind the paper's increasingly rabid attacks on the Ministry of Defence over the summer, which made the Janes controversy such a compelling story for the Sun.Fleet Street sources point out that Brooks began an email exchange with the MoD several months ago, as her time as editor of the Sun drew to a close.She wanted the department to give her reporters better access to Helmand province, where British troops were fighting and dying as they battled to regain control. The department was not keen on the idea but Brooks persisted. The email requests became demands, and their tone grew more belligerent. Shortly afterwards, when it became clear that the MoD was not willing to cooperate, Brooks told it: "The gloves are off." The Sun's coverage has been hostile ever since, offering unqualified support for British troops while traducing their political masters. Its subsequent decision to ditch Labour and back the Tories gave the Jacqui Janes controversy added impetus. Some senior executives who had not relished supporting Labour in the first place seized on the chance to mount a highly personal attack on a man who represents many policies they detest.Murdoch claimed last week that the decision to abandon Brown had been taken by "the editors in Britain" who "have turned very much against Gordon Brown, who is a friend of mine. I regret it." The 78-year-old has always taken the major editorial decisions at the Sun, and to imply that its new editor, Dominic Mohan, could switch its political allegiance without his consent is, at the very least, disingenuous. Crucially, however, it is James Murdoch who masterminded the timing of the decision to swing behind David Cameron, and set the hostile tone of the paper's coverage. "James is behind the decision to make it tough and bloody because he wants to be like his dad," said one acquaintance.The problem, according to his critics, is that he has his father's aggression but does not share his political instincts. Murdoch junior ran pay-TV giant Sky for five years before his promotion in 2007 and his business acumen is not in doubt, but when Rupert placed James in charge of his British operation, he was expecting him to spend as much time in Westminster as he had in the City. Like his father, the 36-year-old James is firmly on the right, but he subscribes to a particularly trenchant form of free market orthodoxy. Those who know him describe him as a radical libertarian who believes that government should stay out of the public sphere, limiting its role to defence and policing. The News International observer described last week's coverage as "bullying" and "mean-spirited", and suggested it was motivated by a genuine dislike of Brown. "The lunatics are now running the asylum," he said. "Back in the day, an editor might disagree with Rupert, but he was a serious person; there were proper checks and balances. If they went over the top Rupert would pull them back." There is little doubt that the Sun's support will give Murdoch leverage over a Conservative government, and that power is already being used. Brooks is thought to have told Andy Coulson, the Tories' director of communications, that the paper could not back David Cameron while Dominic Grieve remained shadow home secretary. He was replaced by Chris Grayling shortly afterwards. Few were surprised when the paper backed Cameron, but James Murdoch's decision to do so long before an election, and risk the ire of an administration that will still be in power for many months, was a bold move. Government sources deny it took revenge on Murdoch last week by placing Ashes cricket matches between England and Australia — currently broadcast by Sky — on the list of "crown jewels" that must be broadcast free-to-air, but it was a timely reminder of how it can make life difficult for the Murdoch empire. Nor is there any hope of a reconciliation. Brown has tried to woo James, said a senior political source, but with little success: "Despite Brown's efforts there is no personal connection between the two men like there was with Rupert." Cameron, in contrast, was quick to cosy up to James, and cemented those ties by hiring the former News of the World editor Coulson, who is close to Brooks, and is also a friend of Mohan. Along with Brooks's new husband, racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, they form a coterie who occasionally socialise at weekends in north Oxfordshire, where the Brooks have a home – as does James's sister, Elisabeth, with her husband, Matthew Freud. Cameron's constituency is also in the county. The Labour party has tried to portray the Tory leader and his new friends in the press as a wealthy, impenetrable clique, although Labour's own relationship with News International is also built largely on a network of fragile friendships. There are rumours of a loss of nerve at the Sun, meanwhile, following a public backlash over its personal attack on Brown. The fact that it spelt Janes's name wrong on its website is acutely embarrassing. Murdoch is heavy-hearted about abandoning Brown. He is not convinced by Cameron, but he know it makes good business sense to back him. In the end, that is the only consideration that really counts

Media

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2008/mar/14/murdoch
Murdoch's printing empire

A peek inside News International's new £350m print plant in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire

Rebecca Lovell and Stephen Brook
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 17 March 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2009/jul/14/news-world-new-evidence

News of the World phone hacking: Guardian shows MPs new evidencehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2009/jul/14/news-world-new-evidence

Documents produced by Nick Davies involve senior News of the World journalists in Mulcaire affair

Murdoch must turn Fleet Street into Quality Street if he wants us to pay

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/15/rupert-murdoch-google-content-payment
Content is already available free - and consumers never paid a realistic price for it anyway

Rupert Murdoch's declaration, in an interview with Sky News, that he was thinking of barring Google's search engine from indexing all of News Corporation's websites, had a magnificent Canutian ring to it and got the blogosphere in a tizz. Some commentators saw it as an early sign of dementia; others interpreted it as an invitation to Microsoft to do an exclusive deal.

Cory Doctorow, for example, thought Murdoch is "betting that one of Google's badly trailing competitors can be coaxed into paying for the right to index all of News Corp's online stuff if that right is exclusive. Rupert is thinking that a company such as Microsoft will be willing to pay to shore up its also-ran search tool, Bing, by buying the right to index the fraction of a fraction of a sliver of a crumb of the internet that News Corp owns".

The prevailing sentiment however can be summed up as a paradox: nobody thinks that a "screw-you-Google" strategy makes sense, but they assume that Murdoch knows something they don't, and that the strategy will make sense when all is revealed. In that way, the Digger is rather like Warren Buffett: his past investment record is so good that people are wary of questioning his judgment.

I have no idea what Murdoch's thinking, but I know what he's thinking about, and that's "content". Everyone's thinking about it too. Content takes many forms – news, opinion, features, audio, video, images – but they can all be lumped into one broad category: information goods.

These goods cost money to produce, so the producers need to earn revenues from them. Until recently, that was relatively easy to do, which is how owners of newspapers, magazines, broadcasting networks, record labels and movie studios became rich and powerful.

This happy state of affairs, however, is terminally challenged in a networked world in which people expect to access information goods for free and where perfect copies can easily – and illicitly – be made. Therefore, the Murdoch argument runs, we must return to the world as it used to be, where people are forced to pay for content.

But if you want to return to the past, it makes sense to understand it, and here we run into some puzzles. Take the notion that, in the good ol' days of print, customers paid for content.

Shortly before writing that sentence I was handed a copy of the LondonEvening Standard, which contained lots of "content" but was, er, free. And although this is the most conspicuous example in the UK of printed content being given away, free newspapers have been thriving for decades. The only thing that marks out the Standard from a provincial freesheet is that its content is of a higher class. So even in the newspaper world, lots of content has been free for ages.

But surely people who buy the Sun, Telegraph, Mail and Times are paying for content? Maybe they are, but we'd need to know what proportion of those publications' revenues came from cover sales rather than from advertising to know how much their readers are actually paying for the content. If newspapers had to recoup the costs of content-creation solely from retail sales, cover prices would be a lot higher and circulations correspondingly lower. So let's not kid ourselves: even in the print days consumers weren't paying anything like a realistic price for content. Why should things be any different in an online world?

But what to charge? Here the print world gives contradictory advice, as a visit to www.newsstand.co.uk will show you. On the one hand, theEconomist sells there for £4.29 an issue and the New Yorker for £4.92, whereas Nuts costs £2.47 and Zoo is £2.37. Quality content clearly commands a higher price.

But why is Ideal Home £6.65 per issue and World of Interiors £5.85? There's no real rationale here, beyond charging what different markets will bear. In the print world, in other words, higher prices could be justified by having better content – but also just by having glossier layout, heavier paper, better colour reproduction, etc.

The trouble is that glossy production values don't cut much ice online. We're moving to what essayist Paul Graham calls "post-medium publishing" (bit.ly/ZBhb8), where the intrinsic quality of the content will determine what people will to pay. If the Digger really wants to charge for his stuff, it had better be good.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/14/peter-preston-sun-gordon-brown

The Sun got too hot without its coolest head

Les Hinton, now departed for Dow Jones, would never have allowed the paper to make such intemperate attacks on Gordom Brown

Les Hinton, chairman of News International. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Two little words sum up what may be one big problem. Those words are "Les" and "Hinton". Quiet, shrewd Les, now running Dow Jones forRupert Murdoch in New York, used to be top dog in Wapping. He didn't let his ego get in the way. He let Rupert be Rupert, descending from New York on sub-royal tours. And he let editors edit, giving prudent advice when asked. But now he's gone. And now things seem a trifle problematic.

What, asks Melanie Reid in the Times, are we supposed to think when "a disabled man is being humiliated for his handicap? Nice. Really nice". Yes, "there's something pretty vile about the personal attacks being levelled at" our PM. Gordon Brown is attacked for failing to bow at the Cenotaph (when he is said to have become disoriented – his wretched eyesight problem). It's "public bullying" he does not deserve. It's like watching "the wings being pulled off flies".

And the wing-puller in chief of course, is the Sun, just across Wapping's forecourt. What Lord Mandelson swiftly labels "crude politicking" even splits Murdoch paper from Murdoch paper. It also sets TV and political circles chomping, as the Indy asks on its front page: "Has Cameron done a deal with Murdoch?"

That's a crudely discomforting question to pose at this stage. It doesn't help Dave or Rupe or son James (in his own Wapping top slot). Fragmentary polling shows that the world in general, and many Sunreaders in particular, think the confrontation between an outraged mother of a war victim and a battered, obviously saddened prime minister has been crassly handled. Public sides with Gordon shock. It was theSun wot lost it?

But go back more forensically to the paper's treatment of Mrs Janes and Brown last week. Front page headlines: "PM sends gaffe-strewn note to soldier's grieving mum then fails to bow at the Cenotaph". Leader page cartoon of premier holding scrawled letter that says: "Er, Sory Gordon". An editorial pillorying his "slapdash condolences" headlined: "Shoddy, PM". And, of course, that covert tape recording of the phone call he made to say sorry again.

Didn't it occur to anyone at Bun HQ that readers might indeed find this treatment shoddy? Which is where the departed spirit of Les Hintonwalks Wapping's byways again.

Dominic Mohan was Rebekah Brooks's hand-picked successor in theSun chair when she moved up to succeed Les as News Internationalchief. He was in situ when the paper turned floridly against Brown (though that had been predictable for months, because Murdoch never backs obvious losers). But nobody could possibly think that Brooks is sitting at some distant desk with the phone off the hook.

Would Hinton, if still around, have been consulted about the Sun's Sorry blast? Of course. Brooks as editor would have wanted his political counsel, since Rupert himself has long been a welcome Brown visitor to Numbers 10 and 11. So, unless incredibly foolish, Mohan must have called Brooks first. In which case, the buck travels up, not down.

Brooks has been in plenty of scrapes before, but she always had Les around to calm her down. Now she's flying solo. Now she's the political adviser to James, who is congenitally unlikely to phone his dad and ask whether the he wants a few adjectives toned down.

Let's be charitable on the politicking front. All incoming governments pay their dodgy dues at the court of King Rupert. Talk of done deals is far ahead of reality: the relationship between Downing Street and Wapping is much broader-brush than that.

But the presence of James Murdoch, master of BSkyB and lord of the print, makes the lobbying harder to manage. It runs up an obvious flag marked "TV interests". And the new presence of Brooks, who invited both Dave and Gordon to her nuptials a few months ago, makes the cruelty of the Sun's vituperation look idiotically inhumane.

Rupert, far away in Oz, says that he still respects Gordon himself. Gordon, newly sympathetic on Today, says he still respects Rupert, too – but that this (he's obviously been told from afar) was something handled by those who run "the British operation".

So, more of a domestic botch than an international battle royal. Crude? To be sure. But, worse (as cool, lost Les might sadly observe): plain dysfunctional.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/nov/13/views-on-the-news-rupert-murdoch-lloyds-redundancies

Views on the news: Murdoch's madness, more banking redundancies and bonuses for Barclays bigwigs

Bloggers unite in their dim view of Rupert Murdoch and his views on Google, but further job losses at Lloyds reset the dividing line

Teena Lyons
guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 November 2009 14.29 GMT
Article history
Who would have believed it? This week Rupert Murdoch succeeded where countless other stories have failed - uniting business bloggers to one dominant viewpoint.

"It is a novelty to see a Guardian Comments with near unanimity,"summarised gpjcyprus after hundreds wrote in to disparage this week's tale that the media baron is considering blocking news from his media empire from Google's search index.

ItalioDutch imagined the scenario: "Breaking news: Pope to visit Iran.

"From The Guardian: Pope's visit to strictly Shiite country first ever.

"From the New York Times: Pontiffs visit already historic.

"From Le Monde: Benoît XVI au pays des Ayatollah

"From The Times: 403 forbidden

"That is going to be a fantastic success."

"News International – big. Google – bigger," said kingfelix. "Murdoch has forgotten the first rule of bullying (which is his business model), the bully must be stronger than those it targets.

"Google won't be getting its dinner money stolen or its PE kit flushed down the bog."

"Excluding yourself from the single biggest source of web traffic?" wroteSsieth. "What could possibly go wrong with that plan?"

"What a numpty," concluded Tisiphone.

Fortunately there were some banking stories out this week that helped restore the combative status quo. Lloyds' announcement that it was cutting a further 5,000 jobs, for example, got a mixed reaction.

Fabiusmaximus a blogger who claims unfair treatment from the bank, had little sympathy for the workforce: "May I be the first to say what goes around comes around. Happy redundancy."

Robotier on the other hand sympathised with the human cost, adding: "It must be a barrel of laughs working in the lower echelons of Lloyds now. The ones below the ivory towers. Especially if you've just been redeployed from Bank Of Scotland and thought you'd escaped the guillotine.

"I really feel for anyone who has worked hard for a career in banking because all they've got to look forward to now is consistent job insecurity and an expectation to jump through flaming hoops as Lloyds take advantage of the workforce."

Siff had an interesting point: "Did you notice the way they worded the job cuts announcement? Only so many jobs will go because we are going to get rid of this many contractors and temporary staff. Contractors and temps are obviously some sort of subhuman who don't register as staff and presumably will not register as unemployed either."

And so to Barclays, which is on track for record profits and is, apparently considering pay rises for its top bankers. Vernier could not resist commenting on the name of the bank's chief operating officer: "Can't help noticing one banking bigwig rejoices under the name of 'Rich Ricci'.

"Presumably, he will now be changing his name to: 'Mega Rich Ricci'".

And, do you think MadBillMcMad was being ironic by writing: "I think these guys work and they deserve their bonus. If it was that easy then why don't we all just do it? Just take your money out of the banking system and invest it elsewhere.

"I have some magic beans you can buy."

You decide.

Of course, most bloggers are quite clear in their views on bankers and bonuses, a view reiterated after Hector Sants, the Financial Services Authority chief executive, said that bankers had not learned lessons from the financial crisis.

Eckythump begged to differ: "They have learned that if they screw up they don't need to worry because the taxpayer will bail them out and they can continue to rake in their massive bonuses."

Of course, for a lively analysis on lessons learned, you really need look no further than a discussion on house prices.

Jpwill2009 was one of many who was less than impressed to hear house prices are rising at the fastest rate since 2006: "Celebrating house inflation again? It's like Groundhog Day. If houses go much higher we'll all be living with our head in the clouds."

LeeWashington was not the only one to smell a rat following the news that the number of homes repossessed in the UK have risen by 3% in the third quarter: "If repossessions are up and house prices are rising because of a shortage of property for sale, does this mean the banks aren't putting the houses back onto the market?"

Indeed, said harmonyfuture: "They [the banks] take cheap taxpayer money, lend to themselves via shadow companies to prove to government they are lending whilst propping up the asset value of their newly acquired, knock down priced property portfolio. This is anti competitive insider dealing and requires proper investigation."

Credit card firms were in the firing line too, with outof offering a firm warning for those who are considering charging an annual fee to cardholders once again: "The credit card companies have to tread very carefully here.

"If they alienate too many customers (and any sort of fee will do that) then they will no longer have the critical mass necessary to force retailers to accept their cards."

For any bloggers who think the economy is getting better – and there are not many – EvilMike had a sobering tale, who wrote following the announcement that unemployment figures rose by the smallest amount since the recession: "I lost my long term contract job (8 years) at the end of September. Because of money I'd been saving for the last 12 months (I could see the writing was on the wall...) it's not worth me registering as unemployed. I'm looking for another job now. I'm sure there are plenty more people like me out there who don't appear in the statistics."

Indeed, according to nocod: "There should soon be an upsurge of jobs in the wheelbarrow making industry as we cart our wages home. "Recession not even started in my book."

However, BrownsHeadDownToilet thought there was room for one more on the list of unemployed, posting: "I would like to see Mandelson join their ranks."

Best not to start discussing this one with the current mood of harmony on the boards. Keep them coming.

Murdoch is running a paid-content propaganda campaign to save media moguldom

23 Oct 2009:

Barely a day passes in which a story doesn't emerge about Rupert Murdoch'sdetermination to charge for content. If he isn't speaking about it himself, his senior executives are doing so

Branson attacks Murdoch's pay-TV dominance

23 Oct 2009:

Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, has attacked Rupert Murdoch's dominance, through BSkyB, of the UK's pay television market

TV websites must begin charging, says Murdoch lieutenant

23 Oct 2009:

News Corp boss says US television site Hulu could stage an abrupt turnaround and begin charging viewers to watch online

Fox among the pigeons

22 Oct 2009:

John McQuaid: Instead of defending Fox News as one of their own, the US media should join the White House's war against the network

Murdoch bids for the Travel Channel

22 Oct 2009:

Media companies may be suffering from recessionary woes, but there is no shortage of bidders for the Travel Channel, the satellite and cable network

Nick Griffin advises BNP supporters to get ready for the 'big time'

21 Oct 2009:

Far-right party leader claims Question Time appearance will be 'a stage-managed farce'

Research: 9 out of 10 consumers won't pay for online news

21 Oct 2009:

A survey among 2,000 Britons found that paid content has not much of a chance in the UK

What Murdoch will put behind the Wapping paywalls - Clarkson and sport

19 Oct 2009:

There are, naturally enough, all sorts of rumours about Rupert Murdoc

h's exact plans for erecting paywalls on his Wapping newspaper websites

Murdoch: I'm charging for Fox TV

19 Oct 2009:

Rupert Murdoch is clearly determined to ensure that nothing produced by his media group is going to be free. He said that News Corporation would be seeking fees from American cable and satellite operators to carry his Fox TV network

Response

19 Oct 2009: This is not personal | Getting the Humph | Political U-turn

Glam Media's online model

19 Oct 2009: The company is outflanking online publishers by providing access to a network of 1,300 quality sites, attracting 110m unique users a month

Obama discovers Fox has friends in the press pack

18 Oct 2009: Murdoch station finds allies among liberal American media after White House attack

Murdoch takes pot shot at Obama's 'anti-business' reputation

16 Oct 2009: News Corp annual meeting highlights tensions between Fox News and White House

Why media moguls are losing their power

16 Oct 2009:

Though I am late in pointing to these pieces they deserve as wide an audience as possible within the media world

Obama's winnable war on Fox News

14 Oct 2009:

Michael Tomasky: Fox News is clearly an arm of the Republican party. Obama is right to throw caution to the wind and treat it as such

London's press war 'a horror story'

14 Oct 2009:

Seen from the outside the saga of the London newspaper war over the past couple of years looks decidedly odd. That's reflected well in an excellent piece by Philip Stone

Wall Street Journal hits top spot

12 Oct 2009:

Rupert Murdoch's daily business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, is expected to be named as the largest US paper by weekday circulation when the latest ABC figures are released in a couple of weeks time

Murdoch and Curley to Google: pay up!

9 Oct 2009:

Rupert Murdoch is determined to make search engines pay for content. Along with Associated Press chief Tom Curley, he called for online outlets using editorial material to pay for it

Has Rupert Murdoch finally lost the plot?

7 Oct 2009:

Has Rupert Murdoch lost the plot? As absurd as it may to suggest that one of the world's most successful media moguls may be in any kind of danger I argue in my London Evening Standardcolumn today that his News Corporation business is facing a genuine crisis

Has Rupert Murdoch finally lost the plot?

7 Oct 2009:

Times and Sunday Times target regular readers with membership scheme

5 Oct 2009:

Plan to offer special benefits for a £50 annual fee marks shift from growing audience to making money from regular readers. By Chris Tryhorn

Dark days for Labour without the Sun

The Sun switches its support to Conservative

5 Oct 2009: Peter Wilby:Never mind its readers, the Sun's effect on other media outlets is all-pervasive, and losing its support is disastrous for Gordon

After the Sun dumps Labour: Who's feeling blue?

5 Oct 2009: The Sun's decision to withdraw its support from Labour just hours after the prime minister's speech raises questions about the media's influence on British politics. By James Robinson and Stephen Brook

Media organisations turn to mobile phone applications to raise revenue

5 Oct 2009:
Financial Times, Radio Times and Spectator join the race to make money out of 'apps'. By Richard Wray

Murdoch wants to charge for news, but what will readers be prepared to pay?

4 Oct 2009: Rupert Murdoch has ordered his lieutenants to fix a price for internet news, but the answer remains stubbornly elusive

The Sun is not leading its readers away from Labour but following them

4 Oct 2009: Rupert Murdoch's bestselling tabloid can have only minimal influence on the next general election

Murdoch and Cameron form an unholy alliance that threatens the BBC's future

2 Oct 2009:
What can David Cameron do for Rupert Murdoch in return for the media mogul granting him support by The Sun?

The politics of the BBC and Murdoch

2 Oct 2009: Letters: You are quite right to highlight the dangers to the BBC that would be posed by a Tory government

NI votes No in Irish referendum

1 Oct 2009: Mick Fealty: The Murdoch press in Ireland is again pushing an anti-EU line – but only half-heartedly as it sees its readers losing interest

Labour goes to war with News International 'chumps'

Cartoon, 1 Oct 2009:
Party unhappy as tabloid swings in favour of the Tories

It's the piddling issues wot might win it

1 Oct 2009: Simon Hoggart: Golly, Labour loathe the paper that has supported them in the last three elections

In praise of... the BBC

1 Oct 2009: Editorial: Rupert Murdoch's decision to pull the plug on New Labour as much as nine months before an election may be bad news for Gordon Brown, but it is potentially even worse news for the BBC

From 'lightweight' to likely PM - how David Cameron convinced Rupert Murdoch to back him

30 Sep 2009: Rupert Murdoch, who once thought David Cameron a 'lightweight', seemed to begin approving of the Tory leader in 2007

Yes camp fights British opinion as Ireland votes on Lisbon treaty

30 Sep 2009: Leader of opposition Labour party voices fears of a 'two-speed Europe'

Labour goes to war with News International 'chumps'

30 Sep 2009: Relations between Murdoch papers and government disintegrates as tabloid swings in favour of Tories

If Labour loses, it will be the fruit of its fatal Faustian pact

30 Sep 2009: Seumas Milne: Brown is moving away at last from his embrace of corporate elites, but it is likely to be too late to save his government

Enough of these media hyenas

30 Sep 2009:
Jonathan Freedland: Conference season 09: Politicians should expect press scrutiny and tough questions. But this sledging of Gordon Brown is ugly and undemocratic

Union leader shreds the Sun as Labour attacks tabloid's defection

30 Sep 2009:
Brighton conference reacts with standing ovation as Tony Woodley rips up newspaper headlined 'Labour's lost it'

We won't be bullied by the Sun, says Labour

30 Sep 2009:
Harriet Harman launches angry attack on Rupert Murdoch's tabloid for declaring support for David Cameron

The Sun won't shine on Labour. So what?

30 Sep 2009: Lance Price: Successive governments have been in thrall to it. The media is obsessed with it. But who really cares if the Sun won't back Labour?

The Sun backs the winner – as usual

30 Sep 2009:
With brutish timing, the sleepy old rottweiler of Wapping gnashes its yellow teeth

Sun turns its back on Labour after 12 years of support

30 Sep 2009: Tabloid deals blow to Gordon Brown after conference speech

News Corp: Our research proves people will pay online

28 Sep 2009:
PaidContent: Rupert Murdoch claims that readers are 'happily' willing to pay, if publishers get the system right

Professor to Fox News: your channel is racist

25 Sep 2009:
Watch this Fox News clip. A Florida law professor, Jeremy Levitt, argues with the right-wing presenter Bill O'Reilly over a claim that the channel has fomented racial tensions in its reports onPresident Obama

Murdoch's digital news cartel will not persuade people to pay for content

21 Sep 2009:
The market research revelation that only 5% of UK web users would pay for online news doesn't surprise me in the least. But I doubt that it will stopRupert Murdoch in his tracks

Media

World news

Politics

Technology

Business

Media Monkey's Diary 16 Nov 2009:
Read Media Monkey's diary from the Monday section

Media Monkey's Diary

?The biter, it seems, has been bit. It is only a few short weeks since the BBC came under fire for scheduling Strictly Come Dancing against ITV1's The X Factor, only for the celebrity dance show to take a drubbing in the ratings. Now Top Gear is back on BBC2 but – what's this? – an hour later than its normal 8pm start time on a Sunday night, to avoid a clash with the ratings behemoth that is ... The X Factor. "We had no choice really," said Top Gear producer Andy Wilman. "X Factor on at the same time with the results show, Cowell on storming form, the whole nation glued – we know when to bravely bugger off and wait until the storm passes." If only they had thought of that with Strictly Come Dancing.

?BBC trustee David Liddiment may as well tear up his review of Radio 2 and go home, after the station's star DJ, Chris Evans, had the last word on complaints from commercial radio that the station was targeting too young an audience. Evans, who will take over the breakfast slot in the new year – around the same time that Liddiment is due to publish his findings – bemoaned the "obvious unhealthy lazy arguments from certain members of the media" that Radio 2 had gone too young. "Anybody who works in radio knows that we are not chasing the younger listener, we are chasing the family. Whether you are seven years old or 107 years old ... we're not chasing, that's who we've always aimed Radio 2 at, and I'm very happy to be part of that armoury." Targeting seven-year-olds? It's even worse than commercial radio thought.

?Among the many BBC executives' expenses claims was the £19.13 put through by Richard Deverell, chief operating officer for the BBC's new northern base in Salford, spent on external hospitality "trying to persuade him to join the BBC". We know not who it was, or whether it was successful, but we wonder whether Deverell could have tried a bit harder.

?The London Evening Standard's list of the 1,000 most influential Londoners is not entirely ruthless when it comes to defining a "Londoner", it would appear, containing as it does the likes of Rupert Murdoch, David Beckham, Madonna and California-based Apple designer Jonathan Ive. They are many things, but not necessarily what you would call London-based.

?Monkey has just got over Charles Spencer's review of Anna Friel in Breakfast at Tiffany's ("long stretches of the action in her underwear … a thrilling frisson of eroticism"), only to find the Daily Telegraph theatre critic has been at it again. Spencer, you'll recall, coined the phrase "theatrical Viagra" for Nicole Kidman's performance in The Blue Room. The new object of his affection is Kelly Brook in the theatre version of Calendar Girls. "It's true that Miss Brook seems to find it pretty tricky to walk and talk at the same time," wrote Spencer. "But my, what a delightful eyeful Kelly Brook is, shaking her great mane of golden hair like a proud lioness and covering her modesty with iced buns." Is that a theatre review in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

?To the British Society of Magazine Editors awards at the Park Lane Hilton, where the host and resident BBC1 standup comic Michael McIntyre enjoyed lots of fun at the expense of Fabulous magazine until informed it was part of the News of the World. "Oh," he said. "That's my life ruined then." The NME-turned-Top Gear editor, Conor McNicholas, organised the bash and said the next edition of Top Gear will feature the top 10 songs to drive to, admitting it would be made up of the top 10 he was playing in his car. You can take the editor out of NME ...

?Monkey's number of the week: 666,000. The peak audience for Sky1's unfortunate attempts to contact Michael Jackson from beyond the grave with the help of Derek Acorah on the entirely taste-free Michael Jackson: The Live Seance. We always thought it was a bad idea.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamonkeyblog/2009/nov/16/media-monkey-diary

Father and Sun: how the Murdoch dynasty handover crippled Labour

15 Nov 2009: The extraordinary run-in between the Sun and the prime minister over Afghanistan last week was a sign of a more aggressive approach from the tabloid as Rupert Murdoch's son James puts his stamp on the media empire.

Murdoch must turn Fleet Street into Quality Street if he wants us to pay

15 Nov 2009:

John Naughton: Content is already available free - and consumers never paid a realistic price for it anyway

The Sun got too hot without its coolest head

14 Nov 2009:

Les Hinton, now departed for Dow Jones, would never have allowed the paper to make such intemperate attacks on Gordom Brown

Views on the news: Murdoch's madness, more banking redundancies and bonuses for Barclays bigwigs

13 Nov 2009:

Bloggers unite in their dim view of Rupert Murdoch and his views on Google, but further job losses at Lloyds reset the dividing line

As the BBC gets more transparent, so do its enemies' motives

13 Nov 2009:

Steve Busfield: The corporation has real questions to answer on top salaries. But that's not why it's under attack

As the BBC gets more transparent, so do its enemies' motives The BBC has real questions to answer about the salaries of its top executives. But that's not why it's under attack

Shift+R improves the quality of this image. Shift+A improves the quality of all images on this page.

The BBC's Mark Thompson: unlikely to jump ship for ITV. Photograph: Richard Sake

The BBC gets a serious kicking today over the salaries of senior executives – not surprisingly led by the Murdoch press.

The Times splashes: "37 BBC staff earn more than the Prime Minister."The Sun adds: "Oceans of BBC exes." (See what they did there? Mark Thompson stayed in the Las Vegas hotel featured in Ocean's Eleven).

The Telegraph weighs in with: "BBC pays its 100 most senior staff £20m a year." And the Daily Mail adds: "The bloated Beeb: BBC pays out £20m to top 100 'decision-making' executives including the 'outreach boss' (so that's where the licence fee goes)." (The Mail, of course, pictures Jay Hunt because, counter-intuitively, there is nothing the Mail hates more than a successful woman).

In these straitened times, with media organisations cutting back all around, it is easy to target BBC salaries. Thompson argues that the corporation must pay "market rates". That might have been true a few years ago. But it certainly isn't true now. Very few of these execs are likely to jump ship to ITV. And the digital revolution companies may have created some billionaires but, on the whole, they are leaner, smaller organisations than the traditional media behemoths. But once salaries have risen, it is hard to claw them back. Not many people like taking a pay cut.

And now, with the economic meltdown sapping the BBC's commercial rivals, and a Tory government on the horizon, this makes the corporation vulnerable. The "even greater transparency" offered by the BBC in the interests of accountability has just been made into a new stick to beat them with. And allowing Tory MP Philip Davies to say: "It illustrates probably better than anything else than we have ever seen why the BBC's funding needs to be radically reduced to enable it to focus on what it should be doing."

And therein lies the rub. Some BBC salaries may be unnecessarily high. It is ridiculous that 37 BBC staff are paid more than the prime minister. Although maybe that is a reflection of the peculiarly low pay grade afforded the chief executive of UK plc. The BBC is a big organisation that does require a lot of managing.

But the real reason it is getting a caning here is because the Tories have realised that there is a lot of political support to be gained by attacking the BBC. Not as a straightforward votewinner, but by ensuring the support of papers from an organisation with an inbuilt desire to weaken the BBC.

Rupert Murdoch wants to make money from the web. The free nature of the web is his biggest problem. But the fact that there is an enormous news organisation in Britain providing for free a lot of the things that he thinks News Corp should be paid for is also a pretty big stumbling block.

The BBC should be accountable. Perhaps some of its executives are paid too much. But the BBC is also a national asset that shouldn't be beaten up for everything that it does.

And although of course they aren't funded by the licence-payer, it would still be interesting to know how many News Corp executives are paid more than the prime minister.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/nov/13/bbc-enemies#start-of-comments

Brown and Murdoch had 'friendly' conversation after Sun's letter attack

13 Nov 2009:

Prime minister and media tycoon spoke after paper's coverage of 'misspelt' letter to Jacqui Janes

Brown to ask Nato countries to commit 5,000 more troops to Afghanistan

13 Nov 2009: Prime minister dismisses reports he is planning to talk to the Taliban

Brown on Murdoch – and Murdoch on Brown

13 Nov 2009: What the media mogul and the prime minister have said about each other over the years

Ashes and World Cup qualifiers should go free-to-air, says Davies review

Andrew Flintoff celebrates after running out Ricky Ponting during the fifth Ashes Test at the Oval

13 Nov 2009: Sports governing bodies set to protest as former FA executive director confirms proposed expansion of 'crown jewels' list. By Owen Gibson

Media Talk: The Sun's attack on Gordon Brown

Audio (34min 51sec), 13 Nov 2009:

The Sun goes to town on Gordon Brown. Plus, Melvyn Bragg returns to BBC television. And which columnist would you pay to read online? With Matt Wells, Maggie Brownand Steve Ackerman

Banks scorns Murdoch's paywall plans

13 Nov 2009:

David Banks was one of the first print journalists to grasp both the theory and practice of digital journalism

Politicians should stop sucking up to the tabloids

13 Nov 2009:

It makes them look unprincipled and probably won't help them win elections either, saysAlexander Chancellor

Sky to cry foul as Ashes and football qualifiers set for return to free TV

12 Nov 2009: Battle between Rupert Murdoch and No 10 hots up as government prepares to accept review recommendations

Who's the racist, Rupert?

12 Nov 2009:
Lola Adesioye: By backing Glenn Beck's wild rant that Barack Obama is racist, Rupert Murdoch is as incendiary as his Fox News pundits

Forbes power list puts Mexican drug lord ahead of presidents

12 Nov 2009: Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman is at 41, beating Medvedev, Sarkozy and Chávez, while Mexico's president misses out

Sorrell and FT's Freeland: let more news outlets close, contraction is good for business

12 Nov 2009:
I generally admire the writings ofChrystia Freeland, the US managing editor of the theFinancial Times, but I haven't much time for her statement applauding the "end of the oversupply of journalism."

Can Brown weather the Sun's storm?

12 Nov 2009: Michael White: Gordon Brown deserves some sympathy – the fast-spinning news industry is as potentially destructive as the financial markets

Sports rights: the latest battleground in Brown v Murdoch face-off?

12 Nov 2009: Steve Busfield: Review of 'crown jewels' events - including The Ashes cricket – comes hot on the heels of the Sun turning on Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown spoke to Rupert Murdoch after misspelling row

12 Nov 2009: PM's official spokesman attempts to play down significance of call, saying the two men were in regular communication

Why Murdoch's legal threats against search engines are hollow

12 Nov 2009:
Jack Shafer, Slate's excellent media commentator, has seen through the charging-for-content smokescreen erected by Rupert Murdoch in a piece headlined Read between the lies

Brown called Murdoch over the Sun

12 Nov 2009:
Prime minister phoned News Corp chief to complain about paper's campaign against the government's handling of the Afghanistan war. By Roy Greenslade

Former New York Post editor claims discrimination in lawsuit

11 Nov 2009:
Sandra Guzman alleges that Rupert Murdoch's US newspaper fostered a 'hostile work environment'

Rupert Murdoch doesn't think Barack Obama racist, says spokesman

11 Nov 2009: News Corporation put on defensive after chief backs Fox News presenter over 'very racist' comment by president. By Chris

Backlash against the Sun over its shameful coverage of Brown's letter

11 Nov 2009:
"Give Brown a break"... "Whilst I have every sympathy with Mrs Janes for the loss of her son, personally I would have been more touched that Mr Brown took the time to personally write to her to offer his condolences"... "I hate to say this, BUT, well done Mr Brown for at least writting a letter, right spelling or not"...

Pass notes No 2,681: Rupert Murdoch

11 Nov 2009: The media mogul's latest target is Google

For whom the net tolls

10 Nov 2009: Cory Doctorow: Rupert Murdoch wants to remake the web as a toll both, with him in the collector's seat, but the net won't shift to his will

The Sun and Gordon Brown: this is pure cynicism

10 Nov 2009:
In using Jacqui Janes's grief in this way, the newspaper is harnessing its traditional pro-squaddie stance to its Labour-bashing campaign

Rupert Murdoch: I regret my papers' anti-Gordon Brown stance

10 Nov 2009:
News Corp chief says prime minister is a friend, but his government has been a 'disappointment'. By Chris Tryhorn

Murdoch plans to strip Google of news

10 Nov 2009: News Corp chairman says papers will probably cut themselves off from Google once they start to charge online. By Chris Tryhorn and Bobbie Johnson

The Sun declares war on Gordon Brown as it campaigns for the Tories

10 Nov 2009:
Last week I ran a posting headlined A newspaper lesson for Gordon Brown - Murdoch is not your friend. I argued that the prime minister was fooling himself if he thought the News Corporation chairman was still his mate after agreeing that The Sun should back the Tories

Murdoch threatens to sue BBC

10 Nov 2009:
Further to yesterday's story about Rupert Murdoch's search engine sabre-rattling, Murdoch could block Google searches entirely, he also launched yet another assault on the BBC

Rupert Murdoch's threat unlikely to worry Google

9 Nov 2009: The News Corp chief could be shooting himself in the foot if he withdraws stories from Google News

A searching question

Poll, 9 Nov 2009:
Rupert Murdoch says he may block Google News from displaying News Corp content to persuade people to pay for his newspaper sites. Who will win this corporate battle?

Murdoch could block Google searches entirely

9 Nov 2009:
Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online

London Lite, a pointless paper without a heart

9 Nov 2009:
When I posted an item on Friday that mentioned the closure of London Lite, a commenter (courtstown) took me to task for a lack of empathy towards staff who will lose their jobs

Murdoch's $1m-a-month property loss

9 Nov 2009:
Yet another digital headache for Rupert Murdoch. His News Corporation is paying more than $1m (£600,000) a month to rent an empty office complex in Los Angeles that it has been unable to sub-lease since scrapping an ambitious plan to moveMySpace and its other digital businesses there

Question of the week

9 Nov 2009:
Can Murdoch make a paywall work?

Newspaper pay walls have a lot of confused writing on them

8 Nov 2009:
As Murdoch hesitates, there are no simple solutions over charging for digital content

Rothermere 'had no faith in freesheets'

6 Nov 2009:
Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail & General Trust, once rejected launching a free newspaper in partnership with the Norwegian media conglomerate Schibsted because, supposedly, he had no faith in freesheets

The Guardian: no news paywall

6 Nov 2009:
When I posted yesterday on the remarkable candour of Rupert Murdoch in admitting that he was holding discussions with Telegraph Media Group about website paywalls, some commenters suggested that The Guardian might be involved too

Murdoch's plan for web pay walls 'raises questions of anti-trust law'

5 Nov 2009:
Talks with other publishers to introduce charging on news websites will undoubtedly attract the attention of competition authorities, warns UK expert

Rupert Murdoch conference call highlights

5 Nov 2009: Three key exchanges in Murdoch's conference call with reporters about the News Corporation quarterly results

Why the Murdoch Paywall Construction Company raises competition concerns

5 Nov 2009:
Rupert Murdoch's statement about the likelihood of his

newspapers missing the deadline to charge for content reveals the difficulties he is having in convincing rival news companies to join his paywall construction company

Murdoch admits delay in introducing newspaper website charges

5 Nov 2009:
News Corp chief says schedule for online charging slipping

NewsNow.co.uk hits back in battle with UK newspapers

4 Nov 2009:
UK's largest news aggregator publishes open letter denying it is undermining publishers' businesses. By Mercedes Bunz

A newspaper lesson for Gordon Brown - Murdoch is not your friend

4 Nov 2009:
So the prime minister thinks The Sun, in trying "to become a political party", has made "a terrible mistake". Where has Gordon Brown been living all his life?

The Sun is trying to become a political party, says Gordon Brown

4 Nov 2009: Prime minister criticises Sun's 'terrible mistake' in backing Conservatives. By James Robinson

Ben Bradshaw urges 'luvvies' to defend BBC from Tories

3 Nov 2009:
Culture secretary warns of threat to arts sector's independence and encroaching influence of Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch axes cheap bulks, demanding a fair price for The Times and Sunday Times

2 Nov 2009:
The headline on the press release, "News International to stop distributing 'bulks'", may not be quite what it says on the tin

Murdoch's attack dog snarls at the 'parasites' threatening his master

1 Nov 2009: Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson is fiercely guarding his boss's pay wall for digital content

Rupert Murdoch: 'There's no such thing as a free news story' http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/01/rupert-murdoch-no-free-news?CMP=AFCYAH
News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch tells US regulators that users will pay for news – and aggregation is theft

Rupert Murdoch: customers are smart enough to know they must pay. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Mercedes Bunz
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 December 2009 17.58 GMT
Article history

Rupert Murdoch has today reiterated his belief that internet users will pay for content, saying they would be happy to shell out for "information they need to rise in society".

Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, gave a wide-ranging address to US media regulators that attacked internet news aggregation as "theft" and claimed that advertising-only business models were dead.

"From the beginning on, newspapers have prospered for one reason: giving readers the news that they want," he said. He said newspapers should not blame technology if they failed. "If we fail, we fail like a restaurant that makes meals that no one wants to eat." His company's customers were "smart enough" to know they had to pay for news, Murdoch told a US Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism in the internet age. Referring to his much-criticised plans to put his newspaper sites behind a paywall, Murdoch said he had succeeded before when nobody had believed he would, adding: "We started Fox when everyone said it couldn't be done." One News Corporation newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, already charges for content and has 1 million subscribers. "We will expend to extend this model to all our news organisations such as the Times in London. At The Times, there are journalists who invested days and weeks into their stories, and our customers are smart enough to know that they can't get something for nothing," he said. "Producing journalism is expensive. We invest tremendous resources in our project from technology to our salaries. To aggregate stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it is theft. "Without us, the aggregators would have blank slides. Right now content producers have all the costs, and the aggregators enjoy [the benefits]. But the principle is clear. To paraphrase a great economist, [there is] no such thing as a free news story." Murdoch said that making the reader pay was the only way to create future revenue streams: "The business model that relies on advertising-only is dead. Online advertising is increasingly only a fraction of what is being lost from print advertising, and it is under constant pressure." Murdoch, who read his speech from printouts and not his laptop at the FTC workshop, announced that News Corporation had worked on a two-year project to spread news content from TV and newspapers to mobile devices, because "today's news consumers do not want be chained to boxes in their homes". He attacked plans to protect newspapers with public funds, saying it could damage democracy. It would lead to "papers giving up their rights to endorse politicians". "In other words, it subsidies their failures. The press is the only institution that is truly accountable. The founding fathers put the first amendment first for a reason." Murdoch ended his speech with a plea to adhere to a series of clear principles in the digital world. "Let them innovate when they want and how they want. Let consumers pay. Let aggregators desist and start employing their own journalists. "When we think of the future of newspapers, we think of the future of democracy. It doesn't matter if we are reading our news from paper or on another device, but the basic truth is that to make informed decisions free man and women need news. If they come on electrons or dead trees is not that important. Therefore the news industry should remain free and competitive." Two men heckled Murdoch as he ended his speech, shouting from the audience: "Do you agree that Obama is a racist?" This was a reference to the controversy surrounding Glenn Beck, the presenter on News Corp-owned Fox News, and his controversial criticism of the US president. Murdoch did not reply as he left the stage at the FTC event and the two men were ushered out quickly.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

US government discusses the future of journalism

1 Dec 2009:

"How will journalism survive in the internet age?" is no ordinary workshop: it's held by the Federal Trade Commission and attended by Rupert Murdoch and Arianna Huffington. By Mercedes Bunz

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/rupert-murdoch?page=2

The 'false gospel of the web': Murdoch lieutenant attacks free content

1 Dec 2009: Chris Elliott:'News is a business and we should not be afraid to say it', proclaims News Corp's Les Hinton to newspaper congress

Lachlan Murdoch 'poised to buy Billboard and Hollywood Reporter'

30 Nov 2009: Partnership involving Rupert Murdoch's son and a nephew of Conrad Black reported to be looking to buy US trade titles. By Chris Tryhorn

Times man recalls Hitler diaries fiasco

28 Nov 2009:

Michael Binyon's valedictory piece forThe Times today, after 38 years with the paper, gives a candid insight into journalism past with several entertaining anecdotes

News Corporation's Wapping revamp gets council go-ahead

Artist's impression of revamped Wapping complex

27 Nov 2009:Redevelopment of News International's 11-acre site, which will house staff from other News Corp businesses, gets green light from Tower Hamlets council. By Abul Taher

Cameron to Mirror reporter: you should try writing for an independent newspaper

26 Nov 2009:

The Daily Mirror has been running an investigation this week entitled "Tory cash - the truth". On Tuesday, it was right on the money by accusing shadow chancellor George Osborne of a dodgy expenses claim, eliciting a later response through gritted teeth that it was "a submission error".

Conspiracy of silence as nationals ignore News of the World's £800,000 payout

25 Nov 2009:

Imagine for a moment that a bank employee in the City of London was awarded £800,000 for unfair dismissal after a lengthy period of bullying by his or her boss. I haven't the slightest doubt that it would be a major news item in every newspaper - from the Financial Times to the Daily Star

iPhone users 'happier to pay online'

25 Nov 2009: Apple device owners are more willing to pay for content online than others, finds survey – but news is a sticking point. By Richard Wray

Will Murdoch's Bing gamble pay off?

24 Nov 2009:

Dan Kennedy: In cosying up to Google's main competitor, Bing, Rupert Murdoch proves once again that he can't be dismissed so easily

Bing! Is this Murdoch's pay strategy?

24 Nov 2009:

Rupert Murdoch's talks with Microsoftabout removing his newspapers' stories from Google, and giving index rights to Bing instead could be a pivotal moment in internet economics, writes John Gapper

When piracy isn't theft

24 Nov 2009:

Alexandros Stavrakas: The argument over file sharing is redundant: creative businesses must change, and the social value of free must be recognised

A look behind the paywall into Rupert Murdoch's ideal future

24 Nov 2009:

Steve Busfield: As News Corp talks to Microsoft over Bing deal, how can the publisher ensure only paying customers see its online content?

News Corp considers a tie-up with Microsoft against Google

23 Nov 2009:

The talks with Microsoft, which are at an embryonic stage are part of Rupert Murdoch's drive to create new online revenue streams

Media Talk: Live-ish at the Guardian Student Media Conference

Audio (39min 20sec), 26 Nov 2009:

Emily Bell,Richard Bacon, Benjamin Cohen, and Josh Hallidayjoin Matt Wells to talk about the future of print, broadcast and online media. Is there any hope for an industry in crisis?

A Murdoch-Cameron pact? Probably not

23 Nov 2009:

Ever since The Sun switched its allegiance from Labour to the Tories there has been an assumption of some kind of deal between Rupert Murdoch and David Cameron

Digital economy bill: A punishing future

23 Nov 2009: Editorial: Instead of building on a positive vision of Digital Britain, the government has capitulated to the fears of music and movie moguls struggling to defend their multi million-pound businesses

Digital economy bill: A punishing future

23 Nov 2009: Editorial: Instead of building on a positive vision of Digital Britain, the government has capitulated to the fears of music and movie moguls struggling to defend their multi million-pound businesses

Response: 23 Nov 2009: The smart party will not let Murdoch dominate | Cameron bound | An ego-heavy media

Bradshaw takes the gloves off

23 Nov 2009:
On the eve of the bill determining Britain's digital future, Ben Bradshaw attacks the Tory leader's 'pact' with the Murdochs and defends the BBC, if not its Trust, from its 'circling enemies'. He speaks to James Robinson

A question of ownership: Tory figures will play Cameron to their advantage

22 Nov 2009: If the Tory leader wins the next election, he faces a media battle between News Corp and Google which could split his inner circle

Murdoch's pay walls will be paper tigers – and he daren't put them round Sky

22 Nov 2009: Newspapers protest at free BBC online news, but press websites are already outgunned by cable networks

Third of UK population on News International database

20 Nov 2009: Times and Sun publisher says database of 20 million people enables it to assess which are the most valuable customers. By Sarah Hartley

Young Murdoch sees smaller role for newspapers and welcomes a small online audience

20 Nov 2009:
James Murdoch's speech to investors in Barcelona the other day revealed the direction thatNews Corporation plans to take in the coming years. His key quote:

Memo to Times: Rupert hates online theft

20 Nov 2009:
Monkey reports that movie director Edgar Wright is unhappy that The Times ran his blogged tribute to the actor Edward Woodward without his permission as if it were an article written for the paper. How dos this square with Rupert Murdoch's intense dislike for the theft of online content, I wonder?

Twitter chief tells Murdoch: internet paywall will not work

19 Nov 2009:
Charging to read news content is like 'putting genie back in bottle', says Biz Stone

Mandelson seeks to amend copyright law in new crackdown on filesharing

19 Nov 2009:
Labour colleagues are concerned business secretary could set precedent that would allow Tories to help Murdoch take on Google

I is not a Daddy's Boy!

Cartoon, 19 Nov 2009:
Steve Bell's If ...

Letters and blogs

18 Nov 2009: Changing connections | Acta-ing up | Old MacDonald, virtually | Engines of change | Glazed over | Farming for energy | Rupert's net vendetta

80% won't pay for online news

18 Nov 2009:
Hardly a day goes by without a poll saying how many people will or will not pay for access to online news. Today's survey, courtesy of Forrester Research polled 4,000 people in the US and found that 80% will not pay for online newspapers or magazines

Times editor James Harding outlines plans for online charging

17 Nov 2009: Micro-payments dismissed in favour of charging for 24-hour access to day's edition of the paper. By Chris Tryhorn

Forty years on - the soaraway Sun is still setting the political agenda

17 Nov 2009:
On this day 40 years ago I was a small cog in what proved to be a giant wheel of change in the British newspaper trade. At 22, I was a raw down-table news sub on the first issue of a tabloid newspaper,The Sun

A chippy chip off the old block

Cartoon, 17 Nov 2009:
Steve Bell's If ...

Readers would pay for online news, study shows

16 Nov 2009:
Findings from a study by Boston Consulting Group across nine countries show regular internet users would be prepared to pay a monthly fee for online news

Claims of Tory-Murdoch pact 'absolute nonsense', says Jeremy Hunt

16 Nov 2009: Shadow culture secretary reacts to Lord Mandelson's accusation that Tories have 'formed a contract' with News International. By Mark Sweney

Even right-wing pundits turn on The Sun for its treatment of Gordon Brown

16 Nov 2009:

The backlash against The Sun for its treatment of the Gordon Brown letter to Jacqui Janesabout the death of her soldier son in Afghanistan was clear in the weekend newspapers

He's right, mate!

Cartoon, 16 Nov 2009:
Steve Bell's If ...

Murdoch's rants put Cameron on a collision course with Google

16 Nov 2009:
Emily Bell: Rupert Murdoch's threats to block the search engine and build a paywall signal to politicians that he wants something done

Patience Wheatcroft interview: 'It's very dangerous to go free'

16 Nov 2009:
On the eve of the relaunch of Wall Street Journal Europe, its new editor-in-chief explains why she returned to journalism and how she will take on Google

Response

16 Nov 2009: C4 needs foresight | It's a free world | SideWiki sideswipe | No web lifeline for Lite

Response

16 Nov 2009: C4 needs foresight | It's a free world | SideWiki sideswipe | No web lifeline for Lite

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Murdoch's digital news cartel will not persuade people to pay for content

21 Sep 2009:

The market research revelation that only 5% of UK web users would pay for online news doesn't surprise me in the least. But I doubt that it will stopRupert Murdoch in his tracks

The nice side of Murdoch's Fox News

20 Sep 2009:

Peter Preston: Rupert Murdoch collects all the blame for Fox News

Rupert Murdoch firm sues Silvio Berlusconi companies over ads on Italian TV

17 Sep 2009: Italian PM's firms accused of blocking ads from Murdoch-owned satellite broadcaster Sky Italia. By John Hooper in Rome

New twist to Murdoch-Berlusconi feud

17 Sep 2009:

The feud between Rupert Murdoch and Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, took another turn yesterday

Optimistic Murdoch: ad markets are improving

16 Sep 2009:

Rupert Murdoch is back on optimistic form, arguing that US advertising markets are "very much better than they were four months ago."

Latest Google news service promises publishers money and readers

15 Sep 2009:

Web firm Google says Fast Flip pages will give publishers the bulk of ad revenue

Former News International boss to give evidence in phone hacking inquiry

10 Sep 2009: MPs will hear from Les Hinton as part of committe's inquiry into press standards, privacy and libel

Please, sir, Mr Murdoch: don't shoot your Fox by cutting jobs

8 Sep 2009:

I wonder if this will work. It's a letter sent privately to Rupert Murdoch and then, rather bravely, posted for public consumption

All Labour needs to summon is nerve, daring and ambition

7 Sep 2009:

Polly Toynbee: I would eat a rack of hats if the party's leaders had the bottle to set national politics alight. There is nothing left to lose

Response

7 Sep 2009:

Murdoch should copy BBC | Look at state of US news

The big issue | Murdoch and the media

6 Sep 2009: The big issue

Don't let Murdoch smash this jewel. The BBC must act to save itself

1 Sep 2009: Jonathan Freedland: Rupert's son is bent on continuing the war his father started. But he'll find Auntie matches the NHS in public affections

The media: An American in Edinburgh

31 Aug 2009: Editorial: James Murdoch would like the British media to be more like the US system, but the mixture of public and private broadcasters works well in the UK

James Murdoch: The evolution of a feud

28 Aug 2009: Emily Bell: The MacTaggart lecture was an interesting contribution to the post-Darwin debate about nature versus nurture

James Murdoch hits out at BBC and regulators at Edinburgh TV festival

James Murdoch delivering the MacTaggart lecture

28 Aug 2009:

News Corp chief describes UK TV as 'Addams Family of world media' in hard-hitting MacTaggart lecture. ByJames Robinson

A Murdoch returns to the MacTaggart, two decades on

28 Aug 2009:

Maggie Brown: As he delivers the MacTaggart lecture tonight, James Murdoch faces an industry vastly changed from the one his father

Gotcha! Dominic Mohan lands dream job at the Sun

26 Aug 2009: Mohan joins pantheon of former showbusiness column editors who went on to run the tabloid

Hounded out of Fox News

25 Aug 2009:

Dan Kennedy: If advertisers can force Fox News talkshow host Glenn Beck off the air and prevent his hateful lies from spreading, good for them

Hounded out of Fox News

25 Aug 2009:

Dan Kennedy: If advertisers can force Fox News talkshow host Glenn Beck off the air and prevent his hateful lies from spreading, good for them

What's to be done about London Lite now that the Murdochs have been defeated?

24 Aug 2009:

What's the future for London Lite now that thelondonpaper is on the verge of closing? Lite, published by the Daily Mail & General Trust, is entwined with the London Evening Standard and has always had some advantages over its News International rival

Why Murdoch closed the London Paper

A disgarded wet copy of the London Paper

24 Aug 2009:

Declaring that free has no part in the future of news, Rupert Murdoch pulled the plug on his freesheet. Ciar Byrneand Ben Dowell report as a bitter rivalry with Associated Newspapers ends

Redtop race: would-be editors vie for a place in the Sun

23 Aug 2009: Dominic Mohan favourite to land role, but Murdoch may have to be convinced

RIP thelondonpaper. So what's the future Standard of success?

23 Aug 2009:

Peter Preston: Rupert Murdoch, to his great credit, does not kill newspapers lightly

The legacy of the London Paper

21 Aug 2009: Simon Fletcher: London's newspaper market should learn from the demise of the first publication to try to break the Evening Standard's monopoly

Murdoch lost millions on his London free and achieved nothing in the process

21 Aug 2009:

Some 24 hours behind the news, I'm breaking into my holiday to write this...

Murdoch forced to take 28% pay cut after advertising slump

20 Aug 2009: News Corp chief's pay falls following advertisivng slump

Why Ridding and Murdoch can't stop talking about pay walls

18 Aug 2009:

paidContent: They are talking up pay walls because they think if more titles join them it will boost their own pay plans

Help Rupert - rent his yacht

14 Aug 2009:

Fancy chartering a yacht? Then why not enjoy a week aboard Rupert Murdoch's 184ft (56m) Rosehearty, described as an "aluminium masterpiece" with a "stunning interior by famous French designer Christian Liagre". It isn't exactly cheap. For just one week the rental charge is $310,000 (£200,000). Still, a media mogul running a loss-making corporation has to make ends meet somehow. Sources (plus pictures):Cityfile/monacoeye

Holiday like a media mogul on Rupert Murdoch's superyacht

13 Aug 2009: News Corporation chairman makes his 183ft 'aluminium masterpiece' available to hire

Goodbye Guardian. Hello the Guardian Experience

10 Aug 2009:

Simon Jenkins: A paywall will only delay newspapers' Dunkirk. But I saw the future at Glastonbury – it's time for print to go live

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/sep/21/charging-for-content-rupert-murdoch

Murdoch's digital news cartel will not persuade people to pay for content

The market research revelation that only 5% of UK web users would pay for online news doesn't surprise me in the least. But I doubt that it will stop Rupert Murdoch in his tracks. According to the survey, by Harris Interactive, if people are confronted by their favourite news site charging for content, then 74% of them will find another free site. That's just as I would expect. I am convinced that paywalls will fail. Say, however, there is no other free site available? By which I mean a site with similar values to the one people currently choose. In Britain, there will always be the BBC - unless the Murdoch-inspired anti-BBC propaganda forces it to close or to reduce its online service. I don't see how any paper will circumnavigate that problem. In the US, there is no equivalent to our public service broadcaster. So let's imagine that Murdoch's attempt by his own News Corporation to stitch together a digital news cartel comes off. He may persuade all the leading newspapers and publishing companies - from the New York Times and the Washington Post, for example, to the sites owned by Gannett (such as USA Today) and Tribune - to erect paywalls at the same time. Would that work? Well, there are still the TV news sites, such as ABC News (which managed to attract 16.3m uniques in July, edging it into the top five US news destinations). So he would need to persuade them too. Then there is the Associated Press to think about. It is owned by the major publishers, but would have to cease its current deal with Google. Of course, news is only one part of the websites' offerings. Each carries commentary, analysis and opinion by bylined contributors who are often sought by users. These could prove more of a lure in specific instances. But what about being able to access a range of columnists? Would people be happy to pay subscriptions to, say, three sites in order to be able to read contributions by commentators? That's very doubtful. Murdoch has confronted and overcome orthodoxy throughout his career. In so doing, he has always stressed that he has defeated "the establishment" on behalf of "the people" (the audience, the readers, the viewers). His mantra: I am giving the people what they want. This time, by contrast, he appears to be flying in the face of peoples' wishes. He is taking away from them what they want. It is his first major strategic error and I am convinced that charging for content - no matter how justified it might appear - will not work.

Sources: PaidContent/Media Guardian

BlairwasagoodPM

22 Sep 2009, 7:54PM

Murdoch is just going to add the Times to one of his Sky packs - so people will not actively be choosing to pay for it but their overall subscription will go up £2 a month and it will be included. Since Sky is a monopoly they can do that.

Waltroon

21 Sep 2009, 1:58PM

Here is the problem: newspaper circulations and ad revenues are in freefall. Millions of people prefer the online versions and – a bit like Kim Fletcher and his wife Sarah Sands – prefer their papers in aggregate. Sadly, the digital titles generate very little cash. Readers who used to consider it obvious that news came at a price – a cover price – now want it for free.

Murdoch has read the runes and has decided that the old rules should still apply: if you want to read his stuff, you're going to have to pay him for the privilege.

Will it all work out? I don't know. Young people read less real news than they used to. My son and his friends – all graduates – hardly read news at all. But it seems to me that Murdoch at least has logic on his side. If his model fails, then I have no idea what will happen.

You disagree, Herr Professor. Presumably you don't receive cash for anything you do and are kept afloat by advertisers who support your many platforms.

Or have I got that wrong?

BlairwasagoodPM

22 Sep 2009, 11:41AM

What journalist is going to want to write for papers who lose 95% of their readers overnight? Journalists need reach, it's their oxygen.

ClaireinOz

21 Sep 2009, 11:16PM

Please, Roy, it's people's, not peoples'. Sub, anyone?

Anecdotal evidence indicates that in-depth news and comment is becoming increasingly peripheral to the lives of generation Y, or Z, or whatever it is these days. Younger twentysomethings are already out of the habit of reading anything more demanding than special-interest blogs and their mates' Facebook entries. Do we really want to drive them - as well as older generations - further away from "serious" sites?

AJFrance

22 Sep 2009, 12:06PM

i gave up newspapers some years ago. I thought I rediscovered news recently online but I didn't, I rediscovered the discussion. The problem with offering news is that people will be selective in what they read. I f i were to subscribe to a guardian site I would expect a good coverage of those things that interest me or I would stop using it. I would also stop if I felt the site was being apologist for any group. I have been in France for two years and the cost of reading any english paper is extortionate so I read the french Midi-Libre in the bar. A genuine free press in every sense of the word.

I remember my Dad taking me to the Library to read the papers when I was little. The internet will be used in the same way. The only solution would be a paywall for everything. I suppose when the paywall hits the western press then we will all watch al-jazeera.

forthurst

22 Sep 2009, 12:06PM

Murdoch should at least be congratulated for attempting to create a more viable delivery model in respect of the established newspaper titles than existed before. The question is to what extent readers value content which has been shaped to confirm a very specific world view. This issue does not have to be faced nearly as starkly by sites which offer specialised content e.g. the FT.

There exists also the question of whether much of what passes for journalism offers any essential added value rather than a mere distraction which could be obtained from innumerable free sites. What value can be placed on the opinions or reportage of an English graduate when operating well outside their sphere of competence?

On the web there exists specialist sites where the content and journalistic endeavour is highly focused. These potentially must be attractive to advertisers and cohorts of readers. This raises the question as to whether general news media have a future per se.

Lastly there is the issue of censorship: it has been very noticeable, for example, how poor the reporting on the 'War on Terror' has been from 9/11 onwards. It is also very noticeable that when a major newspaper attempts to dangle its toes in the water, they are met with a solid wall of anger from a select group. So the question is to what extent should newspapers be constrained by the opinions of a self-important minority when there are so many blogs that put up two fingers and discuss freely areas where others fear to tread? How much longer can you get away with reporting casualty figures or suggesting the war is a mistake without examining the question 'why' until a satisfactory answer is given.

jonnyankles

22 Sep 2009, 11:04AM

@emilybell, 'curtailing the delivery system' has worked extremely well as a model for lots of other successful information-based businesses - all of them in fact! and the idea that online news delivery has a billion potential business models floating around, is severely limited if you want to remain a quality news organisation. this will always cost a lot of money

i know it's easy to claim that a cranky old man like Murdoch doesn't understand the rules of the intertubes (personally I think he might), but what about the whizz kids at Google? they have recently announced a content-payment structure ... i think they're a much better chance to do it successfully (despite the fact about 95% of their ideas fail) as they're in a strong position to leverage news providers to partner with them

EastFinchleyite

22 Sep 2009, 10:14AM

There is another factor to consider. The existence of web based news services has changed the relationship between writer and reader. It was a clear one way transfer with the old paper based systems (if you ignore readers letters). Now its has become much more bothway.

For example, Roy's original article ATL is 462 words long including headings.

The comments BTL so far up to Harbinger at 8.51am are 3622 words. This means that, purely in numbers of words, in this isolated case 89% of this part of the Guardian has been contributed free by the readers. I make no allowance or adjustment for quality either way!

If Murdoch's papers have a similar arrangement then setting up a paywall will cut his publications off from a large amount of content which they get for free at the moment.

harbinger

22 Sep 2009, 8:38AM

The bottom line is that Murdoch has tried this before and quietly dropped the scheme. Why he thinks it's going to work a second time around beats me.

harbinger

22 Sep 2009, 8:51AM

@AlanRusbridger -
I for one praise The Guardian for its digital content and further more its editorial attitude and guidelines.

The Guardian unlike every other newspaper trusts its readers and allows them as much freedom as possible. And furthermore as Alan here demostrates is prepared to join in the discussion.

The contrast with Murdoch's empire is very stark. It is run on autocratic lines where only those opinions that broadly conform to those of the newspapers are allowed. Some criticism gets through for the sake of face saving, but in reality commenting on Murdoch's websites is a bit like offering a comment to the old Pravda.

The Mail group is just as bad, probably worse when it comes to censorship and complete disdain for what readers actually think.

The Telegraph is a bit of an eye popper. Either the only people who read the Telegraph are Colonel Blimps, or they are the only ones allowed through, or God forbid the world is full of Jingoists!

harbinger

22 Sep 2009, 8:51AM

@AlanRusbridger -
I for one praise The Guardian for its digital content and further more its editorial attitude and guidelines.

The Guardian unlike every other newspaper trusts its readers and allows them as much freedom as possible. And furthermore as Alan here demostrates is prepared to join in the discussion.

The Mail group is just as bad, probably worse when it comes to censorship and complete disdain for what readers actually think.

The Telegraph is a bit of an eye popper. Either the only people who read the Telegraph are Colonel Blimps, or they are the only ones allowed through, or God forbid the world is full of Jingoists!

jochebed2

22 Sep 2009, 8:42AM

Mr Greenslade, Mr Rusbridger, the EU could use its own cartel law and ban Murdoch from using OUR taxpayer-funded satellites for his transmissions and then having the chutzpah to double- or triple-charge EU citizens for using their own satellites for his TV and web content. (We still boycott Murdoch at our house; its feasible).

What about lobbying the EU on behalf of the independent media and their supporters?

Corinthian11

22 Sep 2009, 8:29AM

My morning routine used to involve reading the Guardian Newspaper either on my way to work or during lunch break. Since the advent of the digital version and as I now work from home, I dip into it during the day and every now and again I feel compelled to add my thoughts on emotive subjects or to cheer on columnists such as Hadley Freeman, Marina Hyde or Charlie Brooker.

Would I pay for the privilege? - absolutely not. I'd find another distraction. The reason is, I don't really come here much for 'news' I come to be entertained when I'm bored or the work is at a lull period.

The web is a big place... start erecting digital turnstiles and people like me who don't really care much whether you exist or not will merely drift away to find other things to pass the time.

Impressive

22 Sep 2009, 4:00AM

Emily Bell - I'm no Luddite when it comes to online opportunities to spread news to a wide audience and make money out of it. I don't want to uninvent the internet, so apologies if my earlier contribution suggested otherwise.
My interest is content quality, not the medium of delivery. Elsewhere on this site I've been castigated by posters for apparently wanting to flush all papers down the plughole right now.
I agree these are still early days, horribly exciting days, if you like.
However, it's a fact that if you going to charge for viewing, or to make your money from advertisers impressed by the passing eyeball numbers, then you will need good content to lure an audience. And that has a price.
It's great that the Guardian is open about the current gap between accrued revenue on this excellent site against operating and Capex costs. It's still a sound investment for the future.
I think the real danger is to the big regional groups as they belatedly try to gear up for the adventure. Many are already running their limited lifespan print operations on an editorial shoestring and their content will not have the gravitas to hold an audience.
What a dilemma.... their weakened newspapers are losing a dying or disinterested readership too quickly, and not making enough money to properly fund website development or sustain editorial operations capable of changing up a gear and producing dynamic content for print or online.
Some are turning themselves inside out to solve this and, as the internet adventure settles down into a more lucrative future, they will face two further threats to their online revenue streams.
Firstly, start-up costs and overheads for a website are much lower than those for a print operation. I reckon a couple of good, commercially aware journalists and a part-time ad rep will be able to give them a run for their money in some markets.
The regional media operations also face losing a chunk of their bread and butter advertising because web-savvy small businesses are picking up customers directly through their own online sites. They don't need a middleman, at least not one that wants to charge what the traditional newspaper groups will need to do to make their required profit margins.
This week, having had to break into my home following a lost key fiasco, I simply put the name of my small town and 'odd job man' into Google. Up came names within a 10 miles radius, mostly on 'homemade' off-the-shelf websites. A phone call later I had a guy living three street away willing to come round the next day to fix my door.
I didn't even need to go to the local newspaper website, and he hadn't paid to advertise. He told me he stopped 'using the papers' about a year ago and relied on his 'page' and people passing on his website address and mobile number via email and social networks.
He provided an excellent service. Unless media businesses do the same they will have wasted online investment money while not making the maximum out of their print offerings in the meantime.

pauljaymes

22 Sep 2009, 1:34AM

Let Murdoch and others charge for their news content and go out of business. I see only a bunch of regurgitated PR material and week-old blogger stuff there anyway. The real news is on the blogs - like Guido Fawkes - and low budget sites like IndyMedia and Holy Moly - way before it ever gets to established media. Take last week's tube map 'river-gate' as an example. It was all over the blogs days before any print journalists picked it up.

All a lot of traditional print titles are doing now is acting as aggregators and editors for news content that's already out there - some may think there's value in that, but it's exactly what twitter, facebook, delicious and others are doing in a much more automated and faster way. And the kids just aren't reading tabloids any more.

If RM wants to make money from selling internet content in this world, it's going to have to be pretty special content. I'm thinking less news, more exclusive interviews. To sell, you have to provide content you can't get anywhere else; like the sports on Sky.

FreshTedium

22 Sep 2009, 7:32AM

Newspapers and their ilk will always get a small slice of total ad revenue as long as Google dominate so dramatically the placement of ads across the internet. If they wanted to make more they would invest jointly in a competitor and then cease buying from Google en-masse.

LordWotWot

22 Sep 2009, 10:22AM

As much as I hate the vile Murdoch Empire and everything it stands for, I think caution is required when assuming charging for online news will fail. Here is a vicious media group who can swing a general election with a biased newspaper cartel. News International now provide all commercial radio news in the UK (and beyond). Who would have thought in 1988 that we would have to pay to watch most sport on TV? - This group has a history of getting its way - I wouldn't be surprised if it owned the worldwide web in a few years

AJFrance

22 Sep 2009, 12:06PM

BlairwasagoodPM

22 Sep 2009, 7:54PM

Carnac

22 Sep 2009, 6:36PM

The simple reason that the Murdoch clan want the BBC to charge is to create another monopoly for themselves in the UK.

The demise of newspapers is near because of censorship of contributors. It will be the blogs that will win if newspapers charge for onine content.

chass

22 Sep 2009, 6:29PM

I think one problem is, is that the product (news) is in many cases non-essential or not good enough. As someone with an interest in economics I find the blogs (and often their comments) more useful and better than the pay for sites (a lot of which insisted there would be no crisis). Non-essential would be the celebrity and much of the sports journalism. I think in the future there will some paid for news sites, and these will be of high quality (e.g. the FT) but the weaker ones (I can't see a valid online model for the Sun), will go back to being print only and the rest won't survive. It's partly the media's and Murdoch's fault for dumbing down over the past 30 years. Murdoch is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

farisyakob

22 Sep 2009, 6:04PM

indeed - the idea that there are only two models to monetise content is short sighted - i don't think the world is going to change back to the way it was because Murdoch is a recidivist ;-)

I wrote a piece about this for Contagious Magazine:

http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/the-content-republic.html

@faris

djembajdjemba

22 Sep 2009, 4:50PM

The essential problem here as I see it is the Murdoch sites, in the UK at least, aren't ones that are worth paying for. The Times has dull regurgitated articles and a style that seems to have missed any of the advances in website design over the last few years. The Sun is The Sun and offers little compelling reason to pay for sensationalist showbiz gossip and over the top football coverage when superior versions can be found elsewhere.

To convince people to change, there needs to be carrot as well as stick.

gondwanaland

22 Sep 2009, 4:44PM

harbinger

"commenting on Murdoch's websites is a bit like offering a comment to the old Pravda." You can say that again!

during the Gaza massacre i left a mild-mannered comment on a Danny Finkelstein article supporting the Israelis. Not only was it never posted, but after 36 hours there were only 16 posts. All of them supporting Israel.

Disgraceful. Thank god for the Guardian

RGreenslade

22 Sep 2009, 4:26PM

The comments have run on without my being able to respond until now. There is an obvious forecasting split between those who believe paywalls will work and those who don't. We shall, of course, see about that.

I note that Alan Rusbridger and Emily Bell have dealt with Guardian online's losses and revenue. So I've no need to add to that, except to say that GMG's financial numbers are transparent.

And, lest the point did not get across, ALL media companies are in trouble. I spoke about this last week in an interview with Rory McLeod. Hear it at

http://www.nationalbroadcastingschool.com/blog/?p=287

@Waltroon, I am a paid contributor to The Guardian, online and print (as you probably well know).

@ClaireinOz, I plead guilty to the subbing error. Your other point is one that I am pursuing all the time. There is a profound change in interest in news, and not only from the emerging generation.

@SidSmith1, an interesting idea. Google will like that one.

@newsinusacom, in answer to your questions: I don' have a final salary pension, let alone a generous one.

I did benefit from my university fees being paid but, as a mature student, I paid for everything else (by casual subbing at weekends on the Sunday Mirror and Reveille).

I am not a media Trustafarian ring fenced from this current economic downturn. I am in the same perilous boat as all working journalists.

I most certainly am concerned about the levels of debt run up by the government, as every citizen should be. My children and my children's children may well suffer in future.

If there is only one show in town providing news, whether the BBC or BBC/Google, it is plainly not plural and definitely not in the best interests of democracy. (By the way, the BBC agrees).

Finally, I have never owned any Google shares, directly or indirectly. The only shares I own, or have have ever owned, are some 200 Trinity Mirror shares. I bought them during the post-Maxwell period specifically to enable me to attend annual meetings and obtain early copies of annual reports and accounts. They are, in financial terms, worthless. And they have not stopped me from being critical of Trinity Mirror when I felt it necessary.

BernardoB

22 Sep 2009, 3:47PM

I make a point of never knowingly paying for anything connected with Rupert Murdoch, if I can help it. The exception being Fox Films.

FAFENG

22 Sep 2009, 3:37PM

@Landice
22 Sep 09, 3:12pm
I wonder what they'd be holding it (their nerve) for? As @emilybell has said

Guardian's digital revenues have grown ten fold in eight years, to approaching £30m

There are examples of youtube, amazon and others
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/sep/16/facebook-money
or maybe Guardian will become official Google partner, break even and remain free!

wikipedia

22 Sep 2009, 3:34PM

News reporting has historically been a losing proposition, more often than not. That fact hasn't always been seen as an impossible situation, either.

We've had people buying a newspaper simply as a platform for their own views (Col. McCormick at the Chicago Tribune, Hearst) - if you want to make a small fortune in newspapers, start with a large fortune. Of course that meant the playing field wasn't level, because the (losing) newspapers were being subsidized by other sources of income. Remember when Murdoch did his price wars to destroy his competition? Same thing. That's what people do when they hold the public in contempt - they don't believe in the free market of ideas, but try to emulate the old robber barons of industry by making themselves the only game in town.

TV news used to be subsidized by the more popular, cheaper-to-produce entertainment programs (watch "Good Night and Good Luck"), same as local phone service was once subsidized by long-distance. For better or worse, those days are gone. Now everything's supposed to be its own profit center.

The US has PBS (TV) and NPR (radio) and I would guess those are getting more popular for news as network news gets shorter and fluffier, and cable news gets more partisan and less reliable. Americans also have access, through the internet, to news media from around the world - including the Guardian. Obviously that means the Guardian is much more influential now, as are their commentators.

Remember when the NYT put all their columnists behind the pay wall? Krugman suddenly went from being read by everyone to being read by relatively few - and this in the middle of the economic debacle. What Murdoch defines as 'good' is what the rest of us define as 'bad'.

The current problem seems to be that advertising isn't working as a subsidy. Either advertising techniques have to improve, or another subsidy has to be found or invented. I just don't think online subscriptions are going to work.

...

SidSmith1

22 Sep 2009, 12:43PM

I think it might work.

Google is talking about administering such a set-up. It needs to operate as follows:

A known company (eg, Google) runs a one-stop registration process. You get access to every major newspaper in the world. It's cheap.

If it became popular, you might even find sites that are currently free, including blogs, opting to move inside the system on the basis that tuppence a month is better than now.

Sazclark

22 Sep 2009, 12:20PM

Rupert Murdoch already has an exceptionally well proven business model for charging for content that used to be free. It's called the Sky Sports Pack, Children's Pack, News & Events Pack etc.

As Film 4 found out, it's true that very few people are interested in paying to subscribe to individual channels/publications. But Sky has proved that people are perfectly happy to pay for a combination pack of services that appeal to their particular interests.

Ask consumers if they would pay for a package of internet services (say a 'current affairs pack', a 'music pack' or a 'sports pack' that included the leading publications in the field as well as video content and access to comment from the leading experts) and, I think, you'll get a rather different answer.

Murdoch lost millions on his London free and achieved nothing in the process

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/aug/21/rupert-murdoch-freesheets

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/aug/21/rupert-murdoch-freesheets

Some 24 hours behind the news, I'm breaking into my holiday to write this...What was the point? What did Rupert Murdoch achieve beyond losing pots
of money for his own company, News Corporation, while ensuring that his rival, Daily Mail & General Trust, lost pots more?

I am sorry about thelondonpaper journalists losing their jobs, of course. Stefano Hatfield and his team are not to blame for what has happened.

But I cannot mourn the closing of a paper that should never have been launched in the first place. It has accomplished nothing of benefit for London (despite my colleague, Stephen Brook's belief that it punctured the London Evening Standard's relentless negativity and Simon Fletcher's argument about
it challenging a monopoly).

In truth, it was a quasi-paper, a worthless article that made no positive impact of any kind, on London or on journalism. It looked fine enough.
There were occasional articles of interest. But the overall package, with its repurposed agency copy and accent on entertainment trivia, was wholly unmemorable.
Then again, it did not purport to be anything else. It was published to be discarded. It was journalistic sleight of hand, the culmination of the British popular
newspaper trend throughout the last 40 years - a paper with content to amuse and not a paper with content to use. It interested the public
(well, it diverted some of them) without concerning itself with the public interest. Like almost all free newspapers (with honourable exceptions)
it was designed to turn a profit - from advertising revenue - and the editorial content was nothing more than a superficial dressing.
Of course, the difference with thelondonpaper is not only that it never did turn a profit, it never had a hope of doing so.
It was published specifically to spike DMGT's guns and to make life impossible for the Standard. It certainly achieved that. It was a war of
attrition launched by a media mogul who could not bear to see that another media outfit had managed to put one over on him by making money
from the morning free, Metro. Much as I admire Murdoch, I think his strategy stank. He has crippled DMGT and forced it into a sale of the Standard.
He has suffered losses himself, but the big loser is undoubtedly Lord Rothermere's company.

On Murdoch's part, it has been a disgraceful business from pointless start to humbling finish.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/24/thelondonpaper-rupert-murdoch-news-international

Why Murdoch closed the London Paper

Having declared that free has no part in the future of news,
Rupert Murdoch last week pulled the plug on his London freesheet, ending a bitter rivalry with Associated Newspapers

Ciar Byrne and Ben Dowell The Guardian, Monday 24 August 2009 Article history

Waste paper … Rupert Murdoch no longer considers the London Paper a valuable part of his empire.
Photograph: David Levene.

When he closed Britain's first national colour newspaper, Today, in November 1995, Rupert Murdoch was quoted in the paper's final edition:
"I have never closed a newspaper in this country and I hope I never do so again."

But Murdoch is a businessman and last week he looked on as his son James, head of News Corporation in Europe and Asia, announced plans to
close the evening freesheet the London Paper next month.

Journalists on the title were "shaken, shocked and very disappointed" when Clive Milner, chief operating officer of Murdoch's UK newspaper empire
News International (NI), told them of the decision. "We had no inkling until we got an email that there would be a meeting at 1 o'clock when we had gone to press,"
says one staffer. "Even then we weren't expecting this because we often have update meetings. But a pep talk and two PowerPoint slides
later it was clear we were closing." The London Paper's editor, Stefano Hatfield, who only learned of its demise a couple of days before his workforce,
is speaking to each of the 40 journalists – out of a total staff of 60 – to discuss their redundancies. He hopes to find jobs for as many of them as possible
elsewhere in Wapping, including at the new Sunday Times website, one of the few places in the industry still recruiting. The announcement surprised
media observers. Three-quarters of a million pounds had been invested in the London Paper's website this year. Despite making a pre-tax loss of £12.9m
in the year to 29 June 2008 – the last set of figures available – the NI title appeared to hold the upper hand against its Associated-owned free rival,
London Lite. Besides, if anyone could take on Lord Rothermere in the London market, it would be the Murdochs. As recently as February,
when Associated sold majority control of the paid-for London Evening Standard, the London Paper crowed in a full-page advert that its readers had helped
to bring about the "fire sale". Despite this, an internal review recommending the closure of the London Paper convinced James Murdoch, who is understood
to have taken the decision within the past two weeks once he saw the group's year-end figures. Rebekah Brooks (née Wade), who is taking over as
chief executive of News International next week, was away when the announcement was made. But she has never made a secret of her disdain for
free newspapers and, despite her new role, had not joined the board of NI Free Newspapers, the publisher of the London Paper.
The real driving force behind the decision is Rupert Murdoch's new-found evangelism for paid-for content.
This month he declared News Corp's mission is "to increase our revenue from all our content". A loss-making free paper does not fit into this vision.
Given the advertising downturn, most analysts expect the London Paper's losses over the past 12 months to have worsened. Douglas McCabe, a media
analyst with Enders Media in London, says: "Murdoch is saying 'enough is enough'. He's saying newsrooms have value and by giving away free content
you devalue them. It would be somewhat ambiguous to start charging for online news and still give away news in a free paper."
It all seemed so different three years ago when, irritated by the success Associated was enjoying with its free morning newspaper Metro,
Murdoch jumped at Hatfield's proposal for a free evening paper. The London Paper was a carefully market-researched product aimed at 18- to 35-year-olds.
It aimed to be more inclusive than the Evening Standard, appealing to young professionals travelling home to north, south and east London rather than
just well-heeled west London. It hired girl- and boy-about-town columnists and, more radically, gay equivalents; it reached out to Muslim readers,
and made an effort to put black faces on the cover in stories not related to crime. Just days before the London Paper's launch in September 2006,
Associated stole Murdoch's thunder with a spoiler, the London Lite. A bitter contest ensued. The London Paper is more costly to produce,
with a large standalone team of journalists, while the Lite takes most of its copy from the Standard. The Murdoch title prints and distributes around 500,000
copies a day, compared with Lite's 400,000, adding 25% in costs. When advertising became scarcer, the London Paper refused to drop its rates while Lite would compromise, according to advertising agencies. Industry analysts were quick to point out the similarity between the current battle and that waged between
Associated and Robert Maxwell in 1987. Associated responded to the arrival of Maxwell's evening title, the London Daily News, by relaunching a cut-price
version of the defunct Evening News. Maxwell's title lasted just a few months after selling for twice the Associated paper's 5p price. Yet executives at
Associated appeared genuinely surprised by last week's announcement. It is worth noting that News International has not withdrawn from bidding for the
London Underground morning distribution contract currently held by Metro, which is up for renewal early next year. NI declined to comment.
There had even been rumours that Brooks would negotiate a deal with Rothermere, Associated's proprietor, to stem the heavy losses on both sides.
The level of rivalry reportedly led to cheers in the Standard's newsroom when staff heard of their rival's demise last week. On a personal level, however,
journalists there were concerned for former colleagues who had jumped ship, most recently the Lite reporter Bo Wilson, who left last week to join the
London Paper as deputy news editor. The big question now is how long London Lite will keep going. A spokesman for Daily Mail & General Trust,
which owns Associated Newspapers, said only that the group was "watching developments with interest". But Lucy Barrett, editor of Marketing, says:
"If you lose your competitor, you no longer have a market. In theory, Lite should pick up more advertisers, but it depends whether or not the advertisers
are there. I'm not sure they are."

Free newspapers funded by advertising are a volatile business model in any downturn, let alone a recession. While freesheets are unlikely to
disappear altogether, in closing the London Paper the Murdochs have underlined their belief that charging for news is the way forward.

Why Ridding and Murdoch can't stop talking about pay walls

paidContent: They are talking up pay walls because they think if more titles join them it will boost their own pay plans

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/aug/18/financialtimes-news-corporation

Rupert Murdoch and Financial Times CEO John Ridding sure like talking about why newspapersshould charge for content—
but few papers have followed FT.com in charging and none are yet as squarely behind Murdoch. Ridding appears in yet another newspaper
today (NYTimes.com), talking up the paid content paradigm. But what's in it for them if other titles follow their lead?

FT.com MD Rob Grimshaw told me in an interview earlier this month: "We have been the black sheep of the industry for seven or eight years
but we believe very passionately that it was the right thing to do…. We would like other publishers to join up".
He continues: "Our experience has been so positive—we can't understand why they have been so reluctant." But why does the FT want to stop feeling like
an outsider as the sole UK national newspaper to charge online? Put simply - if other, general-interest titles start asking for money, FT.com's existing,
high-end paid-for news might also seem worth handing over cash for. That would make it easier for FT.com to build on its current 117,000 paying subscribers.
Likewise, the normally less open Murdoch is trying to soften up rivals to follow him in charging, fearing that, if he raised the wall alone, he might find readers
knocking on other doors. I asked Grimshaw whether the forthcoming Sundaytimes.co.uk could make a success of charging for content. No comment on that one,
but he added: "In general, we don't see any reason why paid content has to be confined to niche marketplaces." It's an uncomplicated plea to publishers to boost
their revenues—and the FT's—by supporting a single paid model. But Ridding and Murdoch are well aware that if publishers clubbed together to so much
as discuss an industry-wide willingness to charge—let alone a shared technology or cartel—the UK's Competition Commission might express displeasure.
So what better way to side-step that problem than by having the debate in public… ?

Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) CEO Sly Bailey and Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall told the Culture and Media Select Committee in June that competition
laws banned them from meeting to talk about how to tackle "superdominant Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News". Publishers in the US had to meet in private
to escape the attention of anti-trust authorities. By making public statements, rather than agreeing private strategies, they escape risk of antitrust action

Holiday like a media mogul on Rupert Murdoch's superyacht
Rosehearty, his 180-foot 'masterpiece', is yours for a mere€210,000 … a week

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/13/rupert-murdoch-yacht-hire-offer

Esther Addley
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 August 2009 19.13 BST
Article history
Rupert Murdoch. Photograph: Tom Stoddart/Getty
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/13/rupert-murdoch-yacht-hire-offer
It boasts five spacious suites, several luxurious salons, a gym and the king size bed in which Rupert Murdoch enjoys his holiday lie-ins. And now, from just €210,000
(£181,000) a week,
you too can holiday like a media mogul, accompanied by nine lucky guests, and attended to day and night by the same number of exceptionally solicitous staff.

The Australian tycoon may head a $33bn (£20bn) global newspaper and television empire, but even billionaires can do with a little extra pocket money now
and then. It has emerged that the News Corporationchairman has made his yacht, Rosehearty, a 183ft (56-metre) "aluminium masterpiece", available for
holiday rents – although of course only those with quite a few million of their own need apply. The charter company CharterWorld.com is listing the three-year-old
yacht for hire in the Mediterranean or Caribbean, boasting "magnificent" performance and "a stunning interior by famous French designer Christian Liaigre" that
includes "full beam owner's suite with king bed and sitting area". The yacht's two tenders, reportedly named Grace and Chloe after Murdoch's young twin daughters,
are included, along with two dinghies complete with instructor, six sets of dive gear, and nine plasma TVs. Photographs on the company's site of the interior
reveal the 78-year-old to have a minimalist taste in interior design that one might suggest (though not in any outlet owned by NewsCorp) borders on the bland.
The spacious main salon features a large sofa in beige, the same colour as featured in the internal reception rooms, and, for the sake of consistency,
the bedrooms. A similar approach to colour characterises its exterior – hull and masts are a brilliant, uninterrupted white. Hugo Andreae, editor-in-chief
of the magazine Superyacht World, said at 56 metres the Rosehearty was certainly "up there" in terms of luxury and scale, but was by no means among
the flashiest of vessels favoured by the super-rich. "A few years ago that would have been a pretty sizeable yacht, but these days you regularly build up to
100 metres." With even Murdoch's relative tiddler costing an estimated €30m, however, Andreae said it was not unusual for the super-wealthy to offer their
yachts for charter "to offset the enormous costs. There are certainly bigger and more luxurious boats available." He added that those hiring a boat would
not be made aware of its owner's identity. "It's a very discreet world, for obvious reasons." According to enthusiasts who have posted sightings on the web,
the Rosehearty has recently sailed around Alaska, where Murdoch has reportedly been holidaying with the actor Mel Gibson, according to Gawker.com.
One spotter on the site yachts.monacoeye.com reported that she arrived two days ago in British Columbia, Canada, commenting: "What a beauty!"
Others who have first-hand experience of the Rosehearty are the Conservative leader, David Cameron, who in October took a private jet to the Greek island
of Santorini where the yacht was moored in order have drinks on board with the NewsCorp chairman. Singer Billy Joel, a sailing enthusiast, has also reportedly
spent time on board with Murdoch and his wife, Wendi Deng. The billionaire has been a yachting fan for some time, marrying Deng on board the Morning Glory
in New York harbour in 1999. At 48 metres, however, that boat was evidently not large enough for his growing second family; happily, Murdoch found another
media tycoon on whom to offload it – the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

Other top lets

Richard Branson's private island, Necker, is available for private hire for $51,000 (£30,000) a night, with a minimum stay of five nights. The 74-acre island,
part of the British Virgin Islands, can accommodate up to 28 people. The £80m Maltese Falcon yacht of Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley billionaire, can be hired
for £300,000 a week, and comes with four dinghies, two windsurfers and a jet ski. It can accommodate 16 guests, with 18 crew. Musha Cay, a group of 11
islands in the Bahamas owned by David Copper–field can be rented from $37,500 for 12 people to $46,500 for 24 people. The islands have five guest houses,
40 beaches, a gym, and other facilities. Mick Jagger lets out his oceanfront villa, Stargroves, in Mustique. The six-bedroom Japanese-style villa comes with
a large koi pond, a freshwater swimming pool and croquet court. There is also a cook, butler and gardener. It is available for £6,500 a week between May
and December. Goldeneye, an 18-acre estate in Jamaica, was originally owned by Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and is where he wrote 17 of his novels.
It is now owned by Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records. The estate and its three villas can be rented, with the main villa costing from $2,500 a night.

Help Rupert - rent his yacht Fancy chartering a yacht? Then why not enjoy a week aboard Rupert Murdoch's 184ft (56m) Rosehearty, described
as an "aluminium masterpiece" with a "stunning interior by famous French designer Christian Liangre". It isn't exactly cheap. Gir just one ween the rental charge
is $310,00 (£200,000). Still, a media mogul running a loss-making corporation has to make ends meet somehow. Sources (plus pictures :Cityfile/monacoey

Why Ridding and Murdoch can't stop talking about pay walls

paidContent: They are talking up pay walls because they think if more titles join them it will boost their own pay plans

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/aug/18/financialtimes-news-corporation

Rupert Murdoch and Financial Times CEO John Ridding sure like talking about why newspapersshould charge for content—but few papers have followed
FT.com in charging and none are yet as squarely behind Murdoch. Ridding appears in yet another newspaper today (NYTimes.com), talking up the paid
content paradigm. But what's in it for them if other titles follow their lead?

FT.com MD Rob Grimshaw told me in an interview earlier this month: "We have been the black sheep of the industry for seven or eight years but
we believe very passionately that it was the right thing to do…. We would like other publishers to join up". He continues: "Our experience has been so
positive—we can't understand why they have been so reluctant." But why does the FT want to stop feeling like an outsider as the sole UK national newspaper to charge online? Put simply - if other, general-interest titles start asking for money, FT.com's existing, high-end paid-for news might also seem worth handing over cash for. That would make it easier for FT.com to build on its current 117,000 paying subscribers. Likewise, the normally less open Murdoch is trying to soften up rivals to follow him in charging, fearing that, if he raised the wall alone, he might find readers knocking on other doors. I asked Grimshaw whether the forthcoming Sundaytimes.co.uk could make a success of charging for content. No comment on that one, but he added: "In general, we don't see any reason why paid content has to be confined to niche marketplaces." It's an uncomplicated plea to publishers to boost their revenues—and the FT's—by supporting a single paid model. But Ridding and Murdoch are well aware that if publishers clubbed together to so much as discuss an industry-wide willingness to charge—let alone a shared technology or cartel—the UK's Competition Commission might express displeasure.

So what better way to side-step that problem than by having the debate in public… ?

Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) CEO Sly Bailey and Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall told the Culture and Media Select Committee in June that competition laws banned them from meeting to talk about how to tackle "superdominant Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News". Publishers in the US had to meet in private to escape the attention of anti-trust authorities. By making public statements, rather than agreeing private strategies, they escape risk of antitrust action

72 Point achieves more national news coverage than any other PR agency in the UK72 Point is the PR division of SWNS - the UK's largest independent press agency.We have a unique and direct link to the UK press due to: A 40 year relationship with national news editors An EXCLUSIVE, in-house newswire service which every media organisation in the country subscribes to An in-house team of over 100 trained journalists, feature writers and photographers Journalists from the Telegraph, Sun and women's magazines working in the same office. Access to global market research site www.onepoll.com which can sample thousands of respondents No matter who you are or what you do - We can achieve positive exposure for you. An interesting, quirky news story is powerful. We know what will "make" in the newspapers and will aim to build a story which satisfies two key requirements:a)It has strong news value
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72 Point - About Us 72 Point is part of the SWNS Group ? the UK?s largest independent press agency and newswire service.

Our relationship with SWNS secures our position as national news PR specialists. No other agency has: Direct access to a newswire which every media organisation in the
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Click on the following links to see information about SWNS, 72 Point, Onepoll.com and the other parts of our company?

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The 72Point.com Team Andrew Young Job Title: News Editor and Partner - SWNS Joined 72 Point: 1984 and again in 1989 (break to work for Today for 3 years)

Click to read more What he does: As News Editor, Andy has played a major role in the development of scores of young journalists' careers. He has also overseen many major stories, including the Fred West story and numerous Royal exclusives. Before 72 Point: Andy has ink is his veins, as the son of the great Daily Mirror journalist Syd Young, he became one of the UK's youngest ever staff reporters when he landed a job on Eddy Shah's ground-breaking Today newspaper in the mid-80s. After three years with Today and having turned down a number of lucrative offers within the industry Andrew took up the offer of a partnership with SWNS. Likes: Beer, cigarettes and pressure. Dislikes: Fluffy PR Bunnies.

John Sewell Job Title: Managing Director - 72 Point, 72 Point Broadcast and OnePoll Joined 72 Point: Founding Director Click to read more

Clients: Oversees all accounts. What he does: Internet, PR, marketing and helping people with problems.

Before 72 Point: John began his career with ICL, before being headhunted by Siemens to manage new business. After five years with the company he became involved as an Equity Partner with Exepos Software Solutions, a specialist software company. Within its first year John negotiated a £500,000 software order with ASDA supermarkets. This was to launch the company towards a successful trade sale in 1996 for £3.6M to Lynx Plc, who were listed on the main London stock market.

After a two-year Sabbatical during which John helped raise his young family, he formed Phase 8, a company which specialised in investing in internet start-up ventures. Following the acquisition of a small number of internet infrastructure companies and after just 14 months trading, Phase 8 was sold to Namesco Ltd for £3.4M. He then approached SWNS to form 72 Point Ltd. Likes: His kids, the internet, coffee, Redbull, Karaoke and George Best. Dislikes: Decaffeinated coffee, the tube and museums.

Doug Shields Job Title: National News and Creative Manager

Joined 72 Point: Sept 07 Click to read more Clients: Works on all accounts. What he does: Specialises In - Creative idea generation, copywriting, news generation and training.

Before 72 Point: Doug joined SWNS from college in 1994. During his six years as a reporter with the agency he broke a string of world exclusives including the divorce of Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles. He also worked on huge news stories such as the death of Diana Princess of Wales and the House of Horrors murders in Gloucester. He moved to The Sun in January 2001 and in 2002 was head-hunted to run Safeway's Pro-Active PR operation. He later became senior reporter at Closer magazine before taking over as news editor of lad's mag Zoo. In May 2005 was made news editor on The National Enquirer in the United States. After a year at the Enquirer and six months as deputy news editor at Splash News and Picture Agency in Los Angeles he returned to England as assistant news editor at The Sun. He left The Sun in September to join 72 Point. Likes: The buzz of a big news story, good food, Rioja and my family and friends. Dislikes: Taxes, sarcasm, speed cameras and Marmite.

Libby Cottingham Job Title: Account Director Joined 72 Point: August 2004 Click to read more

Clients: Debenhams, Travelodge, WAYN (Where Are You Now?), Cornhill Direct, Cheltenham and Gloucester, Toyota, Green Flag and Thomas Cook. Ad-hoc clients include some of the UK's largest PR agencies such as Weber Shandwick, Taylor Herring, Freud Communications, Ann-Summers, Asda and Fleishman-Hillard. What she does: Web based clients, Finance, Health and Beauty and Fashion. Before 72 Point: Completed a degree in Public Relations and Media Studies in 2003 before working in the Press Office for a large technology company in Bristol. Likes: G & T's, fast food, songs that have a dance routine, anything strangely small and a genuine love of killer heels. Dislikes: Sport of any kind, people that call their cars names and queuing for anything.

Emma Elsworthy Job Title: Account Director

Joined 72 Point: September 2002 Clients: Boots, Imperial Leather, Weight Watchers, Toys'R' Us, Ann Summers, Cheltenham and Gloucester and Coors. What she does: Specialises in Health and Beauty, Insurance, Retail and Food and Drink. Before 72 Point: 7 years In-house PR experience - having joined Hill House Hammond Press Office after University Emma quickly became responsible for generating coverage in national, regional and trade press. She also became the face of the company internally; writing and running a successful internal communications course - teaching more than 3,000 staff members. Emma was head-hunted by 72 Point in 2002 and is now the company's longest serving account manager. Likes: Singing, Coronation Street, big men, my children, cake, pyjama bottoms and mascara. Dislikes: Coughing, Champagne and snobs.

James Coleman Job Title: Account Manager/Business Development Joined 72 Point: August 2005 Click to read more

Clients: Clerical Medical, Churchill and Travelodge (assisting Account Directors). Ad-hoc clients have included PR agencies such as Kavanagh Communications, Philips, BSkyB, Co-Operative Bank, Biss Lancaster and Seal Communications.

What he does: New business development, campaign research, data analysis and Account Management. Before 72 Point: BA Honours PR degree at Bournemouth University with a placement year at 72 Point and sponsorship for the final year.

Likes: Current affairs, cycling, running and all things sporty. Dislikes: Sitting down for too long, slow walkers and unnecessary noise.

Katie Price Job Title: Sales & Surveys support Joined 72 Point: May 2008 Click to read more

Specialises in: Generating new business and providing database support to the sales team. Clients: Waitrose, Choices Videos, Halifax, Co-op Financial Services, MBNA, CLS, Skipton Building Society, SKY, Jamjar cars, Weber Shandwick (Manchester), Green Flag, Chelsea Building Society, Airtours,Littlewoods, Asda What she does: Initially brought on to develop new accounts, Mary now heads up the company's northern division. She is responsible not only for business development but ensuring ongoing accounts run smoothly. She regularly travels up and down the country in search of new and challenging briefs from small web based companies to large Corporates, Financial Institutions being just one of her favorites! Before 72 Point: After completing a BA Hons from London University in History, Mary worked in Sales/ Marketing and PR or KP Foods in London. She was then promoted to HQ United Biscuits working in National Accounts. Moving on to Esselte Letraset to work in International Publicity, after 3 years she joined WH Smith Group working in Sales and Marketing where she continued to be successful. After taking time out to have three beautiful boys, Mary resumed her career in 2001 when she joined 72 Point. Likes: Jewelry; especially diamonds and pearls (shame she can't afford them) wine, James Bond movies, politics, shoes and handbags. Dislikes: Pretentious intellectuals, Big Brother, bad language and bad manners.

Kathy De Mattia Job Title: PR Account Director Joined 72 Point: February 2008 Click to read more Clients: Aston Manor, the National Association of Cider Makers, Distell Wines and Bristol Rugby. What she does: Working in the PR department, Kathy manages campaigns for various national clients. Her role is to make her clients famous through both the trade and consumer media. Before 72 Point: Kathy worked in London for various high profile brands, including Pepsi, Mars and O2 Mobile. Likes: Alan Carr, playing golf, New York and the fall of Kerry Katona! Dislikes:Meetings about meetings, people who don't say thank you or sorry and lime chutney.

Paul Walters Job Title: Picture Editor and Partner - SWNS Joined 72 Point: 1984 Click to read more

What he does: As Picture Editor, Paul has overseen this department's phenomenal period of progress and success over the last decade.

Before 72 Point: Joined the Bath Chronicle in 1988 as a photographer before carrying out shifts for every national newspaper. Likes: Checking bank statements. Dislikes: Fluffy PR Bunnies.

Jay Williams Job Title: Chief Creative Consultant Joined 72 Point:2001 Click to read more

Clients: Works on all client accounts. What he does: Creative idea generation, copywriting, news generation and training. Before 72 Point: Jay's career in journalism began in 1981 when he landed the job of assistant news editor on the legendary music magazine Sounds. In 1985 he moved into mainstream journalism, running the Newcastle bureau of CNA News Agency where he was one of the first reporters on the scene of the 1988 Lockerbie air disaster. Jay joined SWNS in 1990 and was quickly promoted to Chief Reporter. After heading the reporting team which broke the Fred West story amongst numerous others, he was made SWNS Partner in 2000 and later went on to set up 72 Point Ltd with John Sewell. Likes: Elvis, and his son Alfie's band Phoenix Cult - "the best unsigned band in the UK". Dislikes: Stalkers, surly non-smokers who make him step off the pavement, Richard Gere, wine bars.

Harriet Crosse Job Title: Business Development Manager Joined 72 Point: May 2001 Click to read more

What she does: Harriet manages 72 Point's highly driven business development team. She is responsible for sales, marketing and business relations. As a founding member of 72 Point, Harriet has contributed significantly to the company's growth.

Before 72 Point: Completed a degree in Media Studies at Edinburgh University. Likes: Jon Snow, weird movies and Stella Artois. Dislikes: Corporate spiel and Keira Knightly.

Annabel Iles Job Title: Account Director Joined 72 Point: April 2006 Click to read more

Specialises in: Fashion, Travel and Leisure, Health and Beauty and Event Management. Clients: La Senza, Toni and Guy, Debenhams, Travelodge, Thomas Cook, Julian Graves Alberto Culver and GE Money. Ad-hoc clients include some of the UK's largest PR agencies such as Trimedia Harrison Cowley, Biss Lancaster, BMA Communications and Bray Leino. Before 72 Point: 8 years In-house PR experience. Annabel started working life in the luxury travel industry before re-locating to Bristol in 2001 to join At-Bristol, the city's new Landmark visitor attraction. She initially set-up the brand communication for the corporate events division before being appointed PR Manager - achieving continual national, regional and trade coverage for the attraction as well as organising regular high profile film/exhibition launches, royal visits, photo shoots and national TV/radio campaigns. Likes: Johnny Wilkinson, champagne, log fires and the great outdoors. Dislikes: Baked beans, tequila and Smart cars.

Gemma Francis Job Title: Account Manager/Copywriter Joined 72 Point: October 2006 Click to read more

Specialises in: Copywriting Clients: Hi-Tec, Quorn, Jobs2view, Yourpropertyclub, Family Relatives and Legoland Windsor Before 72 Point: Gemma worked as a local newspaper reporter where she went on to complete a Diploma in Journalism. As the only reporter on a weekly newspaper in Somerset she was solely responsible for chasing stories and writing page-ready news copy to strict deadlines. Likes: Take That, Speedway and vodka and lemonade. Dislikes: Flying and multi-storey car parks

Nicky Marks Job Title: Business Development Executive Joined 72 Point: March 2006 Click to read more

Clients: Debenhams, Thomas Cook, HMV and Superdrug. What she does: As a senior member of the sales department, Nicky is highly involved in all sales and marketing processes. She is our first point of contact for new business calls. Before 72 Point: Managed a small telemarketing company in Bristol. Likes: Poker, Reggae and Cosmopolitans. Dislikes: Horses and men that wear flip-flops.

Jo Sansom Job Title: Office Manager Joined 72 Point: October 2006 Click to read more

Specialises in: Administration, Accounts and Event Management. What he does: Jo deals with financial management, recruitment and HR issues. Before 72 Point: Engineering and Management Consultancy background. Likes: Thailand, running, wine and her dog. Dislikes: Pete Doherty, rude shop staff and people who mumble.

Julia Woda Job Title: Business Development Executive Joined 72 Point: February 2006 Click to read more

Specialises in: Generating new business and providing database support to the sales team Clients: Legoland, Lego, Seddons Solicitors, ZPR, Momentum Pictures Before 72 Point: Career break to raise children, prior to that worked in executive support functions at Cisco Systems and Psion PLC. Likes: Wine, yoga, films of Anthony Minghella, good jokes and wine. Dislikes: Big Brother contestants, yob culture, public transport

Blog Web Discovery Machine

Blog Web Discovery Machine In Time for Summer, Top Travel Sites Jun 30, 2009 Posted by Geoffrey Mack

Facebook Juggernaut Overtakes YouTube Jun 10, 2009 Posted by Geoffrey Mack Don't forget the Grads... Top Used Car Sites eb Directory Listings of the top sites in each category.

Blog Web Discovery Machine In Time for Summer, Top Travel Sites Jun 30, 2009 Posted by Geoffrey Mack

Facebook Juggernaut Overtakes YouTube Jun 10, 2009 Posted by Geoffrey Mack Don't forget the Grads... Top Used Car Sites

NEWS SOURCES

More Great World News Links

EXCERPT

The Secrets of His Succession

Prudence

Elisabeth

Lachlan

James

Grace

Chloe

James Robinson

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2008/mar/14/murdoch Murdoch's printing empire

News of the World phone hacking: Guardian shows MPs new evidencehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2009/jul/14/news-world-new-evidence

The Sun got too hot without its coolest head

Views on the news: Murdoch's madness, more banking redundancies and bonuses for Barclays bigwigs

Media Monkey's Diary 16 Nov 2009: Read Media Monkey's diary from the Monday section

Media Monkey's Diary

Facebook Juggernaut Overtakes YouTube Jun 10, 2009 Posted by Geoffrey Mack

Don't forget the Grads... Top Used Car Sites eb Directory Listings of the top sites in each category.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2008/mar/14/murdoch
Murdoch's printing empire

Media Monkey's Diary 16 Nov 2009:
Read Media Monkey's diary from the Monday section