Tag Results for Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. gave a cool $1 million to the Republicans in June, but zilch to the Democrats. With his Fox News network salivating over every primary election return leading up to and including this November's mid-terms, some say the Aussie mogul has managed to rip away whatever tattered shards of "fair & balanced" cred Fox had left. Others are shrugging, though, saying it's just the way the news business - like any other business - does business.

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

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

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

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

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

Convey's a smart guy who took over the Herald at a time when the paper, and the news business in general, was shrinking drastically. During the 1990s, he was part of the triumvirate that ran the paper, serving as managing editor for features along with editor Andy Costello and managing editor for news Andrew Gully.

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

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

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

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

Update: Well, that didn't take long.

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

"Beat the Press" panelists sound off on their rants and raves of the week: Rupert Murdoch says Fox News should scale back its coverage of the Tea Party; a new Rasmussen poll says that 55 percent of Americans surveyed said “media bias” was a bigger problem in politics than “big corporate contributions”; a Fox & Friends interview with an ultimate fighting champion hits a new low; a Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist's iPad app is rejected for making fun of public figures; and the language of the gambling debate.

Exhibit 1 for the argument that newspapers are doomed: Dinosaur thinking and Supersaurus-sized egos.

New York magazine had this item recently on why the New York Post and the New York Daily News couldn't come together on cost-sharing measures that would have helped the bottom line of both struggling Gotham tabloids. According to New York, Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman and the Post's Rupert Murdoch couldn't put their old emnities aside, even if it meant possibly saving their resective papers.

Incidentally, the issue has a local angle too. A year ago Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell told Beat the Press he tried for years to convince the Boston Globe to share costs like delivery trucks, savings that could have made last year's financial crisis at the Globe a little less painful.

I guess, we'll see in the coming year whether Boston's newspaper war is any more enlightened than New York's.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In what could be a clever bid to defuse the controversy stirred up by media owners like Rupert Murdoch, Google has announced that it will allow publishers to set a limit on the number of articles people can access through its search engine without paying.

The News Corp. chairman has called search engines like Google and Yahoo "content kleptomaniacs" for aggregating news content without sharing profits with the companies that create it. He has threatened to block Google from indexing stories produced by News Corp. properties like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

Google officials said yesterday that the company will change it's "First Click Free" program to allow publishers to limit users to five pages per day without either registering or subscribing. It seems as if it's a compromise that could work, since publishers like Murdoch who are hell bent on putting their content behind pay walls could still get the benefit of referrals from Google.

The announcement comes after much reporting, including by our own BTP panelist Dan Kennedy of "Media Nation," that Murdoch was in talks with Microsoft about an exclusive content deal with its new Bing search engine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More and more newspapers are beginning to charge for their web sites. Newsday is now charging for online content.  The Boston Globe is changing the pricing of its Globe Reader.  Will it make for a healthier news industry?

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

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

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

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

Now Murdoch has adjusted the equation to pure hate.

Two predictions:

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

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

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