Tag archive: Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch recently approved an early attempt at a settlement offer to the family of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl that was murdered in 2002. This payment stems from alleged hacking of Milly Dowler's mobile phone by representatives of the Murdoch-owned News of the World. When the public discovered the phone hacking scandal, several of the high-ranking employees at the newspaper were arrested and eventually lost their jobs after the… Read More

During a conference call today concerning the News Corp. fiscal fourth quarter earnings report, it was reported that the news giant lost $254 million on the sale of MySpace to Specific Media on June 29. This loss pushed net income for the company down by 22 percent. Murdoch purchased MySpace in 2005 for $580 million, but watched the investment rapidly lose value as MySpace members defected to Facebook in massive numbers. Management at MySpace… Read More

Hacking group LulzSec are back – and now it’s directing its attention toward Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, which form part of his News Corporation media empire. According to the Guardian, visitors to the website of the UK’s most widely read newspaper, the Sun, were redirected to a page with a report falsely claiming that the News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch had been found dead in his garden. The Sun’s website has since been taken down… Read More

After 168 years in print, the UK's most widely read newspaper, the News of the World, hit the newsstands for the last time on Sunday. The decision to close the weekly tabloid was taken last week by its owner, News International, following allegations regarding the hacking of mobile phones by journalists and private investigators who once worked for the paper. Revelations about the phone hacking grew in seriousness in recent days, causing… Read More

Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp took the online edition of the Times of London newspaper behind a paywall, meaning that if readers wanted to access the paper's content online, they could either pay for the print edition (which included an online subscription) or pay to access the Web site. When the firewall went up, initial reports had traffic to the online Times of London drop by 90 percent; however, in an interview… Read More

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is starting to make good on its threats to take some of its major mass market newspapers behind paywalls in an effort to generate revenue directly from subscribers, rather than relying solely on online advertising. Starting this June, News Corp will take Britain's the

Traditional print news media like magazines and newspapers have been struggling to adapt to the online world: as print advertising sales plummet and a growing number of newspapers scale back or close down entirely, there's been growing momentum in the industry—spearheaded by News Corp's Rupert Murdoch—to take online news content behind so-called “paywalls,” where only paid subscribers will be able to access… Read More

News Corp's Rupert Murdoch has begun waging a fight for newspapers and other paid content providers to lock their content behind so-called “paywalls” so only paid subscribers may have access. The move is based in part on the comparative success of the Wall Street Journal locking its specialized content behind a paywall (News Corp owns the Wall Street Journal), and Murdoch has repeatedly threatened to take the major of News… Read More

Media companies wishing to thrive in the digital age need to persuade consumers to pay for news online by providing compelling information in any form they want, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said Tuesday. Speaking at a two-day workshop on the state of journalism hosted by the Federal Trade Commission, Murdoch said the future is promising for publishers that can adapt to the ongoing migration of audiences and advertisers to the Web.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp released its financial numbers for its fourth fiscal quarter of 2009 (PDF), and the results weren't great: the company reported profits down 8 percent in 2009 compared to 2008, and Murdoch characterized the year 2009 as “the most difficult in recent history.” And what's News Corp's plan to stop the hemorrhaging? The company plans to lock most of its news content behind so-called… Read More

News Corp., owned by Rupert Murdoch, owns newspapers and media around the world, including the Wall Street Journal, the Times, and, of course, Fox. Yesterday, encouraged by the jump in subscriptions and the revenue that brings at WSJ, Murdoch says he’s looking at charging people to read the content at the websites of his newspapers, according to a report in the Guardian. He said papers were undertaking an “epochal”… Read More

Intellectual property is important to companies, and they will prosecute people who violate it. But they’re not always right. Take what happened Scotland’s Gill and Ken Murdoch, who were accused by Atari of sharing the game Race07. As the couple, aged 54 and 66, told consumer magazine Which, they’d never played a video game in their lives. The Murdochs received a letter giving them the option of paying around $900 in… Read More

A judge has ruled that a lawsuit filed in 2005 against the MySpace executives who brokered the deal to sell the social networking site to Ruper Murdoch's News Corp. can finally go forward. The suit accuses former senior executives and directors at Intermix and VantagePoint (a venture capital backer of Intermix) of cheating MySpace shareholders out of billions in revenue by agreeing to a $580 million buyout. U.S. District Court… Read More

In comments at the annual Bear Stearns media conference in Florida, media mogul Rupert Murdoch confirmed his News Corp. will not get in the way of Microsoft's efforts to take over Internet giant Yahoo. “We're not going to get into a fight with Microsoft, which has a lot more money than us,” Reuters reports Murdoch told investors. Industry reports have had Yahoo seeking other partners to fend off an unsolicited $41.4… Read More

It’s the ultimate game of swap. News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch is offering MySpace, his recent high-profileacquisition, to Yahoo in exchange for 25% (some have reported 30%) ownership of the Internet giant.   MySpace cost Murdoch $580 million in 2005, just as hespent $650 million for IGN, the online gaming network, giving him a commanding online presence. He also tried to buy YouTube, then snapped up Photobucket for a cool $250… Read More