Rupert Murdoch

When accusations of illegal mobile phone hacking and arrests first came to the newspaper News of the World a few years ago, the paper responded in the typically guarded, less-said-the-better dance advised by most lawyers and crisis communications experts. For all the talk of bold answers and transparency, the resulting strategy out of brands getting challenged by challenging crises is to stretch out the pain as long as possible with the least amount of comment or operational effort...thereby betting on everyone losing interest, which is normally what happens.

The facts speak for the themselves: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million and is selling it this week to Specific Media for $35 million. It made its purchase price back perhaps a couple times over by crapping out the site with innumerable ads (remember, News Corp. was simply exploring new distribution channels and the ad model was the most obvious way to monetize the thing). But users abandoned MySpace in droves, from a peak of 90 million in 2006 to 18 million 4 years later. Today, the thing is all but dead.

Let’s just get a few things straight, there are a lot of doomsayers out there. Those that say Rupert Murdoch is an idiot for implementing a paywall on his most prized content. If you talk to Journalists, however, they tell a different story. Although most call it bold, most also say they support it. Protecting their skills seems the right way to go.

The top story today was Rupert Murdoch sort of saying that News Corp might start using robots.txt on Google to prevent its stuff from being indexed. Or that's how it was interpreted on the internets anyway. Nevermind that he probably meant something different -- that News Corp will erect pay walls around its online content the way it now does with the Wall Street Journal: a headline and a paragraph of text for free, and everything else is paid.

by: Roger Dooley