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moguls
How Rupert Murdoch's Man-Eating Wife Controls Him
For the most part, Rupert Murdoch courts controversy. "He likes to set the house on fire and watch all the fire engines drive maniacally down the road," Michael Wolff writes in a biography of the News Corporation chairman. But he's touchy about his third wife, Wendi Deng, nearly 40 years his junior. He was upset when the Wall Street Journal decided to profile her in 2000. And he is suspected to be behind the spiking of a Fortune contributor's Deng profile for an Australian newspaper chain he partly owned at the time, and the subsequent sanitization of Deng's Wikipedia entry. So Murdoch can't be tickled that Wolff says Deng has him by the short wires, according to the Times' new review of Wolff's Murdoch bio: More » -
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Hippie Folksinger Invades WSJ Newsroom
Pat Buchanan is defending Hillary Clinton, the Guardian is scooping on U.S. political news, and now this, perhaps the ultimate WTF moment in media this week: Lefty, anti-corporate folksinger Ani DiFranco performed two songs for Wall Street Journal editorial staff today, right before deadline, we hear. "Weird time to be a biz reporter," one staffer at the conservative business newspaper Twittered. The setlist? More » -
dead trees
Murdoch To Hacks: Quit Whining
Amid all the hair-pulling over magazine and newspaper layoffs, Rupert Murdoch's speech broadcast in Australia Sunday sounds bracing: "Too many journalists — ...misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity... — seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise," he said. "I believe that newspapers will reach new heights." But the News Corporation chairman's faith in the power of quality journalism and newspaper websites sounds an awful lot like McClatchy chief Gary Pruitt's iconoclastic (and now-ironic) defense of the industry back in 2006, in the Wall Street Journal: More » -
corrections
WSJ Misidentifies Canada. Twice.
This is what happens when you let an Australian-born media mogul buy an American newspaper and import his chief editor from Britain: Suddenly no one on staff can correctly identify the country to the north (for the record, it's "Canada" — just "Canada"). And to think we actually believed Robert Thomson would make the Wall Street Journal more globalist! [WSJ]
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megalomaniacs
Softer Murdoch Eyes Times
It should really come as no surprise that News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch wants to be respected by the limo liberals who (officially) disdain his politics and tactics. That's why he paid so dearly for the Wall Street Journal, and was proud for having done so, right? But no one really thought age and young wife Wendi Deng would gentrify Murdoch's barbarian soul to such an extent that he now spins fantasies about buying the Times from one side of his mouth while betraying his conservative shock troops at Fox News Channel out of the other. Murdoch's brash past is becoming an embarrassment to him as his portfolio becomes more respectable, at least according to Michael Wolff, who excerpted his sanctioned Murdoch biography in the October Vanity Fair. And yet the Aussie can't help but revert to his old ways, like when he told Wolff that Muslims are, as a group, inbred:
More »
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magazines
How WSJ Could Make An Appetizing Version Of T (But They Won't)
The Wall Street Journal's glossy "Modern Wealth"-themed magazine WSJ is debuting September 6. Just in time for your curiosity to have been thoroughly piqued by the smartified explorations into fashion and luxury commissioned to fill up the heaving style issues of the New Yorker and New York, T Magazine and Vanity Fair! Here's what we know: there are 51 advertisers, 19 of which are new to Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. And here's what we hear: Buzz in the newsroom is that the content, penned by a mix of staff reporters and freelancers, is "very disappointing"* — save for an apparently hilarious piece by veteran retail reporter Ellen Byron. Hey, suggestion! More » -
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Reversal: Murdoch To Charge More For WSJ.com, Not Less
"Murdoch plans to increase the subscription price for WSJ.com, but did not say when or by how much. The site's 1.1 million subscribers pay 'a healthy price, and one that will be increased,' he said." [AP]
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journalismism
Harold Evans Forgives Rupert Murdoch
Bitter personal rivalries usually aren't forgotten in journalism, much less laid aside in the interest of craft. (Just you wait till we all answer to Julia Allison). So it's pretty big indeed of Sir Harold Evans, author of the five-volume newspaper aesthetics bible Editing and Design, to dispense kind words about his archnemesis Rupert Murdoch. The sage old husband of Tina Brown tells The Independent, "The Wall Street Journal has, in the last two or three months since Murdoch took it over, been dramatically improved. They've got rid of the Cheltenham mountainous face, that is still in The [New York] Times...They've made the mistake of still continuing the upper capitalisation but the whole Journal is well-designed – a major improvement in my opinion." What oceans of hostility lie beneath this happy talk of typeface. More » -
newspapers
Wall Street Journal Tarting Up And Slimming Down
The Wall Street Journal's new managing editor Robert Thomson took another step toward remaking the paper in the image of his former employer the Financial Times, hiking the cover price 50 cents to match the FT at $2 per copy. But another directive, reported by Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio, seems to have been borrowed from the Journal's News Corp. sister, the Post: More » -
newspapers
Why The Journal Won't Fall Apart
From the New York Observer's accounting of the "diaspora" from the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, one would think the business newspaper was melting down under its new régime. The Observer's Koblin lists 24 departures and the exodus tallies with the word reaching anyone with friends at the paper: morale is so low that anonymous leaking provides one of the few sources of entertainment for the more sullen veterans. But Murdoch lieutenant Robert Thomson can take his time on newsroom surgery at the Journal; the patient isn't going anywhere. Let's put aside the fact that most of the departed reporters and editors have been pushed out, or left under the old guard, as an exasperated commenter notes. But, more importantly, even if the Journal's talents were inclined to leave, there's nowhere in today's faltering business media for them to go. More »
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