Does Rupert Murdoch get the internet thing? Some thoughts from Roy Greenslade.
Has Rupert Murdoch lost his magic touch? 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 Standard column today that his News Corporation business is facing a genuine crisis.
And I am not alone. Murdoch’s latest biographer, Michael Wolff, makes a similar point in a Vanity Fair article, Rupert to internet: it’s war! His piece is studded with gems.
Michael Wolff’s piece is here.
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Andrew Bolt tells us not long ago on ABC Insiders that Rupert Murdoch is a great Australian. Bolt seems to have deliberately forgotten that Murdoch renounced his Australian citizenship for the almighty American dollar and to suit his business requirements in the USA. Rupert is still trying to have media laws relaxed here to his requirements.’ Don’t become anti-American’ tells us here in Australia not long ago.What can I say but! Yankee go home. Regards Richard Ryan.
AS for Insiders, it should be re-named Onesiders, Bolt and Akerman, singing from the same hymn book——-Fox News aka to Rupert Murdoch’s requirements.
He comes across in the article as a grumpy old man off with the fairies. It’s sad, really, the last great battle of many of his career and he just doesn’t recognise he can’t win it the way he won the old battles, the world has changed beyond his control. Cue Don Quixote (or Citizen Kane?).
I thought the most interesting part was:
“Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud—married to Elisabeth Murdoch, and one of the most well-known P.R. men in the U.K.—explained to me what he believes is the essence of Murdoch’s approach to business: Murdoch is not a modern marketer. He runs his business not on the basis of giving the consumer what he wants but through more old-fashioned methods of structural market domination. His world, and training ground, is the world of the newspaper war—a zero-sum game, where you wrestle market share from the other guy. Curiously, his newspaper battles have most often involved cutting prices rather than, as he now proposes to do on the Internet, raising them. (Murdoch has contributed as much as anyone, with his low-priced papers, to the expectation that news is a de-valued commodity.)
….
In the Murdoch view, media only really works as a good business if it achieves significant control of the market—through pricing, through exclusive sports arrangements, through controlling distribution (he has spent 20 years trying to monopolize satellite distribution around the world).”
Now he thinks he can control the Internet… King Canute?
Its been awhile Mr Green… just saying
Jonathan: It’s going to get worse, a point his shareholders might care to think about. At his age his brain isn’t going to get any better and his mum just hit a hundred the other month!
+5 years and I doubt Mr Murdock will be around(literally). Focus on the son
And you should contribute more Heir Frog