Category: journalism

Ad Age’s Perceptive Piece on Murdoch and WSJ Future

We think this point by Matthew Creamer deserves a highlight:

“A News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal begs a question: In a world where the attention of consumers and hence advertisers is divided among video games, “American Idol” and LOLCats, can a business built solely to deliver news — especially long, serious articles about complicated topics — remain independent and successful? … The nation’s leading purveyor of business information, still an agenda-setter for the planet’s biggest economy, becomes a cog in a vertically integrated, multinational creator and distributor of entertainment, a machine engineered to pump out synergies such as “The Simpsons” movie or, more scarily, that aborted O.J. Simpson extravaganza, rather than Pulitzers… Sure, Mr. Murdoch will pump capital into the paper, allowing it to build out its international operation, but some are predicting that one effect of that bulking up could be to further his business goals, especially in China. And Journal reportage, now a means to the purist end of watchdogging the business community, will be called upon also to add more grist to that massive multimedia content mill, in the form of the Fox Business Network — which is already being positioned as more pro-business than CNBC, absurd as that sounds.”

from: “Stand-Alone News Brands Are Doomed.” Matthew Creamer. Advertising Age. Aug 6, 2007 [sub may be required]

As Murdoch-run WSJ Plans to compete with NYT, FCC Must Review its status as “national” newspaper

We have urged several FCC commissioners to support a review of the Wall Street Journal and its relationship to the New York City DMA. We believe that News Corp.’s plans to have the Journal compete with the New York Times, among other factors, require serious scrutiny by the commission. The broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership safeguard, we suggest, may apply in this case.

As the Journal reported on August 1, 2007:

“Just as vulnerable could be the New York Times, published by New York Times Co., and Pearson PLC’s Financial Times. In a May letter to Dow Jones’s controlling shareholders, the Bancroft family, Mr. Murdoch said he would want Dow Jones properties to “reach a broader domestic audience by expanding the content base.” He emphasized yesterday he “would not want to step back from any of the business coverage” but he would “like to add more general news,” repeating comments about plans to expand the Journal’s Washington bureau. He said that to accomplish his goal there “could be another four pages a day” for news coverage. A person with knowledge of his plans said Mr. Murdoch believes more general news and political coverage would make the Journal a stronger rival to the New York Times, which has a bigger share of consumer advertising.”

Ad Age reported [listen to Nat Ives video] that News Corp. is even considering adding sports news to the Journal, as it competes “head-to-head” with the Times.

As for calls for a national cross-ownership safeguard, we point to the recommendations in our new book which describe a new model for measuring media diversity in the digital era. But if new safeguards are to be enacted, foremost should be policies supporting sustainable community and national services that provide for both diverse expression–and news gathering/reporting–in the digital and multi-platform interactive era. In other words, we should be focused on adding what is missing and will still be ignored by the mainstream. They haven’t got it right so far–and won’t in the future.
Source for Wall Street J. quote: “Deal Will Test a Media Titan’s Instincts:
Rupert Murdoch’s Long-Sought Purchase
Of Dow Jones Could Change Business Journalism”
By MARTIN PEERS, SUZANNE VRANICA and STEPHANIE KANG
August 1, 2007; Page B1

Bancroft Family: Take the $ and Journalism Be Damned

While we know there are so reasons why the majority of the Bancroft family would agree to a takeover by Murdoch (the share price premium, it’s the market at work, etc.), the truth is that they have now stained the family name and legacy. Whenever the name Bancroft is mentioned, it will evoke already well-to-do individuals who have abandoned the public trust for narrow private gain.

Our thoughts are with the dedicated and serious journalism minded employees of Dow Jones. There’s life after Rupert–but it won’t be at the Wall Street Journal.

Bancroft Family: Don’t Let Your Legacy–and Your Heirs– Be the Undermining of U.S. Journalism

We know money is important–and Mr. Murdoch has put a lot of it on the table. We also know that such funds will make the lives of the family and their future generations even more comfortable. But we call on the family to consider its historic role here. It has helped shepherd a publication with a important journalistic culture–one where many of their employees have embraced a mission essential to our democracy. We need serious-minded journalists more than ever–and Dow Jones has many. The Wall Street Journal can play a leading role over the next decade helping the U.S. address so many crucial issues related to the fate of the Republic, such as the environment, health care, public & private accountability. Mr. Murdoch has shown that independent and serious-minded journalism isn’t what he’s about. All you have to do is turn on Fox News. Is that the legacy you wish to leave?

I hope you confound the cynics who believe that everyone is for sale in our society, and make a statement that concern about democracy is more important.

Google Loves Our Data! Let Us Count the Ways…

As admirers go, Google is definitely of the secret variety. From its highly guarded formula for generating search results, to the shroud of mystery that surrounds its plans “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” to a complex privacy policy that is spread over 20 separate pages on the Web, the search giant invariably raises more questions than it answers. “Don’t be evil,” reads the company’s motto, but apparently it’s OK to be evasive. “It’s somewhat of a paradox,” financial analyst Jordan Rohan told the Los Angeles Times last year. “Google’s whole purpose is to make information easier to access—unless, of course, you want to know information about Google.” As the Times added, “Google’s unwillingness to disclose little more than the legally required basics of how it does what it does—and where it’s headed—has left advertisers puzzled, partners confused, competitors nervous and investors frustrated.”

Make no mistake, however, this secret admirer really does care about us. Why else would Google give us so much—lightning-fast search results, interactive maps, email service (with plenty of storage space to archive our communications), online calendars, word processing programs, spreadsheet applications, and more—all free of charge?

The answer, of course, is that Google actually gets plenty in return, in the form of massive amounts of data that it compiles on consumer interests, tastes, and behavior. For all of its variations on the search engine theme—from Google News to Google Video to Google Product Search—the company remains above all else an advertising engine, one whose $500 stock price and $700 billion revenues are testaments of its success.

So how does Google love us? Let us count the ways, with a sampling of the kinds of user data to which Google currently has access:
1. The keywords and phrases we use in the searches we perform.
2. The time and date of these searches.
3. Our Internet IP address and browser configuration.
4. The websites we visit as a result of these searches.
5. The amount of time we spend on those sites before returning to Google.
6. Our patterns of navigation as we travel away from and back to Google.
7. The addresses and directions we enter in Google Maps.
8. The messages we send and receive via Gmail or Google Talk.
9. The schedules we create on Google Calendar.
10. The documents we create and edit in Google Docs.
11. The figures we enter in Google Spreadsheets.
12. The sources we subscribe to in Google Reader.
13. The accounts we create and the information we post to Google’s far-flung Web properties, including Blogger, Orkut, and YouTube.
14. The activities we carry out using a variety of Google-branded “helper” applications, including Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, Google Checkout, Google Web History, and Picasa.

“Google has been aggressive about collecting information about its users’ activities online,” observed Adam Cohen in the New York Times. “It stores their search data, possibly forever…. Its e-mail system, Gmail, scans the content of e-mail messages so relevant ads can be posted. Google’s written privacy policy reserves the right to pool what it learns about users from their searches with what it learns from their e-mail messages, though Google says it won’t do so. It also warns that users’ personal information may be processed on computers located in other countries.”

The lynchpin in Google’s vast data-dragnet is the small text file placed on the user’s hard drive, known as a “cookie,” stamped with a unique user ID and passing information back and forth between one’s PC and a particular website. “Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038,” explains Google-Watch.org. “…This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don’t already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number.”

As if Google (with its billions of searches and millions of users it serves every month) doesn’t already know enough about us, its proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick will bring online consumer surveillance to an entirely new level. DoubleClick might not be the household name that Google is, but in its field—online advertising—it is perhaps even more dominant, reaching an estimated 80 to 85 percent of all Web surfers with some 720 billion ads a year. Its consumer analysis, profiling, and behavioral targeting technologies, carried out on a vast network of affiliated websites, are extraordinarily thorough. “Without a doubt, DoubleClick’s historical data is very valuable,” says Jupiter Research analyst Emily Riley. “Every time you’re online, every page visit, and every ad you see comes with the possibility that a cookie is placed on your machine. DoubleClick has all the data.”

And soon Google will have access to all of that data as well. DoubleClick’s DART system, for example, will provide Google with a complete set of applications—and data access—to allow it to extend its more linear search advertising business into the third-party and rich-media advertising market. Another of DoubleClick’s key technologies, called Motif, is used to track user interaction with video content. As the search and online video markets converge, the ability to identify and assess user response to interactive media environments will be central to online advertising. Google’s interest in such technology was no doubt fueled by its $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006. Google is now in the process of “data-tagging” all of the videos on YouTube in order to make the site a much more effective platform for advertisers.

A combined Google and DoubleClick, clearly, will be a potent force in the online universe. As the New York State Consumer Protection Board recently declared, the Google/DoubleClick “merger presents significant privacy implications. The combination of DoubleClick’s Internet surfing history generated through consumers’ pattern of clicking on specific advertisements, coupled with Google’s database of consumers’ past Internet searches, will result in the creation of ‘super-profiles,’ which will make up the world’s single largest electronic repository of personally and non-personally identifiable information.”

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Bancroft Family & Dow Jones Staff Beware:

Does the Bancroft family really want the Journal to be part of the show-biz style media business? That’s what will happen to the fine editorial staff at WSJ and the news service once the Bancrofts’ take Mr. Murdoch’s $5 B (okay, if they take GE/NBC’s and Microsoft’s money almost the same thing will happen. But at least Fox News won’t be the editorial model). Here’s a chilling excerpt about Mr. Murdoch and News Corp.’s digital data-mining and targeting operation over at MySpace and Fox Interactive (via Forbes):


“Soon MySpace’s ad salesmen will use software that sifts through its members’ profile pages and sorts them based on the often piercingly personal information they pin up on their pages. Then they’ll compile ‘buckets’ of its members and offer them up to advertisers. Looking for married men who live in the U.S. and own dogs? Single women with college degrees who drive pickup trucks? For a fee, MySpace will deliver you directly to their cyber doorstep.”

imediaconnection says “[C]onsider what this means. If Murdoch’s vision for the digital ad world of tomorrow can be reconciled with his power plays of today, he can revolutionize the way marketers approach me when I sit down to watch the next Super Bowl… think how much Anheuser-Busch might pay Murdoch to know that I prefer an import like Tiger beer (another of their fine brews). Now, imagine a media buy where Murdoch can serve up everything the beer-maker wants to know about me and the rest of the people on MySpace while we all tune in to watch the big game. I’ll get the Tiger ad, my neighbor will get the Bud ad, Anheuser-Busch will get a huge ROI, and Murdoch will make money every step of the way. “


Murdoch’s News Corp. will eventually have the Fox Interactive model shape its entire editorial landscape. Such a system will see the Journal’s vaunted news operation reduced to being considered sticky content for online marketers. Surely, the Bancroft family can broker a deal that truly preserves editorial integrity for this key news resource.

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Why is the Knight Foundation Giving a $700K Grant to Viacom? So MTV Can Sell Ads and Collect Data?

The Knight Foundation’s “News Challenge” has announced its grants. But one which raises questions is the $700k grant to Viacom’s MTV. First, the idea that one of the most financially-successful media corporations, with billions in annual revenue, requires a grant for public service boggles the mind. But beyond the pure outrage of Viacom seeking a grant (and taking money away from a well-deserving non-profit or start-up), are the questions which Knight and Viacom must address. The 700 K grant is for a MTV project that will “cover the 2008 presidential election with a Knight Mobile Youth Journalist in every state and the District of Columbia who will create video news reports specifically for distribution on cell phones. The weekly reports will be voted on by the public, and the best will be rebroadcast on the MTV television network. By enabling young adults to report on issues that interest them and distribute those reports on their most commonly used digital medium, the cell phone, MTV hopes to compel leading presidential candidates to address issues important to this demographic and to mobilize you adults to register and vote.”

What happens to all the data Viacom collects from young users? Will it be stored in Viacom’s data-mining operation for subsequent targeting? What kind of behavioral profiling or other data collection techniques will be used? Will MTV “serve” ads to these users? Will these ads be based on the data collection? What will MTV do with such revenue?

You get the picture. The Knight Foundation should be calling on the major news and media conglomerates to support projects which illustrate the potential of the new media to serve democracy and journalism. It should not be funding the fabulously wealthy to do what they long ago should have done with television–and should be now be doing with new media: financially supporting public interest programming.

PS: Note to enterprising journalists. Viacom, we believe, has pursued the foundation grant-seeking route before, to good results for it’s already fattened bottom line. There’s a bigger story here.

Revolving Door Watch on Michael K. Powell: Consolidating the Media for a Living

Is it ironic, tragic, or absurd that Mr. “Deregulator” (meaning end all rules because the market knows best) Michael K. Powell is working for the firm which just scooped up 56 Clear Channel TV stations for $1.2 billion? The former FCC chairman aggressively pushed to end rules that placed limits on the ownership of multiple broadcast television outlets by a single company. Guess what Powell’s Providence Equity Partners got in the Clear Channel deal, according to Media Daily News: “The portfolio houses a series of duopolies and triopolies, including two stations in top-50 markets, such as Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Jacksonville. Twenty-seven stations are affiliated with the Big 4 networks.”

No FCC official should be permitted to work in any media industry related commercial venture for at least ten years after their term. That air blown-in by the FCC’s golden revolving door stinks.

PS: We should have acknowledged that Mr. Powell—who eliminated broadband network neutrality rules while at the FCC—has also just joined the board of directors for Cisco. Cisco has also been opposed to network neutrality, since it makes the equipment designed to give phone and cable companies control over broadband content flow.

Columbia Pres. Lee Bollinger Should Not be on board of Washington Post Co.

We need more independent scholars and public intellectuals, especially in the communications and media fields. That’s why it is disheartening to learn that well-regarded First Amendment scholar and Columbia U. president Lee C. Bollinger has agreed to become a director at the Washington Post Co. Such an involvement raises a number of critical conflicts and problems.

First, Mr. Bollinger will be working to help a company that has substantial interests and investments that run counter to a truly open and diverse communications system in the U.S. Through the Post’s Cable One subsidiary, the company is working to maintain the cable industry’s control over both the multichannel television and broadband marketplace. The Post via Cable One is a member–and has served as a –of the lobby group National Cable Telecommunications Association. The NCTA’s record is strongly anti-First Amendment in terms of the rights of the public, especially its stance against network neutrality (non-discriminatory access).

The Post is also backing the elimination of the key federal safeguard promoting diversity of media ownership–the broadcast and newspaper cross-ownership rule. Through the Post Co’s membership in the lobbying trade group Newspaper Association of America, it is helping to promote consolidation and, more critically, the further erosion of journalistic quality. Finally, the Post is a member of the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau–a group opposed to the kind of consumer safeguards that would protect our privacy online.

Too many academics have ended up working with media conglomerates, helping their consolidation agenda. We are at a crucial moment in the history of U.S.—and global—media. Much work needs to be done to protect the First Amendment rights of the public in the digital era; ensure the openness of the Internet; and help revitalize professional journalism. The country requires independent voices from outside institutions who can speak beyond the narrow self-interests commonly evoked by media companies. We need scholars who are not schmoozing with (such current Post directors) as Melinda Gates, Barry Diller, and Warren Buffet.

Lee Bollinger is a distinguised intellectual and author. But he should be on the outside of the media lobby, examining it critically on behalf of the public interest. Instead, he will likely be swallowed up by it.