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Jude Law Finds Out Family Member Sold Stories About His Life To UK Tabloids

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jude law hacking trialJude Law tells phone hacking trial he was unaware of claim a relative sold stories to tabloid

LONDON (AP) — Jude Law has told Britain's phone hacking trial that for years the media had an "unhealthy" amount of information about his private life. But the actor said he was unaware until he heard it in court Monday that a close family member allegedly sold stories about him to the tabloid press.

Law appeared as a witness at the trial of two former editors of Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid — Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson — and five others on charges related to illegal eavesdropping. The defendants deny all the charges.

The "Sherlock Holmes" star was for years a favorite of Britain's tabloid press, which reveled in details of his relationships with designer Sadie Frost and actress Sienna Miller.

Law said that his media profile rose after he was nominated for an Academy Award in 2001 for "The Talented Mr. Ripley." From then on, he said, "there seemed to be an unhealthy amount of information" about him in the press, and he would often arrive at places with his children to find photographers already there.

Law, Frost and Miller are among scores of celebrities, politicians and others who have been paid compensation for phone hacking by Murdoch's News Corp. Murdoch closed the News of the World in 2011 after details emerged of the scale of its snooping.

But a defense lawyer suggested Monday that some of the information in 2005 News of the World stories alleging an affair between Law's then-girlfriend Miller and actor Daniel Craig might have had another source — Law's associates.

"I didn't know anyone around me was talking to the newspapers," the 41-year-old actor said as he gave evidence for just over an hour at London's Central Criminal Court.

Coulson's lawyer, Timothy Langdale, asked Law if he knew that a member of his immediate family had been giving information to the News of the World in exchange for money.

"I was not aware of that," Law said. Asked when he first heard of the allegation, Law said: "Today."

Law was shown the name of the family member on a piece of paper. It was not shown to the jury or journalists.

The trial also heard evidence from former tabloid journalist Dan Evans, who has pleaded guilty to hacking phones while employed by the News of the World and, before that, rival tabloid the Sunday Mirror.

He said that while at the Sunday Mirror between 2003 and 2005, he was given the phone numbers of celebrities and told to "crack" them.

"Principally I was tasked with covering news events, investigations, undercover work, latterly with hacking people's voicemail," Evans said.

He later worked for the News of the World between 2005 and 2010.

Evans has pleaded guilty to hacking phones at both newspapers, and is appearing as a prosecution witness against his former colleagues.

The police investigation into phone hacking initially focused on Murdoch's papers, but has spread to take in other companies, including Trinity Mirror PLC, which owns the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Mirror.

The Daily Mirror was edited between 1995 and 2004 by CNN interviewer Piers Morgan, who told a British inquiry into media ethics that he was not aware of any phone hacking while he was there. The head of the inquiry, judge Brian Leveson, called Morgan's claim "utterly unpersuasive."

SEE ALSO: Quentin Tarantino is suing Gawker for sharing leaked "Hateful Eight" script

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Here's The Email Rupert Murdoch Wrote To Announce His Son Lachlan's Promotion

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Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch has announced the appointment of his son Lachlan as co-chair of his two vast companies, News Corp and 21st Century Fox.

Here’s a detailed story, and here’s the email in which he announced the news to News Corp staff today:

Dear Colleagues,

We have today announced that Lachlan Murdoch will be taking on an elevated role as Non-Executive Co-Chairman of News Corp, adding strength and insight to our leadership team at a time of great opportunity and challenge for our company.

I asked that the new News have the sensibility of a start-up and that we focus on creative teamwork as we develop our core businesses, and I am proud of the efforts you have made in recent months, under the leadership of Robert Thomson. Our ability to generate compelling ideas and identify investment opportunities gives me much confidence about the trajectory of the company.

I have no doubt that Lachlan’s strategic sense and his passion for media and for knowledge will greatly assist Robert and me as we lead the company over the coming decade. But I will also need your energy and creativity and commitment as we seek to redefine the role of media in the digital age and develop all of our businesses around the globe. And, as we strive to build our businesses and to improve our societies, we must always be passionate, principled and purposeful.

Please join me in congratulating Lachlan, who will make a great contribution in ensuring the new News is an even more successful force for good.

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Meet The Little-Known Time Warner Executive Who Might Hold The Keys To The Murdoch Deal (TWX)

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Screen Shot 2014 07 16 at 12.06.10 PM

Is a former Rupert Murdoch confidant turned Time Warner communications executive helping engineer 21st Century Fox's acquisition of Time Warner?

21st Century Fox, formerly known as News Corporation, recently made an $80 billion offer to buy competing media company Time Warner.

Time Warner rejected the deal.

But this is likely just the beginning of a dance that could well end with Murdoch's control of the rival media company. If that happens, Gary L. Ginsberg will be the man in the middle.  

USA Today's Michael Wolff reports:

Murdoch's business is largely run on the strength of whoever has his ear. Murdoch's former lieutenant, Gary Ginsberg, is the lieutenant of Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes. Ginsberg, forced out of Murdoch's inner circle in a power struggle with Murdoch's son James, nevertheless has kept close to Murdoch, playing his own long game to return.

Wolff noted in GQ in 2012 that Ginsberg, who was vice president of global marketing and corporate affairs at News Corp., was "closer to Rupert than almost anyone else."

But Rupert's son James reportedly pushed Ginsberg out of his father's inner circle. The reason, it's said, was partly the access Ginsberg afforded Wolff while the author was writing his biography of Rupert.

Murdoch himself didn't seem concerned with how Wolff would portray him. But the book ultimately infuriated many in the News Corp. camp, and James blamed Ginsberg for mishandling the incident, according to a 2010 report in New York Magazine.

In his book, Wolff described Ginsberg as "the point man for all of the information going out of the company, as well as all of the information going into the company." He is called the "Murdoch interpreter."

From "The Man Who Owns The News":

Ginsberg is everybody's point man. ... Everybody confers with Ginsberg about what [Murdoch] is thinking — not least of all because the old man doesn't necessarily ever say what he's thinking, or say what he's thinking to any one person in any consistent way — or if he does, he mumbles so much, and his accent is so thick, that you might not understand him anyway. Everybody tends to have just their piece of the story — Ginsberg pieces together the pieces.

Rupert seemed reluctant to let James force Ginsberg out of the company, but once Ginsberg heard that his job was in danger, he resigned. He then took on a similar role at Time Warner.

During his 11-year tenure at News Corp., Ginsberg was a liaison between conservative Murdoch and the Democratic Party, The New York Times notes. Ginsberg had connections to the Clintons through his former job as a White House lawyer.

Ginsberg organized a lunch for Murdoch and Bill Clinton in 2002, and the New York Post endorsed Hillary Clinton for Senate in 2006, the same year that Murdoch held a fundraiser for her at News Corp.'s headquarters in New York, according to the Times.

But Ginsberg's attempts to cultivate a relationship between Murdoch and President Barack Obama did not lead to an endorsement ahead of the 2008 election.

Now Ginsberg is at Time Warner serving as a senior adviser to CEO Jeffrey Bewkes. He helped recruit Jeff Zucker to run CNN and aimed to take on a senior position there. But he was blocked from doing so by "internal politics at Turner," which oversees the cable news network, according to Wolff.

Even though Time Warner turned down 21st Century Fox's first offer, Wolff writes in USA Today that "it would be unlikely, if not unimaginable, that [Murdoch] would allow a move of this magnitude to become public without a high degree of confidence that it will succeed."

Wolff notes that Murdoch also leaked the Dow Jones offer in 2007 as a strategic move. Ginsberg was one of the people closest to Murdoch during the Dow Jones deal.

And Ginsberg might be anxious to get back into Murdoch's inner circle. Wolff writes that he's "become quite restless at Time Warner after the excitement of working for Murdoch."

SEE ALSO: Here's Why Rupert Murdoch Offered $80 Billion To Buy Time Warner

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Murdoch's Takeover Bid Could Be A Defense Against The Likes Of Apple And Google

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rupert murdoch

While Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation US$80 billion takeover bid for fellow US media giant Time Warner has been rejected - for now - there is no doubt the future ownership of this historic company is in play.

For Murdoch personally, it would almost certainly be his last big media takeover bid and there appears to be an element of personal mission about the plan. But the bid should also be seen as a defensive play against the seemingly inexorable rise of companies such as Google and Apple.

All media industries have dramatically consolidated their ownership in recent decades, as the rise of digital platforms and the convergence of media forms has undercut traditional sources of profitability.

For News Corporation, a takeover of Time Warner would consolidate its position as one of the few giant global media content businesses. Alongside the more high-profile news offerings such as CNN and Time magazine, Time Warner is also behind Home Box Office, Warner Bros movies, DC comics, and the digital platforms of the US national Basketball Association and Major League Baseball. For a teenager or 20-something, the company is more likely to be known as the home of Game of Thrones as for CNN or Time.

Similarly, while we may think of News Corporation as being about newspapers and cable channels such as Fox News, its bigger and more profitable offerings are in its entertainment division, with blockbuster films such as Avatar and the X-Men franchise, and TV shows such as The Simpsons, 24 and Modern Family. Both News Corp and Time Warner are major players in US sports broadcasting.

News Corporation formalized the division between its print and entertainment media businesses in June 2013, when it restructured around two companies: 21st Century Fox, which consists primarily of media outlets, and News Corp, which manages publishing assets.

A takeover would cement News Corp’s place alongside content companies such as Disney. But the bid should also be seen as a defensive play against structural forces sweeping the media industry. Power has shifted decisively from the big media content providers to content aggregators and those who control digital distribution platforms. As Robert Chesney has observed in his 2013 book Digital Disconnect, the biggest US corporations are now Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, as well as IT companies such as IBM, Intel and Cisco, or network service providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

Indeed, Murdoch himself argues the takeover needs to be supported by investors and regulators to maintain a strong bargaining position for the media content industries in their dealings with the platform providers and content aggregators. The days in which “Content is King” was the mantra for the internet have long passed.

Any move that suggests Murdoch will be able to enhance his media power will automatically have its critics. But the bid is likely to be less contentious in the US than it would be in Britain or Australia. Unlike Comcast’s takeover bid for Time Warner Cable, it has few implications for threshold issues such as net neutrality, and there is a history in both companies of dealing with their news and entertainment businesses quite differently. It has been argued that anti-trust provisions would be unlikely to be triggered by such a merger.

The biggest implication of the bid is probably for the future of cable news provider CNN. Once the unquestioned giant of global 24-hour news channels, CNN now struggles both domestically and internationally. In the US, it has been caught in the crossfire of growing political polarization, with Fox News being the preferred service of the political right, and MSNBC providing the key counterpoint for political progressives. Internationally, CNN is challenged for leadership by a plethora of state-funded broadcasters, that include BBC World and Al-Jazeera, but also the “soft power” players such as China’s CCTV and Russia Today.

A merged News Corp-Time Warner entity would face questions from the Federal Communications Commission about controlling both CNN and Fox News. Moreover, it is hard to see the two co-existing at an organizational level, since each defines its own mission at least in part in opposition to the other. For CNN, its most likely future would be to merge with one of the major TV networks, such as ABC or CBS, in order to better pool resources between a dedicated news channel and a broad appeal network that nonetheless has news as a core activity.

The Conversation

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Google Hits Back At News Corp With Bizarre 'Hamster' Statement (NWS, GOOG)

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Google has published a bizarre statement joking about eating hamsters as a response to a strongly worded letter from the chief executive of News Corp in which he accused Google of being a "platform for piracy."

The original letter, sent from News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson to European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, criticized the search giant for allegedly exploiting its position as the dominant search engine in Europe. 

Thomson accuses Google of being a "platform for piracy" whose power "increases with each passing day." He goes on to claim that "the shining vision of Google's founders has been replaced by a cynical management."

Hours after the letter was published, Google chose to respond to the criticism. The company didn't offer a rebuttal of Thompson's letter, but instead sent the following statement to us: 

Phew! What a scorcher! Murdoch accuses Google of eating his hamster!

The bizarre statement is a reference to a 1989 newspaper story from the News Corp-owned newspaper The Sun, in which comedian Freddie Starr was accused of eating a hamster in a sandwich. Years later, it emerged that the story was created by disgraced British publicist Max Clifford, who is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence for indecent assault.

Freddie Starr ate my hamster Sun front page 1989

As well as the hamster statement, Google also directed reporters to a blog post authored by the company's former CEO Eric Schmidt. In the post, Schmidt, defends Google and denies claims that it favors its own products and listings in search results over pages from British newspapers.

SEE ALSO: Germany Just Asked Google To Do The Impossible: Reveal Its Secret Search Algorithm

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The UK’s Biggest Newspaper Publisher Thinks Facebook’s New Mobile Publishing Idea Is A Farce (FB)

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chris duncan news uk

News UK Ltd, the UK’s biggest newspaper publisher and owner of The Times and The Sun, is quite categorical about the reasons why it thinks Facebook’s plans to encourage publishers to post their articles direct to the social network’s mobile app is a ridiculous idea, and it won’t be signing up to any time soon.

One of its top executives tells Business Insider the move is a “tax on navigation” and a “tax on audience.”

Facebook’s reasoning is that, with its 654 million daily mobile users and the fact more than half of its ad revenue comes from mobile, it can help publishers make the experience of reading their content on mobile less clunky, according to a report in the New York Times. It says it wants to offer an olive branch by speeding up the load times of publishers’ mobile content by hosting it within its own app, and would offer an ad revenue share.

The report says Facebook has embarked on a “listening tour” with US publishers, encouraging them to sign up to the direct-to-Facebook publishing idea.

The “listening tour” the New York Times described has yet to reach UK shores, Business Insider understands, having spoken to several major UK newspaper publishers.

But Chris Duncan the chief marketing officer of News UK (a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp) told Business Insider it’s extremely unlikely The Sun or The Times (both of which have paywalls) or other big players like the New York Times, Mail Online or Guardian will sign up to the idea.

He describes this new development, plus the general trajectory of the Facebook-publisher relationship, as “a tax on navigation” and a “tax on audience." He says:

“It’s like handing over the keys to all the things digital publishers are good at. We’d lose visibility of our usage and visibility of our audience. I think you’ll find that big players are big enough not to have to [sign up to the publish-to-Facebook idea] but your mid-tier or smaller-tier newspapers with small circulations might have to make a difficult decision if they want to increase their audience.”

attached imageFacebook is the principal source of social referral traffic to the majority of digital publishers. But while it can act as a huge source of additional traffic generation, recent changes to its algorithms have also put strangleholds over the ability publishers have to reach the Facebook audiences they have spent years building up on their Facebook Pages. Unless publishers pay for advertising or create the type of content Facebook’s algorithm deems “quality” (read: the type of stuff likely to get shared on social), the reach of their Facebook posts can be extremely low — to an average of just 6% of a page’s fans or lower, according to a report from Ogilvy released earlier this year.

Duncan explains the timeline of change:

“If you look at the trajectory of Facebook, at the beginning brands like us were part of the social graph, we were people’s friends. There was a lot of referral traffic and audience reach that Facebook was bringing to us and we were bringing to Facebook with our content.

“All that changed a couple of years ago. There are more than 1 million advertisers now and lots more competition for timeline space. Every trend you can extrapolate, it’s become an internet [advertising] platform, not a publishing platform.”

Another sign of that trend escalating was Facebook’s move in December to update its algorithm to feature more “high quality” content from publishers and fewer cat photos and click bait.

That algorithm tweak resulted in huge upticks in Facebook traffic referrals for sites like BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Mashable: digital-only publishers skilled in creating content designed to be shared by thousands online.

But some reputable publishers, usually considered as purveyors of quality content — not just those clickbait-y cat-photo websites the update was designed to catch out — were caught in the net too. News UK saw a double digit drop-off in Facebook referrals to The Times and The Sun websites almost overnight, Duncan says.

facebook traffic chart“The insidious part [of the Facebook algorithm] is that you are creating performance-based editorial. If you get the Facebook algorithm to dictate the quality of content based on what it can see on the Facebook network — time on site, likes, shares — it promotes and rewards a certain type of article so you’re not incentivized to write news that’s important but that is not necessarily likely to go viral,” Duncan adds.

The changes Facebook — but also Google, which particularly punishes sites sitting behind paywalls like The Sun and The Times in search results — means that most publishers have had to “institutionalize cost” in order to get their online audiences, Duncan says.

Going forward, Duncan is also worried by the launch of the Facebook Atlas offsite mobile ad network. He is concerned that Facebook will be able to potentially sell on what it has learnt from publishers’ own audiences and sell that information on to other publishers to help them advertise on their own sites.

“It feels like the shift has really come about in the last six months as Facebook accelerates towards becoming an ad network. As with any media, there will always be changes, but the scale and dominance of Facebook and Google and the fact that the changes they make can affect companies globally overnight is unprecedented,” he adds.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Is Asking Publishers To Post Their Articles Direct To Its Mobile App

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Rupert Murdoch's One-Word Answer For Why He's Still Working At 83 (NWS, FOX)

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Rupert Murdoch at WSJD

We've been at the WSJ's tech conference all week.

All week, everywhere you looked, there was Rupert Murdoch, the 83-year-old chairman of News Corp, the Journal's parent company.

He's been walking the halls just like every other attendee. He's been at every panel and interview, sitting in the front row. 

Today, he went on stage to take questions himself.

He was his usual quick-witted self. For example, he said that in his business, you can't succeed without making friends and enemies.

He said: "On the whole, I'm proud of my enemies."

With flashy socks and thick plastic rimmed glasses, Murdoch these days has the style of a much younger man. He doesn't exactly bound about with energy, but neither is he dragging himself from place to place. He keeps a step ahead of his (small) entourage.

The other night, we buttonholed a News Corp executive and asked him how long he thinks Murdoch plans to keep working.

This executive said that during a recent planning meeting, executives were discussing the notion that News Corp could move from its Time Square offices in Manhattan when the lease is up in seven years.

Murdoch made a point to say that he'd still be coming to the office then, cranking away.

Finally, as the conference closed today, we cornered Murdoch as he was leaving a the show's final session. 

We asked him, after all the money he's made, prestige and power he's accumulated: Why is he still working?

He gave a one word answer: "Curiosity."

We pressed him.

He said, "You've got to look to the future. You can't look back."

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A 'Sexist' Ad From UK Newspaper The Sun Offering A Date With A Topless Model Has Been Banned

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The Sun

A "sexist" advert from UK tabloid newspaper The Sun (see the ad below), offering a date with a Page 3 Girl (the paper features a topless model on page 3 each day of the week) to readers, has been slammed by the UK Advertising Standards Authority after 1,036 people wrote to claim that it objectified women and encouraged gambling.

Subscribers to the tabloid’s Dream Team fantasy football competition were presented with an email promotion stating that players who recruited 10 others to play would be entered into a prize draw for the woman of their choice, adding "we might even let you pick which one".

Defending its unconventional reward structure, the paper said that Page 3 celebrities had been associated with the Dream Team for six years and they abstained from use of ‘seductive, glamorous or inappropriate images’ in all communications.

Responding to both complaints the ASA said: “In the context of the ad, we considered that to offer a date with a woman as a reward for success in the game was demeaning to women and objectified those offered as prizes.

“We also considered that the wording further enhanced the impression that the women were simply objects to be selected at the whim and enjoyment of the winner, and had no choice in the matter themselves.”

The advertising body concluded that the promotion was "sexist, offensive and socially irresponsible" and as such must not be shown again in its current form.

Sun ad

SEE ALSO: Here Are All The Rude Words UK Advertisers Are Allowed To Use

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News UK: Our Paywalls Are Working. Here Are The Numbers To Prove It

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The Times front page

Fresh from announcing "The Sun" had doubled its paying digital subscribers year on year, newspaper publisher News UK Ltd. has posted growth across the board for "The Times" and "The Sunday Times," which first put all content behind a paywall back in 2010.

News UK’s chief marketing officer Chris Duncan tells Business Insider UK that the UK newspaper publisher’s recent figures prove it has established “a fair value for digital journalism.” He is implying that News UK's stats show you don't have to give away your content for free online to have a sustainable digital publishing business.

Digital subscribers pay £26 per month to access The Times and The Sunday Times website and app (but numbers are reported separately as some Apple Newsstand users opt for different packages, comprising of just The Sunday Times, for example). Here are the most interesting recent digital stats from The Times and The Sunday Times, released Tuesday (December 2.) 

  • The Times’ digital subscribers increased 8% year on year 152,000.
  • The Sunday Times’ digital subscriber number rose 12% year on year to 154,000.
  • Overall, 170,000 subscribers take a digital-only membership, up 12% year on year. 
  • The Times Newspapers Ltd, which operates both The Times and Sunday Times newspapers and is owned by News UK, posted its first profit since 2001 in the year ended June 2014.
  • Profit stood at £1.7 million, up from a loss of nearly £6 million in 2013.
  • Total paid sales (including print) for The Times rose 3% year on year to 545,000 (print sales rose 1%.)
  • Total paid sales for The Sunday Times fell 2% to 958,000 (print sales fell 4%.)
  • Sales now account for 51% of revenue, while 44% comes from advertising.
  • Those reading the iPad edition spend an average of 47 minutes reading an issue — far more time than most people spend on a website.

Now let’s look at The Sun’s figures released in November, where subscribers are billed £7.99 per month

  • Digital subscribers were up 92% since The Sun last released figures in December 2013 to 225,000.
  • Total paid sales (using October print sales numbers) were down 2.2% year on year to 2,203,000 (versus an annual decline of nearly 8% for the popular/middle section of the market.)
  • News UK did not strip out separate income figures for The Sun.

chris duncan news ukDuncan told Business Insider that News UK considers itself an “outlier and a pioneer” in the UK newspaper market when it comes to digital. He told us:

“We are helping establish a fair value for digital journalism. At the time we announced The Times paywall five yard ago, that was valued as free, with some ad revenue, but over time we have built a digital proposition customer value.

“We’ve taken it upon ourselves to lead the market on fair pricing for that digital content. We know we’ve been an outlier and a pioneer and we have to create our own metric of success.

He describes those metrics as: arresting a long-term decline, moving into profit, continuing year on year growth in both digital and print and to convince the audience to pay a “fair and sustainable price.”

There are several caveats to all the positive figures.

First: Not all digital subscribers are equal in terms of income. Some — particularly in the case of The Sun — are paying a discounted price, or even receiving free memberships (customers of mobile carrier O2, for example, are currently being offered limited-time free subscriptions to "The Sun" as part of their package.) Also, News UK counts a subscriber as someone with an active membership, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re accessing the site or apps (think about people who receive a free membership from their employer.)

Second: Going behind a paywall dramatically decreases the discoverability of your content via channels like social and search. The Sun's website previously reported 30 million uniques, according to the most recent figure before it went paid-for. Sites behind a hard paywall like those on The Sun and The Times aren't listed as favorably as free sites on Google News, and many who click on links to those sites from social may be disappointed they have to pay to read the content. The result? The Sun and The Times have to work a lot harder (read: pay more through marketing and advertising) to reach new audiences.

Third: The Times swinging back into a profit is only partly attributable to growing digital and print sales. The company recently cut down on property costs by moving to new offices near The Shard in London Bridge that it shares with Dow Jones and Harper Collins. News UK has also spent years making its back-end CRM systems more efficient, so acquiring and retaining customers is far cheaper. News UK is also growing its Newsprinters business, which has contracts to print newspapers not only for its own titles but editions of The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times an local titles, which brings in additional income.

Duncan also admits there is a long way to go until The Times Newspapers Ltd. is reporting “sustainable profit,” but moving back into the black is nonetheless preferable to the £60 million in losses it reported in the year prior to the launch of the paywall.

Where could future growth come from? Duncan says international could well be an option, which could see News UK following in the footsteps of rival British publishers like The Guardian (which in recent months and years has opened offices in the US and Australia) and MailOnline (which also recently launched in the US) in extending its footprint overseas.

SEE ALSO: The Sun Has Doubled The Number Of Its Paying Subscribers Online

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The 10 Things In Advertising You Need To Know Today

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Chanel Cara DelevingneGood morning, here's everything you need to know in the world of advertising today.

1. Where models are looking in ads can make a huge difference in engaging consumers. Heatmaps overlaying ads, generated using eye-tracking technology, reveal that when a model’s eyes look at the product, a viewer’s eyes are drawn to the product and headline too, an important factor in generating sales. 

2. Victoria’s Secret has called on Taylor Swift to drive sales. The singer performs two songs in this year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which airs Dec. 9 on CBS. 

3. The UK’s biggest newspaper publisher, News UK, has numbers out for both The Times and The Sun, which it says prove its digital paywall strategy is working. The Times’ digital subscriber number was up 8% year-on-year to 152,000 and the company that operates the newspaper has swung back into profit for the first time since 2001. 

4. This crazy Japanese ad featuring a double-barreled “Shrimp Cannon” is predictably addictive. The add is for cellphone carrier NTT Docomo Inc. and has been watched on YouTube more than 8 million times.

5. Teen retailers are grappling with not being cool any more. Abercrombie, Aeropostale, and American Eagle will all announce earnings this week, and analysts expect lackluster results.  

6. WPP has signed a $1.25 billion contract with IBM, the companies announced in a press release.WPP says the 7-year services contract will enable the world’s biggest advertising company to develop new digital services, expand the use of big data and analytics, and foster greater collaboration within a global cloud infrastructure.

7. Billionaire investor and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban doesn’t think streaming services like Netflix will replace cable TV any time soon. He told the audience at Business Insider’s Ignition conference that most Netflix hits are only popular because they appeared on TV first and that viewers still demand a “front-end presentation” (not always just what they want when they want it.) 

8. A top Apple analyst has described iAd as a “mobile ad zombie.” Speaking at Business Insider’s Ignition, Piper Jaffray’s senior research analyst Gene Munster said “Apple has really missed the boat,” AdAge reports.

9. Pharrell and Cara Delevingne star in a holiday campaign for Chanel, Adweek reports. The fantasy-themed ad, created by Karl Lagerfeld, tells the story of the history of the brand. 

10. Google is redoubling efforts to attract more brand advertising that largely flows through TV, The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Today reports. Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display and video advertising, says the company is providing new ways to measure how ads perform, with tools like “brand lift studies.”  

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Facebook Is Tackling Recent Publisher Criticism Head-On By Offering Them More Tools (FB)

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facebook andy mitchell

Facebook is promising publishers “better targeting” and “more intelligence” with the launch of a suite of tools it hopes convinces them to invest more resources into distributing content across the network.

The company unveiled the products Wednesday (December 10), presenting them as a reaction to concerns media owners have expressed in recent months. From overposting content, to the challenges of creating a viral post, publishers have waded warily into Facebook’s eco-system as they look to uncover new ways to boost traffic.

The tools will address these challenges, according to the social network, following workshops with publishers and a series of beta tests earlier in the year. But the products will not spark a “fundamental” shift in relations with the industry, insisted Facebook, with articles still hosted in its mobile browser, which links back to publishers’ sites.

News is finding a bigger audience on Facebook, according to Quantcast, which found the social network to be responsible for nearly a quarter of referrals to news sites. Facebook expects the figure to grow even more next year and wants the tools to “encourage publishers to develop and distribute their content” across its network.

To win over publishers, Facebook is sharing data with the promise of better targeting. It has beefed up its “Domain Insights” tool, offering deeper URL-level reporting as well a feature that notifies publishers when other pages and influencers share their posts. Media owners can see referral traffic to their site from Facebook as well as an audience breakdown that extends to fans’ friends that share articles, for example.

Secondly, publishers can now use "Interest Targeting” to push articles to smaller sub sets of their followers in a similar way to how Facebook advertisers already target their ads. For instance, a media owner could use the tool to serve a story about a sports game that will only be shown to people that are fans of the teams playing.

Another product lets publishers specify a day and time to prevent posts appearing in News Feeds. The aim of the “Post End Date” tool is to slash the number of people of seeing out-of-date posts in their feeds, while the same posts will continue to appear on users’ Pages.

The “Smart Publishing” product is being promoted to publishers as a way to understand how articles go viral on the platform. A lot of publishers want to know “what content is really taking off,” claimed Facebook, but until now they have not had the level of insight needed to identify their most popular stories and who they are being shared by. For those viral stories not yet published on Facebook, the social network will republish on behalf of publishers and promises to boost their organic reach as a result.

The service is currently available to limited number of media organisations but the company said it hopes to make it more widely accessible in the coming months. 

Speaking to The Drum, Facebook's director of global media partnerships Andy Mitchell said: “What we’re accomplishing is empowering our publishers to understand their audiences better and adopt a refined way for how they publish and distribute content [on Facebook]. It’s about allowing them to maximize the audience they reach on Facebook.”

Facebook declined to mention which publishers had signed up to use the tools.

The launch follows reports in October that Facebook is to offer publishers a revenue share deal that would allow publishers to host articles directly on its app. While such a venture would give content creators access to the social site’s 546 million daily active mobile users, it could cut traffic to their sites and give Facebook access to key user data.

The tools it has launched will not involve any revenue share deal, according to Facebook and will give publishers far more access to data than they have previously had.

Facebook’s charm offensive on the publishing industry forms part of a wider play to keep users within its own eco-system, particularly on mobile. The prospect of editorial content from well-established titles combined with Instagram and WhatsApp, reflect Facebook's broadening scope beyond its core social network premise. It is a strategy also adopted by Twitter as both look to exploit Google’s stuttering mobile business in order to become the premier platform for advertiser content. 

SEE ALSO: The UK’s Biggest Newspaper Publisher Thinks Facebook’s New Mobile Publishing Idea Is A Farce

SEE ALSO: Facebook Is To Blame For A Wave Of 'Dark Traffic' Swamping The Web, But It's Working On A Fix

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Some Info On The Scale Of Murdoch's Advertising Profits Just Leaked (NWS)

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Rupert Murdoch

Last year, a bunch of News Corp's biggest advertisers went to war against Rupert Murdoch's company, filing a lawsuit alleging they had been overcharged for advertising. Companies such as Heinz, Dial, Foster Poultry, and Smithfield Foods claim that News Corp's alleged monopoly on certain types of supermarket advertising led to them being overcharged for a period of 15 years.

The case is most famous for a memo written by an executive at the cake company Sara Lee, who said that placing advertising with News "feels like they are raping us and they enjoy it."

News denies the allegations.

Today, a New York federal court heard arguments in that case.

Buried in the legal filings is a curious fact: News Corp's gross profit margins on advertising placed with its News America Marketing (NAM) unit were between 81% and 86%. NAM handles in-store advertising in US supermarkets and coupons for groceries. It's one of Rupert Murdoch's under-the-radar businesses. It earns about $400 million in revenues per year. That would imply that annual gross margins at NAM are somewhere approaching $344 million. News Corp does not otherwise break out the margins for NAM in its SEC filings.

Business Insider contacted News for comment but did not immediately hear back.

It's not clear whether those 80%-plus margins are common or excessive. But the document in which they are cited claims that News had the power to raise advertising prices by 54% without losing any business — an indicator of how powerful NAM's hold on the supermarket business is.

In the case, the advertisers claim that for about 15 years, NAM has controlled up to 80% of the supermarket advertising business. It allegedly used that power to write restrictive contracts that distorted the market and kept advertising prices artificially high. News previously paid out $656 million in settlements to competing companies who lost business to News because of its alleged antitrust activity. News has also been sued by a pension fund alleging that NAM's legal liabilities from its alleged monopolistic behavior have reduced the value of the NWS stock it held.

From the legal filings in the case, it looks as if proprietary information about NAM's margins was supposed to have been redacted behind black bars. Everywhere else in the document that info has been blocked out. Except for this bit, which revolves around a discussion of the findings of an expert who calculated that News' profit margins were excessive:

News Corp

News' rebuttal is that the expert, Jeff MacKie-Mason, dean of the School of Information at the University of Michigan, has improperly compared NAM's business to other companies, and that the margin calculation is thus unfair:

news corp

However, News' filing is redacted so that both the average margins earned by other companies and the margin earned by NAM are hidden.

A ruling in the case is not expected for months.

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These Are The UK Newspapers Failing To Tackle The Switch To Digital

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fire paper burn newspaper

Over the last few months, we’ve spoken to nearly 100 people from all the major British newspaper brands. It's given us a nice view into which brands are on a high and which are failing.

Amazingly, given the onslaught of digital media that is replacing them, UK newspapers will actually see advertising revenue growth next year (by 1% to £1.42 billion), only the second annual increase since 2007, according to a report from the Advertising Association and advertising analysts Warc.

That's nice, but 1% is less than GDP growth (which is 3%) — so it's still fairly feeble. The turnaround is being fueled by digital ad spend. The MailOnline and Guardian are the two biggest digital English language newspapers in the world. But not all of London's publishers have been as quick to ease their reliance on print and really shift to digital. Some of them are obviously struggling.

As we spoke to people in the London media, one over-arching theme emerged: Even at companies that desperately want to transition away from dead trees to apps, dozens of staff have their time and resources sucked out of them every day putting out a product that was at its healthiest 65 years ago in the 1950s.

This review does not claim to be a definitive account of the state of UK news media right now. Rather, it's a definitive statement of what people are saying about the state of UK news media right now. In an industry that relies so much on heat and image, this is almost as important.

We've ranked their current reputations from best to worst.

1. The Guardian: in fantastic health

Alan RusbridgerThe search is currently underway for a new editor in chief of The Guardian, after Alan Rusbridger announced earlier this month he was stepping down after more than 20 years in the role.

Rusbridger is “Mr Guardian” and his departure will be quite literally the end of an era (even though he will still be there in spirit, as chairman of The Guardian’s unique owner and sole shareholder The Scott Trust, a huge fund that keeps the Guardian ticking over even in its darkest financial hours). He presided over some jubilant periods for paper which was once Britain’s 11th most-read newspaper and is now the second biggest English language newspaper site in the world

The Guardian has been a pioneer in online media, having first launched a mobile app way back in 2009 and becoming one of the first publishers to launch a news service on Google Glass. It has a formidable digital studio in which it tests new products on readers.

Being a first-mover in digital has paid dividends: Guardian News & Media narrowed its losses to just over £30 million in the year to the end of March as digital revenues grew by almost a quarter (24%) to £69.5 million. That means the Guardian’s digital revenue is growing faster than the New York Times' (11% year over year,) although from a much lower base.  

The Guardian does not envision itself opening up a New York Times-style paywall any time soon, but it is looking to increase revenues via subscriptions in the form of its Membership scheme, where it is asking readers to pay anything between £15 to £60 a month for access to live events and entry into a new Guardian Space venue. 

Print revenues remained flat year on year at £140 million in the 12 months to the end of March — a strong performance in a market suffering some terminal declines. 

Editorially, The Guardian is still celebrating its Pulitzer Prize win this year for its unrivaled coverage of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. The company is also expanding its global footprint, recently opening up offices in the US and Australia.

There is only one negative aspect at The Guardian: It has a massive employee headcount, many of who are overpaid but under-perform. The company can't get rid of them because of the union, so is buttressing its efforts with younger "casual" contract workers. That situation is slowing down the pace of change at The Guardian, we hear. Nonetheless, everyone wants to work here and no one wants to leave.

2. The Daily Mail: firing on all cylinders

dailymailThe Daily Mail’s online version MailOnline is far and away the biggest UK newspaper website, attracting a record 193 million worldwide monthly unique users in October, according to ABC. MailOnline is forecast to make £60 million in digital revenues this year. That's less than The Guardian, but this is being propelled primarily through digital advertising, according to Media Week, (while the majority of The Guardian’s digital revenue is through subscriptions to platforms like its Guardian Soulmates dating service). There’s plenty of room to grow further, even if the ad market becomes unstable.  Owner company Daily Mail & General Trust projects digital revenues of £100 million by 2016.

The MailOnline is currently the fourth most-visited content site in the US (behind Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and The New York Times) and has 200 employees in the region. Jon Steinberg, the ad executive MailOnline poached from BuzzFeed earlier this year to run the US operation, described MailOnline (which is rebranding to DailyMail.com in the US) as “like being a kid in a candy shop. It’s a giant site that has a huge audience, but Madison Avenue hasn’t quite discovered this yet.”

The Daily Mail’s print editorial team runs separately to MailOnline. Like the rest of the market, it too is hemorrhaging readers, with print sales down 5.33% to 1.66 million in October, according to ABC. The Daily Mail is also officially the UK’s most complained about newspaper, according to campaign group Hacked Off’s analysis of information published by the Press Complaints Commission, and the title is still known as “The Daily Hate” in some circles, thanks to its bombastic front pages and right-leaning bias. 

The Mail is the only other newspaper brand that people told us they really want to work at. It really is a beast.

3. The Daily Mirror: a turnaround in progresstrinity mirror simon fox

Ever since Simon Fox joined The Daily Mirror’s owner Trinity Mirror as chief executive in 2012, the newspaper and its online brands have been injected with a new lease of life. Digital is firmly the focus for Fox’s turnaround strategy and the company has launched a number of standalone brands — including the BuzzFeed-style UsVsTh3m, data journalism project Ampp3d and football site Row Zed— as well as staffing up the Daily Mirror with a number of recent editorial and digital hires.The overall feel of the Mirror's digital offering is that they get it, and they're working hard to acquire the next generation of readers. Digital publishing revenues were up 44% year on year in the 17 weeks to October

Fox is resolute on the company’s no-paywall strategy, saying in July: “For as long as we live in a world of a free BBC and a free Mail and a free Guardian, I don’t think it’s a realistic prospect for us to go behind a paywall. And we have no plans to do so.” Instead, The Daily Mirror and its offshoot sites must look to scale to attract digital advertisers, and it’s getting there: its national newspaper group marked a 124% increase in daily unique browsers to 3.6 million in October, according to ABC. 

As with the other red tops, The Daily Mirror’s print sales are in decline (down 7.68% year on year to 936,577), and in Trinity Mirror’s latest financial update, the company reported a 12% drop in print advertising across all its titles (which also includes the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People tabloids). The Daily Mirror is also another title still feeling the aftermath of the phone hacking scandal that ripped apart Fleet Street three years ago and has set aside up to £9 million to deal with costs related to civil legal claims.

4. The Daily Telegraph: struggling to change

telegraph frontThe Telegraph's news product is really solid and its business desk is second only to that of the Financial Times. Nonetheless, its desktop web site is years behind the curve. And the entire organization is struggling with the transition to digital. One problem is the paywall: Journalists know that even when they publish something great, its reach will be limited. That's why not all of them want to complete their careers there.

The Telegraph launched the metered digital paywall last year, whereby subscribers pay from £4 a month for unlimited website and mobile app access. Those not paying get access to a limited number of articles each month.

Jason Seiken, Telegraph’s editor in chief who joined last year, has made a number of shake-ups to the editorial team since his arrival to drive the Telegraph Media Group’s “transformation.” Most recently, this month, the Telegraph hired Trinity Mirror’s Malcolm Coles to become its digital director, The Guardian reported. At the same time, there were a series of internal promotions and changes, including Kate Day’s promotion from director of digital content to director of digital media and deputy editor Robert Winnett expanding his role to look after both print and online news.

Chris Evans, Daily Telegraph editor and director of content, said in a press release announcing those changes the intent is that The Telegraph transform "into a digital-first media newsroom that also produces a fantastic newspaper.” Note that the "newspaper" is filed under "also" in that sentence.

On the print side, where The Daily Telegraph is the last remaining national newspaper to keep the large broadsheet format, circulation was down 9.21% to 498,484 in October, according to the latest ABC figures. Despite the drop, The Telegraph is still the UK’s most profitable quality newspaper, reporting a £2.7 million increase in overall operating profit to £61.2 million in 2013.

5. The Financial Times: way behind where it needs to be

lionel barberThe FT's business news reportage is unparalleled except perhaps by New York's Wall Street Journal. And it's hidden by an extremely aggressive — and extremely expensive — paywall. This has brought joy to the company's finance office, but the editorial side is less enthusiastic: Very few people read the FT as a result. Similar Web says FT has 17 million visitors per month compared to the WSJ's 59 million.

This is the FT's entire story: its digital subscriptions and advertising are doing just fine, it's just that relatively few people see the thing.

FT writers bemoan their lack of reach among readers. They obviously get very important CEO-level readers, but that's often not much compensation when no one else (future employers?) can see your byline. Certain senior FT editorial staff scoff at the new world of digital media. We heard one dismiss BuzzFeed's regurgitation of trivia, for instance. BuzzFeed is expected to book a not-so-trivial $120 million in revenues this year. So perhaps there is something to this newfangled digital business after all!

The FT has taken babysteps in the right direction: its Alphaville blog is a must-read, and its fastFT product is useful too. Its Antenna Twitter experiment looks like a hopeful sign. However the FT site and app overall still feels like they're trying to reproduce the newspaper on the web. And the FT's app isn't available in the Apple App Store. That was the result of a decision in 2011 that, in hindsight, doesn't look too smart.

We hear there is a younger generation of staff at the FT who do actually understand that the group needs to get its act together faster on the digital side. Whether management will let them do that is another question.

6. The Sun: the incredible shrinking audience

The SunThe Sun is in a period of transition on many fronts: Publisher News UK (formerly News International) is still reeling (and paying the legal bills) from the News of the World phone hacking scandal that forced the closure of the Sunday tabloid in 2011; daily print sales of The Sun dipped below 2 million for the first time in its modern history in October (according to ABC); and staff and readers are currently adjusting to its recent paid-for digital strategy.

You’d think with its penchant for popular celebrity gossip stories, investigative stings and photo-heavy reportage The Sun would have sussed how to create a solid online offering — but it’s still a work in progress. Since going behind a paywall last year, The Sun has shed visitors. It currently has 225,000 digital subscribers, the majority of which are billed at £7.99 per month, down on the 30 million uniques it was reporting when the site was free to access, according to comScore. However, it insists that the paying subscribers are more loyal, read more content and that by subscribing, the newspaper gets access to more data about its readers to be able to offer advertisers more sophisticated targeting. 

It’s also generally accepted on Fleet Street that another after-effect of the News of the World fallout and subsequent Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press is that the big scoops The Sun was famed for have become fewer and further between, as its lawyers fear a reprise. 

7. The Times: thundering no more

chris duncan news ukThe Times is a shadow of its former self. Only 5.4 million visitors a month see the site online.

This month, News UK subsidiary Times Newspapers (which owns both The Times and Sunday Times) reported its first annual profit in 13 years, up from a loss of nearly £6 million in 2013. Total paid sales (which includes print and subscriptions to its digital paywall) for The Times were up 3% year on year to 545,000, while The Sunday Times’ figure was down 2% to 958,000. 

The Thunderer swinging back into profit is only partly attributable to growing sales, however. The company recently cut down on property costs by moving to a new office near The Shard in London Bridge that it shares with Dow Jones and Harper Collins; the publisher is also reaping the rewards from improving its back-end CRM systems so that acquiring and retaining customers is far cheaper; and it is growing its Newsprinters business, which has contracts to print newspapers not only for its own titles but editions of The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times and local titles.

News UK’s chief marketing officer Chris Duncan told Business Insider this month its growth figures show that the company is an “outlier and pioneer” establishing a “fair value for digital journalism.” However, there is a caveat: not all digital subscribers are equal in terms of income and value: Some, are paying a discounted price or even receiving free memberships as part of News UK’s marketing acquisition strategy (customers of mobile carrier O2, for example, are currently being offered limited-time subscriptions to The Times’ sister title The Sun as part of their package). Also, News UK counts a subscriber as someone with an active membership, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re accessing the site (think about the people who receive a free membership from their employer — or indeed, those that share The Times’ logins with their colleagues. This is also true of subscriptions to The Telegraph or Financial Times.)

The overall result: On the news side, The Times is a place that writers and editors want to leave, preferably for somewhere like the Telegraph or the FT.

8. The Independent: the plucky dark horse

i100The Independent has been trialling a number of different methods to boost its digital footprint. Most recently, it launched the i100, a site that blends BuzzFeed’s and Reddit’s style, as the Indy looks to capture younger readers. Alongside traditional banner and MPU ads, like BuzzFeed, i100 also offers native advertising in the form of sponsored articles.  While all Independent websites are free to access currently, The Independent newspaper editor Amol Rajan is open to rolling out a metered paywall further down the line. 

Interestingly, despite Rajan's views, we hear that the Independent's digital arm has a separate P&L from the print arm, meaning that the digital staff are not incentivized to worry about the fate of the newspaper. The company's top brass discusses ending the newspaper about once a year, we heard.

In print too, the Independent has gone through some transformational changes. The Independent’s circulation decline has been terminal for some time (down 10.9% to 61,527 in October, according to ABC), but it launched the i (which has fewer pages and offers bite-sized news snippets for the cost of just 30p, compared with £1.40 for the Independent) in 2010. After a strong start, from a low base, that title is down year on year too (-4.12% to 284,369,) but its introduction means the Independent brand as a whole still fights a fairly good fight versus the other quality titles when both those circulations are added together.

Rajan told Press Gazette earlier this year The Independent has gone from losing £12.6 million in 2007 to now aiming to lose just £5 million in the 2013/14 fiscal year. That loss cutting has also been down to a run of redundancies, however, and much of its day-to-day content is created by freelancers rather than desk regulars. A shortage of staff compared with other titles has also led to The Independent often being criticized on social media for being hours, and sometimes even days, late to stories.

9. The Daily Express: losing the war on all frontsrichard desmond

Back in the day, The Express was once co-equal with The Mail. But mismanagement has left the Express's online audience growing in single-digit figures year on year (up 4.53% to 788,924 in October, according to ABC) — leagues behind the reach of its closest competitor in terms of editorial mindset, the Mail Online. Print circulation-wise, The Daily Express is also shedding readers, with its average print sales down 10.18% year on year to 461,873 in October, according to ABC.

The mood inside the newspaper’s headquarters at the Northern & Shell Building continues to be bleak ever since staff were told in July print editorial roles would be cut from 650 to 450 as the Express newspaper group (which also owns The Daily Star) looks to hit a £14 million cost savings target. The announcement was enough for some journalists to condemn owner Richard Desmond as “Britain’s greediest billionaire,” Press Gazette reported at the time. 

The Daily Express is tipped to turn its back on The Conservatives to support UKIP for the 2015 general election, after Desmond reportedly donated £300,000 to the party.  The Daily Express is already pro-UKIP in much of its editorial coverage, a support underlined in October when Express Newspapers brought on board UKIP peer Lord Stevens as deputy chair

SEE ALSO: The UK’s Biggest Newspaper Publisher Thinks Facebook’s New Mobile Publishing Idea Is A Farce

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Why The Phone-Hacking Scandal Has Left Rupert Murdoch Better Off

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rupert murdoch It must all seem like a distant nightmare now.

After the revelations of phone-hacking at the News of the World emerged in 2011, Rupert Murdoch was hauled before Parliament, calling it "the most humble day of my life."

Executives and journalists were arrested. The scandal prompted Mr Murdoch's News Corp to drop a cherished plan to buy out the other investors in BSkyB, a satellite broadcaster (since renamed Sky).

Some predicted that the affair, which included the hacking of a murdered schoolgirl's voicemails, could be Mr Murdoch's and his firm's undoing.

However, corporate karma turns out to be more lenient than business schools lead students to believe. Far from watching their empire crumble, Mr Murdoch and his family have more than doubled their wealth since the scandal broke. Mr Murdoch, who is 83, remains firmly in charge, and his sons, Lachlan and James, seem better placed than ever to succeed him one day.

The Murdoch clan's resilience points to an overlooked reality in business: Sometimes a loss can turn into an unexpected win. The crisis forced Mr Murdoch, a devoted newspaperman, to make difficult choices that he never would have in calmer circumstances.

When the extent of the phone-hacking was uncovered, he promptly closed the News of the World, which he had owned since 1969 and whose sales had been falling since the 1980s. His ambitions to take over BSkyB frustrated, he handed some of News Corp's spare cash back to investors, in the form of buy-backs that boosted its share price.

More momentous for shareholders, Mr Murdoch agreed to split his company in two, separating its high-growth film and television assets from the declining newspaper business, which was exposed to the scandal's legal liabilities.

Investors had been calling for such a split for years, but had no power to force it, because of the group's dual-class equity structure. To please them further Mr Murdoch handed more power to Chase Carey, an executive whom investors trust more than they do his boss.

All this has had a remarkable effect on the businesses' combined value. An analysis by Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm, reckoned that even after the $500m or so in legal fees and other costs incurred over the phone-hacking scandal, shareholders probably made around $2.6 billion more than if the Murdochs had pursued the BSkyB deal instead.

It is an echo of what happened in 1911, a century before the hacking scandal, when John Rockefeller, an oil tycoon as unpopular as Mr Murdoch was during the scandal, was hit with a huge antitrust fine and had his Standard Oil empire broken up. Its pieces proved to be worth far more apart than together, making Rockefeller richer than ever.

robert thomson news corpThe popular belief in media circles is that Mr Murdoch is an unchanged man. Not quite. The events of the last few years have curbed his hubris. Mr Murdoch used to be notorious for pouncing on the biggest, grandest assets without regard to value.

His purchase of TV Guide and other businesses for $3 billion in 1988 nearly bankrupted his company. In 2007 he paid around $5.5 billion for Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, at least double what it was worth at the time.

Having weathered his most recent crisis, however, he does not want to suffer more embarrassment, or generate future losses for his heirs. Many expected that once his publishing company was spun out, he would pursue more newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times. He has not.

Earlier in 2014, 21st Century Fox, the spun-out entertainment division, proposed an $80 billion bid for Time Warner, a rival. But when Fox's stock sank, making it harder to seal the deal, Mr Murdoch walked away.

Meanwhile, Lachlan and James have been given an inadvertent crash course in management. The crisis gave them cause to work out of the public eye, honing their skills before stepping cautiously back into the limelight. Lachlan, who resigned abruptly from News Corp in 2005, has come back and is now "non-executive co-chairman" of both the entertainment and publishing firms.

James is now "co-chief operating officer" of the entertainment firm, working alongside Mr Carey and helping to cook up deals. The timing and the details of the succession remain unclear, though one obvious possibility is for Lachlan to become CEO of the news side and James CEO of the entertainment side.

Out-Foxed

The Murdochs' happy ending is a reminder of how forgiving the corporate world can be if bosses at the centre of a crisis act swiftly and adopt shareholder-friendly policies. Look at Olympus, a Japanese optical company, which raised more than $1 billion within a week of several executives being convicted over a decades-long accounting fraud.

Its shares are more than 800% above their low in 2011, when the scandal was discovered. Shares in Hewlett-Packard, an American technology firm, have also recovered since late 2012, when it took a decisive write-down over alleged accounting irregularities at a firm it had bought.

Rupert James Lachlan MurdochInvestors' memories are indeed short. Only three years ago James Murdoch was seen as one of the biggest liabilities at his father's firm (he had been chairman of the British newspaper operation at the time of the phone-hacking, albeit not implicated in any wrongdoing).

Now, investors have warmed to the ambitious and opinionated younger Murdoch sibling, says Marci Ryvicker, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, an investment bank.

Unfortunately, most bosses at the centre of a corporate crisis cannot count on reaping the benefits of investors' forgiveness and short memories. Incumbent chiefs in public companies are usually purged as part of the clean-up. This would have been Mr Murdoch's fate, had he not controlled such a substantial percentage of the voting shares.

Instead, the Murdochs maintained their grip. Having gone through the pain and scrutiny of one corporate crisis, they are now less likely to risk another. Being enriched by scandal may occasionally happen once, but rarely twice.

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News Corp's Sunday Style Magazine Gets Slammed Over 'Sexist' Woman On-All-Fours Intern Ad

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A News Corp style magazine has come under fire for releasing a belittling call for interns featuring an image of a woman wearing lingerie and posing on a bed on all fours.

Sunday Style, a weekly Australian glossy magazine with a circulation of 900,000 copies, posted the ad on Instagram today (9 January) but quickly removed it in response to criticism from followers.

The offending post was first noticed by Twitter user @SuzanneCarbone, a journalist at Melbourne news outlet The Age.

Sunday Style issued an apology for the post on Instagram where the original image was uploaded.

 on

However, the post has been widely condemned by social media users.

But Twitter user @vervyerver managed to see the funny side.

Twitter Response To Sexist Ad

With editing from Lara O'Reilly

SEE ALSO: London’s Real Estate Agents Are Selling Luxury Properties With Ridiculous ‘American Psycho’-Style Ads

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Prince Alwaleed has dumped most of his stake in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp

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Owner of Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding, billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal attends the traditional Saudi dance known as 'Arda', which was performed during Janadriya culture festival at Der'iya in Riyadh February 18, 2014. REUTERS/Fayez Nureldine/Pool

DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding <4280.SE>, the investment firm owned by billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, sold most of its stake in media giant News Corp <nwsa.o> as part of a portfolio review, it said on Wednesday.

The sale of a 5.6 percent stake in News Corp generated 705 million riyals ($188 million) of cash for Kingdom and leaves it with a one percent holding, according to a bourse statement. The amount of profit or loss booked on the investment was not disclosed.

Kingdom has held a stake in Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate since 1997, according to its website.

It has been a turbulent few years for the media company, after it emerged in 2011 that one of its British tabloid newspapers, the now-defunct News of the World, had been hacking phones and bribing public officials.

News Corp said on Tuesday it would face no charges in the United States over the matter, although it still faces multiple investigations and court cases in Britain.

"We remain firm believers in News Corp’s competent management, led by chief executive Robert Thomson, and are fully supportive of Rupert Murdoch and his family," Alwaleed said in a separate emailed statement.

The action would not impact on Kingdom's 6.6 percent holding of Twenty-First Century Fox <foxa.o>, the emailed statement added.

Both News Corp and Twenty-First Century Fox were part of the same company until they were spun off into separate listed entities in June 2013, representing the previous firm's publishing and broadcasting businesses respectively.

SALE PROCESS

The sale of shares by Kingdom was "predominantly executed" in the first half of 2014 and finalised by the end of the year, the statement said.

News Corp hit its highest level since the stock was split on Mar. 5, 2014, when it traded intraday at $18.53, and was as high as $18.29 on July 24 before slipping to an intraday low of $14.28 on Oct. 16, according to Thomson Reuters data.

The media firm, which is due to report second-quarter earnings on Friday, closed on Tuesday at $15.61.

Kingdom's stake decreased from 13.18 million class B shares, representing approximately 6.6 percent ownership, to 2 million class B shares, representing around 1 percent ownership.

The funds generated from the sale will be reinvested elsewhere, the English-language bourse statement said.

However, in an Arabic-language statement on the bourse website, Kingdom also said part of the proceeds will be used to reduce some of the company's debts.

 

(Additional Reporting by Nadia Saleem and Sami Aboudi in Dubai and Marwa Rashad in Riyadh; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

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NOW WATCH: This Flying Car Is Real And It Can Fly 430 Miles On A Full Tank

Facebook admits publishers are concerned its direct-to-Facebook publishing plan will lead to a 'lack of control' (FB)

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Facebook Chris Cox Peter Kafka

Facebook's VP of product Chris Cox has admitted its proposed revenue share deal with publishers, where it is encouraging them to upload articles to its mobile apps direct, has been met with some challenges.

Speaking at Re/code's Code/Media conference in California on Tuesday, Cox said Facebook was "early in conversations" with publishers over the initiative. When asked by Re/code's Peter Kafka what publishers' main concerns were during these discussions, he said a "lack of control."

Facebook first embarked in its "listening tour" with publishers late last year, according to The New York Times, with the social network discussing how they could better collaborate, particularly when it comes to mobile. One of the options on the table was a direct-to-Facebook publishing approach, sharing any associated advertising revenue.

The idea was that Facebook has honed its mobile offering to load up content quickly. Publisher websites, on the other hand, can be clunky and are often slowed by the amount of advertising they host, where a number of auctions take place in a matter of milliseconds to determine the highest bidder for an ad spot. 

However, the idea was met with scorn from some members of the publishing community. Chris Duncan, the chief marketing officer of the biggest newspaper group in the UK, News UK, told Business Insider that any such move from Facebook would be a "tax on navigation" and a "tax on audience."

At the Code/Media conference, Cox said the idea was to create a better service for users by connecting them directly with the sources they care about, and that it wasn't about eating into other companies' businesses.

"We don't want to try and devour, and, like, suck in the internet," he added.

Cox was also questioned about whether it was Facebook's job to tell people the news from countries like Burma or Iraq ("Not directly, no"), and about a previous Mark Zuckerberg quote in which he said he wanted to build the "perfect personalized newspaper" for every person in the world through Facebook.

"I think of it that it wasn't like we want to replace the newspaper I think of it as a word where there wasn't a good metaphor yet," Cox explained.

Later on in the interview Cox was also asked about Facebook — which has been ramping up its video strategy in recent months— could soon be a real competitor to YouTube.

Predictably, Facebook doesn't quite think of it like that. Cox responded: "YouTube is like a library where you go look for stuff, and watch stuff; you go home and you watch YouTube. Facebook continues to be the window: The shorter duration of time, having a bunch of sessions throughout the day, and we're trying to nail that."

You can watch highlights from Re/code's interview with Chris Cox, and other sessions from the conference here.

SEE ALSO: The UK’s Biggest Newspaper Publisher Thinks Facebook’s New Mobile Publishing Idea Is A Farce Read more:

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News Corp is copying BuzzFeed with a new video site called 'Internet Action Force' (NWS)

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internet action force

NewsCorp is trying to take on BuzzFeed and reach millennials with a Funny Or Die / BuzzFeed-esque viral video website, Mumbrella reports.

The site, dubbed "Internet Action Force,"describes itself as "the world's first rapid-response team of highly trained, socially awkward digital nerds."

Internet Action Force is staffed by a number of improv comedians, including editor John Devore, who was previously the managing editor of talkshow host Conan O'Brien's Team Coco comedy video website.

Videos currently running on the site include "'Game of Thrones' Recap From Someone Who's Only Seen Last Night's Episode,""A Vegan Untangles Her Earbuds," and "Where Were You When Tiger Woods And Lindsey Vonn Broke Up?"

Internet Action Force has been live for "a month or so," according to Mumbrella, but was officially launched to advertisers at the annual Digital Newfronts event in New York last week. The Digital Newfronts is a week-long event where digital media owners including YouTube, AOL, and Yahoo tout their wares in the hope of signing major deals.

The media kit for Internet Action Force pitches the site as "original,""curated,""social," and "entertaining."

Internet Action Force Media Kit

IAF Media Kit

Advertisers can choose from pre-roll 15- or 30-second ads within Internet Action Force original videos and licensed inventory, BuzzFeed-style "native" video ads, and traditional desktop, mobile, and table display ads.

The launch of Internet Action Force comes just months after News Corp chief executive Robert Thompson blasted BuzzFeed, criticizing it as a "strange" and "garish" site filled with "rubbish," as reported by The Huffington Post.

Nevertheless, BuzzFeed has proven extremely successful: It reaches more than 191 million visitors worldwide, according to Quantcast, and it is valued at $850 million.

Millennials, mobile, and video are the combination of priorities publishers are currently looking at in order to boost their value in the digital age — which is clearly what News Corp is attempting to do here, combining all three.

Revenues in News Corp's news and information services division (in which Internet Action Force will sit) fell 6% year on year to $1.5 billion in its second quarter, owing to weaknesses in the ad market and negative foreign currency fluctuations. News Corp reports its third quarter results on Tuesday.

Internet Action Force's traffic is nowhere near BuzzFeed-level yet: Most of the videos it has currently produced only have a couple of hundred views on YouTube, it has just over 800 Twitter followers, and its rank in the US for traffic according to Alexa is just 25,095 — although, bizarrely, Internet Action Force has over 15,000 Facebook likes already.

As Mashable notes, some people on Twitter are not taking Internet Action Force very seriously:

SEE ALSO: Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook are at war over the future of news — and one of them tried to buy a media company

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Dwindling ad sales hurt News Corp revenue in the third quarter

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Rupert Murdoch, Executive Chairman News Corp and Chairman and CEO 21st Century Fox speaks at the WSJD Live conference in Laguna Beach, California October 29, 2014.  REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

(Reuters) - News Corp, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, reported a marginal fall in quarterly revenue, hurt by the stronger dollar and dwindling advertising sales at its newspapers.

Net income attributable to shareholders fell to $23 million, or 4 cents per share, for the third quarter ended March 31, from $48 million, or 8 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue at the publisher, founded by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, fell to $2.06 billion from $2.08 billion.

(Reporting by Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru)

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The 10 things in advertising you need to know today

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rupert murdoch

Good morning. Here's everything you need to know in the world of advertising today.

1. This fun iPhone ad parody has a serious message about how addicted we are to tech. It imagines the iPhone 7 as an implant inserted directly into the brain.

2. This Prada ad was banned in the UK for having "inappropriately sexualized young women." The double-page ad appeared in Vogue magazine.

3. Dwindling ad sales hurt News Corp's revenue in the third quarter. Revenue fell 1% to $2.06 billion, while net profit fell 52%.

4. News Corp has quietly launched a BuzzFeed competitor. It's called "Internet Action Force."

5. Elon Musk's mom is the classy lady in the Virgin America ads. Maye Musk's modeling portfolio dates back to the 1960s.

6. Millennial Media reported a sales drop and widening losses in its first quarter. The company's CEO Michael Barrett said it is "entering its second quarter with a strong foundation."

7. Rubicon Project grew revenue by 62% year on year its first quarter. The ad tech company also managed to narrow its net losses.

8. Burger King reportedly paid $1 million to get its mascot in Floyd Mayweather's entourage. Hundreds of people slammed Burger King on social media for getting its "King" brand ambassador to stand with Mayweather.

9. Twitter is expanding CFO Anthony Noto's role to cover marketing, The Verge reports. The department previously reported to Kevin Weil, senior vice president of product.

10. This ad agency makes all its new employees climb Mount Fuji. Japanese holding group Dentsu has kept up the annual tradition since 1925.

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