Gawker
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Business Media
"Wall Street" Part of Wall Street Journal Increasingly Meaningless
Robert Thomson, the wily Aussie installed by Rupert Murdoch as editor of the Wall Street Journal, wants his newspaper to be big in Japan. And Europe. And Chicago. And Los Angeles.
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By Owen ThomasComment by cassandra: Thomson is Australian, not British. I'm not sure how that affects your illusory "wiliness" matrix but it's worth getting it... 1 Responses | Other threads
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schadenfreude
Schwab held $85 million in bad Lehman, WaMu debt
Venerable San Francisco financial firm Charles Schwab just took an $85 million hit, writing off some debt it owned in Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. On the Old Money quarter-mile, Montgomery Street, a small electronic ticker from Schwab offers a barometer. After yesterday's 777.68 plunge, the year-to-date number from the Dow Jones index has gone from -17.1 percent when I walked by on Friday to -20.5 percent yesterday afternoon. I've updated the photo from Google Street View to correctly reflect current trends. [San Jose Mercury News]
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By Jackson WestComment by sample032: $85M is 0.3% of SCHW's market cap (but a 2.2% ding to its cash reserves). YTD, it's only down... more » | Other threads
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deathwatch
Barry Diller's finance site: "Completely pointless"
FiLife, a personal-finance site backed by IAC and the Wall Street Journal, is struggling, according to one ex-employee we eavesdropped on at the City Bakery, a coffeehouse in Manhattan's Flatiron neighborhood, as she interviewed for a new job. "The business model completely changed," she said. "It used to be personal finance for people in their 20s and 30s. Now it's just completely pointless." An embittered writer? Perhaps. FiLife hired a batch of journalists, only to switch gears shortly before launch and realize that the Web didn't need another content site. But their replacement — a set of automated tools to evaluate one's place in the financial pecking order — do seem pointless. The site only attracts 31,500 users a month. In this regard, FiLife is utterly typical — of both its backer and its genre. More » -
bad ideas
The bubble in personal-finance websites
AOL has launched Walletpop, a personal-finance site; IAC and Dow Jones have FiLife; and TheStreet.com has MainStreet.com. All hope to attract a younger audience to personal-finance news than the conventional stock talk and online portfolios offered by the staid likes of Yahoo Finance and CNNMoney. The bets are wrong both in their timing and their premise. Stockbrokers and mortgage lenders, reliable advertisers during good times, are both ducking for cover and pulling back their budgets. Froth might have sustained these sites a couple of years ago, but not now. No matter when they launched, though, their proponents should have remembered this maxim: Financial advice, like youth itself, is wasted on the young. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Ted Dziuba: Who needs financial advice? I just charge everything to visa anyway. Easy. more » | Other threads
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spy photos
Valleywag spots secret Yahoo conclave at D6
CARLSBAD, CA — On stage at D6, Sue Decker couldn't offer any explanation why she was qualified to be president of Yahoo. But if you ask Valleywag, she's doing a bang-up job of pursuing Yahoo's strategy of embracing openness. For example, by holding a meeting within camera-lens length of Valleywag in the Four Seasons Lobby Lounge. Our eye was first drawn by Yahoo Media Group chief Scott Moore's blindingly colorful Madras shirt; we then saw he was sitting with Decker. Two of the other participants: Gordon McLeod and Matthew Goldberg, business-side executives at Dow Jones, which means they were likely discussing some kind of news-content partnership between Yahoo and the Wall Street Journal. I'd thought I spooted Brad Garlinghouse, the Yahoo executive who wrote the famous "Peanut Butter Memo," in the group, but I'm told he wasn't there. I later spotted him strolling down the halls with Yahoo board member Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision. More pictures of the meeting: More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by brandnew_yerretro: probably a decent call on the ad deal. that's todd teresi in there too, the svp of the yahoo publisher... more » | Other threads
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bubble 2.0
Are VCs fleeing the Web? Yes and no
Most venture capitalists are adept followers of the herd. As such, their investments are best seen as trailing indicators — the financial detritus of events past, rather than predictors of what to come. Is there a bubble in Web startups? The numbers themselves are as confused as investors. Dow Jones says the first quarter saw a record $1.58 billion in venture capital invested in Internet companies. Thomson Reuters says its figure of $1.3 billion was down 7 percent from the fourth quarter. Data about VC investments is hard to obtain, and the two categorize companies differently. Anecdotally, it's clear that smart VCs have stopped funding every new social-media website and online-ad network that cross their desks. But the Valley remains awash in dumb money that has yet to be called home. The popping of this bubble will take more than a quarter's time.
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By Owen ThomasComment by Widget Economist: Venture capitalists are trying to put money into the creative, tertiary sector. These web 2.0 sites start from the base... more » | Other threads
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great moments in journalism
Salon shares secrets to get around Wall Street Journal's pay wall — but not its own
In an article on Salon's Machinist blog today, Farhad Manjoo gives tips for getting around the Wall Street Journal's paid-subscription barrier. WSJ.com allows some featured articles to be read for free, but puts much of its content behind what's known in the business as a "pay wall." The dirty secret Manjoo exposes: Many of the "hidden" articles can be easily accessed with a little technical know-how. What he doesn't stop to ask: Why has new Journal owner Rupert Murdoch made it so easy? More »
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Comment by diggum: @diggum: well, you can see it in the link. salon.com/news/cookie756.html more » | Other threads
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schwag
Valleywag reporter steals pillow from Rupert Murdoch
Along with having excellent food and guests, the All Things Digital party at the Venetian in Las Vegas had very nice throw pillows. Jason Calacanis may have Twittered about stealing one, but I actually did it. (Admittedly, I did so with the connivance of Kara Swisher.) Score one for the bullycub!
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Comment by karaswisher: But Owen does have a man-crush on me. That's clear. more » | Other threads
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wall street journal
When newspaper reporters were hot — the 100-word version
Helicopters. Hot metal print. Faked photos. Police scanners and running engines. Even if you're not a journalism wonk, outgoing Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger's recap of his years in the golden age of newspaper reporting is an engaging read, all 2,963 words of it. If you just want the dirt, I've pullquoted Steiger's dead-bird story, plus the time he asked for a helicopter to do some reporting. Does Pajamas Media have one of those? More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by deathbychichi: Gawker Media bloggers are authorized to do all the flying they need to do to bag a big story --... more » | Other threads
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rupert murdoch
Murdoch advertises his own victory
In his own, not-so-subtle way, Rupert Murdoch is screaming Face! at all of News Corp.'s competitors, detractors, and new Dow Jones employees. The form of his victory lap? Despite the fact that every major news outlet has covered Murdoch's $5 billion acquisition of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones since the first whispered rumors, the billionaire found it prudent to spent $2 million on a global ad campaign — a three-page advertisement that flaunts the history of News Corp.'s acquisitions. With Murdoch's oft-undermined slogan — "Free people, free markets, free thinking," except when he's doing business in China — the promo is running today in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. "We make the stuff that excites, entertains, informs, enriches and infuriates billions of imaginations." Indeed. -
acquisitions
Dow Jones shareholders, for one, welcome Murdoch as new overlord
A Reaganesque landslide: Dow Jones shareholders voted 60 percent in favor of Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the company which publishes the Wall Street Journal. The Bancroft family, split as always on the deal, tendered 54 percent of their supervoting shares to approve the deal, while an overwhelming 78 percent of common stock was voted in favor. Murdoch has already started replacing execs at Dow Jones, and News Corp. takes formal control tomorrow. (Photo by AP/Evan Vucci) -
hires
Rupert Murdoch has added a 27-year-old European opera singer to the News Corp. board of directors. Natalie Bancroft, of the Bancroft family which sold Dow Jones to News Corp., was was offered the position as part of acquisition negotiations. One Dow Jones employee said, "It validates the family's incompetence." Ouch. Natalie has, as best as we can tell, zero experience running a business. An interesting choice for Rupert — we wonder what kind of influence, if any, Natalie will have on News Corp. Other board members include Murdoch's eldest son Lachlan, News Corp. COO and president Peter Chernin and a former prime minister of Spain. [FT]
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Comment by grcl: The funniest aspect of this story is that the family had the right to nominate one board member of their... more » | Other threads
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wall street journal
Killing trees doesn't work anymore for WSJ
I'm always hearing that no matter how bad it gets for newspapers, icons like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will be fine. Don't count on it. Dow Jones announced earnings today, and it looks like even the Journal is in trouble. Print ad revenues sank 2.9 percent in the third quarter. And worse yet, while print circulation increased 7.8 percent, ad revenue dropped 0.5 percent. Advertisers had to spend less to reach more readers. Online ad revenues were up 7.8 percent in the quarter, however. And there's your solution? Rupert Murdoch should go with his instinct and set WSJ.com's content free. The plan appears to be working for the Times. (Photo by Claire L. Evans)
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Comment by Jordan Golson: @SlightlyLessDeliciousNoise: A drop of 0.5% with static readership maybe, but combined with increased readership, it is significant. more » | Other threads
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breaking
MySpace CEO renews contract for two years
WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — "I'm happy to say I'll have a job for the next two years," says Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, on stage with conference organizer John Battelle and his boss, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, confirming widespread rumors that he and MySpace cohort Tom Anderson had renewed their contract to run the social network for another two years. "I had to go from the nickel-and-dime newspaper culture, to the magazine culture ... to Hollywood and the Internet culture," says Murdoch, nodding to the reported — but unconfirmed — figure that DeWolfe and Anderson would make: $30 million over two years. More live coverage, after the jump. More » -
media
Perhaps influenced by The New York Times recently setting its Web site free, Rupert Murdoch chimes in, saying "Me too." He's still leaning towards banishing the Wall Street Journal's online subscription model. [Reuters] -
hires
One more down at the Red Herring
Congratulations to Scott Morrison, the former editor of Red Herring's website, on escaping the troubled publication and landing a new job in the San Francisco bureau of Dow Jones. No matter what they say, Rupert Murdoch has to be a better boss than Alex Vieux, whose mismanagement is driving the once-storied tech-magazine brand into the ground. We suspected he was on to greener pastures when coworkers told us he started missing work, but an announcement on the website of the The Society of American Business Editors and Writers confirms the new position for us. And for the rest of his colleagues, too. Note to Scott, next time you switch gigs, it might be more polite to send out an internal email before your underlings find out via an industry newsletter. Or some scurrilous gossip rag.
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Comment by bierhausser: SO WHO'S LEFT... The Vieux and Joel Dreyfus and Anam???? That's pretty sad. Jim Sullivan more » | Other threads
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dow jones
Kara Swisher's plan for the Journal has more "promiscuity"
Now that News Corp. appears to have locked up Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, every journalist on the planet is volunteering to be an unpaid consultant to Rupert Murdoch. I'm sure he appreciates the free advice. The News Corp. CEO is so known for taking it, after all. First up, there's Kara Swisher's tabloid-headlined call for more "promiscuity," which I was about to get behind. Talk about a paper that needs sexing up! But then I discovered that the word, in Swisher's hands, has gone entirely limp. Her deflated meaning? More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Wally: "Promiscuity" was rather an odd choice for a word. Will she next suggest that the Wall Street Journal should become... more » | Other threads
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to do
Here's what's new on the Valleywag Calendar:
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dow jones
The employable Eric Savitz
Leave it to Eric Savitz, dean of the Valley's tech correspondents, to take on Rupert Murdoch. The rest of the media grudgingly sighs as it treats News Corp.'s pending acquisition of Dow Jones as an inevitability. But Savitz — who works at the Dow Jones-owned Barron's dares to ask the forbidden question: What if the Bancrofts, the family which owns a controlling stake in Dow Jones, turn Murdoch down? After asking this question, and exploring what might happen to the stock (short version: It will probably drop by half, from $57 to $30), he picks up 24/7 Wall Street's idea of having Dow Jones buy its U.K. rival, the Financial Times. Let's hope Murdoch keeps his promises about editorial independence. Or fancies having a stable of cheeky employees around. Because we'd sure miss Savitz if News Corp. buys Dow Jones and something, well, unpleasant happens.
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By Owen ThomasComment by Ray Wert Jr: @eze: It would go so weel with Gawkers reliability cred too! more » | Other threads
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advertising
Google syndicates video for ads
Google is amping up its Adsense offerings with embedded video clips from sources such as Dow Jones & Co. and Condé Nast. A variety of revenue models are being explored, but the basic deal has Google sharing ad income in some proportion with the video content creator and the hosting site; ads are arranged around the video and occasionally inserted between clips, as each video box has a mutli-clip "playlist." Contextual relations between the clips and surrounding material is pretty thin, but no worse than most contextual ads. More interesting is what this could mean for other video creators, should the system's economies scale down as well as up. With a small amount of judicious oversight, even the vast wasteland of Youtube content could be leveraged into embedded clip boxes to punch up boring site content elsewhere, perhaps creating a Revver-style payment scheme for Youtubers.
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