Valleywag is Gawker's column from Silicon Valley. Edited by Ryan Tate, it carries technology and internet gossip — the news too scurrilous and juicy for the industry's trade rags.
We hear News Corporation is winding down MySpace spinoff Slingshot Labs, a vestige of the media conglomerate's efforts to retain MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe. But the labs are hatching one last diabolical plot, on behalf of the Wall Street Journal.
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News Corp, ever the online contrarian, is considering pulling all of its news content off of Google and doing an exclusive deal with Microsoft's Bing. For this, Rupert Murdoch would receive a pittance. Welcome to the future of paid media.
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Forrester Research has a new study out that Rupert Murdoch should probably download: Of 4,000 people polled, 80 percent will not pay for online newspapers or magazines, and the rest are divided on how they want to pay.
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For the second time this week, News Corp. has promised to yank its content from Google, this time within "months." The conglomerate said loudly that search is profitless. But maybe that's just its way of making search hugely profitable.
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It's hard to imagine much of a future for MySpace. Which is probably why it took a science fiction author to do so: Bruce Sterling says the flagging social network is an ideal shantytown for the nihilistic unemployed. Compelling!
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Media mogul and grumpy old man Rupert Murdoch has developed a "personal antipathy to the Internet," biographer Michael Wolff writes. Murdoch even thinks MySpace, which he himself paid $580 million for, is kind of a criminal piece of garbage:
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Rupert Murdochpromises his News Corp. publications will charge for content by next year. Steven Brill swears he has hundreds of newspapers signed up to do likewise. Who wants to be the first to follow these sharks into the pool?
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Rupert Murdoch announced plans yesterday to charge for online access to all of News Corp's media properties. Coincidentally, the company posted a $203 million loss for its fourth quarter, down from a profit of $1.1 billion from the same period last year.
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We'll admit, there were some funny lines in this serenade to Rupert Murdoch at the Wall Street Journal's "D" event. But isn't buttering up the boss at the absolute beginning of your tech conference a little blatant?
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For the media, Twitter is the new confessional. Xeni Jardin admitted to watching an illicit movie, Peter Kafka overcharged his boss, and Jeff Jarvis admitted to being an all-around fraud. Today's crimes against Twitter:
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