News Corp.: “No Panic”; FIM “Breath Of Fresh Air”; One-Way DirecTV

:The Murdoch press tour continues with a rare Press Gazette magazine interview. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was dismissive of recent comments by Sir Martin Sorrell about panicked internet buying. “There’s no panic, and there was certainly no overpayment. It was a very careful strategy to go for the two biggest community sites for people under 30.” But he says the company’s internet strategy will “never be fully formed. The internet is changing, very disruptive technology and there are new inventions coming along every month. And one has to stay awake and race to stay up with it, or if you get enough brilliant people around maybe you can get ahead of it.”
We’re over you, Rupert The Guardian’s Emily Bell reads the interview as a sign that Murdoch’s era is over: “What we once took from Murdoch, as an industry and as media journalists, was his ability to provide a shockingly radical lead: he was the disruptive technology which now is itself being disrupted.”

Building an Internet Empire: News Corp.’s stock has underperformed its peers but hedge fund managing partner James Altucher says its “new Internet unit, specifically the acquisition of Intermix, is a breath of fresh air in this old media empire. … Over the next several quarters, we should see synergies unlock as advertisers in the traditional media sectors of News Corp. start populating the ad space of MySpace and IGN.” MySpace.com highlights: more pageviews than any site save Yahoo, AOL and MSN; twice the pageviews of Google; a 12-percent increase in traffic from September to October.
Static In Rupert’s Satellite Dreams: News Corp.’s one-way DirecTV doesn’t have quite the glow as it competes against two-way operations for consumer attention. “The problem at the heart of DIRECTV’s model is that it can’t yet offer the two-way technologies that are so hot now — from Voice over Internet Protocol to VOD. Satellite’s one-way feed can send shows to TVs, but there’s no path back to the satellite, making its pay-per-view offerings much less popular since they start at scheduled times. Plus, cable is a more attractive platform for ads because it can target spots to specific neighborhoods.”

Related: WPP’s Sorrell Dispenses Wisdom About Internet Advertising — And Takes a Dig At Rupert Murdoch

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