Rupert Murdoch Hates Google, Loves the iPad

Hugh Pickens writes "The Register reports that News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, reiterated his disgust at how search engines handle news and called on old media to rethink how their stories are distributed on the web. 'It's produced a river of gold, but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers,' said Rupert. 'I think they ought to stop it, that the newspapers ought to stand up and let them do their own reporting.' Murdoch added that the iPad was a 'wonderful tool' for listening to music, watching videos and reading newspapers. 'It may well be the saving of the newspaper industry,' by making it cheaper to distribute content to a broader audience, Murdoch said. 'I'm old, I like the tactile experience of the newspaper,' Murdoch said. '(But) if you have less newspapers and more of these, that's OK. It doesn't destroy the traditional newspaper, it just comes in a different form.'"

Comments

The Sooner the Better

[dmgxmichael]

The sooner the "old media" of mega corporations deciding how millions should think passes away, the better. Murdoch has proven to be worse than most in that regard. His misery at the passing away of the bad old days only makes me smile.

Re:The Sooner the Better

[whoever57]

I agree the analysis was simplistic, but maybe I can state it a little more clearly... old monolithic media organizations provide an invaluable service, in terms of investigative reporting

That's why they investigated Madoff and brought about ...... uh, wait..... they ignored the information they were given about Madoff and did not investigate.

IMHO, traditional media has lost the right to claim that they provide an invaluable service through investigative journalism. Madoff isn't the only example where traditional media failed, there are many others. How did Drudge get started? Because traditional media would not touch a story, etc..

Oh grandpa!

[Cyberllama]

He's like the elderly relative at Thanksgiving who keeps saying racist things that would make everyone uncomfortable but they're so used to it they just roll their eyes and say "Oh Grandpa!" Is there any way this guy could not get it less? He understood how to be a Newspaper tycoon, but these days that skillset makes him roughly as useful as a candlestick maker or a wheelwright.

He keeps saying all this crazy stuff, but the guys who actually run Newscorp keep doing the opposite, lucky for them. They could easily edit their robots.txt and keep Google out, but they're smart enough to not only let Google in, but to let users coming in from Google slip past the pay wall . . .

Re:Oh grandpa!

[timmarhy]

don't kid yourself, rupert run's news corp with an iron fist. he knows what he wants to achieve but he doesn't understand how to get there. he want's a slice of google's billion dollar ad business.

if he was clever about it, he'd offer apple a partnership where ipad users get free subscription to all news corp material for a year, and fund an apple search engine to take on google. throw in digitised copies of historical papers as part of the search service.

Re:Logically...

[jd2112]

Actually, the Old Media fixation on the iPad and their false hope of how it will revive their failing empires will only help to hasten their destruction, so it is a good thing.

Re:Endorsement

[mjwx]

Which 'content' in the overwhelming majority of cases they have not even created themselves (Murdoch's business model has no money left for good investigative journalists): they just syndicate the news from AP (which does get paid by Google) or steal it from some blogger (who does not get paid by Murdoch), add their propaganda to it (which Murdoch should be paying for for us to read. A lot.) and then they slap their advertisements on it (which Murdoch should be paying us for as well - my attention has value and Murdoch should not expect to be able to steal it for free).

In case you missed out on the last 40 odd years, Murdoch didn't get rich by being honest and forthright.

But karma's a bitch, if a little slow moving.

Re:I'm torn...

[mdwh2]

It's only on Slashdot that Apple are treated as the number one company.

I've never understood the reason why they buy them - but let's be fair, I think you can forgive people's misunderstanding, when everytime we ask them, instead of coming up with actual reasons, objective examples of things it does better, instead we just get vague handwaving answers like "I can't explain it, it's just a new paradigm" or "You just have to use it, honest" (which incidentally reminds me of the religious argument "You just have to believe in Him, then you'll see the evidence).

It might not be reasons of "cool and hip", but "Buying it because my friend said it was the best, and I believed him" comes pretty close to that in my opinion.

So you say usability - give me an example of this?