News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch is proving that he won’t be reined in when it comes to Twitter. Over the weekend he has been using his shiny new 140 character account to rail against the injustices of the world calling Google a “piracy leader” and opining that Barack Obama had thrown in “his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters”. He is starting to sound like one very hacked off media chairman whose vast PR machine can not keep him quiet.

Google has responded to the elder Murdoch’s tweets and called them nonsense. Oh dear. Maybe not the response the billionaire media mogul was looking for. Read More »

What would the hacking scandal have been like if Rupert Murdoch had tweeted through the whole thing? I’m guessing shouts of “lies, damn lies and that was our (humble) exclusive”. I could be wrong.

While the chairman and CEO of News Corporation was not among Twitter’s users for 364 days of  2011 all that changed on December 31 as Murdoch began to tweet and took the opportunity with one of his first tweets to take a dig at the UK — cause of his annus horribilis. Read More »

News Corp’s exclusive iPad newspaper was unveiled at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City today by Rupert Murdoch, joined by Apple’s Eddy Cue, who was standing in for Steve Jobs.

Featuring a 100+ page newspaper covering current affairs, gossip, opinion, arts and life, apps and games, and sports with lots of complementary multimedia content such as videos and 360 degree images, The Daily is available just in the US at present, at a cost of 99c a week through the iPad App Store.

The application will update throughout the day and you’ll be able to comment on articles, share them on social sites and even have some of them read to you. Read More »

I just stumbled across this. It is an interesting if long shot of an idea. An unnamed group of online executives led by a UK-based online marketing strategist has written an open letter to News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch proposing to buy the troubled MySpce.

The offer comes on the heels of News Corp slashing the once social networking leader to the bone  along with almost 50% of staff. Read More »

Apple has released an email to the media today from CEO Steve Jobs explaining to staff that he is to take another leave of absence.

Back in January 2009 Jobs took six months leave from the company he co-founded after admitting he was suffering from “complex” health problems. Read More »

It’s being reported that Rupert Murdoch will be joined on stage by Apple CEO Steve Jobs for the launch of News Corporation’s iPad newspaper, The Daily, which will be unveiled next week (January 19).

It is also being speculated that The Daily will take a page out of the Times anti-social media playbook and lock its associated website away from search and bloggers.

Read More »

News Corporation has as good as confirmed that efforts to revamp MySpace, the site it paid $580m for in 2005, are more to do with boosting the potential price the social network can fetch than transforming it into a viable part of Rupert Murdoch’s media operations.

MySpace: relic of a bygone age?

Elegantly mustachioed chief operating officer Chase Carey has hinted as much, telling the Reuters Global Media Summit: “There are opportunities here to do 20 things [with MySpace] but that doesn’t mean you’re going to do any of the 20. If there’s something that makes sense, you ought to think about it.”

Read More »

First of all, it is not at all clear what would constitute success for an iPad ‘newspaper’. If it is to quickly reach profitability, which does seem unlikely, even with a projected doubling of the iPad universe to 15 million users in the next twelve months, the take-up rate for the subscription app would have to be astonishingly high for it to cover costs. Read More »

Virgin boss Richard Branson is expected to launch an iPad only magazine as early as next Tuesday.

Sounding a bit like a cross between GQ, Wired and Vanity Fair it has been under development since the summer. Read More »

Things are reported to becoming together for News Corporation’s app based newspaper, which is to simply be called The Daily, as a string of staff are hired to write content and a budget of around $30 million has been assigned.

The project is expected to launch before the end of the year and Rupert Murdoch is said to be personally heavily involved in the development of The Daily, which at one time was rumoured was going to be named The Daily Planet. Read More »