A good article from Fortune magazine about the considerable activity within News Corp. since the Rupert Murdoch speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April this year. The article talks about News’ two pronged approach: bulk up quickly on internet distribution and then add features like video search, instant messaging, VoIP etc. It also talks about Fox TV creating content based on FOX TV shows for access online through News websites. This quote from the Fortune article, including a quote from Murdoch, establishes good background for their acquisitions and rapid integration with existing brands:
When you’ve got a big, expanding world economy, you’d expect a boom in advertising, and it hasn’t been there,” he explains a couple of weeks later in his Los Angeles office, a spacious fifth-floor redoubt overlooking the sprawling lot of his 20th Century Fox movie studio. Even as traditional ad sales failed to boom, he says, small in-house websites like Foxnews.com and Britain’s Times Online started generating meaningful revenue on puny investments. “You start putting two and two together, and we decided to abandon our defenses and get offensive.”