JacobRosenberg.net

Guess who said this in a recent interview:

Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.

Rupert Murdoch. No, really.

The July issue of Wired interviewed Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive of News Corporation and its vast holdings (Fox Network, Sky, the New York Post, 20th Century Fox, DirecTV, TV Guide, Harper Collins). By now, pretty much everyone on the Internet has heard of MySpace, and I’d venture that most of those people know that News Corporation is the owner of that little web property.

Sure, in the midst of $60 billion worth of Diversified Media holdings, a little half-billion dollar bit of Web fluff might seem minor, but the entrance of a company like News Corp into the space could be as revolutionary (pronounce: insane) as the merger of Time Warner with AOL.

Clearly, our favorite tabloid owner isn’t your usual Internet kingmaker. He’s 75, as typecast as they come, and up to his eyeballs in establishment media. But he’s also a firebrand, entering markets and disrupting them. Think of the impact that the Fox network had on ABC, CBS, and NBC. It wasn’t high-minded news coverage, or critially acclaimed shows which took Fox to the top, but appealing if vapid programming which appealed to the mass audience and kept them there.

Wow, MySpace starts to fit right in, doesn’t it?

Of course, the key to News Corp is making money - gobs of money - with well-placed content that pulls in valuable demographics. Sure, MySpace pulls in the 18-45 (well, the 18 anyway), but there hasn’t yet been an outpouring of advertisers who want their latest flashy ad transposed with millions of snapshots of repetitive teenage angst. Sixty ways to hate your mother isn’t what I had in mind when I first heard about the long tail, no matter how many page views it gets.

So, the court is still out on what will happen as that shadowy media elite are pushed out in favor of the tyranny wisdom of the crowds. Does a community functioning as editors favor more niche stories making out, or does it better drown out the unpopular view?
Does giving control to the people allow higher quality content to surface, or does it lower the bar to the lowest common denominator?

Finally, what happens to the MySpace and YouTubes of the world when the next hot thing comes around? If there’s anything teens are great at, it’s trend-hopping, and nobody wants to be stuck with last year’s hot thing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Navel-Gazing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.