News Corp’s BIG news – that it has reached a tentative agreement to buy Dow Jones (owner of the Wall Street Journal) for $5 billion — capped more than a week of heaping helpings of press releases about everything from executive changes at its TV operations to gloating about its MySpace subsidiary’s impact on social networking.
Was the flurry just a buildup to keep the media engaged while the final Dow Jones/WSJ details were hammered out or business as usual in Rupie’s busy PR department? Hard to tell, but the tentative purchase has garnered the most headlines since it was announced in May. I suspect it will continue to do so until the acquisition is approved by the Bancroft family, which controls the majority of Dow’s voting stock.
The press flood began last week with the news that Dana Walden and Gary Newman were both promoted to chairmen of Twentieth Century Fox Television. The benign release celebrated the careers of Walden and Newman’s like a warm fuzzy hug from Rupie himself — at least for that morning.
By mid-day, the thunder was stolen from Twentieth Century’s media storm (OK, more like a isolated shower) as News Corp. announced that it plucked president Kevin Reilly from his post at NBC to become prexy of FOX Broadcasting’s Entertainment operations. Reilly joins his old partner-in-crime at FX Networks, Peter Liguori, to help breathe some new life into Fox’s programming efforts.
Also that week, News Corp. announced that it had set a formal launch date for its new FOX Business Network channel. Led by FOX News SVP Neil Cavuto, the network is a repository for the fantastic delusions of merging Wall Street Journal content with overproduced news channel grandeur. If the Dow Jones acquisition is completed, news channels like CNBC and Bloomberg TV may be able to turn mockery of the deal into a ratings boost. If you can’t beat ‘em, make news out of them.
Now that there is enough news to keep the media busy, it’s only fitting that News Corp. would throw in a headline to gloat about its MySpace subsidiary: “MySpace Outperforms All Other Social Networking Sites.” Um, duh.
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