pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=47a93caf4b543772005f9fd1maxX=100maxY=178" border="0" alt="michaelwolff.jpg" title="michaelwolff.jpg" width="100" height="178" /BusinessWeek's Jon Finea href="http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia/archives/2008/12/michael_wolffs_1.html" takes Rupert Murdoch tell-all author Michael Wolff out for dinner/a. Michael then reveals the secret he didn't put into the book: why Murdoch's News Corp (NWS) is trying so hard to ditch MySpace:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"MW: What [MySpace] understand[s] is their $25 billion to $30 billion valuation.-/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"JF: But that's [expletive]. We both know that's [expletive]./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"MW: It doesn't make any difference. That's gonna go down. What they are looking at is the distinct possibility that it can go down to nothing./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"JF: How do you find that plausible? It's not even a utility like--the anti-Google argument is this: If someone builds a better search engine tomorrow, I have zero switching costs. If I am on MySpace, I have 500 friends. I use it to communicate with people. You can't just move. It's a pain in the ass. All your stuff is there./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"MW: But that's exactly what they said about AOL./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"JF: You did not develop that relationship with AOL./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"MW: You did. You exactly did./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"JF: How?/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"MW: Your email was there, because your friends were there. I mean, AOL operated actually as the community of its day. There were all of those-/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"JF: But besides the email and, OK, the-/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"MW: There were the infinite number of chat rooms. Layer upon layer upon layer of sex chat rooms./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"JF: Of course. And I give you credit for having pointed to that as the secret driver of its success. But, all you need is a different chat room. You don't have pictures up [on AOL]. You don't have your history up there. You don't have-/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"MW: It doesn't matter. What they saw at the time was that [users] were absolutely wedded to AOL. That was Time Warner's bet on that./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"JF: AOL was monodimensional in a way that MySpace is not. I don't think that's particularly debatable./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"MW:strong I don't think that's true. I think it is--if you're on MySpace now, you're a [expletive] cretin. And you're not only a [expletive] cretin, but you're poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people./strong/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"JF: [unsuccessfully stifling laughter] I don't mean to get all Murdoch's-kids on you [an obscure reference to an earlier part of the conversation], but if you are in a band, you are on MySpace. You have to be on MySpace. That's a powerful driver. And second of all-- if I am to accept your reasoning, even though I don't--as the success of [News Corp's British tabloid] The Sun will tell you, there are lot of cretins out there and you can make a lot of money off cretins. By appealing to their essential--/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"MW: No! That is the difference. And that is one of the interesting points of Murdoch. He wants to make money off of what he rightly saw as a rising lower class. He came to this country and he sees, that's just not really true. No one really identifies with being lower class [in the US]. As soon as it comes to you- I am lower class'--you run, and you have to rehabilitate all of your aspirational identifiers./p pstrongSee Also:/strong a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/dewolfe-myspace-hasn-t-seen-any-impact-from-financial-crises"MySpace CEO Dewolfe: Recession Hammering Growth Prospects/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/JJHOOkZezKlQXwjDfWKRwdkdux4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/JJHOOkZezKlQXwjDfWKRwdkdux4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=lvr6H64l"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=lvr6H64l" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=IWKu8ihs"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=Y41F6YQe"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=7XjUZvcU"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=7XjUZvcU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=bCW5Gbf0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=CbPLhmoq"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=uuuhYuVt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=KyqKMFiT"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/9KRR511ipTc" height="1" width="1"/

NEW YORK (Reuters) - MySpace, the online social network owned by News Corp, sees opportunities to buy start-ups for a fraction of what they would have cost six months ago as the economic slump slices millions of dollars off their price tags.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?a=fYhfC0Vl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?a=qUKfcs9S"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?i=qUKfcs9S" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?a=KCPHtPpe"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?i=KCPHtPpe" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Reuters/InternetNews/~4/WbKy-R8v5Pc" height="1" width="1"/

Speaking at a Reuters event, the CEO of the News Corp.-owned social network said that he expects MySpace to continue to grow--just not as much.

Speaking at a Reuters event, the CEO of the News Corp.-owned social network said that he expects MySpace to continue to grow--just not as much.

Speaking at a Reuters event, the CEO of the News Corp.-owned social network said that he expects MySpace to continue to grow--just not as much.

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=47a93a104b543772005e7184maxX=300maxY=241" border="0" alt="murdoch.jpg" title="murdoch.jpg" width="300" height="241" /In the emGuardian/em's a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/01/wall-street-journal-dow-murdoch"excerpt/a from Michael Wolff's new bookem The Man Who Owns The News/em, it's April 2007 and News Corp. (NWS) Rupert Murdoch wants to buy emWall Street Journal/em parent company Dow Jones. The family that owns the paper, the Bancrofts, won't talk to him, but he's developed a relationship with Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino. Murdoch has decided to make him an offer:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"During most of the winter, Murdoch's people (his "henchmen", they tended to call themselves) had continued to analyse the Dow Jones business. The company was trading no higher than the mid-30s; Murdoch had heard about Rich Zannino's estimate of getting the share price to, tops, $45. Nobody at News Corp thought Dow Jones could be worth, most optimistically, more than $50./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"But Murdoch insists they should offer $60 - and because he's Murdoch no one is going to tell him he's a fool. Dow Jones management and the Bancroft family may act sanctimonious and high and mighty, but $60 [which values the company at $5bn], Murdoch knows, will call their bluff./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"In early April he makes the call./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"He's apologetic when Zannino, on vacation at the Ocean Club in the Bahamas, calls him back, sorry to disturb, but it's important, he says, that he see Zannino as soon as he gets back. Suspecting something large, Zannino might here, too, have consulted with others at the company. But he doesn't tell anyone - he persists in allowing himself to believe that seeing Murdoch, even urgently, could be about many things./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"After 45 minutes in which they talk again about American Idol, Murdoch says: "Well, I'm thinking about making an offer to buy Dow Jones."/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Zannino demurs a bit: "You know Rupert, you know as well as anybody, this isn't my call, it's the family's call. And the family has consistently - and Rupert, even as recently at our last board meeting - said that they're committed to the independence of Dow Jones and they have no interest in selling the company."/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Murdoch: "I know that. I was thinking I'd take the offer directly to the board. I know the family feels that way. I've called [Michael] Elefante in the past. He won't even take a number. The number I'm thinking of is ... 60."/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Zannino: (internally) Holy Shit! (externally) Silence./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Murdoch: "So I'm thinking I'll just take that directly to the board to try and get that through the board ... So that's what I'm going to do - I'm going to make an offer to the board. Did I just make an offer to you?"/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Zannino: "No you didn't. You mused about wanting to buy Dow Jones. I told you the family has the call and it's not for sale, and you told me you were going to contact the board."/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Zannino is trying to find his balance - he's walked out to the furthest point and now, teetering on the precipice, he's trying to come back. Zannino tells Murdoch he isn't going to tell his board about the offer, because it's really not an official offer, suggesting to Murdoch that if anybody asks him about it, he should say he was just joking about the $60./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"But, in the car, Zannino understands that the breach has just occurred - that he's let Murdoch in. He breathlessly calls Joe Stern, the Dow Jones general counsel, and tells him: "He gave me a number." Back at the Dow Jones office, each successive person let in on the news understands that the breach is real - and that they can't close it./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Murdoch has correctly analysed that Zannino, who might have blocked his access to the board, has not./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"[a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/01/wall-street-journal-dow-murdoch"Continue reading at the Guardian./a]/p pstrongSee Also:/stronga href="../../2008/11/new-york-times-nyt-now-losing-business-to-wall-street-journal"br /New York Times (NYT) Now Losing Business To Wall Street Journal/a/p p /p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/DXG-iNVd6sMIFqdSKc90_unyrtU/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/DXG-iNVd6sMIFqdSKc90_unyrtU/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=SMukVMhx"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=SMukVMhx" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=ttNOtWLJ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=V0FicYx4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=uNV9EWQZ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=uNV9EWQZ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=pJflhJi5"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=nFuDMZpW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=9DPCku5F"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=bjYrEn7O"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/MAhEHRHikMw" height="1" width="1"/