By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 12/04/12 7:41pm

off the record

ipad-the-daily-2 (1)

Media Winter Redux: The Daily Dies; Downsizing at The New York Times

It didn’t feel much like winter.

It was balmy: 60 degrees and sunny. The holiday decorations felt out of place in the mild breeze. But the frost was creeping in—media winter (as foreshadowed in October by the fall of Newsweek) was in full swing by 9 a.m. on the first Monday in December.

First came the announcement that The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s foray into iPad journalism, was being shuttered after less than two years and many millions of dollars. The news wasn’t wholly unexpected. A third of the staff had been laid off over the summer, and a sense of doom and gloom had hung over the ninth floor of News Corp. HQ ever since. It was a matter of when, not if, the tablet app would disband. But, as with any death watch, just because it’s expected doesn’t make it any less humbling. Read More

By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 10/23/12 7:27pm

off the record

Brown.

First They Came for Newsweek: Is a Second Media Winter On the Way?

Is it happening again?

The bad time went by many names: the meltdown … the shakeout … the reckoning … the death of print… or sometimes, simply, “trying to freelance.”

Old-timers can still remember it—how, amid the frozen winter of 2008, the corridors of once unshakable media empires ran red with ink as the insertion orders dried up and crumbled into dust. Aeron chairs grew wet with tears. Editors were cashiered, contract writers flung overboard like chum. Soon you could see them all over Midtown: the sleek black Town Cars sitting idle on cinder blocks, rusting in the bleak unforgiving sun.

It was terrifying. The death knell—a merciless, unrelenting Twitter feed titled “The Media Is Dying”—sounded on a daily basis, sometimes hourly. Staffers watched in fear as the ghouls of HR, fingernails dabbed in scarlet, inched ever closer. Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 7/11/12 10:00am

off the record

R.I.P. Newscore: News Corp.’s Weird News Wire Goes Dark, Sheds Staff

As News Corp. shores up its print and television properties leading up to the company’s highly publicized split, its scrappy and beloved internal newswire Newscore has quietly gone dark, with at least 20 positions eliminated—and possibly more than twice that if cuts hit bureaus in London and Sydney.

Launched in 2009, Newscore collected and redistributed the news stories from News Corp.’s reporters in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, while racing rivals AP and Reuters on breaking news. Newscore CEO John Moody, a former Fox News executive, was reportedly inspired by a moment of synergy between Fox News and The Australian in covering Heath Ledger’s death. Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 6/28/12 9:50am

Amicable Divorces

69th Annual Golden Globe Awards - Arrivals

Rupert Murdoch Confirms News Corp. Split in Marathon Memo

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch confirmed reports that he will divide the corporation into two companies—one for television and entertainment, one for newspapers and publishing—in a message to employees today.

The lengthy memo, obtained by the The New York Times, touches on everything from the First Amendment to the iPad but does not mention the ongoing phone-hacking and bribery scandal in the UK. Some think the restructuring, on which they’ll reportedly be advised by Goldman Sachs, is an attempt to protect top management from this or future messes. Read More