Sunday, April 4, 2010

Rupert Murdoch is Coming to Campus on Tuesday

The Kalb Report, is a series that brings prominent speakers the National Press Club run by GW in conjunction with Harvard hosted by Marvin Kalb and is having Rupert Murdoch come to speak this Tuesday, April 6th. He was supposed to come speak in early February but it was postponed due to Snowpocalypse #1.

The Kalb Report, at least all the ones I have been too always draw a very large crowd. I have seen a wide range of journalists and editors, even Katie Couric, but this is the one I am most excited about. The topic of the discussion is the future of journalism and the media. This man, this media mogul, this titan of industry has very unique and often times contrary to the norm views on the combination of journalism and business.

To be completely honest, I have a lot of problems with what he believes in and how he behaves, In a time when the internet is flourishing and revolutionizing streams of information, his plan is to charge for content. The only major newspaper that charged, and no longer does for all of it, was his, the Wall St. Journal. He owns FOX News. The manipulation and propaganda they spew, a lot of his mastermind. He bought MySpace for 580 million dollars and people ridiculed it calling it an outrageous sum as social networking could not be worth that. So obviously the man is a genius, I think he just wields way tpo much power in media around the world.


Anyway, if I get a chance to ask a question it will most certainly be about paid content online. Throughout the class, every speaker has made a point of saying online organizing and social media is useless without quality content. I want to know why he thinks he can keep his media outlets online successful through a subscription service. The quality is that much higher? Is it really too hard to go to another source, one that's free? I mean, I guess being the 132nd richest person in the world with a personal net worth of 4 billion dollars means you're pretty good and understanding consumer habits, but I'd still like to ask.

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