DailyDirt: Journalism 2.0 Owned By Billionaires?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
It isn't exactly news that newspapers are facing some serious business difficulties. But if you haven't been keeping up with the business of journalism (and who could blame you since most of the news is crap), you might have missed seeing that some tech billionaires are starting to invest in journalistic endeavors. Sure, billionaires have always owned all the major news organizations (eg. Hearst, Bloomberg, Zuckerman), but the key part here is that technology-savvy billionaires are getting into the game. Maybe that small detail will matter. Or Maybe it won't. In case you haven't been reading any of this news, here are some examples of this billionaire buying trend.- Pierre Omidyar is the latest billionaire to invest in a journalistic enterprise and create a new kind of sustainable journalism. Omidyar was considering buying the Washington Post, but he decided to start from scratch, so he'll find out whether his millions would have been better spent on an existing news organization. [url]
- Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million, and everyone will be watching the natural experiment of how the Washington Post evolves, compared to Omidyar's new media startup. Will any Washington Post journalists cover this story? [url]
- Chris Hughes bought The New Republic last year, and he wasn't the first billionaire to buy a media outlet -- but he might be one of the youngest. TNR has re-designed its layout, and Hughes thinks editorial decisions can't be isolated from the business side of his magazine. Hughes aims to make the company profitable in the next few years.... [url]
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Filed Under: billionaires, chris hughes, jeff bezos, journalism, media trends, news, pierre omidyar
Companies: the new republic, washington post
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Propaganda
How will this not be focused on newspapers that don't attack those people?
This is truly a conflict of interest.
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And Rupert Murdoch is news?
So how come you just noticed?
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Re: And Rupert Murdoch is news?
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It will be worth watching. The news world is in the middle of a huge earthquake that was set off by the internet. There are all sorts of attempts of doing journalism in a new way and i's difficult to see how this will end.
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Just like my wife after sex.
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Billionaires buying newsprint ops
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Just the next logical step
Now that this has resulted in the predicted downfall of newspapers we move on to the next step, which is to pick up the corpses, dust them off, apply some makeup, and have a whole new set of companies use them to control the public narrative.
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