|
Rupert Murdoch has told his senior executives they must find ways to integrate their traditional publishing and broadcasting operations with the internet assets in which News Corporation has invested in recent months.
Delegates at a recent News Corp summit in Carmel, California, were told that different parts of the media conglomerate needed to start talking more to each other to find more ways of collaborating online.
The summit also focused on identifying which of the group's existing news and sports brands - which range from the Fox TV channels in the US to The Sun and The Times in the UK - could best be used on News Corp's new online platforms.
A further priority was to ensure that different divisions were using technology that was compatible across the company, according to one person who attended.
Neither James Murdoch, his younger son who was in charge of the group's internet strategy before becoming chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting, nor his older brother Lachlan, who resigned from his executive duties in July, attended the summit.
Mr Murdoch also invited outside speakers including George Gilder, author of a technology investment newsletter called The Gilder Report, and representatives of Kleiner Perkins Canfield & Byers, a Silicon Valley venture capital group.
The summit, the second in seven months to address News Corp's internet strategy, follows Mr Murdoch's speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April, in which he said that digital technology was driving "a revolution in the way in which young people are accessing news" which would require "a transformation of the way we think about our product".
Since then, News Corp has formed a new online division, Fox Interactive Media. It has announced the $580m acquisition of Inter-mix Media, which operates a social networking site called My-Space.com; bid $60m for Scout Media, which publishes sports websites; and lately unveiled a $650m takeover of IGN Entertainment, an internet video game information company.
Under syndication arrangement
with FE
|