Murdoch understands that in a market where information is so easily accessible and commoditized, opinion, bias, and emotion are amongst the few remaining differentiating factors. Fox builds differentiated content by understanding that the audience is polarized and encouraging it. The same people that hire hosts that call Obama a socialist, provide content like The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad.
In the purchase of The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch proved this. He very easily could have turned it into another Republican powerhouse, but he didn't. The top story on WSJ.com is currently about Americans souring on free trade, not Obamacare's many horrible failures.
Maybe the key to NYTimes's future is the change their slogan from "All The New That's Fit To Print," to "Your Kind of Anger & Bias."
To build on that and tie together the discussion about publishing and media...
ReplyDeleteWhether your discussing news consumption on NY Times or movie/tv consumption on Hulu, do you think catering content to demographics reinforces the polarization of demographics? Will lose the diversity of grays in the range and become a black and white world, where our position or worldview is simply data to be collected and than capitalized on through tailored media?
Agreed! I spoke about very similar stuff as it relates to music in a post I made on this blog yesterday about Pandora. ( http://is714fall2010.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-is-it-so-hard-to-get-music-on.html )
ReplyDeleteThe IBM report we read for today's class had a great matrix entitled, "The conflict between traditional and new media has resulted in four business models that will likely coexist for the midterm"
Wisdom of the Crowd!!