Markets

The Rupert Murdoch Story, in Less than 600 Words

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: March 1, 2010 / 1:57 PM EST / MoneyWatch

During your next vacation, you could spend an afternoon reading New York Magazine's voluminous piece on News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, a piece so long that by the end you almost know which leg goes first when the 78-year-old executive puts on his pants. Or you could refer to the following Cliff Notes on the 9,500- word story, presented, as a public service, by BNET Media. Here's what you need to know:

1) Murdoch's plan to launch an 8- to 16-page New York metro section in The Wall Street Journal isn't just an assault on The New York Times metro section but an assault on the newspaper as a whole. He's even spending $15 million on what is being called "Project Amsterdam." (For some detailed insight on the ad war between the Times and the Journal, read Nat Ives' piece in Advertising Age.)

2) The New York Times set up a committee to evaluate the threat of the Journal's metro section, only to decide that, per managing editor Jill Abramson, that its own metro section is "unmatched." There are concerns that, as the entire Dow Jones unit represents only three percent of News Corp. revenue, Murdoch can afford to slash ad rates in order to challenge the Times.

3) Before he started fighting with Google, Murdoch admired it, and had even been friends with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. According to one ex-employee: ""We would be sitting in meetings, and he'd go on and on about the Google guys, and how they had dry cleaning and massages, and what a great company and culture it was." (A perk Murdoch does offer: free coffee to Journal employees at an annual cost of $100,000, which is part of the new $80 million Journal newsroom.)

4) Murdoch mapped out his war against Google like a political campaign, calling it Project Alesia, "named after Julius Caesar's victorious siege of the Gallic forces in 52 B.C" The battle is being fought on several fronts:

James Murdoch and digital chief Jon Miller are building a cable-style service which would bundle content from a number of publishers for a price;
Miller continues to negotiate with Google about Google paying News Corp. to index its content. If the companies can't reach agreement, Murdoch will sue (for something, the story doesn't say what).
Miller is simultaneously negotiating with Microsoft's Bing to have News Corp. content appear exclusively on that search engine.

5) James Murdoch, the as-of-this-writing heir apparent, thought the Journal would be a nice "retirement" project for Murdoch, and thinks that "Fox (News)'s brand of politics is a problem that ... needs to be managed." You may have noticed that it's hard to come up with a consistent thread here, and that's certainly the case. What does come through, however, is that Rupert Murdoch still relishes a fight, and it almost doesn't matter who the opponent is. Nor does Murdoch have plans of going anywhere. Says his mother at the end of the story: "I'm sure he'll never retire. I don't intend to retire either, and I'm 101."