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Report: How Rupert Murdoch put pressure on Facebook to change its news publishing strategy
Media titan and News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch was never very happy as he watched Facebook Inc.’s rise as the place to go to find news, according to a report Monday in Wired.
According to the report, Murdoch (pictured) saw Facebook as a threat to the traditional publishing industry, taking advertising revenue from news media that it relied on to stay afloat. He made his concerns known when he sat down with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg at an annual media finance conference held in Sun Valley, Idaho.
It seems that there Murdoch expressed his dismay at Google LLC and Facebook for taking the lion’s share of the digital ad market, with News Corp. accusing Facebook of causing mayhem in the publishing industry after making changes to its news feed algorithm.
Observers of the conversation told Wired that Murdoch challenged Zuckerberg, stating in no uncertain terms that if Facebook didn’t offer a better deal to the publishing industry, there would be consequences. Those would include lobbying against Facebook and publicly decrying the company.
Inside Facebook, it seems, executives believed News Corp. would push for a government antitrust investigation into Facebook, and also use its own newspapers and TV stations to criticize the company. News Corp., according to Wired, said that was never the case. Nonetheless, it was a threat Facebook took seriously, mainly because Zuckerberg was apparently aware of Murdoch’s “skill in the dark arts.”
According to a former executive who talked to Wired, these dark arts included a controversy in 2007 when 49 state attorneys accused Facebook of not doing enough to prevent sexual predators using the platform. The unnamed executive said some of these accounts were traced back to News Corp. lawyers or other people working for Murdoch. At the time, Murdoch owned Facebook competitor MySpace.
“We traced the creation of the Facebook accounts to IP addresses at the Apple store a block away from the MySpace offices in Santa Monica,” said the executive. “Facebook then traced interactions with those accounts to News Corp. lawyers. When it comes to Facebook, Murdoch has been playing every angle he can for a long time.”
Wired said it was Murdoch’s threat and what went on at that meeting that was partly responsible for Zuckerberg soon after stating that it was time “to hire 60 new people to work on partnerships with the news industry.”
Image: David Shankbone via Flickr
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