News Corp creates new unit to share content, resources

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has announced the creation of a new unit to share content and resources across his vast media empire.

John Moody, executive vice president at the FOX News television channel, will head the operation, News Corp said in a statement.

"In this new role, Moody will collaborate with news chiefs across all News Corporation properties to improve news gathering efficiencies and identify areas of cost savings," the statement said.

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Meanwhile, a Yankee is starting a printed NEWSpaper using online blogs...  The mind googles...

see toon at top.

From Bob Ellis at unleashed

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I call it the New Wowserism.

By its rules, some people are ruined forever by their minor breaches of etiquette while others bomb Gaza, upend the world economy, order the machete-killings of hundreds of thousands and manufacture cigarettes unpunished.

The first group commit no war crimes, or crimes, or misdemeanours, or mostly even sins, and yet are smashed in their careers and dispirited forever and their families shamed. Why is it happening? And why is it happening now?

Why, in 2007 and 2008, has wowserism returned?

One should ask here Lenin's sharp question: Who whom? Who benefits? Who is making hay out of this persecution of the ill-kempt and grumpy celebrity? And one will come then, like Lenin, to an unsurprising answer: the high lords of greed in Wall Street and Newscorp, that's who.

For the rulers of global capitalism have lately come to fear the jig is up. They have been publicly proved to be not just environmentally toxic, and likely to end with their smoke and avarice the planet Earth, but economically toxic as well, and likely to bankrupt not just Iceland but Wall Street, and they need to take the heat off themselves, and beam it somewhere else.

And they've turned up an adequate alternative target and scapegoat, the bad table manners of certain visible celebrities. Sure, we've ruined two hundred million lives, they say, and caused half a million suicides, but Jacqui Smith's husband watches porn.

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read more at Unleashed

Helen Razer at Unleashed

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Lest you had not heard, a journal once reviled by my mother for its awful lardy recipes and now reviled by most for its awful lardy invasions of privacy, has truly overstepped the mark. This week, Woman's Day published questionable pictures of Rein-Rudd.

Actually, amend that "questionable" to an unforgivable. No one deserves to have their picture taken in the gym. If anyone dared to snap me as I lunge, sweat and stretch, I'd throw a big, litigious Nautilus Machine at them.

Even Malcolm Turnbull, a man to whom questions of ethics rarely occur, concurs that the ACP publication is out of order. We are all agreed that these pictures of a fit, diminished Rein have no place in the public realm.

Chirpy Woman's Day editor Fiona Connolly, however, is defending publication of the covertly taken photographs. Used to visually narrate Rein's Amazing Weight Loss story, the images, Connolly insists, "set a positive example to all of us". It's OK, says the editor, because Rein looks just great.

At this interval, I'd like to spare you the expected. Viz, we reside in a culture where the measure of a woman is indivisible from her looks. I cannot spare you the expected.

I have no problem whatsoever with looking at pictures of lissom women. Or, indeed, at pictures of beautiful men. I do have a problem, however, when those pictures are set within a moral context. Even if it is to set a positive example to us all.

It's all very well and good if Kerri-Anne or Lara Bingle wish to volitionally share their weight loss secrets with the world. It is not, in my view, permissible to hijack the fitness regimen of the Prime Minister's wife.

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read more at Unleashed