Metaversal Mining

I’m really not sure what to make of The Times and its online version, TimesOnline.
Its a NewsCorp company, so like FoxNews, The Wall Street Journal or Truckin’ Life, is under the umbrella of the Murdoch family who have in the past, allegedly, exercised a high degree of editorial control. I’ll admit, I’ve actually never read Truckin’ Life, so it may be the dyed-in-the-wool liberal exception to the rule, but I suspect not.

What confuses me about The Times is the occasional radical deviation from the party line. I first noticed it in The Sunday Times, then in the ‘environment’ section of the Times Online version. The occasional random story will be completely out of place. Without ploughing through every piece of copy over the last year I can’t cite those, but here’s one that I can.

A week or two ago James Murdoch launched an attack on the UK government’s funding of the BBC and described the BBC as ‘the Addams Family of world media’. This came a few weeks after the Chairman of the Board, Mr Murdoch Snr, pronounced the end of free news on the internet. The Murdoch’s have apparently decided that the BBC is now killing journalism, as opposed to what its been doing for the last 87 years under its remit of ‘inform, educate & entertain’. So far, so what ?

Well the pay off is this. NewsCorp’s business model for new media journalism is flawed. All The Family members in the world can bleat all they want about other business models, it doesn’t change the fact that the Corp as a whole has to be concerned about declining revenue and it seems most unwilling to embrace change, and incidentally the pluralism that J. Murdoch said that the BBC was stifling in his lecture in Edinburgh. One world view is not pluralism James. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from a state-sponsored media outlet or a privately owned one, ownership and funding makes no difference to plurality (if that’s a word), its the control exercised over editorial that limits pluralism.

And then the editor reminds us what The Times used to do with a story about the newspaper being on the cutting edge of technology and open information flows – but 40 years ago.

Times have changed. Or should that be The Times has changed ?