March 29, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: Bribery Inquiry at The Journal, and Taking Aim at Cable TV

A United States government inquiry into News Corporation broadened last year after the Justice Department investigated claims that Wall Street Journal employees in China bribed local officials with gifts in exchange for information, Christine Haughney writes. The Journal broke the news of the investigation on Sunday. Paula Keve, a spokeswoman for The Journal, said that the company was conducting its own investigation and had found no evidence of impropriety. The bribery accusations came out of a broader investigation into News Corporation’s practices, and Ms. Keve suggested that the claims had been made to discredit The Journal’s reporting.

Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, has built a long career out of harnessing paradigm shifts in the television world, David Carr writes, but his latest project, Aereo, is stirring up more controversy than usual. Aereo uses antenna farms to capture broadcast signals that can then be streamed on a user’s Internet device, sowing chaos, disruption and turmoil for the cable industry because it allows viewers to access shows without rebroadcasting fees. Aereo gained a big legal victory last summer when a judge declined to issue an injunction against it. An appeal was filed, and a decision is expected in coming months, but Aereo and its backers are not going to wait. The service will roll out in 22 American cities, aiming a missile at the heart of the television business.

Matthew Keys, the 26-year-old social media editor for Reuters who has been charged with helping hackers get into the Web site of The Los Angeles Times, has become the latest lightning rod in the battle between proponents of Internet freedom and the Justice Department, Amy Chozick and Charlie Savage report. Mr. Keys’s indictment says that he provided a username and password to hackers who changed a headline on The Times’s site. The headline was soon changed back, but Mr. Keys faces three charges, each of which could result in $250,000 in fines, and possible prison terms of up to 10 years. The scale of the potential punishment relative to the actual harm caused has drawn comparisons to Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide after he faced steep penalties on charges of breaking into a university system to download an archive of scholarly papers, and new calls for revised hacking laws.

Local TV news broadcasts are suffering from the “shrinking pains,” according to a report by the Pew Research Center, Brian Stelter writes. Local TV news has cut back on stories about government and crime, shortened the length of stories over all and devoted more time to segments about weather, traffic and sports reporting, which now use up 40 percent of airtime. The study did find a robust public appetite for news, particularly for digital news sources, which are used by 50 percent of Americans.

Andrés Rodríguez, publisher and founder of SpainMedia, has a lot at stake when the Spanish-language edition of the business magazine Forbes hits newsstands, Raphael Minder reports. SpainMedia is swimming against a tide that has driven many other Spanish media entrepreneurs out of business amid a recession and credit squeeze, but Mr. Rodríguez remains sanguine about the prospects of paper. Spain is the first foray by the family-controlled Forbes into Western Europe; Forbes already published 26 other licensed editions of its magazine, including several in East European countries like Poland and Romania.

The South by Southwest music festival in Austin last week is really two festivals in one, Jon Pareles writes. One is the festival of the up-and-coming, weary musician trudging from stage to stage, while the other is a giant promotional engine. This year’s SXSW was perhaps as recognizable for big names and big productions with corporate tie-ins, like Prince and Justin Timberlake, as it was for the undiscovered artists.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/the-breakfast-meeting-bribery-inquiry-at-the-journal-and-taking-aim-at-cable-tv/?partner=rss&emc=rss