Results tagged “newscorp”

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch blamed some of New York's troubles on Gov. David Paterson's blindness, which the Australian billionaire claims makes it hard for Paterson to "really know what's going on."

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. continues to back down from a NY Post editorial cartoon in February that featured a dead chimpanzee. The company announced Wednesday that it will form a "diversity community council" to meet with senior New York executives as part of a response to public outcry from civil rights organizations over the chimp cartoon. News Corp. executives met with those organizations last month to hammer out a deal, which spokesman Jack Horner said is similar to policies in place at News Corp. offices elsewhere. "The key is we're always responding and learning from our communities," he told the AP. Serving on the diversity council are expected to be representatives from the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Hispanic Federation, and other New York-area organizations.

The Post is doubling its weekday price to 50 cents. Why? It's the "result of increased production and transportation costs."

Newsday reports that Cablevision is near a deal with Tribune to buy...Newsday! The Bethpage-based company had bid $650 million, $70 million more than bids from both News Corp. and the Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a person trapped under an automobile at 9th Ave. and 55th St. in Brooklyn, a missing delivery man at De Kruif Pl. and Dreiser Loop in the Bronx, and a scaffolding incident on 7th Ave. and 25th St. in Manhattan.
• NYC's Dept. of Health wants pharmacists to be allowed to administer flu shots, citing the death toll of the disease and underutilization of vaccination supplies.
• A female pedestrian was struck and killed by a sanitation truck early this morning at 50th St. and 7th Ave. in Manhattan. A few hours later, a male pedestrian crossing the street at 23rd and 7th Ave. in Manhattan was struck and killed by a U.S. Postal truck.
• Publication synergy at News Corp. as Gawker notes downtown vendors selling The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post together for just $1.
• Plans for a City Jail in the Hunts Point area of the Bronx have been nixed.
• The rap artist known as Snoop Dogg will be performing in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on March 13 as part of a VH1 special. Greenpointers has the 420 411 on how to win tickets.
• The Town of Huntington on Long Island has banned vendors from selling 'silly string' within 1,500 feet of a parade route; but people can bring their own if they want. Firefighters complain that the novelty substance damages the paint on their vehicles.
• And "Danny Boy" is too depressing for Foley's Pub in Midtown, which is banning the song for the entire month of March.

Kids today may be spending too much time online and with their gadgets, but at least they can track down the jerks who rob them of their cellphones. Sixteen-year-old Yudelka Polanco managed to find the guy who stole her SIdekick Slide with a little detective work.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: person under a train fatality at Lafayette and Classon Aves. in Brooklyn, another person under a train at 53rd St. and 5th Ave. in Manhattan, and yet another person under a train at Lincoln Ave. and N. Railroad on Staten Island.
  
• The giant apple will be popping up every time a Mets player hits a home run at the new Citi Field ballpark.
  
• If you work at one the top law firms in the country, surrounded by female colleagues who have graduated from the same prestigious law schools you have, it's probably a terrible idea to run a web site where others can rank them by their "hotness."
  
• StreetsBlog has an interesting claymation short demonstrating the concept of raised crosswalks acting as a sort of speed bump. Drivers may not care about running down pedestrians, but no one wants to bottom out his or her car, so at least they'll slow down.
  
• NY State is opening a probe to determine whether the costs of last year's massive steam pipe explosion will be passed on to Con Ed customers. We're 99% certain of the answer already, but won't spoil the surprise.
  
• A former aide to Gov. Pataki agreed to pay a fine of $15,000 for attempting to get the state to appropriate funds to a go-nowhere plan for a women's museum in lower Manhattan.
  
• It's still mid-winter, but it's never too early to start contemplating the fate of the Red Hook ball field vendors.
  
• Shrugging off offers from Microsoft to buy the company, Yahoo! management is now entertaining a possible deal with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which already has a Internet foothold with its ownership of MySpace.
  

Now that Rupert Murdoch owns The Wall Street Journal, he wants all his toys in one toychest properties in one building, namely News Corporation's Sixth Avenue building. The Wall Street Journal newsroom has always been downtown and is currently located at the World Financial Center.

The MTA has apparently narrowed down the list of contenders to develop the West Side Rail Yards - and may even ask them to team up together. According to Crain's New York, the MTA favors the developers who have already lined up tenants. Which means the front runners are The Related Companies with News Corporation and Goldman Sachs, Durst & Vornado with Conde Nast, and Tishman-Speyer with Morgan Stanley. But front runners may need to be partners as well!

Fox News Porn Robert Greenwald, the man behind the 2004 documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism which concluded that Fox News Channel is biased to the right based on memos and footage from the network, is at it again. This time around he is using clips from the channel culled from six months of broadcasts featuring women in bikinis and pixilated nudity in a YouTube video and website that mimics a porn site called...

Controversial publisher Judith Regan dropped a 70-page lawsuit on her old bosses at Harper Collins and News Corp yesterday. The $100 million defamation suit claims she was the victim of a smear campaign in order to protect Rudy Giuliani's presidential bid (read: Rupert Murdoch's political agenda). She states they asked her to lie to federal investigators about her one-time lover and former police commish, Bernard Kerik (who at the time was working with Regan on...

Could the YES Network and the Yankees be up for sale? A report from Fortune Magazine quotes sources that say the YES Network is being shopped around - and that the Yankees could be up for sale in three or four years.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has secured the votes necessary to purchase Dow Jones & Co., Inc. which includes The Wall Street Journal itself. The win comes after a lengthy proxy battle in which the Bancrofts––the family that has acted as stewards of the company from afar for more than a century––resisted a very generous overture from Murdoch.

There must be something about the morning shift at WABC. After just four days on the job as the permanent replacement for Steve Bartelstein, Ken Rosato, overslept and was late for the 5 a.m. edition of Eyewitness News. We think it is pretty safe to assume that he just overslept, since he probably hasn’t adjusted his body clock fully to the new hours, and that he wasn’t spending the night out clubbing like his predecessor. We wonder if he brought bagels to smooth things over.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a construction accident on West 29th St. and 6th Ave. in Manhattan, a bank robbery on Atlantic St. in Brooklyn, and a shooting on Holland Ave. in the Bronx.
• The awards aren't for another two and a half weeks, but an informal poll has produced a shortlist of possible Emmy award-winning shows.
• A New Yorker who is heir to the Romanian castle of Vlad the Impaler, i.e. Count Dracula, is putting up the mountain-top fortress for sale.
• Get down on your knees and pray for approval on a $900/month 1 BR apt. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Parental Guarantors accepted, but "Reverences required."
• Some ardent recyclers are jumping the gun and skipping the step when New Yorkers read their newspapers, by just grabbing them in bulk off the sidewalk before they can be delivered.
• A doctor who has treated many sick first responders answers questions about former EPA head Christie Todd Whitman's recent Congressional testimony.
• Perhaps just snacking while waiting for The Wall St. Journal, News Corp. recently gobbled up two NYC weeklies––The Bronx Times and The Bronx Times Reporter.
• If you're going to be outside all day tomorrow, don't forget your sunscreen. Be careful if/when fooling around with fireworks. And otherwise have a happy and safe 4th of July!

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bank robbery on East 79th St. in Manhattan, another bank robbery on East 89th St. in Manhattan, and a police scooter accident at Adams and Tillary Sts. in Brooklyn.
• A parking ticket fixer was sentenced to three-to-six years in jail for arranging false-documented excuses to get people out of parking tickets.
• Robert Deniro and Al Pacino are teaming up as detectives tracking a serial killer in a new film. 50 Cent will join them as a helpful drug dealer informant character.
• Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp. isn't about to cooperate with The New York Times or its China-based correspondent.
• No NYC tryouts for the latest incarnation of American Idol.
• Curbed notes an Upper West Side townhouse that can be yours for just a K-note under a half billion dollars, courtesy of a typo.
• An SUV struck two pedestrians in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, before crashing into a storefront. The female pedestrian was pronounced dead at the scene.
• The "limited time only" lobster roll at Cosi gets a Midtown Lunch review: "There’s no way it’s healthy, and if you are not a fan of mayo you will probably hate this sandwich."

The owners of a controlling interest in Dow Jones & Company, Inc. may be considering a move to sell the company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. When the news that Rupert Murdoch was interested in acquiring The Wall Street Journal and adding all of Dow Jones to his News Corp. media empire, we wrote about the potential reluctance of the majority owners of the acquisition––the Bancroft family––and their longheld view that family ownership of a newspaper insulated it from profit-related concerns and guaranteed editorial independence. We also noted that $5 billion is a lot of money and the New York Times columnist David Carr predicted that Rupert Murdoch's past successes in wooing reluctant sellers, coupled with the disparate and disinterested ownership, would result in Murdoch's eventual triumph.

Rupert Murdoch did not become a media tycoon by turning tail at the first sign of resistance in his business dealings. New York Times media columnist David Carr examines Rupert Murdoch's past successes in wooing reluctant sellers into folding their companies into the News Corp. family with promises of benign oversight and marginal interference at best, only to run roughshod over the company and imprint it with Murdoch's style before the ink is dry on the corporate bill of sale.

The Bancroft family, who owns a controlling interest in publicly traded Dow Jones & Co., Inc., is considering an unsolicited bid from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to purchase The Wall Street Journal. Trading in Dow Jones shares was halted temporarily after their price jumped 57%, or nearly $21 during the day. Murdoch is reportedly offering $60 a share for the company, which would make the total offer worth approximately $5 billion. The New York Times reported last week that he loses approximately $70 million annually running the NY Post, which seems to confirm our suspicion he secretly swims Scrooge McDuck-style in a huge vault of cash.

Two weeks ago, Post announced that it was raising its price from 25 cents to 50 cents, with the change going into effect this week. Gawker noticed that a camera crew was filming the new price change for the paper, but NY1 found that the Daily News lowered its price to 25 cents for the week! So sneaky - we almost expect Rupert Murdoch (whose News Corp owns the Post) to visit Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman with a sock full of quarters!

It's total News Corp. synergy! Rudy Giuliani teased his presidential campaign plans for the gazillionth time to Sean Hannity on Fox News last night, but let's talk about the nutty Post cover of Giuliani and wife Judi Nathan making out. Okay, they aren't making out - it's apparently an arty photograph for the next issue of Harper's Bazaar. Even though the picture makes us want to dig out our eyes, Judi looks like a foxy femme fatale. And then we read the Post article:

"I've always liked strong, macho men, and Rudy - I'm not saying this because he's my husband - is one of the smartest people on the planet," gushed the former Judith Nathan to Harper's Bazaar in editions due out Feb. 20.

Continue reading "The Rudy and Judi Show"

HarperCollins president and CEO Jane Friedman fired editor Judith Regan late-yesterday. The dismissal, which was announced while most employees were at the company Christmas party, comes after last month's O.J. Simpson book and Fox TV interview fiasco. Regan was the driving force behind the project, in which Simpson described how he might have hypothetically killed his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. After the project came under intense criticism, Rupert Murdoch, HarperCollins is owned by his News Corporation, was forced to cancel it and apologize. 400,000 books had to be destroyed.

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is just so disgusting and exploitive, we can't believe it was ever allowed. But we're naive and such is life, and the story has been getting crazier, with the book's publisher Judith Regan issued a statement saying she published the book because she was a victim of abuse.

I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives....

Continue reading "Everyone Hates the O.J. Book, O.J. and Judith Regan"

There's nothing like a NY Post vs. NY Daily News pissing match! Yesterday, the Audit Bureau of Circulations announced the latest circulation figures, the Post now has a daily circulation of 704,011 copies (a 5% increase over last year) while the News is at 693,382 (1% increase).

Adam Moss' New York has yet another extra-large "we're an important magazine so please write about us, pretty please" cover story this week, this time on the people that they deem to be Gotham's Influentials. And we guess we're taking the bait.

slow news day yesterday, or the Times gave a very generous gift to Six Editor Richard Johnson on his wedding day today, devoting more than a fifth of its front page to the story, including a super classy photo of Johnson with Sharon Stone (Who doesn't like free publicity, right?). Not to mention the Gray Lady's brief history of the the gossip sheet and its lingo ("the labels it pins on the people it covers can be zingers, as the actor Alec Baldwin and the actress Cheryl Tiegs learned when Page Six dubbed him a 'bloviator' and her a 'superannuated supermodel.'") and a look at Ron Burkle the California billionaire who opened this Pandora's box.

is about to get interesting again. Well, interesting if you find the ever dwindling newspaper circulation numbers interesting. Which for whatever reason, we actually kinda do.

) and even got a quote from a show spokeswoman saying that animated Dolph would not be cut from the show (the show and Post are both owned by News Corp., though). Anyway, some teachers at PS 123 believe that the girls are making up these claims, but they don't have proof. While there are probably weirdos out there who might take advantage of their students, Gothamist wonders if there's a Salem witch trial-like hysteria about these cases (think about day care abuse allegations during the 1980s - like Capturing the Friedmans) among parents.