Rupert Murdoch in his office in London
(4 of 4)
Murdoch sensed the power of the Web not so much as a user but as a businessman who watched the bottom line. In late 2004, he says, he "began to feel the erosion of advertising in print and even the stalling-out of ads on television. So I said, Better pay attention to this." He set up Fox Interactive Media in Los Angeles and started looking for something to buy. Peter Chernin and Ross Levinsohn, then the head of FIM, brought him a games company called IGN, a sports site called Scout and MySpace. He snatched MySpace from archrival Redstone, which made his victory all the sweeter. (Redstone called Murdoch's victory a "humiliation" and later fired Viacom CEO Tom Freston.) Murdoch was surprised by what happened next. "It was an education for me, the way it took off. It was the cool young site. Now the average age is climbing."
MySpace's much smaller archrival, Facebook, is surging: what started as a narrower college site is broadening and accelerating, inviting everyone to join and offering new software tools so people can, for instance, start microbusinesses on their Facebook page. But as MySpace showed signs of reaching saturation, Murdoch began very preliminary, exploratory talks about trading the site for 25% or more of Yahoo! "Terry Semel was enthusiastic about it," he says of the then Yahoo! CEO. "We were looking to see if it was a good idea. I wasn't sure." Now Semel is gone, and Murdoch needs to see what Yahoo! will become under its new boss, co-founder Jerry Yang.
As younger media executives fall by the wayside (Semel is 64), Murdoch keeps fighting on all media fronts. "A media company is basically anything that communicates with people--news, ideas, entertainment, advertising--and allows them to communicate with each other," he says. "But the Internet is teaching people every day to expect everything for free. So it has to be advertising supported."
Murdoch is both the latest and the last of the outsize media moguls like Henry Luce, William Randolph Hearst and William Paley, men who loved their properties and used them to make fortunes and influence politics and society. But unlike many of his contemporaries, Murdoch has consistently been able to see around the corner. Love him or hate him, he moves into the 21st century as a new kind of media titan. Much as he'd like a legacy, he knows that worrying about it isn't good for business in the ever-morphing media environment. The Bancrofts relished their role as guardian of the Journal's independence, but they did not pay close attention to the business at hand. Murdoch is way too rich to care about money and way too involved to let the Journal's garden go unweeded. But he's still going to be Rupert, a man who buys ink by the barrel and isn't afraid to apply it. *