OPEN

MySpace / Murdoch followers better get themselves over to Wired to read the in depth interview and profile there. There’s some good meat here and London’s own Umair Haque gets a mention with BGSL described as a "trendy London media consulting shop".

It opens with this social media-as-revolution salvo:

“To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.” And he’s smiling.

Wired doesn’t get carried away with itself though, it sounds a note of caution about the love affair with MySpace:

For all the monster numbers, though, MySpace is a flabby giant boxing well beneath its weight. Chernin and Levinsohn boast that monthly revenue, estimated to have been in the single-digit millions at the time of the acquisition, is doubling every quarter. But even at that rate, the newly bulked-up sales team will be lucky to pull in $200 million this year, less than 5 percent of Yahoo’s take. MySpace clearly isn’t the Net’s next great cash machine – not yet, anyway.

What Murdoch is betting on is not MySpace as a sure thing. The sure thing he is betting on is massive, twice in a millenium levels of disruption in the media, business and society. He’s bet $600m not on MySpace’s success, but on the idea that it, or a future version of it will be in the middle of it all and that he and his corporation’sbest minds will be able to stick close enough and understand it well enough to adapt and survive:

“You want to learn from MySpace,” he muses. “Can you democratize newspapers, for instance? What does it mean for how we do sports or politics? I don’t know – no one does. I just know we’ll figure it out.”

Wired finishes off with these views from Mr Murdoch on a range of subjects:

BROADCASTING VS. NARROWCASTING
Mass media will go on. Look at American Idol, with 35 million viewers and advertisers rushing to get on. Niches have a future, too. Look at our Speed Channel, which is mostly Nascar stuff. The middle ground – that’s where you don’t want to get caught.

THE FUTURE OF TELEVISION
The majority of viewing will continue to be in a living room on a TV screen – one that is far bigger and better than what most people have today. Sure, everyone’s going to have a small screen, too. It’s a convenience. But I don’t see people sitting on the beach and watching a movie on their telephone.

THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS
Can newspapers make money online? Sure. Can they make enough to replace what’s going out? At the moment, with the Internet so competitive, so new, and so cheap, the answer is no. But don’t look at it as a newspaper – look at it as a journalistic enterprise. If you’ve got authority and trust, if you can make the news interesting, you’ll survive.

GOOGLE
I like those guys, but there’s a bit of arrogance. They could have bought MySpace three months before we did for half the price. They thought, “It’s nothing special. We can do that.”

BANDWIDTH
What you get today is not real broadband, especially if you’re talking about hi-def television. Satellites are fast enough, but they don’t give you a two-way connection. That’s why we’re looking very seriously at building out a WiMax network in the US.

CONTENT VS. DISTRIBUTION
Distribution was nearly king – you couldn’t get a cable channel going in this country without John Malone. But when real broadband arrives, owning distribution will be less and less important.

Tags: Murdoch, News Corp, MySpace, Wired, media, newspapers