2005-2014

We can't say for certain which of his many tribulations was on Rupert Murdoch's mind when he convened his lieutenants for a September offsite in Carmel, Calif. It may have been the son who got away–Lachlan, who had abruptly quit his post as News Corp.'s deputy chief operating officer and moved to Australia, leaving family feud, which saw Murdoch's second wife fiercely guarding her children's...

After its disastrous marriage with Time Warner, America Online (AOL) became the ugly duckling of the online world. Five years down the line, the circle has come full again, and the belle now has a string of suitors lining up. The big three of the new media – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – are falling head over heels in trying to woo AOL. NET PROFITEER: Google chairman Eric Schmidt When Time Warner...

The New York Times won three Online Journalism Awards and darkhorse newbie NewWest grabbed two at the Online News Association's (ONA) sixth annual convention Saturday in New York. NYTimes.com won the General Excellence award, the Outstanding Use of Multiple Media (for its Class Matters series, and Breaking News for Asia's Deadly Waves, the website's coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami. NYTimes...

The United States (US) may have imposed sanctions on Burma (Myanmar), but ironically it is a US company which has indirectly helped the junta in that country to censor the Internet. The OpenNetInitiative (ONI) says a product from Calfornia-based Fortinet Technologies has made it to Burma, and is used to filter sites. In its report, OpenNet said Fortinet's FortiGuard system has made its way to...

Internet connections are very rare in Burma, partly for reasons of poverty but mostly because of the military regime’s harsh crackdown on freedom of expression. As in Cuba and North Korea, the Internet frightens the authorities, who keep it out of the hands of their subjects. So it is growing very slowly, with the opening of only a handful of cybercafés and assignment of a few thousand e-mail...

Fruit cups and tea were served, and then came the matinee feature: a documentary about the Arabic broadcaster Al Jazeera, full of American bomb bursts and bloodied and bandaged Iraqi children. At an international trade show for television programming on the French Riviera recently, Al Jazeera presented the documentary, "Control Room," to promote an English-language news channel it plans to...

LOS ANGELES – It's no wonder Google's profit shot up sevenfold this quarter: Prices are soaring for search ads – those simple text ads that appear next to Internet search results. Advertisers pay each time someone clicks on an ad. Search ads used to be available for a nickel or dime per click. Now they're costing more than $1, some even $40 or $50. Google and rival Internet giant Yahoo dominate...

IN many ways, Larry Page and Sergey Brin seem an unlikely pair to lead an advertising revolution. As Stanford graduate students sketching out the idea that became Google, the two software engineers sniffed in an academic paper that "advertising-funded search engines will inherently be biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers." They softened that line a bit by the time...

The incendiary call by the Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Israel to be "wiped off the map" provoked outrage in the Israeli press, which contended that this invited comparisons with the Holocaust. Iran's newspapers, on the other hand, by and large, rejected the international condemnation of Ahmadinejad's comments about Israel. MARCH PAST: Islamic protesters carry a poster of the of late...

When Time Warner, the world's largest media conglomerate, announced a $100 billion merger with AOL five years ago, it was hailed as the perfect marriage between new media and old. Time's then chief executive, Jerry Levin, believed the combined group would carve out a niche in cyberspace that would make it a powerful player as media content moved online. The synergies between America's largest...