Let me be the first, and possibly only, person to say it: I love Rupert Murdoch like a mother. I'm not sure whether I mean that I love him as if I were his mother, or I love him as if he were my mother, but in either case the love is as heartfelt as it is creepy.
The reason for this love is that the man has vision. He recently stated in an interview with Sky News Australia that his News Corp. properties will soon be blocking Google entirely. This is so brilliant I can barely touch-type, my fingers tremble so.
We all know that traditional media outlets are encountering lots of problems, having to compete with blogs, vlogs, podcasts, Twitter, dubious forwarded e-mails about candidates for public office getting drunk and punching the flag, YouTube videos of '80s-era Star Wars toy commercials and whatever the hell Cory Doctorow's doing this week.
The audiences for traditional newspapers are getting older, more crotchety and increasingly dead. Most people don't want their news to come with such hassles as a cover price, ads or dissenting opinions. How to bring in a younger, hipper audience that's willing to spend money just to prove that they have money?
Murdoch, that crazy mad genius, realizes that the only way to attract this lucrative demographic is to establish street cred. He's going underground, reinventing news as an exclusive club that you can't find just by entering a search term.
Presumably, Murdoch's New York Post, for example, will be renamed to something hip and enigmatic, like Velocity or Unk. The new URL won't be publicized. To get it, you'll have to know somebody, or know somebody who knows somebody, or know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, or show a lot of cleavage. There will be a long line outside the website, just like an exclusive club or World of Warcraft right after an expansion release. A moderator will check out your online presence and won't let you in unless you're a mover, a shaker, a player, a spender or showing a lot of cleavage.
Once inside, the website will be dark, noisy and disorienting, just like an exclusive club or a MySpace page. There will be a two-drink minimum. I'm not sure how that will work, actually, but if anyone can force people to buy $10 beers while browsing the web, it's my man Rupert. People will pretend to be reading stories about police standoffs and Knicks games, but they'll actually be looking around to see who else made it in. And all that affectation and posing is like unto money in Murdoch's pocket.
Sure, he'll lose market share, but he'll make it up by catering to a clientele made up entirely of money-spending, hard-partying young people, plus a single undercover detective who infiltrates the shocking world of underground websites to track down a killer by having conversations in front of pole dancers. I assume.
This is clearly the way of the future. I'd love to say that Murdoch invented it, but he's just taking it to its logical conclusion. The real inventor is — brass sting! — Google itself. An exclusive online space that everyone wants to get into, but nobody really knows why except that they see other people getting in? Sounds like Google Wave to me.
- - -
Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjoberg eventually overcame these handicaps to show a lot of cleavage.
See Also:
