{"id":1788,"date":"2009-11-11T12:32:51","date_gmt":"2009-11-11T16:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=1788"},"modified":"2009-11-11T12:32:51","modified_gmt":"2009-11-11T16:32:51","slug":"murdochs-brilliant-evil-master-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/11\/11\/murdochs-brilliant-evil-master-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Murdoch&#8217;s brilliant, evil master plan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/underwire\/2009\/11\/alt-text-clever-murdoch-turns-news-into-hip-underground-club\/\" target=\"_blank\">Lore Sjoberg<\/a> has cracked the secret plan that Rupert Murdoch appears to be following:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The audiences for traditional newspapers are getting older, more crotchety and increasingly dead. Most people don\u2019t 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\u2019s willing to spend money just to prove that they have money?<\/p>\n<p>Murdoch, that crazy mad genius, realizes that the only way to attract this lucrative demographic is to establish street cred. He\u2019s going underground, reinventing news as an exclusive club that you can\u2019t find just by entering a search term.<\/p>\n<p>Presumably, Murdoch\u2019s <em>New York Post<\/em>, for example, will be renamed to something hip and enigmatic, like <em>Velocity<\/em> or <em>Unk<\/em>. The new URL won\u2019t be publicized. To get it, you\u2019ll 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\u2019t let you in unless you\u2019re a mover, a shaker, a player, a spender or showing a lot of cleavage.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019m not sure how that will work, actually, but if anyone can force people to buy $10 beers while browsing the web, it\u2019s my man Rupert. People will pretend to be reading stories about police standoffs and Knicks games, but they\u2019ll actually be looking around to see who else made it in. And all that affectation and posing is like unto money in Murdoch\u2019s pocket.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lore Sjoberg has cracked the secret plan that Rupert Murdoch appears to be following: The audiences for traditional newspapers are getting older, more crotchety and increasingly dead. Most people don\u2019t 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\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,57,28],"tags":[156,58,213],"class_list":["post-1788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-humour","category-media","tag-fail","tag-internet","tag-newspapers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-sQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1788"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1789,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1788\/revisions\/1789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}