News Corp

After a pho-hacking stir in Britain, News Corp is facing an investigation by US authorities for possible violation of the bribery laws. Employees of News of the World tabloid were accused of hacking into personal voicemail and paying bribes.

News Corp could face scrutiny in the United States if any of the allegations is found true and violate the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

That law makes it a crime for any company with U.S. ties to bribe foreign officials to obtain or retain business.

MySpace has been sold by News Corp for $35 million to an advertising company Specific Media along with the singer Justin Timberlake. It is just a fraction of what News Corp paid for the social networking giant in 2005. At that time MySpace was purchased for $580 million.

Specific Media which deals with digital advertising did not unveil financial details of the deal. The company said that Timberlake would take an ownership stake and serve a "major role" in developing a strategy for Myspace.

According to some sources News Corp was talking to Vevo.com about giving control of MySpace to the music label-owned video site, but the likeliness of a deal remains uncertain.

The unnamed sources say that talking to Vevo.com, News Corp planned to exchange Myspace for a stake in a new venture. Earlier, representatives for News Corp contacted Vevo to see if they would be interested in purchasing all of Myspace but they received a negative response.

Since then, a joint venture has been proposed which could see News Corp spin off its stake into some sort of joint venture.

Social networking company MySpace is laying off almost half of its workforce in a move to restructure the business before it can be sold. The restructuring affects 47% of the staff or 500 employees and comes some weeks after speculations appeared in the media.

According to the source close to News Corp the media giant is not involved in sales talks. Still, mounting losses of MySpace should contribute to the decision to sell it to private equity companies or Yahoo-likes.

According to the statistics provided by comScore the Times UK website saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. News Corp reported that since it put its newspapers other than the Wall Street Journal, behind a paywall: The Times of London and the Sunday Times, it has signed up 105,000 paying subscribers, plus another 100,000 who were already subscribers to the print newspaper.

Latest rumors on the Internet say that several companies are considering the purchase of Yahoo again. As the speculations surfaced the stocks of Yahoo began soaring. The speculations say that no certain offering has yet been made but possible buyers include AOL with venture capital firms Blackstone Group and Silver Lake Partners and News Corp.

Apple Inc is negotiating a deal with News Corp, Walt Disney and other media corporations to rent TV shows to viewers for 99 cents through iTunes, according to the sources with the knowledge of the matter. The talks are aimed at allowing viewers to rent network programming off Apple's iTunes store for 48 hours.

Meantime, the sources also report that a number of companies including NBC and CBS do not seem to be too happy about the offering because they believe it would undercut revenue they already earn through iTunes.

News Corp is holding negotiations with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo over signing a new search advertising agreement for its social networking website MySpace. At the moment MySpace has a deal with Google which is expiring next month. The company made a $900 million four year deal in 2006, now it is looking to sign the kind of agreement but for "significantly less money," according to the Wall Street Journal.

Recently Times Online, a publication from News International, a subsidiary of News Corp, blocked the search engine/news aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from using its content which obviously includes linking. It is considered by many observers as the first step of the war planned by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Meantime, the Internet community does not stay aloof of such measures and NewsNow founder Struan Bartlett started a campaign called Right2Link, the premise of which is as follows:

 Song streaming site imeem was at last purchased by MySpace on Tuesday for less than $1 million. According to MySpace Chief Executive Owen Van Natta in a blog posting the deal will enable MySpace Music venture to integrate imeem's offerings over time.

The acquisition comes as MySpace has launched its own online music service that lacks a mobile phone application that streams songs on Apple's iPhones and devices using Google's Android operating system, such as the new Droid phone.

 News publishers were offered a solution to their problem of charging online readers for their content. In order to retain its main news providers Google launched a First Click Free program that limits the readers to up to 5 free visits to a publisher website.

 Google seems to be seriously challenged by Microsoft who approached News Corp as well as other news companies to offer them shift their sites to Bing searching engine. According to the sources with the knowledge of the matter Microsoft is in talks with News Corp over the agreement that would involve News Corp getting paid to take its news websites off Google Inc.

The source reports that News Corp, which owns such papers as the Wall Street Journal and the Sun, started the discussions, which were at an early stage.