Murdoch’s Last Big Gamble: The California Post

Murdoch's California Post. Last swing from a fading kingmaker. According to Vanity Fair, Rupert Murdoch's latest passion project is the California Post, a West coast spinoff of the New York Post, aimed at Hollywood tech and California politics. It's being sold as bold innovation. But look at Murdoch's actual startup record. One of his big things was the daily. I remember that Gary Vaynerchuk was a part of it. The iPad only news newspaper he once hyped as the future of news spent tens and tens of millions of dollars on it. Shut it down after one year in 2012, after losing about $30 million a year and attracting only 100,000 paying subscribers. Then there was MySpace. Now, he didn't create MySpace, but he did buy it. News Corp. Bought it for $580 million and ultimately sold it for roughly 30, $35 million. A spectacular wipeout in social media. Murdoch's real successes are mostly old brands he bought and he squeezed. The New York. Excuse me, the Wall Street Journal, Times of London, and the New York Post. Not exactly fresh digital winners. Meanwhile, this was surprising to me until I learned about it a few weeks ago. The New York Times now has more digital subscribers in California than than the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisco Chronicle, effectively making its Southern California dominant paper from 3,000 miles away. Okay, so what's the real message here? Rupert Murdoch wants to be a big shot in Hollywood, so he wants to take the New York Post and turn it into the California Post. Why would you do that? Every single person in California who has a cell phone can already read the New York Post. They don't need some piece of paper with the word California stapled onto it. Let's dig a little deeper here. Now, Rupert Murdoch is a survivor. He's been around a long time. He's about 199 years old. I'm exaggerating only slightly. You can't ever completely write off Rupert Murdoch, in part because he's so rich he's willing to lose money. He's lost money on the New York Post for most of the time he's owned it. But it's a great political weapon he can use to beat up his opponents and to curry favor with those he likes. And he may decide he wants a newspaper in California and be perfectly happy losing 10, $20 million a year. Now, I don't know if he's thinking of it as purely a digital format or they're actually going to print real paper. Because, look, I was someone who loved newspaper. I read newspapers my whole life, and at some Point, I don't know if it was 14 years ago or nine and a half years ago. The concept of picking up a paper and touching it and looking at something that's now 12, sometimes 20 hours old, it just seemed like an anachronistic activity. I can't imagine doing it. When I go to hotels now and they sometimes have a stack of the New York Post or a stack of the Wall Street Journal, I rarely even pick it up. And it's free. Sometimes I will pick it up sort of just for a sense of nostalgia. I'm looking at a story and I think, wow, didn't I hear about that like a week ago? And then I realized, well, no, it was just 14 hours ago. It seems like a week ago. So I don't know why you need actual paper if it's a digital format. The New York Post is already a well known brand. Anyone who wants the idea of a, of a New York Post mentality but for California could just go to the New York Post and click a button that says, here's what's going on in California and get it. The New York Times to its credit, realizes that there are a lot of people in Southern California who simply want good journalism. And in the era of the Internet, when every newspaper comes to your fingertips, people are going to just opt for high quality. And that's why the New York Times is doing so well. Now, believe me, it's not partisanship to say the New York Times is higher quality than the New York Post. The New York Post is considered a bit of a sleazy, cheesy rag. Is it a fun read? Sure. Do I go there occasionally? Sure. And this is not to knock all Rupert Murdoch media properties. The Wall Street Journal by all accounts still has great journalism on its front page, its new page, its editorial page, that's another issue. But when it comes to serious journalists doing serious work, Wall Street Journal is excellent. And it does have a lot of subscribers in Southern California as well. So I'm not quite getting this, but I'm not the media mogul that Rupert Murdoch is. Let me be clear about that. He is. Yeah. This is the guy that the TV show succession was based on. He has a larger than life character and has been his whole life. And you know, a lot of people think he's a self made man. No. His father, daddy gave him a newspaper or two. He started off in a very nice position in life, but to his credit, he didn't just sit back on his laurels. He didn't just say, I've got it made. Let me hang out and drink martinis at the country club. He took tiny little empire his father gave him, and he created a vast, vast empire that really has tentacles into the political world of every major country in the world. And he's clearly dominated journalism in his native Australia, in Great Britain, and in the United States. So you can never just count him out completely. But for the life of me, I don't know why he thinks the California Post would be a good allocation of capital at this point, but we'll see if it comes out. I mean, there's always going to be a good initial splash, and I'm sure he'll have some. Some scoops. But whether it's needed in a new media outlet or just something he can do from the Post or the Journal, that's another.