With James Murdoch confirmed as the heir apparent of his father’s News Corporation business there is much speculation about the future of the media empire he is destined to run.

Possibly the most significant indicator this year of the way in which News Corp will move has been the $5bn purchase of Dow Jones which includes the Wall Street Journal.

The spending of more than three times as much, over $17bn, on Reuters by the Thomson Corporation has attracted much less attention. Thomson was once a power in newspapers in the UK and north America, but has largely got out of that business. It sold The Times to Murdoch back in 1981. This year both have been getting into financial information.

The Thomson newspaper business was founded by Canadian Roy Thomson who became the first Lord Thomson of Fleet. Since his son Ken became the boss it has become a huge information business concentrating on legal, financial, scientific and healthcare information.

After 25 years as chairman, Ken Thomson said:

By wholeheartedly embracing change, I’m sure an exciting future lies ahead for everyone associated with Thomson. If my father were alive he would understand completely the need to continuously move on. The world changes, situations change, corporations change, we change personally. Everything changes, you know, that’s the one constant in the world.

How News Corp will change is unknown but it will undoubtedly change. But James Murdoch can at least look at Thomson Corporation and see that family businesses can and do prosper although Thomson is the smaller business.

Thomson has more than prospered with the grandson David Thomson now at the helm with a fortune of $22bn putting him in tenth place in the Forbes rich list. Rupert Murdoch is way down the list at 73 with $9bn to his name.

How embarrassing! It took a 13-year-old Finish boy looking at a newspaper to realise that pictures used to illustrate the story of Russian mini-subs laying claim to part of the Arctic seabed were actually from the film Titanic.

The boy, Waltteri Seretin, contacted the tabloid Ilta-Sanomat to point this out what picture desks around the world had failed to spot. Another Finish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, in English, reported:

The footage used by Reuters was supplied by the Russian television channel RTR, and apparently no claim was made in the original Russian news bulletin to suggest the pictures showed the two manned mini-subs beneath the North Pole. Indeed at the time of the original broadcast, the vessels and their crews were known to be still some hours away from their destination. However, a viewer could conceivably assume that the computer animations, the footage of ships on the surface at the North Pole, and the underwater scenes were all part of the same continuum. In its piece on the subject, two of the four Reuters pictures were from the Titanic filming.

The Finish-made Russian subs that were used to stake the territorial claim were also used in Titanic.

Anyone who speaks Russian will find it easier than I do to judge the Russian TV report. Reuters used pictures from the TV station in its report and a caption with one of the Titanic shots reads: “Russian miniature submarines are seen under water in the Arctic Ocean in this Reuters Television image taken from a television broadcast, August 2, 2007.”

Reuters has admitted that it “mistakenly identified this file footage as originating from the Arctic, and not the North Atlantic where the footage was shot”.

The Guardian on August 3 compounded the error by captioning one of the pictures as: “Mir mini-submarine under the Polar ice cap yesterday.” Reuters had only said when it was broadcast.

Yesterday Media Guardian posted a story about the Reuters admission and said that the pictures had been used by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited.

Surprise then that the story in the Guardian today is about an apparent attempt to “sex up” a news story by a Russian state TV station. There is no reference to either Reuters or the Guardian’s use of the pictures. It is worth comparing these two stories from the Guardian stable.

The Bancroft family has accepted what was inevitable for the past three months and agreed to the sale of Dow Jones, which includes the Wall Street Journal, to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

The controlling family was split from the moment the offer was made and the pressure was on those who did not want to sell from many of the non-voting shareholders. The Dow Jones statement confirming the agreement says that a Bancroft or someone nominated by them ill get a seat on the News Corporation board.

The statement says: "…the parties have agreed on the terms of an editorial agreement that provides for the establishment of a five-member, special committee with the objective of assuring the continued journalistic and editorial integrity and independence of Dow Jones’ publications and services. The initial members of the special committee will be Louis Boccardi, Thomas Bray, Jennifer Dunn, Jack Fuller and Nicholas Negroponte."

Do I remember something similar when Murdoch acquired The Times in London?

But the question now is what does this all mean for the future of financial news? The new Fox business channel and development of the WSJ looks like a challenge to Pearson and the Financial Times.

Financial news and information is certainly going to get more competitive. Thomson (the company that sold The Times to Murdoch) has acquired Reuters for $17 billion — three times more than News Corp has paid for Dow Jones. That may be where the biggest battle will be. 

It is time for newspapers to reconsider the ultimate costs and consequences of free news, Walter E Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, argues in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

He presents a cogent case for not giving away news on the web but, I fear, it is too late to put the genie back in the bottle. (via Lostremote)

Responding to another journalist, Doug Clifton, retiring editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, making the case for paid content, Howard Owens, says:

The choice isn’t between breaking with tradition and start charging for news (because it’s always been free to readers) and getting more advertising (and more for advertising). The only real choice is advertising. And the only way advertising is going to pay the bills is to get more online readers. And that isn’t going to happen if we start charging for content.

Please, let’s stop talking about how to bilk our readers and concentrate on building web sites they’ll want to make a habit. My question for Mr. Clifton is what contribution has he made to that end?

Since the Times passed from the Thomson family to Rupert Murdoch in 1981 we have tended to forget about the media empire founded by Roy Thomson, the Canadian who came to Britain and developed a media empire.

Suddenly the Thomson family business, based in Canada, is in the UK news again, making a bid approach to Reuters in the same week as Murdoch moved to buy Dow Jones.

Rupert Murdoch and Roy Thomson, both started by buying a single newspaper in their home countries, moved abroad and changed their citizenship as their businesses developed.

The Australian, Murdoch is now an American citizen and 73 on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires. Thomson took Biritsh citizenship and became Lord Thomson of Fleet. His grandson David, with his family, is number 10 in the Forbes list, worth $22bn from the control of information and media businesses.

While Thomson does not own newspapers or broadcasters in the UK now it has developed into a powerful electronic information business in the legal, financial, tax, science and healthcare areas. The family also has a 40% share in a primarily TV business which owns the Toronoto Globe and Mail.

Writing in the Guardian today, Emily Bell says: “Murdoch, now 76, does not just want to leave a business empire to the next generation of his family, he wants to leave a digital empire.”

Roy Thomson passed on a media empire which his son and grandson have turned into a digital empire. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for Murdoch.

Roy Greenslade has picked up on Telegraph editor Will Lewis’s opening address at the 6th International Newsroom Summit and thinks it implies that the Telegraph group is going to follow other mainstream publishers into battle against Google.

According to ifra, Lewis called on newspapers to welcome transformation as a friend. The traditional business model would be replaced and he warned news organisations making the digital transition must both invest in training and be alert to attempts to cannibalise their material. He continued:

Our ability to protect that content is under consistent attack from those such as Google and Yahoo, who wish to access it for free. These companies are seeking to build a business model on the back of our own investment without recognition; all media companies need to be on guard for this. Success in the digital age, as we have seen in our own company, is going to require massive investment; [we need] effective legal protection for our content in such a way that allows us to invest for the future.

It would seem to be an obvious step for publishers to follow those who have reached agreements with the secretive Google company. It is difficult to build a picture of what is happening but Lewis’s speech follows one earlier this month by Samuel Zell, new owner of the huge Tribune group in the US .

In a speech (Washington Post) at Stanford Law School he said newspapers could not economically sustain the practice of allowing their articles, photos and other content to be used free by other Internet news aggregators.

He asked the question: “If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” and provided his own answer: “Not very.”

Associated Press has an agreement with Google and a copyright case brought by Agence France-Presse was settled recently. In Belgium cases have either resulted in settlement or a finding against Google.

As Greenslade points out these are piecemeal agreements and, “Globally, publishers and news agencies need to get together to reach a sensible, comprehensive, macro agreement with Google and Yahoo.”

It will certainly be a big fight. As Business Week pointed out recently: “Google is ground zero in a battle among traditional media and tech industry leaders and startups alike for the hearts and minds of the world’s consumers—or at least their eyeballs and wallets. ”
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I have had a couple of pleasant days talking to students who have returned from work placements. They have come back more confident, feeling like real journalist, after using the reporting skills we have been encouraging them to develop since the autumn.

They are happy and more convinced than ever that they want to be journalists, largely because they have been trusted to do real work both print and online. A big “thank you” to all the people at papers, magazines and agencies who have encouraged and helped them.

In one of the tutorials I was reminded of the story Richard Burton told recently about marking one lad’s work in which he circled “retail outlets and residential units” and wrote in the margin “shops? flats?”. Then he read the cutting of the page lead the story had become and it included retail outlets and residential units.

One student was showing me an impressive collection of cuttings from two weeks at a local paper when my eye lit on a caption story. Under a picture of two people it announced the were “sharing a joke”. It was, I suggested, a rather tired old cliche and she could have found something more informative.

I should have seen the smile that was forming on her face and understood before she said: “It was written in by the sub.” That’s journalism!

Yahoo’s choice of Mr Paparazzi as the best UK entertainment website in its 2006 Finds awards suggests there is a way to make money out of “citizen journalism” or whatever you choose to call it.

The site is a spin-off from the Big Pictures business of Darryn Lyons who got a lot of free publicity from the BBC’s Pararazzi documentary series. The neat money-making touch is to offer would-be celeb snappers a “where are the hot subjects” text message service. They promise to send not more than 20 updates at 25p each in a week.

That adds up to £260 a year which might just be better business than actually flogging the pix.

The changing headline on the home page urges visitors to, “Make loads of money from your celebrity snaps.” A rotating gallery of pictures are flashed “sold for” at sums ranging from £8,000 to £200.

Pictures can be submitted direct from mobile phones or by email. There is a warning: “REMEMBER, YOU AGREE AND UNDERTAKE THAT YOU WILL NOT SUBMIT TO US ANY MEDIA THAT ABUSES OR INVADES ANOTHER PERSON’S PRIVACY, CAUSES ANNOYANCE, INCONVENIENCE OR NEEDLESS ANXIETY, IS UNLAWFUL OR WHICH GIVES RISE TO CIVIL OR CRIMINAL LIABILITY OR IS OBSCENE, OFFENSIVE, HATEFUL OR INFLAMMATORY IN ANY WAY.”

There is a sister site in the US but that does not offer the mobile phone service.

According to a report in The British Journal of Photography when Mr Paparazzi was launched in April last year, those who submit pictures that are sold can expect 50% of the earnings.

It is legal and it is encouraging many more people to be involved in journalism. So why do I find this concept distasteful? Probably because I am a po-faced grumpy old man who finds Civil Engineer more engaging than Heat.

And there is a worry that more people with camera phones harassing celebs will eventually lead to more restrictive privacy laws which will make it harder to do the stories that I think matter.

There are seven category winners in the Yahoo awards and visitors to the site are being asked to vote for “The People’s Choice” from a list which also includes the short-listed sites.

From today sending a picture to Yahoo News could lead to world wide distribution to mainstream media by Reuters. Stills and video can be submitted to You Witness pages at both Yahoo and the news agency.

Material will be uploaded to Flickr from where Yahoo will select material to be used in its news service and by Reuters for commercial syndication. According to the Reuters news story, ways of paying contributors are still being worked out.

“We are looking at the possibility of creating photo wires and archives to allow people to be compensated for their work and for the images they are able to capture,” said Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media.

While the Yahoo submission page provides tips for “citizen journalists” it does not look as if the phrase is part of the agreement. The term is avoided in the Reuters report, with an intro talking about turning “spectators into on-the-spot journalists”.

Scott Moore, head of news and information at Yahoo, says: “”There is already a lot of quality amateur journalism being created by our users. Yahoo needed a more efficient process for soliciting and publishing user- contributed photos and video.”

Ahearn says: “We have been seeking to increase the number and range of voices that can be active in our service,”This is another step in that direction.”

While Reuters points out that contributed pictures from the public have long been used, You Witness is clearly a big development. They two organisations are looking at ways to extend the project to text.

Whatever the contributors are called this is clearly an important step in the development of wider participation in the media.

Tim Adams of The Observer has spend a week in the virtual world of Second Life and finds it has “quickly acquired a powerful twist of designer corporate capitalism”.

Adams, or rather his avatar Kenny, finds land price inflation has hit Second Life when he tries to find somewhere better to live than his initial land grant. Not surprising with the population soaring from 876,572 when Kenny moved in to over a million seven days later.

He is, of course, not the first journalist in Second Life. A possible 2008 US presidential hopeful, Mark Warner, has already been interviewed by a virtual journalist in a town hall. And Reuters has set up there with a full-time staff reporter, Adam Pasick.

Kenny, finding his money running out, decides to become a journalist and heads off to Reuters’ newsroom to meet Adam. He asks if there are any jobs going for aspiring feature writers.

Adam says he will “keep Kenny posted”. Some things in Second Life are all too like real life.

The site secondlife.reuters.com was unavailable this morning but there is an interview with Adam Pasick on the Reuters Mdia File blog.