Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Hard Work and It's Almost "Nobody but Rupert"

Trying to finish the work as quickly as I can by working like hell. This morning, I started before 8:30 am and continued until 7:30 pm.

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It may be inevitable that one needs to look at others to discover and rediscover his own identity. Identity as someone’s son, as a man, simply as a person. It is my ideal to learn my identity time and again by placing myself in an international environment because, in such a situation, I should be able to have more people of a variety of background, therefore finding my identity more vividly than in mono-ethnic environments. And this my ideal is finally to be realized.

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From the Wall Street Journal: The agreement on editorial independence that Dow Jones & Co. and prospective acquirer News Corp. hammered out last week after laborious negotiations was designed to preserve a measure of journalistic autonomy for The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones publications by shielding top editors from corporate meddling.

But the document's power relies less on specific language than on how those editors -- and the new owner -- exercise influence. The agreement isn't as detailed as, say, a rule book for a sports event: Much of the wording is vague, leaving operations to mutual agreement between the two parties. And the ability to enforce the agreement legally is less crucial than the ability of reporters and editors to win attention for their grievances.

One key issue about editorial independence is that News Corp. is a giant media and entertainment company. Most newspapers don't need to write much about the business interests of their smallish parents, but Mr. Murdoch has his hand in everything from global politics to making movies and TV shows.

As part of the agreement, News Corp. has promised to adopt a set of journalistic principles that are virtually identical to those in Dow Jones's Code of Conduct. The principles say that in all of News Corp.'s publications, "analyses represent the publication's best independent judgment rather than their preferences or those of their owner, sources, advertisers or information providers." The principles also adopt the Journal's editorial page mantra -- free people and free markets -- at all of News Corp.'s publications. "The result of this deal might not be to corrupt The Wall Street Journal," quips Daniel Okrent, a former top editor at Time Inc. who became the first ombudsman of the New York Times. "It could be that it reforms all the News Corp. publications."

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