News Corp plans to cut costs by sharing editorial resource

NEW YORK - News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has unveiled the creation of a unit designed to help share editorial content across its newspapers as part of a move to cut costs.

Murdoch has moved John Moody executive vice-president of news editorial at Fox News to oversee the department. Moody will be reporting directly to Murdoch.

Moody's role will involve working with editors across the corporation's media properties to improve news gathering efficiencies and identify areas of cost savings.

Moody's will also be examining News Corp's reliance on global news services, such as Reuters and Associated Press.

Speaking about the creation of the new unit, Murdoch said: "The creation of a new unit designed to share valuable news content and harness the power of News Corporation's vast editorial resources is vital to our success as a global entity."

News Corp was unable to provide any examples as to how the new structure would work. However there has been speculation that exclusive content could be shared between titles in different markets.

News Corp owns newspapers including The Times and The Sun, the Wall Street Journal, The Australian and The Daily Telegraph in Sydney -- as well as Fox News and Sky News, MySpace online, HarperCollins and Sky Italia.

News Corp, in a statement, said that it was too early to provide examples of how the new unit might work.

However, if News Corp is attempting to limit the use of stories from news agencies it could start running stories from The Wall Street Journal in The Times.

Reuters cited an example of how Kara Swisher, who runs the Boomtown Blog on Dow Jones's technology news website, broke the news that Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer were talking about an advertising partnership.

This exclusive also ran as a top story on The Wall Street Journal's website.

This story was later replaced by a WSJ article in effect duplicating Swisher's article and highlighting the problem of content duplication that is common at many media firms where different reporters rewrite the same story.

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