Wall Street Journal is also diving into the iPad frenzy with a not-so-hard to reject offer for iPad owners. A monthly subscription to the Wall Street Journal delivered to your iPad for a whooping $17.89 monthly fee.

So what do you get after paying that amount? In addition to the freely available WSJ content such as top articles and market data, the paid subscription model to WSJ will also give you access to subscriber-only content including Business and Markets, access to 7-day downloadable archive, personalization and saving features.

Sounds good, right?  Indeed, it is if you’re daily news fare rely heavily on the Wall Street Journal. But as Engadget noted, it may not seem to be cheaper offer though. This is because of the fact that it would only cost you $11.65 to subscribe to both print and online versions of WSJ.

Still, if you don’t mind spending that much for the rightful access to Wall Street Journal Premium content delivered to your brand new iPad, the WSJ iPad subscription seems like a good offer.  I mean, can you just imagine the envy of your colleagues as you read the WSJ from your iPad while waiting for the board meeting to start? You’re earning more than enough anyway so that extra cost shouldn’t matter.

So, what are you waiting for, subscribe to the Wall Street Journal via the iPad now. Click this link to get you started.

For a supposed technology company, Microsoft sure fails to compete technologically when it comes to search. Instead of actually building a better search engine, they’re bribing newspapers in a feeble attempt to hurt a rival search engine. More →

The future of media driven by search. Unfortunately, old folks grew up in a time when “search” meant walking down to the local newsstand and browsing for dead trees to buy. To them, finding stuff on Google is “stealing“. That’s why News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch plans to block Google from indexing his media conglomerate’s newspaper content, in an effort to put it all behind a paywall. More →

The leaders of the Associated Press and News Corp said Friday it is time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay.

The leaders of these two companies have made an alliance as ad profits from online media have been eerily going down since the beginning of the financial recession about 2 years ago.

Many media companies argue that sites like Google have reaped a fortune from their online content without just compensation from the corporations producing the content.

To me it’s hilarious you would take a potshot at Google when they send you thousands of visitors a minute to your subsidiaries. But hey what do I know. I would never slap the hand that feeds me if I was a multibillion dollar corporation like News Corp, or the Associated Press.

This just seems like posturing or a twisted negotiating tactic.

Weekend Update:
Newsweek has an interesting solution to Fox and the AP’s problem.

News Corporation, which is just one of a number of publishers considering charging for online news coverage, should take note of a recent UK survey which revealed just five per cent of respondents would pay to access walled content.

Unsurprisingly, three-quarters said that if their favourite online news source decided to charge for access, they’d simply find another free site instead, while eight per cent said they’d just look at the service’s free headlines and forego access to complete content. More →

After rejecting Microsoft’s “undervalued” proposal, Yahoo is like a damsel in distress desperately hoping for its prince charming named News Corp. to rescue her from a looming hostile takeover.

According to a news article, the ever mysterious “person familiar with the situation” has confirmed that confidential details of this partnership are still in the works.

Then again, this might just be a contrived effort to force Microsoft to up the ante. As of today, the insensitive software giant stands by its “full and fair” bid. Or perhaps Yahoo is asking for a ridiculous bid simply because it doesn’t to sell to Microsoft. Take your pick.

Though News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch once mentioned that they are not interested in acquiring Yahoo, he remains open about a possible collaboration between this company and his social network site MySpace.com.

Another major acquisition is brewing! TechCrunch has an unconfirmed rumor that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is eyeing the fast growing professional networking site LinkedIn.

Here are some points why News Corp is interested with LinkedIn:

1. LinkedIn’s strong association with mature professionals complements News Corp’s premier advertising properties aimed at the same market such as Wall Street Journal, The Times, and Sunday Times. Hopefully, this could offset the declining advertising in the newspapers.
2. LinkedIn’s strong base of 16 million users worldwide, robust growth, and consistent profitablility.
3. Mature professionals with dry sense of humor do not appreciate its “wackiness” of Facebook. In short, Facebook is more expensive

If the acquisition happens, will News Corp rename it to MyLinkedIn? Just wondering…

NBC / News Corp acquires Beijing-based video startup Mojiti to use their platform for its much awaited $1 billion video project, Hulu.

With a mission to “allow you to tell your own story in any online video”, Mojiti, interestingly, do not host or distribute video content themselves. Instead, they take existing video content online (for example, from YouTube or Google); integrate their technology to these videos in the form of interactive features such as speech bubbles, arrows, shapes and texts, etc; allowing users to personalize the videos to their liking. With this quiet acquisition of Mojiti, one can’t help but assume that this is the format Hulu’s going to take as they launch the site that was said to trample YouTube.

There is no confirmations yet, as of this writing, how much the deal was. However, there were rumors that the acquisition amounted to around $10 million.

Via TechCrunch

The Associated Press (AP) reported that the board of Dow Jones & Co. approved Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion buyout offer. The deal will expand Murdoch’s media and entertainment empire. Dow Jones & Co. is the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, a must read for business.

The AP report also reported that Thomas Walker, who worked on the global copy desk at The Wall Street Journal, said that he was quitting rather than see the paper sold to Murdoch. “I don’t want to work for the man,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has reached a tentative agreement for the purchase of Dow Jones & Co. for $5 billion. The deal will be presented for approval by the board tonight. [Full story]