Rupert Murdoch opens up to Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff as background for an upcoming biography. The article provides great insight to the man and, by proxy, the companies he runs.

But his odd lack of seductiveness or felicitousness—contributing to his aura of villainy—became after a while alluring in itself. There’s no spin, because he really can’t explain himself. Rather, what you see is what you get. He’s transparent. The nature of the beast is entirely evident.

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There is at News Corp. never a discussion of Murdoch’s exit. It is referred to only as “in 30 or 40 years,” when he is gone—which may have started as an amusing locution, but is now a practiced and even official one. His existential predicament is, in other words, his own.

The Guardian also has a good piece on the Battle Royale that is brewing between the new WSJ and the New York Times, and why it may no longer matter.

Murdoch fell into conversation with Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Journal’s arch-rival, the New York Times. By buying the Journal, Murdoch had parked his tanks directly on the NYT’s lawn. What, people wondered, would the two make of each other?

Brilliant, brilliant article. Go. Read. Now.

Some highlights:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first—hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”

At least they’re doing something.

The cost of participating in social media seems like small change given the cognitive surplus from turning the TV off.

If you didn’t listen before… Go. Read.

Social media is the latest buzz phrase to describe the trend in normal people creating content. Something previously the realm of professional journalists.

In a recent article, Nina Simon investigates how much time is involved per week for different types of participation:

I’m considered fairly involved as I participate in a number of services, including this blog, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and monitor a forum here or there. Some of my friends are participating with Twitter alone, as Twitter dropped the barrier of entry to virtually nil.

This raised a question of how journalists are allocated time for social media. The trend in traditional media is to attempt to integrate social media into the news process. This includes using user generated content in the print product and on the web. But it also involves journalists becoming members of the community.

The obvious implication is that more time is required. However, with newsrooms shrinking and with print and online operations attempting to converge, available time is reduced.

Until time is allocated to social media, the voice of the traditional media will continue to broadcast rather than participate in the conversation.