News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), the big media conglomerate that competes with Disney (NYSE: DIS), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), CBS (NYSE: CBS), Viacom (NYSE: VIA) and General Electric's (NYSE: GE) NBC Universal, reported not-so-good earnings for the fiscal second quarter on Thursday after the bell.

Of course, not many companies are reporting good earnings these days, are they? News Corp. lost $2.45 per share due to impairment charges for goodwill and intangible assets. Throwing that aside, the company earned 12 cents per share. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, that came up well short of estimates of 19 cents per share. Net sales dropped 8%.

Continue reading News Corp.'s Q2 earnings get low ratings

News Corp.'s Q2 earnings get low ratings originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Okay, here is an absolutely brilliant idea. And no, I'm not being sarcastic. According to this blurb at The Hollywood Reporter, News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) is interested in doing a sequel to the classic 1987 film Wall Street.

Some of you younger investors out there might not be familiar with the movie, but perhaps you're familiar with the now-famous quote "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." It was uttered by the loathsome Gordon Gekko, whose alliterative name almost oozes corporate scandal and villainy. That character was played by Michael Douglas. Wall Street was directed by Oliver Stone and it portrayed the evil side of capitalism, replete with insider trading and share-price manipulation. It's considered a classic, iconic fictional snapshot of the current zeitgeist at the time: the only thing that mattered was upward mobility and accumulation of as much net worth as conceivable without consideration for the little guy. It came out around the time of the '87 market crash, so it had that going for it.

This is why News Corp. needs to fast-track the project. According to this source from May of last year, a sequel to Wall Street was already in the works. Obviously, the fact that The Hollywood Reporter mentioned the project this week means that execs at Fox feel that the timing for a sequel is approaching an optimal point. In fact, they really should try to get it out into the marketplace as quickly as they can, and hopefully with Michael Douglas reprising his role as Gekko (Douglas' return is not set in stone at this point). Not only could the movie gross a decent amount at the box office, but think of the synergy potential here.

News Corp. is fighting a battle with General Electric's (NYSE: GE) CNBC as we speak. The Fox Business Channel wants to take away as many viewers as possible from the stock-market network. Problem is, CNBC is a very powerful brand in its arena. Of course, that doesn't deter the pit bulls at Fox. If you had to describe the media company with only one word, that word would, by necessity, be a hyphenate: ultra-competitive. In fact, Fox Business Channel recently slammed BloggingStocks' own Jim Cramer in a recent promo (see a piece on this subject by Zac Bissonnette).

Continue reading Would a sequel to "Wall Street" help Fox Business Channel?

Would a sequel to "Wall Street" help Fox Business Channel? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Obama vs. O'Reilly should be a ratings blockbuster for Fox originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

In a confrontation between bombast and street cred, Fox mouth Bill O'Reilly managed to rip the Pepsi (NYSE:PEP) bottle from rapper Ludacris's live, warm fingers. In August of 2002, O'Reilly, upset with the musician's street language and what he perceived as glorification of crime and misogyny, called for a boycott of Pepsi. At the time, Ludacris was a featured representative of Pepsi, no doubt part of the companies attempt to reach out to the 18-34 demographic.

After the company dumped Ludacris in response to the boycott, Pepsi immediately stepped back into a pile of controversy by signing the rock and brain-damage icon Ozzy Osbourne, he of bat-head biting-off fame. (Nothing goes better with bat than an ice-cold Pepsi.)

O'Reilly's diatribe helped call attention to the brutality of Lucacris's lyrics, not atypical for the genre but fear-inspiring to the Fox nation. For example:

"Hollow laid hollow sprayed I'm the hollow man
I get to my hollow point wit my hollow plan
Hollow bullets I pull it I'm about to live in vain
And then I drill em refill em make sure they feel the pain"

(BTW- Is this a shout-out to T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men?)

While the controversy cost Ludacris his Pepsi deal, O'Reilly was to swallow his tongue for a second time two years later when the rapper was signed by Anheuser-Busch (NYSE:BUD).

I don't see Bill O'Reilly pulling in big endorsement contracts these days. So who's your daddy now, Bill?

Read the entire series

Spokesperson fiasco #10: Ludacris for Pepsi originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 20 Jul 2008 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The feud between Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has morphed from a sometimes amusing spat between cable news hosts to a clash of corporate titans.

As Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post notes, O'Reilly has attacked General Electric Co. (NWS: GE) Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt for being "responsible" for the deaths of soldiers in Iraq because the MSNBC parent does a tiny amount of business with Iran which, apparently, is coming to an end. O'Reilly even sent a crew from "The O'Reilly Factor" to GE's annual meeting in Erie, Penn., to buttonhole Immelt and GE shareholders about the issue. One fund manager even called Immelt a "Benedict Arnold CEO" on the Fox program.

On his show, Olbermann often awards O'Reilly the title of "Worst Person in the World," a bit of shtick that's getting tiresome. Everything that O'Reilly says and does irritates Olbermann. Then again, so does Britney Spears.

But that's not the whole story. Fox News chief Roger Ailes warned NBC Universal head Jeff Zucker that "if Olbermann didn't stop such attacks against Fox, he would unleash O'Reilly against NBC and would use the New York Post as well," according to the Washington Post. This underscores the arguments of liberals and progressives that Fox and The Post are the winged monkeys of their corporate masters at News Corp. (NYSE: NWS). Fox, of course, denies Ailes threatened NBC.

The back and forth between the two media conglomerates shows that nerves are starting to get frayed and that life -- sigh -- is a lot like high school.

Continue reading Media World: Bill O'Reilly's nasty war against General Electric

Media World: Bill O'Reilly's nasty war against General Electric originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 19 May 2008 14:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), a media conglomerate that competes with Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), Disney (NYSE: DIS), Viacom (NYSE: VIA), CBS (NYSE: CBS) and Sony (NYSE: SNE), reported third-quarter earnings Wednesday, and they were pretty interesting, to say the least.

I mean, revenues increased 16% to about $8.8 billion, but earnings per share went up like crazy, coming in at $0.91 per diluted share versus $0.27 per diluted share a year ago -- that's more than three times as much as the comparable period's results! As you can imagine, there's a little catch. The stellar appreciation is due to a gain in a transaction with Liberty Media. According to a piece at CNBC, News Corp. earned $0.30 per share after adjustments, which was a penny shy of Wall Street's expectations.

So, News Corp. kind of had a so-so quarter. I think the top-line growth was pretty good even if bottom-line performance wasn't as nice as that special gain made it seem on the surface. Plus, News Corp. is working with some cool assets. Cable programming continues to score thanks to the strength of Fox News Channel, an important platform for the conglomerate which contains valuable brand name pundits such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. News Corp. leverages the channel to drive growth in its other cable properties; in fact, Fox Business Channel is trying to make a name for itself and it definitely benefits from synergy with Fox News.

Overall, the cable programming segment delivered a 17% increase in operating income while Fox News saw its operating profit go up by 11%. The television segment increased its profits by over 50%, and the Fox network just about doubled its bottom-line base. Other parts of News Corp. didn't do as well, such as filmed entertainment -- this segment's profit took a dive to the tune of 36%. However, don't blame one of my favorite shows, Family Guy -- DVD sales of this hot property was a positive driver.

Those are the highlights that stuck out at me. As for the stock, I don't see a compelling reason to buy at the moment. News Corp. should do well over time, but it wasn't like these were blowout numbers or anything. I'll wait and see how the company is doing when it reports its fiscal-year stats.

Disclosure: I own shares in Disney; positions can change at any time.

News Corp.'s adjusted earnings miss the mark originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 08 May 2008 08:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.