MySpace redux? Three reasons News Corp’s social network for WSJ might actually work

Just two years after unloading MySpace at a $545 million loss, it looks like News Corporation is going to take another flyer on social media, with plans to add a LinkedIn-style social network on top of its news offerings in The Wall Street Journal.

Cue the MySpace jokes—WSJ is definitely dropping bedazzled profiles—but here are three reasons that this latest foray into social media may turn out better for Rupert Murdoch and company.

1. Better content isn’t going to cut it.

There is a growing sense that media outlets need to expand beyond content.

Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York, summed this up in a post last week, also featured here on Medium.

“My advice to news organizations: Move out of the content—and sponsored content—business and get into the service business,” Jarvis writes, “Where content is just one of your tools to serve the public.”

This is a realization that seems to be spreading at all levels of media. In a post at Nieman Journalism Lab, Voice of San Diego CEO Scott Lewis writes of his hyper-local news company’s excruciating struggles to learn from social media.

“If your job is to help people get educated, you can’t just display stories. Imagine a university that simply invited students into a room with huge posters and pictures and expected them to find everything they needed,” Lewis writes. “Everywhere I look, news sites remain committed to simply displaying their stories and images. At the same time, social sites keep working on how to serve users.

2. News organizations need to quit letting Twitter do the work for them.

Rather, media companies need to reinvent themselves as service providers in their own right in the vein of companies like Twitter,Google and Facebook instead of piggybacking on top of the services of these more innovative companies.

Instead, news organizations are allowing companies like Twitter to approach monopoly status when it comes to distributing content writes columnist Michael Wolff in The Guardian.

“It is therefore left to the news business itself to produce an alternative to its own obsolescence, subordination and loss of control,” Wolff writes. “Why The New York Times would be thinking about anything else, defies logic.”

3. This isn’t MySpace.

Who’s to say if social media is ripe or overripe, or still developing, but it’s undoubtedly more mature than it was in 2005. A niche approach—based around a narrow community of interest—will probably be a better fit for News Corp. than MySpace.

The new product, which will be called WSJ Profile will offer professional profiles as well as a chat function seen as competing with Bloomberg’s chat tool, Instant Bloomberg. The idea is to build an online community focused mainly on finance.

“We will be able to build a network of like-minded people around the world, into a community,” Dow Jones CEO Lex Fenwick said at an investor day in New York last week.

Now News Corp. and The Wall Street Journal will face the familiar challenge of social startups everywhere: building a service users are willing to pay for.

This post originally appeared at Upstart Business Journal.

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