Intellectual Property Law

Bewkes Disses Blogosphere: Not "Journalism"

By Cynthia Brumfield

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes took a swipe at the reliability of blogs today by dissing a report that appeared on Silicon Valley Insider as not "journalism." Speaking at a Sanford Bernstein conference (webcast here), Bewkes denied the truth of the SAI report, which cited a source close to AOL as saying that Time Warner won't proceed with its previously announced separation of AOL's access business.

When asked about this report, Bewkes said "That's fun. That wasn't a news report. That was a blog." Even worse, Bewkes added that "we?re a journalism company?and we always try to position it as to whether we know or any basis or source for it."

Bewkes said he heard about this report while in the shower (which begs the question about how, precisely, Bewkes found out: was the SAI item reported by some audio service he could hear on a waterproof speaker? was he talking on the phone to his lieutenants while soaping up? was there there someone in there with him reading off the Internet?) and briefly wondered if it were true. "I was taking a shower and gee I thought what if it?s true."

SAI's Peter Kafka (not Henry Blodget, the author of the original item) took note of this insult. Writing about the Bernstein conference, Kafka said "Jeff took time to pee on our earlier report."

In another admission, Bewkes said that AOL probably overpaid for social networking service Bebo, for which it paid $850 million. "Which is not to say that this will work out to be a good idea. We may have overpaid as many critics have said."

Full post as published by IP Democracy on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).