News Corp.’s Peter Chernin: The Entire D5 Interview With Kara Swisher
by Kara Swisher
Posted on August 28, 2007 at 12:49 AM PT
Nothing like getting the opportunity to verbally harass the new boss right before he turns out to be the new boss!
Here’s the interview I did with News Corp. No. 2, President and COO Peter Chernin. Of course, we discuss–well, I question the media giant’s ethics and Chernin defends them–the then-pending bid to buy Dow Jones (owner of this Web site) by his boss, Rupert Murdoch. He does say News Corp. does not want to “Page Six-ify” the Journal. Phew!
But we also talk about the company’s acquisition of MySpace, its pending joint venture with NBC Universal to create an online video service and the intersection of Hollywood and technology.
By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.
That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews and also demos we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players and products.
The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.
And we’ve demoed stuff like the Treo when it first came out, as well as digital toilets, Wi-Fi phones and much more.
We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews and demos six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged D5 and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.
Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.
Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview or demo from the conference.
So here’s Chernin:
