Economy

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp, has strongly backed Rebekah Brooks, the executive at the centre of a phone-hacking scandal, even as he denounced the “deplorable and unacceptable” behaviour at the News of the World.

Over the July 4 holiday in the U.S., the Fox News Twitter account was attacked by hackers who left six tweets saying that President Obama had been shot to death in Iowa. Apple was also attacked over the weekend with a tweet directing readers to a list of user names and encrypted passwords from the Apple Business Intelligence web site. Citibank, Sony and even the CIA have also suffered data breaches in recent months, drawing renewed attention to cyber security and accelerating policy debate on how to protect critical information from hackers.

Guest blogger Kait Vinson writes:

There has been a lot of buzz recently about the future of marketing and social media.  The emergence of social media networks and social media managers has been in astounding numbers.  I did a little research as to why this was happening at such as rapid rate and this is what I found.

Capital is fuel for changing the world in the social capital market. Do-gooders often look upon capitalism with horror as a wild force of nature.  But capital is not untamable: it is a tool that we created, and that can be put back under our control. To paraphrase the proverb: the past decade has shown us that those who seek money without meaning are dangerous, but those who seek meaning without capital are limited in their ability to scale.

An NYT media column by David Carr reviews former L.A. Times editor James O’Shea's new book “The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers.”

The book focuses largely on the deal that lead to Sam Zell's disastrous takeover of the Tribune Company -- which owned the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times among many others and is now in bankruptcy -- in 2007.  

Whoa. Everyone’s least favorite troubled baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, just filed for bankruptcy protection, as Deal Journal colleague Matt Futterman is reporting.

CLICK HERE to read the Dodgers bankruptcy court filing.

By analyzing ancient pottery, Patrick McGovern is resurrecting the libations that fueled civilization

It’s just after dawn at the Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where the ambition for the morning is to resurrect an Egyptian ale whose recipe dates back several hundred centuries.

I recently spent a few days at the Harvard Business School with a group of Deans and Professors from around the globe. The event was a symposium that HBS has run for several years, as a way of reflecting on and improving the field of leadership at a macro level.

The focus of this year's event was "values." The sticky issue of ethics, of the responsibility business leaders have to "do the right thing."

Reinventing the Global Food System

The global food system is under scrutiny for environmental impacts including habitat degradation, greenhouse gas emissions and freshwater use. Half the world’s farmers go hungry, while around a billion people are clinically obese. Demand for food is growing and yields are falling. Radical and rapid systemic change is required.

During tough economic times, the academic challenges of college can pale next to the difficulty of finding a job afterwards. Aiming to help make its graduates’ lives easier in this respect, the Rhode Island School of Design has begun equipping them with a kit of business-oriented tools upon graduation.