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Feb 11
2010
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Reporting from San Francisco and Los Angeles - In the latest blow to what was once the jewel of News Corp.'s digital empire, MySpace Chief Executive Owen Van Natta unexpectedly exited Wednesday after less than 10 months on the job.
Van Natta's departure comes as the media conglomerate struggles to reshape MySpace, a former giant in social networking that has been overtaken by Facebook and confronts new challengers such as Twitter. MySpace's rapid decline also illustrates the perils of placing big bets on digital media, where websites can quickly rise and fall by the mouse clicks of fickle users.
Now Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. hopes to convert MySpace into a portal that guides users to content such as movies, music, TV shows and games, distancing itself from its origins in which people created Web pages to share details of their lives. It remains to be seen whether the site can convince its users to think of it in a fundamentally different way.
