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The Daily

Rupert Murdoch: still struggling to use Twitter (and his own app)

The fledging tweeter, 80, is still only getting the hang of microblogging. He posts a link from his own app – which doesn’t work.

YOU’LL PROBABLY BE AWARE by now that News Corporation chief executive Rupert Murdoch has joined Twitter in the last few days – and that his wife, Wendi Deng, hasn’t (even despite a ‘verified’ logo appearing on her account).

Naturally, anyone in their 80s getting to grips with new technology can be expected to bear a few teething issues more than most.

When you’re an international supermagnate – and you’re trying to share a story from one of your own titles – it’s not quite so easy to forgive you.

This afternoon Murdoch has been reading The Daily – his much-vaunted iPad-only newspaper – and evidently about stories concerning his evidently favoured Republican candidate for the presidency, Rick Santorum.

Seeking to share the story on Twitter – as the app is built to do – he posted a link, prefaced with the automatic addendum ‘Check out this great article’.

But while the link does work – and points to The Daily’s story about Santorum coming within 8 votes of poll frontrunner Mitt Romney – the caption refers to a different article altogether.

Quoth the tweet:

The article, it seems, refers to a sports story from October – in which the St Louis Cardinals defeated the Texas Rangers to win baseball’s World Series.

While the error is unlikely to be Murdoch’s own fault, it’s not a brilliant PR move for the media mogul to somehow botch his first attempt at sharing some of his own content.

The Daily has notoriously struggled to pick up large numbers of readers; in September, it reported having 120,000 weekly users – a figure which was largely padded out with readers pursuing an initial two-week free trial.

Update: ‘Wendi Deng’ Twitter account revealed as fake

“Vacations great time for thinking”: Rupert Murdoch joins Twitter

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