Dan Brown's Freemason friends, Rupert Murdoch's mobile money-grab

GOOD DAY FOR: Secretive book clubs, as Freemasons in Australia have not only embraced Dan Brown’s new book, “The Lost Symbol”—which features Freemasons instead of the Catholic group Opus Dei, as in “The Da Vinci Code”—they’re featuring it as the first novel in their new book club. Publisher Random House is printing 6.5 million English-language copies of “The Lost Symbol” in its largest first printing ever. (Reuters in Yahoo! News)

BAD DAY FOR: Small news, after News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch said The Wall Street Journal would start charging non-subscribers $2 a week to read the newspaper on mobile devices such as BlackBerrys. The Journal is one of the few papers to successfully charge readers for its content. Murdoch also said News Corp. is considering fees for its partly owned Hulu video site. (Reuters)

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