In light of recent scandals, it’s hard not to see this [Amplify announcement] as a bit of image rehabilitation, but we’ll do our best to take it at face value. —Engadget

Engadget has the announcement about Amplify all wrong, I think. The press releases about the new News Corp division Amplify (and Wireless Generation) are less about general press on educational technology and much more about the pending split in News Corp between its money-making ventures and its toxic assets (i.e., newspapers). On the favored side will be Fox and other entertainment assets. On the “get away from me” side will be the various newspapers in the Murdoch empire, HarperCollins, and Amplify/Wireless Gen. The announcement about Amplify Monday was the meat in a bad-news sandwich, a day after the resignation of Murdoch from the newspaper boards, a day before news broke about pending arrests in the phone-hacking scandal in England, and the same day it became clear Peter Rice would be the rising star of the Fox et al. side of the News Corp split. (Okay, so maybe the Rice news was the meat in the sandwich and the Amplify press release was the mustard or hot-house tomato.)

The business problem with the News Corp split is that the publication side is weighed down by unprofitable newspapers. So something has to be profitable, seem to be profitable, or at least seen to be possibly profitable. That could be HarperCollins or maybe some of the offerings of Dow Jones (i.e., the larger entity containing the Wall Street Journal). Or this ed-tech thing.

Except that the Amplify announcement looks premature. Reading through the New York Times reporting, that of Gotham Schools, or elsewhere, I don’t see much there there apart from the existing markets for Wireless Gen. The company already claims a suite of assessments on top of data management (which includes the ARIS package, oft-derided in New York City), and while it claims some stuff on curriculum, the core part of what exists is an integrated system of “analytics,” which includes data collection, data warehousing, and presentation for decision-making. The problem for Wireless Generation is that there are other companies out there in both the older parts of the business (Blackboard, which bought grade-information module Edline in late 2011) and in the headline-grabbing “we’ll get your students learning on tablets using Our Special Content” side (Amazon, which provides avenue to many more publishers than Wireless Gen can). Blackboard has its own problems, but it’s significantly ahead of the flashier players targeting K-12, even if that’s through swallowing smaller companies.

Because of the problems I see ahead for Amplify, I’m left scratching my head on the timing. For all his faults, Joel Klein is no idiot, so why announce a new division with little but promises? Update: Audrey Watters has much more.