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Cut the “crap” says editor
Prime time
Newspaper editors know about cutting. Executive editors know all about cutting. Jyllands-Posten executive editor Jørn Mikkelsen suggested the giant black felt-tip pen should be used on Danish public broadcaster DR.
“DR should not compete with private players,” Mikkelsen said to Raeson, reported mediawatch.dk (November 12). “Therein lies the whole public service obligation. We should cut all the crap away.”
Mikkelsen was critical of “much of what now fills DR1’s prime time,” though he was unable to name a specific program. (More on Denmark's media here)
Newspaper executive editors certainly know it when they see it. (JMH).
ProfMedia in Rambler Media buyout
More high-finance
ProfMedia is the major shareholder in Rambler Media. Using a high-finance tool known as reverse accelerated bookbuilding (ABB) ProfMedia is, essentially, forcing minority shareholders to sell quickly. Rambler Media is listed on the AIM London Stock Exchange. (See ProfMedia statement here)
Reverse accelerated bookbuilding is a rare, very high-finance procedure. It’s a private transaction, with the help of a bank, to quickly – hours, not days – move shares without formal publication. The idea is to avoid price pressure in volatile markets.
ProfMedia suggests it may delist ProfMedia after the reverse ABB, thus leaving shareholders who might not act quickly with, well, nothing. (JMH)
Fight back with lawsuits
Negotiations by another name
Less than a month ago, Russia’s REN TV announced a bit of restructuring. To the Russophobic it looked like darkening at the door of the old Soviet Union, independent media falling under the wheel of – well – something. (See that story here) While staff restructuring has occurred, the rest as been put to rest.
Indeed, the spark of free markets has ignited one of its most powerful tools: lawsuits. REN TV’s owner seems to have, one way or another, acquired the services of another television operators top executives. CTC Media’s former president and CEO Alexander Rodnyansky had resigned those positions in August and, being foot-loose and fancy-free, was offered a position with LMWH, the holding company that owns REN TV. One little complication was Mr. Rodnyansky still held a CTC Media board seat. And then other top people from CTC Media started to cross the street, in effect, defecting to REN TV. (More on media in Russia here)
So, CTC Media’s owners – Alfa Bank and Modern Times Group (MTG) - dragged out the biggest hammer in the free market tool kit and filed lawsuits against Mr. Rodnyansky, appropriately, in the heart of the free market, the US tax haven state of Delaware and the state of New York. CTC Media is incorporated in Delaware and it’s listed on the NASDEC exchange, trading in New York. Mr. Rodnyansky helped engineer CTC Media’s listing. CTC Media shareholders voted him off the board this week (November 9) when the lawsuits were filed.
CTC Media says Mr. Rodnyansky “been involved in the business of one of the Company’s competitors in Russia and has acted against the best interests of CTC Media.” There seems to have been a non-compete clause that keeps Mr. Rodnyansky from working for a competitor for two years. And, too, he’s holding a small fortune in stock options, which the lawsuits could expropriate. (JMH)
Quality journalism can be expensive, and for the New York Times that means spending some $4 million annually for its bureaus in Iraq and Afghanistan – a cost few other newspapers will pay in these economic times.
The figure comes from Jill Abramson, managing editor for news at The Times, who told the university newspaper The Observer, serving Notre Dame and St. Mary’s in Indiana, that quality journalism doesn’t come cheap which is why, she said, newspapers are working hard on coming up with the right business model for today’s media environment.
“I think the thread is just finding a secure business model that can sustain the work to produce quality journalism. It can be very expensive,” she said. Regretfully it seems The Times has yet to find that secure business model – it is currently asking 100 of its 1250 newsroom staff to take buyouts.
If There Is Big News Then Readers Flock To Print
How to explain that the local civilian newspaper in Killeen, near the Fort Hood Army base in Texas, saw its print circulation go up by 50 -75% daily since the tragic shootings? Besides the local newspaper, this was a story available from a huge variety of sources – network TV, countless web sites, including the local newspaper’s web site, and yet still the local print newspaper saw huge daily circulation increases.
It really means that people have not forgotten newspapers and it is to newspapers in print that they turn to for something really big that affects them personally. It rather puts the lie to the fact that the Internet is taking over from print, and it does show that print still very much has a life. Maybe it’s the usual daily content that’s at fault?
Obviously this is a huge story in that community, let alone the country, and such tragic stories we hope will be very few and far between, but the fact is a really big story does bring people back to newspapers so the question becomes what can newspapers do to convince readers it really is worthwhile to read their newspaper each and every day and not just on major events?
That’s the business model that really needs cracking.
Oops, Can Morale Be That Low?
We’ve detailed a couple of times in the Tickle the terrible goings-on at Condé Nast where near unlimited expense accounts and the like used to be the way of life for the magazine group until advertisers cut way back on their advertising and McKinsey walked through the doors to offer their suggestions. Now with some 460 staffers fired and six titles closed comes the truly devastating news that S.I. Newhouse is not going to hold the annual Christmas lunch for chief editors and publishers at the posh Four Seasons, but rather he will host an evening cocktail party instead, so you can just imagine how all of that has brought morale to a really low ebb. What to do?
No problem, just take some of those savings from the fired employees and the six titles closed and hire a really expensive crisis manager and media coach whose job description is basically to improve the company’s tarnished image in Advertising Land and bring some joy to staff. Doubt that hire was in the McKinsey recommendations.
NYT Editor Tells It Like It is On Layoff Effects
It’s always disingenuous when a newspaper goes through a major editorial restructuring (translation: the newsroom gets decimated) and then the editor publicly says basically, “not to worry, this will have no effect on the quality product.” Everyone knows that is not true and New York Times editor Bill Keller – who needs 100 buyouts among his 1250 newsroom staff – at least tells it like it is:
“The idea that you can do ‘more with less’ is, in my view, one of the four great lies. (You can Google the other three, starting with “the check is in the mail.”) What you can do with less, is less. But if you are smart and careful, you can limit the harm,” he told a newsroom meeting.
And he was equally honest on why the cuts come now, just before the Holiday season, and not next year as most thought might happen. “A simple, hard fact of life: under the Guild contract, anyone who is working here on January 1, 2010, is entitled to all of his or her paid vacation. By making the cuts before the end of the year, the company saves those costs. In practical terms, that means if we wait until next year, to get the same saving we would have to cut more jobs than the 100, probably another ten jobs.” Makes one wonder if anyone thought to ask the Guild whether, in order to delay cuts, that clause might have been suspended?
Anyway, not pleasant reading, but at least he’s being honest.
And as another bleak sign that print recovery is still very difficult, the Minneapolis Star Tribune that recently emerged from bankruptcy under new management has announced it now needs another 100 jobs to go including around 10% of the newsroom – 30 positions. It seems the bleeding is not over yet.
Digital radio… in conclusion
The financial perspective
Digital radio, as presently configured, has little prospect of becoming reality, says a consultants report to the French government. There isn’t enough money to make it happen. And, even if the money was spent, it’s increasingly apparent that radio users will have moved to newer, more interactive configurations with IP radio and smartphones. More troubling, forcing broadcasters into digital migration could financially destabilize current and new operators.
“There is still time to question the appropriateness of the proposed Digital Terrestrial Radio,” writes Marc Tessier in Les Perspectives de Financement du Project de Radio Numerique Terrestre (Financial Perspectives of the Terrestrial Digital Radio Project) (November 9). “The cost of terrestrial digital radio will have a significant impact on the entire industry, on the order of 10% to 12% of commercial radio’s revenue.” (See more on digital radio here)
“Many groups do not have, in fact, the financial capacity to deal simultaneously with the corresponding investment and those that will result from the digital revolution in all other media.”
“Real alternatives,” says Tessier, should focus on “new formats adapted to (IP and smartphones).” By the suggested 2019-2020 analogue shut-off dates most radio users, he said, will have moved to more interactive IP radio and smartphones for radio.
Marc Tessier is the former president of public broadcaster France Televisions. (JMH)
Reuters Says No To Owning Print …
Reuters, as we all should know by now, is actually Thomson Reuters, but what readers may have forgotten is that Thomson long ago was in the global newspaper business – it was Lord Thomson who once said that running a newspaper was like having a license to print money (well, actually he said it about television but folklore over the years extended it to his newspaper empire). But license or not, that didn’t stop the family selling out of nearly all of its newspaper properties with The Times and The Sunday Times of the UK, for instance, going to Rupert Murdoch back in 1981. The Thomson family still has a minority interest in Canada’s Globe & Mail, but one can’t help but admire their business acumen for being ahead of their time for getting out of print while prices were still very high, and investing that money in electronic media.
So that background gave added interest last week when Reuters media correspondent Robert MacMillan asked Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer whether Glocer had any interest in getting the company back into the print business, especially given arch-rival Bloomberg’s buy of Business Week. “Thomson did a remarkable job, far earlier than any other company I know, of seeing what was coming and transitioning their business out of print for the most part,” Glocer replied. “I don’t see any particular time or reason at this junction why we should go the other way.”
No doubt spot-on, but no doubt, also, a few twinges perhaps among some of Reuters’ print subscribers on learning how a major vendor feels about their financial viability these days.
…And Pours Cold Water On The Advertising Model
We have detailed in the Tickle for the past few weeks how Rupert Murdoch has gotten born-again when it comes to giving news away for free and now he is getting his newspapers to erect pay walls and once that is done we wants Google access to his sites severely restricted. Difficult to believe that this is the same Rupert Murdoch who in the months leading up to his buy of Dow Jones a couple of years ago hinted strongly that one of his first moves would be to make the Wall Street Journal’s subscription web site mostly free.
Someone who would apparently agree with Murdoch’s new stand is Robert Daleo, chief financial officer at Thomson Reuters, who says Reuters makes the kind of money it makes because, “We shy away from advertising-based business models. We charge for content, we charge for information and news.”
And if that sounds a bit at odds to reuters.com which is free and advertising supported the answer is simple – the people who pay for Reuters news and information get to see it well before that information hits the free Internet – and even then only a small amount of that information makes it to the Internet. So, those who pay have the opportunity to be first to make money from the news (a former Reuters News products manager used to explain to new employees in training classes that the power of news means those who got news first were usually all powerful, but those who got it second were often powerless).
In other words, you get what you pay for!
Please help Rupert Murdoch
I’m indexed, therefore I am
One key to understanding new media is getting beyond the denial phase. Some folks are stuck in the notion that media users (consumers, readers, viewers, however you want to describe them) will respond to barking. It’s a defeated notion and, well, it doesn’t work.
Mr. Murdoch – The Elder – is barking… up the wrong tree. Interviewed on Sky News Austrialia, which he owns, he aimed – again – at Google, Google News in particular. He’s ready to ‘remove’ his newspapers – and, presumably, other parts of the empire – content from Google News. That, he thinks, will surely get people to pay.
Google News, he says, is a ‘parasite,’ using his stuff to get web traffic and not paying him enough.
Unfortunately for The Elder, he’s getting it all backwards. Google News and other aggregators gather headlines, lead lines and links. People – real people – skim these aggregators for an attractive headline, something that grabs their attention. When they see it, they follow the link.
Google News is helping Mr. Murdoch’s fine stable of high quality content sources by presenting – just like a newsstand – a glimpse of what’s available. Real people like this. It’s the reason Google has two-thirds (or more, depending on the country) of all search traffic.
Mr. Murdoch says he’s ready to block Google from indexing his content. The learning – real world – has shown that unless search engines index material it (the content) ceases to exist, in that very existential sense. Surely that would be bad for the business model. (JMH)
Top stations still on top
It’s in the mix
Staying at the top of the ratings still means hard work. Stations at the top of their game don’t cede much to newcomers or competitors trying harder. In highly competitive markets strong leaders set the rules.
Slovakia’s radio market is an interesting mix. Recently released MML-TGI Median SK audience figures show listening levels over the last year have risen to 76% of persons 14 to 79 years from 71%. Survey results are from Q2 and Q3 2009, March through September. (See Slovakia radio share chart here)
Radio Expres remains the solid market leader with 22.8% share, unchanged year on year. News and information public radio channel SRo1 Radio Slovensko is solidly number 2 with 18.2% share, down slightly from the same period 2008. Third is Fun Radio; 15.9%, up from 13.5%. Jemné Melodie is ranked 4th, 8.2% share, slightly up year on year. Market rankings for the top four haven’t changed. (See Slovakia radio share chart here)
Next – 5th place – is SRo2 Radio Regina, unchanged at 6.5%. It has replaced Radio OKEY, which slipped to 6th place, falling to 5.8% share from 6.7%. Earlier this year Radio OKEY went through DJ lineup changes. Radio Viva (7th) and Radio Lumen (8th) are essentially unchanged.
SRo4 Radio_FM – the alternative music channel from public broadcasters – raised share to 2.1% from 1.5%. Market watchers say its programmers are working on music formats, looking at a more mainstream mix. (JMH)
Ad people talk about learning
“He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not…”
Advertising people seem to be speaking out, as they do so well, about digital learning. Everybody, they say, is just learning about the web and digital media. Media people should explore a bit.
"One thing you have to realize is that online, we're all learning,” said Olivier Fleurot, a top guy at Publicis, in a statement to WAN-IFRA ahead of the World Newspaper Congress next month. “It's very new.”
“You have to consider the traditional media as a sort of place where you understand what's going on, which is safe, and you must think of the web as a place where you are an explorer,” he added. (See interview extract here)
Another top ad executive, Mediaedge:cia CEO Melanie Varley, said ad clients are learning more about digital media and “experimenting.” (JMH)
Licensing uncertainty made easy
Certainly appealing
Licensing commercial broadcasters has many dimensions, particularly now as regulators must weigh wholesale changes to the broadcast landscape. License renewals are increasingly contentious, as shown by the decision in Hungary replacing two incumbent licensees with new operators. (See more on that story here) More often than not incumbent licensees are awarded renewals without considerable difficulty.
Like other national regulators Switzerland’s OFCOM has reset frequency allocations for local private broadcasting, opening a few new concessions both for radio and television. The Swiss Federal ministry in charge of communications – DETEC – advertises for and awards broadcast licenses. Earlier this year radio licenses in the Zürich concession zone were awarded resulting in a new licensee – RMC Radio Züri – gaining FM allocations and an incumbent licensee – Radio Energy – failing.
Two criteria have dominated legal frameworks for licensing: “beauty contest” or auction. Some times, as in Hungary, both are combined in some sort of points system. Many national regulators don’t recognize incumbency; licenses are awarded for a fixed term after which a new license is awarded.
For the Zürich concession DETEC used, primarily, a “beauty contest” to determine the licensee. Radio Energy’s owners were understandably upset at losing a long held franchise. But, rules are rules: this is Switzerland. The winning licensee has now asked to transfer its concession to Radio Energy, considerations not disclosed. OFCOM – the regulator – issued a statement (November 6) announcing hearings on that transfer. (See OFCOM statement here – in French)
Most – not all – national rules on licensing include prescriptions for programming sufficiency, often including news and public affairs requirements. Broadcasters must align their business plans to those requirements. When fees are involved broadcasters have yet another benchmark.
Broadcasters, certainly, want to protect not only their brands but their investments. Uncertainty about license renewals may seem unfair but, so long as broadcast spectrum is considered scarce, it can – when administered transparently – insure that public interest is served. One certain digital dividend – whenever it arrives – will be an end to the scarcity principle. (JMH)
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