The Tickle File is ftm's daily column of media news, complimenting the feature articles on major media issues. Tickle File items point out media happenings, from the oh-so serious to the not-so serious, that should not escape notice...in a shorter, more informal format.

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Notice How Newspapers And Web Classified Job Listing Sites Are Now Rushing Together To Form Partnerships. Better Late Than Never, But What About LiveDeal That Started It All In The First Place?

Cosmo Gets Nailed At The Newsstand But It’s Still Number One

Cosmopolitan remains the number one US magazine sold at newsstands, but those sales dropped by 123,046 last year, tumbling below the 2 million mark to 1.945 million.

The biggest newsstand gainer was the $1.99 Life and Style Weekly that put on a whopping 25.25% in newsstand sales to 744,453. Second came Teen People which rose 16.28% to 454,525, but apparently that wasn’t good enough for Time Inc that banished the magazine just to Internet beginning with its September, 2006 issue.

And while Weight Watchers is dedicated to losses it must be more than pleased at the newsstand – up 15.28% to 411,591.

Newspapers Beat Broadcasters In Using Video Ads On Their Web Sites

A new report says that US newspapers have moved far more aggressively than broadcasters in incorporating video ads as part of their online advertising mix. According to Borrell Associates, newspapers are already making some $81 million in local online video advertising compared to just $32 million by local TV.

And the report says that although video advertising today is only about 5% of the total online spend, by 2012 it will have jumped to around 35% of that spend.

Why the video growth? Peter Conti, Borrell senior vice president, explained the advertising would come from local businesses “who can’t afford TV advertising. It’s that kind of video and that kind of marketing that they’ve never been able to do or afford before, and it’s affordable on a much more effective and efficient medium.”

US Newspaper Sites Set Record For Unique Visitors

Each quarter US newspapers reach record numbers of Internet visitors. If only the advertising rates were the same as for print!

According to a study by Nielsen/NetRatings for The Newspaper Association of America, more than 36% of all active web users in Q4 visited online newspaper sites, with newspaper online readership averaging 57.6 million visitors.

For the year online newspaper readership jumped 22% compared to 2005.

“Newspaper Web sites continue to shatter records each quarter,” gushed John Kimball, NAA’s chief marketing officer.

Kanal D Romania Starts Broadcasts

Dogan Media Group (DMG) – Turkey’s major media company – launches this weekend it’s first major expansion in television outside Turkey. And Kanal D Romania has already gained noteriety for acquiring TV rights to Romanian football.

DMG chose Romania, according to company statements, because of the large population (22 million), “stable economy and growing television market. “

DMG’s partner in the Romanian television venture is Swiss media giant Ringier.

Kanal D won Romanian football rights when public broadcaster TVR couldn’t come up with the cash on time, leading to, er, considerable media coverage in Romania.

RTVE Appoints New Commercial Director

Spanish public television Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE) announced the appointment of Ángel de Vicente Boyero as commercial director, replacing the retiring Juan Jesús Buhigas.

Buhigas has been a mainstay at RTVE, serving in many positions since 1978. He is a vice-president of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

de Vincente joins RTVE from Publiespaña where he has been Marketing Director.

RTVE President Luis Fernandez cited Buhigas as “a great defender of public television and radio, an outstanding example of the hundreds of RTVE professionals who have given the best of themselves to make RTVE the premiere audio-visual group in Spain.”

US Business Magazines Having A Hard Time At The Newsstand

Fortune dove 16.5% Leading to a 1.3% Drop In Total Circulation

Fortune fared worse than any other business magazine, down 16.5% at the newsstand with BusinessWeek down 7.7%, and Money down 3.1%. The newsstand  drop caused total circulation losses for all three titles.

The Economist, on the other hand, had a splendid year, increasing its newsstand sales by 11.2%. The Economist’s total circulation of 639, 206 was up some 12% and it is slowly  catching up with Fortune, which ended the year with a total circulation of 869,665, a total drop of 1.3%. There’ll be some real crowing if the British weekly eventually overtakes the American .

By The End Of 2007 1.3 Billion Internet Users Globally Will Be Online

Morgan Stanley estimates that the global Internet population will grow by about 150 million users in 2007 to reach  1.343 billion users by the end of the year.

The fastest growing region is Asia-Pacific, particularly China, with India in hot pursuit as it struggles to improve its telecommunications infrastructure.

“China is quickly emerging as the largest Internet market in the world as its middle class grows and home Internet access becomes widespread,” explained Ben Macklin a senior analyst at eMarketer.

How Do You Surpass MySpace?

How does a company improve upon one giant success such as MySpace on the Internet? Rupert Murdoch believes It’s MySpace on mobile.

He was particularly pleased  with the deal completed with Cingular Mobile that will offer a mobile version of MySpace for an additional $3 monthly. Users will be able to upload pictures taken on their handsets and answer MySpace emails. Launched just in December it already has 200,000 subscribers.

“The telephone is the next great entertainment platform that is coming,” he said at a New York media conference last week. “All the telephone companies are looking for content to sell because they see the price of voice is going down and down, and we think there’s a huge opportunity for us,” he said.

Not to burst his bubble, but a new European study indicates mobile TV may not be the crowd-pleaser that telco vendors are looking for. M:Metrics says that former mobile TV users in Europe out number current users by some 20%. Why so much unhappiness with Mobile TV? Some 45% complained about price, while nearly 25% blamed service quality.

MEP Takes Shot at Broadcast Spectrum

Make no mistake, the frequency spectrum is a war zone. Anyone hanging around the ITU in the last five years knows that broadcast allocations are under threat from every possible wire-less operator. Spectrum is valuable. Governments like the idea of selling it to the highest bidder. Now it’s moved to the European Commission.

Here’s UK MEP Fiona Hall’s statement yesterday (February 14, 2007):

"Creating a more flexible approach to radio spectrum management is essential. European innovation in wireless technology will be held back unless more efficient use is made of spectrum. At the heart of this debate is the Lisbon agenda of growth and jobs. It's important not to get this political commitment mixed up with the technical issue of how such services ought to be delivered. It be a big mistake to ring-fence the frequencies currently used by broadcasting services by insisting on their exclusion from any new approach to spectrum management."

Broadcasters attitude of entitlement to frequency spectrum is sticking their heads in the sand.

Global HDTV Reception Forecast To Triple By 2011

To hear the pundits tell it, first there was black and white television, then there was color, and now there is high definition. And the global number of households using HDTV will triple in the next five years, according to Informa Telecoms and Media.

The report said that at the end of 2006  there are about 1.2 billion homes with television and 48 million of those were with HDTV. By 2011 the number of HDTV households is forecast to rise to 151 million.

At present 58% of HDTV households are in the US, followed by 20% in Japan.

Helping HDTV sales are that prices are coming down. Hindering sales is that there is not enough HDTV being broadcast to make the purchase of the new set that worthwhile.

But more and more broadcasters are adding HDTV programs. In the US, NBC which is already broadcasting its morning news shows in high definition, is said to be adding the Nightly News in HDTV in March.

Still Think the $580 Million Murdoch Paid For MySpace Was Too Much?

When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought MySpace in July 2005, the main reaction was that it was good for News Corp to get into the Web in a big way, but, goodness gracious, he paid too much.

Murdoch was busy telling a conference last week that he figures MySpace today is worth around $6 billion. It is bringing in $25 million in advertising every month, with 20% of the revenue coming from Europe and Australia.

“Next year we’ll be kicking in with search revenue from Google so together with IGN we’ll be getting close to a billion dollars of revenue,” he said.

He admitted the growth had gone much faster than he had thought it would. “We have had to put the brakes on. Physically just handling this traffic we’re going to need a lot more hardware, a lot more servers.”

US May Have The Most Internet Users, But S. Korea Has The Deepest Penetration

The US leads the world with some 181.9 million Internet users, but that gives it just 63.6% penetration, third in the world behind South Korea (70.5%) and Japan (68.4%), according to eMarketer.

In terms of people, China is second with 133.5 million users, but that’s just a 10.2% penetration. When it eventually gets into the 60 percentile areas it will mean more than 750,000 million Chinese online.

In Europe, Germany has the most online users with  39.4 million, representing a 47.8% penetration with the UK second  in numbers, 35.1 million, but leading the penetration with 57.9%. France is third with 28.7 million users, a 47.1% penetration.

Is Nothing Sacred Any More -- Restaurant Owner Sues Over Newspaper Bad Review, And Wins £25,000

Restaurant owner Ciaran Convery took umbrage when, in 2000, the restaurant critic for the Irish News gave Goodfellas,  his new Belfast restaurant, just one star out of five, criticizing the food, drink, staff, and the cigarette smoke.

So he sued for libel and six years later a jury of seven took just 90 minutes to unanimously find the review defamatory. The owner was awarded £25,000 plus court costs, which could be considerable.

Convery said after the verdict, “I think justice has been done. Goodfellas is a successful business and today’s verdict has proved to me, my staff, and my customers that we did the right thing by launching the libel action.”

The British media restaurant critics are beating their chests with their knives and forks as they fear an end to critical restaurant reviews. Guardian newspaper critic Matthew Norman said, “To say there is an issue of free speech here is so blazingly obvious it almost goes without saying.”  An Irish News spokesman said, “ We have instructed our lawyers to launch an immediate appeal.”

What Is A Sunday Newspaper To Do When It Has A Scoop Midweek That Will Be Stale By The Time Print Hits The Street?

The UK’s Observer had a problem. It was Thursday and it had an exclusive about how a case of bird flu might have made its way to the UK from Hungary. But if it held the story until Sunday it might be too late – word could get out from elsewhere. What to do?

The story got published Thursday evening on the Guardian and Observer’s web site. No big deal, you may say, things like that happen all the time. Not at The Observer, this was the first time it had broken an exclusive on its web site.

It’s one thing to talk about how a newspaper needs to be multi-platform, but obviously actually putting change into practice was harder than one might think. The Observer had run stories before on its web site, but this was an exclusive and a new milestone for a newspaper that can track its origins back to 1794.

The Latest From Rupert Murdoch About The Newspaper Business

Rupert Murdoch spoke on many subjects last week at a New York Media conference including  how he sees the newspaper business. “Newspapers are very vulnerable,” he said. “We have got to be neutral about what platform we sell them on. The old lifestyle of families reading a newspaper over breakfast is gone.”

But the good news is that even though his Fox studio and Fox cable business, and the Internet properties are doing far better than newspapers, he said he has no intention of getting out of the newspaper business.

Indeed he is on the lookout to make the segment more profitable. He admitted he would have liked to have teamed with the Chandler family to get his hands on Tribune’s Newsday, set up a JOA operation and, he said, in five minutes the New York Post would have been profitable.

The Foreign Press In China Has More Freedom Because Of The Olympics, But Not So the Domestic Media

Just because the restrictions on the foreign press have been eased in preparation for the Beijing Olympic Games in August, 2008, that doesn’t mean things are getting any easier for the domestic media – indeed it is getting tougher.

The propaganda department of the Communist Party is establishing a penalty point system to rate the domestic media.  All outlets get 12 points, their performance will be judged by the government’s media watchdog, points will be deducted based on the severity of any infraction, and if/when all 12 points are gone, so is that media outlet.

"The new system is a clear message that the top leadership wants a peaceful social environment ahead of the 17th party congress (later this year) and next year's Olympics Games," a senior state media executive said. Its main goal is probably to ensure criticism is kept to a minimum ahead of the Party Congress expected somewhere between September and November that will see a reshuffle of the top political leadership and set the development agenda for the next five years. Certainly don’t want any free media debate for something like that!

Higher Media Profits Threatens Freedom Of The Press

To new generations the name Walter Cronkite may not mean much. But to the older generation of Americans he was the CBS Television News anchor who was so influential and so trusted – yes trusted, a word not heard that much in journalism today  – that when he returned from Vietnam and basically said that America needed to get out of that war, then that was the nail that ended US public support for that war. Whenever TV revisits the day that President John F. Kennedy died it is usually done with the black and white tape of Cronkite, biting his lip and struggling to keep back the tears, telling Americans that terrible news.

He retired a generation ago, but Cronkite is still worth listening to and he spoke his mind last week at an important address to journalism students at Colombia University. His subject was how Wall Street’s insistence on ever-higher profits by media companies attacks the very heart of press freedom.

He warned that public media companies were succumbing to the needs of Wall Street instead of serving their readers. He said that newsroom cutbacks attack the very fabric of the freedom of the press. Journalists “face rounds and rounds of job cuts and cost cuts that require them to do ever more with ever less. In this information age and the very complicated world in which we live today, the need for high-quality reporting is greater than ever. It's not just the journalist's job at risk here. It's American democracy. It is freedom."

Cronkite, who used to end every newscast with ‘And That’s The Way It Is’, and you knew it was, said media companies should recognize they have special responsibilities to the communities they serve, and those responsibilities may not always be conducive to making the highest profits possible. That may be something newspaper companies might understand, but, unfortunately, it is doubtful their investors really care (think: Morgan Stanley’s fight with the New York Times).

The Battle Lines are Drawn Between the Uk’s Sky and Virgin Media, And It’s Already Getting Down And Dirty

When Sky Television (think: Rupert Murdoch) bought a 17.9% stake in commercial TV network ITV last November, basically stopping in its tracks NTL Cable’s attempt to take over ITV, the battle lines were drawn. NTL, now renamed Virgin Cable (think Sir Richard Branson as largest shareholder), responded by lobbying the government to rule Sky’s purchase anti-competitive, but no decision on that yet. So its fair to say that relations between the two are not exactly great, and they have just gotten even worse.

Last week Virgin Media’s Chairman Jim Mooney, an American, fired another volley at Sky, accusing it of taking “advantage of its market dominance. It manipulates the auction process to land the rights to Premiership football, on which it has built that dominance.” Strong words such as “anti-competitive” and “illegal” were also thrown around at a news conference. It’s not often you see an American businessman asking for government intervention but there you are -- the gloves were off, if they were ever on.

Sky, for the moment at least, is taking the high road. “Sky has not acted illegally, and Mr Mooney knows it. Sky has been successful through its focus on choice, value and innovation in a highly competitive market. In contrast, Mr Mooney seems preoccupied with using regulation as a commercial tool.”

The stakes between the two are high, around half of UK households don't have pay TV.

Sporting Hours Increased in 2006 on French TV

A Médiamétrie/TNS Sport survey confirmed what every French football widow knows: it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere.

55% of all sports programming on French TV in 2006 was devoted to football. In all 1741 hours of sports on TV comprised 3.8% of all broadcast TV hours.

The average French viewer watched 76 hours of sports in 2006, 25 hours more than in 2005.

Radio France International Chairman Repeats Call to Combine International Services

Speaking to the Club audiovisuel de Paris RFI Chairman Antoine Schwarz proposed centralizing the efforts of RFI and France 24. He repeated the call first made in a Le Monde op-ed column last December to “mutualize” RFI, France 24 and TV5. He suggested a single State structure, perhaps SOFIRAD.

Schwartz also proposed a European international broadcast service to “affirm a European dimension” financed by the European Union.