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The already shrinking ranks of Wall Street media analysts is going to shrink even more with word that Anthony Noto, senior media analyst and partner at Goldman Sachs is leaving the company to join the National Football League in February as its chief financial officer.
Wall Street firms have been cutting back on media analysts, many believe the sector is in such dire straits there’s not much point in following it very closely.
Back in October, for instance,Morgan Stanley media analyst Lisa Monaco was one of 300 staff fired in a restructuring move and the company said it would no longer be following the newspaper sector. Only just the day before she had applauded the restructuring plans by Belo and E.W. Scripps to isolate newspaper shares into their own company and she urged other companies to do similar to unlock shareholder value, not knowing she was part of Morgan Stanley’s plan the next day to do exactly that.
Wearing his trademark cowboy boots, jeans and shirt wide-open at the neck, and exulting in salty language, Sam Zell is doing the rounds of his Tribune newspapers with the message staff really wanted to hear –the way to make newspapers profitable is not via job cuts but rather by bringing in additional revenue.
In that vein he is implying that staff numbers may increase in the months to come– particularly in sales.
His message: “"Going forward, by definition, there will be a lot of changes. I do not believe that anybody can grow a business by reducing the number of employees. It is not our game plan to, in effect, try and figure out how few people we can have run this business. The focus of everything that we're going to do is directed at one thing: generating more revenue."
At least a tiny portion of the money that craigslist has diverted from print newspaper classifieds revenue is going to go to a worthy cause – endowing the Berkeley Center for New Media with $1.6 million to support research, symposia and lectures.
"The Berkeley Center for New Media and craigslist share a fundamental respect for alternative thinking in the public interest," said the center’s director, UC Berkeley engineering professor Ken Goldberg. "Our mission is to critically analyze and help shape developments in new media by facilitating research with unorthodox ideas, designs, artworks and experiments."
Craigslist was founded in San Francisco in 1995 by Craig Newmark as an e-mail list of events for the San Francisco Bay Area. It is now the eighth largest Internet Company in the world in terms of English-language page views, and the most used classifieds service worldwide in any medium.
It's rather rare that international broadcaster RFE/RL adds several new people at once to its top ranks. President Jeff Gedmin has certainly been on a talent hunt. (Read RFE/RL release here)
I've known John Catlett since the Metromedia Radio days. He's an extraordinary manager with great depth in international broadcasting. (JMH)
VOA launching a blog to engage its listeners is a welcome addition. (Read VOA release here) Company blogs have become good wrap-arounds for explaining the ins and outs of decisions. (JMH)
Ringier turns 175 this week. (Read release here in German) We forget, sometimes, that European newspapers have been around for CENTURIES. Happy Birthday. (JMH)
Rebekah Wade, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid, the largest circulation UK daily, told The House Of Lords Communications Committee on Wednesday that there are times when her boss does take a very hands-on approach on news coverage, such as, of all things, Hilary Clinton’s win in New Hampshire.
She said he phoned her at 0130 UK time last week to make sure The Sun was running the story of Hilary’s unexpected win in New Hampshire. Presumably not on Page 3.
And talking of Page 3 a female peer told Wade that women were offended by the bare-breasted women appearing on that page every day, to which the fiery redhead replied, “If you want to put on the record that millions of people don’t like page 3, then I want to put on the record that millions of people do – 7.7 million to be precise.” While The Sun has just under 3 million circulation, it claims to have 7.7 million readers.
And as for an analyst’s view last week that the Sun’s falling circulation means it could become a free newspaper she responded, “I would never give the Sun away for free.” But she has been selling it at a 40% discount for the past three months in London and the surrounding suburbs.
A Wall Street analyst warned last week that the New York Times could be in trouble this year because it looked like luxury goods spending and movie box office receipts were off in Q4 and that those two categories make up about 20% of the Times’ advertising revenue.
Tiffany, of breakfast fame, has now confirmed that the only reason it did as well as it did for the holidays was because of foreign visitors taking advantage of the low US dollar, but in those suburban New York stores where those foreigners wouldn’t visit sales were down 10%. And it was the cheaper jewelry that got sold, not the very expensive. The rich, apparently, are also counting their pennies.
That information also won’t thrill the folks over at the Wall Street Journal who have been concentrating more and more on luxury trade advertising, especially with their Saturday edition and a planned magazine aimed at the rich.
Belgian newspapers are not happy that the mighty European Commission on two of its web sites links to Belgian newspaper articles for which no payment is made, and a Brussels court, at the request of the publisher’s association, has appointed an expert to investigate just what is going on. Depending on what the report says, the publishers could elect to sue.
The publishers won a victory against Google last year, now under appeal, that the search engine had violated copyright law by providing links to the newspapers without permission.
A trial in Wiesbaden Regional Court opened (Tuesday, January 15) with former Aegis Media (Germany) CEO Alexander Ruzicka in the dock. He and about two dozen others stand accused of ‘misappropriating’ roughly €50 million. Ruzicka says he’s the victim of a power struggle with the British home office of Aegis. Prosecutors say television broadcasters offered free air-time as rebates which Ruzicka and others then sold on through fictitious companies.
The ever popular ‘rebates’ are also on the radar of public prosecutors in Munich and Cologne. ProSiebenSat Chief Sales Officer and executive board member Peter Christmann is under investigation, according to Upper Munich Prosecutor Anton Winkler. Cologne chief prosecutor Günther Feld leveled the same charge - “suspicion of bribery and corruption in the course of trade” – against IP Deutschland chief executive Martin Krapf.
The German Federal Cartel Office has fined ProSiebenSat and RTL, owner of IP Deutschland, at total of €216 million in October 20007 for failing to discontinue the ‘rebate’ practice. Advertisers are often unaware of the special relationships, and money, entangling sales-houses and broadcasters. (JMH)
George Riggs, 61, the CEO of MediaNews Group’s California Newspaper Partnership that has been cutting costs, including scores of people for the past year or so has summed up the newspaper industry to the AP thus: “It’s not much fun for anyone in the industry right now, and I am no exception.” He announced his resignation effective the end of January.
In the two weeks since the BBC launched its Iplayer service that allows viewers to stream or download any BBC program for a set period of time after original transmission, more than 3.5 million programs have been watched, with an average of 250,000 programs downloaded or streamed each day. Streaming is turning out to be far more popular than downloading, with the average stream lasting 25 minutes.
And the good news for program makers who have trouble with their niche programs doing well into the ratings is that nearly half the programs being streamed or downloaded are outside the top 50 meaning this service is getting that programming to a much wider audience than original transmission..
The bad news is that this is good news just for UK residents. The iPlayer is available only to UK users -- the service uses geo-IP technology to detect non-UK IP addresses and denies them access.
While the FCC in the US is looking to loosen cross-ownership rules, its neighbor to the north has other ideas and has announced new rules on future deals that sets limits on broadcast mergers to ensure programming diversity.
Under the new rules announced by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission private companies can control no more than two of the three media types -- radio, television and newspaper -- serving a single local market. The regulator also says that no single entity can control more than 45% of the total television audience in any market.
With the summer Olympic Games less than seven months away the heat gets turned up even more on Chinese authorities to release imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents. This time it is the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) that has written Premier Wen Jibao asking for the specific release of Fan Yingshang, a journalist who has been imprisoned for 12 years.
Reminding Chinese authorities that they have pledged to “be open” and to “draw on the successful experience of others and follow the international standards and criteria” WAN asked that the Chinese “immediately release” all journalists and cyber-dissidents who did nothing more than exercise “their right to freedom of expression”.
During the time when Maoism was at its height in China there was one European country – Albania – that out-Maoed the Maoists. Indeed when China established diplomatic relations with the US in 1978 the Albanians denounced the Chinese.
It has come a long way since then and it is slowly building a capitalist economy and has goals of eventually joining the EU, maybe even NATO. But in an action that could cut Albania off from part of the outside world again, Parliament approved a law in December that would add a 20% tax on all imported newspapers, magazines and the like.
The Zurich-based Distripress has written to Albanian President Bamir Topi urging him not to ratify the law. The company said, “The new law (would) force the companies dealing with the distribution of foreign press products to stop their activity. This would mean the end of the presence of foreign press in Albania.”
It’s not the first time that Albania has restricted the foreign press distribution. During the Maoist times, no foreign media were allowed in.
The US is one market that Metro free newspapers have never successfully cracked, and now it apparently is giving up – it has apparently placed its three titles, Metro Boston, New York and Philadelphia up for sale after having failed to gain new investors or partners.
What happens in Boston could prove particularly interesting since the New York Times Company owns 49% of the newspaper, bought two years ago to court young readers who hopefully would later, as they got older, migrate to the company-owned Boston Globe. In those two years circulation at Boston Metro has slipped by 10,000 and revenue was down 12% in Q3, 2007, according to Metro International. So, does the Times Company sell out indicating its strategy is no long valid, or does it take the paper over to show how much it believes in that strategy, or does it just stay put with its minority holding?
There is talk that Philip Anschutz, who publishes free Examiner brand newspapers in several US cities, may be interested in Metro New York.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s plan to ban advertising from public broadcasting is causing “extreme anxiety” among broadcasting unions. Meeting Friday (January 11) a committee representing the 8 major unions rejected the plan “unanimously.”
Saturday, M. Sarkozy reiterated his opposition to ads on French public TV, saying, “We want a public utility which is not subjected to the dictates of advertising receipts and the audience.”(JMH)
The Russian Parliament is expected to approve legislation proposed by the Cabinet of Ministers that would lead to a complete ban on tobacco advertising.
The Cabinet approved a measure to join the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which mandates a total ban on ads and sponsorships within five years. Russia already bans outdoor ads for tobacco products.(JMH)
My US pals (and extraordinary radio broadcasters) Randy Brown and Kevin Metheny are over-the-top golfers. It’s scary how much they love the game, play it, follow it. This is just for them.
Championship Radio – 95.6 FM – will broadcast shot by shot coverage with interviews and analysis from the Abu Dhabi Golf Championship kicking off this week. It will also be streamed via the internet - www.abudhabigolfchampionship.com. Dedicated frequency radio will be available for purchase. Of course… (JMH)
Yet another radio broadcaster is peering at the newspaper business. (See earlier article on radio broadcasters and the newspaper business) Irish broadcaster and telecom billionaire Denis O’Brien has raised his stake in Independent News and Media (INM), publisher of the Irish Independent, the Belfast Telegraph and the Independent (UK). If this sounds vaguely like a hand of Texas-hold-em, it is.
O’Brien held just over 15% of the newspaper company’s shares at the end of 2007 then raised to 16.4% this week. He’s been critical of INM Chief Executive (and billionaire) Tony O’Reilly, who raised his own stake in the company to 26.6%. O’Brien’s stake as INM’s second biggest shareholder gives him proprietary rights to a board seat. Mr. O’Reilly has referred to Mr. O’Brien as the ‘dissident shareholder.’
For all appearances O’Brien’s game is classic decline phase arbitrage, also known as ‘green mail.’ Three anecdotes, says conventional wisdom, makes a trend. (JMH)
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