UK news media job losses: To October 2008

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 14 November 2008 at 12:00
Tags: Guardian Media Group, Independent News & Media, Media, United Business Media

As requested by one reader, a graphic. Prepare yourself for a big increase in November.

PS: Jeremy Dear (NUJ) and Jon Slattery (ex-Press Gazette) make the point that these reported job losses understate the real magnitude of the problem.

Plenty more jobs are being burned off by non-replacement of staff, for example. Here’s Dear on the subject:

The true picture in some newsrooms is grim. For example yesterday I spoke to a journalist at a daily regional paper who was the only reporter there that day. The reporting staff as a whole has dropped by half. It’s a familiar story for those working in local newspapers. But it is also now becoming more familiar to those working across the media.

A reader called hizz makes the same point — with reference to Northcliffe.

Certain parts of Northcliffe are doing drip drip redundancies and saying nothing about it in public at all, because it’s a sub here, an exec there, and a strict policy of non-replacement when the overworked and underpaid hacks who are left quit.

True enough. All we can do, I think, is capture the trend.

That said, If you’re reading this blog, you can help us by submitting news of unreported redundancies. Get in touch with me: 0208 670 0039 / fullrun [at] googlemail [dot] com.

Do remember to use a non-work email address. A non-work broadband connection might be a good idea, too. When you submit info, I’ll do my best to confirm it. . . and add your numbers to the running total.

Beating recession with the IAB: Easy peasy, innit?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 4 November 2008 at 12:36
Tags: Independent News & Media, Media

Is it my imagination, or has the number of sponsored supplements in Media Guardian increased since the “demise” (^TM Roy Greenslade) of Press Gazette?

Oh well: I suppose that these things are a fact of journalistic life — a bit like moral hazard in the banking profession.

The latest one is an 8-page sponsored effort underwritten by the Internet Advertising Bureau — the trade body that represents Britain’s digital ad agencies and keeps us in a state of perpetual admiration for the sector’s soaraway growth rate.

I perked up a bit when I saw the title, though: “Internet advertising: How a medium aims to beat recession”.

Talk about making promises you can keep. . . For anyone who wasn’t around last time (2001-2002), the time before that (1991-1992) or the time before that (1981-1983), let’s be crystal clear about this: NO-ONE GOES AROUND “BEATING” RECESSIONS.

Anyway: according to (mmm: whom exactly? The IAB? The Guardian?), this time around, the web really will beat recession by . . doing exactly the same as it’s done hereuntofore.

There’s even a headline on page 2 that runs: “Reasons to be cheerful”.

Yeah, right.

A few extracts for you:

“The big question for brand owners today is how to move beyond direct response to building brand recall, purchase intent and brand awareness through search,” says Andy Mihalop, search director of digital agency i-level

Rubbish. The big question facing brand owners today is (a) how to hang on to their job and (b) how to get people to buy more stuff. Search as brand-building? Perhaps we can return to that conversation — reluctantly — in 2011.

“Online video advertising is coming of age. Whereas this time last year the jury was still out, in the final quarter of 2008, industry experts now see online video as a key component for digital campaigns.”

Coming of age? Key component? Not really. Not until we’ve all got fibre-to-the-home and can watch You Tube on our 50″ plasma screens. Meanwhile, Mediacom is forecasting that the going rate for online video advertising will fall by 20% next year. (At least, that’s what it says in an accompanying article by The Guardian’s Mark Sweney. . .)

“The recession is kind of irrelevant because there is going to be a flip — and the recession is going to accelerate that — where digital is going to become more important.” — Daniele Fiandaca, chief executive, Profero Europe.

Translation: Bollocks to you lot. My little digital empire will be fine. In the long term.

The ultimate irony is the fact that Media Guardian’s supplement appears to have been a print-only exercise. (Go on then — you search for it: try “daniele fiandaca” for starters).

Danny Meadows-Klue would have been horrified.

The Independent & DMGT: Anyone for a joint operating agreement?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 3 November 2008 at 13:38
Tags: Daily Mail & General Trust, Independent News & Media, Telegraph Media Group, Trinity Mirror

Big denials this morning from both Independent News & Media and Daily Mail & General Trust.

James Robinson is taking a bit of a pounding for his story in The Observer suggesting that DMGT is “considering” buying The Independents. According to Robinson’s sources, the strike price could have been £1, with DMGT “taking on the loss-making papers’ liabilities”.

In point of fact, Robinson did a good job of highlighting the tactical jam in which INM now finds itself.

But a DMGT spokesperson told Reuters this morning “We have no intention of acquiring them.”

Meanwhile, an INM spokesperson tells the Irish Times: “Any discussions with UK publishers were solely in connection with shared services.”

Ah yes: shared services. At The Guardian, Roy Greenslade writes dismissively: “It all sounds like out-sourcing to me”.

Er. . . not quite, and not necessarily.

For a start, the idea of shared service suggests a consortium-based approach — rather than the old-fashioned Big Bang approach to outsourcing (which effectively involved dumping unwanted business processes — and employees — in the lap of a single, monolithic, specialist supplier).

Secondly, shared services typically involve high levels of automation (and plenty of underlying investment in IT — although quite how this squares with INM’s proposed €50m cut in capital spending next year remains to be seen.)

At the Irish Times, the implication is that The Independents have sparked an industry-wide discussion about creating economies of scale via collaboration.

Discussions appear to have involved INM and DMGT — as well as Telegraph Media Group and Trinity Mirror.

What might end up emerging here is a UK version of the joint operating agreements that allowed two daily newspapers to continue to operate in many US metropolitan markets from the 1970s onwards.

Interestingly, if you look at the structure of these deals, they were far more than flimsy joint ventures. Getting them off the ground required the Nixon administration to pass The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. This was needed to circumvent competition law.

In many cases, there was collaborative selling of classified ads, a lot of shared office space, plus a unified board of directors for the JOA entity. Under the current circumstances, you’d assume that INM is encouraging its partners to think about putting IT, accounting and HR under one roof — for starters.

(The point here is that Robinson’s piece might not be quite so far off the mark as it seems. One outcome could be some kind of semi-merged infrastructure organisation, working across the industry.)

In IN&M’s view, editorial should definitely be involved. There’s talk of creating “more efficient editorial work flows”. No wonder. Beneath the corporate-speak, mind-bogglingly severe cuts appear to be planned.

According to the Irish Times, INM’s UK operation is “expected to seek 100 to 200 redundancies in the coming months — a reduction of up to 40 per cent of its workforce”.

In this context, the prospect of offshoring vast swathes of editorial work to Bangalore or Mumbai has to become very real indeed. The interesting question, I suspect, is whether INM can induce any of its rivals to move in this direction, too.

The upshot? Between INM’s talk of “shared services” and a full-blown acquisition of The Independents lies an interesting bit of territory.

Some of the solutions that end up emerging might not look all that different from a formal corporate merger. (Anyone for a Newspaper Presevation Act 2008?)

At the very least, the hare unleashed by James Robinson this weekend has a way to go before it runs out of breath.

The discreet charm of non-executive directors: Sharp hires at The Guardian and The Telegraph

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 15 October 2008 at 00:59
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Daily Mail & General Trust, Google, Guardian Media Group, Independent News & Media, News Corp, News International, Trinity Mirror, United Business Media, emap

What do non-executives get paid for?

Actually, the money isn’t great (at least not by the standards of Masters Of Universe).

The official version is that non-executives act as neutral voices, mediating between management teams and shareholders. Occasionally, they are called upon to mediate between chairman and chief executives, too.

If that sounds a bit like working as a counselor at Relate, the marriage guidance service, think again. Non-executives also have some serious (fiduciary, in the jargon) responsibilities. In extremis, neglecting these responsibilties can get them prosecuted.

As I say, that’s the official version. In many ways, the unofficial version is much more interesting — particularly at non-quoted companies, where there’s less pressure to appoint directors who are deeply acceptable as guardians of the City’s interests.

Away from the public markets, copper-bottomed presentability in the City doesn’t matter so much as a gilt-edged contact book.

Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s the stuff from which deals are made. In particular, today brought two stunning examples of the genre.

First up, Telegraph Media Group appointed Lauren Twohill, Google’s European marketing boss, as non-executive director.

Twohill has worked at Google for the past six years — long enough to assimilate the DNA of a company that lies at the heart of the web economy.

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian Media Group, in the wake of Paul Myners’ departure, the company has appointed venture capitalist Judy Gibbons as a non-executive director.

Like Twohill, Gibbons is unusual — in the sense that she’s a female Brit with extensive high-level experience of Silicon Valley.

But Gibbons’ track record in the tech industry — all 25 years of it — is deeper and wider. After stints at Hewlett-Packard and Apple, she switched allegiance to Microsoft, playing a big role in the development of MSN.

Next, Gibbons ascended to tech exec heaven — that’s to say, she became a partner at one of Silicon Valley’s largest and most respected venture capital firms, Accel Partners. (Its portfolio of investments include Facebook and a bunch of established and well-respected deep-tech companies.)

No doubt Gibbons will play a big role in advising Carolyn McCall on how to invest the tens of millions that GMG has banked from the part-sale of Auto Trader. (There’s a rather large “investment fund” waiting to be spent — although some of it may already have been blown on the £30m acquisition of Paid Content).

We know less about Telegraph Media Group’s investment plans. Have the Barclays ponied up cash for a 2.0 spending spree? Given the desperation of so many start-ups, they could do a lot worse. No doubt Ms Twohill will help the Barclays to spend what’s available.

If anything, the corollary these appointments is even more intriguing.

At Wapping, can we expect James Murdoch to tear down the walls that traditionally separate News Corp’s operating units — and bring in some digital expertise from his dad’s empire? You’d hope so. But there’s little sign of it.

If anything, the recent promotion of two insiders to take over Anne Spackman’s role as editor of Times Online points to a continuing preference for autarky.

What about Daily Mail & General Trust? This is a company that has excelled in snapping up high-margin B2B and database publishers. But its top table visibly lacks a digital star. (Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse is a retailer at heart, and a superb one. But he doesn’t quite make the cut in tech terms IMHO.)

Endearingly, five of DMGT’s non-execs appear to be over 70 years of age.

At Independent News & Media, there’s no News Corp-style pool of talent to call upon. Here, the roster of non-execs resembles a procession of stuffed shirts, old mates with Irish surnames and the odd bloke who has some expertise in international relations. Plus Baroness Jay.

As at DMGT, this is a boardroom policy minted in the 1980s. The appointment of Twohill and Gibbons elsewhere will steadily increase the pressure on the O’Reillys — and the Rothermeres — to confront the recent arrival of the 21^st century.

And what of Trinity Mirror? Sly Bailey has made some interesting-looking digital acquisitions. But have you looked at Trinity’s line-up non-execs lately? To say the least, it lacks digital oomph.

There’s Gary Hoffman (a vice-chairman at Barclays, who seems well-versed in the credit card business); Laura Wade-Gery (an ex-management consultant and investment banker who runs Tesco.com); Kathleen O’Donovan (former beancounter-in-chief at industrial widget company Invensys); and Jane Lighting (former CEO of Five).

DMGT, IN&M and Trinity Mirror need to get their backsides in gear. Their non-quoted competitors have just raised the ante. Significantly.

Freefall Friday: Richard Littlejohn might laugh at Banki Hankipanki, but the City is running scared

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 10 October 2008 at 13:09
Tags: Centaur Media, Daily Mail & General Trust, Independent News & Media, Johnston Press, Trinity Mirror, United Business Media

Another massive downward lurch on the markets today. Partly caused by technical issues relating to the liquidation of Lehman Brothers.

And partly caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Daily Mail is calling it Freefall Friday. In the media, everything has taken a hammering — except, oddly, Johnston Press.

DMGT: Down 6.7% at 304.5p

Trinity Mirror: Down 9.1% at 65p

Johnston Press: Up 6.5% at 37p

ITV: Down 2% at 35.25p

Independent News & Media: Down 5.4% at E1.05

United Business Media: Down 5.6% at 454.75p

Centaur Media: Down 7.1% at 52.5p

WPP: Down 6.9% at 367p

This morning’s Markets Live session at FT Alphaville made for astonishing reading: 700+ reader comments in the space of two hours.

There’s still little sign that credit markets are unfreezing. Banks are still unwilling to lend to each other, and to their customers.

In the Mail, Richard Littlejohn takes the piss out of “Iceland’s Banki Hankipanki”. Presumably, he’s been reading yesterday’s Sun, which continued its policy of laughing in the face of financial apocalypse.

Under different circumstances, comparing Alastair Darling to a Gerry Anderson puppet would be funny. But there’s something about this humour that doesn’t quite work.

In the real world, anger is building. Max Hastings is now calling for the public naming and shaming of the City’s “lunatics”. (”And when we have the names, like the profiteers of the First World War, they should be perceived as men and women whom decent people will not share a park bench with.”)

On a more somber note, Peter Oborne warns that Britain is just five meals away from anarchy.

Alarmist? Who knows? In North America, there are reports of grain shipments piling up in warehouses because no-one can give (or take) credit guarantees. China is turning away shiploads of iron ore because worldwide demand for steel is collapsing.

Here, thanks to government seizure of Icelandic banks, Debenhams, Moss Bros, Woolworths and French Connection now seem to be part-owned by Gordon Brown’s new best friends in Reykeyavik..

Sainsburys is in deep trouble. Retail Week is reporting that JJB Sports, the high street chain, can’t pay its rent. Several branches have been visited by bailiffs, it seems.

On Wall Street, there are rumours that the investment bank Morgan Stanley might go under. General Motors, too. Yesterday on Wall Street, the motor manufacturer’s shares lost one-third of their value, closing at their lowest level since the 1950s.

At FT Alphaville, economists suggest that equity markets are at “riot point”.

Among Alphaville readers, the gallows humour includes one prediction of martial law in the US within a week. “Go long on ammunition and canned food,” writes one commenter. Another suggests that Zimbabwe is now looking like a safe haven.

There’s talk of surviving by “hunting wild animals and surviving off berries and tree bark”. And, of course, there’s laughter at the fact that the FT published an edition of How To Spend It this morning.

The FT’s Neil Hume has taken to referring to the British krona, rather than the British pound. The krona in question is tumbling against the dollar — down below $1.70 now.

Who’d be a finance minister at this weekend’s G7 and G20 crisis meetings? Our leaders have got 48 hours to save the world from depression. They’d best get busy.

Independent News & Media: The market’s latest whipping boy

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 8 October 2008 at 15:44
Tags: Independent News & Media

Interesting reactions among media stocks to today’s government announcements.

This afternoon, the FTSE 100 is down by around 2.5% on the day. But look at Trinity Mirror: up by 23.8% at one point this afternoon, the company’s stock is now showing an intraday gain of 13.6%. Johnston Press, meanwhile, is up by 7.7%.

By contrast, Independent News & Media has fallen by 1%. United Business Media is down by 1%, too. Daily Mail & General Trust is up by a meagre 0.85%. The big international ad agencies WPP and Aegis are both down.

Plainly, the market is suggesting that the Brown-Darling rescue package will be good news for companies who make most of their money within the UK.

Of course, this is a superficial response. Today has been massively volatile. We’ll need to wait a few days to see what happens to inter-bank lending. Then we’ll get the markets’ considered reaction.

For now, however, it’s worth noting that Independent News & Media — a heavily globalised company if ever there was one — has lost one-third of its value since 1^st August.

As I noted a few weeks back, the company’s outsized presence in Ireland and Australia is causing jitters. So it should be.

The Irish economy has hit the buffers, leading the Eurozone into recession during Q2. In Dublin, the government is preparing the mother of all hairshirt budgets. The country’s Central Bank is currently predicting that recession will continue for “at least” two years.

In Australia, there are mounting concerns about the effects of an Asian slowdown. Today, the Australian government cut interest rates by 1% — the largest cut in 16 years.

The suggestion that Independent News & Media needs to refinance a €200m bond next May hasn’t helped, either.

Between them, Australia and Ireland account for 75% of INM’s revenues — and a bigger proportion of operating profits.

In IN&M, the media sector seems to have found a new whipping boy.

Yahoo’s APT (Part 1): A media-friendly future for digital ad trading?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 26 September 2008 at 12:27
Tags: Independent News & Media, Media, emap

Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, calls APT the “next generation of advertising”. Slightly awkwardly, he adds on his blog that APT would be to 2009 “what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965, and the Internet to 1993″.

You get the idea.

Actually, APT is intended as a market, an exchange — in the same way that you could describe the London Stock Exchange as a market for share trading. As Yang puts it:

The advertising strategy at Yahoo is about building platforms for publishers and advertisers and our second strategy is about opening things up for multiple sales forces and multiple pieces of inventory.

In other words: APT is what happens when a pure-play giant like Yahoo opens up its highly advanced infrastructure as a trading platform for rival publishers. Yahoo now wants to become a supplier to Big Media, the industry it once threatened to destroy.

Business Week offers a flavour of what’s involved:

The core of the system is an open online marketplace where publishers—Yahoo and its network of partners, including 784 newspapers—use a simple dashboard to post ad slots available on their Web pages.

Advertisers, using anonymous data on visitors to the pages, can target ads to the most likely prospective buyers in particular geographic areas—say, ads for minivans to married women aged 31 to 40 in the Chicago metro area. In one transaction, they can reach potential buyers on Yahoo and on partner sites.

So what’s in it for media owners? At APT’s launch, Yahoo wheeled out Dean Singleton, chief executive of MediaNews Group, which publishes the San Jose Mercury News.

Singleton — whose company has collaborated with Yahoo on the development of APT — believes that the system will dramatically improve newspapers’ ability to generate digital ad revenues.

Singleton believes that media owners will benefit from Yahoo’s behavioural targeting prowess. APT’s ability to combine the offerings of different publishers into a streamlined buying process should also help.

“As part of APT, we can bundle our inventory nationally and in a more targeted way. Today, newspapers are focused on selling sites and sections generally. . .

“We can charge higher rates if we can target better. If we could charge normal rates for our advertising, you wouldn’t be hearing about the woes of the newspaper industry. The reason that online newspaper revenues don’t make up the losses on the print side is because we’re selling cheaper remnant ad space.”

In an interview with the FT, Singleton went even further, suggesting that if APT had been launched earlier, “you wouldn’t be hearing people talk about the woes of the newspaper industry”.

Although he didn’t say it, Singleton probably also hopes that platforms like APT will reduce the role of ad networks, or even disintermediate them entirely. Media owners won’t shed too many tears on this score. Ad networks have always been an imperfect solution to the challenge of selling low-value inventory.

APT should also allow publishers to cut the cost of selling digital ads, perhaps radically. This seems likely because Yahoo’s platform promises to address the supreme paradox of digital advertising — namely: organisational processes that are “crummy” at best. (On Thursday, this adjective was used by Yahoo’s Susan Decker, who knows what she is talking about.)

From Yahoo’s point of view, the ambition is similarly heady. And here’s a significant bit of parsing from Reuters’ Paul Thomasch:

What Yahoo wants is a system as efficient for online display advertising as the one run by Google in search advertising.

Well, yes and no. Yahoo, it seems, envisages APT becoming a unified trading system for all kinds of digital advertising including (yes) online display, but also mobile and search. Video advertising sits on Yahoo’s list of ambitions, too.

So why hasn’t anyone else thought of this before?

As it happens, they have. But in recent years, progress toward automated trading of digital display has been frustratingly slow.

Arguably, the faster-growing market for paid search has been occupying all of the best talent at places like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Meanwhile, EBay’s efforts to set up a trading exhange for the US TV industry appear to have foundered in the face of opposition from media owners.

Now, however, Google, Microsoft and AOL are all working on platforms to rival APT.

Of this trio, AOL seems to be closest to realizing something concrete. This week, the Time Warner subsidiary claimed that it will launch an ad exchange called Bid Place in early 2009.

This burst of development couldn’t have come at a better time. In an online display market that shows signs of tanking alongside everything else, it’s precisely what’s required.

By the time we haul ourselves out of recession, digital advertising — and therefore digital media — could look very different indeed.

Simon Kelner on getting across the Bay of Biscay in a Force 9 gale

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 22 September 2008 at 10:31
Tags: Independent News & Media

Simon Kelner, newly-promoted to managing director of The Independents, offers the FT a candid assessment of what’s going on in ad markets.

Media buyers are worried by the “terrible” turmoil in the City. Clients won’t commit to spending anything “three months hence”.

It’s a bit like sailing across the Bay of Biscay on a bad day, says Kelner.

Indeed, if the Beaufort Scale was used to measure advertising recessions, Kelner reckons we’d be “getting up to double figures”. (For reference: 9 characterises a severe gale; 10 is a storm; 11 is a violent storm.)

“We are fighting for every pound of advertising take we can scrabble for,” says Kelner. He adds (quite plausibly) that the Independent is “probably more used to being fleet of foot and having to live on our wits than other papers“.

Such honesty is unusual in commercial managers, who’d much prefer you to go away from a conversation with the impression that their sales operation is somehow faring better than the rest of the market.

In this respect, ad sales is a bit like banking. Confidence counts for a lot. In the end, it’s blank space that’s sold to clients and agencies on a daily basis.

Kelner’s candour can be criticised as a bit naïve. But at least it sets expectations correctly. If we’re heading for the heart of the storm, what’s the point of suffering in silence?

Why Downing Street’s spinners should be scared of the Mirror and (yes) the Express

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 17 September 2008 at 14:04
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Daily Mail & General Trust, Independent News & Media, News International, Trinity Mirror

Who’d be a Treasury minister amid this mess? Or a Square Mile spin doctor? Well, OK — the aforementioned people made their bed long ago. Now they’re going to have to lie in it.

Yesterday, The Sun missed a trick with a front page splash entitled “Crash, Bang, Wallop.” This appeared to suggest that the stock market’s collapse was just another joyride at Alton Towers. Or a scary ghost story.

Cheap thrills are quickly forgotten. Accordingly, this morning, The Bun devoted front page space to Chelsea, Liverpool, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Brown and a Marine crippled in Afghanistan. Apparently, the markets no longer exist.

It was the Daily Mirror that opened up a vein of anti-City sentiment that was yearning to see the light of day.

Next to a psychotic-looking Dick Fuld (chief executive of Lehman Brothers), the headline read: “Gorilla Of Greed”. The copy explained:

This is the super-rich banker known as the Gorilla whose greedy bungling will send our mortgage bills spiraling again.

This morning, The Daily Express has taken the Mirror’s hint and improved on it. The headline? “Don’t let the spivs destroy Britain”.

There is mounting anger in Middle Britain at the excesses of the City of London where huge fortunes have been made by bankers on the back of reckless gambles with the life savings of small investors.

Unless action is taken to stop all these spivs in their tracks, decent people will lose faith in the dynamism of free enterprise and the moral imperative of striving for self-reliance.

It is a horrible thought but the greed of a few bankers and corporate fat cats could hand an undeserved lifeline to the failed creed of State socialism. It must not be allowed to happen.

From the opposite end of the political spectrum to the Mirror, this sounds rather like something from Weimar Germany, circa 1933. (A place and time well-known to Lord Beaverbrook.)

Are both ends closing in upon the middle ground occupied by Gordon Brown and the regulators? Perhaps.

It’s still early days, though. You can tell this because the Mail is playing with the populist urge, but restraining it, too. This morning, the paper published a piece under the headline: “Spivs, sharks and why the champagne corks were popping on Meltdown Monday”.

Paul Bracchi’s colour piece focuses upon “a group of men in expensive suits” eating at Caprice on Sunday night.

The copy is littered with pictures of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko — and the 90s vintage City boy traders known as the Flaming Ferraris.

These days, both seem as threatening as the contents of a Take That CD. But the Mail’s copy does succeed in painting the guests at Le Caprice as the kind of grotesque magnates who populated German Expressionist canvases in the 1920s and 1930s.

Predictably, the diners were holding Blackberrys. According to Bracchi, they were checking up on news about the “impending collapse of the world’s fourth biggest investment bank”.

Le Caprice is in Mayfair. And Mayfair is home to half the hedge funds in London. Bracchi continues:

Unlike almost everyone else, they wanted Lehmans to crash; hence, the febrile atmosphere around their table. By the time they had drunk their last bottle of bubbly they knew they were about to make a killing.

Yep. As Bracchi advises us, the short-selling associated with these Mayfair-based “vultures” is “the very inverse, both practically and morally, of normal share trading”.

At the Mirror and the Express, anti-City populism is full bore. The Mail’s approach is a bit more complex and muted.

But the Mail’s use of that word “morally” should worry Downing Street PR advisers who owe their jobs — in part — to the prawn cocktail offensives that took place in another era.

Contagion has already afflicted the insurance industry and mortgage banks. It’s not so far away from the gates of Downing Street.

All that’s needed now is a botched rescue attempt and we’ll ready for a latter-day replay of The Sun’s iconic front page from 1992 — the one featuring Neil Kinnock, a light bulb and a headline urging the last person to leave Britain to “turn out the lights”.

You can almost feel it coming. The odd thing is that The Sun doesn’t seem the least bit interested in being the one to run it. Yet.

Denis O’Brien: Adopting the General Macarthur approach in a Pacific hellhole

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 12 September 2008 at 11:07
Tags: Independent News & Media, Media

Take a look at this startling profile of Denis O’Brien in Forbes and then look again at the man’s allegations of boardroom cronyism at Independent News & Media.

No doubt about it: The O’Reilly clan’s taste in non-executives belongs back in the 1970s, where it originated. Sooner or later, 21^st century norms of corporate governance will intervene.

But the picture thrown up by Forbes of O’Brien sitting in an office in the “pacific hellhole” of Papua New Guinea, surrounded by razor wire and armed guards . . . is something else entirely.

O’Brien runs his $2bn-turnover third world mobile phone company like General Douglas MacArthur. (”You run like MacArthur from island to island - and you conquer. This is going to be a very big business.”)

He takes tea with Commodore Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama of Fiji, who has organized two military coups in the space of a decade. And he runs a mobile operator in that well-known human rights paradise East Timor.

He’s even got an operation in Haiti, where discussions about corporate governance are notoriously subtle and complex.

There, the lack of an electrical grid means that donkeys are used to transport the diesel that powers the generators at each of his company’s cell phone masts.

When O’Brien first arrived in Haiti, he had 75 of those towers impounded by Customs for nine months. Getting them released involved a visit to see a “hard-to-find” government official at his mistress’s house.

Despite all of this exotica (not to mention an ongoing investigation in the Irish Republic), O’Brien is adamant that he has never been asked for a bribe, or given one. Indeed, Forbes even calls the man “a tyrant’s worst nightmare”.

Which is reassuring.