Posted by Peter Kirwan on 15 March 2010 at 16:31
Tags: Journalism
Johnston Press may yet regret not selling its Irish newspapers for a firesale price last year. I say this because of what the company told investors last week about ad revenues at its division in the Republic.
During 2009 as a whole ad revenues at papers like the Leinster Leader and the Kilkenny People fell by a [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 4 March 2010 at 12:08
Tags: Journalism
Some news organisations have had a half-decent recession. Trinity Mirror’s nationals rank among them.
This morning, Trinity Mirror released its final results for the year to December 2009. Ad revenues at the Daily Mirror and its stablemates fell by 8% during 2009. That’s far less than the chunky double-digit percentage declines that afflicted many broadsheets.
But at tabloids [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 3 March 2010 at 13:59
Tags: Journalism
I love the BBC, but I tend to worry about it a lot.
On p70 of Mark Thompson’s Strategic Review, I found the kind of evidence that supports my fears. The paragraph that gripped me refers to the future of BBC Online. It goes like this:
There will be no specialist content for a specialist audience, such [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 2 March 2010 at 15:37
Tags: Journalism
At both the Guardian and the Daily Mail, readers are outraged by Mark Thompson’s plans to prune the BBC’s output. It might not feel like it, but this is excellent news for the Corporation.
Finally, the BBC has achieved its aim: it has moved ahead of the curve in terms of anticipating a Conservative government’s actions. In doing [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 11 February 2010 at 14:39
Tags: Journalism
Over at t’other place, newsquestslave casts a critical eye on yesterday’s post comparing GMG and Trinity Mirror as owners of the Manchester Evening News.
(S)he takes issue with my suggestion that GMG invested steadily in its regionals during the late noughties, even as revenues and profits declined.
1) Operating expenditure isn’t everything
I looked at GMG’s track record [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 10 February 2010 at 12:19
Tags: Journalism
A few kind souls at Hold The Front Page are predicting what awaits employees of Guardian Media Group who will soon start working for Trinity Mirror:
“For those who thought [GMG Regional Media chief executive Mark] Dodson was a ruthless hatchet man, you ain’t seen nothing yet…”
“God help them….If they think they’ve been squeezed in [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 10 February 2010 at 00:17
Tags: Journalism
For most Britons, the Blair-Brown boom reached a peak in early 2008. Yet as always, the news business was ahead of the game. For most publishers, revenues hit an all-time high during 2004-2005.
One deal, in particular, signalled that we had reached the peak.
In December 2005, Johnston Press bought Scotsman Publications from the Barclay brothers for £160m. [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 8 February 2010 at 13:52
Tags: Journalism
As inevitably as night follows day, the debate about paywalls started in earnest during early 2009, a few months after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, and several months after online display advertising stopped growing.
Publishers have spent the past year obsessing about paid content. Yet in the meantime, something wholly inevitable and largely unnoticed has happened [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 5 February 2010 at 13:28
Tags: Journalism
The ongoing spat between the Telegraph and the Guardian has been entertaining. But I wonder whether it might be drawing to a close.
In recent months, the Telegraph has become deeply interested in the Guardian’s financial performance, variously describing this as “grim”, “disappointing”, and “disastrous”.
The Guardian’s apparent inability to impose compulsory redundancies on editorial staff has [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 2 February 2010 at 22:49
Tags: Journalism
So Times Newspapers has just hired Paul Gilshan from BSkyB as marketing director. Gilshan was previously head of marketing for Sky Movies and Sky Box Office. At Wapping, Media Week notes, Gilshan will be reunited with his former boss Alex Lewis, who was a director of marketing at BSkyB before moving across to Times Newspapers [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Peter Kirwan on 27 January 2010 at 22:54
Tags: Journalism
And lo, the Jesus tablet came among us.
Predictably, the fan boy sites are focusing on the form factor and tech specs. It’s a 1GHz computer with a touchscreen interface. Apple will be making its own CPU (the technology involved is challenging, to say the least). Physically, it looks like an outsized iPhone, or an iPhone [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 12 January 2010 at 15:13
Tags: Journalism
Our unelected upper chamber is going to work on Lord Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill, which resumed its second reading in the House of Lords today.
Ralph Palmer, the 12th Baron Lucas and 8th Lord Dingwall (a.k.a. Lord Lucas) has tabled a string of amendments to the Bill. Cumulatively, they suggest ambitions that stretch beyond this peer’s [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 12 January 2010 at 13:18
Tags: Journalism
So here’s the sequence of events. In February last year, Peter Chernin, the boss of film and broadcast operations at Fox, quits News Corporation after 12 years.
This was followed by Roger Ailes, the newly-liberated chairman of Fox News, making a move against News Corp’s top PR man, Gary Ginsberg, who was an ally of Chernin.
Ginsberg [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 18 December 2009 at 13:20
Tags: Journalism
Guardian Media Group is hopping mad with the Daily Telegraph for revealing its discussions with Trinity Mirror about a possible sale of the company’s regional newspapers.
GMG has been stung by several aspects of the Telegraph’s story, including the allegation that the company is turning its back “on its heartland to keep the Guardian afloat”.
The Telegraph’s [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 18 December 2009 at 11:50
Tags: Journalism
In itself, GMG’s effort to sell its regional newspapers to Trinity Mirror isn’t surprising. The timing is interesting, though.
Only a few weeks ago, sources at GMG played down the chances of selling off the Manchester Evening News in the near term. My assumption was that a sale would have to wait until economic recovery took [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 10 December 2009 at 18:59
Tags: Journalism
Alternatives to Murdoch’s Google strategy are emerging. The New York Times reports that Christoph Keese, head of public affairs and “architect of online strategy” at Springer wants to work with “Internet companies” to build a “one-click marketplace solution” for paid content.
Google or other Internet gateways would display links to newspaper articles, videos and other content from [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Peter Kirwan on 10 December 2009 at 11:45
Tags: Journalism
Patrick Smith from Paid Content went along to the AOP’s Microlocal Forum yesterday and came away a bit disappointed.
There wasn’t much at the AOP’s Microlocal Forum on Wednesday to suggest that either semi-amateur, entrepreneur-led start-ups or big-league newspaper publishers will make real successes of hyperlocal in 2010.
Well, no. But did we expect “real successes” so soon? Not really. [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Peter Kirwan on 3 December 2009 at 11:43
Tags: Journalism
As News Corporation’s public campaign against Google rolls on, the newspaper executives I’ve encountered find themselves rooting for Murdoch from the sidelines. Like 16th century ambassadors trying to anticipate the motives of a warrior king, they remain intensely curious about where all of this might lead.
What seems certain is that News Corporation didn’t start out [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 3 December 2009 at 11:43
Tags: Journalism
News Corporation’s offensive against Google keeps growing in scale and intensity. Already, the aggro feels much more significant than anything Murdoch has doled out to the BBC in the past.
This week, the sabre-rattling reached new heights, with Murdoch himself, Les Hinton and Robert Thomson all participating in assaults.
So far, News Corporation executives have delivered [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 18 November 2009 at 15:34
Tags: Journalism
Did 25% of Guardian News & Media’s revenue base really disappear into thin air between April and September?
Last week, the Guardian itself left the door open to this interpretation. The Times appeared to confirm it, suggesting that revenues at the Guardian and the Observer had declined by £33m since April.
The contextual maths are unpleasant. In [...]
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