Posted by Peter Kirwan on 28 August 2008 at 14:29
Tags: Media Business
No webcasts at Independent News & Media, which yesterday issued its financials for the past six months the old fashioned way: in digital silence.
The noise was provided by dissident investor Denis O’Brien. Floating into the coverage surrounded by the usual fog of speculation, O’Brien did his best to kick up a racket by suggesting that [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 27 August 2008 at 12:15
Tags: Media Business
Last year, Sly Bailey cheekily appended a quote from Larry Page, co-founder of Google, to a presentation she gave to analysts and investors.
Page’s quote ran: “Newspapers have a good future. A laptop runs out of battery and you can’t tuck it under your arm.”
Nice, upbeat, stuff. During the past year, however, the prognosis from The [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 27 August 2008 at 11:15
Tags: Media Business
Following on from a post earlier this month, here’s what we now know about newspaper ad volumes for July and August.
As last time, the percentages refer to all ad revenues including digital (or in the case of Newsquest, to classified revenues only, where mentioned). The months mentioned are those in which the declines actually occurred [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 27 August 2008 at 10:40
Tags: Media Business
Results presentations usually contain hatfuls of interesting data — but oddly no-one covers them live in the UK. So we thought we’d redress the balance a bit. Here’s my near-live take on JP’s 1H08 results , which Tim Bowdler & Co. delivered at 9am this morning. If you like it, let me know, and [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Peter Kirwan on 26 August 2008 at 17:38
Tags: Media Business
Ahead of tomorrow’s six-monthly financials from Johnston Press, here’s an intriguing quote captured by the Independent’s Sarah Arnott from Steve Liechti at Investec:
“There are three factors all happening at once: the structural, the cyclical, and the structural multiplied by the cyclical.”
Er, the structural multiplied by the cyclical? Is that what happens when Carolyn McCall and [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Peter Kirwan on 15 August 2008 at 15:52
Tags: Media Business
Kudos to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, who admitted this week on US television that Google was spurning “some number of billions of dollars” by not running ads on its search engine home page.
“People wouldn’t like it. We prioritize the end user over the advertiser,” said Schmidt.
He’s right. But Google enjoys the luxury of making decisions [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 11 August 2008 at 12:42
Tags: Media Business
I guess we should be grateful for accountants who are optimistic under the current circumstances. They’re a rare breed.
Among them is BDO Stoy Hayward, which has just sent me a news release entitled: “Technology, media and telecoms companies can see the light at the end of the credit crunch tunnel”.
The mixed metaphor deserves to be [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 8 August 2008 at 17:25
Tags: Media Business
If you work at Wapping, what should you think of News Corporation’s full-year results? Here’s the stuff investor relations would like you to shout about:
Revenue up by 9%
Operating profit up by 18%
Q4 net income per share up 27%
Yadda-yadda. So is everything really rosy in the garden? Given News Corp’s typically miserly approach to disclosure, it’s [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Peter Kirwan on 8 August 2008 at 10:58
Tags: Media Business
Writing in the FT, Tim Bradshaw predicts that ITV’s forecast 20% YOY decline in September ad bookings might come to be seen as “the moment the credit crisis finally hit advertising budgets”.
This is unlikely. The credit crisis was taking a visible toll on ad expenditure as long ago as January. But in ad markets, as [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Peter Kirwan on 31 July 2008 at 00:53
Tags: Media Business
Reporting on the boss’s performance is difficult for hacks who cover the media. But today’s joint effort by Stephen Brook and Richard Wray to explain Guardian Media Group’s annual results was particularly abject.
The piece started out:
Guardian Media Group, owner of the Guardian, saw its annual profits boosted dramatically. . .
Oh err, sounds good. So how [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Peter Kirwan on 30 July 2008 at 15:10
Tags: Media Business
No doubt Colin Myler, editor of the News of the World, carries around in his head a moral profit and loss account that allows him to balance his Catholic faith against the occasional need to broadcast footage of S&M orgies on the web.
In the real world, it was left to Chris Horrie, writing in the [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 29 July 2008 at 23:17
Tags: Media Business
Future Publishing was another company delivering better-than-feared results today.
Several months ago, chief executive Stevie Spring provoked smiles among perennial Future-watchers by suggesting that the company would cope with a downturn relatively well.
The reason for this, Spring suggested, was Future’s status as a special interest publisher. In a downturn, its typical reader would behave less like [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 29 July 2008 at 22:55
Tags: Media Business
This morning, United Business Media turned in revenues up by 10.4% YOY for the six months to the end of June. Cash conversion improved, and so did operating profit (up 11.4%).
Even CMPi managed growth of 6.2% (although margins dipped slightly below 20%).
For the journalists among you, it’s worth pointing out that all of this happened [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 25 July 2008 at 20:26
Tags: Media Business
Cheers to the ever-reliable Nate Elliott, research director at Jupiter Research, who has picked apart the old saw that advertisers need to invest a lot more money in digital advertising in order to catch up with consumer behaviour.
The logic that underpins this argument is based on the notion (accurate enough) that European web users spend [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 25 July 2008 at 15:55
Tags: Media Business
I haven’t checked. But almost certainly, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard isn’t an anagram for Hieronymous Bosch.
Still, in recent months, I’ve started to wonder whether this one-man engine of doom strapped to the Telegraph’s business desk can take the strain.
The Telegraph and Evans-Pritchard have been whipping their readers into a singular frenzy about recession and depression for several [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 25 July 2008 at 15:10
Tags: Media Business
“Remember, the market tends to overreact sometimes.”
No wonder the analyst who offered up this pearl while discussing Trinity Mirror with Nikhil Kumar of The Independent this morning wanted to remain anonymous.
Yesterday afternoon, Trinity Mirror’s share price shot upwards on rumours of a bid from Bennett Coleman, which owns The Times of India.
Last week, Trinity Mirror’s [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 25 July 2008 at 13:54
Tags: Media Business
As this week’s events in Kamchatka reminded us, bears have sharp claws and teeth. The latter bite chunks out of investors frequently. And commentators get bitten, too.
The Times has had a torrid time of it in recent weeks. On 16 July, its reporter Robert Lindsay suggested that an analyst had concerns about Trinity Mirror breaking [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 23 July 2008 at 19:13
Tags: Media Business
Those counter-cylical brothers-in-media Ivan Fallon (The Independent) and Padraic Fallon (Euromoney) will have plenty to discuss on family get-togethers this summer.
The Indy is going south with the rest of the consumer media. But as today’s trading update for Q2 proved, Padriac Fallon’s Euromoney Institutional Investor is firing on all (or most) of its cylinders.
Euromoney’s home [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 18 July 2008 at 13:21
Tags: Media Business
The hysteria-fuelled bear market in newspaper stocks has been accompanied by talk of private equity interest in the sector.
In the US, the newspaper executive turned VC Alan Mutter has been thinking about the economics of taking newspaper groups private.
The same logic could be applied to both Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press, whose share prices have [...]
Posted by Peter Kirwan on 18 July 2008 at 12:34
Tags: Media Business
At The Times, Dan Sabbagh does the sums on Trinity Mirror’s share price. When Sly Bailey arrived in 2003, it was 370p. On Wednesday morning, it was 41p, valuing the entire company at a derisory £106m.
This, writes Sabbagh, means that the market is allocating a value of £72 to each of the Daily Mirror’s 1.47m [...]
