Media

John Gapper Fleet Street is becoming a luxury for Murdoch

July 11, 2011 5:10 pm by John Gapper

The News International scandal, which today led Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, to refer Rupert Murdoch’s bid to acquire complete control of British Sky Broadcasting, throws the entire shape of his UK operations into doubt.

Might the ultimate effect be that News Corporation disposes of its troublesome UK print operations to focus on its far bigger and more profitable entertainment assets in the US and elsewhere in the world?

That possibility, raised by Andrew Hill last week, would have seemed implausible even a week ago. Rupert Murdoch is an inky-fingered newspaperman who loves papers of every stripe and infuriated investors by paying $5bn for Dow Jones four years ago. Events are, however, moving very fast.

Continue reading: “Fleet Street is becoming a luxury for Murdoch”

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Business, Media |
From FT.com July 6, 2011

Having been jailed in 2007 for hacking phones on behalf of the News of the World, Glenn Mulcaire this week pleaded for understanding. “I knew what we did pushed the limits ethically,” the private investigator told The Guardian. “But, at the time, I didn’t understand that I had broken the law at all.”

Posted in Media |

Andrew Hill Brooks, Beck, and Murdoch’s queasy advertisers

July 6, 2011 3:04 pm by Andrew Hill

When advertisers put pressure on news organisations, it’s often a sign press freedom is threatened. From South Africa to Hong Kong, public opinion puts companies or governments that use their commercial clout to protest against editorial policy on the side of the bad guys.

It’s symptomatic of the sorry state of UK news media that in the widening scandal over phone-hacking, the reverse is true.

Continue reading: “Brooks, Beck, and Murdoch’s queasy advertisers”

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Advertising, Business, Media |

John Gapper Sarkozy gives himself an e-G8 internet platform

May 24, 2011 11:25 am by John Gapper

I am in Paris with a group of leaders of internet and technology companies, all of whom have been asking the same question: What am I doing here?

The formal answer is that Nicolas Sarkozy organised the e-G8 Forum in the city (in a rather hot and stuffy tent on the Tuileries gardens) and, as one internet CEO put it to me this morning: “When Sarkozy asks you to come, you come.”

Although billed as an opportunity for such executives as Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Eric Schmidt of Google to draw up recommendations on internet governance for the Deauville G8 summit, no-one is taking that too seriously.

Instead, most attendees assumed it was a talking shop to contribute to President Sarkozy’s image and his re-election as president. However, they discovered this morning that he is wilier than that.

Continue reading: “Sarkozy gives himself an e-G8 internet platform”

Tags: ,
Posted in Business, Media, Technology |

John Gapper In defence of LinkedIn

May 19, 2011 5:14 pm by John Gapper

The 137 per cent surge in LinkedIn’s shares on the first day of trading – on a stock that was initially priced at 17 times last year’s estimated sales – is pretty much impossible to justify on normal financial measures and has led to talk of a new internet bubble.

I will not try to justify it because, as I wrote the other day in a column, valuing social networks is inherently a highly risky business – there is a history of others such as Friendster, Bebo and  MySpace flaming out despite high initial hopes.

Meanwhile, I agree with John Plender’s doubts about the dual share structure being adopted by networks including LinkedIn and Renren, which insures that the founders retain control while selling shares to the public.

Yet there are at least good reasons to believe that LinkedIn is a proper business – with more potential staying power than some of the consumer-oriented social networks. Whatever it is worth, I am at least hopeful that it will stick around.

Continue reading: “In defence of LinkedIn”

Tags: ,
Posted in Media, Technology |
From FT.com May 9, 2011

Tom Glocer has been celebrating the success of the three-year integration process that melded Thomson with Reuters. But the chief executive of the information and media group needs to beware overstating the value of its ownership model. In a recent Financial Times interview, he said that Thomson Reuters – 55 per cent of which belongs to a family investment company – had “what may become the defining corporate structure of the best institutions for the next 20 years”.

Posted in Business, Media |

John Gapper A flawed measure of internet news loyalty

May 9, 2011 6:33 pm by John Gapper

The most popular measure in selling news and entertainment sites to advertisers at the moment  is “uniques” – the number of people who visit a site at least once a month. The more I hear about it, the more I question it.

The number of “uniques” is, like the radio measure of “reach”, inherently flawed because a person who clicks once on a website – or a person who tunes in for 30 seconds to a programme – counts equally with a regular reader/listener.

The degree to which “uniques” are a poor measure of loyal readership is highlighted in a new study by the Pew Research Centre in the US. Most big news sites, it points out, have very disengaged readers.

Continue reading: “A flawed measure of internet news loyalty”

Posted in Media |
From FT.com May 4, 2011

Late on Sunday night, Wolf Blitzer, the news anchor on CNN, was visibly struggling not to tell his 9m viewers something a lot of them already knew or suspected – that Osama bin Laden was dead. The rumour broke out on Twitter at 10.25pm but it was only 20 minutes later that he reported the fact.

Posted in Media, Technology |
BackOlder entries
Newer entries

Business blog

Strategy & managing

About this blog Blog guide
This blog is mainly about business and strategy and how and why people who run companies take the decisions that they do.

Most of the time, John Gapper is in New York and Andrew Hill is in London. We occasionally debate business issues between us, but your comments and criticism are welcome.




To comment, please register for free with FT.com and read our policy on submitting comments.

All posts are published in UK time.

Contact andrew.hill@ft.com or john.gapper@ft.com about the Business blog.

See the full list of FT blogs.

About John and Andrew

John Gapper is an associate editor and the chief business commentator of the FT. He has worked for the FT since 1987, covering labour relations, banking and the media. He is co-author, with Nicholas Denton, of All That Glitters, an account of the collapse of Barings in 1995.

Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He is a former City editor, financial editor, comment and analysis editor, New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.

Archive

« AprMay 2012
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031