An unique take on the recent Huffington Post buyout from the Taiwanese Next Media Animation .tv (hat tip @psmith).
NMA World Edition: AOL buys the Huffington Post – the video
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Category Archives: Business
LA Times: Huffington Post deal bad news for journalism
LA Times correspondent Tim Rutten predicts that editorial quality and pay for journalists will both fall as a result of the AOL Huffington Post buyout.
Rutten compares the Huffington Post’s business model to a “gallery rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates” where contributors often get paid less than US$50 for their contributions.
The bulk of the site’s content is provided by commentators, who work for nothing other than the opportunity to champion causes or ideas to which they’re devoted. Most of the rest of the content is “aggregated” — which is to say stolen — from the newspapers and television networks that pay journalists to gather and edit the news.
He also points to a memo from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong:
It’s fairly chilling reading, ordering the company’s editors to evaluate all future stories on the basis of “traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turnaround time.” All stories, it stressed, are to be evaluated according to their “profitability consideration”.
Crains: Mail Online to open New York office
Associated Newspapers is to open an office in New York to house journalists for Mail Online.
According to Crain’s New York Business, the news group has signed a four-year lease and will move in next month.
Mail Online receives 65 per cent of its traffic from outside the UK – 35 million unique users in December out of a total of 53.9 million, according to ABCe.
Future reports substantial progress online
A decline in print advertising at specialist leisure publisher Future has been more than compensated by strong growth in digital, the group announced today.
Print ad income fell 10 per cent year on year in the last quarter of 2010, but digital grew by 25 per cent over the same period.
Online now makes up a third of Future’s total advertising revenue and the company said income from digital magazine subscriptions was also increasing “substantially”.
Chief executive Stevie Spring said in today’s trading statement: “We expect the trading environment to remain challenging throughout 2011 but our progress online and in tablet and mobile development is pleasing.”
AP: Huffington Post sale boosts newspaper stocks
Shares in some of the big publicly quoted American newspaper groups rose yesterday on the back of news of AOL’s £195m acquisition of the Huffington Post.
Gannett rose 2.8 per cent yesterday and the New York Times Company 2.7 per cent.
According to the Associated Press, the flurry of trading activity shows that investors are still interested in news companies. “The [Huffington Post] deal raised the value on leading branded digital properties,” one analyst told the newswire.
Telegraph: IPC Media considers selling off more titles
Magazine publisher IPC Media is considering selling off more titles, after disposing of 20 publications shortly before Christmas.
Sources have told the Daily Telegraph that senior IPC executives are taking a detailed look at the whole portfolio, but no talks with interested parties have begun yet and a full sell-off of the whole business is “unlikely”.
IPC Media completed a major strategic review of its titles in December, selling off 20 magazines in the space of just a few months, including Loaded, Web User, Caravan and Guitar & Bass.
Speculation that more sales are on the way comes as Sylvia Auton returns to IPC Media as chief executive after spending four years in the US as executive vice president of parent company Time Warner.
A Time Warner spokesman told the Telegraph: “Of course we conduct regular reviews of all of our businesses to ensure we remain competitive, but there is no plan for any further action at IPC.”
IPC’s titles include Nuts, NME and Marie Claire.
European publishers to hold meeting over Apple’s proposed subscriptions change
Earlier this month it was alleged that Apple had told a number of European newspapers that soon they would not be able to offer print subscribers free access to iPad editions through the App Store.
According to this report by Apple Insider, Apple is keen to make the change to prevent publishers cutting it out of the 30 per cent fee it requires.
The story developed this week as reports such as this one by the Financial Times claimed that Apple had told book publishers customers could be given the ability to purchase books outside of an app as long as the same option is also available to customers from via an in-app purchase.
It’s not yet been confirmed whether this will apply to news media apps as well, although some reports are claiming it will.
Last week the International Newsmedia Marketing Association announced that it will hold an invitation-only roundtable on tablet subscriptions at the Park Inn Hotel at Heathrow Airport on 17 February, claiming that “Apple is changing the rules”. The roundtable will analyse Apple’s new plan, discuss ways to work with it and look at alternative subscription models.
Today paidContent reported that publishers in Belgium and France are taking the matter to the authorities, “making requests that Apple be investigated by antitrust watchdogs”.
Apple has not responded to requests for comment but paidContent points out that the situation may be made clearer later today when Apple’s VP of internet services Eddy Cue joins Rupert Murdoch to launch News Corp’s new iPad newspaper, the Daily.
Center for Public Integrity strikes content deal with Newsweek and Daily Beast
The Center for Public Integrity, a US non-profit investigative journalism organisation, will provide exclusive content to Newsweek and the Daily Beast as part of a new agreement announced this week.
The Center’s executive director William Buzenberg said in a statement today that the new deal is a “tremendous opportunity” for the organisation to provide its journalism to a new audience and get paid for its work.
Newsquest ad revenue drops almost 8% but digital revenue is on the rise
Fourth-quarter advertising revenues at UK publisher Newsquest were down 7.8 per cent year on year in 2010, while digital revenues were on the up, according to figures published by US parent company Gannett.
Gannett released its financial results for 2010 yesterday, including a detailed report of it’s fourth-quarter revenue.
The US company went on to describe Newsquest as “an internet leader in the UK”, claiming that its network of web sites attracted over 65 million monthly page impressions from approximately 8.8 million unique users in December.
You can read the full release from Gannett here…
Journalism.co.uk reported last week that staff at Newsquest titles in certain regions were understood to have been asked to take a week’s unpaid leave in response to “poor trading conditions”.
An internal Newsquest memo circulated in Wales, Gloucestershire, and the South Midlands said that revenues are “considerably below last year’s performance” and therefore action needed to be taken “to drive revenues and control costs sooner rather than later”.
MediaWeek: How long can News International hide its ABCe figures?
News International has been keeping its ABCe figures – the audited traffic figures for its news websites – close to its chest for ten months now, MediaWeek reports.
That means it has just two more months before having to either pull out of ABC membership altogether or restart publishing traffic figures for the Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of the World.
News International withdrew from the ABCes after the launch of its Times and Sunday Times paywall. The News of the World is also now behind a paywall.
A spokesman from ABCe confirmed that despite reports to the contrary last year, News International is still “absolutely a member of ABCe”.