All entries tagged: News Corp.
Earnings season: Newspapers finish 14th straight revenue-losing quarter; some intel from Wall Street filings
When revenue is still seriously down, but profits are up, is that good news? The U.S newspaper companies that have reported fourth quarter 2009 results so far would have you believe it is. But based on their reports, it’s clear the industry as a whole is still in deep trouble, with no strong indication that better days are ahead.
Five of the ten publicly-owned U.S. newspaper companies have reported their fourth-quarter 2009 results; five more to go. (Those reporting so far are Gannett, New York Times Co., Media General, Lee Enterprises and McClatchy. We also have results from News Corp., but News publishes newspapers on four continents, and much of its revenue comes from films, television, cable, and book publishing. Its U.S. newspapers represent perhaps 10 percent of News Corp.’s total revenue and are not broken out for comparison.)
Got a #tip? Gawker Media opens tag pages to masses, expecting “chaos”
Gawker Media is unveiling an innovative and unruly twist on traditional reader forums this morning. The new feature, part of an otherwise modest redesign across the company’s nine blogs, could transform tag pages, typically little more than archives of old posts, into commenter free-for-alls and transparent tip lines.
Readers are now greeted with a text box as large as the blog’s logo, inviting them to share news, videos, links, and trivialities. Tagging a message with #tips on Gawker, for instance, automatically sends it to the “tips” tag page, where anyone can follow the stream of submissions and Gawker writers will keep an eye out for news to promote on the front page. Same for #mac on Gizmodo, #snapjudgment on Jezebel, #DUAN on Deadspin, or any other tag. (If DUAN means nothing to you, then welcome to the impassioned world of loyal blog commenters. It’s short for Deadspin Up All Night.)
Gawker Open Forums is the name of this potentially wild mix of reader-controlled news and commentary. “I’m expecting chaos,” Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker Media, told me on Gchat late yesterday. “But as the front pages of our sites become ever more professional, it’s even more important to allow anarchy to bubble up from below. The goal is to blur the line between our editors and commenter-contributors.”
AP’s Tom Curley on the “oversupply” of news and what he’s doing about it
Tom Curley, president and chief executive of The Associated Press, was in China last week for a government-sponsored media summit, where he compared digital content to NCAA basketball and explained the AP’s plans to build revenue online. But Curley was far more revealing when he spoke without a prepared text on October 6 at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. I wrote about the big news from that talk on Friday but can now share the audio and transcript.
For all the criticism of Curley and the AP, he had a few really smart observations about the economics of news. Regarding the AP’s competition, which ranges from free news sites to CNN’s new wire service, he was realistic:
Our pricing has to be competitive. There are going to be more competitors. There are going to be fewer people who can afford us. This is a moment of tyranny in the marketplace. There are quality providers, and there are those who aren’t going to be able to sustain the revenues. We don’t expect to have the market share that we used to have.
Speaking broadly about the market for journalists and journalism, Curley was candid:
The truth is, again, the market for news is growing. But the reality is — and none of us can create some fantasy picture here — there is an oversupply, at least in the short term, of us. And so that is creating some differences in the market, and I see these being resolved by innovation and creativity over time.
Oh, there were silly remarks, too, like his misuse of the word “crowdsourcing” and his flat declaration that “we’re all done with random search.” (If that sounds like an ad for Bing, consider it another sign of a looming partnership between Microsoft and the AP.) Others will be interested in his explanation of how the AP will change the licenses for online distribution of its content.
Some comments that I reported on Friday aren’t contained in this recording, which covers Curley’s opening remarks and a question-and-answer session that followed. (Those additional comments are from a separate small-group chat with Curley after his speech, and my source has asked me not to post that audio.) You can download the audio, listen to it below, or read the transcript after the jump.
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Here’s the full transcript: Keep reading »
