The Consumer: Terms of Engagement
by Paul Parton
Ah, the perils of a monthly column. As usual, the things that I'm reacting to in early March will seem like ancient history by the time you read this. But, at the risk of seeming redundant, I was struck by Procter & Gamble exec Jim Stengel's keynote speech at the 4A's media conference this spring.
In many ways, the speech was a fairly familiar call for advertisers, media companies and agencies to embrace the consumer more fully. (Specifically, he suggested that marketers and agencies enter into a relationship with the consumer, rather than focusing on selling and telling.)
But a couple of points stood out. First, I hadn't realized that "telling and selling" was a P&G mantra -which explains in many ways why that approach to marketing is so ingrained. What gave me more cause to think, though, was why it's taking creative and media agencies so long to wake up and smell the Folgers.
Why are the traditional approaches to marketing communications still so widespread? Why is there still so much telling and selling? Why is the media industry still driven by buying rather than planning? Why is there still so little focus on the consumer?
Granted, even the most lumbering large agencies (creative or media) will supplement their TV campaign presentation with a little online advertising these days. Hell, they might even present (or at least talk about) viral communication. But at the end of the day, those things are really just repurposed forms of traditional media. A Web banner is usually little more than an animated billboard. Viral recommendations from traditional agencies generally come down to putting commercials online.
These things, though, are examples of media neutrality - or of the idea that it doesn't matter whether you're on TV or on the Web, as long as you connect with the consumer. When agencies endorse this concept, it makes them seem more progressive than they actually are.
Unfortunately, the reality is that media neutrality is the first baby step toward engaging with people the way that people want to engage with brands. Media neutrality is really easy. Because essentially, media neutrality comes down to different forms of the same thing - advertising.
What is significantly more difficult - and yet significantly more important, too - is discipline neutrality.
Being discipline neutral means that you're just as likely to propose a direct marketing solution to a communications problem as you are to present an advertising solution, a search solution or a PR solution.
Discipline neutrality is more difficult to embrace than media neutrality because it demands a working understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of different communication strategies and the ability to execute them.
Discipline neutrality demands that everything starts with a granular understanding of the consumer how they live, what's important to them and how they engage with the category and the brand. The task, then, is to build a communications plan from that understanding with no preconceived ideas about the form that plan will take or the disciplines or channels that will be used.
Consider, for instance, an agency tasked with jump-starting the sales of a brand of canned soup. The conventional approach would involve creating a TV and print campaign that would, say, extol the benefits of soup as an aid to weight loss. The ads would run in daytime talk shows and women's lifestyle magazines.
The media-neutral approach would be to do the same thing but take it further by sponsoring a segment on "The Biggest Loser," seeding the campaign in weight-loss forums and encouraging bloggers to write about the soup.
The discipline-neutral approach would be to understand how people used the soup and what kind of relationship they had with the brand. It could turn out, for example, that the soup was generally consumed at lunchtime, but only by people with microwaves in their offices. In this case, the discipline-neutral approach could consist of designing a self-heating soup can and launching it with sampling programs at major commuting locations and in city delis.
That kind of approach is the only way brands will ever really be able to develop a relationship with consumers. It's the opposite of "telling and selling." It's understanding customers and finding ways to engage them in a relevant way with genuinely useful innovation. Who'd argue with that?
Paul Parton is the brand-planning partner at The Brooklyn Brothers, a creative collective.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
Major Magazine Distributor Acquires Primedia Enthusiast Magazines
Major Magazine Distributor Acquires Primedia Enthusiast Magazines
by Tony Silber
http://foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=7715
Source Interlink Companies, one of the leading magazine distributors, announced today that it is acquiring Primedia Enthusiast Media (PEM) in a stock purchase for approximately $1.2 billion in cash.
A public company based in Bonita Springs, Florida, Source Interlink also distributes DVDs, music CDs, and books. It generated about $1.9 billion in its fiscal 2007, which ended January 31.
Source Interlink is controlled by Yucaipa Cos., a supermarket-holding company owned by billionaire businessman Ron Burkle. Last week, Folio: reported that insiders were saying the Burkle bid was coming on strong, although one source told Folio: the Burkle bid (mentioned to be in connection with American Media) was not being taken seriously. “It is a stunning development that a publicly owned distribution company controlled by Ron Burkle is buying one of the largest portfolios of enthusiast magazines,” one source said Monday morning. “It’s shocking. The valuation is significantly higher than they would have gotten from others.”
Indeed, Source Interlink also paid significantly more than sources in the last few weeks indicated the company might get. PEM, with revenue of about $524 million and EBITDA of about $100 million, turned out to command an EBITDA multiple of about 12-times.
To fund the acquisition, Source Interlink has secured a financing commitment from Citigroup Global Markets. It was unclear at presstime whether American Media was involved.
Source Interlink has been on a buying spree in recent years. In 2004, it acquired Empire News, and in 2005, it acquired Chas. Levy Circulating Co. for $30 million, giving it about 20 percent of the single-copy magazine-distribution market.
“Over the last several years Source has driven the consolidation of a fragmented and inefficient channel for the distribution and merchandising of home entertainment content at retail and the newsstand,” said Source Interlink chairman Michael Duckworth. “This acquisition is a first step to leverage what we have built by transforming Source into a fully integrated media company with both print and digital content. Primedia Enthusiast Media's industry-leading special interest magazine titles and consumer Web sites diversifies our earnings streams and accelerates our growth.”
Following the completion of the transaction, PEM will operate as a division of Source Interlink and will be headed by Steve Parr, PEM’s current president. He will report to Duckworth.
PEM is the leading special-interest magazine publisher in the U.S., with over 70 magazines. Its portfolio includes: Motor Trend, Automobile, Hot Rod, Lowrider, Soap Opera Digest and Soap Opera Weekly, Power & Motoryacht
by Tony Silber
http://foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=7715
Source Interlink Companies, one of the leading magazine distributors, announced today that it is acquiring Primedia Enthusiast Media (PEM) in a stock purchase for approximately $1.2 billion in cash.
A public company based in Bonita Springs, Florida, Source Interlink also distributes DVDs, music CDs, and books. It generated about $1.9 billion in its fiscal 2007, which ended January 31.
Source Interlink is controlled by Yucaipa Cos., a supermarket-holding company owned by billionaire businessman Ron Burkle. Last week, Folio: reported that insiders were saying the Burkle bid was coming on strong, although one source told Folio: the Burkle bid (mentioned to be in connection with American Media) was not being taken seriously. “It is a stunning development that a publicly owned distribution company controlled by Ron Burkle is buying one of the largest portfolios of enthusiast magazines,” one source said Monday morning. “It’s shocking. The valuation is significantly higher than they would have gotten from others.”
Indeed, Source Interlink also paid significantly more than sources in the last few weeks indicated the company might get. PEM, with revenue of about $524 million and EBITDA of about $100 million, turned out to command an EBITDA multiple of about 12-times.
To fund the acquisition, Source Interlink has secured a financing commitment from Citigroup Global Markets. It was unclear at presstime whether American Media was involved.
Source Interlink has been on a buying spree in recent years. In 2004, it acquired Empire News, and in 2005, it acquired Chas. Levy Circulating Co. for $30 million, giving it about 20 percent of the single-copy magazine-distribution market.
“Over the last several years Source has driven the consolidation of a fragmented and inefficient channel for the distribution and merchandising of home entertainment content at retail and the newsstand,” said Source Interlink chairman Michael Duckworth. “This acquisition is a first step to leverage what we have built by transforming Source into a fully integrated media company with both print and digital content. Primedia Enthusiast Media's industry-leading special interest magazine titles and consumer Web sites diversifies our earnings streams and accelerates our growth.”
Following the completion of the transaction, PEM will operate as a division of Source Interlink and will be headed by Steve Parr, PEM’s current president. He will report to Duckworth.
PEM is the leading special-interest magazine publisher in the U.S., with over 70 magazines. Its portfolio includes: Motor Trend, Automobile, Hot Rod, Lowrider, Soap Opera Digest and Soap Opera Weekly, Power & Motoryacht
Who says industry magazines are cozy with their advertisers?
A Nod to Journalistic Integrity Is Seen in an Editor’s Return
By DAVID S. JOACHIM
Who says industry magazines are cozy with their advertisers?
Last week, the International Data Group removed the chief executive of its largest-circulation computer magazine, PC World, and reinstated its top editor, who had quit days earlier over the executive’s decision to not run an article critical of an advertiser.
The editor in chief, Harry McCracken, rejoined the magazine on Wednesday after the disputed article, “10 Things We Hate About Apple,” was posted on the magazine’s Web site.
It was a hero’s homecoming for Mr. McCracken, who was praised on the PCWorld.com message boards and in the blogosphere for sacrificing himself in the name of journalistic integrity.
“I was on the brink of canceling my subscription,” wrote one reader. “Now that McCracken’s back, I’ll stick around, too.”
PC World, a monthly magazine with a companion Web site that mixes technology news with product reviews, has a reputation for smart and sometimes hard-hitting articles that often offend big tech companies.
In recent years, it has criticized several of its advertisers for what it described were bait-and-switch tactics and price gouging. Its survey of the reliability of manufacturers has given poor ratings to several of the magazine’s advertisers. It even has a regular column chronicling the defects in Microsoft software.
Mr. McCracken says that several advertisers have withdrawn ads over the years, after their products were negatively reviewed in the magazine, most recently last month. (He would not name the advertiser.)
“PC World is surprisingly reportorial, especially against some other technology magazines that don’t invest a lot” in articles that might provoke companies, said Sam Whitmore, an analyst in Beverly, Mass., who tracks technology publishers.
That may explain why Mr. McCracken’s resignation drew the attention of hundreds of bloggers. It became a cause célèbre for many who viewed the spiking of the article as an affront to Silicon Valley’s Fourth Estate. To others, it was a confirmation of what they had long suspected — that the business side routinely meddles in editorial decisions at technology magazines, especially in recent years, as ad pages have declined considerably, leaving many magazines to rely on only a handful of advertisers.
Mr. McCracken says he did not quit to make a statement. But now, a part of him is glad that the skirmish became public. “With the conclusion we reached, this should tell everyone that computer journalism isn’t sleazy,” he said.
Even so, on blogs and in interviews, some observers noted that the final version of the Apple article appeared next to another article titled, “10 Things We Love About Apple,” making them wonder whether a compromise had been made to appease Apple, and whether the “We Hate” article had been toned down before publication.
Mr. McCracken, a 12-year veteran of PC World, said that the dustup with his boss occurred while the “We Hate” article was still a draft, and that editing was done before it was published. He said, however, that it was edited without consideration to how Apple might react. He also said that the “We Love” article had been planned all along.
He acknowledged that the “We Hate” article made for an odd source of controversy, because it required little reporting and contained no news. “We saw it as a fun little story that would get people talking,” he said. Wired News called it a “fluffy piece of Digg bait” meant to compel user-driven news sites like Digg.com to link to it.
The ousted chief executive of PC World, Colin Crawford, has been reassigned to his old job of overseeing business development for International Data’s online properties. He did not respond to messages left at his office and on his cellphone.
Mr. Crawford, who had been at PC World for only two months, spent 10 years as chief executive of the company’s Macworld magazine, which is devoted to Apple’s line of Macintosh products. International Data also runs the Macworld convention, where the chief executive of Apple, Steven P. Jobs, introduced the iPhone in January.
Apple is “not just any advertiser,” Mr. Whitmore, the analyst, said, pointing out that Mr. Jobs had a reputation for trying to influence coverage of the company.
Apple did not return calls seeking comment. The writers of the Apple articles, Narasu Rebbapragada and Alan Stafford, declined to comment.
By DAVID S. JOACHIM
Who says industry magazines are cozy with their advertisers?
Last week, the International Data Group removed the chief executive of its largest-circulation computer magazine, PC World, and reinstated its top editor, who had quit days earlier over the executive’s decision to not run an article critical of an advertiser.
The editor in chief, Harry McCracken, rejoined the magazine on Wednesday after the disputed article, “10 Things We Hate About Apple,” was posted on the magazine’s Web site.
It was a hero’s homecoming for Mr. McCracken, who was praised on the PCWorld.com message boards and in the blogosphere for sacrificing himself in the name of journalistic integrity.
“I was on the brink of canceling my subscription,” wrote one reader. “Now that McCracken’s back, I’ll stick around, too.”
PC World, a monthly magazine with a companion Web site that mixes technology news with product reviews, has a reputation for smart and sometimes hard-hitting articles that often offend big tech companies.
In recent years, it has criticized several of its advertisers for what it described were bait-and-switch tactics and price gouging. Its survey of the reliability of manufacturers has given poor ratings to several of the magazine’s advertisers. It even has a regular column chronicling the defects in Microsoft software.
Mr. McCracken says that several advertisers have withdrawn ads over the years, after their products were negatively reviewed in the magazine, most recently last month. (He would not name the advertiser.)
“PC World is surprisingly reportorial, especially against some other technology magazines that don’t invest a lot” in articles that might provoke companies, said Sam Whitmore, an analyst in Beverly, Mass., who tracks technology publishers.
That may explain why Mr. McCracken’s resignation drew the attention of hundreds of bloggers. It became a cause célèbre for many who viewed the spiking of the article as an affront to Silicon Valley’s Fourth Estate. To others, it was a confirmation of what they had long suspected — that the business side routinely meddles in editorial decisions at technology magazines, especially in recent years, as ad pages have declined considerably, leaving many magazines to rely on only a handful of advertisers.
Mr. McCracken says he did not quit to make a statement. But now, a part of him is glad that the skirmish became public. “With the conclusion we reached, this should tell everyone that computer journalism isn’t sleazy,” he said.
Even so, on blogs and in interviews, some observers noted that the final version of the Apple article appeared next to another article titled, “10 Things We Love About Apple,” making them wonder whether a compromise had been made to appease Apple, and whether the “We Hate” article had been toned down before publication.
Mr. McCracken, a 12-year veteran of PC World, said that the dustup with his boss occurred while the “We Hate” article was still a draft, and that editing was done before it was published. He said, however, that it was edited without consideration to how Apple might react. He also said that the “We Love” article had been planned all along.
He acknowledged that the “We Hate” article made for an odd source of controversy, because it required little reporting and contained no news. “We saw it as a fun little story that would get people talking,” he said. Wired News called it a “fluffy piece of Digg bait” meant to compel user-driven news sites like Digg.com to link to it.
The ousted chief executive of PC World, Colin Crawford, has been reassigned to his old job of overseeing business development for International Data’s online properties. He did not respond to messages left at his office and on his cellphone.
Mr. Crawford, who had been at PC World for only two months, spent 10 years as chief executive of the company’s Macworld magazine, which is devoted to Apple’s line of Macintosh products. International Data also runs the Macworld convention, where the chief executive of Apple, Steven P. Jobs, introduced the iPhone in January.
Apple is “not just any advertiser,” Mr. Whitmore, the analyst, said, pointing out that Mr. Jobs had a reputation for trying to influence coverage of the company.
Apple did not return calls seeking comment. The writers of the Apple articles, Narasu Rebbapragada and Alan Stafford, declined to comment.
Mag Bag: Stuff Goes to the Kentucky Derby, Stack Takes a Different Tack
Mag Bag: Stuff Goes to the Kentucky Derby, Stack Takes a Different Tack
by Erik Sass, Monday, May 14, 2007 7:00 AM ET
http://publications.mediapost.com
Stuff Goes to the Kentucky Derby, Stack Takes a Different Tack
Magazines are getting into event marketing in a big way, using high-engagement activities to draw groups of readers together and form a sense of identity centered on the publications. One favorite high-interest theme, of course, is sports--from both the fan and participant perspectives. These two sides of the sporting world have rather different vibes, of course.
The fan side might best be described as "decadent and depraved," at least when you're talking about the Kentucky Derby. A party hosted by Stuff magazine figured prominently among the revels on Saturday when Street Sense won the Kentucky Derby--as well as the revels both before and after the event, a 30-second race at the center of a two-day bout of upper-class binge drinking. The magazine, whose publisher wants to head up-market, is tapping into a variety of upper-crust class signifiers, including establishing its own online concierge service and now the Kentucky Derby. The association with Hunter S. Thompson, a renowned drinker, probably doesn't hurt either.
The Stuff magazine party on the eve of the Derby, after the Derby's annual Barnstable Brown party, was hosted by cover babe Taryn Manning, with guests including Jermaine Dupri, Janet Jackson, Joey Fatone, and NSync's Chris Kirkpatrick. Queen Elizabeth II did not attend--perhaps unconvinced by the "high class" vibe of the event; nor was she seen at the competing Crown Royal Playboy Lounge party.
The Derby party is one of a raft of upper-crust initiatives from Stuff and fellow Dennis Publishing title Maxim, which in recent years have both sought to shed its decade-old moniker of "lad mags." With the implosion of that category confirmed by the demise of down-market competitor FHM, the magazines are trying to reposition themselves as vehicles for advertisers to reach affluent, employed young men, both married and single, with (slightly) more highbrow content and lifestyle advice. Maxim is opening a chain of steakhouses with Jeffrey Chodorow, and has teamed with Concord Wilshire Partners to build a 2,300-room Maxim-themed hotel and casino on a 9-acre plot on the famed Las Vegas strip.
Meanwhile, Stack--a magazine targeting high school athletes with training tips and celebrity profiles--is taking a rather different approach: it's hosting a series of events where ambitious high school athletes can meet hundreds of coaches and recruiters from the nation's best collegiate athletic programs. In addition to helping readers get a shot at the big time, the recruiting events fit with the publication's multimedia delivery strategy: video of the events will be posted on the site, which also features exclusive video of celebrity athletes. Users are also invited to post clips of their workout routines and "best of" moments.
Since its founding in 2005, Stack has grown from an initial circulation of about 300,000 to 400,000 this year. With advertisers like Nike, Gatorade, U.S. Marines, Adidas, Sony PlayStation and New Balance, the magazine has a cover price of $4.99, but is distributed free to high school students through partnerships with school athletic directors. Its "Elite Tour" for high school football players will visit five cities: Atlanta on May 13th, Miami on May 19th, New York City on May 20th, Dallas on May 26th, and Los Angeles on May 27th.
Meredith to Map Home Renovation Projects, Consumer Behavior
Meredith Corporation is launching a research effort to figure out what consumers need for home renovations, when and how much of it they need, and where they typically go to procure it. The new research program, called HomeSight, promises to open a new area of business for Meredith's already substantial custom marketing efforts. HomeSight is being launched in partnership with CNW Marketing/Research, a consumer research organization based in Portland, Oregon. CNW's robust database of 5 million households covers a spectrum of geographic locations, financial attributes, "lifestages," and various related demographic attributes. Meredith will begin presenting the data to major homeware manufacturers and makers of other products used in home renovations, focusing on specific areas like bathroom or kitchen projects over the next couple of months.
Vibe's Gertler Steps Down
Eric Gertler, CEO of Vibe Media, is stepping down after 10 months, leaving the Wicks Group looking for a new publisher. No reason for the move was given; in January of this year Vibe President Ari Horowitz also stepped down. The Wicks Group, which owns Vibe Media, is said to be looking for a replacement for Gertler.
Mansueto Names Tebeau Publisher of Inc. Magazine
John Tebeau has been named publisher of Inc. magazine, effective immediately, according to Mansueto Ventures, which publishes both Inc. and Fast Company magazine. Mansueto CEO John Koten remarked: Under John's leadership, several new advertisers appeared in Inc. in the first quarter of 2007, including Comcast, Ketel One Vodka, Nissan Altima, Northern Trust, BMW, Wachovia, American Chemistry Council and UPS. His drive and vision will be instrumental in leading our advertising sales team as we continue to expand the Inc. brand with new ventures and programs." Tebeau was hired in 2005 as national sales director.
by Erik Sass, Monday, May 14, 2007 7:00 AM ET
http://publications.mediapost.com
Stuff Goes to the Kentucky Derby, Stack Takes a Different Tack
Magazines are getting into event marketing in a big way, using high-engagement activities to draw groups of readers together and form a sense of identity centered on the publications. One favorite high-interest theme, of course, is sports--from both the fan and participant perspectives. These two sides of the sporting world have rather different vibes, of course.
The fan side might best be described as "decadent and depraved," at least when you're talking about the Kentucky Derby. A party hosted by Stuff magazine figured prominently among the revels on Saturday when Street Sense won the Kentucky Derby--as well as the revels both before and after the event, a 30-second race at the center of a two-day bout of upper-class binge drinking. The magazine, whose publisher wants to head up-market, is tapping into a variety of upper-crust class signifiers, including establishing its own online concierge service and now the Kentucky Derby. The association with Hunter S. Thompson, a renowned drinker, probably doesn't hurt either.
The Stuff magazine party on the eve of the Derby, after the Derby's annual Barnstable Brown party, was hosted by cover babe Taryn Manning, with guests including Jermaine Dupri, Janet Jackson, Joey Fatone, and NSync's Chris Kirkpatrick. Queen Elizabeth II did not attend--perhaps unconvinced by the "high class" vibe of the event; nor was she seen at the competing Crown Royal Playboy Lounge party.
The Derby party is one of a raft of upper-crust initiatives from Stuff and fellow Dennis Publishing title Maxim, which in recent years have both sought to shed its decade-old moniker of "lad mags." With the implosion of that category confirmed by the demise of down-market competitor FHM, the magazines are trying to reposition themselves as vehicles for advertisers to reach affluent, employed young men, both married and single, with (slightly) more highbrow content and lifestyle advice. Maxim is opening a chain of steakhouses with Jeffrey Chodorow, and has teamed with Concord Wilshire Partners to build a 2,300-room Maxim-themed hotel and casino on a 9-acre plot on the famed Las Vegas strip.
Meanwhile, Stack--a magazine targeting high school athletes with training tips and celebrity profiles--is taking a rather different approach: it's hosting a series of events where ambitious high school athletes can meet hundreds of coaches and recruiters from the nation's best collegiate athletic programs. In addition to helping readers get a shot at the big time, the recruiting events fit with the publication's multimedia delivery strategy: video of the events will be posted on the site, which also features exclusive video of celebrity athletes. Users are also invited to post clips of their workout routines and "best of" moments.
Since its founding in 2005, Stack has grown from an initial circulation of about 300,000 to 400,000 this year. With advertisers like Nike, Gatorade, U.S. Marines, Adidas, Sony PlayStation and New Balance, the magazine has a cover price of $4.99, but is distributed free to high school students through partnerships with school athletic directors. Its "Elite Tour" for high school football players will visit five cities: Atlanta on May 13th, Miami on May 19th, New York City on May 20th, Dallas on May 26th, and Los Angeles on May 27th.
Meredith to Map Home Renovation Projects, Consumer Behavior
Meredith Corporation is launching a research effort to figure out what consumers need for home renovations, when and how much of it they need, and where they typically go to procure it. The new research program, called HomeSight, promises to open a new area of business for Meredith's already substantial custom marketing efforts. HomeSight is being launched in partnership with CNW Marketing/Research, a consumer research organization based in Portland, Oregon. CNW's robust database of 5 million households covers a spectrum of geographic locations, financial attributes, "lifestages," and various related demographic attributes. Meredith will begin presenting the data to major homeware manufacturers and makers of other products used in home renovations, focusing on specific areas like bathroom or kitchen projects over the next couple of months.
Vibe's Gertler Steps Down
Eric Gertler, CEO of Vibe Media, is stepping down after 10 months, leaving the Wicks Group looking for a new publisher. No reason for the move was given; in January of this year Vibe President Ari Horowitz also stepped down. The Wicks Group, which owns Vibe Media, is said to be looking for a replacement for Gertler.
Mansueto Names Tebeau Publisher of Inc. Magazine
John Tebeau has been named publisher of Inc. magazine, effective immediately, according to Mansueto Ventures, which publishes both Inc. and Fast Company magazine. Mansueto CEO John Koten remarked: Under John's leadership, several new advertisers appeared in Inc. in the first quarter of 2007, including Comcast, Ketel One Vodka, Nissan Altima, Northern Trust, BMW, Wachovia, American Chemistry Council and UPS. His drive and vision will be instrumental in leading our advertising sales team as we continue to expand the Inc. brand with new ventures and programs." Tebeau was hired in 2005 as national sales director.
Affluent Regional Magazine Readership in 87 Markets
Affluent Regional Magazine Readership in 87 Markets
According to a new report by The Media Audit, Texas Monthly, which is read by more than two million adults across the state of Texas, reaches 38.7% of all adults in San Antonio who earn $75,000 or more in household income, making it the number one publication in reaching affluent households among The Media Audit's 87 measured markets.
And Austin came in second! The surveys, through March 2007, found that Texas Monthly in Austin ranked second in reaching affluent households (38.2% of affluent households read one or more of the past four issues). Affluent households are defined as those adults who earn $75,000 or more in household income. Next are:
Texas Monthly in Houston (33.5%)
Tucson Lifestyle (31.7%)
Boston Magazine (31.6%)
The conversion rate used by The Media Audit (the percent of total readers who are likely to read every issue) points to the loyalty or frequency of exposure of a media's audience. Among the affluent reading the Texas Monthly in San Antonio and the Tucson Lifestyle, more than three quarters of the total readers also read the past issue, suggesting that these publication's affluent readers are very likely to be exposed to every issue, concludes the report.
Bob Jordan, President of Houston-based International Demographics, Inc., comments, "The degree of audience loyalty for these City and Regional Magazines is significant when you compare them to other media such as radio or television..."
Rounding out the top ten publications reaching affluent households one or more times in the previous four issues are:
Pittsburgh Magazine (30.6% of affluent adults)
D Magazine in Dallas-Ft. Worth (30.4%)
Sacramento Magazine (29.5%)
Gulfshore Life in Ft. Myers-Naples (28.6%)
Milwaukee Magazine (28.3%)
According to a new report by The Media Audit, Texas Monthly, which is read by more than two million adults across the state of Texas, reaches 38.7% of all adults in San Antonio who earn $75,000 or more in household income, making it the number one publication in reaching affluent households among The Media Audit's 87 measured markets.
And Austin came in second! The surveys, through March 2007, found that Texas Monthly in Austin ranked second in reaching affluent households (38.2% of affluent households read one or more of the past four issues). Affluent households are defined as those adults who earn $75,000 or more in household income. Next are:
Texas Monthly in Houston (33.5%)
Tucson Lifestyle (31.7%)
Boston Magazine (31.6%)
The conversion rate used by The Media Audit (the percent of total readers who are likely to read every issue) points to the loyalty or frequency of exposure of a media's audience. Among the affluent reading the Texas Monthly in San Antonio and the Tucson Lifestyle, more than three quarters of the total readers also read the past issue, suggesting that these publication's affluent readers are very likely to be exposed to every issue, concludes the report.
Bob Jordan, President of Houston-based International Demographics, Inc., comments, "The degree of audience loyalty for these City and Regional Magazines is significant when you compare them to other media such as radio or television..."
Rounding out the top ten publications reaching affluent households one or more times in the previous four issues are:
Pittsburgh Magazine (30.6% of affluent adults)
D Magazine in Dallas-Ft. Worth (30.4%)
Sacramento Magazine (29.5%)
Gulfshore Life in Ft. Myers-Naples (28.6%)
Milwaukee Magazine (28.3%)
For Magazine Industry, Less may be More
For magazine industry, less may be more
Time magazine's move to shed subscribers aims to shore up the publication.
By Randy Dotinga
Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
These days, Time magazine may not have much time for its 2006 Person of the Year – you.
A few months ago, the venerable newsmagazine announced that it will cut the number of paying readers that it guarantees to advertisers from 4 million to 3.25 million. Publicly, at least, Time doesn't care if 750,000 subscribers throw all those pesky renewal notices in the trash.
On the other hand, Time is reaching out to its most loyal readers through a beefed-up website, a new arrival date on newsstands, and a stable of spotlighted writers who fill its pages with commentary instead of traditional news reporting.
Why the extreme makeover? While the magazine industry is doing well as a whole, Time and its rival newsweeklies are struggling to stay afloat. Gutted by staff cuts and suffering from sluggish circulation, they're trying to figure out how to avoid the grim future facing the newspaper industry.
Time's solution is to adopt the philosophy that's ruled the wider magazine industry for years: Don't try to please all readers all of the time. Instead, just make some readers happy most of the time.
"The trend in the whole magazine industry has been from the general to the special interest," says Shirrel Rhoades, a consultant and a former vice president at Reader's Digest. The result: hundreds of magazines geared toward miniature dollhouse aficionados, surfers, and owners of old houses.
While there have been some high-profile magazine failures in the last decade (including Talk, George, and, most recently, the movie magazine Premiere), the total circulation of American magazines rose to 370 million in 2006, the highest since 2000.
High-brow magazines like The New Yorker and The Economist are doing especially well, and there are some 200 more magazines about just three subjects – dogs, golf, and interior design – than there were just a decade ago.
But the circulation of the Big Three newsmagazines (Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report) was largely flat in 2006, reaching a combined audience of about 9 million. They've each lost readers over the past 20 years, despite the growth of the US population.
"The extent of their influence has declined," says journalism professor David Sumner, coordinator of the magazine program at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. "News has become more of a commodity, and it's cheap and easy to find."
As a result, the newsmagazines "are trying to reinvent themselves to compete with all the free news available on the cable channels and online," Mr. Sumner says. "They're trying hard to provide more interpretation, insight, and context, as well as soft entertainment stuff."
But cost-cutting has hobbled the news magazines. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Newsweek and Time cut their news bureaus from a combined total of 62 in 1983 to 37 in 2006. They've also drastically reduced their staffs over that time period, with Time going from 362 to 226 employees, and Newsweek falling from 348 to 165.
Advertising doesn't appear to be saving the day, financially. While statistics suggest advertising in magazines in 2006 reached its highest level in six years, the newsweeklies reported little growth in total ad dollars.
Among the Big Three, Time has been in the forefront of change with its redesign and the change in its publishing date from Monday to Friday, intended to allow the magazine to be more timely for a weekend audience. Time is also publishing more original content on the Internet and devoting extra space in the magazine to commentary.
Time declined to make any company officials available for interviews for this story, but an editor's note in the magazine said Time hoped its redesign would make it "more meaningful and more forward looking."
In perhaps its most drastic move, Time is hoping to persuade advertisers to consider its cumulative reach, including website readers and those who read someone else's copy of the print magazine.
Traditionally, advertisers focus on a magazine's paid circulation, but Time is reducing the number of paid readers it guarantees to advertisers by 19 percent. In 2005, TV Guide made a similar move by slashing its guaranteed circulation from 9 million to 3.2 million.
While it may seem counterintuitive, dumping paid readers can save magazines money by allowing them to reduce the amount they spend persuading fickle subscribers to renew. And advertisers may appreciate being able to reach a more select and loyal audience.
Newsweek, meanwhile, continues to publish on Mondays and offer a more traditional mix of stories. Writers still tie up stories with pithy conclusions, using what staffers have called the authoritative "voice of God."
Newsweek wants to report less and interpret more, says worldwide publisher Gregory Osberg. "In the past, you followed the news. Now we're getting out in front of it and providing analysis."
Along those lines, Newsweek's website may offer a more specific focus on topics like politics, technology, and healthcare, Mr. Osberg says.
As for the third-place newsweekly, U.S. News & World Report remains the most serious – or the stodgiest, depending on your point of view – of the Top 3. It continues to focus heavily on topics like international news, politics, and business. It gives scant attention to, say, Paris Hilton's latest shenanigans. In fact, an analysis of eight months of 2006 issues by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that U.S. News allocated less than 1 percent of its pages to celebrity and entertainment news; Time and Newsweek devoted 11 to 12 times as much of their space to those topics.
In regard to the future of magazines as a whole, industry insiders will be closely following the success or failure of a glossy new monthly business magazine called Condé Nast Portfolio, which published its first issue in April.
"Portfolio is being held up as the last big example of whether an old-school print magazine launch can still make it," says Matthew Kinsman, managing editor of the industry journal Folio:. "Their fate will have a lot of impact on the rest of the magazine world."
Overall, there seems to be much less hand-wringing in the magazine industry compared with, say, the newspaper business. There's plenty of speculation that your local daily newspaper could vanish in 20 years or less, but no one is saying that People, Good Housekeeping, and National Geographic will go the way of Life and Look magazines.
People move from place to place and encounter different newspapers, but magazines remain longstanding parts of people's lives, says journalism professor Sumner. "People feel more of an emotional bond to magazines, particularly if they've been long-term subscribers," he says.
Then there's the simple pleasure of reading a long, fascinating story on the couch instead of in a desk chair, staring at a computer monitor. "The portability and convenience factor will ensure that print magazines will be around for a long time," Sumner predicts.
Time magazine's move to shed subscribers aims to shore up the publication.
By Randy Dotinga
Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
These days, Time magazine may not have much time for its 2006 Person of the Year – you.
A few months ago, the venerable newsmagazine announced that it will cut the number of paying readers that it guarantees to advertisers from 4 million to 3.25 million. Publicly, at least, Time doesn't care if 750,000 subscribers throw all those pesky renewal notices in the trash.
On the other hand, Time is reaching out to its most loyal readers through a beefed-up website, a new arrival date on newsstands, and a stable of spotlighted writers who fill its pages with commentary instead of traditional news reporting.
Why the extreme makeover? While the magazine industry is doing well as a whole, Time and its rival newsweeklies are struggling to stay afloat. Gutted by staff cuts and suffering from sluggish circulation, they're trying to figure out how to avoid the grim future facing the newspaper industry.
Time's solution is to adopt the philosophy that's ruled the wider magazine industry for years: Don't try to please all readers all of the time. Instead, just make some readers happy most of the time.
"The trend in the whole magazine industry has been from the general to the special interest," says Shirrel Rhoades, a consultant and a former vice president at Reader's Digest. The result: hundreds of magazines geared toward miniature dollhouse aficionados, surfers, and owners of old houses.
While there have been some high-profile magazine failures in the last decade (including Talk, George, and, most recently, the movie magazine Premiere), the total circulation of American magazines rose to 370 million in 2006, the highest since 2000.
High-brow magazines like The New Yorker and The Economist are doing especially well, and there are some 200 more magazines about just three subjects – dogs, golf, and interior design – than there were just a decade ago.
But the circulation of the Big Three newsmagazines (Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report) was largely flat in 2006, reaching a combined audience of about 9 million. They've each lost readers over the past 20 years, despite the growth of the US population.
"The extent of their influence has declined," says journalism professor David Sumner, coordinator of the magazine program at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. "News has become more of a commodity, and it's cheap and easy to find."
As a result, the newsmagazines "are trying to reinvent themselves to compete with all the free news available on the cable channels and online," Mr. Sumner says. "They're trying hard to provide more interpretation, insight, and context, as well as soft entertainment stuff."
But cost-cutting has hobbled the news magazines. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Newsweek and Time cut their news bureaus from a combined total of 62 in 1983 to 37 in 2006. They've also drastically reduced their staffs over that time period, with Time going from 362 to 226 employees, and Newsweek falling from 348 to 165.
Advertising doesn't appear to be saving the day, financially. While statistics suggest advertising in magazines in 2006 reached its highest level in six years, the newsweeklies reported little growth in total ad dollars.
Among the Big Three, Time has been in the forefront of change with its redesign and the change in its publishing date from Monday to Friday, intended to allow the magazine to be more timely for a weekend audience. Time is also publishing more original content on the Internet and devoting extra space in the magazine to commentary.
Time declined to make any company officials available for interviews for this story, but an editor's note in the magazine said Time hoped its redesign would make it "more meaningful and more forward looking."
In perhaps its most drastic move, Time is hoping to persuade advertisers to consider its cumulative reach, including website readers and those who read someone else's copy of the print magazine.
Traditionally, advertisers focus on a magazine's paid circulation, but Time is reducing the number of paid readers it guarantees to advertisers by 19 percent. In 2005, TV Guide made a similar move by slashing its guaranteed circulation from 9 million to 3.2 million.
While it may seem counterintuitive, dumping paid readers can save magazines money by allowing them to reduce the amount they spend persuading fickle subscribers to renew. And advertisers may appreciate being able to reach a more select and loyal audience.
Newsweek, meanwhile, continues to publish on Mondays and offer a more traditional mix of stories. Writers still tie up stories with pithy conclusions, using what staffers have called the authoritative "voice of God."
Newsweek wants to report less and interpret more, says worldwide publisher Gregory Osberg. "In the past, you followed the news. Now we're getting out in front of it and providing analysis."
Along those lines, Newsweek's website may offer a more specific focus on topics like politics, technology, and healthcare, Mr. Osberg says.
As for the third-place newsweekly, U.S. News & World Report remains the most serious – or the stodgiest, depending on your point of view – of the Top 3. It continues to focus heavily on topics like international news, politics, and business. It gives scant attention to, say, Paris Hilton's latest shenanigans. In fact, an analysis of eight months of 2006 issues by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that U.S. News allocated less than 1 percent of its pages to celebrity and entertainment news; Time and Newsweek devoted 11 to 12 times as much of their space to those topics.
In regard to the future of magazines as a whole, industry insiders will be closely following the success or failure of a glossy new monthly business magazine called Condé Nast Portfolio, which published its first issue in April.
"Portfolio is being held up as the last big example of whether an old-school print magazine launch can still make it," says Matthew Kinsman, managing editor of the industry journal Folio:. "Their fate will have a lot of impact on the rest of the magazine world."
Overall, there seems to be much less hand-wringing in the magazine industry compared with, say, the newspaper business. There's plenty of speculation that your local daily newspaper could vanish in 20 years or less, but no one is saying that People, Good Housekeeping, and National Geographic will go the way of Life and Look magazines.
People move from place to place and encounter different newspapers, but magazines remain longstanding parts of people's lives, says journalism professor Sumner. "People feel more of an emotional bond to magazines, particularly if they've been long-term subscribers," he says.
Then there's the simple pleasure of reading a long, fascinating story on the couch instead of in a desk chair, staring at a computer monitor. "The portability and convenience factor will ensure that print magazines will be around for a long time," Sumner predicts.
'Paper dumping' hotline planned
'Paper dumping' hotline planned
Mark Sweney
MediaGuardian.co.uk
Ditched: copies of the London Paper and London Lite in a bin. Photo: Christian Sinibaldi
Londoners fed up with seeing dumped copies of London Lite and the London Paper around the capital may soon have an outlet for their frustration, with plans afoot for a complaints line people can call to report alleged dumping.
A complaints line is one of four proposals the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the body that audits newspaper sales, is considering as it seeks to stamp out dumping of the two London freesheets.
The ABC said its investigation of alleged dumping had found evidence that copies of London Lite, published by Associated Newspapers, and the News International-owned London Paper are being ditched.
As a result ABC is asking the publishers of both freesheets to adhere to a tighter code of conduct, including giving "consideration" to setting up a dumping complaints phone line for members of the public to report offences.
"The review has identified that copies of newspapers are being dumped which is, obviously, not compliant with the ABC rules," the organisation said.
ABC added that it was, however, "satisfied" that the reported circulation figures for April are "materially compliant".
"Having identified the distinct risk associated with hand distribution, ABC, in conjunction with publishers, has been working on improving the publisher management controls still further," the organisation added.
"ABC will be requiring additional improvements to the management control and reporting of the distribution."
The body's four-point plan to stamp out freesheet dumping in London also includes increased focus on internal publisher controls, compliance checking and complaints handling.
ABC is proposing more regular spot checks within London Lite and the London Paper distribution areas to monitor the effectiveness of publishers' compliance procedures and an ongoing review of hand distribution and ABC certification by industry representatives.
The circulation body launched the review following tit-for-tat allegations made last month by News International and Associated Newspapers - including the latter's release of video and photographic evidence that distributors were dumping free papers.
ABC said the review was instigated despite the fact that neither publisher made a formal complaint.
Mark Sweney
MediaGuardian.co.uk
Ditched: copies of the London Paper and London Lite in a bin. Photo: Christian Sinibaldi
Londoners fed up with seeing dumped copies of London Lite and the London Paper around the capital may soon have an outlet for their frustration, with plans afoot for a complaints line people can call to report alleged dumping.
A complaints line is one of four proposals the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the body that audits newspaper sales, is considering as it seeks to stamp out dumping of the two London freesheets.
The ABC said its investigation of alleged dumping had found evidence that copies of London Lite, published by Associated Newspapers, and the News International-owned London Paper are being ditched.
As a result ABC is asking the publishers of both freesheets to adhere to a tighter code of conduct, including giving "consideration" to setting up a dumping complaints phone line for members of the public to report offences.
"The review has identified that copies of newspapers are being dumped which is, obviously, not compliant with the ABC rules," the organisation said.
ABC added that it was, however, "satisfied" that the reported circulation figures for April are "materially compliant".
"Having identified the distinct risk associated with hand distribution, ABC, in conjunction with publishers, has been working on improving the publisher management controls still further," the organisation added.
"ABC will be requiring additional improvements to the management control and reporting of the distribution."
The body's four-point plan to stamp out freesheet dumping in London also includes increased focus on internal publisher controls, compliance checking and complaints handling.
ABC is proposing more regular spot checks within London Lite and the London Paper distribution areas to monitor the effectiveness of publishers' compliance procedures and an ongoing review of hand distribution and ABC certification by industry representatives.
The circulation body launched the review following tit-for-tat allegations made last month by News International and Associated Newspapers - including the latter's release of video and photographic evidence that distributors were dumping free papers.
ABC said the review was instigated despite the fact that neither publisher made a formal complaint.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Murdoch, like Hearst, yearns to tell the world how to think
Citizen Murdoch reaches out
Mogul wants to be man on the Street
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117964733.html?categoryId=1&cs=1
Rupert Murdoch, a man who has a penchant for buying, is out there doing some selling. Specifically, he's selling the Bancroft family on the idea that he's not William Randolph Hearst.
The Bancrofts are the New England Brahmins who control Dow Jones & Co., and the Wall Street Journal, a media empire that Murdoch covets. He covets it to the tune of a lofty $5 billion bid.
Murdoch has always salivated for the Journal because it's rich, conservative and could be an elegant companion piece to his long-planned Fox Business Channel. But the Bancrofts, who control 64% of the company's voting shares, are resisting Murdoch's entreaties.
They don't explain why (Brahmins never do), but clearly they feel a certain responsibility -- noblesse oblige -- for the health and autonomy of their paper. At the same time, they distrust Murdoch, the media baron, as being, well Hearstian.
Which to some extent is understandable. Murdoch, as he gets older (he's just turned 76), increasingly displays some fascinating ambiguities. Unlike Hearst, his business acumen continues to sharpen with age. But like Hearst, he yearns to tell citizens of the world how to think and what to believe, and like Hearst, his views grow ever more polarizing. Witness his zealous support for a president with a 28% approval rating, according to the recent Newsweek poll.
There are other Hearstian reminders as well. Murdoch, like Hearst, feels drawn to Hollywood. Though he's never built a castle, Murdoch, like Hearst, entertains grandly at his various mansions (and yachts). Like Hearst, Murdoch also loves newspapers, not only for their economic heft but also for their ideological clout.
Hearst didn't hesitate advocating war when it served his purposes, and in his later years seemed drawn more to Hitler than to Roosevelt. He worshipped power for the sake of power.
Murdoch represents himself as a libertarian but is fiercely pro-Bush, pro-Iraq War and pro everything Republican. While many of his newspapers stay above the fray, the Murdochian world view is vividly on display at the New York Post and Fox News. At the recent Milken Conference in Los Angeles, Murdoch vented his opinions before an enclave of business CEOs, as though reminding fellow power players that he understands not only how to build a media empire but also how to run the world.
Given all this, Murdoch's appetite could stir problems on the political front. A cross-ownership waiver obtained by Murdoch will expire next year -- News Corp. needs the waiver because it owns two TV stations in New York as well as the Post. Democrats in Congress could also try to bar Murdoch's acquisition by redefining the Wall Street Journal as a local rather than national newspaper, thus making him more vulnerable to cross-ownership constraints.
To be sure, Murdoch has gone out of his way to stress that he will not impose ideology on the Wall Street Journal, a dubious commitment since the newspaper's editorial pages already proclaim that the Bush Era is golden. The news pages of the Journal, on the other hand, have remained remarkably "pure" -- that is, free of ideological taint. Some of its reporters, nonetheless, are nervous about whether things would stay that way.
Peter Kann, the paper's long-term executive editor and later chairman, dispatched a letter last week praising the Bancroft family for upholding the Journal's independence, while James H. Ottaway, Jr., a former Dow Jones executive and major shareholder, saw fit to remind his confreres that Murdoch's control would imperil the Journal's "news quality and integrity."
As a corporate leader, to be sure, Murdoch has some important achievements to "sell." Just about the entire business community applauds his dealmaking prowess -- witness MySpace. His senior management team at Fox also is vastly admired. Peter Chernin provides brilliant leadership and Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos have run the studio with a consistency that's the envy of the rest of Hollywood. Roger Ailes, too, has brought a pizzazz to network news that's left CNN in the dust. Only the Fox Network has failed to build a durable management.
As a result of all this, the media community seems a bit dazzled by the Rupe offensive. The Economist, while criticizing Murdoch for taking the Times of London "downmarket," nonetheless has instructed the Bancrofts to accept his offer. The Economist's parent, Pearson, might regret this recommendation -- Murdoch could emerge as a more important competitor of the Financial Times, which also is part of Pearson.
Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin also recommends that the Bancrofts give the nod to Murdoch. Having been granted an exclusive and persuasive interview last week, Sorkin concluded the media baron would be "the perfect publisher for the Wall Street Journal."
Sorkin also notes that Murdoch's longtime banker, Goldman Sachs, suddenly is representing Dow Jones, with which it has never had a relationship. John Thornton, a former Goldman president, also is a member of Rupert's board of directors.
In his declining years, William Randolph Hearst found the world to be increasingly disinterested in his power and distrustful of his world view. One senses that, whatever the surface similarities, Rupert Murdoch has no intention of replicating that scenario.
The big question: Will Rupert be defeated by his own appetites? And, more specifically, does the world want to be told what to think by a media mogul whose ideas, like Hearst's, grow ever more doctrinaire?
Mogul wants to be man on the Street
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117964733.html?categoryId=1&cs=1
Rupert Murdoch, a man who has a penchant for buying, is out there doing some selling. Specifically, he's selling the Bancroft family on the idea that he's not William Randolph Hearst.
The Bancrofts are the New England Brahmins who control Dow Jones & Co., and the Wall Street Journal, a media empire that Murdoch covets. He covets it to the tune of a lofty $5 billion bid.
Murdoch has always salivated for the Journal because it's rich, conservative and could be an elegant companion piece to his long-planned Fox Business Channel. But the Bancrofts, who control 64% of the company's voting shares, are resisting Murdoch's entreaties.
They don't explain why (Brahmins never do), but clearly they feel a certain responsibility -- noblesse oblige -- for the health and autonomy of their paper. At the same time, they distrust Murdoch, the media baron, as being, well Hearstian.
Which to some extent is understandable. Murdoch, as he gets older (he's just turned 76), increasingly displays some fascinating ambiguities. Unlike Hearst, his business acumen continues to sharpen with age. But like Hearst, he yearns to tell citizens of the world how to think and what to believe, and like Hearst, his views grow ever more polarizing. Witness his zealous support for a president with a 28% approval rating, according to the recent Newsweek poll.
There are other Hearstian reminders as well. Murdoch, like Hearst, feels drawn to Hollywood. Though he's never built a castle, Murdoch, like Hearst, entertains grandly at his various mansions (and yachts). Like Hearst, Murdoch also loves newspapers, not only for their economic heft but also for their ideological clout.
Hearst didn't hesitate advocating war when it served his purposes, and in his later years seemed drawn more to Hitler than to Roosevelt. He worshipped power for the sake of power.
Murdoch represents himself as a libertarian but is fiercely pro-Bush, pro-Iraq War and pro everything Republican. While many of his newspapers stay above the fray, the Murdochian world view is vividly on display at the New York Post and Fox News. At the recent Milken Conference in Los Angeles, Murdoch vented his opinions before an enclave of business CEOs, as though reminding fellow power players that he understands not only how to build a media empire but also how to run the world.
Given all this, Murdoch's appetite could stir problems on the political front. A cross-ownership waiver obtained by Murdoch will expire next year -- News Corp. needs the waiver because it owns two TV stations in New York as well as the Post. Democrats in Congress could also try to bar Murdoch's acquisition by redefining the Wall Street Journal as a local rather than national newspaper, thus making him more vulnerable to cross-ownership constraints.
To be sure, Murdoch has gone out of his way to stress that he will not impose ideology on the Wall Street Journal, a dubious commitment since the newspaper's editorial pages already proclaim that the Bush Era is golden. The news pages of the Journal, on the other hand, have remained remarkably "pure" -- that is, free of ideological taint. Some of its reporters, nonetheless, are nervous about whether things would stay that way.
Peter Kann, the paper's long-term executive editor and later chairman, dispatched a letter last week praising the Bancroft family for upholding the Journal's independence, while James H. Ottaway, Jr., a former Dow Jones executive and major shareholder, saw fit to remind his confreres that Murdoch's control would imperil the Journal's "news quality and integrity."
As a corporate leader, to be sure, Murdoch has some important achievements to "sell." Just about the entire business community applauds his dealmaking prowess -- witness MySpace. His senior management team at Fox also is vastly admired. Peter Chernin provides brilliant leadership and Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos have run the studio with a consistency that's the envy of the rest of Hollywood. Roger Ailes, too, has brought a pizzazz to network news that's left CNN in the dust. Only the Fox Network has failed to build a durable management.
As a result of all this, the media community seems a bit dazzled by the Rupe offensive. The Economist, while criticizing Murdoch for taking the Times of London "downmarket," nonetheless has instructed the Bancrofts to accept his offer. The Economist's parent, Pearson, might regret this recommendation -- Murdoch could emerge as a more important competitor of the Financial Times, which also is part of Pearson.
Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin also recommends that the Bancrofts give the nod to Murdoch. Having been granted an exclusive and persuasive interview last week, Sorkin concluded the media baron would be "the perfect publisher for the Wall Street Journal."
Sorkin also notes that Murdoch's longtime banker, Goldman Sachs, suddenly is representing Dow Jones, with which it has never had a relationship. John Thornton, a former Goldman president, also is a member of Rupert's board of directors.
In his declining years, William Randolph Hearst found the world to be increasingly disinterested in his power and distrustful of his world view. One senses that, whatever the surface similarities, Rupert Murdoch has no intention of replicating that scenario.
The big question: Will Rupert be defeated by his own appetites? And, more specifically, does the world want to be told what to think by a media mogul whose ideas, like Hearst's, grow ever more doctrinaire?
Tilting at a Digital Future
Tilting at a Digital Future
By RICHARD SIKLOS
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/business/yourmoney/13murdoch.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=media&adxnnlx=1179063530-uHy2sFBfx8U+keUkWB6YgQ
IN Rupert Murdoch’s world, two things are certain: the sun never sets on the kingdom, and a TV is always on in the background.
On the evening of April 26, several large television monitors adorned the terrace of Mr. Murdoch’s Beverly Hills mansion for a dinner celebrating a special edition of “American Idol” that raised more than $70 million to fight poverty. An Asian noodle station was set out by the pool; nearby, sushi chefs busily sliced tuna for “Idol” co-hosts Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest, and seven, hyperactive “Idol” finalists who, when they weren’t clamoring around megastar Tom Cruise, dreamily watched themselves on the big screens. Wendi Deng, Mr. Murdoch’s wife, wore a billowy, green dress and introduced their 5-year-old daughter, Grace, to guests before sending her to bed.
Mr. Murdoch casually sipped wine and chatted with his daughter, Elisabeth, and other guests. He had planned for the event to be an early dinner party, but he finally headed to bed at 1 a.m., leaving music impresario Quincy Jones and others chatting on a sofa. After all, he had work to do.
What partygoers didn’t know was that during the previous week, on April 17, Mr. Murdoch had offered to buy Dow Jones & Company, the venerable publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for $5 billion. So far, he had not heard back directly from the Bancrofts, the family that controls Dow Jones. Signals sent by the Bancrofts’ intermediaries were not encouraging, but he was prepared to fly cross-country and meet with the family on a moment’s notice.
As is so often the case with Mr. Murdoch, the Dow Jones bid is counterintuitive and seemingly quixotic. While investors and media giants have cooled on the newspaper industry, the News Corporation’s czar has patiently waited for the right moment to bid on a prize he has long coveted but felt was beyond his reach. Mr. Murdoch’s bid has also caused hand-wringing about his intentions for The Journal, a publication that has long led the pack in authoritative business coverage.
Perhaps the chief worry among those concerned about the journalistic future of Dow Jones is how much editorial independence the company would have under Mr. Murdoch’s rule. It also raised questions about how well the strait-laced Journal would fit within a conglomerate whose offerings include the online hangout MySpace, racy British tabloids, and table-thumpers like Bill O’Reilly.
WHATEVER the media mogul says he may do with such a powerful enterprise, a close look at what he’s actually done in the past — particularly how he has deployed his far larger Hollywood and television properties — is a telling indicator of what life may be like for Dow Jones in a Murdoch regime.
When Mr. Murdoch bought the struggling 20th Century Fox studio in 1985, Hollywood viewed him as just the latest arriviste, doomed to be suckered by the industry’s vagaries. Yet Mr. Murdoch restored the studio, let his staff there produce the films they wanted (for the most part), and used Fox as a springboard to start his Fox television network and a passel of cable channels and other ventures around the globe.
“Rupert Murdoch is utterly consistent,” says Barry Diller, who once ran Fox and now oversees the IAC/Interactive Corporation. “It’s not like he’s adding toys. This is oxygen to him.”
In almost every case, Mr. Murdoch endured years of losses to put new offerings like Sky Television in England the Fox News Channel in America on the map. There is scant evidence of Mr. Murdoch’s envelope-pushing imprimatur at the studio that is the center of it all, just as it is less in evidence at the large quality newspapers he owns, including The Times of London and The Australian.
Mr. Murdoch’s long-held desire to own The Journal fits into a similar grand plan: to revitalize if not save the original business — newspapers — on which he built his empire. Mr. Murdoch’s vision is to fold together the far-flung news businesses he owns into a seamless digital platform anchored by the Web-oriented Journal and, in the process, reinvent the newspaper industry that his company was built on. “We are a relatively old company deeply rooted in print journalism,” Mr. Murdoch told his top news executives in his Aussie drawl a few days after the “Idol” party. “Now, we have to make huge leap into a completely different world.”
The digital future he envisions has information zipping across an expanding, ubiquitous array of screens — TVs, laptops and cellphones. In a world of proliferating broadband, Mr. Murdoch sees video as a bigger component of the news blur and he wants to meld his disparate video assets into his sprawling digital infrastructure: from Fox News in the United States, Sky News outlets around the world, and the business TV channel he is launching this fall in America and plans to take international (which, if his cards play out, he hopes to tie closely to The Journal).
As Mr. Murdoch tries to make the digital future a reality, skeptics wonder whether he will use his newfangled media platform to merely transmit news and analysis or whether he will package information according to his own needs — and even use it as a cudgel.
A couple of days embedded in the Murdoch camp yields a few clues about what makes Rupert run and why. At age 76, he appears to be in his strongest position in years — with his company’s share price up nearly 50 percent in the past two years and his grip over his company finally secure. He remains unblinkingly fixated on the advancement of the News Corporation as though it were a nation state and his relentless corporate march has imbued his company with a maverick culture less apparent at other media giants scrambling to adapt to the hurly-burly of the digital age.
Mr. Murdoch has also shown little hesitation to reverse course when his plans go awry. He says that China, for instance, is no longer the corporate imperative that it once was for him. Until recently, he was determined to build a global satellite-TV empire to delivery his programming, but the rapid emergence of the Internet cooled his ardor. DirecTV, was a company he pursued for years with as much fervor as he now shows for Dow Jones, but he recently agreed to sell it only three years after it was acquired. While the News Corporation’s involvement in the newspaper business could seem like nostalgic attachment to an industry that has seen better days, Mr. Murdoch is hardly known for being sentimental. Indeed, Mr. Murdoch is pretty much the same in public as he is in private, with little evidence of an inner Rupert — even to some who work closely with him.
“This is a man who’s been single-minded since he was 22 years old and he’s woken up every morning with the same agenda: which is to extend the reach and power and influence of his company,” said one person close to Mr. Murdoch who was given anonymity to speak openly about him. “I think tomorrow is the same as today in that respect.”
Mr. Murdoch has had an eventful personal life — including six children from three marriages — and his raw ambition dovetails with an endless curiosity about world affairs, a mischievous streak, and a self-image as the ultimate outsider. In fact, Mr. Murdoch says he is most energized when he is taking on “the elites” — words he practically sneers when he says them — in what he perceives as a career-long battle to offer consumers more media choices. (The Journal, of course, represents one of the quintessential elite media trophies).
Asked if even now he doesn’t consider himself an elite, Mr. Murdoch shakes his head. “No, I’m going to keep myself as much of an outsider as possible,” he says. “We just don’t join clubs.”
MR. MURDOCH’S many critics over the years have viewed him in a far less noble light, accusing him of a cynical worldview that appeals to the lowest common denominator. In sum, they say, he is willing to sacrifice principle for profit.
“His business is privatized, government propaganda; that’s all the company essentially does,” says Bruce Page, a journalist who worked at The Sunday Times of London before Mr. Murdoch owned it and is among his toughest critics. Mr. Page’s 2003 book, “The Murdoch Archipelago,” portrayed Mr. Murdoch as nothing less than a threat to democracy. “It isn’t that Murdoch’s particularly wicked. He’s not a fearsome, warriorlike figure. He’s Falstaff. He has absolutely no concept of honor.”
James H. Ottaway Jr., whose family owns 6 percent of Dow Jones, sounded a similar, if more measured, alarm in a statement on May 6 opposing the offer. “When Rupert Murdoch’s news interests conflict, his business interests usually prevail,” Mr. Ottaway wrote.
This is far from how Mr. Murdoch sees himself, although he has acknowledged that “it has been a long career, and I’m not going to say that it hasn’t been punctuated by mistakes.” He also argues that he has evolved as a newspaper owner and does not interfere in coverage or dictate editorial positions at his quality titles.
There are certainly well-worn stories about how he dropped BBC from his Chinese satellite service to appease the government, published the so-called Hitler Diaries in his Sunday Times, and pummeled foes in the pages of The New York Post. But his proponents say that there are the less-told stories about how he once owned The Village Voice and New York magazine and left their editorial operations largely alone.
Asked what he would tell the Bancrofts if they granted him a meeting, Mr. Murdoch says, “I want to tell them how much I appreciate them as a family and to impress on them that my family would be a worthy successor.”
Mr. Murdoch half-jokingly says that he is too busy to roll up his shirtsleeves and write headlines; after all, he has 47,000 employees. He has also offered to install an independent board at The Journal to ensure independence, something he did at The Times. But he has also made it clear that he is not offering a 67 percent premium over Dow Jones’ share price to stay away from the place — and that he vows to invest in the business. In the British market, for example, he has spent nearly $1 billion on new presses, converted the venerable Times to a tabloid format while expanding its foreign bureaus, and started a free daily — all in the past few years.
Although Mr. Murdoch is a huge fan of The Journal’s conservative editorial pages, which are routinely aligned with the political tenor of the Fox News Channel, he insists that most of his editors pick for themselves which candidates they support in elections. In England, it is not unusual for The Sunday Times and The Times of London to support different candidates; same for his big tabloids The Sun and News of the World. (In this political season, Mr. Murdoch says that personally, he is keeping his options open; among the American presidential candidates, “I’m not madly enthusiastic for anyone,” he says.)
Without his cherished newspapers, Mr. Murdoch would be just another billionaire spouting about politics and world affairs and occasionally chairing fund-raisers — not playing as defining a role in shaping public opinion and packaging information. But print isn’t, at first blush, where the action is in the Murdoch kingdom.
From the sprawling Fox studio lot in Century City and the twinkling lights of the Los Angeles splayed out beneath his terrace, newspapers seem like a quaint and distant quadrant of the empire, contributing just 15 percent of the company’s $21.3 billion in revenue in the nine months ended March 31, 2007, and 14 percent of its $3.2 billion in operating income. Like most newspaper companies, the newspaper group is facing slow revenue growth, and its operating margins are running at a solid, if unspectacular, 14 percent.
Over his usual lunch of whitefish and spinach at the Fox commissary three days before CNBC first reported his bid for Dow Jones, Mr. Murdoch boasted that the “underlying readership of newspapers is going through the roof.” Yet he had notably sat on the sidelines as two of America’s largest newspaper groups, Knight-Ridder and Tribune Company, went up for sale and failed to attract more than a single bidder. Had the industry become so impaired that he would never buy another newspaper again?
“It’s all possible,” he said, with an earnest smile. “Never say never.”
In the days after he submitted his bid for Dow Jones, Mr. Murdoch says that he had started to think his offer was going to be quietly rejected. But the Bancrofts authorized the family’s trustee to hire bankers and lawyers to represent them — an encouraging sign. Then, word leaked out through CNBC, to the chagrin of Mr. Murdoch and his advisers, who worried that if it became public the family may close ranks.
Mr. Murdoch was back in New York when the news broke and went on the Fox News Channel to talk about his offer. While he was in the studio, the Bancrofts issued a statement that family members representing 52 percent of the votes in Dow Jones opposed the offer. Mr. Murdoch said that he held out hope — which he says he still maintains — for a meeting with the family.
Three days after his Fox News appearance on May 3, Mr. Murdoch still had not received any direct word from the Bancrofts. He sat on a sofa in his office on the eighth floor of the News Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters, behind him a wall of TV screens showing his channels, set next to a luminescent blue and yellow map of the world. (There is also a rack for his newspapers, flown in daily).
He said that he believed some of the 35 Bancroft family members may be swayed to take his offer, and then did something he rarely does: talk about the past. He spoke of his father’s beginnings in Australian newspapers, and how he rescued papers that, he said, would have otherwise disappeared. “There’s a pattern that goes right up to today, of providing choice.”
Later that same day, he boarded the company jet for a flight to Monterey, Calif. For the third year in a row, he was gathering his top publishing and digital executives from here and abroad to brainstorm about how to go about conquering the Internet. By the time the jet was over Michigan, several News Corporation executives were playing poker in the back of the plane. Col Allan, the editor of The New York Post, watched the Republican debate on a big television screen and Robert Thomson, editor of The Times of London, phoned his newsroom to get the results of the French election.
Mr. Murdoch had planned to view some TV pilots, but never got around to it as he, Mr. Thomson and his executive vice president of corporate affairs, Gary Ginsberg, sat in his study and talked into the night about politics and world affairs. At one point, Mr. Murdoch, wearing a beige cardigan, glanced at a screen tuned to his news channel.
“Fair and balanced,” he declared, repeating the Fox News motto, which he meant as a playful jab at Mr. Ginsberg, who worked in the Clinton administration.
THE next morning, Mr. Murdoch was joined by Peter A. Chernin, the News Corporation president, to kick off the “Digital News Initiative” conference at the Monterey Plaza Hotel. The 60 or so attendees ran the gamut of his company’s news operations, including teams from not only his British and Australian papers and The Post, but also from Sky Television in London, the Fox television group and MySpace.
There was urgency in the room, because the company’s online media outlets do not have the same kind of dominance they enjoy in TV and in print. For instance, both FoxNews.com and NYPost.com saw the number of unique users to their sites rise around 30 percent in April versus a year earlier, but they still ranked only 9th and 26th among the most visited general news sites, according to ComScore Networks.
Guest speakers included Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old founder of Facebook, Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, and Kjell Aamot, the chief executive of Schibsted, the Norwegian publisher that generates a majority of its earnings from its online operations. Mr. Murdoch was staying at his ranch in nearby Carmel, where he had a dinner for the group.
Critical to reinventing the newspaper business, Mr. Murdoch told the audience, is getting the 175 newspapers the company owns to share resources and move quickly in unison. “We need to take advantage of our global scale everywhere,” he said.
Although Mr. Murdoch had not expected to discuss his offer for Dow Jones at the meeting, he offered a brief explanation. “We had hoped to keep it private and secret for a lot longer while they were having proper time to consider it,” he said. “I think it’s an incredible franchise with outstanding people.”
The challenges facing Dow Jones are somewhat different then those facing Mr. Murdoch’s papers because financial news is one of the few forms of information that consumers will pay for online. Still, The Journal, like other newspapers, has struggled to find ways to grow as print advertising and readership has come under pressure.
Jeremy Philips, a 34-year-old former Internet executive who joined the company last year to oversee strategy and acquisitions, followed Mr. Murdoch with a presentation that brought the challenges and opportunities facing the newspaper industry into sharp focus.
Online news is typically free, and advertising rates for it are comparatively low. Mr. Philips calculated that for every print reader a newspaper loses, it currently needs 100 online readers to generate the same amount of revenue. The more encouraging news is the costs of reaching those readers are less expensive through the Internet than through print — indeed, The Times of London, which recently revamped its Web site, is regularly visited by more users outside of England than within.
Another slide posited that of the millions of readers who come to various newspaper sites in a given month, a huge majority come only once, a consequence of all those referrals from search engines and aggregators. Mr. Philips said he sees that traffic, despite how fleeting it may be, as an incredible opportunity if all those one-time visitors can be compelled to come back a few times more.
Mr. Murdoch perked up when discussing the online potential of The New York Post, which has consistently lost money since he acquired it for a second time in 1993. At a break in the conference, Mr. Murdoch sought out Rebecca Wade, the editor of The Sun, to discuss the results of that day’s Scottish election. For a while, he sat at the back of the ballroom chatting with Mr. Zuckerberg of Facebook, who sat next to him again at dinner. Mr. Murdoch listened closely.
If one thing was clear over the weekend, it was that Mr. Murdoch’s determination to revitalize the news will depend as much on mastering geeky technology as storytelling and layout. Winning The Journal will require other masterful feats like convincing the Bancrofts that the sometimes fractious Murdoch clan will be worthy stewards.
Mr. Murdoch says that if the Bancrofts grant him a meeting, he would like to introduce them to his grown children so they can see the passion they all share for the news business.
Of course, Mr. Murdoch does not exactly see himself as a wizened septuagenarian preparing to hand off his media assets. His wife, Wendi, is 38 years his junior, and they have socialized with the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his fiancée, Anne Wojcicki. The Murdochs are planning to move into a $44 million penthouse on Fifth Avenue next year. It is the most expensive apartment in New York and was once owned by Laurence Rockefeller; it is another prize that Mr. Murdoch has said he has long coveted.
By every measure, he appears to believe he has plenty of time to get exactly what he wants. As he wrapped up the conference in Monterey last Sunday, he looked out at his employees and said: “You all think I’m too old.” Pausing for a beat, he added: “I think you’re too old.”
By RICHARD SIKLOS
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/business/yourmoney/13murdoch.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=media&adxnnlx=1179063530-uHy2sFBfx8U+keUkWB6YgQ
IN Rupert Murdoch’s world, two things are certain: the sun never sets on the kingdom, and a TV is always on in the background.
On the evening of April 26, several large television monitors adorned the terrace of Mr. Murdoch’s Beverly Hills mansion for a dinner celebrating a special edition of “American Idol” that raised more than $70 million to fight poverty. An Asian noodle station was set out by the pool; nearby, sushi chefs busily sliced tuna for “Idol” co-hosts Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest, and seven, hyperactive “Idol” finalists who, when they weren’t clamoring around megastar Tom Cruise, dreamily watched themselves on the big screens. Wendi Deng, Mr. Murdoch’s wife, wore a billowy, green dress and introduced their 5-year-old daughter, Grace, to guests before sending her to bed.
Mr. Murdoch casually sipped wine and chatted with his daughter, Elisabeth, and other guests. He had planned for the event to be an early dinner party, but he finally headed to bed at 1 a.m., leaving music impresario Quincy Jones and others chatting on a sofa. After all, he had work to do.
What partygoers didn’t know was that during the previous week, on April 17, Mr. Murdoch had offered to buy Dow Jones & Company, the venerable publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for $5 billion. So far, he had not heard back directly from the Bancrofts, the family that controls Dow Jones. Signals sent by the Bancrofts’ intermediaries were not encouraging, but he was prepared to fly cross-country and meet with the family on a moment’s notice.
As is so often the case with Mr. Murdoch, the Dow Jones bid is counterintuitive and seemingly quixotic. While investors and media giants have cooled on the newspaper industry, the News Corporation’s czar has patiently waited for the right moment to bid on a prize he has long coveted but felt was beyond his reach. Mr. Murdoch’s bid has also caused hand-wringing about his intentions for The Journal, a publication that has long led the pack in authoritative business coverage.
Perhaps the chief worry among those concerned about the journalistic future of Dow Jones is how much editorial independence the company would have under Mr. Murdoch’s rule. It also raised questions about how well the strait-laced Journal would fit within a conglomerate whose offerings include the online hangout MySpace, racy British tabloids, and table-thumpers like Bill O’Reilly.
WHATEVER the media mogul says he may do with such a powerful enterprise, a close look at what he’s actually done in the past — particularly how he has deployed his far larger Hollywood and television properties — is a telling indicator of what life may be like for Dow Jones in a Murdoch regime.
When Mr. Murdoch bought the struggling 20th Century Fox studio in 1985, Hollywood viewed him as just the latest arriviste, doomed to be suckered by the industry’s vagaries. Yet Mr. Murdoch restored the studio, let his staff there produce the films they wanted (for the most part), and used Fox as a springboard to start his Fox television network and a passel of cable channels and other ventures around the globe.
“Rupert Murdoch is utterly consistent,” says Barry Diller, who once ran Fox and now oversees the IAC/Interactive Corporation. “It’s not like he’s adding toys. This is oxygen to him.”
In almost every case, Mr. Murdoch endured years of losses to put new offerings like Sky Television in England the Fox News Channel in America on the map. There is scant evidence of Mr. Murdoch’s envelope-pushing imprimatur at the studio that is the center of it all, just as it is less in evidence at the large quality newspapers he owns, including The Times of London and The Australian.
Mr. Murdoch’s long-held desire to own The Journal fits into a similar grand plan: to revitalize if not save the original business — newspapers — on which he built his empire. Mr. Murdoch’s vision is to fold together the far-flung news businesses he owns into a seamless digital platform anchored by the Web-oriented Journal and, in the process, reinvent the newspaper industry that his company was built on. “We are a relatively old company deeply rooted in print journalism,” Mr. Murdoch told his top news executives in his Aussie drawl a few days after the “Idol” party. “Now, we have to make huge leap into a completely different world.”
The digital future he envisions has information zipping across an expanding, ubiquitous array of screens — TVs, laptops and cellphones. In a world of proliferating broadband, Mr. Murdoch sees video as a bigger component of the news blur and he wants to meld his disparate video assets into his sprawling digital infrastructure: from Fox News in the United States, Sky News outlets around the world, and the business TV channel he is launching this fall in America and plans to take international (which, if his cards play out, he hopes to tie closely to The Journal).
As Mr. Murdoch tries to make the digital future a reality, skeptics wonder whether he will use his newfangled media platform to merely transmit news and analysis or whether he will package information according to his own needs — and even use it as a cudgel.
A couple of days embedded in the Murdoch camp yields a few clues about what makes Rupert run and why. At age 76, he appears to be in his strongest position in years — with his company’s share price up nearly 50 percent in the past two years and his grip over his company finally secure. He remains unblinkingly fixated on the advancement of the News Corporation as though it were a nation state and his relentless corporate march has imbued his company with a maverick culture less apparent at other media giants scrambling to adapt to the hurly-burly of the digital age.
Mr. Murdoch has also shown little hesitation to reverse course when his plans go awry. He says that China, for instance, is no longer the corporate imperative that it once was for him. Until recently, he was determined to build a global satellite-TV empire to delivery his programming, but the rapid emergence of the Internet cooled his ardor. DirecTV, was a company he pursued for years with as much fervor as he now shows for Dow Jones, but he recently agreed to sell it only three years after it was acquired. While the News Corporation’s involvement in the newspaper business could seem like nostalgic attachment to an industry that has seen better days, Mr. Murdoch is hardly known for being sentimental. Indeed, Mr. Murdoch is pretty much the same in public as he is in private, with little evidence of an inner Rupert — even to some who work closely with him.
“This is a man who’s been single-minded since he was 22 years old and he’s woken up every morning with the same agenda: which is to extend the reach and power and influence of his company,” said one person close to Mr. Murdoch who was given anonymity to speak openly about him. “I think tomorrow is the same as today in that respect.”
Mr. Murdoch has had an eventful personal life — including six children from three marriages — and his raw ambition dovetails with an endless curiosity about world affairs, a mischievous streak, and a self-image as the ultimate outsider. In fact, Mr. Murdoch says he is most energized when he is taking on “the elites” — words he practically sneers when he says them — in what he perceives as a career-long battle to offer consumers more media choices. (The Journal, of course, represents one of the quintessential elite media trophies).
Asked if even now he doesn’t consider himself an elite, Mr. Murdoch shakes his head. “No, I’m going to keep myself as much of an outsider as possible,” he says. “We just don’t join clubs.”
MR. MURDOCH’S many critics over the years have viewed him in a far less noble light, accusing him of a cynical worldview that appeals to the lowest common denominator. In sum, they say, he is willing to sacrifice principle for profit.
“His business is privatized, government propaganda; that’s all the company essentially does,” says Bruce Page, a journalist who worked at The Sunday Times of London before Mr. Murdoch owned it and is among his toughest critics. Mr. Page’s 2003 book, “The Murdoch Archipelago,” portrayed Mr. Murdoch as nothing less than a threat to democracy. “It isn’t that Murdoch’s particularly wicked. He’s not a fearsome, warriorlike figure. He’s Falstaff. He has absolutely no concept of honor.”
James H. Ottaway Jr., whose family owns 6 percent of Dow Jones, sounded a similar, if more measured, alarm in a statement on May 6 opposing the offer. “When Rupert Murdoch’s news interests conflict, his business interests usually prevail,” Mr. Ottaway wrote.
This is far from how Mr. Murdoch sees himself, although he has acknowledged that “it has been a long career, and I’m not going to say that it hasn’t been punctuated by mistakes.” He also argues that he has evolved as a newspaper owner and does not interfere in coverage or dictate editorial positions at his quality titles.
There are certainly well-worn stories about how he dropped BBC from his Chinese satellite service to appease the government, published the so-called Hitler Diaries in his Sunday Times, and pummeled foes in the pages of The New York Post. But his proponents say that there are the less-told stories about how he once owned The Village Voice and New York magazine and left their editorial operations largely alone.
Asked what he would tell the Bancrofts if they granted him a meeting, Mr. Murdoch says, “I want to tell them how much I appreciate them as a family and to impress on them that my family would be a worthy successor.”
Mr. Murdoch half-jokingly says that he is too busy to roll up his shirtsleeves and write headlines; after all, he has 47,000 employees. He has also offered to install an independent board at The Journal to ensure independence, something he did at The Times. But he has also made it clear that he is not offering a 67 percent premium over Dow Jones’ share price to stay away from the place — and that he vows to invest in the business. In the British market, for example, he has spent nearly $1 billion on new presses, converted the venerable Times to a tabloid format while expanding its foreign bureaus, and started a free daily — all in the past few years.
Although Mr. Murdoch is a huge fan of The Journal’s conservative editorial pages, which are routinely aligned with the political tenor of the Fox News Channel, he insists that most of his editors pick for themselves which candidates they support in elections. In England, it is not unusual for The Sunday Times and The Times of London to support different candidates; same for his big tabloids The Sun and News of the World. (In this political season, Mr. Murdoch says that personally, he is keeping his options open; among the American presidential candidates, “I’m not madly enthusiastic for anyone,” he says.)
Without his cherished newspapers, Mr. Murdoch would be just another billionaire spouting about politics and world affairs and occasionally chairing fund-raisers — not playing as defining a role in shaping public opinion and packaging information. But print isn’t, at first blush, where the action is in the Murdoch kingdom.
From the sprawling Fox studio lot in Century City and the twinkling lights of the Los Angeles splayed out beneath his terrace, newspapers seem like a quaint and distant quadrant of the empire, contributing just 15 percent of the company’s $21.3 billion in revenue in the nine months ended March 31, 2007, and 14 percent of its $3.2 billion in operating income. Like most newspaper companies, the newspaper group is facing slow revenue growth, and its operating margins are running at a solid, if unspectacular, 14 percent.
Over his usual lunch of whitefish and spinach at the Fox commissary three days before CNBC first reported his bid for Dow Jones, Mr. Murdoch boasted that the “underlying readership of newspapers is going through the roof.” Yet he had notably sat on the sidelines as two of America’s largest newspaper groups, Knight-Ridder and Tribune Company, went up for sale and failed to attract more than a single bidder. Had the industry become so impaired that he would never buy another newspaper again?
“It’s all possible,” he said, with an earnest smile. “Never say never.”
In the days after he submitted his bid for Dow Jones, Mr. Murdoch says that he had started to think his offer was going to be quietly rejected. But the Bancrofts authorized the family’s trustee to hire bankers and lawyers to represent them — an encouraging sign. Then, word leaked out through CNBC, to the chagrin of Mr. Murdoch and his advisers, who worried that if it became public the family may close ranks.
Mr. Murdoch was back in New York when the news broke and went on the Fox News Channel to talk about his offer. While he was in the studio, the Bancrofts issued a statement that family members representing 52 percent of the votes in Dow Jones opposed the offer. Mr. Murdoch said that he held out hope — which he says he still maintains — for a meeting with the family.
Three days after his Fox News appearance on May 3, Mr. Murdoch still had not received any direct word from the Bancrofts. He sat on a sofa in his office on the eighth floor of the News Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters, behind him a wall of TV screens showing his channels, set next to a luminescent blue and yellow map of the world. (There is also a rack for his newspapers, flown in daily).
He said that he believed some of the 35 Bancroft family members may be swayed to take his offer, and then did something he rarely does: talk about the past. He spoke of his father’s beginnings in Australian newspapers, and how he rescued papers that, he said, would have otherwise disappeared. “There’s a pattern that goes right up to today, of providing choice.”
Later that same day, he boarded the company jet for a flight to Monterey, Calif. For the third year in a row, he was gathering his top publishing and digital executives from here and abroad to brainstorm about how to go about conquering the Internet. By the time the jet was over Michigan, several News Corporation executives were playing poker in the back of the plane. Col Allan, the editor of The New York Post, watched the Republican debate on a big television screen and Robert Thomson, editor of The Times of London, phoned his newsroom to get the results of the French election.
Mr. Murdoch had planned to view some TV pilots, but never got around to it as he, Mr. Thomson and his executive vice president of corporate affairs, Gary Ginsberg, sat in his study and talked into the night about politics and world affairs. At one point, Mr. Murdoch, wearing a beige cardigan, glanced at a screen tuned to his news channel.
“Fair and balanced,” he declared, repeating the Fox News motto, which he meant as a playful jab at Mr. Ginsberg, who worked in the Clinton administration.
THE next morning, Mr. Murdoch was joined by Peter A. Chernin, the News Corporation president, to kick off the “Digital News Initiative” conference at the Monterey Plaza Hotel. The 60 or so attendees ran the gamut of his company’s news operations, including teams from not only his British and Australian papers and The Post, but also from Sky Television in London, the Fox television group and MySpace.
There was urgency in the room, because the company’s online media outlets do not have the same kind of dominance they enjoy in TV and in print. For instance, both FoxNews.com and NYPost.com saw the number of unique users to their sites rise around 30 percent in April versus a year earlier, but they still ranked only 9th and 26th among the most visited general news sites, according to ComScore Networks.
Guest speakers included Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old founder of Facebook, Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, and Kjell Aamot, the chief executive of Schibsted, the Norwegian publisher that generates a majority of its earnings from its online operations. Mr. Murdoch was staying at his ranch in nearby Carmel, where he had a dinner for the group.
Critical to reinventing the newspaper business, Mr. Murdoch told the audience, is getting the 175 newspapers the company owns to share resources and move quickly in unison. “We need to take advantage of our global scale everywhere,” he said.
Although Mr. Murdoch had not expected to discuss his offer for Dow Jones at the meeting, he offered a brief explanation. “We had hoped to keep it private and secret for a lot longer while they were having proper time to consider it,” he said. “I think it’s an incredible franchise with outstanding people.”
The challenges facing Dow Jones are somewhat different then those facing Mr. Murdoch’s papers because financial news is one of the few forms of information that consumers will pay for online. Still, The Journal, like other newspapers, has struggled to find ways to grow as print advertising and readership has come under pressure.
Jeremy Philips, a 34-year-old former Internet executive who joined the company last year to oversee strategy and acquisitions, followed Mr. Murdoch with a presentation that brought the challenges and opportunities facing the newspaper industry into sharp focus.
Online news is typically free, and advertising rates for it are comparatively low. Mr. Philips calculated that for every print reader a newspaper loses, it currently needs 100 online readers to generate the same amount of revenue. The more encouraging news is the costs of reaching those readers are less expensive through the Internet than through print — indeed, The Times of London, which recently revamped its Web site, is regularly visited by more users outside of England than within.
Another slide posited that of the millions of readers who come to various newspaper sites in a given month, a huge majority come only once, a consequence of all those referrals from search engines and aggregators. Mr. Philips said he sees that traffic, despite how fleeting it may be, as an incredible opportunity if all those one-time visitors can be compelled to come back a few times more.
Mr. Murdoch perked up when discussing the online potential of The New York Post, which has consistently lost money since he acquired it for a second time in 1993. At a break in the conference, Mr. Murdoch sought out Rebecca Wade, the editor of The Sun, to discuss the results of that day’s Scottish election. For a while, he sat at the back of the ballroom chatting with Mr. Zuckerberg of Facebook, who sat next to him again at dinner. Mr. Murdoch listened closely.
If one thing was clear over the weekend, it was that Mr. Murdoch’s determination to revitalize the news will depend as much on mastering geeky technology as storytelling and layout. Winning The Journal will require other masterful feats like convincing the Bancrofts that the sometimes fractious Murdoch clan will be worthy stewards.
Mr. Murdoch says that if the Bancrofts grant him a meeting, he would like to introduce them to his grown children so they can see the passion they all share for the news business.
Of course, Mr. Murdoch does not exactly see himself as a wizened septuagenarian preparing to hand off his media assets. His wife, Wendi, is 38 years his junior, and they have socialized with the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his fiancée, Anne Wojcicki. The Murdochs are planning to move into a $44 million penthouse on Fifth Avenue next year. It is the most expensive apartment in New York and was once owned by Laurence Rockefeller; it is another prize that Mr. Murdoch has said he has long coveted.
By every measure, he appears to believe he has plenty of time to get exactly what he wants. As he wrapped up the conference in Monterey last Sunday, he looked out at his employees and said: “You all think I’m too old.” Pausing for a beat, he added: “I think you’re too old.”
Saturday, May 12, 2007
All-out outsourcing
All-out outsourcing
Alan Mutter
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/
Struggling to sustain their traditional profitability amid weakening sales, newspaper publishers are looking to outsource everything from composing ads and printing papers to producing content and answering the phones.
After nipping and tucking headcount in newsrooms over the last few years, publishers appear to be poised to eliminate a significantly greater number of jobs in their plants by focusing on areas that previously were immune to cutbacks.
The initiative likely to claim the largest number of positions in the near future is the outsourcing of advertising composition to places like India and other low-wage countries.
In light of the apparent success of a pilot ad-outsource program at the Media News Group properties in Northern California, publishers like Gannett, McClatchy, the New York Times Co. and Scripps are considering whether they, too, should export such duties to offshore vendors, according to insiders familiar with the discussions.
These talks may or may not result in a decision to outsource jobs at any given property. But, human costs aside, the economics are powerfully persuasive.
Newspapers sending ad production offshore typically can reduce payroll costs by some 45%, says Robert Berkeley, president of Express KCS, one of the outsourcing companies. Thus, a paper could cut its costs to $30,000 a year per outsourced worker from $55,000 for an American doing the same job. These savings are even higher in unionized metro environments, where papers are struggling the hardest to sustain their margins.
The Columbus (OH) Dispatch was among the first to shift ad production to India, eliminating 90 jobs from a paper with daily circulation of 231,355. Assuming savings of $25k per employee, the paper should be able to add roughly $2.25 million a year to its bottom line.
Putting it another way: If a paper paid each departing employee a generous half-year of severance, the outsourcing project would begin to pay for itself in little more than 12 months – a terrific return on investment.
In what may be a harbinger of future initiatives elsewhere in the country, the San Francisco Chronicle has signed a 15-year contract with a Canadian company to begin printing the paper in in a new plant being constructed by early 2009. The opening coincides with the termination of the contract covering the newspaper’s 230 unionized press operators. When the new plant opens, their jobs will be gone.
While not outsourcing their production altogether, companies like the New York Times, Gannett, Media News and Journal Register have consolidated the printing and mailroom operations among certain of their geographically contiguous properties. In New Jersey, 200 production positions were eliminated when Advance Publications opened a plant to combine the production of the Newark Star Ledger and the Trenton Times.
While outsourcing production is complicated and not always feasible, the easiest jobs to shift are those of the people who work in telephone rooms or perform accounting, billing, accounts payable, human resources and other clerical functions.
Many newspaper groups already funnel want-ad and circulation calls to regional or national centers, where a single group of workers serving multiple time zones is far more efficient than a team dedicated to a single market. Many chains also have either consolidated clerical functions at in-house service bureaus or outsourced them to domestic vendors.
Sending call-center and clerical work offshore can shave 25% to 30% off the present costs of such operations, according to Gartner Research, a private firm. The New York Times and Boston Globe, among others, are each sending 40 to 50 clerical jobs to offshore contactors.
Even editorial and online operations are not immune from outsourcing.
Knight Ridder had a plan to create regional copy desks to handle headlines and layouts for groups of newspapers, a concept that was shelved prior to the sale of the company last year. Preposterous as the idea might sound, this is exactly what is being implemented in New Zealand by the publisher of the country’s largest daily and several other publications.
APN News and Media, a division of Britain’s Independent News & Media, is outsourcing about 70 jobs to an Australian company, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. If it works well, Independent News may extend the program to its titles in England and Ireland.
Reuters has more than 300 journalists in India writing many of the routine stories on its financial wires, according to MediaGuardian. Reuters has said it may increase the size of the Indian staff to 1,500 writers, though this could be affected by the potential merger with Thomson Corp.
And today's Los Angeles Times reports that a hyper-local website in Pasadena (not affiliated with a newspaper) has hired two writers in India, who, among other things, will cover city council meetings via webcam.
As valuable as Internet operations are to the future of newspaper companies, some publishers are having at least a portion of the work done overseas. London’s Financial Times, for example, relies on a staff in the Philippines to help edit and maintain its web site.
With offshore development, testing, hosting and technical support common in the information-technology sector, it is only logical that newspapers could achieve additional economies by moving – or expanding – many of these functions abroad.
When everything from designing buildings to analyzing X-rays can be performed by lower-paid professionals in another part of the world, there’s no reason to believe newspapers can avoid the workforce shake-ups that have jolted most other industries.
Institutional inertia and economic self-satisfaction have maintained the status quo until now. As an increasingly challenging business environment forces newspapers out of their comfort zones, many dedicated workers, unfortunately, will be forced out of theirs, too.
Alan Mutter
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/
Struggling to sustain their traditional profitability amid weakening sales, newspaper publishers are looking to outsource everything from composing ads and printing papers to producing content and answering the phones.
After nipping and tucking headcount in newsrooms over the last few years, publishers appear to be poised to eliminate a significantly greater number of jobs in their plants by focusing on areas that previously were immune to cutbacks.
The initiative likely to claim the largest number of positions in the near future is the outsourcing of advertising composition to places like India and other low-wage countries.
In light of the apparent success of a pilot ad-outsource program at the Media News Group properties in Northern California, publishers like Gannett, McClatchy, the New York Times Co. and Scripps are considering whether they, too, should export such duties to offshore vendors, according to insiders familiar with the discussions.
These talks may or may not result in a decision to outsource jobs at any given property. But, human costs aside, the economics are powerfully persuasive.
Newspapers sending ad production offshore typically can reduce payroll costs by some 45%, says Robert Berkeley, president of Express KCS, one of the outsourcing companies. Thus, a paper could cut its costs to $30,000 a year per outsourced worker from $55,000 for an American doing the same job. These savings are even higher in unionized metro environments, where papers are struggling the hardest to sustain their margins.
The Columbus (OH) Dispatch was among the first to shift ad production to India, eliminating 90 jobs from a paper with daily circulation of 231,355. Assuming savings of $25k per employee, the paper should be able to add roughly $2.25 million a year to its bottom line.
Putting it another way: If a paper paid each departing employee a generous half-year of severance, the outsourcing project would begin to pay for itself in little more than 12 months – a terrific return on investment.
In what may be a harbinger of future initiatives elsewhere in the country, the San Francisco Chronicle has signed a 15-year contract with a Canadian company to begin printing the paper in in a new plant being constructed by early 2009. The opening coincides with the termination of the contract covering the newspaper’s 230 unionized press operators. When the new plant opens, their jobs will be gone.
While not outsourcing their production altogether, companies like the New York Times, Gannett, Media News and Journal Register have consolidated the printing and mailroom operations among certain of their geographically contiguous properties. In New Jersey, 200 production positions were eliminated when Advance Publications opened a plant to combine the production of the Newark Star Ledger and the Trenton Times.
While outsourcing production is complicated and not always feasible, the easiest jobs to shift are those of the people who work in telephone rooms or perform accounting, billing, accounts payable, human resources and other clerical functions.
Many newspaper groups already funnel want-ad and circulation calls to regional or national centers, where a single group of workers serving multiple time zones is far more efficient than a team dedicated to a single market. Many chains also have either consolidated clerical functions at in-house service bureaus or outsourced them to domestic vendors.
Sending call-center and clerical work offshore can shave 25% to 30% off the present costs of such operations, according to Gartner Research, a private firm. The New York Times and Boston Globe, among others, are each sending 40 to 50 clerical jobs to offshore contactors.
Even editorial and online operations are not immune from outsourcing.
Knight Ridder had a plan to create regional copy desks to handle headlines and layouts for groups of newspapers, a concept that was shelved prior to the sale of the company last year. Preposterous as the idea might sound, this is exactly what is being implemented in New Zealand by the publisher of the country’s largest daily and several other publications.
APN News and Media, a division of Britain’s Independent News & Media, is outsourcing about 70 jobs to an Australian company, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. If it works well, Independent News may extend the program to its titles in England and Ireland.
Reuters has more than 300 journalists in India writing many of the routine stories on its financial wires, according to MediaGuardian. Reuters has said it may increase the size of the Indian staff to 1,500 writers, though this could be affected by the potential merger with Thomson Corp.
And today's Los Angeles Times reports that a hyper-local website in Pasadena (not affiliated with a newspaper) has hired two writers in India, who, among other things, will cover city council meetings via webcam.
As valuable as Internet operations are to the future of newspaper companies, some publishers are having at least a portion of the work done overseas. London’s Financial Times, for example, relies on a staff in the Philippines to help edit and maintain its web site.
With offshore development, testing, hosting and technical support common in the information-technology sector, it is only logical that newspapers could achieve additional economies by moving – or expanding – many of these functions abroad.
When everything from designing buildings to analyzing X-rays can be performed by lower-paid professionals in another part of the world, there’s no reason to believe newspapers can avoid the workforce shake-ups that have jolted most other industries.
Institutional inertia and economic self-satisfaction have maintained the status quo until now. As an increasingly challenging business environment forces newspapers out of their comfort zones, many dedicated workers, unfortunately, will be forced out of theirs, too.
All-out outsourcing
All-out outsourcing
Alan Mutter
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/
Struggling to sustain their traditional profitability amid weakening sales, newspaper publishers are looking to outsource everything from composing ads and printing papers to producing content and answering the phones.
After nipping and tucking headcount in newsrooms over the last few years, publishers appear to be poised to eliminate a significantly greater number of jobs in their plants by focusing on areas that previously were immune to cutbacks.
The initiative likely to claim the largest number of positions in the near future is the outsourcing of advertising composition to places like India and other low-wage countries.
In light of the apparent success of a pilot ad-outsource program at the Media News Group properties in Northern California, publishers like Gannett, McClatchy, the New York Times Co. and Scripps are considering whether they, too, should export such duties to offshore vendors, according to insiders familiar with the discussions.
These talks may or may not result in a decision to outsource jobs at any given property. But, human costs aside, the economics are powerfully persuasive.
Newspapers sending ad production offshore typically can reduce payroll costs by some 45%, says Robert Berkeley, president of Express KCS, one of the outsourcing companies. Thus, a paper could cut its costs to $30,000 a year per outsourced worker from $55,000 for an American doing the same job. These savings are even higher in unionized metro environments, where papers are struggling the hardest to sustain their margins.
The Columbus (OH) Dispatch was among the first to shift ad production to India, eliminating 90 jobs from a paper with daily circulation of 231,355. Assuming savings of $25k per employee, the paper should be able to add roughly $2.25 million a year to its bottom line.
Putting it another way: If a paper paid each departing employee a generous half-year of severance, the outsourcing project would begin to pay for itself in little more than 12 months – a terrific return on investment.
In what may be a harbinger of future initiatives elsewhere in the country, the San Francisco Chronicle has signed a 15-year contract with a Canadian company to begin printing the paper in in a new plant being constructed by early 2009. The opening coincides with the termination of the contract covering the newspaper’s 230 unionized press operators. When the new plant opens, their jobs will be gone.
While not outsourcing their production altogether, companies like the New York Times, Gannett, Media News and Journal Register have consolidated the printing and mailroom operations among certain of their geographically contiguous properties. In New Jersey, 200 production positions were eliminated when Advance Publications opened a plant to combine the production of the Newark Star Ledger and the Trenton Times.
While outsourcing production is complicated and not always feasible, the easiest jobs to shift are those of the people who work in telephone rooms or perform accounting, billing, accounts payable, human resources and other clerical functions.
Many newspaper groups already funnel want-ad and circulation calls to regional or national centers, where a single group of workers serving multiple time zones is far more efficient than a team dedicated to a single market. Many chains also have either consolidated clerical functions at in-house service bureaus or outsourced them to domestic vendors.
Sending call-center and clerical work offshore can shave 25% to 30% off the present costs of such operations, according to Gartner Research, a private firm. The New York Times and Boston Globe, among others, are each sending 40 to 50 clerical jobs to offshore contactors.
Even editorial and online operations are not immune from outsourcing.
Knight Ridder had a plan to create regional copy desks to handle headlines and layouts for groups of newspapers, a concept that was shelved prior to the sale of the company last year. Preposterous as the idea might sound, this is exactly what is being implemented in New Zealand by the publisher of the country’s largest daily and several other publications.
APN News and Media, a division of Britain’s Independent News & Media, is outsourcing about 70 jobs to an Australian company, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. If it works well, Independent News may extend the program to its titles in England and Ireland.
Reuters has more than 300 journalists in India writing many of the routine stories on its financial wires, according to MediaGuardian. Reuters has said it may increase the size of the Indian staff to 1,500 writers, though this could be affected by the potential merger with Thomson Corp.
And today's Los Angeles Times reports that a hyper-local website in Pasadena (not affiliated with a newspaper) has hired two writers in India, who, among other things, will cover city council meetings via webcam.
As valuable as Internet operations are to the future of newspaper companies, some publishers are having at least a portion of the work done overseas. London’s Financial Times, for example, relies on a staff in the Philippines to help edit and maintain its web site.
With offshore development, testing, hosting and technical support common in the information-technology sector, it is only logical that newspapers could achieve additional economies by moving – or expanding – many of these functions abroad.
When everything from designing buildings to analyzing X-rays can be performed by lower-paid professionals in another part of the world, there’s no reason to believe newspapers can avoid the workforce shake-ups that have jolted most other industries.
Institutional inertia and economic self-satisfaction have maintained the status quo until now. As an increasingly challenging business environment forces newspapers out of their comfort zones, many dedicated workers, unfortunately, will be forced out of theirs, too.
Alan Mutter
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/
Struggling to sustain their traditional profitability amid weakening sales, newspaper publishers are looking to outsource everything from composing ads and printing papers to producing content and answering the phones.
After nipping and tucking headcount in newsrooms over the last few years, publishers appear to be poised to eliminate a significantly greater number of jobs in their plants by focusing on areas that previously were immune to cutbacks.
The initiative likely to claim the largest number of positions in the near future is the outsourcing of advertising composition to places like India and other low-wage countries.
In light of the apparent success of a pilot ad-outsource program at the Media News Group properties in Northern California, publishers like Gannett, McClatchy, the New York Times Co. and Scripps are considering whether they, too, should export such duties to offshore vendors, according to insiders familiar with the discussions.
These talks may or may not result in a decision to outsource jobs at any given property. But, human costs aside, the economics are powerfully persuasive.
Newspapers sending ad production offshore typically can reduce payroll costs by some 45%, says Robert Berkeley, president of Express KCS, one of the outsourcing companies. Thus, a paper could cut its costs to $30,000 a year per outsourced worker from $55,000 for an American doing the same job. These savings are even higher in unionized metro environments, where papers are struggling the hardest to sustain their margins.
The Columbus (OH) Dispatch was among the first to shift ad production to India, eliminating 90 jobs from a paper with daily circulation of 231,355. Assuming savings of $25k per employee, the paper should be able to add roughly $2.25 million a year to its bottom line.
Putting it another way: If a paper paid each departing employee a generous half-year of severance, the outsourcing project would begin to pay for itself in little more than 12 months – a terrific return on investment.
In what may be a harbinger of future initiatives elsewhere in the country, the San Francisco Chronicle has signed a 15-year contract with a Canadian company to begin printing the paper in in a new plant being constructed by early 2009. The opening coincides with the termination of the contract covering the newspaper’s 230 unionized press operators. When the new plant opens, their jobs will be gone.
While not outsourcing their production altogether, companies like the New York Times, Gannett, Media News and Journal Register have consolidated the printing and mailroom operations among certain of their geographically contiguous properties. In New Jersey, 200 production positions were eliminated when Advance Publications opened a plant to combine the production of the Newark Star Ledger and the Trenton Times.
While outsourcing production is complicated and not always feasible, the easiest jobs to shift are those of the people who work in telephone rooms or perform accounting, billing, accounts payable, human resources and other clerical functions.
Many newspaper groups already funnel want-ad and circulation calls to regional or national centers, where a single group of workers serving multiple time zones is far more efficient than a team dedicated to a single market. Many chains also have either consolidated clerical functions at in-house service bureaus or outsourced them to domestic vendors.
Sending call-center and clerical work offshore can shave 25% to 30% off the present costs of such operations, according to Gartner Research, a private firm. The New York Times and Boston Globe, among others, are each sending 40 to 50 clerical jobs to offshore contactors.
Even editorial and online operations are not immune from outsourcing.
Knight Ridder had a plan to create regional copy desks to handle headlines and layouts for groups of newspapers, a concept that was shelved prior to the sale of the company last year. Preposterous as the idea might sound, this is exactly what is being implemented in New Zealand by the publisher of the country’s largest daily and several other publications.
APN News and Media, a division of Britain’s Independent News & Media, is outsourcing about 70 jobs to an Australian company, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. If it works well, Independent News may extend the program to its titles in England and Ireland.
Reuters has more than 300 journalists in India writing many of the routine stories on its financial wires, according to MediaGuardian. Reuters has said it may increase the size of the Indian staff to 1,500 writers, though this could be affected by the potential merger with Thomson Corp.
And today's Los Angeles Times reports that a hyper-local website in Pasadena (not affiliated with a newspaper) has hired two writers in India, who, among other things, will cover city council meetings via webcam.
As valuable as Internet operations are to the future of newspaper companies, some publishers are having at least a portion of the work done overseas. London’s Financial Times, for example, relies on a staff in the Philippines to help edit and maintain its web site.
With offshore development, testing, hosting and technical support common in the information-technology sector, it is only logical that newspapers could achieve additional economies by moving – or expanding – many of these functions abroad.
When everything from designing buildings to analyzing X-rays can be performed by lower-paid professionals in another part of the world, there’s no reason to believe newspapers can avoid the workforce shake-ups that have jolted most other industries.
Institutional inertia and economic self-satisfaction have maintained the status quo until now. As an increasingly challenging business environment forces newspapers out of their comfort zones, many dedicated workers, unfortunately, will be forced out of theirs, too.
Global newspaper circulation up
Global newspaper circulation up
11 May, 2007 l 0444 hrs ISTlTIMES NEWS NETWORK
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Business/Intl_Business/Global_newspaper_circulation_up/articleshow/2030538.cms
SMS NEWS to 8888 for latest updates
LONDON: Internet and TV channels may be getting an increasing number of eyeballs, but newspapers are holding out to the competition as their circulation rose last year across the world on booming demand in India and China, World Association of Newspapers (WAN) said.
The paid-for newspaper circulation rose by 1.9% over the 12 months and by 8.7% over five years to more than 510 million copies in 2006. Similarly, the number of new paid-for titles crossed 11,000 mark for the first time in the history, WAN said, quoting preliminary data from its World Press Trends survey.
"Circulations continue to grow globally and not just in China and India,” it said, while asserting that these facts and figures have belied various myths about the newspapers, liek “circulations are falling” and “newspaper as a medium and a business is on decline".
India and China played a major role in the rising circulations. Excluding Asia (including India and China), the global paid-for circulation was up just 0.04%.
Across the various sub-continents, Asia recorded a 2.99% growth, second-biggest after South America’s 4.59%. However, North America recorded a decline of 1.97% in the paid-for circulations in 2006. Asia recorded the biggest rise of 6.13% in the number of paid-for titles, as against 3.22% globally and declines in North and South Americas.
Free daily newspaper circulation more than doubled over the five years to 40.8 million copies a day.
Including free newspapers, the circulation rose by a higher rate of 4.3% in one year and by 14.2% over five years. The number of paid-for newspapers and the combined total of free and paid-for titles rose to 510.4 million and 551.2 million in 2006.
11 May, 2007 l 0444 hrs ISTlTIMES NEWS NETWORK
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Business/Intl_Business/Global_newspaper_circulation_up/articleshow/2030538.cms
SMS NEWS to 8888 for latest updates
LONDON: Internet and TV channels may be getting an increasing number of eyeballs, but newspapers are holding out to the competition as their circulation rose last year across the world on booming demand in India and China, World Association of Newspapers (WAN) said.
The paid-for newspaper circulation rose by 1.9% over the 12 months and by 8.7% over five years to more than 510 million copies in 2006. Similarly, the number of new paid-for titles crossed 11,000 mark for the first time in the history, WAN said, quoting preliminary data from its World Press Trends survey.
"Circulations continue to grow globally and not just in China and India,” it said, while asserting that these facts and figures have belied various myths about the newspapers, liek “circulations are falling” and “newspaper as a medium and a business is on decline".
India and China played a major role in the rising circulations. Excluding Asia (including India and China), the global paid-for circulation was up just 0.04%.
Across the various sub-continents, Asia recorded a 2.99% growth, second-biggest after South America’s 4.59%. However, North America recorded a decline of 1.97% in the paid-for circulations in 2006. Asia recorded the biggest rise of 6.13% in the number of paid-for titles, as against 3.22% globally and declines in North and South Americas.
Free daily newspaper circulation more than doubled over the five years to 40.8 million copies a day.
Including free newspapers, the circulation rose by a higher rate of 4.3% in one year and by 14.2% over five years. The number of paid-for newspapers and the combined total of free and paid-for titles rose to 510.4 million and 551.2 million in 2006.
Friday, May 11, 2007
NEWS FLASH * * * Elimination of Publishers Periodical Rates for Foreign Subscribers.
BoSacks Speaks Out: The Following News Flash was submitted by a BoSacks Reader. I felt it was too important not to pass along immediately .
"He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else"
Benjamin Franklin
It appears to be a little known fact that included in the next increase and effective May 14th is the elimination of Publishers Periodical Rates for foreign subscribers. Publishers will no longer be able to include foreign mail on Form 3541, nor will they be able to pay for these subscribers from their Periodicals accounts at their respective mailing points. These copies will have top be repackaged and mailed with postage affixed via ISAL. The USPS will not allow the copies to be mailed even though the new mailing statements 3541-1 (8 pages vs. 3) don't go into effect until July 15. As an example a 10oz magazine from the US to Canada will go from $1.09 to $2.45 that is almost a 244% increase. I don't think the fulfillment houses are even aware of this change.
The USPS says the change is being forced due to complaints on service to foreign countries by Publishers, but won't give any names. I don't know what service the IMTAC committee has provided in this area for the small publisher as most of their foreign subs are already being handled by remailers. This is about the stupidest thing I have see the USPS do in the 33 years I have been in this business.
(Submitted by a Director)
"He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else"
Benjamin Franklin
It appears to be a little known fact that included in the next increase and effective May 14th is the elimination of Publishers Periodical Rates for foreign subscribers. Publishers will no longer be able to include foreign mail on Form 3541, nor will they be able to pay for these subscribers from their Periodicals accounts at their respective mailing points. These copies will have top be repackaged and mailed with postage affixed via ISAL. The USPS will not allow the copies to be mailed even though the new mailing statements 3541-1 (8 pages vs. 3) don't go into effect until July 15. As an example a 10oz magazine from the US to Canada will go from $1.09 to $2.45 that is almost a 244% increase. I don't think the fulfillment houses are even aware of this change.
The USPS says the change is being forced due to complaints on service to foreign countries by Publishers, but won't give any names. I don't know what service the IMTAC committee has provided in this area for the small publisher as most of their foreign subs are already being handled by remailers. This is about the stupidest thing I have see the USPS do in the 33 years I have been in this business.
(Submitted by a Director)
The year advertising turned digital
The year advertising turned digital
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article2530809.ece
Traditional media groups are finding it hard to claim a share of increasing advertising budgets as online services grow at breakneck speed. By Nic Fildes
Published: 11 May 2007
Commercial media companies that have struggled amid tough market conditions over the past few years will have to navigate further choppy waters in 2007 with the latest data in the radio and newspaper publishing sectors suggesting that the threat from online competitors will continue to bite hard.
Despite steady increases in the amount of money that companies have spent on advertising, the proportion allotted to television and radio marketing has stayed flat and, in the case of newspapers, has fallen.
The UK radio sector has been one of the worst hit by the surge in interest in online advertising. Alongside outdoor and cinema advertising, radio companies have struggled to fill the gap left by advertisers attracted to online advertising, a form of marketing that can be targeted specifically at individual groups based on demographic data.
With advertising industry heavyweights such as Sir Martin Sorrell predicting that online advertising will continue to grow at breakneck speed in the UK, newspaper publishers, television broadcasters and radio companies face the prospect of further revenue declines in the coming year.
Online advertising has taken off particularly quickly in the UK due to the equally rapid uptake in broadband services among consumers. Traditional forms of advertising like billboards and radio jingles are fairly unsophisticated compared to flashy new video advertisements that can be used on webpages. While traditional advertising relies on attracting the attention of random passers-by or unknown radio listeners, online marketing can be targeted at specific individuals, increasing the relevance of the advertising. Advertisers can also tell whether the user looked at the marketing, important data in gauging the effectiveness of the campaign.
Radio companies' struggle to attract more advertising revenue is not helped by volatile audience figures. The latest data from Rajar, the radio industry's ratings body, yesterday showed that commercial radio companies have continued to lose market share to the BBC, which took a record 56 per cent of the radio audience during the first three months of the year. Despite the ongoing progress of digital radio, commercial broadcasters slipped to 42 per cent from over 43 per cent last quarter.
Commercial broadcasters like Emap, Chrysalis and GCap took some heart from increases in the number of young people listening to stations like Magic and Galaxy. However there is still much work to do to challenge the BBC and win back advertisers that have moved online.
Some commercial radio companies are coping better with the tough market conditions. UTV's TalkSport station reported record listening figures whilst Emap's Magic station won back its top spot in London status during the quarter.
However analysts were disappointed with the performance of Chrysalis, whose Heart station lost out to Magic, and GCap's flagship station Capital which reported a record low audience share of 4.6 per cent. Paul Richards, an analyst at Numis Securities, said that SMG's performance was the most disappointing with Virgin FM recording its worst ratings performance since 2003.
Analysts said the data suggests that radio companies face an uphill struggle in 2007. Howard Bareham, an investment director at Mindshare, said: "It's a Catch-22. Radio companies need to invest in product but to do that, they need the advertising revenue."
Newspaper publishers have also struggled as advertising budgets have increasingly moved online. Trinity Mirror yesterday warned that advertising conditions remain "challenging and volatile" with advertising revenue falling 2.4 per cent in the first four months of the year. The drop represented an improvement on the 6 per cent fall that Trinity Mirror reported in the last quarter of 2006, but analysts attributed the slowing rate of decline to easier comparative figures, rather than an improvement in the underlying advertising market. Advertising revenue at the company's national newspapers such as Daily Mirror fell 4 per cent while circulation revenue dropped 0.7 per cent.
Companies such as GCap, run by long-serving chief executive Ralph Bernard, and Trinity Mirror, which has Sly Bailey at its helm, face tough challenges over the coming year as the structural shift in the industry gains pace. Mr Bernard has said that he doesn't expect recent investments in improving its radio stations to show up in Rajar figures until August but remains confident that the company can be turned around after a disastrous performance since the merger of GWR and Capital in 2005. Meanwhile Ms Bailey has overseen the acquisition of a number of websites in areas like online recruitment and real estate to offset the collapse in newspaper advertising revenue. However, digital revenue still only accounts for 5 per cent of Trinity Mirror's revenue.
Publishers, terrestrial television broadcasters and radio companies also face significant threats from emerging online competitors aiming to take advantage of changing consumer behaviour to take a large chunk of advertising budgets. In the radio sector, Rajar reported that 24 per cent of people in the UK now listen to the radio via the internet while 11 per cent listen to the radio on mobile phones. With computers becoming an increasingly popular way to consume media, a new form of radio station has emerged where consumers have control over the sort of songs that are played. Pandora and LastFM, two of the most high profile user-controlled radio stations, have proved very popular among young radio listeners.
In the television sector, Joost has created headlines as the first broadcast-quality internet TV platform that offers users free access to an increasingly large amount of content. Similarly advertising-funded services have been launched in the music and mobile-phone space as new media companies look to offer consumers free services if they agree to listen to advertisements.
Patrick Yau, an analyst with Bridgewell Securities, said that radio companies have been slow to invest in the internet despite attracting large audiences to basic internet radio websites due to a "fear of the unknown". "Radio and the internet are very complementary media - we can consume both at the same time. Why aren't we seeing a more integrated online strategy from radio companies?" he said. He noted that Virgin Radio argues it has the most popular internet radio site in the world but has not taken advantage of that traffic, perhaps by offering community-based information.
Richard Menzies-Gow, an analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort, said that overall radio-listening figures will continue to rise as more people listen to radio on mobile phones or at work but that radio companies need to figure out how to ramp up revenue as a result of higher listening figures. He expects that over time, there will be an interweaving of old and new media with a relaxation of cross-media ownership laws "inevitable" as advertisers look to run integrated campaigns.
Mr Bareham said: "In some respects, technology is against radio at the moment but the strengths of radio are as relevant today as a decade ago when the young and sexy radio industry outflanked the traditional media sector. Now it's online that is in vogue." He said radio companies needed to focus on taking advantage of the interactive elements of online radio and personal devices such as mobile phones over the coming year to stimulate growth in 2008 and 2009.
BT unveils vision to compete with Sky and Virgin
The media sector is getting increasingly crowded, with BT upping the ante in the television space.
Sky and Virgin Media have torn strips off each other to win new customers over the past few months while BT has slowly added customers to its BT Vision service. Customers will receive a set-top box that connects to BT's broadband network and offers customers video-on-demand services, Freeview television and an in-built video recorder.
BT will kick off a multi-million pound national marketing campaign tomorrow to promote the service and compete more aggressively with Sky and Virgin. BT is expected to spend at least £10m promoting the service.
BT Vision is designed to be more flexible than its cable and satellite-based rivals as it does not charge customers a minimum monthly subscription. There will be a set-up fee of around £90 although BT expects to launch a self-installation version later in the year at which point, analysts expect customer numbers to soar. The company has invested in building a large library of content for the on-demand service, including sports and hit movies.
BT expects to have up to 3 million customers in the medium term as it continues to invest in offering services outside its legacy residential telecoms business.
The threat to advertising revenue
* Personalised internet radio stations such as Pandora and Last.fm have built large customer bases by giving listeners control over playlists and dispensing with DJ chatter. Such stations ask the listener to list bands they like and then play songs by similar artists based on those preferences. Listeners can reject songs they don't like and buy ones they do. However the companies have hit licensing problems and Pandora has stopped allowing access to the site outside the US.
* Following on from the success of YouTube, new companies that offer free broadcast-quality television over the internet have started to emerge. Joost, set up by the founders of Skype, has made headlines and built a large library of content, and the company has just secured financial backing from a series of investors, including eBay backers Sequoia Capital, to strengthen the offering. However analysts expect it to be a niche service in the medium term.
* Another possible threat to advertising revenue comes from new companies which aim to offer free content and services to consumers who accept advertising. Blyk, a mobile phone company that uses Orange's network in the UK, will offer free calls and texts to people looking to save money by pumping ads down their handset. Meanwhile, We7, backed by Peter Gabriel, left, offers free digital music tracks to customers happy to accept advertising.
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article2530809.ece
Traditional media groups are finding it hard to claim a share of increasing advertising budgets as online services grow at breakneck speed. By Nic Fildes
Published: 11 May 2007
Commercial media companies that have struggled amid tough market conditions over the past few years will have to navigate further choppy waters in 2007 with the latest data in the radio and newspaper publishing sectors suggesting that the threat from online competitors will continue to bite hard.
Despite steady increases in the amount of money that companies have spent on advertising, the proportion allotted to television and radio marketing has stayed flat and, in the case of newspapers, has fallen.
The UK radio sector has been one of the worst hit by the surge in interest in online advertising. Alongside outdoor and cinema advertising, radio companies have struggled to fill the gap left by advertisers attracted to online advertising, a form of marketing that can be targeted specifically at individual groups based on demographic data.
With advertising industry heavyweights such as Sir Martin Sorrell predicting that online advertising will continue to grow at breakneck speed in the UK, newspaper publishers, television broadcasters and radio companies face the prospect of further revenue declines in the coming year.
Online advertising has taken off particularly quickly in the UK due to the equally rapid uptake in broadband services among consumers. Traditional forms of advertising like billboards and radio jingles are fairly unsophisticated compared to flashy new video advertisements that can be used on webpages. While traditional advertising relies on attracting the attention of random passers-by or unknown radio listeners, online marketing can be targeted at specific individuals, increasing the relevance of the advertising. Advertisers can also tell whether the user looked at the marketing, important data in gauging the effectiveness of the campaign.
Radio companies' struggle to attract more advertising revenue is not helped by volatile audience figures. The latest data from Rajar, the radio industry's ratings body, yesterday showed that commercial radio companies have continued to lose market share to the BBC, which took a record 56 per cent of the radio audience during the first three months of the year. Despite the ongoing progress of digital radio, commercial broadcasters slipped to 42 per cent from over 43 per cent last quarter.
Commercial broadcasters like Emap, Chrysalis and GCap took some heart from increases in the number of young people listening to stations like Magic and Galaxy. However there is still much work to do to challenge the BBC and win back advertisers that have moved online.
Some commercial radio companies are coping better with the tough market conditions. UTV's TalkSport station reported record listening figures whilst Emap's Magic station won back its top spot in London status during the quarter.
However analysts were disappointed with the performance of Chrysalis, whose Heart station lost out to Magic, and GCap's flagship station Capital which reported a record low audience share of 4.6 per cent. Paul Richards, an analyst at Numis Securities, said that SMG's performance was the most disappointing with Virgin FM recording its worst ratings performance since 2003.
Analysts said the data suggests that radio companies face an uphill struggle in 2007. Howard Bareham, an investment director at Mindshare, said: "It's a Catch-22. Radio companies need to invest in product but to do that, they need the advertising revenue."
Newspaper publishers have also struggled as advertising budgets have increasingly moved online. Trinity Mirror yesterday warned that advertising conditions remain "challenging and volatile" with advertising revenue falling 2.4 per cent in the first four months of the year. The drop represented an improvement on the 6 per cent fall that Trinity Mirror reported in the last quarter of 2006, but analysts attributed the slowing rate of decline to easier comparative figures, rather than an improvement in the underlying advertising market. Advertising revenue at the company's national newspapers such as Daily Mirror fell 4 per cent while circulation revenue dropped 0.7 per cent.
Companies such as GCap, run by long-serving chief executive Ralph Bernard, and Trinity Mirror, which has Sly Bailey at its helm, face tough challenges over the coming year as the structural shift in the industry gains pace. Mr Bernard has said that he doesn't expect recent investments in improving its radio stations to show up in Rajar figures until August but remains confident that the company can be turned around after a disastrous performance since the merger of GWR and Capital in 2005. Meanwhile Ms Bailey has overseen the acquisition of a number of websites in areas like online recruitment and real estate to offset the collapse in newspaper advertising revenue. However, digital revenue still only accounts for 5 per cent of Trinity Mirror's revenue.
Publishers, terrestrial television broadcasters and radio companies also face significant threats from emerging online competitors aiming to take advantage of changing consumer behaviour to take a large chunk of advertising budgets. In the radio sector, Rajar reported that 24 per cent of people in the UK now listen to the radio via the internet while 11 per cent listen to the radio on mobile phones. With computers becoming an increasingly popular way to consume media, a new form of radio station has emerged where consumers have control over the sort of songs that are played. Pandora and LastFM, two of the most high profile user-controlled radio stations, have proved very popular among young radio listeners.
In the television sector, Joost has created headlines as the first broadcast-quality internet TV platform that offers users free access to an increasingly large amount of content. Similarly advertising-funded services have been launched in the music and mobile-phone space as new media companies look to offer consumers free services if they agree to listen to advertisements.
Patrick Yau, an analyst with Bridgewell Securities, said that radio companies have been slow to invest in the internet despite attracting large audiences to basic internet radio websites due to a "fear of the unknown". "Radio and the internet are very complementary media - we can consume both at the same time. Why aren't we seeing a more integrated online strategy from radio companies?" he said. He noted that Virgin Radio argues it has the most popular internet radio site in the world but has not taken advantage of that traffic, perhaps by offering community-based information.
Richard Menzies-Gow, an analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort, said that overall radio-listening figures will continue to rise as more people listen to radio on mobile phones or at work but that radio companies need to figure out how to ramp up revenue as a result of higher listening figures. He expects that over time, there will be an interweaving of old and new media with a relaxation of cross-media ownership laws "inevitable" as advertisers look to run integrated campaigns.
Mr Bareham said: "In some respects, technology is against radio at the moment but the strengths of radio are as relevant today as a decade ago when the young and sexy radio industry outflanked the traditional media sector. Now it's online that is in vogue." He said radio companies needed to focus on taking advantage of the interactive elements of online radio and personal devices such as mobile phones over the coming year to stimulate growth in 2008 and 2009.
BT unveils vision to compete with Sky and Virgin
The media sector is getting increasingly crowded, with BT upping the ante in the television space.
Sky and Virgin Media have torn strips off each other to win new customers over the past few months while BT has slowly added customers to its BT Vision service. Customers will receive a set-top box that connects to BT's broadband network and offers customers video-on-demand services, Freeview television and an in-built video recorder.
BT will kick off a multi-million pound national marketing campaign tomorrow to promote the service and compete more aggressively with Sky and Virgin. BT is expected to spend at least £10m promoting the service.
BT Vision is designed to be more flexible than its cable and satellite-based rivals as it does not charge customers a minimum monthly subscription. There will be a set-up fee of around £90 although BT expects to launch a self-installation version later in the year at which point, analysts expect customer numbers to soar. The company has invested in building a large library of content for the on-demand service, including sports and hit movies.
BT expects to have up to 3 million customers in the medium term as it continues to invest in offering services outside its legacy residential telecoms business.
The threat to advertising revenue
* Personalised internet radio stations such as Pandora and Last.fm have built large customer bases by giving listeners control over playlists and dispensing with DJ chatter. Such stations ask the listener to list bands they like and then play songs by similar artists based on those preferences. Listeners can reject songs they don't like and buy ones they do. However the companies have hit licensing problems and Pandora has stopped allowing access to the site outside the US.
* Following on from the success of YouTube, new companies that offer free broadcast-quality television over the internet have started to emerge. Joost, set up by the founders of Skype, has made headlines and built a large library of content, and the company has just secured financial backing from a series of investors, including eBay backers Sequoia Capital, to strengthen the offering. However analysts expect it to be a niche service in the medium term.
* Another possible threat to advertising revenue comes from new companies which aim to offer free content and services to consumers who accept advertising. Blyk, a mobile phone company that uses Orange's network in the UK, will offer free calls and texts to people looking to save money by pumping ads down their handset. Meanwhile, We7, backed by Peter Gabriel, left, offers free digital music tracks to customers happy to accept advertising.
Magazine scam hits Severna Park
Magazine scam hits Severna Park
By SCOTT DAUGHERTY, Staff Writer
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2007/05_10-53/CSP
The young man at the door told a good tale.
He had just moved to the area and was working his way through college.
He said he was at the Severna Park doorstep yesterday trying to help a local charity.
And, the man said, if he managed to sell enough magazines and books; maybe, just maybe, he could earn a trip to Barcelona.
"It was a hard luck story," said Al Passori, of Boone Trail, explaining the salesman - who signed a receipt with the name Bryan Ackerman - sold him on the idea of buying some reading material for the YMCA in Towson.
"I wrote a check for $160," he said.
But then Mr. Passori started to worry about what he'd done and launched his own investigation into the young man and his company, "Xtreme Marketing."
Mr. Passori said the boy gave a fake address, the YMCA had never heard of the group, and that there are several fraud alerts about the company and Mr. Ackerman posted on www.ripoffreport.com.
Calls to Xtreme Marketing, which does not have a Web site, were not returned.
An employee at their Sugar Hill, Ga. offices initially said she could not connect a reporter to a manager because the president of the company didn't have an office - only a cell phone.
She eventually agreed to take the reporter's number and pass it to him.
"I'm glad I had the presence of mind to investigate further and stop the bank check before it could be cashed," Mr. Passori said. "It breaks your heart that kids would try to cheat a bona fide charity out of $160 simply to enrich themselves."
County police are now investigating, but advise against giving money to anyone who comes to the door unsolicited.
Other Severna Park residents reported similar incidents yesterday involving two teenage girls from "UMD." Those girls, however, said the books would go to a pediatrics hospital and never mentioned the company's name.
And Mr. Passori said he turned two boys away two weeks ago when they came to his door and immediately started asking about his cars.
"It appears to be a pattern," he said.
According to ripoffreport.com and numerous other Web sites, Xtreme Marketing also works under the name United Family Circulation and Ultimate Empire Sales. Among the postings on ripoffreport.com - some of which praised and some of which vilified the company - was one from a person claiming to be a former employee of United Family Circulation.
"Basically they told us lies that we could tell people to get them to buy our subscriptions. A common story was something like "Hi, my name is Scott. I just moved into the neighborhood."
The Better Business Bureau of Atlanta is aware of several similar complaints involving such lies. Xtreme Marketing told the bureau, however, they do not condone lying by their "independent contractors."
United Family Circulation has an unsatisfactory record with the Bureau due to unanswered complaints. Sixty-two complaints were filed against the company.
Also, according to the bureau, Xtreme Marketing, Inc. entered into an "Assurance of Voluntary Compliance" with the Georgia Governor's Office of Consumer Affairs.
"This was due to the company allegedly not providing refunds when consumers did not receive magazines, not honoring cancellations within the correct time frame, and while selling magazines the salespeople stated affiliation with or connection to various charitable organizations, high schools and universities, when such was not the case," the Web site said.
Mr. Passori said the incident will make him think twice about donating to a charity or giving money to a door to door salesman.
"This really irks me," said Mr. Passori. "This has really soured it on me."
By SCOTT DAUGHERTY, Staff Writer
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2007/05_10-53/CSP
The young man at the door told a good tale.
He had just moved to the area and was working his way through college.
He said he was at the Severna Park doorstep yesterday trying to help a local charity.
And, the man said, if he managed to sell enough magazines and books; maybe, just maybe, he could earn a trip to Barcelona.
"It was a hard luck story," said Al Passori, of Boone Trail, explaining the salesman - who signed a receipt with the name Bryan Ackerman - sold him on the idea of buying some reading material for the YMCA in Towson.
"I wrote a check for $160," he said.
But then Mr. Passori started to worry about what he'd done and launched his own investigation into the young man and his company, "Xtreme Marketing."
Mr. Passori said the boy gave a fake address, the YMCA had never heard of the group, and that there are several fraud alerts about the company and Mr. Ackerman posted on www.ripoffreport.com.
Calls to Xtreme Marketing, which does not have a Web site, were not returned.
An employee at their Sugar Hill, Ga. offices initially said she could not connect a reporter to a manager because the president of the company didn't have an office - only a cell phone.
She eventually agreed to take the reporter's number and pass it to him.
"I'm glad I had the presence of mind to investigate further and stop the bank check before it could be cashed," Mr. Passori said. "It breaks your heart that kids would try to cheat a bona fide charity out of $160 simply to enrich themselves."
County police are now investigating, but advise against giving money to anyone who comes to the door unsolicited.
Other Severna Park residents reported similar incidents yesterday involving two teenage girls from "UMD." Those girls, however, said the books would go to a pediatrics hospital and never mentioned the company's name.
And Mr. Passori said he turned two boys away two weeks ago when they came to his door and immediately started asking about his cars.
"It appears to be a pattern," he said.
According to ripoffreport.com and numerous other Web sites, Xtreme Marketing also works under the name United Family Circulation and Ultimate Empire Sales. Among the postings on ripoffreport.com - some of which praised and some of which vilified the company - was one from a person claiming to be a former employee of United Family Circulation.
"Basically they told us lies that we could tell people to get them to buy our subscriptions. A common story was something like "Hi, my name is Scott. I just moved into the neighborhood."
The Better Business Bureau of Atlanta is aware of several similar complaints involving such lies. Xtreme Marketing told the bureau, however, they do not condone lying by their "independent contractors."
United Family Circulation has an unsatisfactory record with the Bureau due to unanswered complaints. Sixty-two complaints were filed against the company.
Also, according to the bureau, Xtreme Marketing, Inc. entered into an "Assurance of Voluntary Compliance" with the Georgia Governor's Office of Consumer Affairs.
"This was due to the company allegedly not providing refunds when consumers did not receive magazines, not honoring cancellations within the correct time frame, and while selling magazines the salespeople stated affiliation with or connection to various charitable organizations, high schools and universities, when such was not the case," the Web site said.
Mr. Passori said the incident will make him think twice about donating to a charity or giving money to a door to door salesman.
"This really irks me," said Mr. Passori. "This has really soured it on me."
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Web Leads, Print Pubs Improve Environmental Impact
Web Leads, Print Pubs Improve Environmental Impact
by Mark Glaser, 11:44AM
If you’ve grown tired of answering the question, “paper or plastic?” you can now consider another nagging environmental question when choosing your news source: “Online or print?”
Environmental critics have decried “dead-tree media” for decades, saying that print publications rely on clear-cutting forests, energy produced to run paper mills, and gasoline used to deliver publications to each doorstep.While print publishers have started to look at recycled paper content and other environmentally friendly practices, the web remains a more eco-friendly choice for information consumers who care about their carbon footprint.
And it’s not just about getting news on the web; people are now getting information on smartphones and other wireless devices, too. In their unpublished research paper, “The Impact of Environmental Issues and Information Technology on the Future of Paper Industry,” Lauri Hetemaki and Majella Clarke of the Finnish Forest Research Institute explain how digital technology could eventually substitute for print:
One of the main trends in the publishing business has recently been the proliferation of media and venues for delivering content. Three interconnected drivers are likely to have an important impact on this process: bandwidth affordability, wireless communication, and the convergence of digital equipment. The rapid increase of broadband services and their declining real prices result in increasing usage of computer-based equipment for the delivery and consumption of media. Wireless communication allows people to break free from the tether of the network, and significantly increases the portability of digital media platforms. The convergence of technologies implies that single-function analog devices are giving way to multi-function digital devices.
The paper goes on to mention the environmental problems of technology and electronics hardware, often becoming obsolete quickly and containing toxic chemicals. Still, the amount of energy and environmental impact of one session on a computer pales in comparison to the impact of reading a printed newspaper or magazine. Frank Locantore is director of the Magazine Paper Project at the non-profit Co-op America. The aim of the project is to help magazines start using more recycled paper content.
Frank Locantore
“With the web we’re talking about energy use more than anything else,” he said. “When you talk about magazines and newspapers, you’re talking about forests, as well as energy and water use and even social conflict from where the forest fiber is being sourced. I can’t imagine magazine readership and production having less impact than the web.”
While that might be true in general, web and computer usage does have its environmental impact with the electricity and power used for server farms. And conversely, print publishers have started to pay attention to environmental concerns by pushing recycling programs as well as using recycled fiber in their publications.
Mixed Record for Newspapers
Recycling newspapers has become an ingrained habit for Americans over the past couple decades. Publishers have increased their use of recycled paper in newspapers and have become more cognizant of the impact of discarded newspapers on the local communities they serve.
In two separate investigative reports, specific newspapers detailed the environmental impact they were having. The Sacramento Bee’s State of Denial report from 2003 includes a section detailing how California forests had been preserved but newspaper publishers were taking paper stripped from the Canadian boreal forests. And the Montreal Gazette literally gave itself a Green Report Card , figuring its own ecological footprint with an in-depth package. The Gazette noted that it had taken some environmentally friendly steps by using 20% recycled paper content in its newspapers, but that the dream of a paperless office was far from coming true.
Tyson Miller, director of the Green Press Initiative , has helped book publishers switch to recycled paper, and is planning to start doing the same thing to the newspaper industry. He told me there were already a lot of good signs that newspapers were ahead of books and magazines — but there was still a long way to go.
“Newsprint consumption is 9.2 million tons per year, and the average amount of that which is recycled material is 32%, so about 6 million tons of virgin fiber is used to make U.S. newsprint per year,” he said. “That’s more virgin fiber than the books, magazine and catalog business combined. So even though they use a lot more recycled content, and print circulation is dropping, the industry as a whole uses a lot of paper. The good news is that the industry has a fairly high recycled fiber use rate.”
The Newspaper Association of America found that 69% of newspapers in the U.S. were recovered and recycled in 2005, up from about 57% in 1995. The NAA has been touting digital distribution of news articles and the rise of newspaper website readership for the past few years, though it hasn’t made it an environmental issue. David Johnson, administrator of ScrippsNews.com, wrote an Earth Day-related blog post detailing the eco-friendly steps the newspaper industry was taking. He told me newspapers had lowered the amount of newsprint used in each paper — though that was more for cost-cutting than anything else.
“I know at Scripps [environmental issues are] a big deal,” Johnson said. “I just got out of a newspaper technology directors meeting a couple weeks ago, and we’re looking for every way we can to increase profit and one of those ways is recycling. We’re recycling everything that we’re not distributing…There are a few boutique presses here in DC that say they only do recycled newsprint and that’s their marketing advantage. The newspapers will find that as a marketable peg they can get onto as eco-friendly.”
When I was visiting London last year, I was amazed at all the discarded free Metro newspapers in the subway trains. The trend toward free commuter newspapers is not one that has captured the hearts of environmentalists. Quite the contrary. London-based photographer Justin Canning started the website Project Freesheet to ask people to photograph the waste created by free newspapers, and to pressure publishers to promote recycling and pay for the garbage they are creating.
Justin Canning
“Will people change the way they read because they have concerns for the environment?” Canning said via email. “I’m not sure because I don’t think people are yet 100% comfortable about sitting in front of screens to read for hours. Papers and books still offer the ability to ‘disappear’ (into the garden, on the beach, on the train, etc.) and read for amounts of time, without the need to worry about support for your device…So I think the onus still rests on the producers of printed matter to take responsibility for their product and produce it in a way that is positive for our environment.”
Magazines Still Lagging
The magazine industry has been slower to embrace recycled paper in their publications, citing a higher cost and lower quality of the paper. As paper production changes and recycling becomes more widespread, those arguments will start to lose their strength — especially if readers start asking for more eco-friendly publications.
After the Al Gore documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” magazine publishers are starting to pay more attention to environmental issues, at least in their editorial outlook. The Week magazine decided to do one online-only issue with a green theme around Earth Day this year. Elle and Vanity Fair both had special green issues as well, and WashingtonPost.Newsweek.Interactive launched the online-only enviro-women’s pub, Sprig .
Yet, there’s a hint of hypocrisy in some of these nods toward the green revolution. Vanity Fair uses absolutely no recycled paper in its issues, and Elle has only used recycled paper in its two green issues over the past couple years.
“It drives me batty,” said Frank Locantore of the Magazine Paper Project. “It’s like a Ford Escalade SUV with a ‘Stop Global Warming’ bumper sticker. Vanity Fair and Elle make such a hullabaloo with their Green Issue, and the most impactful thing that they could do for the environment is to switch to recycled paper, and Shape [magazine] does that for every issue.”
Locantore says that only about 100 magazines out of 18,000 titles in print use some recycled paper content or use responsibly sourced virgin fiber. (His group includes a list of these titles on a special Heroes page .) He is starting to see more interest from publishers to use recycled paper, and is hoping to convince six high-profile magazines to set examples by using some recycled paper content in their publications. He ticks off the enivoronmental benefits if magazines would switch from 0% recycled content in their publications to 30% recycled: 16% less solid waste; 10% less waste water; 13% less greenhouse gases; and 10% less total energy expended in production.
There are a lot of other areas that magazines could help out the environment beyond just using recycled stock paper. Samir Mr. Magazine Husni, chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, notes that publishers could do a much better job of printing up the right number of copies instead of overshooting.
“The newspaper and magazine industry must find ways to trim the waste, and that’s why they have to be more clever about delivering relevant information to relevant audiences,” he said. “We can’t afford to have publishers who say, ‘I’m going to print 1 million copies and will see who’s going to buy them.’ And we know that only 3 out of 10 copies will be sold, and 700,000 will go to waste. We have to be more laser-targeted in our publishing instead of a shotgun approach. The technology will help us laser target our publishing, our printing.”
E-Ink to the Rescue?
Despite the obvious ecological problems with ink on paper, the Internet isn’t exactly solar-powered and eats up plenty of energy. An Ask.com executive told Wired Magazine last fall that the five leading search engines have about 2 million servers for a total of 600 megawatts of power consumption. When you add in hard drive power and air conditioning, the total energy usage for search engines hits 5 gigawatts — enough to power Las Vegas on a hot day, according to the article.
Journalist/blogger Nicholas Carr noted that 4,000 servers power the virtual world Second Life, and that there are an average of 10,000 to 15,000 avatars living there. He wanted to know if Second Life citizens ended up using up more energy than real-life people and found that the average avatar uses up 1,752 kilowatt hours per year — about the same amount used by the average Brazilian. “Avatars aren’t quite as intangible as they seem,” he concluded. “They don’t have bodies, but they do leave footprints.”
So perhaps a more perfect ecological solution for getting news and information would be on low- or solar-powered e-readers that were cheap, flexible and reusable.
Sony Reader with E-Ink
“I think with the increased use of handheld electronic devices, the consumption of traditional printed media is already being affected,” Project Freesheet’s Canning said. “But we’ll always have our favorites that we will want to buy hard copies of, so the book/magazine/paper format will not fall out of demand for a long time — or until someone invents a device that can open up to the size of a magazine and fold down to the size of your present mobile phone. That is why we have to encourage the publishing industry to look at the products they produce and to ask them if they can really justify polluting the planet for the next 50 years with a product that is showing itself to be extremely bad news for the environment.”
The researchers from the Finnish Forest Research Institute believe that e-readers could eventually become a real substitute for printed material — unlike the desktop computer, which doesn’t lend itself to lengthy readings.
“When consumers see that paper-like displays or smart paper are as easy to use and as good quality as print media, and that they come at mass-market prices, then the environmental perspective (green purchasing) becomes much more relevant,” they write. “The further we look to the future, the more likely the relationship between print and digital media is to evolve from that of a complementary preference, to that of substitute…The more consumers accept electronic media as a substitute for printed media, the easier it is for politicians and environmental authorities to regulate media that are environmentally more damaging.”
by Mark Glaser, 11:44AM
If you’ve grown tired of answering the question, “paper or plastic?” you can now consider another nagging environmental question when choosing your news source: “Online or print?”
Environmental critics have decried “dead-tree media” for decades, saying that print publications rely on clear-cutting forests, energy produced to run paper mills, and gasoline used to deliver publications to each doorstep.While print publishers have started to look at recycled paper content and other environmentally friendly practices, the web remains a more eco-friendly choice for information consumers who care about their carbon footprint.
And it’s not just about getting news on the web; people are now getting information on smartphones and other wireless devices, too. In their unpublished research paper, “The Impact of Environmental Issues and Information Technology on the Future of Paper Industry,” Lauri Hetemaki and Majella Clarke of the Finnish Forest Research Institute explain how digital technology could eventually substitute for print:
One of the main trends in the publishing business has recently been the proliferation of media and venues for delivering content. Three interconnected drivers are likely to have an important impact on this process: bandwidth affordability, wireless communication, and the convergence of digital equipment. The rapid increase of broadband services and their declining real prices result in increasing usage of computer-based equipment for the delivery and consumption of media. Wireless communication allows people to break free from the tether of the network, and significantly increases the portability of digital media platforms. The convergence of technologies implies that single-function analog devices are giving way to multi-function digital devices.
The paper goes on to mention the environmental problems of technology and electronics hardware, often becoming obsolete quickly and containing toxic chemicals. Still, the amount of energy and environmental impact of one session on a computer pales in comparison to the impact of reading a printed newspaper or magazine. Frank Locantore is director of the Magazine Paper Project at the non-profit Co-op America. The aim of the project is to help magazines start using more recycled paper content.
Frank Locantore
“With the web we’re talking about energy use more than anything else,” he said. “When you talk about magazines and newspapers, you’re talking about forests, as well as energy and water use and even social conflict from where the forest fiber is being sourced. I can’t imagine magazine readership and production having less impact than the web.”
While that might be true in general, web and computer usage does have its environmental impact with the electricity and power used for server farms. And conversely, print publishers have started to pay attention to environmental concerns by pushing recycling programs as well as using recycled fiber in their publications.
Mixed Record for Newspapers
Recycling newspapers has become an ingrained habit for Americans over the past couple decades. Publishers have increased their use of recycled paper in newspapers and have become more cognizant of the impact of discarded newspapers on the local communities they serve.
In two separate investigative reports, specific newspapers detailed the environmental impact they were having. The Sacramento Bee’s State of Denial report from 2003 includes a section detailing how California forests had been preserved but newspaper publishers were taking paper stripped from the Canadian boreal forests. And the Montreal Gazette literally gave itself a Green Report Card , figuring its own ecological footprint with an in-depth package. The Gazette noted that it had taken some environmentally friendly steps by using 20% recycled paper content in its newspapers, but that the dream of a paperless office was far from coming true.
Tyson Miller, director of the Green Press Initiative , has helped book publishers switch to recycled paper, and is planning to start doing the same thing to the newspaper industry. He told me there were already a lot of good signs that newspapers were ahead of books and magazines — but there was still a long way to go.
“Newsprint consumption is 9.2 million tons per year, and the average amount of that which is recycled material is 32%, so about 6 million tons of virgin fiber is used to make U.S. newsprint per year,” he said. “That’s more virgin fiber than the books, magazine and catalog business combined. So even though they use a lot more recycled content, and print circulation is dropping, the industry as a whole uses a lot of paper. The good news is that the industry has a fairly high recycled fiber use rate.”
The Newspaper Association of America found that 69% of newspapers in the U.S. were recovered and recycled in 2005, up from about 57% in 1995. The NAA has been touting digital distribution of news articles and the rise of newspaper website readership for the past few years, though it hasn’t made it an environmental issue. David Johnson, administrator of ScrippsNews.com, wrote an Earth Day-related blog post detailing the eco-friendly steps the newspaper industry was taking. He told me newspapers had lowered the amount of newsprint used in each paper — though that was more for cost-cutting than anything else.
“I know at Scripps [environmental issues are] a big deal,” Johnson said. “I just got out of a newspaper technology directors meeting a couple weeks ago, and we’re looking for every way we can to increase profit and one of those ways is recycling. We’re recycling everything that we’re not distributing…There are a few boutique presses here in DC that say they only do recycled newsprint and that’s their marketing advantage. The newspapers will find that as a marketable peg they can get onto as eco-friendly.”
When I was visiting London last year, I was amazed at all the discarded free Metro newspapers in the subway trains. The trend toward free commuter newspapers is not one that has captured the hearts of environmentalists. Quite the contrary. London-based photographer Justin Canning started the website Project Freesheet to ask people to photograph the waste created by free newspapers, and to pressure publishers to promote recycling and pay for the garbage they are creating.
Justin Canning
“Will people change the way they read because they have concerns for the environment?” Canning said via email. “I’m not sure because I don’t think people are yet 100% comfortable about sitting in front of screens to read for hours. Papers and books still offer the ability to ‘disappear’ (into the garden, on the beach, on the train, etc.) and read for amounts of time, without the need to worry about support for your device…So I think the onus still rests on the producers of printed matter to take responsibility for their product and produce it in a way that is positive for our environment.”
Magazines Still Lagging
The magazine industry has been slower to embrace recycled paper in their publications, citing a higher cost and lower quality of the paper. As paper production changes and recycling becomes more widespread, those arguments will start to lose their strength — especially if readers start asking for more eco-friendly publications.
After the Al Gore documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” magazine publishers are starting to pay more attention to environmental issues, at least in their editorial outlook. The Week magazine decided to do one online-only issue with a green theme around Earth Day this year. Elle and Vanity Fair both had special green issues as well, and WashingtonPost.Newsweek.Interactive launched the online-only enviro-women’s pub, Sprig .
Yet, there’s a hint of hypocrisy in some of these nods toward the green revolution. Vanity Fair uses absolutely no recycled paper in its issues, and Elle has only used recycled paper in its two green issues over the past couple years.
“It drives me batty,” said Frank Locantore of the Magazine Paper Project. “It’s like a Ford Escalade SUV with a ‘Stop Global Warming’ bumper sticker. Vanity Fair and Elle make such a hullabaloo with their Green Issue, and the most impactful thing that they could do for the environment is to switch to recycled paper, and Shape [magazine] does that for every issue.”
Locantore says that only about 100 magazines out of 18,000 titles in print use some recycled paper content or use responsibly sourced virgin fiber. (His group includes a list of these titles on a special Heroes page .) He is starting to see more interest from publishers to use recycled paper, and is hoping to convince six high-profile magazines to set examples by using some recycled paper content in their publications. He ticks off the enivoronmental benefits if magazines would switch from 0% recycled content in their publications to 30% recycled: 16% less solid waste; 10% less waste water; 13% less greenhouse gases; and 10% less total energy expended in production.
There are a lot of other areas that magazines could help out the environment beyond just using recycled stock paper. Samir Mr. Magazine Husni, chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, notes that publishers could do a much better job of printing up the right number of copies instead of overshooting.
“The newspaper and magazine industry must find ways to trim the waste, and that’s why they have to be more clever about delivering relevant information to relevant audiences,” he said. “We can’t afford to have publishers who say, ‘I’m going to print 1 million copies and will see who’s going to buy them.’ And we know that only 3 out of 10 copies will be sold, and 700,000 will go to waste. We have to be more laser-targeted in our publishing instead of a shotgun approach. The technology will help us laser target our publishing, our printing.”
E-Ink to the Rescue?
Despite the obvious ecological problems with ink on paper, the Internet isn’t exactly solar-powered and eats up plenty of energy. An Ask.com executive told Wired Magazine last fall that the five leading search engines have about 2 million servers for a total of 600 megawatts of power consumption. When you add in hard drive power and air conditioning, the total energy usage for search engines hits 5 gigawatts — enough to power Las Vegas on a hot day, according to the article.
Journalist/blogger Nicholas Carr noted that 4,000 servers power the virtual world Second Life, and that there are an average of 10,000 to 15,000 avatars living there. He wanted to know if Second Life citizens ended up using up more energy than real-life people and found that the average avatar uses up 1,752 kilowatt hours per year — about the same amount used by the average Brazilian. “Avatars aren’t quite as intangible as they seem,” he concluded. “They don’t have bodies, but they do leave footprints.”
So perhaps a more perfect ecological solution for getting news and information would be on low- or solar-powered e-readers that were cheap, flexible and reusable.
Sony Reader with E-Ink
“I think with the increased use of handheld electronic devices, the consumption of traditional printed media is already being affected,” Project Freesheet’s Canning said. “But we’ll always have our favorites that we will want to buy hard copies of, so the book/magazine/paper format will not fall out of demand for a long time — or until someone invents a device that can open up to the size of a magazine and fold down to the size of your present mobile phone. That is why we have to encourage the publishing industry to look at the products they produce and to ask them if they can really justify polluting the planet for the next 50 years with a product that is showing itself to be extremely bad news for the environment.”
The researchers from the Finnish Forest Research Institute believe that e-readers could eventually become a real substitute for printed material — unlike the desktop computer, which doesn’t lend itself to lengthy readings.
“When consumers see that paper-like displays or smart paper are as easy to use and as good quality as print media, and that they come at mass-market prices, then the environmental perspective (green purchasing) becomes much more relevant,” they write. “The further we look to the future, the more likely the relationship between print and digital media is to evolve from that of a complementary preference, to that of substitute…The more consumers accept electronic media as a substitute for printed media, the easier it is for politicians and environmental authorities to regulate media that are environmentally more damaging.”
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