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Time Warner Inc (NYSE:TWX - News) will eventually sell the Time Inc magazine unit and could buy holdings in its core entertainment category, Gordon Crawford, managing director of its largest shareholder, said during a presentation this week. "Time Warner just spun off their cable division, they are going to sell their print division, they are going to spin off AOL and they're just going to be Warner Brothers, HBO and the Turner Networks," said Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group. "Now, they will make acquisitions ... but they're probably going to buy just stuff in their wheel house of...

The surprise hit "Inglourious Basterds" appears to have breathed some life into Weinstein Co., but the independent movie studio is still facing a serious cash squeeze. Several people familiar with the finances of the company, founded by independent film producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, said it needs a fresh capital infusion or successive box-office blockbusters to ease the growing pressure. snip The four-year-old film company has burned through most of the roughly $1.2 billion in debt and equity financing raised for its launch in 2005, these people said. Now, these people said, the company likely has to do one of...

Even the cable networks that are today’s multi-revenue stream darlings are destined for the same “digital destruction” as advertising-supported broadcast television, newspapers and other traditional media. It’s just a matter of time. That likely scenario from former News Corp. president and COO Peter Chernin, represents the final blow to media conglomerates. which currently rely on their cable networks for at least 60 percent of their profits. Whether niche cable programming can survive and thrive in a streaming on-demand video world “is the single biggest question facing the media industry,” Chernin said Wednesday during a roundtable discussion USC Annenberg School for...

From: NEWSPAPER GUILD MAILING Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:03:54 -0400 Subject: Guild UNION TIMES: 'Cost-Saving' Committee Meets To: [New York Times guild members] September 24, 2009 "Cost-Saving" Committee Meets Times Agrees to Offer Voluntary Buyouts Pay Cut to be Restored in January Representatives of the Guild and Times management met earlier this week to discuss the possibility of offering a Voluntary Buyout and to identify cost-saving opportunities that still may exist at the newspaper. The meeting was part of a process that was agreed to in discussions between the union and company management last spring regarding the temporary 5...

Memo from St. Petersburg Times editor Paul Tash September 24, 2009 To: All Times Publishing Company Staff From: Paul Tash Last week, the board of directors unanimously reached two decisions to bring our expenses into better balance with our revenues, and help the company weather this prolonged economic storm. First, we will implement a 5 percent, across-the-board wage reduction for all employees, starting November 2nd. We recognize that this will add to the strain that staffers are bearing, and we regret that this step is necessary. But in due time, we would regret even more a failure to recognize and...

While the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday takes up the issue of a federal shield law, another congressional committee in the House will be focused on the impact of the newspaper industry's financial problems. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), Chair of the House Joint Economic Committee (JEC), will convene a hearing "to examine contraction in the newspaper industry, the economic impact of the changing media landscape, as well as the future of the industry at large," according to an announcement. The hearing, titled "The Future of Newspapers: The Impact on the Economy and Democracy," will take place Thursday, at 10:00...

If you're buying fewer DVDs and renting more of them -- especially from automated Redbox kiosks -- you've got the Hollywood studios scared. DVD sales fell 13.5% to $5.4 billion during the first half of 2009, according to the Digital Entertainment Group. During the same span, DVD rentals rose by 8.3% to $3.4 billion. Digital sales and rentals -- such as those conducted over online stores like Amazon.com and Apple's iTunes -- jumped 21% to $968 million. The studios know that DVD sales have been in decline since at least 2005. Now, however, a depressed economy, convenient rental options and...

If there was a theme running through the 61st Annual Primetime Emmy Awards, broadcast Sept. 20 on CBS, it was one of wry desperation. From host Neil Patrick Harris' opening number--with its chorus imploring "Don't touch that remote!"--to Tina Fey's, tongue-in-cheek "thank you" to NBC Universal executives for keeping 30 Rock "on the air even though we are so much more expensive than a talk show," this year's Emmys played like an elegy to a dying business model. Mathew Wiener, the creator and executive producer of AMC's Mad Men, which took home its second consecutive Emmy for outstanding drama series,...

Despite some tentative optimism from Washington, Wall Street and Madison Avenue, people who monitor the newspaper business for a living say it has not yet hit bottom. But in what passes for good news these days, the free fall in newspaper advertising may be slowing, and specialists predict it will ease through 2009 and into 2010. With 10 days left in the third quarter, analysts, publishers and ad buyers say that ad revenue will be down about 25 percent industrywide from the third quarter last year, possibly a little less. They predict that the decline will be smaller in the...

A provocative full-page newspaper ad from Fox News drew heated reactions from its rivals today and one demand that The Washington Post apologize for running it. Over photos of protesters gathering for an "anti-tax" rally in Washington last Saturday, the ad asked: "How Did ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN Miss This Story?" The problem with the ad is that the other networks indeed covered the protest, which -- like similar demonstrations across the country -- were heavily promoted by Fox, especially talk show host Glenn Beck. The ad appeared Friday in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post,...

The Northern California Media Workers Guild said late Wednesday that five members of the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial department are being laid off, the latest in a series of staffing cuts at the troubled daily newspaper. The Guild didn’t indicate which editorial staffers were losing their jobs. Five staffers in the Chronicle’s classified advertising department, four of them Guild members, agreed to job buyouts last week, according to the union, and “at least one voluntary layoff has been accepted in editorial, the Guild said. That would mean at least 11 jobs have been eliminated this month, after earlier rounds of...

Gannett's The Town Talk in Alexandria, La., will lay off about 40 employees when it shifts its printing next month to Lafayette, La., according to a Wednesday memo. Leslie Hurst, Gannett's vice president of the South group and publisher of The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette announced the move in a memo obtained by Gannettoid.com. In the memo, Hurst said, "this decision was not made lightly, but is the result of a great deal of thought and research to ensure that we are making the best decision for both operations." According to a story published Wednesday on The Town Talk's Web...

I thank the Fates every day that my greatest professional mistakes came when nobody was watching. This morning, as her newspaper reported the spiking of a piece of the sort she had bad-mouthed, Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth must be wishing that the Fates had been as kind to her. Earlier this summer, Weymouth got in Dutch when a Post plan to sell off-the-record access to reporters and government officials at "salons" at Weymouth's home was made public by Politico. Weymouth and Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli quickly canceled the events after much confusion over whether the paper had put...

The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and the bloggers and talk show hosts aggressively pursuing an ideological agenda on-line and on TV and radio. From birthers to tea parties to town halls and ACORN, the scandal-plaged anti-poverty group — not to mention President Obama’s speech last week to school children and the background of former White House aide Van Jones — issues initially dismissed or missed entirely by the national media have burst,...

Obviously, the "main stream" media are hard of hearing and seeing. About 2 million mad-as-hell taxpayers assembling in Washington, D.C. for the largest-ever (most well-behaved ever, most respectful ever) protest did not make it onto their radar screens (or our TV screens). They need our help. Maybe we cannot repeat an assembly of 2 million mad-as-hell taxpaying patriots in one place, but surely those who longed to go and couldn't would love to be a part of Operation "Can You Hear Us Now?" I'll bet for every one patriot who went to D.C. there are 10-20 more who wished they...

They said "The Jay Leno Show" wouldn't feel like going to bed really early, that it would feel new. But it's like going to bed really early. It feels old. For a lot of people, "The Jay Leno Show," which premiered Monday in its game-changing 10 o'clock weeknight format, it might feel perfectly comfy. There was an uncomfy moment with a chastened Kanye West, who 24 hours earlier acted like a jerk by interrupting Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards. "What would your mom have said about this?" Leno asked the rapper, who sat frozen at...

It has become a familiar chain reaction: Talk-show hosts whip up a noisy controversy, which hits higher decibels as it spreads to the establishment media, which costs some unfortunate soul his job. But now the middleman -- the journalistic gatekeepers of yore -- may no longer be necessary. By the time White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned over Labor Day weekend, the New York Times had not run a single story. Neither had USA Today, which also didn't cover the resignation. The Washington Post had done one piece, on the day before he quit. The Los Angeles Times had...

IN one of the best scenes in “The Hucksters,” one of the best movies about advertising, Sydney Greenstreet, as the demanding client who makes Beautee soap, tells Clark Gable, as a Don Draper-ish adman named Victor Norman, how to peddle his product — or anything else. “Beautee soap, Beautee soap, Beautee soap,” Greenstreet intones. “Repeat it until it comes out of their ears. Repeat it until they say it in their sleep. Irritate them, Mr. Norman. Irritate, irritate, irritate them.” Jay Leno is no soap. And he is certainly no Beautee. But by Monday night, when “The Jay Leno Show”...

Some habits die hard in TV -- even the antiquated ones, like fall premiere week. With so many distractions competing for viewers' time (including an explosion of original cable fare), the thought of trying to cram a crowded plate of new shows down their throat at the same time seems ludicrous. In just one week -- Sept. 21 through 27 -- the broadcasters are stuffing more than 43 new and returning shows. And then there's the several early launches (mostly on the CW and Fox) airing their second or third segs that week, or a handful of shows that make...

Money-losing Newsweek hopes to break even by 2011 and plans to as much as double its subscription rate over the next two years. Ann McDaniel, managing director of Newsweek, which is owned by The Washington Post Co., said the magazine will aim for a "smaller base of very committed subscribers and get more money from each of them," while speaking at The Post Co.'s annual shareholders meeting at the company's D.C. headquarters. Analysts suggested that the new Newsweek is modeling its editorial strategy on England's Economist, and now it appears to be doing the same thing with its business strategy....

The marketing executive at the center of a controversial series of Washington Post-sponsored dinner "salons" has resigned from the newspaper some 10 weeks after the events were canceled, The Post said Friday. Charles Pelton, who had helped organize and promote the monthly dinners as The Post's newly hired general manager of events and conferences, made no mention of the controversy in his resignation letter to Post President Stephen P. Hills. Instead, Pelton wrote, "Given the current circumstances with regard to the resources needed to launch [an events business], my family and I have decided not to relocate to Washington, D.C.,"...

Political commentator, author and writer for The Atlantic magazine Andrew M. Sullivan won't have to face charges stemming from a recent pot bust at the Cape Cod National Seashore - but a federal judge isn't happy about it. U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings says in his decision that the case is an example of how sometimes "small cases raise issues of fundamental importance in our system of justice." While marijuana possession may have been decriminalized, Sullivan, who owns a home in Provincetown, made the mistake of being caught by a park ranger with a controlled substance on National Park...

Fans of Jay Leno may have high expectations for the comedian's new show beginning Monday night. But in negotiating ad rates, NBC and advertisers have set the bar low. In the weeks leading up to NBC's launch of "The Jay Leno Show," advertisers are buying spots for about half what they'd spend per commercial in new episodes of dramas on competing networks at the same time of night, executives say. snip The number of people watching shows on weeknights between 10 and 11 p.m. on NBC, CBS Corp.'s CBS and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC has declined 23% from three TV...

As a curmudgeon who has embraced many of the new technologies of journalism, I want to draw a line. Let’s quit tweet, tweet, tweeting like the birdbrains do. I don’t care what your friend had for lunch. I don’t care how many people are following you through Twitter.com. Or Facebook, for that matter. My intelligence drops just about every time I see a tweet pop up on a web page I frequent. I really like Missouri basketball player Kimmie English. He’s a bright, intelligent, witty kid. He speaks in complete sentences. His expresses opinions clearly in person and I suspect,...

If you're watching more TV on your computer these days -- and less on an actual TV -- you're not alone. A survey by the nonprofit Conference Board released Tuesday showed that nearly a quarter of households in the U.S. now view television programs online. That's up from 20% last year. The quarterly Consumer Internet Barometer survey found that news shows were watched by 43% of online viewers, followed by sitcoms, comedies and dramas, watched by 35%. Slightly less than 20% viewed reality shows online, and 18% took in sports. Viewership of the Hulu online service -- which offers shows...

Think about that for a second. Are they a death panel? I think they are. On a day to day basis...... hourly.... they kill information. They kill A LOT of information. Whatever gets deemed too inconvenient gets omitted and ignored and suppressed. Whatever is unavoidable they propagandize and spin away to make it fit the template, or they just poo poo and down play it. They are a body which keeps rationing and rationing information that they don't approve of. Think about some of those commonly heard talking points regarding the drive bys: "If it bleeds it leads" Except when...

There is no doubt about it: Network television desperately needs a comeback this fall. A 2008-09 season that produced only one clear new hit and saw several solid veterans slump was followed by a summer in which tumbleweeds could be seen blowing across ratings charts. And all of this happened amidst a whirlwind of well-known challenges, from the floundering economy to audience fragmentation to an increasingly empowered viewer dictating the when and how of consumption. And while every year the white knight known as the upfront marketplace comes galloping majestically along to save the day, in 2009 the broadcast nets...

If the year's first four months defied all expectations for what Hollywood could do in a recession, this summer delivered some sobering reality. Through the end of April, domestic box-office receipts leaped 17% while admissions surged nearly 16% from the previous year, according to Hollywood.com. But as the weather turned hot, business cooled: From May 1 through Aug. 31, attendance was down 2.4% from 2008 and 6% from 2007. Summer box-office revenues rose 1.3%, not even enough to account for ticket price inflation, let alone the premiums charged in a growing number of 3-D theaters. In the midst of the...

After months or "reorganizing," the rubber hits the road today at the Palm Beach Post. By the end of working hours, some 20 newsroom staffers will be gone in the latest round of buyouts/layoffs. Some have already packed their bags and taken the reduced severance package. Award-winning feature writer Christine Evans left on her own volition recently and is now teaching at a private school. Photo Editor Pete Cross took the buyout early as well. So did Deputy Metro Editor Maria Garcia. A few copyeditors were given the heave-ho last night. Updated: Resigning and taking the package is Assistant Metro...

To pen a living as a Hollywood screenwriter has always required fortitude and patience. Given the ratio between number of writers and available work, the odds of success are long. Now it looks like the odds have become a whole lot longer. Thanks to a recession-driven downturn forcing studios to make fewer movies and TV shows, coupled with a screenwriters strike last year that ground production to a halt, the wordsmiths of Hollywood have seen jobs and income evaporate. That's the bleak take-away from the annual financial report of the Writers Guild of America, West, the union that represents about...

The Ledger-Enquirer will require nearly half of its employees to take a week off without pay beginning Sept. 6, said Valerie Canepa, the newspaper’s publisher, on Wednesday. The mandatory furloughs impact 88 of 174 employees — including the newsroom — and will run through Dec. 12. Exempt are advertising sales employees, most production workers and the staff of The Bayonet, a publication that focuses on Fort Benning. The furloughs come with the newspaper industry nationwide under financial pressure from the severe recession and print readers migrating to the Web for news. “We have an excellent newspaper and a building full...

More than $10bn in advertising disappeared from US media markets in the first six months of this year, according to new data that show intense pressure on media owners and ad agencies as they search for other business models. Preliminary figures from Nielsen show a 15.4 per cent year-on-year decline in US advertising revenues, the largest drop for any period in the decade since the marketing and media measurement group began compiling such reports. The study showed sharp differences in the behaviour of different media and product categories, with cable television the only medium on which ad spend increased, up...

For three days, I couldn't find my fire on TV. And that's a problem -- before and after -- you've been evacuated from your La Crescenta home as I, my husband and my three children were in the early morning hours this weekend. As a television critic, I have spent hours watching endless news loops of Octomom coverage, Tim Russert memorials and the Sarah Palin watch. Less than two months ago, I sat through at least an hour's worth of overhead shots of a freeway emptied in anticipation of Michael Jackson's memorial procession. An hour. Of empty freeway. I have...

A Web site for local news hopes to fill the growing void in professionally reported local news by recruiting citizens armed with iPhones as reporters. The site, Fwix, will release an iPhone application this week that enables its users to file news updates, photos and videos, live from the field. The items will appear on Fwix’s year-old Web site, which also collects links to local news articles from newspapers and blogs in 85 cities. “We believe we are the real-time local newswire,” said Darian Shirazi, Fwix’s 22-year-old founder. Many local news Web sites are sprouting up, relying on sources like...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the owner of the Orange County Register is expected to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week. The Journal reported on its Web site Sunday that Freedom Communications Inc. has reached agreements with its lenders to restructure its debts. The report cites unnamed people familiar with the situation. Representatives of the company did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. The Journal says Freedom's lenders are expected to take control of the company while it operates under bankruptcy protection. The lenders hold about $770 million in debt.

Freedom Communications Inc., the owner of the Orange County Register, is expected to declare bankruptcy this week, according to people familiar with the situation, the latest in a string of Chapter 11 filings in the battered newspaper business. The company, majority owned for more than 70 years by the Hoiles family, has reached agreements with its lenders to restructure its debts, according to these people. With annual revenue of about $700 million, Freedom owns the Register and more than 30 other daily papers and eight TV stations. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization -- a popular measurement for leveraged...

The Democratic Majority Leader of the US Senate Harry Reid told a Nevada businessman this week at a luncheon, "I hope you go out of business." The Review-Journal reported, via FOX Nation: On Wednesday, before he addressed a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Reid joined the chamber's board members for a meet-'n'-greet and a photo. One of the last in line was the Review-Journal's director of advertising, Bob Brown, a hard-working Nevadan who toils every day on behalf of advertisers. He has nothing to do with news coverage or the opinion pages of the Review-Journal. Yet, as Bob shook...

Broadcast TV ad revenues were down 12.8% in the second quarter vs, the same qurter in 2008, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR data released by the Television Bureau of Advertising. Local broadcast TV revenues (spot TV) were down 26.3% to $2.7 billion, while network TV was down 6.9% $5.86 billion, and syndication was down 1.5% $1.09 billion. For the first half, spot TV was down 27%, network 5.8% and syndication only .7%. Leading the spot TV slump was automotive, which was down 54.5%, with dealership advertising down 43.6%. In fact 24 of the top 25 ad categories all showed reduced...

The entire business news staff at The Journal News in Westchester County, New York, a Gannett newspaper, is gone this week in the round of 50 cutbacks at the paper. These include business editor Mike Bieger and reporters Julie Moran Alterio, Jerry Gleeson and Jay Loomis. The former business editor, who was most recently data desk editor, Frank Brill, was also laid off. Brill is a former board member of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. The move calls into question whether eliminating coverage of business news in the worst recession in two decades is a good idea....

Newspapers' financial woes worsened in the second quarter as advertising sales shrank by 29 percent, leaving publishers with $2.8 billion less revenue than they had at the same time last year. It's the deepest downturn yet during a three-year free fall in advertising revenue — newspapers' main source of income. The magnitude of the industry's advertising losses have intensified in each of the last 12 quarters. The numbers released Thursday by the Newspaper Association of America weren't a shock, given the dramatic erosion mirrored the advertising losses that the largest U.S. newspaper publishers already had reported for the April-June period....

Disgruntled Tribune Co. bondholders have asked a U.S. bankruptcy judge to let them investigate Sam Zell's 2007 buyout of the newspaper-and-television chain in an effort to derail a plan that would hand the company over to its banks. The filing, made late Wednesday, calls the $8.2 billion transaction a "fraudulent conveyance" that left Tribune insolvent from the onset of the 2007 deal. It accuses senior lenders led by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. of completing a leveraged buyout they should have known would push the company into bankruptcy. "Fraudulent conveyance" is a legal term most often used in bankruptcy court,...

Carl T. Hall, the local representative for the Media Workers Guild, told SF Weekly this morning that he has been informed by San Francisco Chronicle management that another round of layoffs is in the works. "We're anticipating some discussions," he said. "And it's not good news. But that's all I know." When asked how many layoffs were possible, Hall noted "Obviously that's the question everyone wants to know." He also added that no reason was given for the paper's announcement other than "what one might infer: I guess it's a continuing problem of getting costs in line with revenues given...

Slate is retiring “Today’s Papers,” one of the original aggregators of the Web, 12 years after it started its beloved once-a-day summary of the nation’s news pages. In its place comes a new recap of the news, one that acknowledges that the news cycle has, well, sped up quite considerably since “Today’s Papers” started in 1997. That is why the “Slatest,” the name of the new feature that comes online Monday morning, will collect the world’s news three times a day. David Plotz, editor of the online magazine Slate, very superlatively calls it a “very fast, very intelligent, very witty...

As The Times' Dawn C. Chmielewski reported Friday, emissaries of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. recently approached the owners of this newspaper, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Hearst Corp. about joining a consortium that would charge for online news content. Murdoch's Wall Street Journal already does so, but the Australian-born media magnate understands that what's required for serious -- which is to say expensive-to-produce -- journalism to survive is that all the quality English-language papers and news sites agree to charge for Web access and then mercilessly sue anyone who makes more than fair use of their work...

An online backlash is building against Whole Foods Market Inc. chief executive John Mackey, thanks to his op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal knocking President Barack Obama's proposed health care bill.

Did you see Michael Sragow's article "Twitter Effect rattles Hollywood" in the Baltimore Sun? Sragow's thesis is neatly laid out in the first paragraph: "Although word of mouth could always make or break a movie, it usually took days to affect the box office. But the rise of social networking tools such as Twitter might be narrowing that time frame to hours. And that has Hollywood on edge." Now keep in mind that, as Sragow goes on to note, "Movietickets.com recently ran a home-page poll in which 88% of the voting sample said Twitter had no effect on them." Of...

The spring and summer box office has murdered megawatt stars like Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Eddie Murphy, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks, Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell. Can Brad Pitt escape? A-list movie stars have long been measured by their ability to fill theaters on opening weekend. But never have so many failed to deliver, resulting in some rare soul-searching by motion picture studios about why the old formula isn’t working — and a great deal of anxiety among stars (and agents) about the potential vaporization of their $20 million paychecks. “The cratering of films with big stars is...

Jayson Blair knows his new profession — life coach — smacks some people in the face like a bad punchline. "People say, 'Wait a minute. You're a life coach?' That makes no sense,'" says Blair, the ex-journalist best known for foisting plagiarism and fabrications into the pages of The New York Times. "Then they think about my life experiences and what I've been through and they say 'Wait a minute. It does make sense.'" Blair, 33, resigned from the Times in 2003, leaving a journalistic scandal in his wake. The resulting furor led the paper's top two newsroom executives to...

Inflation-adjusted numbers show papers are even worse off than you think Martin Peers had a smart Heard on the Street in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal on the critical question of how much of the recent plunge in media companies’ fortunes has been a cyclical decline versus a secular one. It’s obviously some of both, but the mix will decide what the next five years look like for magazines and newspapers, the critical providers of original reporting in the country. Alas, I’ve crunched some numbers on the industry and they’re beyond ugly. First, some definitions. A cyclical decline is one due...

With annual revenue of more than $2 billion, the Reader’s Digest Association may be the largest magazine publisher to ever file for bankruptcy. But it probably won’t be the last this year. The private-equity frenzy of the past decade, combined with the unprecedented downturn, has caught up with the industry. So far in recent months, supplier companies including distributor Source Interlink and printer Quebecor World filed for protection, and publishers including the newspaper giant (and owner of Connecticut magazine) Journal Register Co. and Cygnus Business Media have as well. Summit Business Media is said to be in the process of...