Media news digest archive for December 2005

Packer’s passing dominates media (Dec 29)
The death of PBL proprietor Kerry Packer on the evening of December 26 sparked an extraordinary amount of media coverage. Numerous retrospectives ran on television the following day, while newspapers gave it extensive coverage on December 28. The Australian, owned by business associate and News Ltd proprietor Rupert Murdoch, devoted its entire front page to the story, plus the following four leads news pages.
The media release from Packer’s Publishing & Broadcasting Limited said: "On behalf of PBL’s thousands of employees and their families, Mr John Alexander, PBL’s Chief Executive Officer, has expressed deepest condolences to the family of the late Mr Kerry Packer.
"Mr Alexander said it was a very sad day for the PBL family of companies.
“'Australia has lost not only an extraordinary man of remarkable achievements but the business community has lost one of its great entrepreneurs, innovators and creative minds,' he said.
He said under Mr. Kerry Packer’s guidance PBL had been moulded into one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies.
“'PBL is a company of great strength and diversity and its businesses are industry leaders in their various fields,' he said.
"He said the management of PBL was committed to continuing to build on that strength and diversity and to use the present platform of companies to develop even more ambitious and successful enterprises.
"Mr Alexander said that the Executive Chairman of PBL, Mr. James Packer, had a very clear vision for the future development of the company which was enthusiastically supported by the Board and the senior management."
Here is a selection of links to major stories:
Obiturary by The Age: click here
Obiturary by Paul Barry in The Australian: click here
Overview of the many Packer business interests in The Australian: click here

Wikipedia to tighten up (Dec 20)
From the Guardian media section: Wikipedia, the online user-generated encylopedia, plans to tighten editorial practices after coming under criticism for inaccuracies. The site, which gets around 1,500 new submissions from ordinary individuals every day, said it would introduce a "stable" version and require contributors to register, to counter the criticism.
Guardian home; Story

Satellite radio approaches secure orbit (Dec 19)
From the New York Times, via Benton: The mainstreaming of satellite radio, XM and Sirius hope, is just around the corner. A new generation of portable satellite radio receivers -- many being heavily marketed this holiday season -- has helped to raise consumer interest. The smaller devices make it possible for subscribers to listen in the house and even while walking down the street. Later in 2006, new devices are to enable XM to be played through a wide variety of home entertainment systems. For now, satellite radio's most important market remains the automobile. Typically, customers ordering a new car with a satellite radio receiver also get several months of free service. XM, which holds the advantage in the auto market, has exclusive distribution agreements with GM, Honda and Hyundai. Toyota is to offer factory-installed XM radios beginning next year. And by 2007, XM is to be the exclusive provider to Nissan. Sirius has exclusive agreements with BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Ford and some Ford-owned manufacturers, as well as Mazda and Mitsubishi. Some automakers offer both satellite services as options.
New York Times home; Story
Benton news summary
XM Radio
Sirius Radio
How Stuff Works -- satellite radio

Journos should face FOI (Dec 16)
Self-confessed media tart and Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, recently launched a few salvos at the media in general and the Courier-Mail in particular during a speech at Melbourne University.
He expressed the view that journalists and publishers should be subject to the same FOI scrutiny that affect public organizations.
He also believes the Courier-Mail desperately needs a competitior. "With the south-east corner's rapid growth rate, I'd love to see another newspaper. I think we need competition and I'd love to see someone, for example, a Sydney Morning Herald or a Melbourne Age come here.
"I'd like to say to Fairfax we are the fastest growing market in Australia and we'd love to see you come here and I think competition would be great,” he said. Fairfax has so far politely declined the invitation…

Stealth PR (Dec 16)
From USA Today, via Benton: A $300 million Pentagon psychological warfare operation includes plans for placing pro-American messages in foreign media outlets without disclosing the US government as the source. Run by psychological warfare experts at the US Special Operations Command, the media campaign is being designed to counter terrorist ideology and sway foreign audiences to support American policies. The military wants to fight the information war against al-Qaeda through newspapers, websites, radio, television and "novelty items" such as T-shirts and bumper stickers. The program will operate throughout the world…
USA Today home; Story 1; Story 2.
Benton

Courier-Mail goes compact (Dec 15)
Brisbane's Courier-Mail newspaper is following world trends by going for a more compact tabloid format next year, after 159 years as a broadsheet.
See this story in from The Australian on the world trend for smaller papers.

'Free' news - at a price (Dec 15)
From the Washington Post, via Benton: Meet NewsUSA Inc, a 70-person company that churns out audio clips, newspaper copy and radio scripts, all based on information provided by paying clients -- corporations, associations and others. Reformulated into journalistic style, with a pitch for the client included as unobtrusively as possible, the articles are distributed free to newspapers and radio stations around the country. Invoking the credible tone of traditional news media for commercial purposes, the articles find their way into the advertising supplements of major dailies. They fill out the news pages of staff-strapped small-town or community newspapers. They get airplay in the guise of consumer tips -- often rounded out with a mention of a Web site…
Washington Post home; Story
Benton

If you can't beat them, digitise (Dec 14)
From the Wall Street Journal, via Benton: In the latest salvo in the fight over the future of books on the Internet, one of America's biggest publishers said it intends to produce digital copies of its books and then make them available to search services offered by such companies as Google Inc, Yahoo Inc, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com, while maintaining physical possession of the digital files. News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers Inc hopes to head off the prospect of these big Internet companies taking charge of books that it has purchased, edited and published. Its move to digitize its active backlist of an estimated 20,000 titles and as many as 3500 new books each year comes at a moment when technology companies and the publishing industry are wrestling over rights and economic models for books online. HarperCollins's effort to make search companies use its digital copies is an aggressive response to anxieties felt by publishers worried that they will lose control over their intellectual property.
Wall Street Journal
Benton

TV flexes broadband muscle (Dec 14)
From Broadcasting & Cable, via Benton: Across the USA, TV stations are taking on newspapers, Web sites and all comers online -- and challenging them with video and exclusive online newscasts. Indeed, many stations say they are just beginning to flex their broadband muscles, offering rich video clips of dramatic news and displaying real-time traffic reports and weather by a local meteorologist. The market for online news is exploding. Twenty-nine percent of Americans say they go online regularly for news, up from virtually zero a decade ago, according to the Pew Research Center. The migration has caused tectonic shifts across media sectors, shrinking the audience for TV news -- both national and local -- and sending shockwaves through the newspaper industry, which has seen readership tumble sharply in the past decade. According to the Pew study, 71% of adults 18-29 say they get their news online, yet only 46% say they regularly watch local TV news. In the early 1990s, 75% of Americans said they watched local news.
Broadcasting & Cable home; Story
Benton

Media's role in race riots (Dec 14)
Media commentator Mark Day writes in today's Australian newspaper: Some radio practitioners are fond of calling talkback shows "dial-in democracy" … it is also the haunt of a core of uneducated, bigoted, aged insomniacs carefully orchestrated by clever and manipulative hosts, universally right-wing, who know exactly which button to push to yield extreme reactions - all in the name of "good radio".
The Australian home; Story

Poor outlook for US Media (Dec 14)
From Business Week online: Standard & Poor's Ratings Services' outlook for the media and entertainment industry in 2006 has become less optimistic, with traditional advertising representing an area of slowing momentum and potential negative surprises that could neutralize the expected boost from local elections and the Winter Olympics.
Business Week home; Story
Standard & Poor's home

DIY TV -- the next big thing? (Dec 13)
From the Wall Street Journal, via Benton: What some people really want to do is direct. After a decade of the Internet revolutionizing the way people communicate and spend their leisure time, a growing number of consumers are going further -- creating entertainment and other media "content" on their own. Cable networks, radio stations -- even advertisers -- are embracing such "user-generated content" and serving it up, hoping to appeal to new and younger audiences that are impatient with standard media fare. This new genre of Do-It-Yourself Media harks back in some ways to public-access cable TV, to funny home videos and radio call-in shows. But it's slicker and more sophisticated. For a generation of young people raised on the Internet, it is second nature to express themselves in new ways. These aren't passive consumers: They think they have something to say and they don't see why they can't do what the big media companies are doing. In a series this week, The Wall Street Journal explores how Do-It-Yourself Media in various forms is creating a kind of parallel media universe. Today's article describes Al Gore's Current TV, which is helping to fill its 24 hours of daily programming with films made by viewers. Subsequent articles will look at how advertisers are soliciting ad ideas from their consumers, how cable operators are asking viewers to contribute material for dating services and real-estate channels and how phone companies are encouraging contributions to video logs.
Wall Street Journal
Benton media updates

Car bomb a blow for freedom -- IFJ (Dec 12)
The killing of a Lebanese newspaper boss and member of Parliament in a Beirut bombing is a “devastating blow” for press freedom said the International Federation of Journalists, which has postponed a regional meeting of journalists' groups in the city this weekend citing security concerns. Gebran Tueni, the publisher of the independent An-Nahar newspaper, was among four people killed in the explosion that destroyed his car in the Mekalis area.
IFJ home; Story

Pulitzers to open entries to online journalism (Dec 9)
From OPA: The August Pulitzer Prizes made a historic change to their rules, now allowing online material from newspaper sites to be submitted in all 14 categories. Plus, the breaking news reporting and photography categories can include material that appeared only on the web. "This is designed to be a change that reflects the evolving nature of the newspaper industry as historically defined, and the growing importance of online content," Pulitzer Prize administrator Sig Gissler told the New York Times. However, the Pulitzers still require that material comes from print newspaper outlets, and won't allow submissions from Slate, Salon, CNN.com or other non-newspaper sites. Gissler told the Wall Street Journal the Pulitzer Board would continue to gauge the evolution of newspapers and consider future changes.
Online Publishers Association
Pulitzer Prize

News Corp treads lightly on MySpace (Dec 9)
From OPA: Social networking is a magnet for teens and twentysomethings online, but no one has a formula for turning that into a highly profitable endeavor just yet. A BusinessWeek cover story, "The MySpace Generation," lays out just how young people use online and offline social interactions seemlessly, depending on sites such as MySpace, Buzz-Oven, Xanga and others to find where bands are playing or keep up with friends. Now that Fox Interactive Media owns MySpace's owner Intermix, the company says it will respect the values of its audience, who want marketing messages on their own terms. FIM honcho Ross Levinsohn told the UBS media conference that Fox would treat lightly with commercial pitches. "It only becomes commercial if you inundate them with advertising," Levinsohn said. "I don't think we'll ever get to a place where we could kill it. The minute we put something up people don't like, we hear about it." BusinessWeek said that Xanga polled its users before deciding on shifting the size of its ads.
To explain the interest in social networking, you only have to look as far as MySpace's skyrocketing membership, going from 3.4 million unique users in October 2004 to 24.2 million unique users just one year later. News Corp. predicts its Internet revenues will jump 600% this year, thanks to $1.3 billion in acquisitions so far. Business 2.0's blogger Erick Schonfeld found that News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch had three more Net buyouts queued up, including a search engine such as Snap, Lycos or Blinkx, and voice-over-IP service SIPphone. "My source tells me that these are just sitting on Murdoch's desk, waiting for his approval," Schonfeld wrote. "Maybe Rupe will get to it now that the big Turkey Weekend slowdown is over, and the shopping season is upon us."
Online Publishers Association
Business Week home; Story

Big media facing ice age? (Dec 6)
From the Benton files: Author and National Public Radio host Bob Garfield believes the media as they exist are headed for extinction due to a fragmented audience and a significant loss of advertising dollars. He believes that the corporate media giants currently in operation will give way to less expensive outlets. As advertisers look for new outlets to spend their money, small specialised operations will become the dominant forces in media.
Benton media news
Story link

Sedition laws softened for media (Dec 5)
The Federal Government’s new anti-terror laws go through parliament this week, with some minor modifications aimed at settling down the media unrest over the sedition provisions.
Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock has been keen to hose down the criticism. “To put beyond doubt that these measures do not apply to those who are involved in reporting, we've made it clear by including in the defences of good faith a specific provision that says this does not apply to reporting in the media, by publishers," he told The Australian newspaper.
Meanwhile the Law Council of Australia has attacked the laws as draconian.
The Australian home; Story. Law Council

Media a tool for the battlefield – US military (Dec 4)
From Xinhuanet: The US military command in Baghdad on Saturday admitted planting paid propaganda in Iraqi media, defending it as an "essential tool to give Iraqis reliable information."
A statement issued by the US military command in Baghdad said the information from the battlefield in Iraq was contested and filled with misinformation and propaganda by the insurgent groups to discredit the Iraqi government and the US troops in a bid to intimidate the Iraqi people.
"Information operation is an essential tool for commanders to ensure the Iraqi population has current, truthful and reliable information," it said.
Xinhuanet story

Journalism a dangerous game in Phillipines (Dec 3)
From ABS-CBN: The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines has condemned a recent spate of killings, after the death of another reporter.
The murder of George Benaojan is the third in the last two weeks, which happened two days after a Cebu City court convicted a police officer for the killing of another journalist.
ABS-CBN Interactive story

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