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Shareholders have approved Thomson’s takeover of Reuters and Reuters will disappear come April 17 as a completely independent company. From then on its Thomson Reuters with 53% of the shares controlled by the Woodbridge Company (the investment vehicle for the Thomson family), and, yes, the Reuters Founders share remains to guaranteee editorial independence.
At the end of the day Reuters shareholders didn’t get near the premium they thought they were getting because of a dramatic decline in the value of Thomson shares (around 20%) during the intervening time it took to get all of the necessary regulatory approvals.
When the deal was originally annnounced it was valued at £7.05 a share, but in the intervening time it moved down to around £6.30, a 10% decline. Reuters shares were at £4.925 when the deal was announced so the sale price ends up being a 28% premium instead of the promised 43% premium. No telling, of course, what would be the price of Reuters shares today if there was no such deal in place but very doubtful it would be at £6.30.
Reuters shareholders get half the value of the deal in cash and the other half in shares in the new company at a ratio of 0.16 new shares for each old share. Holders of the old Reuters shares will be looking to CEO Tom Glocer for the promised £500 million in cost savings over three years to restore the deal’s lost premium, and then some.
UK newsprint in 2007 contained 79% recycled content, according to the Newspaper Industry Materials Committee. That’s actually down from the 80.6% in 2006 with the Confederation of Paper Industries saying the increased availability of cheap virgin material from Canada pushed recycled content down slightly.
Newspaper publishers had agreed with the government in a voluntary arrangement in the year 2000 that their use of recycled content would be at least 70% by the end of 2006, so the figures are well ahead of target.
A law proposed before the Turkish Parliament will bring sweeping changes to the country’s public broadcaster TRT. Among the changes, if the law passes, might be a new TV channel replacing one of the existing five TRT channels, reaching out to Kurdish, Arabic and Farsi speaking viewers.
Another objective of the proposed rule making is shrinking TRT’s staff of 8000 by more than half. Workers will be moved to other State institutions. The Ministry of Culture will take over management of musicians and singers.
TRT and Cuban State radio and TV signed an agreement for program exchanges (March 26). Monday (March 24) Turkey’s president Abdullah Gul signed a similar exchange agreement with Turkmenistan. (JMH)
Interest in 'next generation' TV is "generally low" say a report from ABI Research on US TV watchers. There's more interest among younger viewers but that is limited to moving video objects from laptops to the big(ger) screen. (Read ABI Research presser here)
US TV consumers may have HD receivers but fewer have subscriptions to HD services. Likewise, they may have access to pay-per-view video but use it "just once a month or less." (JMH)
Telecom regulator National Communications Authority (NCAH) has opened bids for digital radio and television frequencies (March 25). Five DVB-T television frequencies and one DAB radio network are offered. Bids must be submitted by April 24th.
Excluded from bidding at existing analogue TV broadcasters with audience or subscribers over 300,000 and radio broadcasters with national licenses, except Hungarian public broadcasting. The successful bidder for the radio network and at least two of the TV frequencies must be prepared to launch before the end of 2008.
Hungary’s legislators and regulators have been seen as slow getting their heads around digital broadcasting, allowing only ‘experiments’ until now. With the EU’s December 31st 2011 deadline for digital TV switchover looming large the big plunge has been taken. Language in the tender suggests a digital radio switchover by 2014. (JMH)
One would think that news organizations would have learned by now that if they stick together in fighting sports rights holders’ attempts to restrict the media’s rights to independently cover sporting events, then the whole industry wins -- witness the climb-down by rugby officials at last year’s World Cup in France.
But now comes word from Australia, which has had its share of such rights issues in the past, that the Australian Associated Press (AAP) is being shut out of Australian Football League (AFL) games because it insists on shooting its own game pictures and not buying them from a third party source designated by the league.
Meanwhile News Limited and Fairfax have reached agreements with the league and their papers have photo coverage. Whatever happened to “all for one and one for all?”
Not giving the AAP access means that 16 regional newspapers, representing more than 500,000 readers, don’t have photo coverage of AFL games.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says he is "very concerned" about the trend by sporting organizations to restrict the media's right to independently report the news.
"I encourage the parties to come together to resolve these issues so that the members of the public, particularly in rural and regional Australia, are not unfairly disadvantaged," he said.
The AFL is demanding that AAP buy photographs from the league's official photographer, and says the AAP have been offered pictures for less than it would cost the organization to shoot pictures themselves.
It’s not just the English language US community newspapers that are doing okay in these tough economic times, so is the Hispanic press, according to Hispanic Market Weekly. "From emerging markets such as Orlando to long-established print markets including Los Angeles, the future looks bright for the Spanish-language newspaper," the report said.
Adam Jacobson, the report’s author, noted "Even where Spanish-language titles have not fared well as dailies, long-term growth with weekly distribution has kept management and ownership more than satisfied with weeklies showing a 26.4% jump in ad revenue between 2005 and 2007."
According to the report, at the end of 2007 there were 33 daily newspapers and 417 weekly newspapers targeting Spanish-language readers in the U.S.
Well here’s one thing we can support the Chinese on – they’re going after spammers targeting mobile phone users.
It comes after Chinese Television exposed that seven companies recently bombarded some 200 million mobile phone users via China Mobile and China Unicom networks. The spammers had personal information about each user and were able to reach about 40% of the country’s 555 million mobile phone users.
China's cabinet has now ordered an investigation after so many recipients complained not only about the spamming but that the spammers knew what they did about the recipients. There are basically no privacy protection laws in China.
China Mobile, the country's biggest operator, has apologized and says it will block further such attempts to send massive text mailings. Text messages are big business to China Mobile -- its 386.6 million subscribers sent 502.7 billion text messages in 2007, up 42.3% from 2006.
One of the spammers, Focus Media, also apologized. It says it is setting up systems so it will no longer send messages without the recipient’s approval.
The people in French speaking Switzerland and German speaking Switzerland don’t agree on too many things, but apparently one thing they do have in common is their liking of free newspapers. In both parts of the country free newspaper readership easily excels that of any paid for newspaper, according to the WEMF media research institute.
The highest read newspaper by far is the German language edition of the free tabloid 20 Minutes with 1.24 million readers daily. By comparison the best selling Blick tabloid lost 2.5% of its readership and has less than 800,000 readers across Switzerland, while the staid Neue Zürcher Zeitung saw its readership fall below 300,000.
In the French speaking part of the country, French language 20 Minutes increased its readership by 41.3% in the 12 months to September, 2007, for a readership of 390,000 but that fell second to Le Matin Bleu that saw its readership increase by 33% to 469,000 daily. By comparison the top paid-for newspaper in French-speaking Switzerland is Le Matin that saw readership drop 6.6% to 296,000.
The mighty Drudge Report has fallen. Outside the US nobody cares. A small item running on the wires Monday (March 24) told of February numbers from Nielsen Online and comscore showing traffic to The Drudge Report falling to the Huffington Post.
The Drudge Report is noted for gossip, UFO reports and right-wing talking points. The Huffington Post is nominally a center-left political site. Nielsen numbers show HuffPo reaching 3.7 million visitors in February with Drudge at 3.4 million. (JMH)
MEL !!!
…Sirius / XM deal clears anti-trust authorities…
That Mel Karmazin is the world’s greatest salesman is granted. After more than a year plying his talents with regulators, politicians and investment bankers the deal to merge XM Satellite Radio with Sirius Satellite passed scrutiny of US Department of Justice anti-trust lawyers (March 24). Final approval by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected.
That little problem out of the way, Mel now needs to sell more satellite radio subscriptions to Americans facing the worst economy, arguably, since the 1930’s. (Read more about Mel here) (JMH)
A leading American consultant has told The Australian newspaper that audiences for free TV may well dissipate over the next five years as the likes of YouTube become ever more popular.
Philip Evans, managing director of the Boston Consulting Group, is quoted saying, “I would anticipate, over the next five years, there will be a quite rapid decline in people accessing free-to-air broadcasting. I think that’s just inevitable. As technology continues to evolve, so we will see what today is a very small threat – YouTube, things like that – will steadily grow.”
He believes the current free-to-air model is unsustainable, especially in those countries like Australia where the transmission mode makes interactivity very difficult.
“People were once debating ‘will the CD replace vinyl records?’ and some were saying ‘it will never happen,” he said.
Mind you, vinyl is making a bit of a comeback!
Korea has reached 11 million mobile TV subscribers, about a 10% penetration, according to the Broadcasting and Communications Commission and the Special Committee on Terrestrial DMB(Digital Multimedia Broadcasting).
Some 9.69 million subscribe to terrestrial DMB and 1.31 million to satellite DMB. If the growth continues at this rate, terrestrial DMB users will pass the 10 million mark this month, the commission said.
DMB is a digital radio transmission system developed in South Korea and first commercially used in 2005 to send multimedia to mobile phones. It has some similarities but is not the same as DVB-H, the mobile television standard backed by Nokia that the European Union last week adopted as its standard mobile TV technology. (Read more about mobile TV standards here)
In some countries poking fun at your politicians will get you thrown in jail. South Africa's Jacaranda 94.2 recently had a few laughs about the elections in neighboring Zimbabwe.
Listen carefully and don't press 1.
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