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Today, we announced that Nielsen Business Media has reached an agreement with e5 Global Media Holdings, LLC, a new company formed jointly by Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners, for the sale of eight brands in the Media and Entertainment Group, including Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, The Clio Awards, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. e5 Global Media Holdings has also agreed to acquire our Film Expo business, which includes the ShoWest, ShowEast, Cinema Expo International and CineAsia trade shows. In addition, we’ve made the decision to cease operations for Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews. This move...

Remember how big the November sweeps used to be? For viewers, the memory is becoming more distant. On the last Thursday of the still-big November TV period, virtually every network show took it on the chin. Similar ratings trends also took place earlier in the week. Big shows -- such as ABC's "Grey's Anatomy," CBS' "CSI," NBC's "The Office" and Fox' "Fringe" -- all sank lower versus their respective results of a week before. Some of this could be due to a NFL Network Thursday night game between the Miami Dolphins-Carolina Panthers. That network's Thursday games have been pulling in...

When, in late September, rumors surfaced that Comcast was trying to buy NBC Universal from General Electric, Wall Street reacted with dismay. Grandiose attempts to combine media production and distribution — programming and plumbing — are nothing new in the entertainment business, but they almost always end in disappointment. Witness AOL Time Warner. So what in the world could be prompting the Comcast chief executive, Brian Roberts, to start down this accursed path? I fear that I’m to blame. A few months ago, while stalking the aisles of my local Best Buy, I gave in to techno-temptation. I bought a...

Warren Buffett, the second richest man in the world and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A), doesn't have much faith in the future of print media. In an interview on CNBC's Nov. 3 "Squawk Box," following the announcement of his purchase of Burlington Northern (NYSE:BNI), Buffett was asked to comment on the future of news media, in particular newspapers and business news by "Squawk Box" co-host Becky Quick. Buffett is optimistic on the future of business news. "Our system has just gotten started," Buffett said. "I mean, we've had a couple of hundred years of progress, but we have not exhausted...

The guillotine has begun its descent at Time Inc. Sources at the publishing company (which is part of the same conglomerate as DailyFinance parent AOL) say executives have asked for an emergency meeting with representatives of the Newspaper Guild to discuss job eliminations. A Time Inc. spokeswoman declined to comment, but John Shostrom, chairman of the company's Guild unit, said the meeting will take place "soon." He said it was Time Inc. that called the meeting. "They act, and we react," said Shostrom. "The Guild doesn't lay people off. We just fight back when they make proposals to lay people...

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 "MSM" label has stuck and gets a lot of play, but we need to revise it. It is not enough to imply that "Main Stream Media" means liberal lapdogs. The MSM is no longer just biased, they are partisan. We need to press this issue and to that end I believe it would be very effective to replace the "MSM" referece with "PLM" i.e. Partisan Liberal Media. PLM, or another suitable name, needs to become the next commonly understood household name. The DNC is simply the political wing of the PLM and we need to go after the PLM's...

After a summer swoon, you would think that the evening newscasts of the Big 3 networks would start to recover a bit now that many Americans are back from vacations, kids are back in school, and fall routines are getting established or re-established. So far, you would be wrong. It's early, and there's still plenty of time this fall to recover, but during the time period after Labor Day, the broadcasts primarily anchored by Brian Williams at NBC, Charles Gibson at ABC, and Katie Couric at CBS: Are down a combined 28.5% from their peak in late January during...

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...

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...

The 'Creative' Technology Behind The AP's News Registry from the magic-beans dept The Associated Press' attempt to DRM the news is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, but its claims for the news registry's capabilities seem pretty misguided, once you examine the technology behind it (the "magic DRM beans"). Ed Felten dug into the details of the registry's microformat, hNews, which the AP announced a few weeks earlier, and here's where it gets really interesting: the hNews rights field is based on the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL). If the AP thinks it'll be able to build...

Guardian News and Media was on Sunday considering options for the future of the UK’s Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, that could see the 218-year-old title close in its current form. GNM has started work on a three-year strategic plan, including radical measures aimed at assuring the future of The Guardian, the group’s daily newspaper, a senior figure in the group said. The plan is aimed not so much at addressing a fall in newspaper advertising revenues caused by the economic downturn but at surviving the effects of a longer-term shift by readers and advertisers to the internet. On...

Here’s one of the most short-sighted and self-destructive things I’ve ever seen the Associated Press do — they’re going to try to prevent search engines and blogs from even linking to their articles, unless they pay for the privilege.

NEW YORK (AP) - The Associated Press will collect undisclosed damages as part of a settlement of its lawsuit against All Headline News, a site that allegedly misappropriated AP stories online. The AP considered the lawsuit an important test of the "hot news" doctrine, which was established in a 1918 Supreme Court case involving the AP. That principle holds that while facts cannot be copyrighted, news organizations can sue when competitors copy time-sensitive stories.

Reminiscent of Orwell’s book 1984, soon all television broadcasts may carry Dictator in Chief Barack Hussein Obama and his message all of the time. Joining NBC (the New Barack Channel), ABC (the All Barack Channel) will now begin broadcasting from the White House. We assume CBS (perhaps the Central Barack Station?) will follow its betters soon and announce that it too will officially become an Obama mouthpiece. By the way, no opposing viewpoints will be carried or allowed. ABC also plans to run a free-to-Obama campaign promoting the dictator’s healthcare plan. Does anyone at all remember the name Hugo Chavez?...

Spot TV in the top 100 markets cratered The Television Bureau of Advertising on Friday released its broadcast TV crunch of the TNS Media Intelligence ad spending estimates put out earlier in the week. Total broadcast TV, including spot TV, syndication and network TV, dropped 11.9% to $10.5 billion in first quarter. The decline was driven by spot TV in the top 100 markets which cratered, falling 27.6% to $2.89 billion. In stark contrast, network TV dipped 4.8% to $6.5 billion, while syndication inched up 0.2% to nearly $1.1 billion. Spending in nine of local broadcast TV's top 10 ad...

Executives from many of America's leading newspaper companies and the head of the Associated Press met quietly in Chicago on Thursday to discuss ways to increase revenues from their online operations -- presumably by charging visitors to their websites -- as well as how to recapture some share of their catastrophically declining classified ad business. The meeting, whose participants included an antitrust lawyer to make sure the conversation didn't stray into impermissible collusion or price-fixing, was conducted under the auspices of the Newspaper Assn. of America, and its agenda was titled "Models to Lawfully Monetize Content." These guys may be...

U.S. newspaper businesses face the possibility of "unending losses" and Berkshire Hathaway wouldn't invest in the industry "at any price," Chairman Warren Buffett told shareholders on Saturday. "They were the ultimate business 30 or 40 years ago," Buffett explained at the company's annual meeting. "They lost their essential nature." Berkshire owns a large stake in the Washington Post Co. (WPO) and owns the Buffalo News. The Buffalo News is trying to develop a business model that allows it to make a little money, with the help of its unions, Buffett said. The Washington Post has other attractive businesses, but it...

The urgency I’ve felt about the possible closure of the Boston Globe was put into stark contrast yesterday morning. As I walked home after accompanying my daughter to her elementary school, I was joined by another parent who had just completed the same duty. As we strolled up the street, I mentioned the story that I’ve been obsessing over the last few days. Cadbury, put the Boston Globe next to the champagne and cavier. And send a check to some orphans. Cadbury put the Boston Globe next to the champagne. And send a check to some orphans. It was news...

The newspaper industry is turning upside down. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, the Baltimore Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle are among the papers that have ceased daily publication or announced in recent months that they may have to stop publishing. Not long ago, Tribune Co., owner of the Baltimore Sun, filed for bankruptcy. None of this bodes well for our democracy. Our country depends on an open and free press to monitor what happens in our communities so that Americans can make sound judgments about their lives and leaders. Thomas Jefferson, a man who was frequently vilified...

~ EXCERPT ~ CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) — The company that owns the Chicago Sun-Times and 58 other newspapers and online sites said Tuesday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The talk of the media world this week is Mark Bowden's exhaustive, 11,000-word Vanity Fair profile of Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the no-longer-boy-wonder publisher of the New York Times and chairman of its parent company. Bowden does not use weasel words to express his opinion of Sulzberger's reign, writing that he "has steered his inheritance into a ditch". Best known for the book Black Hawk Down, about an American military mission in Somalia gone horribly wrong, Bowden tells us that Sulzberger, now 58, is simply not up to the task of saving the Times at a moment when the newspaper business...

As Cities Go From Two Papers to One, Talk of Zero By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA The history of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer stretches back more than two decades before Washington became a state, but after 146 years of publishing, the paper is expected to print its last issue next week, perhaps surviving only in a much smaller online version. And it is not alone. The Rocky Mountain News shut down two weeks ago, and The Tucson Citizen is expected to fold next week. At least Denver, Seattle and Tucson still have daily papers. But now, some economists and newspaper executives say it...

Breaking news on Philadelphia local TV - Philadelphia "Inquirer" and "Daily News" are filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy - company says papers will continue to publish, filing is to retire debt primarily -

CBS Corp. says it saw profits fall 52 percent in the fourth quarter because of weaker advertising sales. And the broadcast network is slashing its quarterly dividend to 5 cents per share, instead of 27 cents. CBS said Wednesday it had a net profit of $136 million, or 20 cents per share. That's down from a profit of $286 million, or 42 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue fell 6 percent to $3.53 billion. Analysts expected earnings of 26 cents per share on revenue of $3.56 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

Still reeling from a long strike by screenwriters this past winter, Hollywood is bracing for the possibility that the entertainment industry will grind to a halt again -- this time because of a dispute with actors. The studios' contract with the Screen Actors Guild expires June 30, and talks are getting contentious. Already, film and television producers are holding back on new projects, fearing the talks will fail, even as they rush to complete existing projects before the end of the month. The two sides have made little progress on key issues including compensation for actors when their work is...

SEATTLE — A group devoted to keeping two daily newspapers in Seattle is pushing a community effort to buy the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from Hearst Corp. It might be the best hope for keeping the P-I alive, the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town said Wednesday, adding that it would welcome the involvement of political, business, labor and community leaders. “The goal is to ensure that the P-I, which has been publishing local news daily since 1863, is not lost forever,” the group said in a news release. Hearst announced Jan. 9 that it was putting the P-I up for sale, and...

A Delaware bankruptcy judge is expected to approve the Tribune Co.'s request to implement a new severance plan for nonunion employees. Tribune attorneys said at a hearing Tuesday that they will submit a modified order for Judge Kevin Carey to sign that would provide for notice to the creditors committee and the U.S. trustee in the case before any payments are made to officers or other insiders. "We don't intend to give them more than what the market bears at this time," Tribune attorney Kevin Lantry assured the judge. Lantry said the company anticipates "a number of layoffs" this year,...

Just when it started to look as if The New York Times Co. had found a way to dig itself out from under its massive debt load, the beleaguered newspaper company may be on the verge of getting knocked down again. The cash-strapped publisher last week reported that its pension plan was facing a $625 million shortfall at the end of 2008, compared with a deficit of $48 million a year earlier. Without a significant recovery in the markets, the owner of the Gray Lady could be forced to sink in millions more to shore up the plan, starting in...

Several newspaper executives launched a public relations campaign Monday to counter what they call "gloom-and-doom" reports of the industry's demise. Sure, they admit, times are tough. The economy is bad, the Internet has sucked away advertising dollars and people are losing jobs. But the 100 million people who read a newspaper the day after the Super Bowl outnumbered the TV audience for the game, the group said in an advertisement that appeared Monday in more than 300 daily newspapers, including The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution...."We are still a dominant media, and we don't give ourselves credit for...

WASHINGTON — Republicans have long accused mainstream journalists of being on the payroll of President Obama and the Democratic Party, a common refrain of favoritism especially from those on the losing end of an election (see Bush vs. Gore, Clinton vs. Bush and Bush vs. Dukakis). But this year the accusation has a new twist: In some notable cases it has become true, with several prominent journalists now on the payrolls of Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congressional leadership. An unusual number of journalists from prominent, mainstream organizations started new government jobs in January, providing new kindling to the debate...

Chicago-based Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times said it is cutting 300 positions and will shrink the daily sections to four from five. The paper's publisher, Eddy Hartenstein, informed staff in a memo Friday, explaining the cuts "are designed to help us deal with the economic realities of the day." The expected savings from the move were not announced. Editor Russ Stanton said in a separate memo that the cuts will include a 70-position reduction across the editorial department, or 11 percent, in the coming weeks.

That's about 11% of the editorial staff. "Other departments at The Times will be undertaking similar cost-saving measures, some more painful than the ones we will experience," says Times editor Russ Stanton. Eddy Hartenstein's MemoColleagues: As you know from reading our front page and our homepage, not a day goes by that we don't give our readers the latest news and analysis on the deepening troubles of the US economy. The same challenges that face the companies we report about also are affecting us. We need to implement changes to our flagship print product, and throughout our organization, that will...

The annual convention of the National Association of Television Programming Executives, or NATPE, kicks off today and runs through Thursday. The Wall Street Journal's Sam Schechner files updates from Las Vegas. Monday, January 26 Las Vegas is cold. Pools are drained, hotels are sparsely filled, and rain is on the forecast. Inside, as the National Association of Television Programming Executives' yearly TV marketplace kicks off, the mood is scarcely any warmer: The TV world is girding for what's likely to be one of its most challenging years in decades. [Flavor Flav] Kevin Winter/Getty Images Hip-hop artist and reality-show star Flavor...

Wenner Media, which publishes Rolling Stone and Us Weekly, saw another round of cuts this week, just two weeks after an earlier bout of layoffs. The company laid off three employees of Rolling Stone's editorial department, following four positions cut earlier this month. Out of an original 47, that's about 15% of the editorial staff. Wenner also revealed this week that it is delaying a planned spinoff of Us Weekly called Us Style, citing adverse economic conditions. According to MIN Online, through Nov. 13, biweekly Rolling Stone's ad pages are down 23% to 986, while Us Weekly is down a...

Media conglomerate Tribune Co. has filed for bankrutpcy protection, pressured by high debts, according to the Associated Press.

Call it the big shrink. Citing the effects of a recession that's prompting marketers to trim budgets and the number of media outlets they work with, media companies are shedding jobs at a furious rate. But the deep cuts they're making are as much about these conglomerates shedding their old media models as they are about the economy. Viacom and NBC Universal swung the ax last week, eliminating 850 and 500 jobs, or 7% and 3% of their work forces, respectively. Add that to 600 job cuts at Time Inc., 1,500 at Yahoo, 1,800 at Gannett, hundreds at CBS's radio...

An article in NYT, reporting on today's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, had this to say about terrorist attacks in Mumbai: "Many of them were initially attributed to Islamist militants, although in recent weeks, the police have pointed to a Hindu terrorist network"

The Associated Press said Thursday that it would cut assessments paid by its member newspapers by another $9 million in 2009, on the heels of $21 million in fee reductions announced earlier this year. The AP, following its quarterly meeting in New York, also said it would complete a review of its pricing and governance structure -- including a two-year notice required of papers who intend to leave the cooperative -- by mid-2009. The move comes after last week's news that Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday and other major metropolitan dailies, gave AP...

Paper "Is Where Minority Reporters Can Go to Die" The Chicago Tribune laid off more than 40 newsroom employees on Friday, including a disproportionate number of journalists of color, according to newsroom employees there. "Coupled with last week's voluntary exit of more than 30 journalists," the additional cutback "means the paper has cut 80 people from its editorial staff as part of cost-cutting campaign at all of parent Tribune Co.'s newspapers," Phil Rosenthal wrote on the Tribune's Web site. Among those called in Friday and told their jobs were eliminated was Ray Quintanilla, a 14-year Tribune veteran. "It's sad because...

The always-interesting results of the biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press were released Sunday afternoon. Findings on TV news and online-only news produced a few surprises (follow to come), but on the newspaper front the indications were mainly negative, especially on the print front, but also in some aspects of newspapers on the Web. Namely: while more young people are indeed reading newspapers online, their total readership, print and Web combined, has not grown in two years. This survey was conducted by telephone from April 30 to June 1 among 3,612...

Signaling a generational change at one of the nation’s most influential newspapers, the new publisher of The Washington Post on Monday selected an outsider as the paper’s top editor. Marcus W. Brauchli, a former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, will become the executive editor of The Post on Sept. 8, at a time of great upheaval in the industry. At age 47, he is young enough to remain in place in for many years, working alongside the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, who is 42 and has been in her job for five months. He will succeed Leonard Downie...

That's the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago -- and the first time the nets' median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo. Fueling the graying of the networks: the rapid aging of ABC, NBC and Fox. The three nets continue to grow older, while CBS -- the oldest-skewing network -- has remained fairly steady.

The broadcast networks have grown older than ever -- if they were a person, they wouldn't even be a part of TV's target demo anymore. According to a study released by Magna Global's Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets' average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That's the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago -- and the first time the nets' median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo. Fueling the graying of the networks: the rapid aging of ABC, NBC and Fox....

CHICAGO Gannett Co. Inc. has an enviably low debt burden and online businesses growing at a healthy rate, yet even it cannot escape Wall Street's current aversion to newspaper stocks. The latest evidence comes from Morningstar Inc., the Chicago-based investment research firm. In its latest note from stock analyst Tom Corbett Morningstar lowered its "fair value estimate" of Gannett stock to $23 from $32 a share. It said investors should "consider buying" the stock at $17.30, and "consider selling" at $29.90. In afternoon trading Tuesday, Gannett (NYSE: GCI) was at $22.59, off 18 cents, or 0.8%, from its opening. It...

Leonard Downie Jr. said today he is stepping down as The Washington Post's executive editor, ending a 17-year tenure in which the paper became a major online force and won a slew of prizes for high-profile investigations, including one that Downie published over President Bush's objections. Downie, 66, said his last day will be Sept. 8. The paper's new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, said she plans to announce a successor soon. "After 44 years, the notion of not working in the newsroom anymore brings a lot of emotions," Downie said in an interview. "I will really miss it . . ....

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies. Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated. On top of long-term changes in the industry, the weak economy is also hurting ad sales, especially in Florida and California, where the severe contraction of the...

NEWSPAPER AD REVENUE PLUNGES, SPREADING FEAR IN INDUSTRY... DEVELOPING...

The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright. The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For...