Turns out investors aren't keen

"A possible John Fairfax investment in the Ten Network continued to receive the thumbs down from investors yesterday ahead of an expected board announcement today about its acquisition strategy."

Meanwhile, speculation continues about the new Fairfax CEO.

A real solution

A US regional newspaper in Greensboro, North Carolina, is leading the blog revolution into the heartland of traditional media.

How long before Australian papers catch on?

Backing off of the north east wind

More on the Fairfax - Ten Network proposal.

Interestingly, there is some disagreement about the motivation for these discussions. The weekend papers reported that it was most likely about reaching an agreement on a deal before any changes to the legislation are decided.

But not according to UBS media analyst Tony Wilson.

"Mr Wilson dismissed the suggestion that either Fairfax or Ten was aiming to protect itself by doing a big deal before the Government's media law changes go through. 'If Fairfax buy Ten, they might close the door to someone like a PBL buying them, but they don't close the door to every other foreign group who might decide they want a major media stake in Australia,' he said."

Journalists, objectivity and the blogosphere

How much freedom should mainstream journalists who blog outside their news organisations have in expressing their opinions? A Wired piece looks at this question, taking the policies of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times as examples.

All major news organisations, The Age included, aim to protect the independence and credibility of their publications through strictly enforcing codes of conduct. But blogging is by nature an opinion driven form.

Within the right, transparent kind of framework, why shouldn't reporters be allowed, even encouraged to write about their views on a range of subject? It comes back to that trust question again.

British journalism is grappling with the issue in the wider context of media generally.

Jay Rosen has an extended piece on PressThink titled "Bloggers vs. journalists is over", argues that the debate has been overtaken by events.

"The question now isn't whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn't whether bloggers 'are' journalists. They apparently are, sometimes. We have to ask different questions now because events have moved the story forward. By 'events' I mean things on the surface we can see, like the tsunami story, and things underneath that we have yet to discern."

Everybody's talkin'

Bit of a mixed approach today to Fairfax's mooted takeover of Ten.

The SMH acknowledges that the Fairfax board will consider the question:

"John Fairfax directors will meet on Monday to thrash out the viability of a bid for the Ten Network and what that would mean for the publisher's succession plans."

A piece by the same writer, Wendy Frew, in The Age hedges its bets:

"Rumours continued yesterday that John Fairfax Holdings was trying to buy a 57.5 per cent stake in Ten Network Holdings for up to $1 billion from Ten's major shareholder, Canadian company CanWest Global Communications Corp. Executives from Fairfax and CanWest were unavailable for comment, but it is believed the most likely option would be an equity swap."

The Australian Financial Review took the big picture approach looking at the broader media landscape where a number of companies are jostling for leverage positions in anticipation of legislation changes later in the year. The Fin is a subscription-only site, but has a longish piece by Katrina Nicholas outlining the complex picture that will be filled in over the next year or so.

Basically, Fairfax and Ten - and you'd expect PBL and News are running numbers on a range of possibilities - are trying to get an opening advantage by reaching an agreement on a deal before any changes to the legislation are decided, and they're banking on that decision being favourable. Given the sums involved it's hefty bet.

As one investment banker put it: "Everyone is talking to everyone ... but nothing is concrete."

Former Fairfax journalist Jane Schultz has a fairly comprehensive roundup of the issues. She also throws in a piece speculating on who might succeed Fred Hilmer as CEO of Fairfax. It includes this odd sentence about the subject, Doug Flynn:

"He is believed to have told some disbelieving associates he was once offered the top job at Telecom New Zealand before it finally went to Theresa Gattung."

So, who believed what?

Media manoeuvres

As The Australian reported yesterday Fairfax and Channel Ten are in discussions over a possible sale of the television network to the newspaper group. Ten has had a bumpy financial history but the Asper family have done well after buying in at 10 cents a share and are looking to sell at more than 40 times this price.

But the catch will be the complex structure that Canwest, the Asper's company, devised to skirt Australia's cross media ownership laws. Can it be transferred to a buyer? The MEAA has asked the ABA to investigate, so we should know something before the next election.

The Prime Minister has said that media legislation reform is on the agenda, but not high on his list of priorities. It's high on some people's list, though.

The major Australian media companies include:

* News Corp which is now US-based. With a market cap of $65 billion it can afford to buy whichever Australian media company it chooses, but any expansion plans will be limited by ongoing foreign ownership limits.
* PBL is Australia's largest domestic media company with a market capitalisation of $11.3 billion.
* Fairfax is the next largest at $4.53 billion. This makes it too large for PBL to pick up unless it offers a scrip deal.
* Ten is the fourth largest media company with a market cap of $1.7 billion followed by Channel Seven at number with a market value of $1.4 billion.

Live from the vlogzone

Lots of reaction to the phenomenon of vlogs following the tsunami disaster. BlogPulse has released an in-depth analysis of tsunami-related coverage in the blogsphere. BlogPulse's analytical tools tracked the coverage of the tsunami and relief efforts and the site produced maps showing how discussion spiked considerably in the affected countries and the Southern Asia region.

A piece I wrote for The Age ran on the oped page yesterday. It really only scratched the surface of the issue, but Mark Glaser has done a more thorough job here.

The big questions include -
1. What is the best distribution mechanism? Browser interface? BitTorrent? Something else?
2. What is the best commercial distribution model? Hosting high traffic video content costs money which localised bloggers can't afford. Who pays?
3. And who owns the content? What are the copyright implications?
4. How can news organisations work most effectively with bloggers in a breaking news environment?
5. As things like mobile phones become more loaded with viable video, audio and camera equipment, how can news web sites position themselves to take advantage of the next wave of public generated news content?

The trust question

AP President and CEO, Tom Curley, in his much quoted speech says "content will be more important than its container" in the next phase of journalism's development on the internet. No argument there. Wire services are uniquely placed to take advantage of changing reader habits in the evolving media landscape.

But then he adds:

"The expanding 'blogosphere' is indeed huge, but the bloggers need a baseline of facts and professional analysis on which to base their work. And that's where the AP and many of the other organizations you all represent come into play.
Imagine Drudge without somebody to link to, or Wonkette without somebody to poke fun at."

This might be an oversimplification of what bloggers do. We'll cut Curley some slack here, his speech was delivered before the latest major story broke and bloggers took on an expanded role.

While everyone who works in the media for a living might wish to hang on to the privilege of always breaking stories and shepherding the analysis of major events and issues, it ain't going to be like that. It's clear that while the Drudges and the Wonkettes might make a lot of noise and gain a hefty readership by linking and commenting, this represents only a limited view of what blogs are doing. Some blogs, perhaps many, will break news as it happens. I get the sense from Curley's speech that he thinks AP reporters have a buffer of expertise or reputation or something protecting them from the mass of bloggers who, because they lack the training or profile of a professional reporter, cannot have the same impact.

Jay Rosen made some similar comments on Curley's speech:

"The American newsroom never went to school about the Web. That remains true to this day. Instead, it took what it was doing and 'moved' it online. The results gave birth to the generic news sites we see today, as well as the Online News Assocation. But they also delayed a day of intellectual reckoning, and the costs of doing it that way were a subtext in Curley's speech."

The problem is that while Curley is able to recognise the flaws in news organisations' early web strategies, he might just be making a similar mistake by assuming that only pro journalists can provide a "baseline of facts and professional analysis".

Where the type of news story relies on access to powerful institutions and individuals, maybe this is still the case. Big politics and business stories remain difficult for unknown bloggers to break, but you would expect this to remain the case only as long as the major news organisations were able to deliver stories to exclusive audiences. It's not clear how long that is going to continue. If newspapers and TV can't deliver the audiences but bloggers can then access privileges are going to change drastically. In fact, it's already begun.

In event based news the barriers are down. As the Asian tsunami story showed, citizen reporting is gaining traction. The issue then becomes ... trust.

Small miracles, part 5

"An Indonesian man swept out to sea by the Asian tsunami has described how he survived adrift for two weeks, living on coconuts and chancing upon a leaky boat and a raft."


Photo: Reuters via smh.com.au

Will nyt.com charge for access?

"The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper's readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. 'The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn't growing, and the one that is growing -- the Internet -- isn't producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality,' says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites."

via Simon Waldman

The NYT has simply hit the nub of the dilemma earlier than most. My own feeling is that charging a cover price or subscription fee won't be the answer. I don't believe online advertising has come close to its potential in terms of creative and when it begins to - and broadband will have a serious impact in this context - we should expect to see business develop.