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2nd Newspaper Group Faces Inquiry in British Hacking Scandal

September 12, 2013 by

“The group does not accept wrongdoing within its business and takes these allegations seriously,” Trinity Mirror, which also publishes the left-leaning Daily Mirror tabloid and Sunday People, said in a statement. “It is too soon to know how these matters will progress and further updates will be made if there are any significant developments.”

The hacking scandal has largely embroiled British newspapers in Rupert Murdoch’s empire. In July 2011, Mr. Murdoch closed The News of the World, a tabloid, after disclosures that its staff had hacked into the cellphone messages of a teenager, Milly Dowler, who had been abducted and was later found murdered.

Two former editors and several ex-employees of Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper subsidiary have been formally arraigned on charges relating to the scandal pending trials expected to start later in the year. All have denied wrongdoing.

In March, the police said that four Mirror group journalists had been arrested in South London on suspicion of “conspiracy to intercept telephone communications.” The journalists were not identified by name. Scotland Yard said they were three men ages 40, 46 and 49, and a 47-year-old woman. British news reports at the time said the four were all senior serving or former editors, including the editor and deputy editor of the tabloid Sunday People and the former editor and former deputy editor of The Sunday Mirror.

The hacking scandal led to an array of investigations, one of which, the Leveson Inquiry, concluded that Britain needed a new form of press oversight with statutory underpinnings.

During months of hearings, one of the witnesses at the inquiry led by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson was Piers Morgan, the CNN talk-show host who was editor of The Daily Mirror from 1995 to 2004. He told the investigation that he knew no one who hacked phones.

Other witnesses testified that phone hacking was rife at The Mirror, but Mr. Morgan repeatedly testified that it was not and that he knew nothing about it.

The Sunday Mirror, according to recent industry statistics, had a circulation of around 1 million in August, but The Sun on Sunday, which replaced the shuttered News of the World, led the Sunday tabloid market with sales of 1.9 million, followed by The Mail on Sunday with around 1.6 million.

The arrests in March related to individuals, but Thursday’s announcement showed that police officers also wanted to investigate whether their employer bore a corporate responsibility for any wrongdoing.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/world/europe/2nd-newspaper-group-faces-inquiry-in-british-hacking-scandal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Times Co.’s Thompson to Testify to Parliament About BBC

June 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The program started in 2008, according to a release the BBC issued last month, and was intended to have all of the BBC’s production and archived materials converted to a digital format. The BBC halted the project in October 2012 to review how well it was performing. In May, the BBC’s current director general, Tony Hall, decided to cut the program after it had accumulated about $154 million in costs because, he said, “The D.M.I. project has wasted a huge amount of license fee payers’ money and I saw no reason to allow that to continue, which is why I have closed it.’’

He added that he had “serious concerns about how we managed this project and the review that has been set up is designed to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned.”

“Ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure,” he said. “It does not mean we should not attempt them but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here.”

When Mr. Thompson testified before the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons about the program in February 2011, British newspapers said, he described how the program had been progressing.

“When I appeared in front of the P.A.C. in 2011 to discuss D.M.I., I answered all of the questions from committee members honestly and in good faith,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement on Monday, according to The Guardian, which on Tuesday reported on Mr. Thompson’s pending appearance before Parliament. “I did so on the basis of information provided to me at the time by the BBC executives responsible for delivering the project.”

Mr. Thompson left the BBC last fall to become chief executive of the Times Company. Since then, he has been called to testify about how the BBC handled sexual abuse accusations against one of its longtime television hosts, Jimmy Savile.

While it is unclear exactly when Mr. Thompson will return to London to testify in the Digital Media Initiative matter, Eileen Murphy, a Times Company spokeswoman, said in a statement, “Mark has always been cooperative with inquiries when they arise and he fully intends to continue that practice.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/business/media/times-cos-thompson-to-testify-to-parliament-about-bbc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: ABC Works on a Streaming App and British Newspapers Protest Regulations

March 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The Walt Disney Company is working on an app that would stream ABC programming to the tablets and phones of cable and satellite subscribers, Brian Stelter reports. ABC would be the first of the American broadcaster to provide such an app, and it is likely to result in a mixture of awe and fear from other networks. Disney already has streaming apps for content from ESPN and the Disney Channel, but special complexities exist for networks like ABC because of older contracts with companies that produce its shows and local stations, which might feel threatened by the app. It is not yet clear what the app would mean for online streaming services like Hulu, which does not require viewers to subscribe and has grown increasingly marginalized as its parent companies (including Disney) seek more lucrative revenue streams.

An array of British newspapers on Tuesday protested an attempt to impose stricter curbs on them, Stephen Castle and Alan Cowell write. The agreement announced by lawmakers on Monday creates a system under which newspapers would face a tough regulatory body that could order corrections be published prominently and impose large fines on publications that breach standards. The deal enshrines the regulator’s powers in a royal charter, the same document that governs the BBC and the Bank of England. The newspaper society, which represents 1,100 newspapers, said that the possibility of fines of up to $1.5 million would prove “crippling” for their struggling publications.

Much of the entertainment world’s metabolism has sped up, but major film productions often still lurch forward at a zombie’s pace, Michael Cieply reports. A case in point is the forthcoming “World War Z,” a zombie movie to be released in June that seems timely given the success of undead fare like AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” But Paramount Pictures acquired the rights to the novel “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment in 2006, just one example of a Hollywood system that mires its biggest films in an ever-lengthening process.  Whether these delayed releases make films miss the mark is an open question, but it is a fact that this year the release schedules feature at least eight high-budget films that were conceived five to 14 years ago.

Marriott International is using the release of the new movie “42,” about Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color line, to promote its loyalty program for African-Americans, Jane L. Levere reports. The campaign involves a Facebook contest, special screenings of the film and promotion of “42” on hotel room TVs, among other initiatives, and marks the first time Marriott has done niche marketing for the program, called Marriott Rewards. Apoorva Gandhi, vice president for multicultural markets and alliances at Marriott International, said that the movie was a good fit because it matches Marriott’s fundamental values (interestingly enough, Marriott Rewards also has 42 million members globally).

The media truism “if it bleeds, it leads,” appears to be undermined by social networks, John Tierney writes. A number of different studies show that social media users are more likely to share uplifting stories, perhaps because they are more concerned with how stories make their friends feel than a traditional media company. One study on the dissemination of thousands of articles from The New York Times Web site found that readers were more likely to share articles they found exciting or funny, or that inspired negative emotions like anger or anxiety, but not ones that just left them sad. But the more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared.

The BBC confirmed plans to sell the Lonely Planet travel guidebooks to a reclusive American billionaire on Tuesday, drawing internal scrutiny for losing public money on the sale, Eric Pfanner writes. BBC Worldwide sold Lonely Planet for £51.5 million, or $77.3 million, far below the £130 million that the BBC paid for Lonely Planet. At the time of the purchase the BBC talked about extending Lonely Planet into digital channels, an area where traditional guidebooks face stiff competition from travel Web sites.

Air New Zealand has enlisted Bear Grylls, the bug-eating, urine-drinking adventurer best known for the survival show “Man vs. Wild,” to liven up that pariah of in-flight entertainment, the onboard safety video, Bettina Wassener reports. The airline’s video features Mr. Grylls running, crawling and rappelling. At one point he leaps into a raging river to demonstrate the efficacy of the plane’s life jackets. These attempts to spice up the safety-spiel are a relatively new development, with Virgin America one of the first companies to try in 2007.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/the-breakfast-meeting-abc-works-on-a-streaming-app-and-british-newspapers-protest-regulations/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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James Murdoch Has Quit Boards of British Newspapers

November 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Media analysts in Britain speculated that the move by the younger Mr. Murdoch might presage the News Corporation’s eventual exit from British newspapers, once a core holding but now an increasingly marginal segment, in financial terms, of the company’s worldwide operations.

The younger Mr. Murdoch no longer sits on the boards of News Group Newspapers, which publishes The Sun, and of Times Newspapers, which publishes The Times and The Sunday Times of London, according to a statement released by the News Corporation’s News International unit, which oversees all Murdoch-owned businesses in Britain. All three papers are among the most influential in the country.

The statement, issued in response to reports in the British news media, said James Murdoch, 38, stepped down from the boards in September, but remained a director of Times Newspapers Holdings, the holding company of Times Newspapers that was established by Rupert Murdoch when he bought The Times titles in the early 1980s to honor his pledge to keep the papers editorially independent. James Murdoch will also remain chairman of News International and deputy chief operating officer, from a base in New York, of the News Corporation.

He will also continue as chairman of British Sky Broadcasting, Britain’s most powerful satellite broadcaster and one of the News Corporation’s most lucrative businesses.

The board changes appear to signal a significant gesture by the Murdochs, a step back from the family’s personal oversight of the newspaper properties in Britain that were the foundation for Rupert Murdoch’s emergence as an international media tycoon, after making his start as a newspaper proprietor in Australia. From Britain, Rupert Murdoch, now 80, moved his headquarters to the United States and vastly expanded his empire into film, television and other holdings.

Rupert Murdoch is said to have a passion for newspapering that James Murdoch, who has spent much of his career overseeing the News Corporation’s overseas television holdings, does not share.

News International spokesmen disputed suggestions that the Murdochs were walking away from the British newspapers, or seeking to distance themselves from the phone hacking scandal that ensnared The News of the World, a highly profitable tabloid that they closed this summer amid revelations about the newspaper’s role between 2001 and 2009 in the illegal interception of private voice mail messages of almost 6,000 people. The hacking victims included members of the royal family, sports and entertainment celebrities, and vulnerable families that had lost children to abduction and murder.

The News of the World had published continuously for 168 years, and James Murdoch has refused to rule out closing The Sun, the country’s largest daily newspaper by circulation, if it should become embroiled in the phone hacking scandal, as some of those who believe that their phones were hacked have alleged. At least 16 former News International employees, including Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive, have been arrested in police investigations.

Two News Corporation officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in return for discussing internal company matters that they described as confidential, said the board moves were “housekeeping” measures. The decision was made, one said, because Mr. Murdoch “will be spending more time in the United States” in his role as a News Corporation executive. His position on the two boards was assumed by Tom Mockridge, the new chief executive of News International, who was appointed to the position after his predecessor, Ms. Brooks, resigned over the phone hacking scandal.

The news of Mr. Murdoch’s departure from the two boards, two months after the moves occurred, broke when a reporter for The Evening Standard, which is not a Murdoch property, examined filings at Companies House, the government agency where privately owned businesses in Britain file financial statements and other corporate documents.

Mr. Murdoch’s decision to step down from the two boards followed his appearance with his father in July before a House of Commons committee conducting televised hearings into the long-running scandal.

James Murdoch made a second appearance this month before the panel, known as the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, where he faced further questioning about his role in the scandal, in particular his approval of a $1.3 million financial settlement with Gordon Taylor, a soccer executive whose cellphone messages were among those intercepted by a private investigator working for The News of the World. Mr. Murdoch testified that the settlement was not a payment to cover up the extent of the wrongdoing at the newspaper, as some members of the committee suggested.

Although James Murdoch has rejected any hint of wrongdoing, it is widely expected that he will come in for criticism, and possibly harsher censure, when the parliamentary committee makes its report, expected before the year’s end.

Media analysts in the City of London financial district said they saw the board changes as part of a broader strategic repositioning by the News Corporation, and as a possible preliminary to a decision by the Murdochs to abandon their British newspaper holdings. “It feels like they’re loosening the ties,” said Alex DeGroote, an analyst at Panmure Gordon. “Over all, I don’t think News Corporation will own News International in the next 14 months or so. This is slowly withdrawing family interest from the U.K. titles, which are a marginal asset and increasingly became a distraction of management time.”

Julia Werdigier contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a5fa4b0137ea623e5fe2cc8270227288

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Essay: The Great Fleet Street Novel

August 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The scandal that started at The News of the World and is now threatening to spread to the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire and beyond, appears, on the face of it, to have more in common with a British remake of “24” than with “Scoop,” Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 “Novel about Journalists,” still widely acknowledged as the unrivaled masterpiece of Fleet Street satire. Its plot turns not on criminal wrongdoing but on a classically farcical case of mistaken identity. Instead of sending John Courteney Boot, fashionable novelist and travel writer, to cover “a very promising little war” in the East African republic of Ishmaelia, The Daily Beast dispatches William Boot, the mild-mannered and absent-minded author of the paper’s “biweekly half-column devoted to nature.” His complete lack of journalistic experience comes in handy when, instead of charging up a false trail with the rest of the international press corps, he stays behind in the Ishmaelian capital, Jacksonburg, and scoops the lot of them.

The journalists’ herd mentality and disregard for anything so tedious as “the truth” is partly what Christopher Hitchens had in mind when, in his introduction to the 2000 Penguin Classics edition, he called it (and he should know) “a novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has ever done save Hecht and MacArthur’s ‘Front Page’ and, to a smaller extent, Michael Frayn’s ‘Towards the End of the Morning.’ ”

Frayn’s novel, published in 1967, the year before Murdoch bought The News of the World, can be seen as foreshadowing the transformation of the British press that Murdoch brought about. It’s based on Frayn’s experiences at The Guardian and The Observer, left-of-center broadsheets as far from The News of the World as British newspapers can be. The manageable chaos of a quiet corner of an unnamed paper where the “nature notes” (shades of William Boot), obituaries and crossword puzzles are put together is disturbed by the arrival of a terrifyingly efficient young man. “You really see yourself working on a paper for the rest of your life?” another character asks him. “I see myself owning one,” he replies.

The transformation was more fully registered in Martin Amis’s “Yellow Dog” (2003), whose psychotic tabloid journalist, Clint Smoker, makes almost any other fictional Fleet Street Caliban look like Ariel. Smoker, “a very fine journalist indeed,” works for The Morning Lark, where the staffers refer to readers with an unprintable epithet and “no global cataclysm had yet had the power to push the pinup off the front page.” He is racist, misogynist, hideously ugly and fixated on his tiny penis. He concocts stories by setting up liaisons between soccer players and models. “You might think that the contempt shown by the reporters for both their subjects and their readers is overdone,” Hitchens has written of his friend Amis’s novel, “but you would be wrong.” No doubt. But Amis’s chthonic hatred for the functionaries of the gutter press is so overwhelming that he misses a trick: Smoker’s depravity stands in murky isolation from the rest of society.

Thomas Jones is a contributing editor at The London Review of Books.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a2aafc8f68f83c6e1d2a8890eee56e23

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DealBook: Path Cleared for News Corp.’s BSkyB Bid

June 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Rupert Murdoch on June 21 at The Times C.E.O. summit in London.Pool photo by Ben GurrRupert Murdoch on June 21 at The Times C.E.O. summit in London.

British regulators confirmed on Thursday that they were ready to pave the way for News Corporation’s takeover of the pay television company BSkyB.

The government said that a long review of the deal, which the News Corporation offered to adjust in order to satisfy regulatory concerns, had “produced no new information” to change the official stance to allow the acquisition.

With that, the News Corporation is one step closer to buying the 60.9 percent of BSkyB that it does not already own, leaving the price of the takeover as the chief remaining uncertainty.

Concessions made by Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to spin off Sky News, BSkyB’s popular news channel, were enough to appease the concerns of Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, who said in March that he was “minded to accept” the proposal.

Mr. Hunt, however, has submitted a few more conditions to closing the deal. These include appointing an independent director with experience in journalism to the Sky News editorial board, ensuring that BSkyB continues to cross-promote Sky News after the spin-off and appointing a trustee to monitor the News Corporation’s compliance with the rules in the transition period.

“The regulators have confirmed that the proposed undertakings are still sufficient to ensure media plurality,” Mr. Hunt said on Thursday in a statement. “I could have decided to accept the original undertakings, but a number of suggestions were made in response to the consultation.”

Given the proposed changes, Mr. Hunt extended the review period until July 8, but government backing is all but assured. Issues of media plurality have delayed the acquisition, given that the News Corporation owns the British newspapers The Times, The Sun and News of the World.

Now, Mr. Murdoch is left to haggle with BSkyB shareholders, many of whom expect a higher offer than the 700 pence a share he bid last summer, which values the 60.9 percent stake at £7.8 billion.

BSkyB responded at the time that its management would support an offer worth more than 800 pence, and some analysts think the final proposal could be well in excess of that.

Nick Bell, an analyst with Jefferies, said he thought a bid of 850 pence a share was likely, but that expectations of anything above 900 pence were unrealistic.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c4b4076a533b5605b546af14226948aa

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