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Al Jazeera Makes Limited American Debut

August 20, 2013 by

There was ample attention in journalistic circles as Al Jazeera America had its premiere on Tuesday — particularly among those who could not watch.

The news channel — which replaced Current TV at 3 p.m. Eastern time — was expected to be carried by five of the country’s 10 biggest television providers, but one of those, ATT U-verse, dropped Current, and thus Al Jazeera, late Monday night.

That decision irritated some U-verse subscribers, who complained online about the company’s move and which further limited Al Jazeera America’s potential audience on Day 1.

On Tuesday evening, Al Jazeera said it was looking to the court system to resolve the contract dispute.

“Unfortunately ATT’s decision to unilaterally delete Al Jazeera America presented us with circumstances that were untenable — an affiliate that has willfully and knowingly breached its contractual obligations,” the broadcaster said in a statement. “We had no choice but to take this action and to enforce Al Jazeera’s rights under its agreement with ATT — and to compel ATT to do the right thing.”

The complaint, filed in Delaware Chancery Court, accuses ATT of wrongful termination and seeks restoration of the channel as well as damages.

ATT said it had not yet seen the lawsuit. In a statement, it hinted that Current’s transformation into Al Jazeera gave it an opening to drop the channel: “As a result of our inability to come to terms on a new agreement and due to certain breaches of the existing agreement, we have decided not to carry Current TV on U-verse.”

People who were curious about the new channel but were not able to access it on TV found that they could not access it online, either. It is not being live-streamed on the Internet, much to the disappointment of a small but vocal group of longtime Al Jazeera viewers in the United States.

Those fans had grown accustomed to watching the pan-Arab broadcaster’s existing English-language news channel, called Al Jazeera English, via the Internet. But on Monday, Al Jazeera English turned off its live stream for users in the United States. It also started to geo-block the news reports it posts on YouTube, so that instead of seeing the videos, American users saw a message that said, “The uploader has not made this video available in your country.”

Al Jazeera officials said privately that in the run-up to the premiere of the new American channel, they had little choice but to acquiesce to cable and satellite providers, which generally discourage online competition of the kind that Al Jazeera English previously represented. In effect they have sacrificed Internet distribution for a shot at traditional distribution.

Al Jazeera’s decision made a certain amount of sense, considering that most Americans spend far more time with television than the Internet. Still, complaints about the blockade piled up on Al Jazeera America’s Facebook page. One of the most-liked comments criticized the broadcaster for “going backward” by prioritizing TV over the Internet.

The concerns were shared by some Al Jazeera staff members, especially those who have been at Al Jazeera English, or A.J.E. for short, for years. The live stream and the YouTube page were the main ways their work was seen in the United States until the restrictions were put in place this week. The staff’s complaints were channeled by Rob Reynolds, an A.J.E. correspondent based in Los Angeles, who wrote on Facebook on Monday that “the great blackout has begun.”

“Al Jazeera is now blocking all A.J.E. videos from the U.S.A.,” Mr. Reynolds wrote. “It’s a form of corporate censorship that would make the Chinese Politburo jealous. And an incredible show of disrespect to all the reporters operating in the U.S. who have helped build Al Jazeera’s brand name in this country.”

Mr. Reynolds deleted the Facebook post, but not before other Al Jazeera staff members saw it and shared it with each other approvingly. Reached on Tuesday, Mr. Reynolds said the post was intended for family and friends and was written out of frustration. He deleted it, he said, because he concluded that it was unfair to his colleagues. He said his reference to censorship was aimed at the cable and satellite providers, not his employer.

Mohamed Nanabhay, the former head of Al Jazeera English’s Web site, pointed out in an e-mail message that there were thousands of Al Jazeera videos “embedded on third-party sites across the Internet that have suddenly become unavailable to audiences” because of the blockade.

Mr. Nanabhay said Al Jazeera America could have gone in a different direction and tried to appeal to the growing number of Americans dissatisfied with cable, the so-called cord-cutters who access video online.

A spokesman for Al Jazeera did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, but the head of social media for the new channel, Riyaad Minty, hinted about a possible solution. To those “who have lost the live streams,” he wrote on Twitter, “We hear you. We’re working on it.”

The new American channel was supposed to be available in about 48 million homes, according to Nielsen. The loss of U-verse reduces that to around 45 million.

Still, that is a decent start for a new channel: many other now-successful cable channels, including Fox News and MSNBC, started in fewer homes.

On Tuesday, Al Jazeera America was available to some subscribers of Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network, and Verizon FiOS. The biggest provider that is not yet carrying the new channel, Time Warner Cable, said it remained in negotiations about possibly carrying it in the future.

As for the channel itself, when it started Tuesday afternoon, it seemed to deliver on what it promised — serious, straightforward news. The first hour had a lengthy promotional video that said, among other things, “We will connect the world to America, and Americans to the world.” Then, at 4 p.m., the news began, led by the former CNN anchor Tony Harris, who updated viewers on the unrest in Egypt and a shooting at a school in Georgia.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/business/media/al-jazeera-makes-its-american-debut.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Bertelsmann Confirms Plans to Sell Stock in RTL

April 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The German media conglomerate Bertelsmann confirmed plans on Thursday to raise money for acquisitions by selling stock in RTL, the biggest commercial broadcaster in Europe.

Bertelsmann, which currently controls 92 percent of RTL, said it planned to reduce its ownership to as little as 75 percent through a public stock offering and private sales to institutional investors. The company said it planned to sell RTL shares on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange “before the summer,” adding to existing listings in Luxembourg and Brussels, where RTL is thinly traded.

No price was given, but Ian Whittaker, an analyst at Liberum Capital in London, estimated that at current market prices, the sale would raise €2 billion to €2.2 billion, or $3 billion to $3.3 billion.

Thomas Rabe, chief executive of Bertelsmann, told reporters last month that Bertelsmann planned to raise money to fuel an expansion in digital media and developing markets, which are growing faster than the company’s core businesses in Europe.

RTL, which owns television channels and radio stations in many European countries, including Germany, France and the Netherlands, has been Bertelsmann’s cash cow for years, but broadcasting is a slow-growing business.

RTL does, however, also own a television production house that Mr. Rabe has identified as a key source of future growth — Fremantle Media, the television production house behind shows like “American Idol” and “The X Factor.”

“We have resolved to make Bertelsmann more growth-oriented, more digital and more international in the coming years,” Mr. Rabe said at a news conference in Berlin as Bertelsmann announced its 2012 financial results last month. At the time, the company, which is privately held by the Mohn family, reported sales growth of 4.5 percent, to €16.1 billion.

One driver of that growth, Mr. Rabe said, was the “Fifty Shades of Grey” book series, published by a Bertelsmann unit, Random House. Bertelsmann recently moved to bolster its book publishing operations by agreeing to merge Random House with Penguin, which is owned by Pearson, a British media company. The companies are still waiting for regulatory clearance in Europe to complete that deal.

Another potential growth area identified by Mr. Rabe is Bertelsmann’s music arm, BMG, which manages the rights to songs by artists like Duran Duran and Johnny Cash but does not operate in the troubled record label business. Bertelsmann this week announced that it had taken over full control of BMG by buying a 51 percent stake from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a private equity firm.

Mr. Rabe has said the company plans to spend as much as €3 billion on acquisitions over the next three years. Instead of using it all for one big purchase, he told reporters in Berlin, Bertelsmann would prefer to do a number of medium-size deals.

Other areas of growth, he added, include education, professional publishing and the Fremantle content production business, prompting considerable speculation among analysts about possible takeover targets.

“They clearly don’t want to use all their firepower at once,” Mr. Whittaker said. “There are plenty of niches in digital. If you look at what Axel Springer has done, that should give you a pretty good indication.”

Axel Springer, a German newspaper publisher, has expanded its digital operations by buying medium-size Internet businesses like SeLoger and AuFeminin in France.

While Mr. Rabe last year raised the possibility of an initial public offering of Bertelsmann stock, he said in March that this option was now “off the table for the foreseeable future.” In January, Bertelsmann gave the first indication that it was instead weighing the possibility of reducing its stake in RTL.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/business/global/05iht-bertelsmann05.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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BBC Inquiry Blames Rigid Management for Mishandling Sex Abuse Scandal

December 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a former head of the Sky News channel who began his broadcast career as a BBC reporter, traced in detail what it described as “a chain of events that was to prove disastrous for the BBC.” Among other things, Mr. Pollard blamed a “rigid management system” that had “proved completely incapable of dealing with” the crisis that followed the program’s cancellation.

While much of the report centered on the interplay between journalists and their superiors as the allegations against Mr. Savile were investigated, its central conclusion appeared to be that confusion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision to drop the Savile program. Mr. Savile died at 84 in October 2011, weeks before the “Newsnight” program was scheduled to be broadcast.

“The efforts to get to the truth behind the Savile story proved beyond the combined efforts of the senior management, legal department, corporate communications team and anyone else for well over a month” after the crisis broke, precipitated by a program earlier this year on ITV, Britain’s leading commercial broadcaster, the report said. “Leadership and organization seemed to be in short supply.”

Mr. Pollard dismissed one theory that was widely circulated in recent months, that BBC News executives or their superiors, reluctant to have the BBC reveal a dark passage in its past, pressured the “Newsnight” team to cancel the Savile segment. Critics who took this views have played down the reason Peter Rippon, the program’s editor, cited to his staff. Mr. Rippon said he considered the team’s conclusions about Mr. Savile had not been adequately substantiated.

“While there clearly were discussions about the Savile story between Mr. Rippon and his managers,” Mr. Pollard said, he did not believe that they had exerted “undue pressure on him.”

The report was strongly critical of several news executives who were directly involved in the decision to cancel the Savile exposé, including Mr. Rippon and the two top executives in the BBC’s news division to whom he reported, Helen Boaden and Stephen Mitchell, all three of whom were suspended from their posts during the nine-week Pollard inquiry.

But it adopted a largely sparing tone in its review of the role played by the broadcaster’s former director general, Mark Thompson, who stepped down after eight years in the job in September and became president and chief executive of The New York Times Company last month.

The report’s criticism appeared to be aimed mainly at the broadcaster’s complex management systems, not on the actions — or absence of them — by Mr. Thompson and other top executives who presided over the BBC, its $6 billion annual budget and its 23,000 employees.

Mr. Thompson has said that he was not briefed about the “Newsnight” investigation before its cancellation, was not involved in canceling it, and did not know about the allegations of sexual abuse against Mr. Savile until the report about the cancellation appeared on ITV, a commercial competitor of the BBC.

The report does not dispute Mr. Thompson’s public statements that he did not know about the Savile investigation until it had been killed.

It cited, without criticism, Mr. Thompson’s account of an episode when he was asked about the “Newsnight” cancellation by a BBC reporter at a social gathering. The report quoted Mr. Thompson as having testified that he subsequently asked BBC News executives about the matter and “received reassurances” that the program had been killed for “editorial or journalistic reasons.” After that, Mr. Thompson said, according to the report, he “crossed it off my list and went off to worry about something else.”

While the scuttled program became the subject of media stories in London beginning in January — some of which, BBC officials have said, were included in press summaries prepared for Mr. Thompson — Mr. Pollard concluded: “Mr. Thompson told me that the various press stories which followed passed him by. I have no reason to doubt what he told me.”

Matthew Purdy contributed reporting from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/world/europe/pollard-report-bbc-jimmy-savile-sexual-abuse-inquiry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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