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Tina Brown to Write Memoir

September 12, 2013 by

The book, titled “Media Beast,” will chronicle her career in magazines, from her early days at Tatler in London on through her stewardship of Vanity Fair, her reinvention of The New Yorker and her exit this week from The Daily Beast Web site.

Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, will publish the book in early 2016.

In the interview, Ms. Brown said that she had kept detailed notes throughout her working life and intends to write a wide-ranging memoir. It was time, she said, “To get my thoughts down on it all.”

“I’ve seen a great deal, I’ve seen so much change, so much up close, amazing forces at work in the media business,” Ms. Brown said. “It’s been a pretty interesting world.

Her publisher said in a statement that “Media Beast” will “bring a unique perspective to the forces driving and disrupting publishing in the last three decades as well as keen observation of the worlds of media, Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street through which Tina Brown moved as an editor whose mission was to break news.”

Ms. Brown said that she made up her mind to write a memoir earlier this summer during a series of conversations with Stephen Rubin, the president and publisher of Holt, whom she worked with at Doubleday, which published her previous book, “The Diana Chronicles.”

Mr. Rubin said in a statement that he was “overjoyed to be reunited” with Ms. Brown.

A day after announcing she was leaving journalism to start her own conference company, Ms. Brown said that she had no regrets about the decision. “I had such a fantastic time in the magazine world at its very height,” she said. “I always have somehow had the opportunity to take over some fantastic titles.”

She said she had come to feel restless at the Daily Beast. “I like the creation process and then I start to feel like I want to create something else,” she said. “I love the Daily Beast and I always will. I’ll always feel very close to it.”

“I just felt that my job was done,” she added. “It’s time for me now to get new satisfaction having my own company.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/business/media/tina-brown-to-write-memoir.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Music Industry Records First Revenue Increase Since 1999

February 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

PARIS — The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said Tuesday that its global sales had risen last year for the first year since 1999, suggesting that a long-sought recovery might have finally begun.

The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5 billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, are a significant psychological boost.

“It’s clear that 2012 saw the global recording industry moving onto the road to recovery,” said Frances Moore, chief executive of the federation, which is based in London. “There’s a palpable buzz in the air that I haven’t felt for a long time.”

For years, the music industry’s decline looked terminal, with the record companies seemingly unable to come up with legitimate digital business models that could compete with the lure of piracy. Last year, however, digital sales and other new sources of revenue finally grew significantly enough to offset the continuing decline in CD sales.

“At the beginning of the digital revolution it was common to say that digital was killing music,” said Edgar Berger, chief executive of the international arm of Sony Music Entertainment. “The reality is that digital is saving music.”

Digital revenue comes in a variety of forms. Sales of downloaded singles and albums, from services like Apple’s iTunes, continue to grow. More promising for the industry, however, are subscription-based services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Muve Music, which have attracted a combined 20 million users worldwide. Subscription fees and licensing revenue are both growing rapidly.

Performance remains highly uneven around the world. Eight of the 20 biggest music markets showed growth last year, but in some countries that the industry classifies as “emerging,” like Russia and China, piracy remains endemic and licensed, legitimate digital services struggle.

There are also worrying signs in some more developed markets that had previously been relatively robust, like Britain. There, the recent bankruptcy of the leading retail music chain, HMV, has prompted fears about an acceleration of the decline in CD sales.

In the United States, sales slipped slightly last year. But Enders Analysis, a research firm in London, predicted in a separate report published Tuesday that this year would mark the beginning of a turnaround, with revenue rising to $5.35 billion from $5.32 billion.

Alice Enders, a senior analyst at the firm, said growth in the coming years was likely to remain slow, as CD sales continue to plunge. Still, after more than a decade of falling revenue, the performance last year was encouraging for the industry.

“It’s huge,” she said. “It’s a milestone.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-industry-records-first-revenue-increase-since-1999.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Time Inc., the Unwanted Party Guest Being Pushed Out the Door

February 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

12:43 p.m. | Updated How toxic have print assets become? This toxic: Media companies have begun to quarantine them.

On Wednesday, Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher in the country, found itself at the wrong end of a 10-foot pole. Its corporate parent, Time Warner, which has a broad and lucrative array of entertainment assets, was making plans to spin off much of the tattered print unit in a shotgun marriage with Meredith, a Midwest-based company that was trying to do much the same thing.

Under the plan, which is far from final, the two companies would contribute magazines to create a new, publicly held company that would be left to make its own way.

In shearing off its print division, Time Warner is following a path laid down by News Corporation, which announced last year that its entertainment assets and print assets would be split into two divisions. Its stock hit a five-year high when the plan was floated last June, and sometime early this summer there will be two companies – Fox Group and News Corporation – that will allow the fast-growing film and television assets to grow unencumbered by legacy print businesses.

Print publishing may have lost significant currency with consumers and advertisers in a digital age, but investors have a far deeper animus. They see little possibility that the business as a whole will right itself, and they find its lack of growth wanting compared to the cable, television and film businesses that are now the epicenter of the media business.

Time Inc. may be baked into the name of Time Warner, but it long ago lost salience as a significant player in the company’s business. Time Inc. earnings dropped 5 percent last year, and the division now contributes less than 12 percent of overall sales at the company. The Time Life building, an edifice standing tall in the middle of Midtown, was long a revered totem of the publishing business. To people in the industry who came of age back when things were good, Time Inc. was legend, having grown up not just on the force of its journalism but on tales of editors’ offices the size of racquetball courts and liquor carts rumbling through the hall spreading cheer and an aura of privilege.

But the news of a possible sale of its magazine division came at a time when Time Inc. is laying off some 6 percent of its global work force, and many of those who remained wondered whether their jobs, if they continue to have them, might require them to move to Des Moines, the headquarters of Meredith.

It was a bit of a moment for the people at Time Inc. and for the publishing business as a whole. Even though Time Warner has said that it will hang on to Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Money, the profits from those Olympian sounding titles are meager, less than 10 percent of the division. Time Warner is keeping them in part because they might bolt on to a reconceived CNN television network, and in part because, well, no one wanted them.

Many wonder what it means for the actual magazines, and no one knows the answer. Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Money, all male-oriented, news driven publications, seemed likely to stay with the mother brand. People are particularly interested in Time because of its enduring cultural status, its ability to memorialize events or trends with its covers, and its occasional large role in the coverage of news developments. Now it will be part of an ad hoc news division with CNN.

Bad relationships between Time Inc. and CNN had always made collaborations difficult, but Jeff Zucker, the new head of CNN, is said to be very interested in the content of those magazines, especially Time. For instance, for the last few years, Time has announced its Person of the Year on the “Today” show with a great deal of fanfare, and it would be a natural as a television franchise. In spite of its lack of actual profits – making money as a giant weekly is a difficult endeavor – Time magazine has significant brand and sentimental value at the company. Its long history, the recent closure of Newsweek’s print edition and the fact that CNN and Time are two of the leading news brands on the planet may mean that, over the long run, the split will be good for the weekly.

The new entity will lean hard on People, as close as the magazine industry has had to a money machine, with sales of almost $1 billion last year. But even that juggernaut has slowed: Last year, People’s newsstand sales declined 12.2 percent in the second half of 2012 compared with the year before, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

Once the crown jewel of Manhattan publishing, Time Inc. has been lurching of late, with three publishers in three years, steadily dropping earnings and a digital future that is much ballyhooed but never seems to arrive. The division still makes money, kicking out $460 million in earnings last year, but the trend lines have been down for the last five years as secular changes in the industry – particularly, declining advertising revenue — have clobbered the former earnings standout.

The other two big Manhattan magazine companies – Hearst and Condé Nast – are privately held and can afford to play for the long haul, hoping that trusted print brands find a new toehold through tablet apps and digital extensions. Not so at Time Inc., where the contrast between print and the rest of the company has grown only more stark.

Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, has always said nice things about the magazine division, but his actions suggest that he is no longer interested in waiting for a turnaround. Mr. Bewkes came up through HBO, a cable division that has managed to keep growing and throwing off profit in spite of changes in the media landscape, and he clearly would rather cheer on Time Inc. from a greater distance.

Mr. Bewkes did much the same thing for many of the same reasons when he engineered a split between the parent company and Time Warner Cable back in 2008. Then, as now, the company was trying to open up a space between the parent and so-called mature businesses. And in each instance, the parent could obtain the benefit of a sale without suffering big capital gains taxes.

When the cable company was spun off, it paid a dividend to the parent of some $10.9 billion by taking on a great deal of debt; a similar gambit is expected to yield some $1.75 billion if the deal for a new joint venture with Meredith comes to pass. (And nothing, it should be pointed out, ages faster than the future gone amiss. AOL, which once swallowed Time Warner in a reverse merger, was spun back out in 2009.)

The deal to largely exit the magazine business could take weeks or months, and the specifics are far from worked out; in the end, Time Warner could explore other options. But the basic decision to unwind the magazine division has been years in the making. The difficulties have been widespread and dispersed in the industry as a whole – magazines as tiny as Cat Fancy and as giant as Reader’s Digest have been taken apart by fundamentally changed economics and consumer habits.

There were many other signs over the last few years. Gourmet is gone from Condé Nast, a company that had never tightened its Gucci belt in its history. Then Newsweek, a former primary player in American consciousness, sold for a dollar and gave up on print.

Disruption in various economic sectors takes place over years as insurgents rise and former titans crumble, but its effects often become most clear in a signature moment. The specter of Time Inc., which lent its name to one of the largest media companies in the world, being pushed out the door like a party guest who has overstayed his welcome is a stark reminder of how fundamentally the game has changed.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/time-inc-the-unwanted-party-guest-being-pushed-out-the-door/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Media Equation: Scandal Splinters a Family Business

July 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Murdoch, long a spectral presence who made his plays on a chess board of his own making, was brought low before a committee of Parliament composed of people he could not have been bothered with three weeks ago.

In testimony last Tuesday, he appeared as a supplicant, a faltering one at that, who interrupted his son James in the opening moments of the hearing, not to correct him, but to tell the members of the committee how sorry he was.

He is very sorry. Sorry that one of his tabloids hacked into the voice mail of a 13-year-old murder victim. Sorry that the scandal threatens to derail his plans of succession. And sorry to find himself suddenly in the public stockade.

Is he sorry that he and his employees created a culture and a business where all that seemed cricket? Probably not so much.

His family and the board of his company are sorry as well, but that will probably not end up meaning much. The protective instincts of the family were on broad display last week. James sought to leap in front of every hard question while Mr. Murdoch’s wife, Wendi, inserted herself into the fray when someone tried to shove a shaving cream pie at her husband. She has a mean right hook.

Rupert has his own protective streak when it comes to his family, and has gone to great lengths to make them central to the News Corporation’s success structure. But what his sons and daughters could soon find out is that if Mr. Murdoch is forced to choose between the family and the company he has built, he will choose the News Corporation.

“Rupert may end up having to make a choice between his son and the company, which is fairly biblical,” said a friend of the family who works in the media business and who declined to be identified when speaking about private family matters.

James Murdoch is done. He and his father both know that. His testimony curdled as he emitted it, and within two days a couple of former News Corporation executives publicly challenged it. The hooks are still in him, as Prime Minister David Cameron made clear when he said James still had “questions to answer.” And so he will, gradually sinking further into the mess he has overseen.

Oddly, the News Corporation’s stock began to tick up during the hearings as Rupert Murdoch testified, his large hands thumping as he dropped them to the table. But it was less about his performance than about the clear message that emerged: an era had ended. The family business is splintering. If James is out, as would seem to be the case, will his other offspring, Elisabeth and Lachlan, come swinging into view? I and others doubt that the charms of a global media enterprise being run as a corner grocery store will continue.

While the family reign seems certain to fracture, the News Corporation’s own fortunes are less predictable. A report by the analyst Michael Nathanson of Nomura Capital Investments nicely captured the moment. The market does not care if you have done bad things; it cares when you get caught.

“While we remain disappointed by the actions of a muckraking newspaper and frustrated that perhaps the least-valuable asset in the News Corp. portfolio could cause this much value destruction,” Mr. Nathanson wrote, “we continue to believe that the risk/reward for News Corp. investors remains positive.”

Reached later by phone, Mr. Nathanson suggested that the News Corporation had been cornered into doing the right thing, after doing a lot of not-so-right things. The fact that the company moved swiftly to buy back its stock — approving $5 billion of the oodles of cash the company has on hand — calmed the markets, if not the troubled waters that the company finds itself in.

“The loss of the BSkyB deal is significant and not good for the company, but in the long term, I think this will force the company to take a hard look at where they are putting capital,” he said, referring to the company’s abandoned bid for British Sky Broadcasting, Britain’s most lucrative satellite television network.

Historically, Mr. Murdoch has used the digital and broadcast parts of his empire to make money, and the more quotidian assets — newspapers, family influence and raw political power — to create running room for the rest of the organization. That was fine as far as it went.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter.com/carr2n

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3cfde799d3f286b42fa03b57b4483cea

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