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Jackson’s Earning Potential Is at the Heart of a Wrongful-Death Suit

July 28, 2013 by

Four years after his death, Michael Jackson still rules the music business.

Jackson’s importance to music and his continuing earning potential have been on display in a courtroom in Los Angeles this summer as members of his family battle with the promoter of his final concerts over who was responsible for his death, a question that may be worth more than $1 billion.

The darker part of Jackson’s legacy is also on display: the drug dependence, financial fecklessness, accusations of sexual abuse and the inescapability of his family, which first propelled him to stardom as a child and now continues to live off his fortune.

To judge by the market, that history is largely forgiven, if not forgotten. Forbes estimated that the estate made $145 million last year through a range of music and merchandising deals; the only living musician to come close, according to the magazine, was Dr. Dre with $110 million, mostly from the sale of his company Beats Electronics.

 Cirque du Soleil’s tribute, “Michael Jackson The Immortal World Tour,” has sold more than $300 million in tickets since it opened two years ago, and last month an elaborate new Cirque show, “Michael Jackson One,” opened in Las Vegas.

Projects like these keep money pouring into the estate even as Jackson’s album sales have slowed from a peak after his death. Since 2009, the estate is estimated to have earned at least $600 million.

“Time is an elixir,” said Stephen G. Hill, the president of music programming and specials at BET Networks. “We’ve already seen in four years that what is really celebrated about him is his music, and his place among the greatest entertainers of all time.”

The wrongful death suit against the concert promoter A.E.G. Live, brought by Jackson’s 83-year-old mother, Katherine, hinges on the narrow question of whether Jackson or the company was responsible for hiring Dr. Conrad Murray, who administered the anesthetic that killed Jackson in June 2009. Dr. Murray is serving a four-year prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

Mrs. Jackson, who with Jackson’s three young children is suing A.E.G. Live, gave emotional if sometimes confused testimony last week, as her lawyers’ last witness before the defense began making its case.

 “They watched him waste away,” Mrs. Jackson cried from the stand, encapsulating her lawyers’ argument that A.E.G. Live ignored Jackson’s health and pressured Dr. Murray to do whatever it took to get him on stage.

But the trial, now entering its 14th week, also shows Jackson’s exceptional role in the music industry. As with everything he did, his comeback was planned on a huge and risky scale.

Even though Jackson had not toured widely in more than decade, some $30 million was spent to mount 50 shows in London, with rough plans for a world tour to follow. Hours before his death, the show’s insurers were still seeking details about Jackson’s health, prompted by news reports that he suffered from a variety of illnesses including lupus, cancer and anorexia, according to an e-mail shown in court.

Lawyers at the trial have delved, often in numbing detail, into the minutiae of the music business to try to assess Jackson’s earning potential. Last week, nearly an hour of combative questioning was devoted to the seating capacity of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.

 A major question, beyond the culpability of A.E.G. Live in Jackson’s death, is how much money the entertainer might have made had he lived. That amount has been hotly disputed in court. Arthur Erk, an accountant called by the Jacksons, gave a future earnings estimate of $1.5 billion, but his analysis and methodology — Mr. Erk said that much of his information came from the Web site Wikipedia — were attacked by lawyers for A.E.G. Live.

Like plenty of other artists, Jackson turned to touring by necessity, said Stan Soocher, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, and the editor of the journal Entertainment Law and Finance.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/business/media/jacksons-earning-potential-is-at-the-heart-of-a-wrongful-death-suit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Boston Phoenix to Cease Publication

March 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

4:30 p.m. | Updated The Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly newspaper known for its sharp political coverage and smart insight into the cultural and music scene, announced Thursday that it will fold.

Sister papers the Portland Phoenix in Maine and the Providence Phoenix in Rhode Island will remain open, the company said.

The Phoenix has struggled with the decline in advertising that has been affecting the rest of the newspaper business. But only six months ago, the paper’s owners announced a transition to a glossy magazine format that seemed to signal a commitment to staying open. On Thursday, it became clear that the advertising they had hoped would materialize, did not.

“We are a text book example of sweeping marketplace change,” said Peter Kadzis, the paper’s executive editor in a statement. “Our recent switch to a magazine format met with applause from readers and local advertisers. Not so — with a few exceptions — national advertisers. It was the long-term decline of national advertising dollars that made the Boston Phoenix economically unviable.”

Dan Kennedy, who worked at the Phoenix from 1991 to 2005, primarily as its media columnist, said the shutdown came as a complete surprise. He said that during his time at the paper, it had been a destination for “hard working and idealistic young journalists who were looking at this as a great opportunity.”

He said that in a media town dominated by the Boston Globe, the Phoenix long fought to carve out its own  presence with extensive arts coverage and enterprising journalism. He noted that reporters like Kristen Lombardi were investigating the Catholic church sexual abuse scandal a year before the Boston Globe started its ambitious and award winning coverage.

“You really have the Globe as the dominant media presence in the city and then there’s everybody else,” said Mr. Kennedy. “I do think what the Phoenix brought to the table is an absolutely fierce intelligence which is rare to find in journalism in any era. It had terrific political coverage, terrific arts coverage. The one Pulitzer the Phoenix won was for its art coverage.”

News of the paper’s closing triggered a boom of comments from Phoenix fans across Twitter. Susan Orlean mentioned that the paper was her alma mater. Ellen Barry, the former Boston Globe reporter and Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent, wrote: “Heartbroken to hear that the Boston Phoenix is closing; it was a glorious nerdy pirate ship of a workplace. V. sad.”

The Phoenix responded through its Twitter handle: “Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/boston-phoenix-to-cease-publication/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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BBC Director Quits in Furor Over Coverage of Sexual Abuse

November 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Entwistle’s sudden departure as the BBC’s chief executive was prompted by outrage over a report last week on “Newsnight,” one of the network’s flagship current affairs programs, that wrongly implicated a former Conservative Party politician in a pedophile scandal involving a children’s home in Wales.

Mr. Entwistle said the report, broadcast on Nov. 2, reflected “unacceptable journalistic standards” and never should have been broadcast.

That broadcast has only compounded the problems facing the network since the revelation last month that a longtime BBC television host, Jimmy Savile, was suspected of having sexually abused perhaps hundreds of young people over the course of decades, sometimes on the BBC premises. The network has been accused of covering up the accusations by canceling a Newsnight report on Mr. Savile last year, when Mr. Entwistle was a senior executive at the network.

Mr. Entwistle was barely two months into the director’s job, heading one of the world’s largest media organizations. His departure followed the suspension in the past month of a number of senior producers as the BBC has struggled to find a path through what many commentators have described as its greatest crisis in decades.

A 50-year-old career broadcaster who rose through the ranks of BBC producers, Mr. Entwistle made his announcement on the steps of the BBC’s new billion-dollar headquarters in central London. With the BBC’s chairman, Chris Patten, standing gloomily beside him, Mr. Entwistle said that resigning was “the honorable thing to do.”

“The wholly exceptional events of the past few weeks have led me to conclude that the BBC should appoint a new leader,” he said. He added that the intense public scrutiny of the BBC that has resulted from the pedophile scandal should not lead people “to lose sight of the fact that the BBC is full of people of the greatest talent and the highest integrity.”

His statement that he was “responsible for all content” came after weeks of what the BBC’s harshest critics have described as obfuscation and evasion by the broadcaster’s management in the face of demands for explanations of how the fiascoes over the two “Newsnight” programs had been allowed to happen.

As of late as Saturday morning, Mr. Entwistle was holding to the position he had taken for weeks, that he had not known about the Nov. 2 “Newsnight” broadcast ahead of time because of the BBC’s longstanding tradition that the director general not interfere with details of how programs are made. “I found out about this film after it had gone out,” he said. “In the light of what has happened here, I wish that this was referred to me, but it wasn’t.”

His resignation, barely 12 hours later, suggested that the BBC’s trustees had concluded that the argument that the network’s top brass was insulated from responsibility for programming decisions by a lack of prior knowledge was not sustainable.

That argument was similar to the one advanced by Mr. Entwistle’s predecessor, Mark Thompson, who was the BBC’s director general when the “Newsnight” expose on Mr. Savile was canceled. Mr. Thompson, who left the BBC in September and will become the president and chief executive of The New York Times Company on Monday, said he had not been aware of the report until after it was canceled.

Mr. Patten, the BBC chairman, said that Tim Davie, 45, the BBC’s director of audio and music, would become the network’s acting director general.

Mr. Patten, whose own position may now be imperiled, did not attempt to disguise the gravity of the situation, alluding to the “unacceptable mistakes, the unacceptably shoddy journalism” that had culminated in the Nov. 2 “Newsnight” program.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/world/europe/george-entwistle-resigns-as-head-of-bbc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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