Newsdesk - The end of EMAP

Media company Emap has sold it’s business-to-business division to Guardian Media Group and private equity firm Apax for £1bn, this appears to be the final nail in the Emap coffin after the sale of its magazine and radio divisions to german publishers Bauer for a joint price of £1.14bn.

Earlier in December Emap looked unlikely to sell its business-to-business division, as they believed the offers were too low but GMG and Apax recently returned with the offer of £1bn. The chairman of Emap Alun Cathcart felt sadness seeing the end of 60 years of Emap as a publishing company but considers the investors their top priority. "Our job is to look after shareholder value. We now have an offer that is substantially better than the one we had two weeks ago."

It is believed that GMG and Apax will run the newly acquired division as one company together.

GMG's chief executive, Carolyn McCall, said the deal helped meet the commitments of its owner, the Scott Trust, formed in 1936 to safeguard the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian.

It’s been interesting to see this development over time as I was assigned to research Emap at the beginning of the semester and now the company effectively no longer exists, it seems that this has been set in motion in the absence of Chief Executive Tom Moloney who resigned last May however it is believed that this has happened due to the advertising markets moving from print and radio to the web, a true example of how broadcasting is rapidly changing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/22/emap.emapbusiness?gusrc=rss&feed=media

Newsdesk - Youtube partner sharing program

Youtube are putting a system in place that will allow its users (some, not all) to make money in a revenue sharing program. The program has been tested in the last year and is a partner system.

User’s can apply to be a youtube partner and if they qualify will be able to get a cut of the AdSense advertising revenue associated with the videos on the site. The criteria for membership are:

—You create original videos suitable for online streaming.
—You own the copyrights and distribution rights for all audio and video content that you upload — no exceptions.
—You regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube users.
—You live in the United States or Canada.

So far it hasn’t been revealed how much of a share you will receive if you do qualify as a partner. The list of current partners is quite diverse as well from universal music group to that annoying lonelygirl15 girl.

This is an interesting development in user generated content as far as revenue sharing programs for user generated content go I think youtube will be one of the most popular ones, as long as the users get a decent share from the revenue.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/10/youtube-shares-the-wealth-with-everyone-apply-now/

Week 3 Newsdesk

The digital age of technology, communication and of course media continues to develop in the weeks news.

Xbox are to launch a VoD service on Tuesday to allow gamers the chance to download films.

It is expected that within a year we will a broadband connection which will deliver up to 24mb connection speed however because of the fibre needed to connect to the internet it could take up to a decade for rural areas to catch up with city areas. Jupiter research analysts Ian Fogg says, "There is going to have to be an acceptance that broadband will be faster in the cities.”

American corporation and their government are looking to the internet in ways to communicate with a bigger audience, Rupert Murdoch has purchased Christian social site belief.net and will use this to target the audiene for adverts, marketing and sales of Fox groups products. Republicans have been using Youtube to communicate with American voters in a debate believing this to be a way of targeting the youth vote.

The BBC were unable to get the license fee they requested and some are paying the price including BBC Journalists set to lose their jobs, so Jonathan Ross’s claims of being “worth 1,000 BBC Journalist" have not gone down well with the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). The BBC are determined to maintain quality childrens programming even though the departments budget has been cut by 10%, they are also unable to launch a television broadband service and instead will invest more money in local text and radio broadband services.

It seems like this week is seeing how the BBC are going to deal with the license fee issue and the continuing innovation of digital media as a way of integrating media platforms together for example with Xbox’s new VoD service and also innovating in using the internet to tap into audiences not available through other media.

Week 2 Newsdesk: TV chiefs take joint stand on viewer trust

The heads of the four main public broadcasters have met earlier this week in a bid to regain the publics faith facing the viewer deception scandals. BBC director general Mark Thompson, ITV executive chairman Michael Grade, Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan and Five Chief Executive Jane Lighting met with Ofcom chief executive, Ed Richards in a seminar hosted by Ofcom chairman, David Currie, and BBC Trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons. They are planning on creating a group that will uphold a cross-industry framework for best practice and ways to deal with issues raised with premium-rate services. They will work on developing industry wide training on ethical standards and best practice and have a common framework of principles to promote best practice. It will also clarify on contractual and compliance issues "to ensure that responsibilities are clearly expressed and audience interests are clearly protected". It’s good to see that they are addressing the issue in a practical way, by uniting and creating this group it seems they can ensure that the audiences are satisfied with programming which is important it’s no good to have an audience that doesn’t trust you.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/nov/29/tvfakery.television

Week 1 Newsdesk: New Reality Show On Islam

A new reality show on C4 sees a diverse group of people living as Muslims for three weeks. This could be seen as dumbing down the faith for the masses, however the producer Narinder Minhas has defended it as being a way for people who are alien to the religion to gain better insight instead of the hate mongering that is evident among some programming on Islam. An issue that has come up with this programme is that it has come out at a time where the public do not trust television broadcasters. He assures this has been taken into account and that what the viewer sees is as it happened rather than being edited to make it look like more was happening or to make the show appear more tense and exciting. “If an event didn’t happen in a chronological order then we couldn’t put it in as if it had.” I started reading this article thinking that the show sounded like the usual bad reality programming and would probably do more bad than good for Islam’s image however by the end of the article it sounded like it could be quite a credible show considering they’re making an effort to be more genuine with the way the show is presented.

(from Media Gaurdian)