Twenty minutes into my interview with Rupert Heseltine, executive chairman of Haymarket Media Group, I ask my 15th question about the company’s finances. Did Royal Bank of Scotland, the magazine publisher’s bank, require his father, the Tory grandee Michael Heseltine, to step down as chairman as part of a debt-restructuring deal in June 2010? At this point I [...]
In a Shoreditch bar, a couple of years ago, I realised that the future was going to be very different from the past. The various tribes of media all seemed present and correct: the agency people, the media sales folk, the publishers and the web developers. Slowly, though, I realised that one tribe was missing. [...]
Roy Greenslade highlights this from Adam Smith, futures director at WPP-owned media agency Group M, as a potential quote of the year: “No previous ad recession has put household media names at risk like this one has, from local newspapers to high-street magazines to national TV channels”. Separately, Mark Sweney at the Guardian paraphrases Smith [...]
Signs of severe stress at Incisive Media: according to the FT, the company breached its banking covenants during December. Breaching one’s banking covenants: a bit like Pugin’s Gothic parliament, this sounds like a Victorian restyling of a medieval offence that merits terrifying punishment. The reality is more prosaic: what Incisive has done is to break its [...]
The Lex column at the FT takes a dim view of the prospects for exhibitions and trade shows. The starting point is a statistic from Tradeshow Week. The US magazine suggests that average attendance figures for exhibitions in the US fell to 19,377 last year from 25,637 the year before. You can blame it on [...]
What’s to say about Reed Elsevier’s decision to pull the sale of Reed Business Information? As far as the eye can see, the result is a mess. For RBI’s employees, it’s a case of back to the future. Here’s a backhanded assessment of what’s on the horizon from Crispin Davies, the outgoing chief executive of Reed [...]
Here are a few possibilities for the next few weeks and months. On reflection, most seem fairly obvious. If so, apologies, but I thought I’d post them anyway. Against the backdrop of new corporate budgets being put in place for next year, this week’s events feel like the trigger for serious declines in B2B marketing [...]
You’re probably assuming that the worst has happened to the share prices of media companies this week. Not quite. Much of the carnage has been confined to financial stocks. By contrast, the broad FTSE-100 index of Britain’s largest quoted companies fell by 7% between Monday morning and Wednesday evening. That’s a lot by normal standards. [...]
Press Gazette carries a gloomy prognosis from Graham Harman, the managing director of Incisive Media’s business and technology magazines. Harman has just merged Computing and IT Week, two weekly trade titles for IT professionals. Last time I looked, these titles had a combined circulation of nearly 150,000. Harman has also severed the title-specific loyalties of [...]
Informa has gotten itself into a right old mess. First a potential merger with United Business Media collapsed. This happened because private equity came lumbering over the hill with an apparently unbeatable offer. Now, it seems, that unbeatable offer has been revised. Instead of the rumoured 500p-per-share, a consortium led by Providence Equity Partners has [...]