Ofcom thinks that Richard Desmond is a fit and proper owner of Channel Five. Others don’t. In a stinging attack in the Guardian, for example, Desmond’s biographer Tom Bower expresses amazement that he has passed the regulator’s “quality threshold”. Fit and proper: like the other verbal doublets that infest English legalese, the expression dates back [...]
To understand what the web has done for free speech, it’s necessary to think about how Natalya Gorbanevskaya and her fellow dissidents produced 65 issues of the samizdat publication Chronicle Of Current Events in the Soviet Union between 1968 and 1983. The Soviet state controlled access to printing presses and photocopiers. So when it was [...]
Shortly after the birth of Keith Rupert Murdoch in 1931, the newspaper moguls of America did something remarkable. They ordered Associated Press, United Press and the International News Service – the three dominant news agencies of the day — to stop providing news stories to hundreds of radio stations across the United States. Radio, at [...]
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 [...]
Worried about the share prices of newspaper groups? A quick look at the radio sector might make you feel slightly better. On Friday, shares in GCap Media, the company that owns Capital and Classic FM, fell to their lowest level (FT — sub. reqd.) since the company was formed in May 2005 via the merger [...]
The FT’s Ben Fenton has a depressive take on the prospects for commercial radio. The BBC is “crippling” the commercial sector, writes Fenton. Meanwhile, growth in digital audiences — the object of much investment — is slow. (85% of homes possess digital TV; only 22% possess a DAB radio.) The remedy? There are two schools [...]