It’s only a few days since Alan Rusbridger gave his lecture on libel and privacy at City University, but a lot has changed. The tabloid kiss-and-tell business model that seemed to be on its knees last week has suddenly found its legs again. 1) Twitter has blown the gaff on CTB (an event which presumably [...]
The first thing you’ll notice when you read the annual report of the Press Board of Finance is that it looks like a restaurant menu, from somewhere like the Savoy Grill in pre-Gordon Ramsay days. The second notable thing is the anachronistic language, which reads like a cross between a press statement from Buckingham Palace [...]
When Eric Schmidt argued recently that online display advertising could become a $200bn industry within the next decade, his words triggered thousands of bullshit detectors across the media industry. Today, online display is worth a mere $17bn globally. Relatively few publishers buy the story that Mr Schmidt is selling. For many, online display remains an [...]
Thanks to frantic politicking in the House of Lords, the 2003 Communications Act endorsed, but didn’t quantify, the idea of a “sufficient plurality” among news organisations in the UK. In the wake of the deal to spin off Sky News from News Corporation last week, have we now got a definition? In part, perhaps. Last [...]
It’s a bit like watching a martial arts sensei at work. In a choreographed move, Rupert Murdoch buys his daughter’s TV production company for £415m on behalf of the publicly-quoted company he chairs. Result? Barely anyone bats an eyelid. Most of medialand took the opportunity to wallow — yet again — in the complexities of [...]
How unpleasant can Apple make the experience of publishing apps for the iPad? In Europe, the disincentives are piled high. The cost structure behind every £1 of revenue earned by a UK paid-app publisher has looks distinctly nasty: In the UK, publishers will continue to pay Apple 30%. Thanks to Apple’s decision to ban in-app [...]
What happens when you put Barcelona’s strongest team up against a mob of 13th century yokels who play the beautiful game in a frenzy, kicking an inflated pig’s bladder from one end of the village to another? The only possible result is a mess. Coincidentally, this word precisely describes the government’s “quasi-judicial” examination of News [...]
This is about as good as it gets for the United States of America. Backed by the righteous anger of lawmakers and commentators, hundreds — perhaps thousands — of the nation’s brightest brains are working toward the goal of making Julian Assange answer for his alleged crimes in a US court. Those engaged in this [...]
The regulators who work at Ofcom could be forgiven for allowing themselves a sardonic smile. On 17th November, the gaffe-prone communications minister Ed Vaizey delivered a speech that challenged assumptions about the future of net neutrality in the UK. In a key passage, Vaizey suggested that ISPs might want to “experiment” with ” a two-sided [...]
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 [...]