Guardian Media Group isn’t known for losing bosses. Yet it’s been a busy 12 months at the top of the company. In April of last year, GMG appointed the former investment banker Amelia Fawcett to replace Paul Myners as chairman. Six months later, finance director Nick Castro retired. Now it’s spring again, and Carolyn McCall is [...]
The ongoing spat between the Telegraph and the Guardian has been entertaining. But I wonder whether it might be drawing to a close. In recent months, the Telegraph has become deeply interested in the Guardian’s financial performance, variously describing this as “grim”, “disappointing”, and “disastrous”. The Guardian’s apparent inability to impose compulsory redundancies on editorial [...]
So we learn that Guardian Media Group will report an overall operating loss for the 12 months to March 2009 — its first such loss for several years. How big is the deficit? We’ll find out in early August, when GMG publishes its accounts. But based around reports of McCall’s presentation to staff yesterday, here’s [...]
Enemies were elated and then deflated; well-wishers concerned and then (somewhat) relieved. This week’s Telegraph story suggesting that Apax Partners, the private equity group, had written off its £300m investment in EMAP initially seemed to promise a world of trouble for Guardian Media Group. In much the same way that Engels subsidized Marx’s writing career [...]
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 [...]
The Guardian is starting to look a bit like one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s perpetual motion machines. News International might have ditched plans to move out of Wapping. But the Guardian has completed its move to a new HQ in Kings Cross. DMGT and the Barclays are cutting costs aggressively. But there’s no news of [...]
Ahead of tomorrow’s six-monthly financials from Johnston Press, here’s an intriguing quote captured by the Independent‘s Sarah Arnott from Steve Liechti at Investec: “There are three factors all happening at once: the structural, the cyclical, and the structural multiplied by the cyclical.” Er, the structural multiplied by the cyclical? Is that what happens when Carolyn [...]
Reporting on the boss’s performance is difficult for hacks who cover the media. But today’s joint effort by Stephen Brook and Richard Wray to explain Guardian Media Group’s annual results was particularly abject. The piece started out: Guardian Media Group, owner of the Guardian, saw its annual profits boosted dramatically. . . Oh err, sounds [...]
Evolution is a remarkable thing. At the Guardian Media Group, it has resulted in executives sprouting what used to be called sharp elbows. Last month, I was intrigued to see GMG chairman Paul Myners telling the House of Lords Communications Committee that Google needed to sign up to ACAP — forthwith. At least I think [...]