Media Wonk   

Final Update: Thanks to all for your kind comments. Here's hoping our paths cross again.

Well, this is it: the post I've been putting of writing because I wasn't sure exactly what to say, or how. I'm still not sure. But it is Media Wonk's sad duty to report that Content Agenda will be shutting down this week. Our parent company, Reed Business Information, has decided not to continue supporting the site, making us officially a victim of these very hard times in the publishing business. Our last day will be Friday, May 1. I would like to thank all our readers, contributors, supporters, friends and competitors for helping us get this far. I think we gave 'em a good run and now it's time to move on. I wish you all the best of luck in the future.

Though Content Agenda is shutting down, Media Wonk will be soldiering on alone, for those who might...Read More

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Eric Gertler has a very smart post up about the future of newspapers over at the Huffington Post. Gertler, the former head of business affairs at the Daily News and the founder of nydailynews.com among other senior positions in publishing, argues correctly in Media Wonk's view, that when it comes to surviving online, newspapers need to dump the "news" as well as the "paper."

Gertler writes:

The most valuable asset a newspaper has is not the content, but rather its brand. To be profitable and relevant, newspapers need to do more to leverage their brand and their recognition in the local marketplace. For example, VG Nett, a European newspaper, started a weight loss membership club for

...Read More

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Sue Zeidler of Reuters has an interesting piece out today on the impact of declining DVD sales on movie financing, particularly the hedge-fund fueled movie "slate" deals Wall Street banks have been packaging for the past decade. No real breaking news in it, but a good overview of the current state-of-play between Hollywood and Wall Street. Essentially, the realities of the back end of the business have now been fully baked into the assumptions on the front end:

"Consistent with the financial markets as a whole, film lenders and investors are taking a much more conservative approach to structuring deals then they previously had," said Eileen Burke, principal of West End Capital and Advisory.

"If a company's business plan relies on robust

...Read More

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Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) on Tuesday reminded a luncheon crowd of studio chiefs and other Hollywood heavyweights here in Washington for the day that they're rich--and the rich pay taxes. Lot's of them. And they will soon pay even more taxes under the Obama Administration, which intends to raise the top marginal income tax rate for individuals who earn more than $250,000 a year, a category that included a good portion of Hatch's audience (although, sadly, not Media Wonk).

Hatch offered his pointed comments on taxes and the administration at the end of otherwise light-hearted remarks at the Business of Show Business event organized by the MPAA to showcase Hollywood's economic firepower in front of lawmakers and appropriators.

Hatch's goal, presumably, was to remind the heavil...Read More

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Pali Research media analyst Rich Greenfield just destroys Paramount and its CEO Philippe Dauman in a report issued Monday, while lowering its rating on the stock from buy to neutral. "While we continue to believe Viacom’s assets are undervalued, we simply do not believe its management team is capable of closing the valuation gap, particularly given a pattern of poor decision-making, the lack of respect Dauman has from his employees, peer media company managements and investors, as well as a Board of Directors that continues to excessively reward
underperforming management," Greenfield writes.

Ouch.

Of particular note to Media Wonk is Greenfield's dissection of what he refers to as the "EPIX debacle":

While Viacom’s management team (as well as the Lionsgate and MGM management teams) con

...Read More

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Hollywood's top moguls will be in Washington, DC this week for the MPAA's Business of Show Business event on Tuesday where topics will include the results of a new study by the studio trade org on the importance of the entertainment industry to the U.S. economy. The heads of all the major studios will be making the scene, while featured speakers will include U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah.

The studio honchos will also no doubt be fanning out across Capitol Hill while in town to press Hollywood's legislative and regulatory agenda. No offic...Read More

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Democratic cultures, particularly capitalist ones, have a way of eventually taming their own counter-culture impulses. Often it's accomplished by commodifying those impulses and absorbing them into the broader, rationalized market culture. Witness the marketing and exploitation of 60's iconography in the U.S., from selling CBGB T-shirts at Wal-Mart to Dennis Hopper shilling for investment services in TV commercials. Other times, those impulses are turned into objects of respectable scientific or academic inquiry and embedded into official cultural institutions supported by the government or corporate largesse.

That's what already seems to be happening to The Pirate Bay, regardless of tomorrow's today's verdict in its trial for copyright infringement. While the defenda...Read More

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Lots of buzz this a.m. over a new project backed by Court TV-founder Steven Brill and former Global Crossing CEO exec Leo Hindery called Journalism Online LLC. Most of the stories have focused the company's plan to offer newspaper publishers ready-made tools to administer and manage various schemes for charging readers directly for content online, as well as a plan to launch a global subscription tool that would give users access to content from all participating publishers for a single flat monthly fee. 

The really interesting news, however, is the company's third planned initiative, described in the press release as a plan to "negotiate wholesale licensing and ro...Read More

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Apparently no taboo is too taboo to come before fighting online piracy in France. Having lost the vote in the National Assembly on a three-strikes law, the government of French president Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to resubmit a revised text of the bill for a second reading on April 28, immediately following Parliament's Easter recess. Trouble is, that date is already taken on the legislative calendar by a bill to rewrite the laws on incest in France supported by the head of Sarkozy's own party, the UMP. 

Too bad. Under pressure from Sarkozy, the president of the National Assembly, Bernard Accoyer, has called a meeting for April 15 to consider revising the schedule. Under France's constitution, the legislative agenda can only be changed through a public meeting of the National Assembly. But it looks like victims of incest will have to wait.

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While the U.S. Navy was shooting it out with pirates on the High Seas this weekend, prosecutors in Sweden, along with the movie and music companies were heading into the last week of their showdown with The Pirate Bay. A verdict in the most closely watched file-sharing case since Napster is due this week. If convicted, the four defendants who created and maintain the popular BitTorrent index site could face up to two years in jail each and civil damages of up to $14 million. The verdict will be decided by a four-judge panel.

The trial was largely a PR disaster for prosecutors and lawyers for the music and movie companies. Prosecutors were forced to drop half their case before the first witness was call...Read More

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The movie and music industries, not to mention the administration of President Nicolas Sarkozy, were licking their wounds today after the Creation and the Internet bill unexpectedly went down to defeat in the French National Assembly Thursday. Gone with the defeat, at least for now (the government vows to reintroduce the bill next month) are the movie and music companies' hopes for establishing the world's first mandatory graduated-response regime for thwarting peer-to-peer file-sharing of unlicensed copyrighted content. 

But the defeat wasn't all bad news. Lost in all the uproar over bill's "three-strikes" provision, which would have given a new extra-judicial High A...Read More

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It's a bit rich for the MPAA to be questioning the validity of a National Consumers League survey that found an overwhelming majority of Americans want to be able to copy their DVDs on grounds it was paid for by RealNetworks, given the studios' own propensity for hyping dubious data on the losses from piracy. Still, the RealNetworks funding is relevant and I should have noted it in my previous post on the survey's results. 

That said, I don't think the provenance of the survey really gets the studios off the hook for their failure to deliver the value consumers are clearly ...Read More

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