Saudi Prince to Launch News Network in Partnership with FOX

The Canadian Press

 

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The Kingdom Holding company, headed by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, says it plans to launch a new Arabic television news channel in partnership with the Fox network.

In a statement Tuesday, Prince Alwaleed says the 24-hour broadcast channel "will be an addition and alternative" to Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera.

He named veteran Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi chief of the new network.

He did not say when the network would begin broadcasting.

Alwaleed was ranked last year by Forbes as the world's 19th wealthiest person. He also owns the Arabic media giant Rotana Group.

In February, Fox said it was becoming a partner with Rotana by taking over 9.1 per cent of its shares.

Advertising Whiz Bogusky takes his Leave

The Globe and Mail

 

Alex Bogusky wanted to ruin things for every other advertising agency.

The wildly influential creative, who helped shape agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and the rest of the industry, has arguably done just that. On Thursday Mr. Bogusky announced he was leaving advertising.

“I want people to say ‘then CP+B came along and changed things and now nobody does it that old way any more.’ I want to be the agency that ruined it for every other agency in the world,” Mr. Bogusky wrote in an internal e-mail to CP+B employees in 2002. “… I’m afraid to be mediocre.”

Under his creative direction, the team at CP+B created such campaigns as the “Subservient Chicken,” a website that underscored Burger King’s promise to deliver chicken “any way you like it” by showing a man in a chicken suit who would follow any visitor’s commands, typed into a box on the screen. The site generated huge traffic and helped kick off the trend of viral marketing.

Mr. Bogusky relinquished his creative duties at the agency two years ago when he became co-chairman with Chuck Porter. In January, he left CP+B to join its Toronto-based parent company, MDC Partners Inc. as “Chief Creative Insurgent”. On Thursday, MDC announced Mr. Bogusky had chosen to leave after seven months in the position, to work on other projects outside the industry.

“We have enjoyed a long and tremendously productive partnership over the past ten years and have the utmost respect and admiration for Alex,” the company wrote in a statement.

“He’s an immense talent and he leaves a huge legacy,” said Andy Macaulay, chairman of the Toronto-based agency Zig, which is also part of the MDC network.

Under Mr. Bogusky’s creative direction, CP+B was noted for a 2002 Mini Cooper campaign that sought to introduce the European car to the American market – without the aid of a big TV buy. In the bigger-better car era, the agency mounted the tiny cars on top of SUVs and drove them around 22 cities across the U.S. The little car towered above the sport utility, and along with a number of other stunts, raked in publicity for the Mini.

CP+B became known for taking large international brands and giving them bold campaigns, said Andrea Southcott, president of ad agency TBWA\Vancouver. According to the book Hoopla, about CP+B, Mr. Bogusky encouraged his staff to ask the following question: “If there were no TV and no magazines, how would we make this brand famous?” Ms. Southcott said that thinking represents a shift in the industry over the past 10 to 15 years..

The Subservient Chicken website represented another trend CP+B helped to define.

“It shook the industry,” Mr. Macaulay said. “It showed where we were headed digitally before an awful lot of people were there … Their view was always, if the idea is great enough, in a world that is intensely connected through the Internet and social media, the idea will run wild through the population without us having to pay for media.”

On a conference call in February, MDC chief executive officer Miles Nadal told analysts that Mr. Bogusky “really is the Steve Jobs of the advertising business.” Projecting the image of a creative genius was undeniably good for business; as news of Mr. Bogusky’s departure circulated, some observers questioned whether the agency would function as well without him.

But Mr. Macaulay pointed to the talent of other creatives at the agency, many of whom Mr. Bogusky helped to mentor. Last week at the Cannes International Lions Advertising Festival, CP+B was named Interactive Agency of the Year, for work done after Mr. Bogusky handed the creative direction over to Andrew Keller and Rob Reilly.

“The agency he built and the work they created really got people to think about things in bold ways,” Ms. Southcott said. “That’s a place where everyone is going now … You can’t execute in a routine way any more. You have to find a sharp way to engage.”

Home Delivery Cuts Working for Detroit Newspapers

Associated Press

Detroit's two daily newspapers knew they were shoving some readers overboard in an effort to stay afloat when they decided to limit home delivery to just three days a week.

It was only a question of how many subscribers would abandon the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News once their print editions were no longer hitting doorsteps and driveways each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday.

More than a year later, Detroit newspaper executives are convinced they made the right call. If that holds up, other newspapers could follow as they look for ways to save money to offset a three-year slump in advertising, the industry's main source of revenue. About 100 U.S. newspapers already have reduced the number of days they publish or have shifted exclusively to Web editions, but Detroit is the biggest market to try a version of either move.

The Detroit newspapers won't release detailed financial figures, but they say they have saved millions of dollars by reducing the use of delivery trucks, paper and ink. Yet revenue hasn't fallen as much because the remaining three days — Thursday, Friday and Sunday — had already garnered most of the advertising anyway. Many readers have bailed on the newspapers, as anticipated, but the exodus hasn't been has dramatic as at several other large dailies that alienated subscribers by raising their prices while maintaining daily home delivery.

That suggests many readers are more willing to tolerate limited home delivery than significantly higher prices for newspapers in an era of high unemployment and free news online.

Besides covering the same metropolitan area, the Detroit newspapers are tied together by a business partnership known as a joint operating agreement. The News, which is owned by MediaNews Inc., and the Free Press, owned by Gannett Co., rely on the partnership to handle advertising, distribution and administrative tasks.

The financial benefits from joint-operating agreements haven't been enough to keep two newspapers afloat in other cities, such as Seattle and Denver. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer went online only last year and the Rocky Mountain News shut down entirely. A similar fate likely awaited one of the Detroit dailies if they hadn't sacrificed some of their readership or found some other way to lower their costs. While the newspaper industry has been slumping for the past three years, the Free Press and the News were among the worst off because Detroit's manufacturing-driven economy had been struggling even before the Great Recession began in December 2007.

When Detroit newspaper executives did the math on their plan last year, they said they could have cut their costs about 40 percent by dropping print entirely. But they said that would have erased the more than 85 percent of their revenue that comes from subscriptions, newsstand sales and ads in the printed newspapers. Less than 15 percent of the newspapers' revenue had come from online ads.

Instead, the publications said, cutting back home delivery to three days would reduce the newspapers' joint costs by about 20 percent while giving them the chance to keep most of their revenue.

Executives at the newspapers won't discuss how close they came to meeting those projections. Rather, they say that more than 90 percent of the newspapers' advertisers have stuck with the dailies. The publications won't give detailed revenue figures, other than to say that Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays now account for 93 percent of the newspapers' print ad revenue. Even before the home-delivery cutback, those three days accounted for about 80 percent of the print ad revenue.

And the publications say the savings on newsprint and distribution costs have helped to minimize newsroom layoffs. The two newspapers have retained about 400 reporters, editors and photographers. That's down from roughly 600 newsroom workers five years ago, but still a much larger staff than would have otherwise been possible, said Rich Harshbarger, vice president of marketing for the Detroit Media Partnership.

Avoiding additional layoffs has allowed the remaining reporters to work on more projects, produce more engaging online coverage of Detroit touchstones such as automobile trade shows and provide early morning news reports from the Free Press for a local TV program.

"We have accomplished most of what we set out to do," said Susie Ellwood, CEO of the Detroit Media Partnership, which manages the business side of the two newspapers.

The average combined weekday circulation of the News and Free Press fell 12 percent to 401,889 during the six months ended March 31. That amounted to nearly 56,000 fewer copies than last year and was worse than the industry's total circulation decline of 9 percent. It also marked an acceleration from the decline in the first six months of the reduction in home delivery, when the combined Free Press and News circulation fell 8 percent. (In that same span the overall industry dropped 11 percent.)

However, Detroit's latest decline wasn't as severe as the drop-offs at newspapers in Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta and Dallas, which all have raised delivery prices during the past 18 months while still delivering daily. Weekday circulation at those big-city newspapers plunged about 15 percent to 25 percent during the October-March measurement period. Getting more money from fewer subscribers has helped some of these newspapers increase their circulation revenue, although the gains have not been nearly enough to offset the declines in their ad revenue.

The Detroit newspapers are still printing on non-delivery days. But those editions generally have about a dozen fewer pages than on other weekdays, and they are sold on the street and in stores. The publications sold more than 122,000 copies on newsstands on non-delivery days during the October-March period, accounting for a little more than one-quarter of the average circulation. That compared to about 99,000 copies on Thursdays and Fridays, when readers can still get the print edition dropped on their doorsteps.

Buying the thinner newspapers on non-delivery days has been less appealing since October, when the Detroit dailies doubled their newsstand price to $1 for weekday editions. Newsstand sales in the latest measurement period were down by an average of more than 51,000 copies, or 30 percent, on non-delivery days compared with the six months before the price increase. The three-day home delivery rate for either of the newspapers has remained unchanged at $12 per month since the cutbacks. That price is $1 to $2 less than what many subscribers had been paying for seven-day delivery.

Going without daily delivery hasn't been easy for some longtime readers.

Bill and Karen Foster are among the loyal Free Press subscribers who have stuck with the newspaper, even though they don't like having to turn to the Web on non-delivery days. Before the home-delivery cutback, the Fosters got a course in Web training from the newspaper in an effort to ease the transition.

"I still would prefer getting the paper on the porch," said Karen Foster, 70. "I find it very difficult to read on the computer. My eyes blur."

Don Nauss, managing editor of The Detroit News, empathizes. He, too, would prefer being able to walk out his front door to pick up the newspaper instead of heading into his den to sit down at his computer.

"It's hard to break a habit that some people have had for 40 or 50 years," Nauss said. "And I don't think anyone likes the idea of not being able to deliver your product to your customers. But we had to do what we had to do to survive."

Unwilling to give up their daily fix, more than 4,000 of the Detroit newspapers' subscribers have been paying an additional $30 per month to have the print editions mailed to their homes on the four days a week that carriers don't deliver, Harshbarger said.

In other instances, independent contractors buy the newspapers at retail outlets on non-delivery days and bring them to subscribers willing to pay an extra $4 to $12 per week to have a newspaper dropped on their porch or driveway. The Detroit newspapers recently began to encourage more of this entrepreneurial system of daily home delivery by offering independent carriers an opportunity to buy the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday newspapers at a discount. It's still up to the independent carriers to negotiate the delivery price with subscribers. About 2,000 subscribers are going this route, Harshbarger said.

Some alienated readers already may have defected to neighboring publications that still provide daily home delivery. For instance, weekday circulation of The Oakland Press in nearby Pontiac rose 3 percent to 68,770 in the October-March period.

But the management of the Detroit newspapers suspects the circulation losses would have been even worse if not for the hard times that their readers have experienced through years of factory closures, home foreclosures and unemployment rates well above most of the country. The adversity made it easier for people to understand why the newspapers took such drastic measures, Nauss said.

And it may be one reason that limited home delivery may not be as well received elsewhere.

"No other market has made such a risky move like this and we would not at all endorse it for everyone," Harshbarger said. "Just because it has worked in Detroit doesn't mean it will work in Des Moines."

Lions Gate adopts 'Poison Pill' to Thwart Icahn

Associated Press

NEW YORK — Boutique film studio Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. has adopted a shareholder rights plan, also known as a "poison pill," to prevent hostile takeover attempts such as the one billionaire investor Carl Icahn is conducting.

The plan, announced late Thursday, would let shareholders buy extra shares at a deep discount. The right doesn't apply to any shareholder attempting to take control of the company. If exercised, the plan would dilute the stake of any potential acquirer.

Lions Gate has been battling Icahn for a year, and it's not the first time it has attempted to put a poison pill in place. The British Columbia Securities Commission voided an earlier plan in April, saying the new shares could not be traded.

Lions Gate, based in Vancouver but operated out of Santa Monica, Calif., falls under the jurisdiction of the Canadian province of British Columbia.

On Thursday, Icahn said he had gained 33.9 percent of Lions Gate shares through a tender offer. That leaves him short of a controlling interest, but he can block decisions that require a two-thirds shareholder vote.

Investors appear to be betting on a higher bid, though Icahn has said that he will not raise his offer. The stock closed at $7.15 on Thursday, 15 cents above Icahn's tender offer.

Larry King to Quit Show this Fall

The Wall Street Journal

CNN Ratings at all-time low

 

Larry King said Tuesday that he will end his nightly talk show on CNN in the fall, after a quarter century marked by high-profile interviews, and more recently by sagging ratings.

"It's time to hang up the nightly suspenders," Mr. King, 76, said at the top of his 9 p.m. show Tuesday, adding that he would continue to host "while a replacement is found."

Mr. King's "Larry King Live" has long been CNN's flagship prime-time show. The native New Yorker, who made his CNN debut in 1985, became one of the most recognizable interviewers of all time, donning his trademark suspenders and lobbing questions across the table to U.S. presidents, world leaders and celebrities.

Mr. King's departure comes as the Time Warner Inc. news network is making moves to reverse a long slide in its prime-time viewership, falling far behind Fox News and often below General Electric Co.'s MSNBC, according to figures from Nielsen Co. Fox News is owned by News Corp., which also owns the Wall Street Journal.

Last week, CNN announced that it is bringing on former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer to co-host a new evening show in the 8 p.m. hour, replacing the Campbell Brown, who said she was leaving because of her poor ratings.

In a memo to CNN staff, CNN/U.S. President Jon Klein said that Mr. King "is not leaving CNN" and that he would continue to appear in periodic specials on the network.

CNN said in a statement that it would announce plans for its 9 p.m. hour in "the weeks ahead." A spokeswoman said in an email that there are "a number of options."

Reports in the British press have speculated that "America's Got Talent" judge Piers Morgan could be in line to take over Mr. King's job. John Ferriter, Mr. Morgan's manager and a former agent for Mr. King, declined to comment on Mr. Morgan's plans, but described Mr. King as "a legend in the business."

Meanwhile, Katie Couric, whose contract to anchor the "CBS Evening News" expires around the end of May 2011, has not ruled out moving to CNN, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mr. King's show has seen its ratings sag significantly this year, but did see a bump in June among viewers between 25 and 54 years old, according to CNN. Nevertheless, his average audience among those viewers was still less than half that of Fox News's Sean Hannity and trailed MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, his competition in the 9 p.m. hour.

During Tuesday night's show, former first lady Nancy Reagan, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer and TV host Regis Philbin each called in to speak with Mr. King about his departure.

"I'll miss your suspenders, I'll miss your voice, I'll miss everything," Mr. Philbin said.

BP Enlists Washington Elite to aid with Image Management

USA Today

 

WASHINGTON — James Lee Witt, the former FEMA director who built his reputation responding to disasters, is poised to become the latest big name on a team of Washington insiders that BP has amassed to help it respond to the Gulf Coast oil spill, rescue its reputation and protect itself from lawsuits.

The list, which includes several prominent Democrats now working on behalf of a company responsible for the worst environmental disaster in the nation's history, is causing some unease — even in a city where power and influence are wielded and traded with ease.

The company is "hoping to buy a little extra credibility with Washington government officials and regulators, and these people have credibility and BP has very little credibility," says Melanie Sloan of the non-profit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Sloan says she can "understand why people feel troubled by it" but it's simply "the way Washington operates."

BP Managing Director Bob Dudley says the company is asking Witt, who presided over the government's response to more than 350 disasters in the 1990s, to conduct "an independent overview" of BP's spill response.

Once he finalizes a contract, Witt will join other power brokers including Jamie Gorelick, a former Clinton administration Justice Department official and 9/11 commissioner, and Tony Podesta, lobbyist extraordinaire and brother of former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta. Gorelick, a lawyer, helped BP broker a deal with the White House to set aside $20 billion for those harmed by the Gulf Coast spill.

Witt, who was named to run FEMA by then-president Clinton in 1993, was the first FEMA chief to be given the rank of a Cabinet member after he turned the ineffective bureaucracy into a nimble disaster-response agency.

He now runs his own emergency management consulting company, working for states, cities and private companies looking to improve their emergency-response plans. Nearly five years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast, he is still helping Louisiana with long-term recovery efforts.

Like most big companies that are subject to government regulations, BP has been represented by various Washington law, lobbying and public relations firms for years. Those include Gorelick's law firm, WilmerHale, and the Duberstein Group, a prominent lobbying shop run by former Reagan White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein.

"We've got nothing else to add," BP spokesman Robert Wine said when asked about the talent the company has gathered while oil continues to gush from its undersea well.

Many of those now working for BP also won't talk publicly about the work they're doing:

• Podesta, responding to an e-mail asking for comment, said he would not "talk for BP."

• Hilary Rosen, a former Capitol Hill staffer who worked for several Democratic lawmakers, also wouldn't discuss her work for the company as a partner with the London-based Brunswick Group public relations firm.

• Gorelick would say only that she is "assisting the company in responding to congressional inquiries and inquiries from executive branch agencies." So far, that amounts to 170 requests for information and/or testimony from 20 committees and agencies, she said. In one month since the spill began on April 20, there were 10 congressional hearings, including three in one day with two BP executives as witnesses.

• The Duberstein Group said Michael Berman, a onetime aide to former vice president Walter Mondale who is handling the BP account, was traveling and unavailable for comment.

Some watchdog groups say it's alarming that so many Democrats are to be paid by BP.

"Do these people go to bed at night and think, 'I hope I get to wake up in the morning and represent a corporate criminal?' " asks Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, which has called for a BP boycott.

BP's ability to scoop up so much talent is evidence that "Washington is broken," he says. "The former insiders are the most powerful and effective advocates for the wrongdoers because they have their own personal credibility they're trading on and they understand how the system works."

Some longtime Democrats, however, say having some of their own on the inside will work to the greater good.

"This is an enormous challenge and it doesn't matter who they hire to contain the spill, clean up the mess and compensate those who have lost so much," says veteran Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, a New Orleans native who has relatives who have been affected by the spill and filed claims with BP.

"Like Republicans, Democrats are ready to help with this project," she said. "I sincerely doubt any of my friends on both sides of the partisan divide will take this on without knowing we expect BP to 'get it right.' "