Richard Desmond is the rags-to-riches, pleased-with-himself Brit who has made a billion by upstaging established media leaders. Across the past 40 years, Desmond has successively scored big against the odds. Look at his record: 1966: Leaves school at age 15 after an impoverished, lonely adolescence living with his mother above a garage. Sells classified ads…
Home-made TV from London will change everything
Television networks across the world can’t decide whether the internet represents more of an opportunity than a threat. Most broadcasters recognise the upside potential. That’s why they are playing with the web. But (like their cousins in print media) the mood darkens when they worry about how they can find 21st century gold while preparing…
Is he the world’s smartest magazine publisher?
The twentieth century was “The Magazine Century”. Times when great people did great things with magazines, whose births and deaths tracked the lives of readers everywhere. Magazines will never again be so important, so profitable, so pervasive. Or so easily-defined. Even when we get used to describing digital editions as “magazines”, it will never be…
10 hurdles as ‘old media’ dream of digital success
It is 10 years since US learning luminary Marc Prensky wrote his seminal work about “digital natives” (those born digital) and “digital immigrants” (the rest of us). He might, of course, have been addressing the challenges of traditional media companies as they struggle in a world of hyperactive digital natives. Here are my 10 Thoughts for immigrants… They…
Will most newspapers and magazines be free?
Newspapers and magazines have been rocked by collapsing advertising revenues. Hard copy is, quite simply, losing much of its consumer advertising power in the face of falling circulations and digital competition. Such lost revenues frequently turn publishing profits into losses. The economic model is (mostly) broken, and the race is on for traditional publishers trying…
Can Australia’s best magazines recover?
Private equity group CVC is this week hosting directors of its Nine Entertainment Company, whose Channel Nine has the Australian broadcast rights for the Olympics. But they have nothing to celebrate. The Australian TV coverage itself may or may not lose a reported A$40m. But CVC is staring into the abyss. It is six years…
Meet the genius behind Britain’s last magazine boom
We may well live to read “where-were-you-when…” obituaries for Time magazine and Rolling Stone. But this month, a stream of UK newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, Tweets and blogs lamented the death of a nine-year-old monthly magazine with a circulation of under 25,000. In a farewell blog, the magazine’s founder reflected on the trials of traditional media and…
Radio broadcasters face digital dogfight with internet
Radio has always confused media futurologists and defied the sceptics. The sound-only medium survived the conquest of TV and the ipod, and has managed to bounce back from recession and technological revolution, with audiences and advertising more or less intact. In the 1990s, just as radio audiences were starting to sag under the weight of MTV…
Newspapers in 4 countries show how to win a future
Daily newspapers will one day provide the most intriguing episodes in the story of how traditional media was tortured and tamed by the digital new wave. In the week when I learned that the six-year-old Twitter is generating fast-growing profits of more than $100m on turnover of perhaps $350m, Britain’s The Guardian (a UK web…
iPad comes to the rescue of magazines (sort of)
UK magazine publisher Mark Wood knew what everyone was thinking: “The iPad is not the saviour of magazines”. But the calm-down words came just as it looked as if Steve Jobs’ last great creation was, indeed, coming to the rescue of the gasping magazine industry. It all happened in October. Eighteen months after the launch of…
