Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of News Corporation – who may have more reason than usual to want to make a break with 2011 – has apparently joined Twitter.
Users of the microblogging site have reacted with a mixture of incredulity and unabashed horror to a declaration by its executive chairman Jack Dorsey that Murdoch had set up a verified account and would be gracing the site with his unique observations. "With his own voice, in his own way, @RupertMurdoch is now on Twitter," wrote Dorsey.
Within hours, the media tycoon had amassed more than 14,000 followers and was giving them his views on everything from the US presidential election to his family holiday in the Caribbean.
A cursory glance at his output reveals that he considers Steve Jobs's biography to be "interesting but unfair", that thoughts are best kept private in St Barths ("like London!"), and that George Clooney deserves an Oscar for his performance in The Descendants (whose distributor is News Corp-owned Fox Searchlight Pictures).
Murdoch's latest tweet, posted late on New Year's Eve and betraying a certain technological unease with punctuation, reads: "Huge NY eve do. Oligarchs and silicon valley biggies(like Jack) . May. Learn something".
The arrival on Twitter of one of society's most divisive figures was welcomed by some, but pilloried by many others. Piers Morgan, former editor of the News of the World, wrote: https://twitter.com/#!/piersmorgan/status/153266312993443840
But the former deputy prime minister John Prescott captured the reaction of many when he made indirect reference to the phone-hacking scandal which saw Murdoch come under huge pressure in 2011. "Welcome to Twitter … @rupertmurdoch," he wrote. "I've left you a Happy New Year message on my voicemail!"
Another tweet suggested Murdoch follow Tom Watson, the Labour MP whose dogged pursuit of the scandal has won him many fans.
Despite a blue and white tick appearing next to the Murdoch account – the sign Twitter uses to show that an account has been "verified" as belonging to the right person – many remained dubious as to its authenticity.
Michael Wolff, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and biographer of Murdoch, declared the account to be "fake, fake". Another user, @factor50, commented: "It can't be him, because all he should be tweeting is SORRY in every single breath." But Dorsey's tweet seems to prove the doubters wrong.
"There won't be too many willing sellers next year, I wouldn't think," said one city banker, summing up the somewhat downbeat view of the mergers and acquisitions market next year. "With the market how it is why would you sell unless you are being forced?"
The failure of Shameless maker All3Media and Dutch firm Eyeworks, maker of Test the Nation and The Biggest Loser, to find buyers in 2011 is indicative of how tough the market is shaping up to be next year.
Big plays by private equity have all but evaporated due to the difficulty of securing funding – as was seen by the dramatic thinning of ranks in the bidding for EMI, which eventually went against the betting to Universal and Sony – with trade buyers taking pole position in any dealmaking in 2012.
All eyes are on Big Brother maker Endemol, which if it can finally agree the protracted restructuring of its €2.8bn debt, which is widely expected to be put up for sale next year. Time Warner and Mediaset, an existing investor, are already circling with unsolicited bids; if Endemol goes into play expect RTL, owner of The X Factor co-producer FremantleMedia, and ITV to run the numbers on a bid.
ITV will be debt free by the end of the year and has access to £1bn, or more, with chief executive Adam Crozier finally likely to make a major acquisition to boost its production arm.
Facebook's highly-anticipated IPO, which could well dwarf Google's effort in 2004, will send the tech stock buzz back into overdrive after the failure of Netflix, Groupon and Zynga to set investors alight.
Netflix's launch in the UK & Ireland next year will be one of the major strategic business moves of the year (well, that we know about) sparking an intense battle with, among others, BSkyB and Amazon's LoveFilm.
However the biggest potential development of the year is whether Rupert Murdoch will be forced by his board into looking to sell off some, or all, of his newspaper titles.
A forced sale attracts bargain-hunting predators and top of the list is Richard Desmond, owner of Express Newspapers and Channel 5, who has form here, having offered £1bn for the Sun in 2009.
If a sale doesn't happen then all eyes will be on whether Murdoch will green light the launch of the Sun on Sunday to fill the gap left by the News of the World.
"We hope News International will launch a replacement in time for the European football," said Group M in a note on national newspapers recently.
Interestingly Group M notes that Murdoch will have to run a very tight business model as following the shrinking of the market after the closure of his Sunday tabloid there will be "pressure on any NoW replacement to wash its face on copy sales, as the ad revenue pot is unlikely to grow to welcome it".
The London Olympics will save the UK advertising industry next year.
Sir Martin Sorrell's Group M reckons that the 3% growth it has factored in for 2012 would be lucky to be flat, at best, if not for the Olympics.
Yet some major media owners seem unconvinced. ITV chief executive Adam Crozier cautioned recently that while the broadcaster will get a "positive reaction" – an uplift in TV ad revenue – from the event it will "not be as much as some people think".
By this he means that comparisons with the uplift in ad revenue seen in other host countries, where the Olympics airs on commercial TV, are misguided because in the UK it airs on the BBC.
Daily Mail & General Trust top brass Martin Morgan and Stephen Daintith, the chief executive and finance director respectively, have also been downbeat on expectations – despite the fact that freesheet Metro is expected to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of millions of visitors to the capital.
Morgan said that investors should not have "expectations of a significant lift'; Daintith added that the event is "not the answer" and that the market "shouldn't be thinking about huge numbers from the Olympics for our titles". DMGT reckons it will see an uplift of about £5m.
The big winner will be the outdoor advertising market - Group M reckons it will be up 6%, the most of any media bar digital advertising - with the £746m ad take pencilled the highest since 2008.
Radio is also expected to do well, with advertisers warming to the moves by players such as Global Radio to have fewer station brands and more national networks.
"Radio has managed to completely replace the major revenue loss from the government scrapping COI advertising," said Adam Smith, Futures director at Group M.
The only media that won't be benefiting from one of Sir Martin Sorrell's fabled "maxi quadrennial" years – when events such as the Olympics, US elections and Euro occur – is, unfortunately the press market.
National newspaper advertising is forecast to be down 3.1% and the regional market down 7.8%.
"Head of the column [of issues] is retail," said Smith. "It is the major category in print advertising and it is being massively affected by the squeeze on household income."
Publishers, preparing for the handheld arrivals, took the chance to break with a tradition that dates back to 1912, when publishers agreed not to produce Christmas Day papers to give paperboys, among others, a day off. For the first time in its 190-year history the Sunday Times published a digital-only edition on 25 December – with the normally paid for product given away in the hope of luring sought after digital subscribers.
Boxing Day publication, for dailies like the Guardian, has also become a necessity – to ensure digital editions for new Kindle and iPad owners to read. The result is that what was a traditionally quiet period for news has become a critical moment to showcase new work, at a time when an industry already riven by the phone-hacking scandal and under judicial examination, is facing what can be described as an existential crisis.
Fifty years ago two national dailies – the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express – sold more than 4m copies each; today the bestselling Sun sells 2.6m. In the last year alone, printed sales declined by 10% for daily broadsheets and by 5% for daily tabloids – and when the News of the World stopped printing last July 600,000 copy sales simply disappeared.
The knock-on impact of the decline has been a push for digital readers that have seen newspapers like the Daily Mail win 5m unique visitors a day – compared with its printed sale of 2m – but struggle to generate revenues to match. The Mail generated £16m from its website last year, out of £608m overall.
Some specialist titles, such as the Financial Times, are managing the transition well – it has 260,000 digital subscribers – up 40% this year – compared with 337,000 buyers of the printed product, where sales are down by 12%. Digital subscribers generate £180 a year and the paper, priced at £2.50 on the newsstand on a weekday, is profitable.
John Ridding, the managing director, says that 30% of the FT's revenues come from digital sales and that "within two or three years" digital readers and revenues will account for more than those from the printed business. During a typical week the number of people signing on digitally is "five to 10 times" what it was a year earlier, as the newspaper looks to a future beyond print.
Others, though, are under pressure. Local newspapers have been hit particularly hard, with 31 titles closing in the last year. Most of those shutting are freesheets – with titles distibuted in Yeovil, Scarborough and Harlow lost. Historic paid for titles have seen their frequency cut: the Liverpool Daily Post is to go weekly in print in the new year, after sales dropped as low as 6,500. Its website, however, will update in real time. Daily titles in Birmingham and Bath have also gone the same way in recent years – while pre-tax profits at Johnston Press, the owner of the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, fell from £131.5m five years ago to £16m last year.
Roger Parry, chair of Johnston Press since 2009, believes the party has been over for several years, since Craigslist and Google began to take classified advertising away from local press.
"I think the future is for local multimedia companies which focus on signing up 50% plus of the households in their area on some form of subscription – that's what happens in Scandinavia," he says.
For journalists there will have to be a shift from acting as "print writers to multimedia curators. There will be more content created by local people. The National Union of Journalists will hate this but it is fact of life."
With the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, wanting to license local television stations in 20 cities, that gives local media a new way to reach audiences, although some – such as Witney TV in Oxfordshire – have already made a start with a daily offering of local video news. David Cameron, the local MP, regularly appears, but the site is staffed by volunteers, and its content limited – underlining how tough the digital economics are.
There are commercial pressures in national media too. Although the tabloid media have faced criticism at the Leveson inquiry, not least from the likes of Hugh Grant or Steve Coogan, popular titles remain in fair commercial health. Trinity Mirror's stable of nationals – the Daily and Sunday Mirror, the People, and the Record titles in Scotland – will earn about £70m this year, although they made £86m the year before. The profit margin at the Daily Mail hovers at around 10%.
The challenge for the popular press is retaining printed sales – but the financial pressure is acute elsewhere. Three of the traditional broadsheets – the Independent, the Times and the Guardian – all lose money in a market where five titles compete for 1.3 million print buyers. Their readers are more likely to make the digital transition too, leaving newspapers no option but to embrace new forms of reporting – such as the live blog – and seed content at digital hubs, such as Facebook.
The Guardian may generate £40m in digital revenues from its largely free offerings, but some of that comes from its dating sites. The Times titles have gone for a low price subscription model, which has attracted 111,000 takers, but which generates £11m a year against an editorial budget estimated at £100m.
Some, like Paul Zwillenberg, from Boston Consulting Group, says serious newspapers "will have to cut their cloth because there will be a smaller pool of revenue and profit". But he acknowledges that by pursuing different business models, they may increase their chances of success. The result, though, is that was once an industry of one business model: a printed product sold on the newstand is fracturing into very different types of mainly digital content companies.
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