World of the News

Posted: February 25th, 2012 | Author: Michael Courtenay | Filed under: World of the News | Tags: Australian Media Roundup, Drone Journalism, Fairfax Media, JK Rowling, Marie Colvin, Rupert Murdoch, Seven Network, Simpsons 500th Episode, Standout, Ten Network | Comments Off

JK Rowling: Author of the Harry Potter book series, is writing her first novel for adults The British writer, 46, whose teenage boy wizard tales became international best-sellers and inspired a series of hit films, said on Thursday her new novel would be “very different” to the Harry Potter books that made her a household name and turned her into a billionaire.

The Simpsons 500th Episode: Our favorite four fingered family, The Simpsons, have reached another milestone. On Sunday the 19th The Simpsons aired their 500th episode, “Long Last Leave”, Episode 14 of Series 23 to be precise. Since first airing December 17, 1989 the Simpsons have gone on to become an an institution of hilarity. Springfield’s all over America have never been the same.

Australian Media Roundup: Fairfax’s 40 percent drop in revenue is about to take it’s toll on employees, the Seven Network ups it’s profits and market share. Meanwhile, Ten Network Holdings has warned that its half-year profits will be significantly down on the year before due to a drop in revenue from its television and outdoor advertising divisions.

Rupert Murdoch’s latest venture, The Sun on Sunday kicks off this weekend, the challenge for Murdoch’s new Sunday tabloid: Keep the scoops, drop the sleaze. Drone Journalism: ABC has a superlative piece on one of the emerging tools in modern journalism ‘No Brooks it’s not your finger followed by your halitosis‘ Drones play an increasing and controversial role in modern warfare. From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iran and Yemen, they have become a ubiquitous symbol of Washington’s war on terrorism.

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HOMAGE! World of the News, Worldwide: Marie Colvin’s final dispatch, published just three days before she and a French photographer were killed by shell and rocket fire, came from a bleak cellar packed with women and children cowering in the besieged Syrian city of Homs. Relating the stories of those sheltering in what she called ‘the widows’ basement’, Colvin explained how she had made her way to the pulverised city by crossing into Syria from Lebanon via a secret smugglers’ route.

The forces of president Bashar al-Assad had opened fire twice with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades on the car she used to get there, she said. But the focus of her final article in Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper was not her own fate, but that of the Syrian people. ”The scale of the human tragedy in the city is immense,” sColvin wrote. ”Everyone in the cellar has a similar story of hardship or death.”

On all the Syrian civilians’ lips around her, she added, was the searing question: “Why have we been abandoned by the world?”

Born in Long Island, New York, in the mid 1950s, Colvin was famous among her peers for her determination. A graduate of Yale University, she made it her cause to try to cover every war zone in the world during the last quarter of a century and, if possible, to get there first. Colvin also had a reputation for exceptional bravery and for taking calculated risks.

Colvin began working for Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper in 1985 and went on to cover conflicts from the Middle East to Chechnya, taking big risks to expose the often hard-to-get stories of atrocities, injustice, and human suffering that some of the world’s bloodiest dictators would have preferred remained untold.

It was physically and psychologically bruising. She was injured while reporting in the West Bank during the 1980s when a stone thrown through the window of a car hit her in the face and broke her nose. In Sri Lanka more than a decade later, a hand grenade that went off nearby left her without the use of her left eye. Rather than get a prosthetic eye, she wore a piratical black eye patch over it. It was a decision that made her instantly recognisable in the world’s war zones, and the patch became a symbol of her courage.

Her friends say she was always superb company despite constant exposure to trauma around the world. She revelled in mischievous humour and reeling off incredible anecdotes. ”As the tributes to Marie pour in, you’ll hear many amazing things about her,” Mark Franchetti, a Sunday Times colleague who has known her since 1995, said. ”They’re all true. Not only was she truly the best and most fearless war reporter in British journalism of her generation, hands down, she was also a deeply special human being.”

Colvin set out her philosophy of war reporting in a memorial service for journalists killed in conflict zones in 2010. ”Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice,” she said.

She made it clear she knew the risks. ”We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story,” she told the audience at St Bride’s, the journalists’ church on London’s Fleet Street. “What is bravery, and what is bravado?”

“In an age of 24-7 rolling news, blogs and twitter, we are on constant call wherever we are. But war reporting is still essentially the same – someone has to go there and see what is happening.”

A resident of West London, Colvin cut a glamorous and life-affirming figure, equally at ease mingling in London high society as she was hunkering down among refugees. Blessed with a rich contacts book that she often exploited to devastating journalistic effect, she was a doyenne of the small international war reporters’ fraternity. Her fearless approach won her a clutch of awards.

Among them was the Woman Journalist of the Year prize at the 2010 Foreign Press Association in London, which she won for a story headlined “Swift and Bloody: the Taliban’s revenge”. She also won the Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation in 2000 for her behind-the lines work in Chechnya and Kosovo. In one notable incident in Chechnya, she and a photographer found themselves trapped by Russian forces and pulled off a daring escape over the mountains to neighbouring Georgia.

Before she entered Syria to write what would turn out to be her last story, she told a friend she had an “ominous feeling” about the dangerous assignment. A chorus of tributes honouring her poured in from around the world on Wednesday. British prime minister David Cameron said her death was a sad reminder of the risks journalists take. Sunday Times editor John Witherow recalled that nothing ever seemed to deter Colvin, and Rupert Murdoch, her newspaper’s proprietor, called her “one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of her generation”.

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Marie Catherine Colvin

12 January 1956 – 22 February 2012

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“Although I’ve enjoyed writing it every bit as much, my next book will be very different to the Harry Potter series,” Rowling said in a statement. “The freedom to explore new territory is a gift that Harry’s success has brought me, and with that new territory it seemed a logical progression to have a new publisher.”

Publisher Little, Brown and Company, part of the Hachette Book Group, acquired the rights to publish the book, whose title and publication date will be announced later this year. It is Rowling’s first major novel in several years after the last Harry Potter book in the series was published in 2007 and a supplement book in 2008. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was published by Scholastic in the United States, Bloomsbury in Britain and other publishers around the world. Rowling expressed her pleasure at garnering another publishing house, saying “I am delighted to have a second publishing home in Little, Brown, and a publishing team that will be a great partner in this new phase of my writing life.”

Neither Rowling nor her publisher = Little, Brown and Company – released the terms of the deal or whether any more adult novels were planned. The books will be released in print and e-book form. Such is the scale of Rowling’s fan base and the success of her novels that the news of an adult novel is a boon for the book publishing world, which has struggled in recent years as it crosses over into e-books. The influential 46-year-old writer’s seven-book Harry Potter saga between 1997 and 2007 sold 450 million copies worldwide and the eight movies from the Warner Bros. studios have taken more than $US7.7 billion ($7.2 billion) at global box-offices, making the films the largest-grossing franchise in history.

Last year Rowling unveiled Pottermore, a website allowing fans to interact with the characters and storylines, and the books were due to be released in e-book form for the first time, but the website has been delayed. After Rowling announced that website last year, the author said she had “closure with Harry” and had no plans to write another Potter novel. But while many adult fans emerged from her boy wizard Harry Potter series, it is yet to be seen if Rowling can achieve the same success with a novel directly aimed at adults.

Executive Producer James L. Brooks said “I think it’s the flexibility of these characters. They can do any kind of comedy anyone ever thought of, from farce to reality. For a long time, we didn’t want to deal with the fact we could do anything we wanted. There were no sets, no past, no future. The first group of years was spent not taking advantage of any of that. Then we started letting it in.”

Opening with the ultimate montage of the funniest moments, the intro to the show lets you know, this is the 500th Episode. Also reminding us just how long the Simpsons have been a part of our lives. This was after-all one of the first cartoons to appeal to all age groups and demographics. Read the full article >>>>

Fairfax Media has hinted that more job cuts are set to come as it reported a 41 per cent fall in first-half net profit to $96.7 million and outlined moves to restructure its operations. Chief executive Greg Hywood said the company would focus operations on content and advertising sales as part of a three-year plan dubbed “Fairfax of the Future”. The company, which publishes The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Financial Review, plans to cut costs by reducing print distribution, sharing content across platforms, outsourcing and possibly moving equipment to New Zealand.

“Fairfax of the Future recognises that many parts of our business were built at a time when the newspaper was king and print classified advertising was the biggest driver of our business success,” Mr Hywood said. ”Large parts of our current operating model are still geared to supporting the old business model.”

Fairfax already has reduced staff by 4 per cent in the last six months, but additional cuts to staff and activities are expected to save $170 million in the next three years to centralise many aspects of the business. ”I’m talking IT systems, finance, human resources and other support functions, and we are going to shift from in-sourced to substantially outsourced non-core activities,” Mr Hywood said.

Regional and remote communities are set to lose access to Fairfax newspapers under the plan. ”How and where we distribute newspapers has a great impact on our costs. It does not make sense to lose money by delivering small numbers of printed newspapers to remote locations,” Mr Hywood said.

Mr Hywood said the first-half results were disappointing but came as the company was adapting to a changing market. ”It is no surprise that trading has been tough this half,” Mr Hywood said. ”We have had to contend with extremely poor advertising conditions in New South Wales and Victoria and no improvement in the subdued New Zealand market. Fairfax is particularly exposed to stresses in finance, retail and real estate sectors.”

All this in mind, we still feel Fairfax is being optimistic, they haven’t ever taken thier ubercool digital spinoff seriously, to-do-so now would simply be shutting the gate after the horse bolted . .

Seven Network is almost the flipside, patient and paracticed. Australia’s largest media company, Seven West Media, says it expects to increase market share across its television, newspaper and online businesses this year. The company announced its first interim result since West Australian Newspapers’ acquisition of Seven Media was approved in April last year, posting a net profit of $163 million in the six months to the end of December. Seven West Media says it has re-financed all of the debt on its balance sheet, in-line with analysts’ expectations.

Chief executive David Leckie said the company’s strong product offering would help it overcome a weak advertising market. ”There is no doubt this market could be stronger but we have not wavered in our pursuit of share in the market … we’re further entrenching our market-leading positions,” Mr Leckie said.

Ten Network shares could be heard 139 km’s away as they fell through the floor after the company announced it’s half yearly profit results would be dramatically lower than last years results. The television network expects earnings of $64 million, well down on the $106 million result from a year ago, due to a drop in revenue from its television and outdoor advertising businesses. Ten also warned shareholders they would not an interim dividend.

In a statement, chief executive James Warburton said the dismal earnings were due to “tough trading conditions”. ”The first-half results reflect tough trading conditions and a difficult final quarter of calendar 2011 as the company re-set its cost base and focused on creating a more sustainable business,” Mr Warburton said. The final first-half results will be released in April. Ten Network Holdings shares plummeted 9.3 per cent after the announcement to close at 78 cents.

Drone Journalism: ABC has a superlative – as always – piece on one of the emerging tools in modern journalism ‘No Brooks it’s not your finger followed by your halitosis‘ Drones play an increasing and controversial role in modern warfare. From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iran and Yemen, they have become a ubiquitous symbol of Washington’s war on terrorism.

Critics point to the mounting drone-induced death toll as evidence that machines, no matter how sophisticated, cannot discriminate between combatants and innocent bystanders. Now drones are starting to fly into a more peaceful, yet equally controversial role in the media. Rapid technological advances in low-cost aerial platforms herald the age of drone journalism.

But it will not be all smooth flying: this new media tool can expect to be buffeted by the issues of safety, ethics and legality. There is nothing quite like the sensation of being stalked by a drone. You take it very personally. My first drone encounter was amid the bomb-ravaged apartment blocks of South Beirut in 2006. Hezbollah and Israel were at war in Lebanon. From an unseen point high in the sky emanated a faint distant whine: part lawnmower, part chainsaw.

From an unseen point high in the sky emanated a faint distant whine: part lawnmower, part chainsaw. There was a hint of panic as the otherwise disciplined Hezbollah gunmen, our escorts as we filmed the rubble of their South Beirut stronghold, suddenly vanished into unseen bunkers, leaving us alone and very exposed.

Even without firing a shot, the drone, remote pilotless aircraft (RPA), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), call it what you will, is the perfect weapon of intimidation. The Israeli fixed-wing drone above us that day carried no weapons, but high-resolution cameras and sensors, hunting targets for fighter aircraft that were doing lazy circuits out high above the Mediterranean Sea – sitting on a kind of deadly supersonic cab rank. Read Mark Corcoran’s full report >>>

World of the News Online: Gannett, the largest United States newspaper chain, has announced plans to begin charging for online access to its 80 US dailies by the end of the year with the exception of flagship USA Today. The Virginia-based company said it expects the move to bring in an additional $US100 million a year beginning in 2013 and it expects overall annual revenue growth of between 2 per cent and 4 per cent by 2015.

“We are going to charge for what is valuable and that’s our content, regardless of the platform, via a new content subscription model,” chief executive Gracia Martore said at Gannett’s “Investor Day” in New York.

Several US newspapers have begun charging for access to their websites but Gannett would be the largest US newspaper chain to do so. The Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has always charged online readers for full access to WSJ.com. The New York Times began charging for full access to its website in March and the Times-owned Boston Globe followed suit in September.

The Gannett strategy is expected to mirror that of The Times and The Globe, which allow a reader to view a set number of articles each month before they are asked to pay. Like other US newspapers, Gannett has been grappling with declining print advertising revenue, falling circulation and the migration of readers to free news online. Besides USA Today, Gannett publishes 80 daily US newspapers, including The Louisville Courier-Journal, Des Moines Register and Reno Gazette-Journal, and more than 600 magazines and non-dailies.

It also has 23 US television stations. Its British operation, Newsquest, publishes newspapers, magazines and trade publications. Gannett shares were down 1.28 per cent at $US15.41 in early afternoon trading on Wall Street.

Rupert Murdoch’s latest UK venture, The Sun on Sunday launches this weekend, promising the same irreverent attitude that has kept The Sun tabloid at the top of the British newspaper market, even as its proprietor fights to limit the damage caused by the long-running phone hacking scandal, reports Huff Post.

Can Murdoch win while keeping it clean? Tabloid veterans say yes.

“There’s a dangerous misconception that the News of the World or tabloids generally can’t break major stories without resorting to illegal or unethical practices,” former News of the World executive-turned PR professional Paul Connew said in a telephone interview. “The rivals are going to be sweating.”

The News of the World closed in July after an advertising boycott led Murdoch to pull the 168-year-old paper. Britons were disgusted by revelations that the paper had routinely hacked into the phones of those in the public eye — including, most notoriously, a missing schoolgirl whose murder had shocked the country.

It was long rumored that Murdoch would try to reclaim the gap in the lucrative Sunday market. And the Australian media tycoon appears to be throwing his weight and enthusiasm behind the launch, buying up broadcast advertising and putting up posters to promote his latest venture into the newspaper business.

There’s already been the inevitable controversy. News vendors are upset over the low, 50 pence (roughly 75 U.S. cent) cover price, a Labour parliamentarian has reportedly pulled out of a planned column under pressure from his colleagues, and media-watchers have been whispering about the possibility that new arrests of journalists could eclipse the paper’s launch. Read the full article >>>>

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World of the News

Marie Catherine Colvin

12 January 1956 – 22 February 2012

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