Posted in: Mixed Media
Posted by: Keach Hagey on January 31, 2010 11:00 AM
Tags:
Alf Alf, licences, radio, Saudi Arabia
A new era for Saudi radio began yesterday. After a lengthy selection process, the Ministry of Culture and Information awarded its first licence for a private radio operator to Alf Alf, a Saudi media company that currently produces a newspaper and will soon be launching a television station, according to ministry officials. The price was 75 million Saudi riyals (Dh 73.4 million, $20 million).
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Posted in: Mixed Media
Posted by: Paul Driscoll on January 28, 2010 6:19 PM
Tags:
consumers, deals, digital, media, migration
After the worst year for media deals in the UK since 2002 with similar trends worldwide, the irresistible pace of the digital revolution looks set to take hold.
Always inevitable, plummeting revenues and the growing graveyard of bankrupt media houses are forcing executives to tune in to what frugal consumers want quicker, or face closure.
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Posted in: Mixed Media
Posted by: Keach Hagey on January 28, 2010 11:55 AM
Tags:
Apple, iPad, tablet
 That copy of the New York Times in this promotional shot of Apple's iPad? Disturbingly free. In all the reporting about the unveiling of the Apple iPad, there is one, frightening sentence that I can't get out of my head: " All of the content that was accessed on stage was free."
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Trust in journalism is on the wane, according to Edelman's annual trust barometer. Globally, less than half of those surveyed said they trusted the media three years ago, and things have only gone south since then. (Forty-five per cent now do.)
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One of the strangest features of the Gulf media scene is the way the entire region caters to the tastes of the all-powerful Saudi consumer -- oil-rich and 28 million strong -- without actually spending much time in Saudi Arabia. Sure, advertising companies have offices there, as do the big Saudi-owned media companies like MBC and Rotana, but in general pan-Arab satellite television is beamed into the kingdom from head offices in Dubai and Amman, using content produced in Cairo.
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 The fight between some Arab broadcasters and lawmakers in the US who want to ban those "hostile to the United States" could not be happening at a worse time. Yesterday, Arab ministers of information gathered to "slam", in the words of the AFP, the US Congress for the bill the House of Representatives passed in December that imposes sanctions on broadcasters deemed a threat to the country. After a six-hour meeting in Cairo, the ministers issued a communique
that said the bill was "considered an interference in the internal
affairs of Arab states who regulate their media affairs according to
national legislation." Osama Bin Laden
claimed the December 25 attempt to bomb a US airliner in an audio tape
broadcast by Al Jazeera television yesterday. (AFP Photo)
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 Since Etisalat unblocked Twitter in August of 2008, it has tweeted nine times. Nine. (To be fair, though this is more than the Twitter account Etisalatsucks, which has only Tweeted twice.) Du, in contrast, has tweeted 1,608 times since opening its Dutweets account four months ago.
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Posted in: Mixed Media
Posted by: Paul Driscoll on January 20, 2010 5:51 PM
Tags:
advertising, apple, bt, courier, editor, highcrest, media, mosaic, motorola, news, newspaper, publisher, uk, yahoo
Among the deals this week, Indian IT giant Tata looks ready to snap up a subsidiary of British Telecoms, and Apple buys Yahoo! News UK.
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Posted in: Mixed Media
Posted by: Keach Hagey on January 20, 2010 12:53 PM
Tags:
CNN, hipsters, Sub Pop, VBS.TV, Vice
Living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn during the early years of the 21st century, my friends and I saw Vice Magazine as our local neighborhood newsletter. It had stacks in every coffee shop, and stories and photo shoots that always managed to be pretty shocking, even to those of us who considered ourselves hard to shock. But the most shocking thing off all was the way the magazine outlasted electroclash and all the other nonsense of that era to grow into a media empire capable of pulling off some pretty serious journalism. (Its Appalachia Issue remains one of my favorite bits of reporting of any kind, anywhere).
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 For most of the last decade, Baghdad brought together the world's top media brands to cover the war. Now, a group of Iraqi investors want them to stay for the economic opportunity.
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