business
Online
Twitter Officially A Fundraising Juggernaut
9:31AM Andrew Belonsky | Twitter’s become quite the superstar, and it will only get bigger now that the company will soon wrap a round of funding that will bring its value to the $US1 billion mark. Are ads the next step? [Reuters]
Online
After All That Drama, Google China Loses Leader
7:37PM Andrew Belonsky | Poor Google! The company’s Chinese expansion hasn’t been easy: they’ve been shamed for giving into government censors and continue to play second-fiddle to a state-supported competitor. And now they’ve lost their regional leader. What will become of the company? More »
Online
The Internet Faces Frightening, Market Driven Future
7:27PM Andrew Belonsky | Happy Birthday, Internet! This September marks the 40th anniversary of our virtual god, and, as happens with the marching of time, it faces some changes. The scope and impact of those potential changes remains to be seen, but they’re scary! More »
Flotsam & Jetsam
Disney Staging Its Own, Narcissistic Comic-Con
7:10PM Andrew Belonsky | Disney sent representatives and stars to last month’s Comic-Con, but apparently the company isn’t content with collective marketing, because they’re launching their own event, the D23 Expo. More »
Flotsam & Jetsam
Smart Media People Moonlight In Booze
4:18AM Hamilton Nolan | We’ll give you one guess: Which is the heaviest-drinking class of “professionals” in England? If you said “the media,” you are well acquainted with the media’s habits! In fact, we hear that some media workers here are going into the booze business as a dependable second job: More »
‘Crash’ Producer Follows Intellectual Bankruptcy With Chapter 11 Variety
6:22AM STV | Bob Yari, the development baron-turned-indie mogul who co-produced Crash before losing a lawsuit to share the film’s 2005 Best Picture Oscar, announced late Friday that he’d seek bankruptcy protection for his distribution company. More »
TV Stars’ Salaries Commensurate With Ego
7:15AM Defamer Hollywood | The compiling compulsives at Forbes have once again amassed a list of famous people graded according to their gross annual income, this time focusing the wealth-as-worth index on Hollywood’s lucrative TV sector. (No, you aren’t having deja vu – TV Guide did a similar list a few months ago, but Forbes’s editors are far better equipped to type out 9-figure salaries without having their fingers tremble.) On it, you’ll spot the familiar faces of any number of trap-jawed cooks and follicly deficient self-help gurus, birthed in test tubes at Harpo Laboratories and currently reaping the generous rewards of multi-year syndie strip deals. More »The Age To Own Big Brother?
3:13PM Jess McGuire | What looked like a boring business-related article to us (our limited attention span is a problem, we know) might actually be a rather interesting media development, now that a Defamer Australia tipster has put a few things in perspective for us.
Fairfax Media and Macquarie Media have joined forces to break up Southern Cross Broadcasting in a deal expected to be worth $1.3 billion. Fairfax, owner of The Age, will return to the radio airwaves in Melbourne and Sydney after an absence of almost two decades.
Under the deal, to be announced as early as this morning, Macquarie Media will buy Southern Cross – capitalised at $1.19 billion – to get its Ten Network affiliate stations in regional Queensland, NSW and Victoria, as well as Seven Network affiliates in Darwin and Tasmania.
On completion of the purchase, it will sell to Fairfax the company’s metropolitan radio business, including the 2UE and 3AW talkback stations plus talkback and music stations in Brisbane and Perth. The deal comes a month after Fairfax completed its $2.7 billion takeover of Rural Press.
Sources said the deal would also give the newspaper and online operator the Southern Star TV and video production assets, allowing it to add expertise to its expanding online video products, and a satellite music business that provides subscription music channels to pay TV networks Foxtel and Austar.
What does this mean? As our anonymous tipster so wonderfully put it, “Should this buyout succeed, Big Brother will essentially be owned by Fairfax. … Awesome. However it will mean Fairfax has a 49% ownership of Endemol Southern Star (while it has FULL ownership of the other Southern Star arms). I don’t really get business so I don’t know why they won’t have 50% or nuffin’.”
Very interesting indeed!
A NOTE ABOUT TIP OFFS TO DEFAMER AUSTRALIA! – If you’ve sent something in and not heard anything back from us, don’t be disheartened! The embarrassing truth is… we bugger up our email settings “back in the day” and while we can receive email, we’re getting nothing but error messages when we try to reply. So rest assured we appreciate and love every bit of feedback and still adore the contributions from you guys, it’s just your editor is a fucking idiot. We’re arranging for someone to fix it next week though, which is nice news. More » 
