ARCHIVES: Companies
Unionised workers at the Journal de Montreal have voted to accept a contract offer, ending an employer lockout that lasted more than two years, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. Quebecor Media locked out more than 200 employees in January 2009, arguing that journalists refused to adapt to changes in their job duties brought on by technologies including the Internet. To avoid a strike, the company turned to a lockout, which allowed for the suspension of work contracts until an agreement... MORE
The Sunday Tribune , the Irish quality newspaper partly owned by Independent Newspapers, has closed shop, less than a month after a receiver was appointed. Jim Luby, the receiver, wrote to the 43 staff on Tuesday telling them they would be made redundant at the end of the month. It brings to an end a chequered 31-year history for a paper that attempted to inject new life into a newspaper sector dominated by two traditional Irish papers, the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Press. The company... MORE
AOL Inc will buy Arianna Huffington's influential website for $315 million, looking to the high-profile liberal pundit to rescue it from the dustbin of Internet history. The move, announced Monday, comes at a hefty premium. AOL is estimated to be paying 32 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for The Huffington Post, said Benchmark Co analyst Clayton Moran. Similar content deals, such as Hellman & Friedman's acquisition of Internet Brands in September 2010,... MORE
News Corp will launch its long-awaited digital newspaper created for Apple Inc's iPad on February 2, two weeks after the two companies were widely expected to introduce the new product, Reuters has reported. News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Apple Vice President of Internet Services Eddy Cue will introduce the Daily, a digital newspaper for tablet devices, at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York. The event invite, emailed to reporters on Thursday, caps weeks of speculation surrounding... MORE
The BBC has confirmed plans to close five of its 32 World Service language services. Staff have been informed that up to 650 jobs will be lost from a workforce of 2,400 over the next three years. The Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian services will be axed, as will English for the Caribbean and Portuguese for Africa, in a bid to save £46m a year. The BBC estimates audiences will fall by more than 30 million, from 180 million to 150 million a week. Director general Mark Thompson said it was "a... MORE
Viewers of Euronews, a 24-hour television news channel, may soon see images of people they can’t avoid on other TV news programmes, even though they have been practically invisible on Euronews: the journalists, the New York Times has reported. Euronews, which is owned by 21 European public broadcasters, has avoided showing reporters and anchors because of the network’s unusual, polyglot approach. The channel provides a single video feed, while the audio narration is translated into 10 languages... MORE
The People’s Daily newspaper, published by the Communist Party of China, may lead a wave of state-run media going public as the government aims to reinvigorate official news organisations in the next five years, according to Bloomberg News. People’s Daily Online Co Ltd., which operates the website People.com.cn, plans to sell 40 million shares at a price range of 15 yuan to 20 yuan a share in an initial public offering in Shanghai, China Daily reported today, citing an unidentified person. An... MORE
News Corp's Australian arm agreed to sell its Fiji Times newspaper to a local owner, likely ending a dispute with the Fijian government over media ownership, the Wall Street Journal has reported. News Ltd said Tuesday it agreed to sell the newspaper to Motibhai & Co, after the Fijian government issued a decree that the nation's media groups be owned by Fijian companies. Terms of the sale weren't disclosed. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal . In a... MORE
France's newspapers are kept in a state of "permanent artificial respiration" by the annual billion euros in state aid they get and badly need to shake themselves up to survive, a report said Thursday. The government-commissioned report lamented that the massive subsidies had failed to create the "emergence or the presence of political and general press titles that were strong and not dependent on public aid." The aid even had the effect of discouraging newspapers from trying to find... MORE
More than 2,000 journalists working for the BBC at centres across the UK have voted in favour of strike action in protest at planned reforms to their pension scheme. Figures released Wednesday night by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) reveal the extent to which its members are angered by management proposals to cap their pension contributions. Of around 3,500 NUJ members at the BBC, 2,251 voted in the ballot with 2,107 (94 per cent) voting for strike action and 2,175 (97 per cent) voting... MORE
Pages
